To Paradise

So why would he want to bring a baby into it? Who would want a child to grow up in this time, in this place? It takes a special kind of cruelty to make a baby now, knowing that the world it’ll inhabit and inherit will be dirty and diseased and unjust and difficult. So why would you? What kind of respect for life is that?

beggars and touts and pickpockets; all the poor, cold, struggling hordes of people trudging through their small lives in this impossible, proud, heartless city, the only witness to so much human misery the stone gargoyles that leered, meanly, with their sneering smiles, from their perches on grand buildings high above the teeming streets. And then there

Then there were the smells, the sounds, the sights: the peddlers pulling their wooden carts with their misshapen wheels that jostled off the sidewalk into the mud-lapped streets with a thunk, the men bent like mules; the gray-faced, starved-eyed children filing dully from the factory where they’d spent hours sewing buttons to poorly made garments;

he had been beginning to fear that it was not just that no one might love him but that he might be incapable of receiving such love

than he would were his time his own

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

But they still get more billable hours from you than I do, he’d said to Charles, once.

“Larsson, Wesley owns me by day, but you own me by night,” Charles always said, and that was satisfying, too.