Madness came to get you.

I said baby, I'm so far away from home.

“Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props... Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes magic out of China...” Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender’s blackened teeth. “But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.”

I dream of everybody's death.

"I can never wash the guilt
Or get these bloodstains off my hands.
And it takes a lot of whiskey
To make this nightmares go away."

"Como a noite é longa!
Toda a noite é assim...
Senta-te, ama, perto
Do leito onde esperto.
Vem p’r’ao pé de mim...

Amei tanta coisa...
Hoje nada existe.
Aqui ao pé da cama
Canta-me, minha ama,
Uma canção triste.

Era uma princesa
Que amou... Já não sei...
Como estou esquecido!
Canta-me ao ouvido
E adormecerei...

Que é feito de tudo?
Que fiz eu de mim?
Deixa-me dormir,

Dormir a sorrir
E seja isto o fim."

Fernando Pessoa, in "Cancioneiro"

Orquídea

Vagueias por onde não me podes ver; mas eu vejo-te. Vejo os teus passos, observo-os de longe, sabendo que não são meus - mas quando mais os tento não ouvir mais eles pisam as teclas de um piano, quanto mais os tento não ver mais eles dançam, inocentes e cativantes. Os mesmos passos te conservam na sombra, da qual apenas vejo as pernas e as mãos delicadas, chamando-me. Desconhecida, assombração das noites mais descansadas, conforto dos dias mais escuros. És-me uma folha de papel onde as letras querem aparecer mas se escondem para eu não as ver, como nova, mas que carrega consigo a beleza da idade e da cultura - és-me um livro que gostaria de ler, um vinil com que me deliciaria, um cálice de vinho que me faria esquecer o mundo.

E és-me o terror de uma promessa por cumprir, uma orquídea que aflige à negligência, um segredo quebradiço. Uma história que temo ser perdida por um vulto intermitente, um poema que foi escrito na paixão de um café e cai tragicamente do bolso a meio de um caminho - o poema que passamos a vida a procurar, sem saber que se afogou na neve do passeio.

Mas será que existes? E eu mesmo, existo?

Riviera sat motionless on his foam pad, his right arm extended straight out, level with his shoulder. A jewel-scaled snake, its eyes like ruby neon, was coiled tightly a few milimeters behind his elbow. Case watched the snake, which was finger-thick and banded black and scarlet, slowly contract, tightening around Riviera's arm.

"Come then," the man said carresingly to the pale waxy scorpion poised in the center of his upturned palm. "Come." The scorpion swayed its brownish claws and scurried up his arm, its feet tracking the faint dark telltales of veins. When it reached the inner elbow, it halted and seemed to vibrate. Riviera made a soft hissing sound. The sting came up, quivered, and sank into the skin above a bulging vein. The coral snake relaxed, and Riviera sighed slowly as the injection hit him. Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. "If God made anything better, he kept it for himself. 'You know the expression, Case?"

As paredes interiores escorrem com inveja, desilusão, enquanto as mãos do crescimento as tentam escalar. Quão difícil é escolher por que se esquece; entre odiar, e deixar de querer. Que não se queira nada. Que o futuro já tenha passado. Que cada dia seja o último. E que o último seja apenas outro. Paz, ou abafamento?

You know she still had her shades.

And she said.

"Honey, nothing to it. 'Cause you see? Presley is what I go by. And why don't you change the stations? Let's count the green elevators as they go by the rearview mirror. 'Cause anyway you pointed this thing it's got to beat the hell out of the sting, 'cause every night I go to bed and I lie down next to all my dreams. But they die here every morning.
So come on, Presley! Drill me a hole, with a barber pole, 'cause I'm jumping my parole just like a fugitive tonight. And let's have another swig at that black velvet. Let's pass that car, man, you brave enough? 'Cause we're getting there just before the sun comes up out in Burma Shave.

Just you and me, baby. 'Cause this town is driving me crazy, it's driving me crazy! I'm going crazy, baby."

And the sun hit the derrick and cast a bat wing shadow up against the car door on the shot gun side. And baby, when they pulled you from the wreck you still had on your shades.

Your shades, baby, and a red-stained Camel in your lips.

La Vie en Noir, Pluie Noire

Film Noir (literally "black film" in French) is a genre of stylish crime dramas, difficult to define, but the 1940s and 1950s were the classic period. Whether works since then can be accurately classed as Noir is a subject of much debate among film critics. Film Noir, and the literature from which it is drawn, is clearly the progenitor of later genres, particularly cyberpunk.

A tua alma tem as janelas fechadas, as persianas em baixo, as cortinas corridas. Ainda assim espreitas pelos frinchos das dobradiças, pelas fechaduras das portas, sem deixares que te vejam de volta.

Podias ser um detective abrindo com dois dedos uma ranhura nos estores, observar o mundo a preto do alcatrão e branco da neve, com jazz no ouvido e whisky na língua, e nicotina a sair das narinas da femme fatale que te contrata. Mas já não é esse o tipo de melancolia.

Nunca me tinham dito que se podia ter algum tipo de saudades da melancolia.

Voices.

Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given...

Hold still. Don't move.

And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull.

Goddamn don't you move.

Chiba City Blues

"A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaring obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee.

He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarrette smoke."

Name your god and bleed the Freak.

Hohenheim.

"I'm just interested in watching what kind of world will be born from someone held prisioner by hatred."

Rain

Quando o sopro passava na prata da tua flauta.