Early one windy morning Maxine’s walking down Broadway when here comes a plastic top from a nine-inch aluminum take-out container, rolling down the block in the wind, on its edge, an edge thin as a predawn dream, keeps trying to fall over but the airflow or something – unless it’s some nerd at a keyboard – keeps it upright for an implausible distance, half a block, a block, waits for the light, then half a block more till it finally rolls off the curb under the wheels of a truck that’s pulling out and gets flattened. Real? Computer-animated?

Bleeding edge, Thomas Pynchon