The Locked Room

In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for.

The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about

I liked names associated with the sky - Orville Wright, Amelia Earhart - , with silent humor - Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd - , with long homeruns - Killebrew, Mantle, Mays - , and with music - Schubert, Ives, Armstrong

به خصوص از اسم هایی که آسمان را تداعی می کردند خوشم می آمد - اورویل، رایت، آملیا ارهارت - ، آنهایی که طنزی درشان پنهان بود - کیتن، لنگدون، لوید - ، اسامی اشیای موجود در خانه - کیل برو، منتل، میز - و آن ها که آهنگین بودند -شوبرت، ایوز، آرمسترانگ

These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about.

Take blue for example, he says. There are bluebirds and blue jays and blue herons. There are cornflowers and periwinkles. There is noon over New York. There are blueberries, huckleberries, and the Pacific Ocean. There are blue devils and blue ribbons and blue bloods. There is a voice singing the blues. There is my father's police uniform. There are blue laws and blue movies. There are my eyes and my name. He pauses, suddenly at a loss for more blue things, and then moves on to white. There are seagulls, he says, and terns and storks and cockatoos. There are the walls of this room and the sheets on my bed. There are lilies-of-the-valley, carnations, and the petals of daisies. There is the flag of peace and Chinese death. There is mother's milk and semen. There are my teeth. There are the whites of my eyes. There are white bass and white pines and white ants. There is the President's house and white rot. There are white lies and white heat. Then, without hesitating, he moves on to black, beginning with black books, the black market, and the Black Hand. There is night over New York, he says. There are the Chicago Black Sox. There are blackberries and crows, blackouts and black marks, Black Tuesday and the Black Death. There is blackmail. There is my hair. There is the ink that comes out of a pine. There is the world a blind man sees. Then, finally growing tired of the game, he begins to drift, saying to himself that there is no end to it. He falls asleep, dreams of things that happened long ago, and then, in the middle of the night, wakes up suddenly and begins pacing the room again, thinking about what he will do next.