"Look," he said, "I fall in love every five minutes. I might be half in love with you now." "You're not the first caller to this line to say that," she said. "Love is everywhere." "I'm supposed to be writing down your complaints," she reminded him. "Okay, right," he said. "Well, today's complaint can be about what happens when I fall in love. Though I try not to, anymore. It makes me bad at being where I am." "I don't understand." "If I really fell in love with you, then when we hung up the phone I'd be stuck halfway. I'd be all disjointed in time and space, half there and half here. And I don't even know where there is. Whereas now, we get off the phone, no trouble. I'm where I am, like the Buddhists prefer." "We all want to keep the Buddhists happy." "The little Buddhists inside of ourselves, those are the ones I worry about." "But you still haven't really told me what happens when you really fall in love," she said. "Only that you want to avoid it."
"My eyes destroy you.""What?" "I have this condition called monster eyes. I find something not to like and it becomes enormous, it becomes the whole world. Once it was a woman's fingernails. I started to think they were too weird and short and stubby, and then it was all I could think about. I tried encouraging her to work on her cuticles, to push them up-am I disgusting you?" "No." "I told myself that if she'd just work on her hands I'd go back to adoring her. But really there were other things about her voice and personality and the way she fucked that were waiting to take the place of the fingernails. I'd begun to erode and degrade her in my mind. With my monster eyes."
Cradling the pen at the point like chalk, Lucinda wrote, in block letters,
M-O-N-S-T-E-R E-Y-E-S."So," he continued, "sometimes I think the kindest thing I can do for a person is keep them out of range of those eyes. Like keeping a wolf out of moonlight." "You mean a wolfman," Lucinda corrected. "Well, if he isn't exposed to the moon it doesn't have to get to that point." "But isn't a wolfman a man before he sees the moon? Rather than a wolf? But anyway, the danger in a wolfman seeing the moon isn't to the wolfman-" "Or the moon."
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