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"A word about a small lie I have been weighing. I called the table he moved to ours our table, which is accurate to the geometry but not to the encounter; the man was always, in my memory, slightly apart. He sat with us for the better part of three hours, and yet the after-image I carry is of a man at the next table over — present, addressable, but on the other side of a small invisible distance the conversation never quite closed. The lie I have been weighing is whether to tell you he was at the next table over throughout, because that would be truer to what I remember even though it is contradicted by where the chairs were. I have not told it. I note the temptation because it is itself diagnostic."

"What the book is, I think, is a speculative ontology. A description of what would have to be the case for a particular set of public artifacts and a particular set of less public ones to fit together in the way they appear to fit together. The hypothesis is not mine. I did not generate it. I found it half-assembled in the materials, and I am presenting the assembly here with my hand on the work but not, I hope, on the conclusions."

"about his prostate"

"I do not mean it was disproved. I have no instrument that disproves it"

"drinking an unsweetened iced green tea. No modifications. I noticed because it was the first thing about him that did not match the story. A man telling you, in 2025, that his former leadership had the ability to travel to nearby galaxies should, by every law of narrative economy I know, be drinking something complicated. He was drinking the simplest thing on the menu.1"

"the chain has, for reasons known only to its procurement department, decided should be the temperature of the surface of Venus by mid-morning nine months of the year"

"which is a thing some people can give and most cannot."

"id, which meant the red skirt"

"was eleven and in love with her grandfather"

"At the post office a tall man in a Stetson"

"had a tattoo of a hummingbird on her wrist"

"This was not a surprise — it was a small town, and Pop had lived in it for forty years — but the specific texture of it was"

"“Mars. Not very bright this year. He’s far.” He talked about the planets like they were uncles he hadn’t seen in a while. Marisol lay on the porch with her head on a couch cushion and Lucha against her side, and Pop sat in his chair with his Big Red sweating in his hand, and he named things, and she listened, and she did not, that week, learn any of the names"

"Around four it stopped being too hot. They made dinner together. They sat on the back porch and Pop pointed at things in the sky."

"which was how they had agreed, a long time ago, to look at photographs of Grandma Elena. Her room had been her mother’s, repainted, with a quilt on the bed that had every state on it and a window that looked out at the cottonwood and Lucha sleeping under it. Pop put her suitcase on the bed and said bathroom is across the hall, don’t drink from the tap because the"

"like the green soap Pop used, the kind that comes in a bar wrapped in paper."

"The living room had a couch with a Mexican blanket folded over the back and an armchair with a dent in the seat the exact shape of Pop and a low shelf of books that was mostly westerns and a few thick blue ones about birds and one whole row of small black notebooks lined up like soldiers, which Marisol noticed but did not ask about, because she had been raised to know which questions were her business."

"Some of these readers will treat the contents as fiction. They are entitled to that reading. The book is composed of materials some of which appear to be fictional and some of which appear to be the records of events that did, by the standards of a record, happen. I have declined to settle the question on the reader’s behalf. It is not the editor’s part to tell the reader which sentences to believe. I will say only that I have considered the question myself, at length, over a period of years; that I have not arrived at an answer; and that I have come to consider the question secondary to the question of whether the materials, taken together, are doing what I take them to be doing — which is to describe, from a great many angles and in a great many registers, a structure that no single witness could describe from one angle alone."

"There is a transcription of an audio tape that has been in restricted custody for nearly four decades and that I will not say how I obtained."

"Some claims need a long approach. This one needs the opposite. The human species is the observed experimental population of an older, more careful intelligence. The abduction corpus is the record of that observation. We are not their vessels. We are their long study."