Dept. of Speculation

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of cursing and sexual content.

“My old apartment in Brooklyn. It was late, but of course, I couldn’t sleep. Above me, speed freaks merrily disassembling something. Leaves against the window. I felt a sudden chill and pulled the blanket over my head. That’s the way they bring horses out of a fire, I remembered. If they can’t see, they won’t panic. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.”

The narrator’s vivid description of her home life in Brooklyn, New York establishes this urban setting as a symbol of isolation and entrapment. The narrator can hear the “speed freaks merrily disassembling something” above her and the leaves scraping “against the window”—images of life beyond her insular space, but she remains trapped in her solitude, illustrated through the image of the blanket on her head. The descriptive passage conveys the narrator’s “panic” and anxiety, internal restlessness that she’ll combat throughout the novel.

“He gave me a CD to take home. On the cover was an old yellow phone book, ruined by rain. I closed my eyes and listened to it. Who is this person? I wondered.”

The soundscape CD the philosopher gives to the narrator marks the inception of the narrator’s interest in the husband. Listening to the CD affords her a rare sense of calm, illustrated by the image of her closing her eyes, and thus incites her curiosity over the husband. This passage foreshadows the couple’s forthcoming relationship.

“We walked for a ways along the edge of the cliff until we came to a bus stop. There we waited, holding hands, not talking. I was thinking about what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my brain?”

The narrator and the husband’s overseas trip inspires new intimacy between them. The image of the cliff near the bus stop suggests notions of danger—representative of the world beyond the couple’s developing connection—while the image of them “holding hands” in patient silence suggests comfort and safety.