The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul… — Cormac McCarthy
The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul breath rising visibly from the pierced sewerlids. The watertruck goes by like a night-beast, its drum-shaped brush clanking. Water wells inkblack in the streets repeating the polelamps in glozy rosettes that dish and slide in the wash like radiolarians pale with phosphorus on a midnight sea. The sweepers broom the trash along the flooded gutters, their yellow slickers bright with wet. They leap to the truck and ride with brooms aloft like figures done in lacquered wax, like hortatory gnomes. The hotel nightlights shine behind the drawn Venetian blinds and the slatted patterns on the curb-side cars give them the look of anchored smallcraft with lapstrake hulls. Out there in the winter streets a few ashen anthroparians scuttling yet through the falling soot. Above them the shape of the city a colossal horde of retorts and alembics ranged against a starless sky. Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone.
p. 228Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
He reached down and tapped Suttree's knee with his forefinger. You, my good buddy, are a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch. That's what your problem is. And that being your problem, there's not a whole lot of people in sympathy with you. Or with your problem.
And what happens then?
When?
After you're dead.
Dont nothing happen. You're dead.
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: what's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?
The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it. I dont believe there is an answer.
p. 258
Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? And who is this fool kneeling over your bones, choked with bitterness? And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
p. 154
