![]() ![]() She understands that he’s not real, yet she also believes in his separate existence, a being “small and frail and brave… ashamed” of his body’s spectacle. She’s a math prodigy, the daughter of a man who worked on the Manhattan Project, but she’s also been visited since the age of twelve by an apparition she calls the Thalidomide Kid, a restlessly pacing figure three feet tall and with flippers instead of hands, who to her is neither dream nor hallucination but “coherent in every detail.” The Kid often checks up on her, talking and teasing and goading, and knows her every thought and weakness. ![]() The one we see, in the italicized, single-page prologue with which the book begins, is of a frozen golden-haired girl found hanging “ among the bare gray poles of the winter trees.” Her name is Alicia Western, and she’s dressed in white, with a red sash that makes her easy to spot against the snow, a “ bit of color in the scrupulous desolation.” It is Christmas 1972, a forest near the Wisconsin sanitarium where the twenty-year-old has checked herself in-a place she’s been before. ![]() ![]() Or two corpses, really, one of which has gone missing. No regular reader of Cormac McCarthy will be surprised to find that The Passenger begins with a corpse. ![]()
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