Book - Coronado
She told him a bit about marriage. How it wasn’t what you expected, how Perkin Lut might know a lot of things but he didn’t know a damn sight about having fun.
PATIENT Twelve years of my life and I can’t see his face. It’s the noise, the noise, the noise.
DOCTOR What noise?
PATIENT What noise? The fucking bells, the whistles, the plethora of fucking choices for fucking nothing. The fucking Coast or Irish Spring or Ivory Snow. The SUVs and handbags and coats and diet pills and fitness programs and everything new-and-fucking improved! And you buy it so it’ll fill those places in you that never did fill, those places you carry around in you like extra lungs? It’ll make you feel right, but you’re not filled, you’re not right. And then you wake up and you can’t remember what your dog looked like. Jesus Christ.
Bobby: Like a bulldog on a pork chop.
PATIENT After all your years climbing around in people’s heads like a cranial janitor, do you think people know why they do things? People rationalize, they turn their delusions into something romantic that they can disguise as ethics or principles or ideals. People are selfish, Doctor - odiously, monstrously, but in so small and paltry a monstrousness that we barely notice it.
PATIENT [cont’d] If we could have everything we wanted in an instant without fear of consequence? No worry of jail or societal reproof of any kind? No having to look our victims in the eyes because the victims have conveniently vanished? If we could have that? Stalin’s crimes would pale in comparison to what we’d do in the name of love. In the name of the heart wanting what the heart wants.
PATIENT So I’m a sociopath.
DOCTOR You have sociopathic tendencies.
PATIENT You’re parsing. I hate that. Have some balls. I either am something or I’m not.
DOCTOR The human psyche can’t be reduced to a simple this- or-that equation.
PATIENT Sure it can. You, for example, are effete. A repulsive quality in anyone, but in a man? And like most people who are effete, you’re pompous, and like most people who are pompous, you’re insecure, and like all people who are self-consciously insecure, you make the rest of the world pay for your fucking insecurities. So if I have to choose between flaws, I’ll take mine, thank you.
Small things in life (like a baby taking his first steps) … you hear about it, but you’re never prepared for how… miraculous it seems.
Gwen: Well, you’re not cruel.
Bobby: Never been tested. Hell, eveyone’s nice until some kind of hard choice is put in front of them.
BOBBY’S FATHER: You’d a preferred going to some same-as-every-other-fucking-kid grade school? Playing video games in some stink-ass suburban basement? Some stink-ass suburban town with a mall looks like every other mall? You get through high school and go to college, study business or poli-sci? And then get you a job, a 401(k), marry the receptionist because she smiles at you right and gives okay head? And then you’re thirty- five and she ain’t giving any head anymore and you’ve got two kids crying for fucking video games and sneakers and your soul feels like a tomato left on a warm porch, but, wait, you got a couple pornos in the closet and a new fucking car and the supermarket’s right down the street! So-hey-living large! And there’s only fifty-five years to go if you live right, don’t smoke or drink or eat food that tastes good, all so you can die in Florida in a nice white house while Guatemalans water your lawn. Hey, have at it.
There was something about Jewel Lut that sank into men’s flesh the way heat did. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, had a beautiful body, moved in a loose, languid way that made you picture her naked no matter what she was wearing. No, there was more to it. Jewel, never the brightest girl in town and not even the most charming, had something in her eyes that none of the women Elgin ever met had; it was a capacity for living, for taking moments-no matter how small or inconsequential-and squeezing every thing you could out of them. Jewel gobbled up life, dove into it like it was a cool pond cut in the shade of a mountain on the hottest day of the year.
So Elgin, who’d been so lonely in the year after his discharge, now had two women. Sometimes, he didn’t know what to think of that. When you were alone, the happiness of others boiled your insides. Beauty seemed ugly. Laughter seemed evil. The casual grazing of one lover’s hand into another was enough to make you want to cut them off at the wrist. I will never be loved, you said. I will never know joy.
Blue was the kind of guy you never knew if he was quiet because he didn’t have anything to say or, because what he had to say was so horrible, he knew enough not to send it out into the atmosphere.
It was since Elgin’d come back from Vietnam that he’d noticed some things and kept them to himself, wondered what he was going to do the day he’d know he had to do something.
And when hope comes late to a man, it’s a dangerous thing. Hope is for the young, the children. Hope in a full-grown man - particularly one with as little acquaintanceship with it or prospect for it as Blue - well, that kind of hope burns as it dies, boils blood white, and leaves something mean behind when it’s done.
He watches the war in waiting rooms with the loved ones of the injured, the impaired, the damaged and broken and internally soupy, the brain-dead, the cancer-stricken, sickle-cell-stricken, terminally anemic, HIV positive, jaundiced, tumor-ridden. He hears stories of rare diseases with odd names. He hears of sudden flicks- of-the-switch in the cerebral cortex, the aorta, the left and right ventricles, the kidneys and pancreas. (And of these, he learns that more than anything, you should pray for a healthy pancreas. Once it goes wrong down there, modern medicine pretty much skips the rest of the show.)
Take care of your colon too. Exercise, for God’s sakes. Stay away from the fried food, the cigarettes and liquor, asbestos.
But there’s more - don’t cross streets where the noon sun is sure to hit the windshields bearing down on you. Don’t swim drunk. Don’t swim at night. Don’t swim. Don’t work on the electrical yourself. Don’t anally pleasure yourself with a Coke bottle (a rumor, true, going around one of the surgical wards, but a good one; everyone gets a laugh). Don’t ski anywhere near trees. Don’t live alone. Don’t climb a stepladder while pregnant. Don’t laugh while eating. And whatever you do, don’t retire. Half the people in here are less than a year removed from retirement, and Daniel hears the same tragic-comic stories night after night. He’d taken up fishing, he tended to his garden, he’d been planning a trip, she loved lemonade, she went on long walks, she was knitting an afghan the size of your house, he bought into a time-share, they took up golf.