Against the Day

Their voices will be gentle, they will administer the pain only when they must, and when they bring out the weapons, objects we’ve never seen before, we stare, wordless as dogs, we don’t recognize them, perhaps we think they are toys or something else to amuse us…

They thought it was funny that white men should act quite so disagreeably toward other whites, treating them indeed almost as if they were Indians, some of them already believing that Colorado, because of its shape, had actually been created as a reservation for whites.

Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals.