Blood Test by Charles Baxter

Highlights from "Blood Test" by Charles Baxter

Joe’s lying on the floor and has got earbuds on and is listening to the Go-Fuck-Yourself-Electrocute-Me-Monster-Death-Metal music he likes, singers screaming as if they’re being tasered.

Everyone feels like a fugitive right now. I recall that a recent poll shows that 54 percent of people in the United States believe in demons with hooves and pitchforks. They await the resurrection of John F. Kennedy, Jr.

I say my evening prayer for the souls of everyone, living and dead. God is watching over us and is arranging the future that computers can only guess at, and once I’m under the covers, that’s it, that’s the day.

Getting a job at our local 7-Eleven as night manager did not solve her issues. Made them worse, in fact, all that nocturnal thinking in the back room while the Slurpee machine ground on as if nothing was happening. She wanted to breathe the air of other planets. Poor woman, she went to work at 7-Eleven as an assistant manager to have extra money for Christmas presents and instead she discovered despair under the harsh fluorescent lighting

The whole operation is too zany for my taste. On the other hand, if you don’t like zany you probably shouldn’t live in America. You can always go to somewhere like Switzerland, where you can gaze at the banks, the mountains, and the clocks

parked my car in the lot as far away from the other vehicles as I could. Actuarial tables will tell you that people who have been given a diagnosis of a terminal illness are reckless drivers, and you should stay away from where they park after they’ve gotten a diagnosis or at any other time. They have nothing to lose, flinging open the car doors and sitting down without attaching the lap-and-shoulder belt before they apply the heavy foot to the accelerator pedal as they open their fourth can of beer. Read the statistics if you don’t believe me

Recreational drugs and medical school arrogance have knocked this guy into the psychic ozone.

He glances up at me, examines my face as if it were a clue to a future crime, then scrutinizes the page again

I may be untrained, but I went to a Catholic school as a kid and was taught grammar by Jesuits, and Jesuits sure know their grammar. For those guys, it’s a rock of certainty in a sea of doubt. Also, Jesuits like logic.

He has an effortless condescension. It costs him nothing

about monsters is that they never seem to relax or take a day off. They’re always on the prowl in Monsterville and have an insatiable appetite for destruction. With them rage never goes away.

If you were to ask him where Italy is located on the globe, he wouldn’t know but would despise you for asking.

Given his intermittent employment, his carelessness, his mean streak, and his bad habits, Burt would be no prize to anybody, but here I have to be truthful and submit an important detail about him, which is that by any standard, he is exceptionally handsome. A prank of fate

But Ol’ Farmhouse takes the cake, the cake in question having an almondy cyanide aroma. They also have a diet cola for the calorie-conscious that tastes like fizzy sugared cat food.

Famous Discount is set up like a treasure hunt or a yard sale. Confusion reigns on the sales floor. You want it, you have to find it. The commodities seem to have been laid out by stoned half-wits. The drugged employees have no idea where anything is. Given all the disarray, shoppers at Famous Discount can feel the store’s contempt for them. If they respected their customers, they’d sort this shit out. But no: it’s a labyrinth with expired protein bars at the center

he’s fifteen, and when you’re fifteen, a lot of the cards that fate is going to put in your hand are still being dealt. Some of the cards you’re holding are hard to read. The cards are telling you your fortune, a blueprint of the future, but the report is written in a dead language

Whenever my family gets together, they’re always putting things into their mouths. Tonight it’s not much of a meal, the usual, meatloaf, but it’s micro-love, and all those micro-love deeds add up.

doesn’t have a website?” “Security. Security pure and simple,” she says with a twist of her head, sweeping a bit of hair behind her ear. “We don’t want the trouble that people are talking about when they talk about trouble."

I have figured those Generomics characters out. They are tempters intent on doing harm, as performed by me and others, and they will profit from my efforts at crime. It’s in their interests financially for me to shoot somebody. New frontiers in capitalism are always opening up when you think nothing new is on the horizon.

and under a cloud of prophecy that claimed I was about to become a murderer, I went back to my life, a life as ordinary and as calm as a lake that you discover after a long hike in the wilderness—a lake that isn’t on your map and doesn’t have a name or a fixed location but whose surface reflects the blue sky, and, until you get there and dip your hands in the water, is untouched.

Cheryl helped Burt out of the car and into the wheelchair. He was wearing a white cowboy hat. I think it was a Stetson, but I can’t claim to be an expert on such matters. Nor was I certain whether his headgear was of the ten-gallon variety. The hat gave him courage, I believe. I noted also that he was wearing dark glasses, cowboy boots, and a T-shirt with another flag of our nation on it. The flag made a bold statement on his behalf. Here was a true American.