From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?

I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

Where in this pukehole can a man get a drink? he said

Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupations of men engaged in rash undertakings.

In the nights sometimes now he'd wake in the back and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?