The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.