We are scared there is a black woman deliberating on suicide in our building. Will Phyllis Quaddan gas herself? Hang? If she has to do it we'd prefer she'd use pills. We're afraid if she drowns herself in the bathtub the water will flood our apartment as well, get all our books wet. Only for a second do we consider going upstairs, knocking at her door, talking to her about it. Try to dissuade her. Convince her life is worth living.

Then ask her in a roundabout way if she could connect us to her publisher. Like Naipaul did with Foster Morris.

There is always the danger of her not being at the end of her rope. Us coming to discuss her suicide, the suicide she's not even thinking of - it's a kind of responsibility we don't need, putting the thought of dying in the woman's mind. So we decide to wait, wait for her to come up with it on her own, then go up and try to talk her out of it.

…

Good! Phyllis is satisfied. The room looks much better now. More space. To move around. To think. To play. To breathe. All the books are in the bench-trunk in the corner. Those that didn't fit she left in the backyard. Phyllis forgets this is a rainy season. She had to do it. Books cause allergies. Or so it says in “The Good Housekeeping Illustrated Book of Pregnancy and Baby Care”. They could be wrong, but Phyllis doesn't want to take that chance.

…

We look at our American library. It's small, it's growing, being fed by FedEx deliveries from Amazon.com. But it's small. It's focused, subject driven, it's an arrow, a bullet, a canon ball of a library. A thunderbolt. It would still fit in just one suitcase. A suitcase library for people living out of their suitcases. People with two camping foldable tent beds, foldable table and chairs (Euro foldable chairs!), foldable lamps, a pair of laptop computers, with yellowed pages of LA Times taped on the windows instead of curtains. We're getting ready to leave, any day now. We don't even clean the apartment, mildew bruising the shower curtain, dust blown in blue clouds over the floors, like tumbleweeds across the desert, stove top encrusted in spill-overs of food and olive oil. We don't wash the dishes either, we throw them away, plastic disposable bowls, eat on the chairs, the table is rendered unusable for eating on it, littered with scrap paper and scrap thoughts, it's a desk determined not to be a dining table.

N. puts a plastic bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup on a piece of paper that says:

Phyllis Quaddan came from Ghana to America. V. S. Naipaul went from Trinidad to Britain. They write.

True change is brought on by those ignorant enough of the past and those aware enough of the future.

There is nothing intelligent one can hear from a person who doesn't listen.

A banana peel has more appeal to a banana you peel, but it feels it more appeals to a person feeling the peeling.

Slavs have unlocked the mystery of existence: Life is hard and then you die!

There is no such thing as free association, someone always pays for it at the end.

Notes on language acquisition: coin a new word every day, then forget what it's supposed to mean, like OTHERWHERE – a pronoun of place, PROJECTIVE - a noun, or OBJECTILE – noun or an adjective?