conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a title for a book about Zach, Await, Reply with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Stay Awake'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Stay Awake
  Pierce rose up out of bed and padded down the hall. Jesse was there in his old bedroom, facing the full-length mirror that was attached to the door. He was saluting himself and marching in place with a look of fierce triumph, like a soldier tramping through the streets of a smoldering enemy town.
  The boy looked at Pierce in that blank, fake-innocent way that he had, glancing sidelong at the mirror again, as if his reflection were an old pal he shared some little secret with. It had occurred to Pierce recently: Jesse was the kind of person who could betray his own mother.
  He was a real pack rat, this kid, Pierce thought. Every motel room they stayed in, Jesse made up a collection of the free soaps and shampoos and lotions, and sometimes took along the television remote for good measure. And then there were the houses he and Pierce had broken into.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I drift past several dreadfully intimate tableaus, trying to avert my eyes. Behind one curtain is the melancholy glare of a bleeding, tattooed hip-hop guy, emasculated by a cotton smock with a periwinkle pattern; behind another is a skeletal old person in an oxygen mask, male or female, whose gaze of biblical despair trails along beside me as I pass.
  And then—as if I have been led directly to her curtained doorstep—there she is; I see her only a few yards away. She is sitting propped in her bed, wearing a neck brace and a metal halo that encircles her forehead, frozen there into an alert, attentive posture the way statues of empresses sit in their thrones.
  She closes her eyes for a moment, five seconds, ten seconds, and when she opens them again it seems that she has lost her train of thought. She smiles up at me fondly, as if I'm an old dear friend she hasn't seen in a long time. "Did I tell you, Charlie? My husband is flying back from Japan! I'm going to be in traction for a few weeks and he's flying home to be with me."
  I wait for her to finish her sentence, but now she appears to be completely unconscious, and her expression slackens and sags. "Rain?" I say, and I adjust the blanket on her bed, straighten the wrinkles underneath her hand. For a moment, I imagine that I could just sit here and talk, the way Mrs. Fowler used to talk to my mother, my mother sitting there deafly, the two of them watching TV, Mrs. Fowler chatting away.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She will read this passage aloud to them, Eden thinks, she will read it with great inflection and feeling and they some of them
  She will look out at the students at their desks and there will be Christopher with his dark sad eyes
  Let us say that there is soon to be a moment when Daddy wakes up and he cannot breathe; the dog Angeline is sound asleep on his chest and his mouth opens to try to take in air and there is nothing, his throat clenches and his lungs don't fill up
  Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don't we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?
  Many people helped me with individual stories, and I owe thanks to the editors of the journals in which some of these stories first appeared, as well as to a great number of friends who indulgently read and commented on these pieces.