#slothrop

Just for the knife-edge, here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

"He, the new one, the shy one, how he tangled in the spreading roots and tendrils of inner event twisting in primitive patterns, in choking growths, in the shapes of killer animals. How he submitted. Made love. Loved his own inwardness, his inner wildness the primeval forest where his heart stood like a green shoot among huge fallen trees. Made love. Let it go, went on down through his own roots and out to the monstrous beginning where his little birth had happened so long ago. Loving it he waded downward into more ancient blood, into canyons where Horror itself lay gorged from eating his fathers and every Terror knew him and winked in complicity.”

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end. He just runs.