Book 11 : Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

Her eyes, which are a brilliant and dazzling shade of blue custom-made for sparkling mockingly, sparkle mockingly at him.

' - I mean, if it was really a lucky condom, wouldn't you have used it by now?'
'How long have you had it in there, Mario?' Geoff says.
'Three years," Mario says.
'Three years?'
'Without using it?'
'Doesn't that sound more like an unlucky condom?'
Mario looks troubled as his unshakable faith in the luckiness of the lucky condom begins to show cracks.
'It was definitely pretty unlucky for the condom, to wind up in your wallet!'
'Yeah, Mario, your wallet is like the Alcatraz of condoms.'
'It's like the condom Bermuda Triangle!'
'Condoms tell each other stories about your wallet, "Oh, he disappeared into Mario Bianchi's wallet, and was never heard from again."'
'Yeah, I bet right this very second your lucky condom is in there whistling the theme from The Great Escape and digging a tunnel out of your wallet with a plastic coffee stirrer -'

This is a world, he is thinking, where you can lie in bed, listening to a song as you dream about someone you love, and the feelings and the music will resonate so powerfully and completely that it seems impossible that the beloved, whoever and whereever he or she might be, should not know, should not pick up this signal as it pulsates from your heart, as if you and the music and the love and the whole universe have merged into one force that can be channeled out into the darkness to bring them this message. But in actuality, not only will he or she not know, there is nothing to stop that other person from lying on his or her bed at the exact same moment listening to the exact same song and thinking about someone else entirely - from aiming those identical feelings in some completely opposite direction, at some totally other person, who may in turn be lying in the dark thinking of another person still, a fourth, who is thinking of a fifth, and so on, and so on; so that rather than a universe of neatly reciprocating parts, love and love-returned fluttering through space nicely and symmetrically like so many pairs of butterfly wings, instead we get chains of yearning, which sprawl and meander and culminate in an infinite number of dead ends.

Skippy Dies receives: