don delillo "sine cosine tangent"

She said something about the boring state of Wednesdays throughout the world. A little ash, at minimum expense, and a Wednesday, here and there, she said, becomes something to remember. a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small, crowded type Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? I used to watch her guide the device over the back of her cloth coat. I tried to define the word “roller” without sneaking a look in the dictionary. I decided to wait a while before asking, thinking of her as one spelling one day, the other spelling the next day, and trying to determine whether it made a difference in the way I thought of her, looked at her, talked to her, and touched her. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks, and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself. This was the unseeable texture of a life, except that I was seeing it.