#zero history

Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.

She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.