Free City of God by E.L. Doctorow

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    But this cannot be a story about details. It cannot depend on a realistic presentation of thoughtfully worked out details to prop up its credibility. All of that can be passed over lightly in montage. The movie should operate in the abstract realm where practical matters give way to uncanny resonances with everyday truth. Because evil as it is most often committed comes of the given life, it takes not only its motivation but its form from the structure of existing circumstances, it is not usually a thing of such high-concept deviance and requiring such extensive planning to perform.
    In fact the movie can be said to begin only with what in the lover’s mind is the culminating scene, a work of performance art, in which an American business success, a man for whom he has no feelings whatsoever let alone dislike, will be dropped precipitously into material and psychic dereliction. He will come to a door he thinks is his own and not be recognized by his wife. She will deny that she knows him. A duplicate of himself will ask the police to take him away and charge him with stalking. Security guards will prevent him from entering his office. Hotels will not accept his credit cards. Old friends will back away from him in fear. Lawyers will not take his calls. His passport will be confiscated as a forgery. Disoriented, and only imperfectly understanding that something has been done to him, he will be left ranting and railing in a mad state of total self-displacement, a deportee from himself.
    Perhaps, thinks the lover, he will go crazy. Perhaps he will attempt to kill me and end up in some hospital for the criminally insane. Another delicious bit of suspense is the measure of my control over her, calculable to the extent to which she can be trusted. If residual feelings of affection in the form of pity or terror will operate in her, perhaps to the point of revealing the truth to him, so that even at risk of criminal indictment to herself, she will bring down the whole beautiful work of art to a crashing conclusion.
    What is most likely, of course—and how can I claim I did not suspect this of myself from the beginning—is that having brought about this crime of usurpation, I will discover that even this cannot stave off my profound, chronic lassitude, which can now be alleviated, if onlyfor a moment, by abandoning the woman who has committed herself so obsessively, adoringly to me, so that all she has left for the life of her is the shattered husband whom she has betrayed.
    And so we have the secular Enlightenment version of Amphitryon. And all of it from the lovely, self-assured young woman I sat next to at a dinner party. This is my laboratory, here, in my skull. . .

    â€”Crows on the dock? So they’re here now too. I have never heard of crows coming to saltwater. This is very bad. Look at them, three or four, hopping down from the piling to the dock, pecking away at the crab legs and clamshells left by the gulls. An advance party, a patrol. If they like what they find, the flocks will follow squawking and croaking in the waterside trees, raising hell like a goddamn motorcycle club. Jesus. I’ve got orioles here that flash in the blueberry, finches who like to balance on the tips of water reeds when the wind is up, I’ve got redwinged blackbirds, mockingbirds, cowbirds, cardinals, wrens, flickers, swifts, I’ve got skimmers, sandpipers, and bad-postured night herons like old ladies with hump necks.. . . Crows are smarter and bigger and noisier and they commune. They take over, they will drive out all the others, this is serious, I will have to watch them closely. You must go back to the suburban woods of Westchester, crows. You are inlanders, you flock in the big maples and come down to the street to eat the car-casses of squirrels. You don’t look good against an open sky. Crows on the dock are a mixed metaphor.

    â€”Let us consider for a moment those remarks of my teacher in the Luitpold