All children know their parents plot to dispose of them. Black box. Big room. Mad and Dag fitted with other people’s faces. This is place without interruption, pinpointless time, motion extending beyond its own surrender to the Outside, and whether an isolated childhood encompasses the whole of “life and death,” this converse density, is itself a question too compact to be intelligible, dimension n, containing the total unbroken distance over which a thing extends and the presiding energy that informs it, no “part” separate from any other, continuous being, hole to hole, nourished from below. Baggy gray faces saying aga aga. Mad and Dag with a reel and rhyme. Count to ten to ten. Box with Chinese insides. Gas pumped from ex-sanguine stomachs. Continued din of popping optic disks. Big T, little w, little i, little l, little l, little i, little g. Nourished from below, from below. Hopping Mad and gad-about Dag plotting to dispose. Count to ten to ten to ten to ten.
— Don DeLillo, Ratner’s Star (1976)
