2
" I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody’s cousin’s gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands. "
― Sam Lipsyte , The Ask
4
" Middling monsters died at the point of pitchforks, burned with torches, or at the butt of silver-capped canes wielded by angry, geriatric Poles. Middling people were dime-a-dozen, emptied souls, shorn sheeple, human husks. A good monster didn’t worry about what it was doing; it just did it. A true predator didn’t worry about guilt, or being popular, or anything. It just cruised along, living for the kill, surviving. A good person, well, she’d put a bullet in her head or weigh her feet down and throw herself into the Chicago River, holding her breath until she went to the sludgy, filthy bottom, and had to open wide and breathe water until she died. "
5
" You don’t understand,” my dad said. “They stop you.”
“Who? What are you talking about?” my mom asked.
“That’s why I was being cautious.”
“Who stops you?”
“The police. If you’re white, or maybe Oriental, they let you drive however you want. But if you’re not, they stop you.”
“Who told you that?”
“The guys at the diner. That’s what they say. If you’re black or if you’re brown, they automatically think you’ve done something wrong.”
“Rafa, that’s ridiculous. We’ve lived here for fifteen years. We’re citizens.”
“The police don’t know that by looking at us. They see a brown face through the windshield and boom! Sirens!”
My mom shook her head. “That’s what that was about?”
“I didn’t want to give them reason to stop me.”
“You were driving like a blind man, Rafa. That will give them reason to stop you.”
“Everybody else just has to obey the law. We have to obey it twice as well.”
“But that doesn’t mean you have to go twice as slow as everybody else!”
The light turned green and my dad brought the car out of first. We cruised under the overpass, a shadow draping over the car like a blanket.
“Next time, just try to blend in with everyone else and you’ll be fine,” my mom offered.
“The way of the world,” my dad said.
“What?” my mom asked as we emerged back into the sunlight.
“Just trying to blend in. That’s the way of the world.”
“Well, that’s the way of America, at least,” my mom said. "
― , The Book of Unknown Americans