“Jacques Cousteau said that jet lag was his favorite drug.”
She has no internalized surface map of this city, only of the underground and of assorted personal footpaths spreading out from its stations.
IF there’s any one thing about England that Cayce finds fundamentally disturbing, it is how “class” works—a word with a very different mirror-world meaning, somehow. She’s long since given up trying to explain this to English friends. The closest she can come is that it’s somewhat akin, for her, if only in its enormity, to how the British seem to feel about certain American attitudes to firearms ownership—which they generally find unthinkable, and bafflingly, self-evidently wrong, and so often leading to a terrible and profligate waste of human life. And she knows what they mean, but also knows how deeply it runs, the gun thing, and how unlikely it is to change. Except, perhaps, gradually, and over a very long time. Class in England is like that, for her.