They passed through towns that warned people away with messages scrawled on the billboards. The billboards had been whited out with thin coats of paint in order to write on them and through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed. (127-28)
The decay of the world
Do I look like an imbecile to you?
I dont know what you look like. (65)
My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word. (75)
We’re not robbers.
He leaned one ear forward. What? he called.
I said we’re not robbers.
What are you?
They’d no way to answer the question. (162)
What does he look like? his father said.
I dont know. I cant see good. (166)
After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin. (77)
There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he’d no longer any way to think about at all. (129-30)
He’d been ready to die and now he wasnt going to and he had to think about that. (145)
The boy nodded. He sat looking at the map. The man watched him. He thought he knew what that was about. He’d pored over maps as a child, keeping one finger on the town where he lived. Just as he would look up his family in the phone directory. Themselves among others, everything in its place. Justified in the world. Come on, he said. We should go. (182)
The re-invention of the world
He [the man] watched him stoke the flames. God’s own firedrake. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground. (31)
The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember. (31)
they sat warm in their refuge while he told the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blankets. (41)
Sometimes the child would ask him questions about the world that for him was not even a memory. He thought hard how to answer. There is no past. What would you like? (53-54)
[The man’s wife:] You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. (57)
he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them. (74)
His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned. (187)