the last book I ever read (A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone, excerpt four)

from A Hall of Mirrors by Robert Stone:

So she stayed on at the bar, seeing little of the baby, which went sickly about a month later and was pale all the time and didn’t take much nourishment and had convulsions finally and died. After that, things were a little blurred. She had moved around a lot. That was most of her life it felt like, the four years since then. It had turned out that there were barmaids and barmaids, and if you stayed at it long enough you just naturally made the second category. And sooner or later by some law of circulation you ended up in Texas. You gotta go up or you go down, they said – down always turns out to be Texas and you can figure anywhere else is up.