A passage of fiction is not an account of something that might once have happened in the visible world; it is not even an account of something that could conceivably have happened in that world… Such issues are irrelevant; a passage of fiction reports his or her contemplation of what did happen or what did not happen or what might have happened or what can never happen.
“The car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors’ “People Are Strange (When You’re a Stranger)” as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let any of it go, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redreamed in colors pale but intense, with unnaturally fine sand blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky — holding on, letting go, redreaming each night stop the less easterly places she’d been in all day, coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror’s single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.”
Thomas Pynchon | Vineland