During the years when Solana was growing up, her siblings had laid claim to all the obvious family roles: the athlete, the soldier, the cut-up, the achiever, the drama queen, the hustler, the saint, and the jack-of-all-trades. What fell to her lot was to play the ne'er-do-well. Like her mother, she'd gotten pregnant out of wedlock and had given birth to a son when she was barely eighteen. From that time forward, her progress through life had been hapless. Nothing had ever gone right for her. She lived paycheck to paycheck with nothing set aside and no way to get ahead. Or so her siblings assumed. Her sisters counseled and advised her, lectured and cajoled, and finally threw up their hands, knowing she was never going to change. Her brothers expressed exasperation, but usually came up with money to bail her out of a jam. None of them understood how wily she was. She was a chameleon. Playing the loser was her disguise. She was not like them, not like anyone else, but it had taken her years to fully appreciate her differences. At first she thought her oddity was a function of the family dynamic, but early in elementary school, the truth dawned on her. The emotional connections that bound others to one another were absent in her. She operated as a creature apart, without empathy. She pretended to be like the little girls and boys in her grade, with their bickering and tears, their tattling, their giggles, and their efforts to excel. She observed their behavior and imitated them, blending into their world until she seemed much the same. She chimed in on conversations, but only to feign amusement at a joke, or to echo what had already been said. She didn't disagree. She didn't offer an opinion because she had none. She expressed no wishes or wants of her own. She was largely unseen—a mirage or a ghost—watching for little ways to take advantage of them. While her classmates were self-absorbed and oblivious, she was hyperaware. She saw every thing and cared for nothing. By the age of ten, she knew it was only a matter of time before she found a use for her talent for camouflage. By the age of twenty, her disappearing act was so quick and so automatic that she was often unaware she'd absented herself from the room. One second she was there, the next she was gone. She was a perfect companion because she mirrored the person she was with, becoming whatever they were. She was a mime and a mimic. Naturally, people liked and trusted her. She was also the ideal employee—responsible, uncomplaining, tireless, willing to do whatever was asked of her. She came to work early. She stayed late. This made her appear selfless when, in fact, she was utterly indifferent, except when it was a matter of furthering her own aims.

The job of having to soften up the brick every day, the job of cleaving a passage through the glutinous mass that declares itself to be the world, to collide every morning with the same narrow rectangular space with the disgusting name, filled with doggy satisfaction that everything is probably in its place, the same woman beside you, the same shoes, the same taste of the same toothpaste, the same sad houses across the street, the filthy slats on the shutters with the inscription THE HOTEL BELGIUM. Drive the head like a reluctant bull through the transparent mass at the center of which we take coffee with milk and open the newspaper to find out what has happened in whatever corner of the glass brick. Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the doorknob, that act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex. See you later, sweetheart. Have a good day. Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee.

He [Welles] must choose "Moby Dick," a book whose setting is the open sea, whose hero is more mountain than man and more symbol than either, and whose villain is the supremely unstagable whale. He must take as his raw material Melville's prose, itself as stormy as the sea it speaks of, with a thousand wrecked metaphors clinging on its surface to frail spars of sense. You do not dip into Melville, you jump in, holding your nose and praying not to be drowned. If prose styles were women, Melville's would be painted by Rubens and cartooned by Blake: it is a shot-gun wedding of sensuousness and metaphysics. Yet out of all these impossibilities Mr. Welles has fashioned a piece of pure theatrical megalomania: a sustained assault on the senses which dwarfs anything London has seen since, perhaps, the Great Fire.

Passing a Woolworth’s, she gripped my arm: “Let’s steal something,” she said, pulling me into the store, where at once there seemed a pressure of eyes, as though we were already under suspicion. “Come on. Don’t be chicken.” She scouted a counter piled with paper pumpkins and Halloween masks. The saleslady was occupied with a group of nuns who were trying on the masks. Holly picked up a mask and slipped it over her face; she chose another and put it on mine; then she took my hand and we walked away. It was as simple as that. Outside, we ran a few blocks, I think to make it more dramatic; but also because, as I’d discovered, successful theft exhilarates. I wondered if she’d often stolen. “I used to,” she said. “I mean I had to. If I wanted anything. But I still do it every now and then, sort of to keep my hand in.” We wore the masks all the way home.

By killing Hamilton, Burr had nothing to gain and everything to lose, as he almost certainly knew at the time and as subsequent events confirmed quite conclusively; Burr’s initial reaction to Hamilton’s collapse, as described by both Pendleton and Van Ness, was apparent surprise and regret, followed soon thereafter by an urge to speak with the wounded Hamilton; moreover, in the latter stages of the preduel negotiations when Hamilton’s side proposed that David Hosack serve as physician for both parties, Burr had concurred that one doctor was sufficient, then added, “even that unnecessary”; finally, when duelists wished to graze or wound their antagonist superficially, the most popular targets were the hips and legs; Burr’s ball missed being a mere flesh wound on the hip by only two or three inches, the damage to vital organs resulting from the ricochet off Hamilton’s rib.

In the end, we can never know for sure.

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