Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them… - Jonathan Lethem

Thing is, for me a woman has to have a certain amount of muffling, you know what I mean? Something between you, in the way of insulation. Otherwise, you're right up against her naked soul.

Then again, the story does involve a missing person, and it could well be me. Or you, or practically anybody. As he said to me once, who's not missing?

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's — the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance — as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.