Ingesting words with his eyes

"Anthony could talk and read at the same time. But his eyes trumped his ears. He usually remembered what he'd read while talking, but he never remembered conversations he'd had while reading. He was like a sleepwalker who grocery-shopped and paid bills in his sleep and forgot it all the next morning. Most of our conversations were now conducted with a book between us-- his book, of course. When I read, I shushed him ferociously, for all the good it did me; he had never accepted the fact that other people didn't possess his unique facility for ingesting words with his eyes while spewing them from his mouth." --from Trouble by Kate Christensen