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Mercy and metaphor: the empathy era and its discontents

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Mercy and metaphor: the empathy era and its discontents

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Mercy and Metaphor:
The Empathy Era and its Discontents

by

Michael Powers

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Michael Powers
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I —Critical Dissertation: Mercy and Metaphor: The Empathy Era and its
Discontents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. iv

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….1

Chapter 1: Mercy and Metaphor…………………………………………………..7

Chapter 2: The Empathy Era……………………………………………………..30

Chapter 3: Human Beings Who Feel Pain………………………………………..47

Notes……………………………………………………………………………...56

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………58

Part II —Creative Dissertation: Gladness, a novel

Chapter 1………………………………………………………………................61

Chapter 2…………………………………………………………………………76

Chapter 3………………………………………………………………………..111

Chapter 4………………………………………………………………………..113

Chapter 5………………………………………………………………………..138

Chapter 6………………………………………………………………………..155

Chapter 7………………………………………………………………………..182

Chapter 8………………………………………………………………………..184

Chapter 9………………………………………………………………………..199

Chapter 10………………………………………………………………………202

Chapter 11………………………………………………………………………204

Chapter 12………………………………………………………………………221

iii
Chapter 13……………………………………………………………………….225

Chapter 14……………………………………………………………………….228

Chapter 15……………………………………………………………………….242

Chapter 16……………………………………………………………………….243

Chapter 17……………………………………………………………………….257

Chapter 18……………………………………………………………………….263

Chapter 19……………………………………………………………………….266

Chapter 20……………………………………………………………………….273

Chapter 21……………………………………………………………………….275

Chapter 22……………………………………………………………………….282

Chapter 23……………………………………………………………………….284

Chapter 24……………………………………………………………………….288

Chapter 25……………………………………………………………………….290

iv
Abstract

My doctoral work at USC includes a critical and a creative dissertation. Both components
seek to explore the limits of empathy as both a moral and an artistic virtue, and to define the
overlap between empathy and solipsism—the degree to which, in seeking to imagine the inner
lives of people other than ourselves, we in effect replace the vital context of the other person’s
life with our own.
The novel, Gladness, depicts a family struggling to make sense of their own private grief
against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating how individual and collective grief
intertwine with one another, threatening to erase the carefully constructed borders of the self. It
considers how disaster alters the flow of time, colonizing the past, rearranging our histories.
The critical dissertation, Mercy and Metaphor: The Empathy Era and Its Discontents,
aims to shed light on a mode of literary optimism that, I argue, characterized the early years of
the current century and became untenable in the aftermath of the 2016 election: the belief that
what was wrong with American life could be repaired if only we could re-learn how to
empathize with one another, and the concomitant belief among writers and readers of literary
fiction that they constituted a special tribe uniquely equipped to accomplish that mission. This
particular form of wishful thinking began largely in reaction to the official discourse of the “War
on Terror”—an alternate language that, with its color-coded threat levels and its ambient
paranoia and its endless euphemisms for state violence, seemed actively designed to thwart and
suppress empathy. This discourse, many American liberals surmised, had poisoned the national
psyche. About this they weren’t exactly wrong. The problem—exploited by wellness gurus from
John Harvey Kellog to Gwyneth Paltrow—is that once a toxin has been identified, it begins to
v
look, conveniently, like the cause of everything that’s wrong with us. A kind of nostalgia kicks
in: If I could just go back to the way I was before I drank the poison, I could be pure and clean
and good again.
What was needed was remediation. Culture industries rebranded themselves around the
salubrious task of teaching empathy. The movies were, per Roger Ebert in 2005, “a machine that
generates empathy.” Prose fiction was, per George Saunders, a form of “empathy training
wheels.” Barack Obama entered the White House promising to repair the “empathy deficit”
America had accrued over the first brutal half-decade of the new century, and by the end of his
second term was sitting at a table in Des Moines, Iowa with the novelist Marilynne Robinson,
arguing mildly over the success of the project and the direction the country seemed to be turning.
Robinson pointed to what she called “a terrible darkening of the national outlook”: the
proliferation of ever more arcane conspiracy theories, the tendency among so many Americans to
look at their political opponents not as good-faith interlocuters but as “the sinister other.” It was,
she said, “as dangerous a development as there could be, in terms of whether we continue to be a
democracy.” Obama, in his celebrated role as comforter-in-chief, pointed to the aftershocks of
the great recession and the paralyzing effects of congressional gridlock as temporary, situational
causes of what would surely be a brief interlude in the larger story of social progress. “I’m
always trying to push a bit more optimism,” he said. “We go through these moments.” Beneath
this momentary profusion of hostile weeds there was the good healthy soil of American
democracy—“people from every end of the earth,” in Robinson’s words, “just dealing with each
other in good faith”—a soil that Robinson and other writers like her had tended and would
continue to tend.
vi
If the first two decades of this century have seen prose fiction elevated to a new and
special status—as repository and teacher of what we have designated as our highest and most
elusive virtue—it’s a promotion about which both writers and readers might rightly feel some
ambivalence. As with any apparent gain in social status, it comes with a reduction of
possibilities, a loss of wildness. It’s not necessarily that fiction itself has changed at all, but the
way we read it has. To the extent that we turn to fiction for practice in seeing from perspectives
other than our own, we treat it as an adjunct to life, a useful aid, rather than as a distillation of
life itself. To the extent that we turn to it for proof that people apparently unlike ourselves are
nonetheless “human beings who feel pain,” as the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong says in her
book Minor Feelings, we conflate humanity with suffering and erase everything else any
particular person’s humanity may mean. I recognize that these strangers are humans. Elusive as
that recognition may feel at present, we should perhaps not be so ready to congratulate ourselves
for clearing such a low moral bar.

1
Introduction

I began writing these essays early in 2018, at a time that felt, to me and just about
everyone I know, as if the floor had slipped out from under us and we were falling together into a
chasm whose depth we could not yet begin to guess. A year earlier, in an essay published in The
Village Voice three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, the novelist
Aleksandar Hemon described the feeling this way:
There is a certain kind of abdominal pain felt only when a catastrophe appears at the door
of the world you know and proceeds to bang on it. The sensation could be likened to a
steel ball grinding on your intestines. There is nothing like it: there were times when I
thought I could hear it revolve.
i

He’s describing the feeling of watching as tens of millions of Americans choose an openly racist
demagogue to be their leader, but also the feeling, years earlier, of watching his infant daughter
slowly die from a brain tumor. Also the feeling, decades before that, of watching his home city
of Sarajevo descend, little by little and then all at once, into civil war.
Hemon’s essay borrowed its title from Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film about the
Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense. In a moment uniquely awash in think-pieces, it stood out to
me as the clearest, most recognizable description I’d come across of what it felt like to live
through the 2016 election and its aftermath. The fear it described was communal and at the same
time wholly personal, drawing lines of connection between its world-historical center and all the
moments of private catastrophe, of disorientation and rupture, in any individual life. “The only
unbearable consequence of the electoral outcome,” Hemon says:
was that the reality—the world—in which I lived had become instantly unimaginable. It
was clear to me not only that nothing would be as it used to be, but also that nothing had
ever been the way it used to be. I knew neither what had happened nor what would.
Overnight, America—its past, present, and future—had become unreal.
2
We were still years away from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the January 6
th
insurrection,
and Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine—unimaginable events that, as soon as they
happened, took on the aura of narrative inevitability: the flowering of the seeds planted in the
catastrophe of the 2016 election. This is the nature of catastrophe. “The future belongs to the
disaster,” writes the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, whose own long life seems to have been
forever transfixed by the disaster of the Nazi occupation of France in his youth.
ii
Impossible to
look back at November 2016 now without imagining that every awful thing that came later was
somehow latent within that moment. But what it felt like at the time was just the sensation
Hemon describes—that not only the future but also the past had become unreal, that nothing had
ever been as it had seemed to be. Most relevant for these essays—a certain mode of hopefulness
had been permanently shattered, shown to have been hollow all along.
These are not essays against hope. They’re not even, as one of my discarded early titles
had it, against empathy. Rather, they aim to shed light on a single important component of the
“nothing [that] had ever been the way it used to be”: the belief that what was wrong with
American life could be repaired if only we could re-learn how to empathize with one another,
and the concomitant belief among writers and readers of literary fiction that they constituted a
special tribe uniquely equipped to accomplish that mission. This particular form of wishful
thinking began, I argue, in the early years of this century, largely in reaction to the official
discourse of the “War on Terror”—an alternate language that, with its color-coded threat levels
and its ambient paranoia and its endless euphemisms for state violence, seemed actively designed
to thwart and suppress empathy. This discourse, many American liberals surmised, had poisoned
the national psyche. About this they weren’t exactly wrong. The problem—exploited by wellness
gurus from John Harvey Kellog to Gwyneth Paltrow—is that once a toxin has been identified, it
3
begins to look, conveniently, like the cause of everything that’s wrong with us. A kind of
nostalgia kicks in: If I could just go back to the way I was before I drank the poison, I could be
pure and clean and good again.
What was needed was remediation. Culture industries rebranded themselves around the
salubrious task of teaching empathy. The movies were, per Roger Ebert in 2005, “a machine that
generates empathy.”
iii
Prose fiction was, per George Saunders, a form of “empathy training
wheels.”
iv
Barack Obama entered the White House promising to repair the “empathy deficit”
America had accrued over the first brutal half-decade of the new century, and by the end of his
second term was sitting at a table in Des Moines, Iowa with the novelist Marilynne Robinson,
arguing mildly over the success of the project and the direction the country seemed to be turning.
Robinson pointed to what she called “a terrible darkening of the national outlook”: the
proliferation of ever more arcane conspiracy theories, the tendency among so many Americans to
look at their political opponents not as good-faith interlocuters but as “the sinister other.” It was,
she said, “as dangerous a development as there could be, in terms of whether we continue to be a
democracy.” Obama, in his celebrated role as comforter-in-chief, pointed to the aftershocks of
the great recession and the paralyzing effects of congressional gridlock as temporary, situational
causes of what would surely be a brief interlude in the larger story of social progress. “I’m
always trying to push a bit more optimism,” he said. “We go through these moments.” Beneath
this momentary profusion of hostile weeds there was the good healthy soil of American
democracy—“people from every end of the earth,” in Robinson’s words, “just dealing with each
other in good faith”—a soil that Robinson and other writers like her had tended and would
continue to tend.
v

4
If the first two decades of this century have seen prose fiction elevated to a new and
special status—as repository and teacher of what we have designated as our highest and most
elusive virtue—it’s a promotion about which both writers and readers might rightly feel some
ambivalence. As with any apparent gain in social status, it comes with a reduction of
possibilities, a loss of wildness. It’s not necessarily that fiction itself has changed at all, but the
way we read it has. To the extent that we turn to fiction for practice in seeing from perspectives
other than our own, we treat it as an adjunct to life, a useful aid, rather than as a distillation of
life itself. To the extent that we turn to it for proof that people apparently unlike ourselves are
nonetheless “human beings who feel pain,” as the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong says in her
book Minor Feelings, we conflate humanity with suffering and erase everything else any
particular person’s humanity may mean.
vi
I recognize that these strangers are humans. Elusive
as that recognition may feel at present, we should perhaps not be so ready to congratulate
ourselves for clearing such a low moral bar.
This dissertation aims to trace, briefly, the history of this recent change in fiction’s status,
and to consider in greater depth its effects on how we read and understand stories. Chapter 1,
“Mercy and Metaphor,” defines empathy as a species of metaphor—a means of knowing the
unknowable other by equating that other with the familiar self. Drawing on the life and work of
the theorist Michel Blanchot, and on ideas from Malcom Bull, John Tasioulas and others, I
attempt to draw a distinction between the literary virtue of empathy—the act of substituting our
own context for that of another person—and the more ambivalent but ultimately more generous
act of imagination in which we recognize that, paraphrasing Maxwell, other people are as real to
themselves as we are to ourselves.
5
The impulse to justify time and effort apparently wasted on made-up stories and made-up
people is not new. The empathy defense, to borrow a term from Trinity University professor
Michael Fischer, is only the latest in a long line of arguments for the moral and social benefits of
what is ultimately a source of entertainment and pleasure. Like those earlier arguments, the
empathy defense arises from the specific social conditions of its own time. Chapter 2, “The
Empathy Era,” attempts to map those conditions, beginning in hopeful resistance to the
euphemistic language of militarism, paranoia and surveillance that characterized the first years of
this century, and finally collapsing under its own weight with the rise of Donald Trump. The
career of the writer George Saunders roughly spans this era, and in Chapter 2 I read his work as a
case study illustrating both how powerfully fiction can work to engender empathy and how badly
the assumptions underlying the empathy era can break down under the pressures of a complex
reality.
Chapter 3, “Human Beings who Feel Pain,” considers the limitations of a model that
treats literary fiction primarily as evidence that people are people. The latter phrase comes from
novelist Jeanine Cummins, who defended her 2020 novel American Dirt, about Mexican
migrants trying to reach the United States, against charges of cultural appropriation by saying
that she had intended the book to confront its readers with the recognition that “these people are
people.” Revisiting Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and drawing from Cathy Park Hong’s Minor
Feelings and Danielle Evans’ The Office of Historical Corrections, I draw a distinction between
“being human in the moral sense, in the sense that one’s suffering has moral weight,” and being
real, which requires a recognition that our pain is not always readily legible to others, or even to
ourselves, and that we are more than just pain. Through close readings of stories including Anton
Chekhov’s “Heartache” and Sara Majka’s “White Heart Bar,” I attempt to define the limits of
6
literary empathy and to sketch what lies beyond those limits, to define the pleasure and purpose
of fiction as “not the imaginative collapsing of difference that we call empathy, but [an]
embodied intimacy, [a] contact within and across difference.”

7
Mercy and Metaphor

“At Their Mercy,” one of the 104 stories in Thomas Bernhard’s 104-page collection The
Voice Imitator, proceeds by a series of ironic reversals. A village woman comes down with a
life-threatening lung ailment, and in order to save her life her husband undertakes to build for her
a house high up on the hillside, “in good clean air.” The work is arduous—is “really too much
for him” as the unnamed, collective narrators have it—with the result that this formerly healthy
and vigorous “man of all work” dies of exhaustion just as his formerly ailing wife is recovering
her health. Suddenly alone, she finds that she is frightened of other people, and so she acquires a
vicious dog to protect her. The dog performs its function too well, frightening away any and all
visitors, until finally the woman, unable to stand her isolation any longer, bludgeons the dog to
death with a logging implement and throws herself “on the mercy of her fellow human beings.”
vii

The above summary is nearly as long as the story itself. To tell a memorable story in half
a printed page requires a ruthless economy. Many of the things we’ve come to expect from
modern, literary fiction must be stripped away. We know nothing about what either the woman
or her husband look like, and more strikingly we know nothing about how they speak to one
another, how they share space. There are none of the precisely chosen, revealing gestures that in
another kind of story might stand for the whole history of their intertwined lives. Indeed, there is
no intimacy at all between narrator and character. There are only such facts as might be gleaned
from a brief report in the local paper, such suppositions about cause and effect as might be
arrived at by any mildly interested observer.
This is a work of domestic fiction if there ever was one—a story about a marriage, a story
about homemaking in the most literal sense of the word—and yet at this distance nothing feels
8
familiar, lived in, but the language: It was really too much for him. She threw herself on their
mercy. As ruthlessly as it strips away the granularity of observation that has been, at least since
Flaubert, the hallmark of literary realism, the story strips away the domesticated quality of these
phrases. This is the story’s real project, and the book’s—to make us consider these pieces of
language that normally pass, with their cargo of accumulated and forgotten significance, beneath
our notice. In another story from the same collection, a respected family man murders four of his
six children and then defends himself in court “by saying that all of a sudden the children were
too much for him.”
viii
How does the significance of that common expression change if we use it
literally? For one thing, it becomes unsettling: Some things might really be too much. There
really are limits.
More striking still is the dual sense of mercy operating in “At Their Mercy.” The wife has
enlisted a member of another species to protect her from her own. Realizing her mistake too late,
she grievously violates the terms of her arrangement with the dog, effectively killing the animal
for serving her too faithfully. Having committed an act of violence, a crime, in order to
reestablish contact with humanity, she finds that she can now do so only as a criminal, subject to
the force of the law. This is the sense of the word mercy as it appears in the title, in the phrase at
their mercy, a usage more or less synonymous with in their power. She will appear, presumably,
in court, where it will be up to the law and its ministers to determine what becomes of her life.
Apart from the degree of formality, her predicament here is not fundamentally different from
yours or mine. To live with other people is to assume risk—this is why she got the dog in the
first place. To live in a human community is to allow our personal histories and our actions to be
judged, to be placed within legal and ethical frameworks that are not of our own making, that
may be wholly inadequate containers for the chaotic abundance of our inner lives, and that bear
9
on our outer, material lives in quite direct ways. And yet the alternative, to be left alone, is
worse. Have mercy on me. Meaning—Try to understand.
___

These twin locutions—have mercy on me, try to understand—apply so equally well to so
many of the same situations that it’s easy to imagine they mean the same thing. Any glance at the
literary output of the past two centuries is likely to reveal protagonists—Raskolnikov, Humbert
Humbert, Holden Caulfield—whose efforts to make themselves understood, or to understand
themselves, double as literal pleas for mercy, leniency, forgiveness. If you had to live inside my
mind, the protagonist thinks, you would understand why I did what I did. And so he sets out to
map the interior of his mind—to make his private experience legible to others and, just as
importantly, to himself. The phenomenon is perhaps most interesting—most productive of
tension and pathos—when the protagonist’s understanding of himself is farthest from the
author’s understanding of him, and farthest from ours. “This then is my story,” says Humbert.
“At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker
waters than I care to probe.”
ix
It is we who are asked to probe those waters, whether we care to or
not. To do so is in itself a kind of mercy. To state the obvious, fictional characters exist nowhere
but in the minds of readers. Better to be known as a monster than not to be known at all. “This is
the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,” (309) says Humbert. In the Bible, the
most dreadful punishment God inflicts on his people is to cast them out of his sight.
In this context, what is most striking about the Bernhard story may be how little its
narrators seem to care about the project of making legible either their own inner lives or that of
their protagonist. The sexton’s wife—we have no other way to identify her—begins by isolating
10
herself from other people out of fear and ends by committing a desperate act in order to break
free of her own self-imposed isolation. Given the circumstances in which the author has placed
her, both actions seem perfectly comprehensible, even reasonable. It doesn’t matter whether we
ourselves would do the same thing in the same circumstances. Nor does it necessarily matter that
the text has not done what modern, realist fiction normally does, which is to supply the details of
her inner life so we can imagine that we are her and not ourselves. In the absence of all that
interiority, what we’re left with is what it actually means to throw oneself on the mercy of one’s
fellow human beings: to seek not empathy, but recognition. What matters is that we read her
actions as recognizably human, arising from feelings and motivations akin to our own.
Humanity in this sense is not a taxonomical but a moral category, one that the
imaginative engine of fiction can confer on animals, plants, and indeed even nonliving things. It
is not the same as mercy, though it is often the ground from which mercy springs. It’s distinct
from—both more and less than—the virtue we’ve come (erroneously, I’m going to argue) to
associate most closely with the literary project: the kind of empathy that leads us to believe we
can imagine ourselves fully into the lives of other people. Such empathy may be a prerequisite
for mercy—Humbert certainly thinks so, hence the moral challenge posed by the text, which asks
us to enter into the subjectivity of a truly hideous person. But of course, the trick doesn’t work.
It’s not meant to. We never leave our own subjectivity behind, nor does Nabokov allow us to
withhold our condemnation. By the end, whatever empathy we have left is reserved for Dolores
Haze herself, whom we glimpse only through the grotesquely distorting screen of our narrator’s
predatory gaze.
It perhaps goes without saying that these are characters—textual constructs—and not
actual people. In a 1970 essay titled “The Concept of Character in Fiction,” critic and novelist
11
William Gass points up the absurdity of “these views…which think of fiction as a mirror or a
window onto life—as actually creative of living creatures.”
x
He describes a painting by Picasso
in which a blue enamel pot rests on a table beside a pitcher and a candle. No less absurd, Gass
implies, to try to guess what’s inside the pot than to imagine characters having inner lives that
extend beyond the words of which they are made. When Humbert claims to contain depths he
himself is afraid to plumb, we might imagine that he’s referring to the contents of that pot. But
Gass is perhaps being obtuse here, even pedantic, insisting on a distinction that in the end is both
obvious and rather trivial. It’s not absurd to say that the pot has contents. To the extent that it
exists at all, so does whatever is in it. It’s only absurd to say that we know what those contents
are.
This is exactly the alchemy we seek in fiction—the real toad in Marianne Moore’s
imaginary garden. The text gives us only what it can. “A character, first of all,” says Gass, “is the
noise of his name, and all the sounds and rhythms that proceed from him.” The trick works when
those sounds and rhythms trigger some readerly radar, the mechanism in our minds that
recognizes a singular, living intelligence, separate from our own and, crucially, separate from
that of the author. What the evidence of the text does not provide, we fill in out of our own
experience—understanding, because we’ve been convinced that the character is alive, that there
is more to her than we can know, just as there is more to ourselves than we can know. The net of
language that holds these people up and shows them to us does not contain them fully. Especially
when the narrator describing the character to us is also preying on her. Or, as in the Bernhard
story, when the narrator doesn’t know the character at all and can tell us nothing more about her
than we might read for ourselves in the newspaper.
12
The character is a textual object made of sound and rhythm, given meaning and moral
value in a continual, tense negotiation between her own self-perception and the perceptions of
others, including the reader. In this she is exactly like us. When the spell of fiction works, we are
convinced that she is more than the sum of all those competing perceptions—that she is
continually slipping out of the grip of words, gliding into deeper waters, and so are we. “She
threw herself on the mercy of her fellow human beings,” says Bernhard. What does it mean to be
merciful? What kind of recognition does she hope for? Maybe only what we all hope for: that we
will be as real to other people as we are to ourselves, and as unknowable.
Now to go out on a limb: The difference between the life of a person (including that of a
fictional person within a fictional world) and the life of a character (as a textual object in the
world in which that text is read) is that the word mercy means something very different in either
context. In the fictional village where the sexton’s wife lives, it’s not enough merely to be seen
and recognized. That recognition may be a precondition for mercy, but it's not the thing itself.
The mercy she’s looking for is practical: allow me back into the community, and please don’t
punish me as harshly as I may deserve for my crime against the dog. We may be more inclined to
show this kind of mercy if we can convince ourselves that we know what it’s like to be in her
position, but it’s not strictly necessary. In his 2019 book On Mercy, the philosopher Malcolm
Bull goes so far as to state explicitly that understanding is not a necessary condition for mercy.
For Bull, we don’t even need to care about another person in order to act mercifully toward that
person: all that is required is an intent to do less harm than we might normally do under the
circumstances, coupled with a result that is in fact less harmful. The motivation doesn’t matter.
In a war one might show mercy to an enemy in order to rebel against one’s superiors, or in order
to save ammunition. These cases still count.
xi

13
But the woman living in that alpine village is not real, and neither is the village. Neither
is her need for community, nor her fear of the same. What’s real is the character—made of words
and their interactions with other words, the whole assemblage as much a part of the contents of
the actual world as a stapler or a stone or a rhinoceros. In “Talking Forks: Fiction and the Inner
Life of Objects,” Charles Baxter tries to map the confluence of cultural and economic and
literary trends that led John Ruskin to name and decry what he called “the pathetic fallacy”—the
tendency of writers and artists to ascribe to fields and houses and windstorms the emotions of the
humans observing them. Insofar as he helped to usher in a sanitized modernism in which objects
became lifeless, inert, incapable of speaking either for themselves or for any human
consciousness, Ruskin was wrong, Baxter says. But his wrongness sprang not from a snobbish
disdain for the vulgarity of all those raging storms and gloomy forests, as is commonly supposed,
but from the recognition of a genuine problem: that the human sphere was expanding, in
capitalist and imperialist fashion, beyond its proper bounds. “Objects are being forced to go to
work—they are being employed as a literary workforce to carry their burden of human feeling.”
xii

As readers, of course, we do the same to the human characters we encounter in fiction—
we treat them as emblems of ourselves, fragments of our own frustratingly interior lives held up
to the light and made visible. Ourselves as we would be if our passions were allowed to play
themselves out on a stage less cluttered with all these extras having wandered in from who
knows where for no apparent purpose. If this has long been the most readily recognized source of
fiction’s social and moral value—its ability to make us visible to ourselves, to confront us with
questions about what we ourselves would do and think and feel if we were tested in ways we’d
rather not be tested in our actual lives—it’s nonetheless a value that can’t easily be discounted.
The forces of loneliness and solipsism are everywhere, always in ascendence. The world is
14
awash in media that promise connection while delivering its opposite—a hall of mirrors in which
wherever we look we see only flattened, distorted images of ourselves. In this context, it’s easy
to see the appeal of what is now the dominant model of the relationship between reader and
text—call it fiction as practice for living. If we can learn to empathize with fictional characters,
to imagine what it might feel like to be living their lives and thus what the world might look like
from a perspective other than our own, then we can learn to do the same with the actual people in
our actual lives.
And yet what draws me to fiction is not the imperfect form of knowledge we call
empathy, but rather the sensation of something moving beyond its limits. I don’t think I’m alone
in this, though because there’s no word to describe it, no one talks about it. Through the faculty
of readerly empathy, I imagine my way into the life of another person—though often it might be
more accurate to say I borrow the most dramatic moments from other lives and weave them into
my own. Through this other faculty—which for lack of a better word I’ll call mercy—I recognize
that this other person is real and therefore extends beyond the reach of any language I might use
to describe or classify her. This is what the sexton’s wife seeks when she throws herself on the
mercy of her fellow human beings: not only punitive leniency but also—and more importantly—
an end to her isolation. The need to end that isolation is what leads her to risk punishment in the
first place. She wants to be seen, to be present in the lives of other people, as a complete person
whose life exceeds the ontological categories—woman, widow, sexton’s wife, guilty or not
guilty, sane or insane—that make up her public identity. From our perspective, what astounds is
that a fictional character—an object made of language—should seem so clearly to exceed the
bounds of language.
15
Contra Gass, the cassoulet (let’s suppose) invisible inside that pot might be the only thing
in the painting that’s real, the very locus of the real within that fictional scene. This is what
fiction does for us. It makes into an object—as physically present in the world as a clay pot—
what is otherwise only a rumor or a hope. Here is a whole person in the context of her life and
her world, including everything I don’t know about her, everything she doesn’t know about
herself, everything the text does not include and yet somehow contains—as, per Wittgenstein,
the inexpressible is contained, inexpressibly, within the expressed.
xiii
We might wish nothing
more for ourselves than to be contained in the world in the same way. The sexton’s wife asks for
mercy, and what she means is Try to understand, but don’t imagine that what you understand is
all there is.
This imaginative crossing of the border between one subjectivity and another—the effort
to understand, coupled with an admission of the limits of understanding, an allowance made for
that which is unknowable in another person (and in ourselves)—constitutes what I’m calling
mercy in the fictional space. It represents a reprieve from the twin disasters that await any
fictional character: to be unseen and unknown on the one hand (and thus not to exist at all), and
on the other hand to be pressed into mere employment as a container for the reader’s experiences
and emotions. This may be less a moral justification for the work of reading and writing fiction
than an argument against such justifications. The character’s wish to exist is imaginary, and so is
any ethical claim that wish might impose on us. Whatever actual benefits exist here accrue only
to us, the actual people. Just as well then to measure those benefits in pleasure as in virtue.

___

16

Translating our lives into story—whether fictional or not—means making legible to
others aspects of our experience that may not have been legible to ourselves. It means submitting
to the demands of empathy. Under the long reign of psychological realism, what empathy mostly
demands is legibility. Give us the mystery of personality—the strange, unaccountable motives
that drive the story, but then in the end be sure to reveal the hidden causes. Make it make sense.
The psychoanalytic habit of mind, the belief that fiction’s job is to render the subconscious
legible, is perhaps one source of the ubiquity of the flashback in modern fiction. The writer’s
task is to negotiate between conflicting interests: on the one hand to make it make sense, to peel
away the layers of the self and expose its inner workings until the unaccountable is accounted
for; and on the other hand somehow to keep the subject of this dissection alive and intact, ready
at any moment to jump up from the table and set fire to the laboratory.
In a work of autofiction written several decades before that term existed, the philosopher
Maurice Blanchot dramatizes precisely the point at which fiction’s drive to uncover and reveal
reaches its limit. Blanchot was born in the village of Quain, France, in 1907 and died in Le
Mesnil-Saint-Denis in 2003, at the age of ninety-five. In 1944, in Paris, he came so close to the
moment of his own death that he seems to have thought of himself, ever afterward, as a man who
had both died and not died. The Allied liberation of the city was at this point already underway,
and the Germans, defeated but not yet displaced, were going around executing all the young men
they could find, conducting themselves in general with what Blanchot, in his account of this
event, calls “useless ferocity.”
Some caution is warranted here, since the account from which these details are drawn
xiv

is described by its author and its publishers as a work of fiction. Still, the known facts of
17
Blanchot’s life line up with the facts of this account, and elsewhere in his essays Blanchot refers
to these events as having happened to him.
I refer to the “fictional” account here—whatever “fictional” means in this context—
because it is the most detailed narrative of this experience in Blanchot’s writings.
He was marched out of his house, along with his family, and made to stand alone against
the wall outside, the ad hoc firing squad arrayed before him. He persuaded his captors to send his
family back inside, to spare them the sight of his execution. At the moment when there should
have been the sound of the lieutenant’s voice giving the order to fire, and then the sound of the
rifles, which perhaps their target would not even have heard, there was instead the sound of other
guns, other voices—a battle breaking out nearby. The lieutenant stepped away to investigate, and
the soldiers decided that, if no one was going to force them, they’d just as soon not shoot this
helpless stranger. We don’t know what motivated those soldiers to spare Blanchot. They were
not Germans, as it turned out, but Russians, members of the so-called Vlasov Army, a regiment
largely comprised of Soviet prisoners of war whose relationship to their German commanders
was often ambivalent at best. At any rate, Blanchot was given an opportunity to run away, and he
took it.
A novelist as well as a theorist, Blanchot narrates his own experience in the third person,
referring to himself only as “the young man,” as though his younger self were standing beside
him, broken out of time and memory by the force of these events, somehow wholly separate
from the self that narrates:
The lieutenant shook him, showed him the casings, the bullets; there had obviously been
fighting; the soil was a war soil.
The lieutenant choked in a bizarre language. And putting the casings, the bullets, a
grenade under the nose of the man already less young (one ages quickly), he distinctly
shouted: “This is what you have come to.” (3-5)
18
The oracular voice of the lieutenant, at this point as much a personification of death as a living
person, defies interpretation, but seems to imply a radical shift in context. The soil is a war soil.
Here your life is worth less than it was worth a moment ago, when you were with your family in
your well-ordered house. Of the moment in which the young man is expecting the bullet,
Blanchot says, “In his place, I will not try to analyze,” but then, being who he is, he finds that he
can’t help himself:
He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead—immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the
feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or
eternal. Henceforth he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship. (5)

The contradictions pile up. Being already dead, he is immortal. Or he is experiencing “the
happiness of not being immortal.” Or, a few pages later, “a feeling of lightness…neither
happiness, nor unhappiness” (9).
The ambiguity of this language, mired in paradox as it seems to be, suggests something
about the utility of “fiction” as a category here—about what it means to write about oneself as a
fictional character, about one’s own experiences as elements in a fictional narrative: as long as I
am alive, what I say about myself is always at risk of falling short of the truth, because the judge
of its truth value is the living person who in fact had those experiences. What I say about myself
is always at risk of being falsified by the self that lives on and remembers, who may remember
things quite differently tomorrow. What I say about a fictional character who shares my name,
who happens to have lived through the same events I lived through, is true.
___

I have one child, a daughter who was born at the very end of 2015, in what I would later
come to see as the last year of the world I’d thought I lived in, before the nightmare of the 2016
19
election swept that world and its future out of existence. In that first year of my daughter’s life
people asked me all the time how it felt to be a parent—whether my life felt different, whether
the self I inhabited felt different to me. I was always surprised anew at how difficult it was to
answer this question. For one thing, so much of what I was feeling was difficult to talk about—
difficult to describe in words that don’t falsify the experience, and also just socially
problematic. In most conversational settings you can’t really say, “I’m never not afraid that
she’ll die.” Most people aren’t looking for that kind of thing when they ask you how you’re
doing. But in those first two years I was never not afraid that she would die. I was never not
thinking of all the ways she could die soon, or about the fact that, no matter what, she would die
eventually, even if she outlived me, as one hopes and expects. And that if she did outlive me she
would live on into a world growing less and less livable, in ways that I wouldn’t know how to
understand or predict or prepare her for—in ways that I would never be doing enough in the
present to mitigate.
In addition to the problem of constant fear, the reasonableness or unreasonableness of
which one fundamentally lacks the tools to assess, there was the problem of time—of how
complicated and riven with contradictions my experience of time had become. For the first few
months my daughter would sleep only with her body draped over someone else’s body, mine or
her mother’s, her head against our chests where she could hear our hearts beating. This was yet
another source of fear, since of course all the doctors tell you how dangerous and irresponsible
it is to sleep this way with the baby, how vital that the baby sleep alone, on her back, in a crib
without blankets or pillows. But also, of course, it meant simply that time slowed down and
stretched out. I mean this in the most ordinary sense. You want to get up to use the bathroom or
to get a glass of water or to find your phone so at least you can distract yourself with scrolling,
20
but you won’t, because as soon as you move, the child will wake and cry. So you keep still,
cultivate boredom, settle into what must be something close to the infant’s experience of time—
in which each present instant stands alone, infinite and discontinuous, a great rambling house in
which each room opens onto another and there is no exit. And meanwhile, elsewhere, time is
always sweeping by unseen in huge, ragged chunks, so that you are always looking at the child
as she is now and remembering her as she was, it seems, just a minute ago, and wondering what
could have happened to all that time.
Another paradox: while it sometimes seems as though she’s transformed overnight from
the red-faced, helpless creature she was when I first met her to the garrulous child she is now, I
find at the same time that I can’t quite believe she was ever not there. I can remember vividly
what my life was like when she wasn’t there—how much easier everything was, how it felt to
wake up in the morning and decide what to do with the day in front of me without having to
consider anyone else if I didn’t want to—but I can’t really remember her not being there. She’s
so present now, it doesn’t seem possible that there was a time quite recently when she wasn’t
present at all—when she wasn’t even absent. I catch myself thinking of my whole life before she
was born as the time in which she was coming, which is of course not at all how it works.
“It is possible to speak properly of time only in metaphor,” says Franco Moretti in his
great essay on literary historiography, “The Soul and the Harpy.”
xv
Clocks and calendars
measure time but have almost nothing to do with the experience of its passage, which depends
entirely on what transpires within it—often invisibly, in an interior space inaccessible to others.
For Moretti, metaphor facilitates the communication of such incommunicable realities because
it draws on a communal system of associations that—at least within a given cultural context—is
theoretically accessible to everyone. Cliches are instructive here. If I call someone a snake, it’s
21
because of that shared system of associations that you know I mean that he’s treacherous or
untrustworthy, and not for example that he likes to keep warm by basking on rocks in the sun.
Crucially, however, each of us meets that network of associations at our own juncture. The
snake in your mind is not precisely the same as the snake in mine, nor is the list of other words
and meanings and narrative scraps that attach to it. Across widely disparate cultural contexts,
the bonds between associated concepts can break down entirely. To communicate through
metaphor is to risk misunderstanding and mistranslation, but also to engender a productive
derangement of meaning, out of which new forms and new imaginative possibilities arise.
It’s possible to speak properly of time only in metaphor. Likewise love, anger, hatred,
fear. In Los Angeles, where I live, a pregnant woman once hiked into the five-thousand-acre
urban wilderness preserve of Griffith Park armed only with a bottle of water and a phone,
intending to hunt down and somehow kill the park’s famous and elusive mountain lion, which
she had become convinced would one day devour her as-yet-unborn child. This sounds like a
work of not-very-good fiction, one whose metaphors—for generalized maternal anxiety, for the
ancient savagery hidden within the fine shimmering cloth of a modern metropolis—are
altogether too legible, but, at least insofar as it’s possible to know how nonfictional anyone’s
autobiographical nonfiction actually is, it really happened. The mother-to-be, a writer named
Kathleen Hale, later published a personal essay about her doomed hunt for the lion in Elle.
xvi

In the essay, she recounts getting mildly chided by her therapist after cancelling a session
to go out again in search of the cougar:
My psychiatrist said “Hm,” and asked whether I might actually be worried about more
abstract threats. “Motherhood, sexism, the idea of forever,” she offered. “A lot of my
female patients are very upset about Trump.”

22
In hindsight, Hale seems to agree with the therapist. The cougar is a metaphor—a concrete and
finite container for an abstract and infinite universe of threats. Her mind clings to it because it
offers the illusion of control: if I can just defeat this one flesh-and-blood monster, I can protect
my child from the world:
The solution was simple: I’d hunt down P-22, and hang his head on the wall of my baby
girl’s nursery, so that when she became sentient, she would know that her mother was
strong, and that she was safe.

Maybe so. I’ll confess to some skepticism here. The metaphor feels too apt to be wholly
plausible as a product of the unconscious, or at least as one whose motives could remain
unconscious for long. I believe she briefly imagined herself doing that—I have a harder time
believing she really thought she would do it. The cougar feels less like a genuine fetish, that is,
and more like a story—a fetish tamed and forced to speak. Trying to communicate the
incommunicable, Hale does what anyone would—she points to its outward manifestations. “At
11:11 I kissed my fingers, muttering ‘Strong baby.’ I spent all day Googling, ‘How to make a
healthy fetus.’” For the thing itself she offers a metaphor—equal parts pathos and comedy, a
vessel skillfully crafted to cross the ocean separating her subjective, individual experience from
the collective mind of the internet: Here is what my fear looked like, and here is how I faced it.
___

Whenever I teach a class on fiction I begin with the same story, a very short one by
Anton Chekhov, sometimes called “Heartache” and sometimes “Misery,” depending on who is
doing the translating.
xvii
Difficult as it is to pin down, the story is easy to summarize. A cab
driver named Iona Potapov has lost his grown son to a sudden, unspecified illness. In the
immediate aftermath of this loss he goes to work, ferrying strangers from place to place on a
23
bitterly cold St. Petersburg night. It’s the end of the nineteenth century, and so of course the cab
he drives is an actual cabriolet, a carriage drawn by a horse whose own fundamentally
unknowable experience Chekhov is not at all afraid to speculate about. “No doubt the mare was
plunged in deep thought,” the narrator says in the very first paragraph. “So would you be if you
were torn from the plow, snatched away from familiar, gray surroundings, and thrown into a
whirlpool of monstrous illuminations, ceaseless uproar, and people scrambling hither and
thither” (99). The invitation to empathy is explicit here, and quintessentially Chekhovian. Every
other life is accessible to us, even non-human lives, if we pay close enough attention to the task
of imagining how we ourselves would react in the same circumstances. The writer’s job is to
supply the circumstances in sufficient detail so that the reader can imagine accurately. In this
case, we are asked to experience—with the horse—a singular instance of a mass phenomenon:
the movement from rural to urban life that characterizes the onset of modernity, the moment at
which one steps out of the small, familiar world of the village into what Rousseau calls le
tourbillon social—the whirlwind of the modern city.
But it’s not really the horse but ourselves we’re thinking about here. It’s not the horse’s
confusion but Iona’s that interests us. All night long, he tries to share the story of his son’s death
with everyone he meets, but no one wants to listen. So great is his need for human contact that he
seems to enjoy even the cruelty others inflict on him. His drunken passengers mock him, strike
him, subject him to horrible abuse, and he laughs, “Tee-hee, such merry gentlemen!” (102). Even
this is preferable to being alone with his grief. His problem is one of scale, and of perspective.
From his own perspective, his grief is huge, all-encompassing. And yet from the diffuse
perspective of the crowded, socially stratified city that surrounds him, his life itself is so small
and insignificant as to be beneath notice:
24
If his heart could break, and the grief could pour out of it, it would flow over the whole
world; but no one would see it. It had found a hiding place invisible to all: even in broad
daylight, even if you held a candle to it, you wouldn’t see it. (103)

In the end, having found no human being willing to listen, he tells the story to his horse. Feeding
the mare a supper of hay because he hasn’t earned enough to pay for oats, he says, “Now,
suppose you had a little foal, and you were the foal’s mother, and suddenly, let’s say, the same
little foal departed this life. You’d be sorry, eh?” (105)
Iona is making as direct an appeal for empathy here as the narrator does in the story’s
first paragraph: How would you feel, if what has happened to me had happened to you? This is
the project of literary realism, we’re often told. It might even be the project of modern fiction as
a whole, with its celebrated turn toward the individual and the interior. Poor Iona is barking, so it
would seem, up the wrong tree, but what’s striking is how little this problem turns out to matter.
“The little mare munched, and listened, and breathed on his hands,” the story concludes.
“Surrendering to his grief, Iona told her the whole story” (105).
Empathy is metaphor. Like any metaphor, it grants partial access to the unknowable by
means of comparison to the already known. It aims to redeem, in the biblical sense in which
redemption means substitution. For the life of his only son, Abraham is permitted to substitute
the life of a ram. An act of mercy (though not for the ram). For the inner life of another person,
which we can never really know, we are permitted to substitute our own familiar selves. It would
be foolish to deny that this kind of empathy is central to the work of modern fiction. It’s central
to the work of modern life, the defining experience of which is that we are continually thrust into
contact with strangers. If you’re feeling optimistic about humanity, and you want to claim that
the ability to imagine our way into the lives of other people is what make us human, it would be
hard to argue that you’re wrong. Still, at least when it comes to fiction, it would also be a mistake
25
to believe that the trick of substitution goes farther than it does, or that it’s everything. Every
metaphor leaves out infinitely more than it contains, and every metaphor maintains a slippery,
subterranean life in the gap between figure and ground.
“The little mare munched, and listened, and breathed on his hands.” Two of those three
verbs are reassuringly factual, straightforwardly verifiable by the senses. The other is a leap of
faith. What does it mean to say that a horse listens? How would you know? Notable here is the
confidence with which that leap is slipped in among the plain, material facts of this sentence.
There is no hedging admission that the narrator is speculating here, as there is in the first
paragraph when the same narrator says, “No doubt the mare was plunged in deep thought…”
There’s a certain degree of ambiguity in the narrative perspective. Certainly from Iona’s
perspective—and maybe only from his perspective—it’s true that the horse listens. And yet it’s
the narrator who speaks to us here. There is no tricky free indirect discourse, in which the
narrator speaks in the character’s voice and the phrase he thought or he believed is implied rather
than stated. Here the narrator speaks in the narrator’s own plain, clear voice. The perspective
hovers somewhere between that of narrator and character, belonging to both and to neither. What
takes place here is not a metaphorical substitution—my subjectivity for yours—but a transitory
joining of separate subjectivities. In this moment of consummation, what is true for Iona is true
for the narrator, and is true for us.
___

When my daughter was very young, there was a season of scarcity in our house that must
have lasted a long time, though as seasons do in Los Angeles it interwove itself with other,
happier seasons so that we could never be sure where its borders lay. The problem was time, but
26
like all problems that arise from scarcity it quickly became a problem of empathy. My wife and I
were both graduate students, both writers struggling to finish our first books. We had no family
nearby, and nothing like the money that in this country is what it takes to raise a small child
without laying waste to everything else in your life. None of this is unique. We were happy,
healthy and lucky, and well aware of the layers of privilege between us and the people most
severely impacted by America’s depraved indifference to the lives of parents (especially
mothers!) and children. Still, the effect was that our home became an arena of competing
needs—mine, my wife’s, our child’s—in which each of us was continually asking for empathy
from others who must sometimes have felt they had none to spare.
At the same time, California’s housing crisis was deepening. We lived in Koreatown,
near the center of Los Angeles, and the streets in our neighborhood were filling up with
unhoused people who lived right beside us in conditions of unimaginable deprivation. I had
plenty of empathy for them, but my empathy was morbid, voyeuristic, worse than useless. I was
worried about the future. It was a short leap from How would I feel if I were you? to How will I
feel when I am you? It became a matter of mathematics: I looked at the ruined tents in which my
neighbors lived and tried to calculate how far removed my own family was from their condition,
how many setbacks it would take before we found ourselves among them. There was plenty I
could have done to help, but if I couldn’t afford to give my own wife and child as much of my
time as they needed, how could I give it to strangers? Mostly I did nothing at all except on rare
occasions when, overcome with guilt, I spontaneously handed someone all the money in my
wallet—an act of pointless, petty generosity that in all likelihood helped no one.
___
27
Malcom Bull’s view of mercy as divorced from motive is far from universal. The Oxford
philosopher John Tasioulas hews much closer to the long-standing consensus when he argues
that mercy, in order to be mercy, “must be shown for the right reasons,” reasons which should
“reflect a generalized love of humanity; in particular, a concern to alleviate serious misfortunes
that the human condition is prey to and which, in consequence, one can regard as evils that could
befall oneself or those to whom one has special ties.”
xviii
The word Thomas Aquinas used for
mercy—misericordia—means literally “compassionate heart,” but it’s not synonymous with
compassion. Or not always. It might be better to say that it’s not coextensive with compassion.
Compassion is interior. I could be overwhelmed with compassion, incapacitated by grief at the
suffering of others for whole days at a time and still (perhaps even as a result of the depth of my
compassion) be no help to anyone. To rise to the level of mercy, says Aquinas, my compassion
must move me to take some action, and that action must produce some definite good in the life
of another person.
xix
In the view of many contemporary commentators, such mercy is by
definition supererogatory—a surfeit of goodness that goes beyond any moral or legal or social
obligation. And though Aquinas, like Augustine before him, understood the territory of mercy to
be human suffering in all its forms, modern usage has tended to associate it almost exclusively
with forbearance in the administration of punishment. The meaning of the word appears to have
evolved in a direction opposite that of most words—becoming more restrictive over time, rather
than less. It’s easy to understand the appeal of such restrictions, tending as they do to set mercy
aside as a space reserved for the divine presence in the most mundane of human affairs—legal
proceedings, ledgers of debt and so on. Still, I appreciate the almost scandalous permissiveness
of Bull’s definition, which retains the emphasis on external effects but dispenses with the need
for any special goodness at all. Mercy is a line of communication, a conduit—however fragile or
28
ephemeral—along which some good is passed. It doesn’t require that we try on one another’s
lives like costumes. The failure to do so can even be merciful in itself, if it means a rejection of
the instinct to demand accountings and explanations, to seek mastery over the intractable
problem of the other through perfect knowledge.
___

In an early, minor scene in William Maxwell’s masterful short story, “Over By the
River,”
xx
the protagonist confronts what he believes is his truest self:
With his safety razor ready to begin a downward sweep, George Carringon studied the
lathered face in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. He shook his head. There was a fatal
flaw in his character: Nobody was ever as real to him as he was to himself. If people
knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn’t want to have anything
to do with him. (19)

The George Carrington that emerges one sentence at a time as we read on is a deeply decent
man—a little oblivious at times, not as conscious of his considerable privilege as he could be, but
devoted to his family, honest, unkind to no one. He believes his solipsism is his own secret
shame, a void at the center of himself that would repel anyone who could see it. Maxwell knows
better. What’s wrong with George is what’s wrong with us all—most of the time, anyway.
The story goes on for nearly forty pages in which, refreshingly, almost nothing of any
consequence happens. The threads of causality binding one event to another are so thin as to be
almost imperceptible. The narrative perspective moves at its leisure from one life to another—
George, his wife, his two school-age daughters, the maid, a “junkie” who scours the park’s trash
cans for food, the neighbors’ cook who one night climbs over a high railing to drown herself in
the Hudson. George wakes at night to the sound of his youngest daughter—a kindergartener—
crying, and goes into her room to comfort her. After a while he leaves and we stay with her,
29
watching an imaginary tiger as it stalks her from behind a chair and then disappears into the air
conditioner.
It’s not so much that the story ends as that the intensely concentrated attention that’s held
it together breaks and disperses into the air, returning us to our own subtly transfigured lives.
George holds his older daughter in his lap, conscious that she’s almost too old for such affection,
and listens as she tells him a riddle. Later he hears a woman screaming for help from somewhere
outside, but he can’t tell where she is and doesn’t know how to help her.
30
The Empathy Era

Empathy has emerged as 21
st
-century liberalism’s moral virtue par excellence—the
highest aspiration of an era defined by a hyperconnectivity whose chief product seems to be
more and more novel forms of isolation and estrangement, and of an era in which the one thing
many of us seem to have in common, across all the other dividing lines, is a pervasive sense that
no one is listening to us.
Barack Obama claimed this territory as his own in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope,
and then again in nearly every public utterance for the rest of his political career. In the book, the
future president says “[empathy] is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the
Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a
call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.”
xxi
Everything that was most
obviously wrong with America then—the disastrous invasion of Iraq, the abuses of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the tens of millions of Americans without access to regular health
care—could be explained in terms of what Obama called an “empathy deficit.” The first of many
times he used that phrase was in a commencement address at Northwestern University in the
same year The Audacity of Hope was published, when he was still a senator from Illinois. “We
live in a culture that discourages empathy,” he said. “A culture that too often tells us our
principal goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. A culture where
those in power too often encourage these selfish impulses.” Much of this was surely right and
timely despite the broad brush he was painting with, and more on that later. In the meantime we
might just ask ourselves whether “the call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through
31
their eyes” is really so much more demanding than the easily derided virtues of sympathy and
charity, the latter of which at least involves, by definition, some tangible help.
Coincidentally, Twitter launched in July of that same year, 2006, and Facebook became
available to non-college-student users for the first time in September. It would be a few more
years before the advent of the “like” and “share” and “retweet” buttons and the ever more
sophisticated technologies of surveillance whose function is to identify and promote the content
that attracts the most “engagement”—usually in the forms of fear, outrage, and the kind of in-
group bonding that occurs at the expense of a hated out-group. A full accounting of the damage
these phenomena have wrought in global public life is beyond the scope of this essay, and that
territory has been well covered elsewhere.
xxii
Suffice it to say that in the years since then-Senator
Obama spoke to the graduating class at Northwestern, the empathy deficit has both grown and
become—through the same technologies that fueled its growth—more visible.
Paradoxically, the erosion of empathy from public life has solidified its status as the
ultimate aspirational virtue. Having nearly brought about the end of democracy, Facebook has
now rebranded itself as Meta, promising to bring us together as never before in a coming neo-
futurist utopia where the border between the real and the virtual will be all but erased.
Anticipating the challenges of this brave new world, scholars and tech entrepreneurs have begun
to speak of “virtual empathy” and to speculate about how the virtual world might be designed to
cultivate it. In a meta-analysis published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behavior in 2021,
researchers Alison Jane Martingano, Fernanda Herrera, and Sara Konrath reviewed the past
several years’ worth of mostly overblown claims for the power of virtual reality to generate or
teach empathy. By way of example, the researchers note a viral 2015 TED talk by the
entrepreneur and “digital artist” Chris Milk, in which Milk promises to show us how we might
32
use VR to build “the ultimate empathy machine”—a phrase nearly identical to one used by
Roger Ebert way back in 2005 to describe the movies.
xxiii
“Three-dimensional,” 360-degree
photos embedded in New York Times articles a few years later, aiming to immerse the viewer in
the visual experience of a war refugee or a starving polar bear, read as early, rudimentary efforts
toward building that machine.
Martignano et al. are ultimately skeptical of such claims, noting a crucial difference
between “cognitive empathy”—understanding someone else’s experience on a logical or
intellectual level—and “emotional empathy”—actually being moved to feel the emotions we
suppose that other person to be feeling. It turns out that peering around the ruins of a recently
shelled apartment doesn’t tell us much about what it feels like to have lived in that apartment and
now to have nowhere to go and no way to keep our loved ones safe. Narrative, skillfully crafted,
can do that. Fiction can do that—including, per Ebert, the movies. Before long there may well be
skillfully crafted narrative art in VR that will do it too. At which point that new medium will be
misperceived in the same way that the old media of literature and film have been misperceived
for many years—as a tool for moral improvement rather than as a source of pleasure, as an
instructive simulation of life rather than as life itself. The question will remain whether feeling
someone else’s feelings necessarily helps them, or us.
___

In the title essay of her 2014 collection, The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison describes
the experience of learning that her brother has come down in late middle age with a
neuromuscular disease that has paralyzed half his face and left him dependent on steroids that
make him debilitatingly ill:
33
I spent large portions of every day—pointless, fruitless spans of time—imagining how I
would feel if my face was paralyzed, too. I stole my brother’s trauma and projected it
onto myself like a magic-lantern pattern of light. I obsessed, and told myself this
obsession was empathy. But it wasn’t, quite. It was more like inpathy. I wasn’t
expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own.
xxiv

How would I feel, if what has happened to him had happened to me? Under certain
circumstances it may be possible to redeem what would otherwise be lost—inaccessible,
unknowable—by means of this kind of substitution. But if we’re looking for synonyms for
substitution, there are more obvious candidates than redemption. Replacement comes to mind, as
does displacement. When I ask what is it like for you, I mean what is it like in the context of your
life? But I can’t answer that. I’m not living your life. The question that gets answered is, at best,
what would it be like in the context of my life? In the movement from question to answer, your
life is displaced, replaced with mine.
Nobody was ever as real to him as he was to himself. A long time ago I came across that
sentence in William Maxwell’s “Over by the River,” and remembered it long after I’d forgotten
where it came from. It seemed such a perfect expression of what fiction does, or hopes to do:
remind us that other people are as real to themselves as we are to ourselves. We know this
already, but not really. We know it in the way we know that the universe is expanding. Logic and
evidence suggest that it must be true, and everyone pretty much agrees about it, but it doesn’t
really form part of our direct experience. What we need may be less a reminder than a way to
integrate into our own experience the reality of lives other than our own. If fiction—perhaps
paradoxically—presents itself as such a way, it cannot be merely by supplying more context so
that we can more fully imagine other people’s problems as if they were ours.
In the opening pages of “The Empathy Exams,” Jamison recounts her experience
working as a medical actor, a job that consists mainly of performing the symptoms of various
34
maladies so that medical students can be evaluated on their ability to diagnose those maladies.
Each set of symptoms comes with a pre-written character, and many of the characters have
surprisingly elaborate backstories. The doctors-to-be are rated not only on the speed and
accuracy of their diagnosis but also on their bedside manner, their ability to suss out and respond
appropriately to the backstory:
Checklist Item 31 is generally acknowledged as the most important category: “Voiced
empathy for my situation/problem.” We are instructed about the importance of this first
word, voiced. It’s not enough for someone to have a sympathetic manner or a caring tone
of voice. The students have to say the right words to get credit for compassion. (3)

In this artificial setting, the students’ attempts to express empathy are often tragicomically
formulaic and inadequate:
That must really be hard [to have a dying baby], That must really be hard [to be afraid
you’ll have another seizure in the middle of the grocery store], That must really be hard
[to carry in your uterus the bacterial evidence of cheating on your husband]. (5)

Some students are better at this than others. The most successful understand that trying to
imagine someone else’s pain can be an imposition. An intrusion. Instead of telling the patient
how she feels (That must really be hard), they ask questions. The insight that emerges here is
central not only to this essay but to the book as a whole. The kind of empathy that the cabdriver
Iona yearns for in Chekhov’s “Heartache,” in which another person takes in our pain in its
entirety and feels it as we feel it, is impossible, and anyone who tries to give it to us is likely to
do us more harm than good. No aspect of anyone’s individual experience is separable from
everything else in that person’s life. “Empathy means knowing that you know nothing,” Jamison
says “…acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”
(5)
“The Emapthy Exams” is not primarily about literature—it’s an essay about interpersonal
obligation, about what kind of understanding we can offer one another, with what degree of
35
humility. In another essay from the same collection, titled “Grand Unified Theory of Female
Pain,” Jamison extends this warning about the limits of empathy into the territory of fiction
writing. Recalling her own career as a fiction writer, she considers the problem of writing about
suffering women in the context of a culture already awash in myths and archetypes of female
suffering. “Here is the danger of wounded womanhood: that its invocation will corroborate a
pain cult that keeps legitimating, almost legislating, more of itself” (206). Here is where empathy
shades into erasure. The danger is that in trying to imagine how someone else feels, I lose the
context that gives shape and meaning to her experience. The context that belongs to her alone
gets swept away by the flood of context that belongs to everyone and no one: not this one
woman’s actual life, but the life of every wounded female protagonist from Medea to the present
day. The answer cannot, Jamison insists, be to avoid writing about certain widely mythologized
forms of female suffering. Such avoidance would merely constitute another form of erasure:
The hard part is that underneath this obscene fascination with women who hurt
themselves and have bad sex and drink too much, there are actual women who hurt
themselves and have bad sex and drink too much. Female pain is prior to its
representation, even if its manifestations are shaped and bent by cultural models. (206)

What’s needed is a way to reclaim the singular from the jaws of the universal. Those cultural
models are powerful. They inform and limit our choices. They inform the way we read the texts
of our lives in memory. They certainly inform the way we read and write fiction. And yet no one
experiences her life primarily as the umpteenth iteration of a pre-existing archetype. Other
people are as real to themselves as we are to ourselves. “It’s news whenever a girl has an
abortion,” Jamison says near the close of this essay, “because her abortion has never been had
before and won’t ever be had again. I’m saying this as someone who’s had an abortion but hasn’t
had anyone else’s.” (208)
___
36

I try to render your subjective experience accessible by means of metaphor—by
substituting mine for yours—and the result is that I displace yours. I push you farther away at the
very moment when I begin to bring you closer.
“In his place, I will not try to analyze,” says Maurice Blanchot in The Instant of My
Death, though the person whose place he is afraid to usurp is himself. He was eighty-seven years
old when he wrote that, near the end of a long and illustrious life, remembering the moment
decades earlier when he had faced a firing squad and at the last second, by sheer luck, had been
spared. From the standpoint of the present, even one’s past self is a fiction. I try to remember
faithfully how I felt then, but I can only generate the fiction of memory from within the context
of my present self, with everything I’ve experienced and everything I’ve learned in the time
between then and now. If I’m Blanchot, the mere fact that I’m still alive at eighty-seven may
make it impossible to recall precisely how it felt to be certain, at thirty-eight, that my life had
reached its end. What I’m left with is the slipperiness of metaphor: henceforth he was bound in a
surreptitious friendship with death (5). In the course of events, the young man is granted a
reprieve from death. In the language with which his future self writes about this moment, he is
granted another reprieve: both from oblivion—the condition of being unseen, unknown,
unremembered—and from the demand the would-be empathizer makes on us—that we strip
away the fullness of our experience in an effort to make that experience legible to another. This
is mercy. The gap between my subjectivity and yours, between present and past or future, is the
space in which mercy operates. It may be the only component of this semiotic system supple
enough to respond to constantly shifting external realities, to the constantly shifting interrelation
37
between the text and its myriad readers, across vast spatial, temporal, and social distances—the
source of the longevity of any literary text.
___

The Empathy Exams stands as one of the defining documents of what I’m going to refer
to as the empathy era in American literature, an era that began sometime in the middle of the
George W. Bush administration and may or may not now have ended, though some of its
fundamental assumptions are certainly feeling less and less tenable. The point of this descriptor
is not that writers in the empathy era were (or are) more adept at conjuring empathy, or more
concerned with it, than the writers of any other era. Rather, this is the era in which empathy
became the watchword of literature—its chief means of justifying the diminishing space it takes
up in the world. In an article titled “Literature and Empathy,” Trinity University English
professor Michael Fischer summarizes a recent phenomenon he calls “the empathy defense” of
literature and the humanities in academia. Citing Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, and others,
he outlines some of the ways in which the idea of empathy has been deployed to make a
utilitarian case for the study of literature in a landscape of increasing economic precarity, and at
a moment when university budgets are being slashed and resources redirected to fields of study
with more obvious material benefits.
xxv
Such concerns bleed beyond the walls of the academy.
Whether or not they depend on the universities for their livelihoods, writers are as anxious as
anyone to believe that the work they do—mostly alone and unseen—is real and has impact.
But then also, at the risk of stating the obvious: in the early years of this century, much of
American public life had become something of an empathy desert. After the events of September
11, 2001, Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” curdled into an obsessive taxonomizing of
38
enemies, in which the other was always and everywhere perceived as a potential threat. The
official language of the state was redirected toward the task of washing the state’s hands. Torture
became “enhanced interrogation,” the act of sending people to other countries to be tortured
became “extraordinary rendition,” human beings became “enemy combatants,” and so on. It
should perhaps not surprise us that writers felt themselves tasked with restoring the capacity of
language to name the truth, or that there was a revival of the quaint belief that words, chosen
with care and in good faith, could function as a transparent lens through which we might see one
another clearly.
___

For a variety of reasons—some of which arise from the limitations and dangers Jamison
described in 2014, some of which will be familiar to anyone who has lived through the last six
years or so—this particular mode of liberal humanist optimism is today looking a bit threadbare.
Anyone wishing to pinpoint the exact moment when the curtain began to fall on the empathy era
might do worse than to watch George Saunders struggling—in the pages of The New Yorker—to
make sense of a series of Trump rallies he attended in the lead-up to the 2016 Republican
primary.
xxvi
Armed with a set of anecdotes about real, vulnerable people likely to suffer further
harm as a result of the candidate’s demented xenophobia, Saunders seeks to forge connections
with Trump supporters, to puncture the mythos of invasion and threat in which their leader has
transfixed them. At times, this almost seems to work:
In the face of specificity, my interviewees began trying, really trying, to think of what
would be fairest and most humane for this real person we had imaginatively conjured up.
It wasn’t that we suddenly agreed, but the tone changed. We popped briefly out of zinger
mode and began to have some faith in one another, a shared confidence that if we talked
long enough, respectfully enough, a solution could be found that would satisfy our
respective best notions of who we were.
39
But the moment never lasts, never seems to have any lasting impact:
We’d stay in that mode for a minute or two, then be off again to some new topic,
rewrapped in our respective Left and Right national flags. Once, after what felt like a
transcendent and wide-ranging conversation with a Trump supporter named Danny (a
former railroad worker, now on disability), I said a fond goodbye and went to interview
some Hillary supporters across the street. A few minutes later, I looked over to find
Danny shouting at us that Hillary was going to prison, not the White House. I waved at
him, but he didn’t seem to see me, hidden there in the crowd of his adversaries.

The essay is witty and genial and at times keenly insightful, as Saunders’ essays tend to be, and
yet at moments like this, one feels almost bad for the man, who is after all no more baffled than
the rest of us were back then, this high priest of the empathy era waving hopefully at Danny,
waiting in vain for the mask of blind, collective rage to fall away and the vulnerable human self
to emerge again. The critical tools of the empathy era are of little use here, and despite his keen
psychological insight, Saunders’ habitual fair-mindedness leads him to fatally misdiagnose the
problem:
Where is all this anger coming from? It’s viral, and Trump is Typhoid Mary.
Intellectually and emotionally weakened by years of steadily degraded public discourse,
we are now two separate ideological countries, LeftLand and RightLand, speaking
different languages, the lines between us down. Not only do our two subcountries reason
differently; they draw upon non-intersecting data sets and access entirely different
mythological systems…

And so on, rehearsing in sparkling, affable prose what by then had already emerged as the
dominant center-left narrative about what was wrong with America. In the maelstrom of bullshit
that is the Trump movement, Saunders’ vaunted intellectual generosity is instantly transformed
into a crippling both-sidesism. It’s the same good habit gone bad, the same situationally
inappropriate virtue that for the next four years would prevent the press from mustering any
effective defense against the president’s full-scale assault on democracy. Yes, we’ve all
conflated our politics with our identities, we’ve all retreated into our separate, algorithm-driven
40
information silos, and so on, but (with italics for emphasis) some silos are better ventilated than
others.
Reading this paean to ineffectual, misplaced empathy, one is reminded that American
politics has always functioned by conjuring the fiction of an empathy economy—an economy of
scarcity in which the precious resource in question is always being contentiously redistributed. In
“Literature and Empathy,” Fischer recalls the political jiu-jitsu by which Ronald Reagan
redirected public empathy from the poorest Americans to the salaried professionals whose hard-
earned tax dollars were being used to subsidize the undeserving poor. In the early years of the
Trump era we were continually reminded of the need to empathize with Trump supporters,
which was, to say the least, hard to do while also empathizing in any meaningful way with the
thousands of migrant children snatched from their mothers on behalf of those supposedly
forgotten Americans.
___

In another political reality, not very long ago, Saunders’ fiction was a vital corrective.
The best of his stories are populated with characters who long to be understood and yet fail
utterly to understand themselves. What they want, you begin to suspect, is not so much to be
understood as to have their delusions confirmed by those around them. They speak in voices that
sometimes sound—from the standpoint of the present—like eerie premonitions of the Trumpian
voice. The fractured, distractable syntax is there, as is the limited vocabulary, the liberal use of
superlatives, the ocean of grievance seething under the surface of even the blandest statements.
“Sad,” says a corporate middle-manager of an underperforming employee he’s about to fire.
“Sad is all it is. We live in a beautiful world, full of beautiful challenges and flowers and birds
41
and super people, but also a few regrettable bad apples, such as that questionable Janet. Do I hate
her? Do I want her killed? Gosh no, I think she’s super, I want her to be praised while getting a
hot oil massage, she has some very nice traits.”
xxvii
This is Nordstrom, a stock antagonist in the
story “Pastoralia.” He shares a surname with an upscale department store, he speaks for the
company, and otherwise he has almost no discernible identity. His thorough misapprehension of
the world is purely sinister. Saunders’ real, abiding concern, across four collections of short
stories spanning nearly twenty years, is with people trying to figure out how to live and speak
and relate to one another in the world that Nordstrom and his ilk have made.
In 2013’s “Home,” a military veteran returning from an unspecified Middle-Eastern
conflict zone tries to re-enter his domestic life, which we gather was already in a state of pretty
advanced entropy when he left it.
xxviii
His wife has long since divorced him and remarried, and
now this other man is serving as a father to his children. His mother is months behind on her rent
and about to be evicted from her home. His sister has married into a wealthy family whose
contempt for the narrator and his mother is covered over with the thinnest possible veneer of
politeness. Like a lot of Saunders protagonists, the narrator of “Home” is mostly a mystery to
himself. At some point he seems to have been involved in some kind of war crime, but he can’t
bring himself to think about it and thus we never learn the details. He may have been
dishonorably discharged. With the exception of his mother, everyone who knows him is a little
afraid of him. His sister and her husband won’t let him hold their new baby. He has violent,
dangerous impulses that he confuses with some kind of righteous intuition. It’s not only the
war—in which empathy and even conscience are viewed as liabilities that can get you and your
compatriots killed—that has handicapped the narrator in this way. The social world in which the
story takes place seems designed to thwart understanding. At one point the narrator enters a
42
computer store and is presented with a mysterious device called MiiVoxMax, which looks “like
just a plastic tag. Like if you wanted MiiVoxMax, you handed in that tag, and someone went and
got MiiVoxMax for you, whatever it was” (185). He asks how much it costs and receives no
answer, the implication being that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. He asks what it’s for
and the “kid” working at the store says, “Well, if you’re asking is it data repository or
information hierarchy domain, the answer to that would be yes and no” (184). His mother is
trying to clean up her language, and so instead of diversifying her vocabulary, she beeps herself,
television style:
“Still ain’t no beeping cleaning lady,” Ma said.
I looked at her funny.
“Beeping?” I said.
“Beep you,” she said. “They been on my case at work.” (169-70)

Her new job has her working at a church, a position she seems to feel entitles her to special
respect. As the police are carrying her belongings out of her apartment and depositing them on
the lawn, she says, “See how they treat a lady that works at a church” (192). Pitiful as this is—
the substitution of the most trivial outward sign of devotion for the thing itself—it’s also true,
and obvious, that no one should be treated the way she’s being treated. The special respect she’s
asking for is really just the basic dignity that should be afforded to all people, but in this world
the way we get it is by possessing the social status that the narrator’s new in-laws possess. For
his mother, “working at a church” is as close as she gets.
In a 2015 appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, Saunders described fiction as
“empathy training wheels.” Two years later, in an interview with the writer Jeff Salomon in
Texas Monthly, he elaborated further on the same idea:
If you could inhabit the secret thoughts of your enemy, they wouldn’t be your enemy.
You would see their understanding of the world; what they were doing would make
perfect sense. When you read a great book, you’re lifted out of your consciousness and
43
into someone else’s, even though that second one is an imitation of a consciousness. It’s
almost like compassion training wheels.
xxix

There’s a relationship here between the “training wheels” analogy and the recognition that the
consciousness we’re lifted into is “an imitation of a consciousness.” Fictional characters are not
real people, Saunders is saying. They aren’t harmed if we fail to empathize with them, but
empathizing with them teaches us to empathize with real people in our real lives. It’s the social-
utilitarian argument for literature expressed as plainly as I’ve ever seen it—the kind of thing
another writer would hesitate to say for fear of sounding naïve. But what Saunders’ fiction in
particular has always done exceptionally well is to show why the training wheels are needed, to
make visible the forces—the degradation of language, the elevation of profit over all other
concerns—that conspire against empathy in our daily lives.
The typical Saunders protagonist blunders from one indignity to the next in comically
inarticulate, uncomprehending frustration, believing himself to be destined for far greater things
if only he could figure out what those greater things are, if only other people could see how
special he is, until steadily worsening circumstances force on him a moment of Flannery
O’Connor-esque grace and clarity in which he finally sees beyond the narrow confines of his
own ego. Usually, as with O’Connor, this moment arrives under extreme duress. The protagonist
is on the point of murdering his entire family, as in “Home,” or he’s on the brink of death, as in
“The End of FIRPO in the World,” or he has to sacrifice his own life in order to save someone
else’s, as in “The Falls,” or “Escape From Spiderhead.” It’s a method better suited to the short
story than to any other form, which is why O’Connor’s short stories are better known and better
loved than her two novels, and perhaps why it took twenty years and four collections of stories
before Saunders wrote a novel. In the essays, his unshakeable faith in the meliorative power of
empathy leads to profound meditations on the human condition about as often as it leads to ersatz
44
insights and moments of cringe-inducing schmaltz. Exploring Dubai for GQ in 2005, he finds an
indoor event where mountains of artificial snow have been fabricated out of crushed ice for the
enjoyment of Emirati children, who presumably have never seen snow. Describing the open-
hearted joy he sees on the faces of the children and their parents, he says, earnestly, “If
everybody in America could see this, our foreign policy would change.”
xxx
As if it’s remarkable
or surprising that people in Muslim countries love their children and enjoy fun. As if the Iraq war
could have been avoided if someone had just thought to tell Dick Cheney that Arabs are people.
The long-awaited novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, seems to serve its author as a kind of
laboratory in which to test the outer limits of the Saundersian theory of empathy.
xxxi
The story
takes place over the course of a single, pivotal night in the life of our most beloved president. It’s
the winter of 1862, and Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son, Willie, has died of typhoid just as the
Civil War is grinding into its bloodiest phase. Overwhelmed with grief, guilt, and uncertainty,
Lincoln makes a late-night visit to the cemetery where Willie has just been interred, hoping to
hold his son’s body one last time. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the bardo is the liminal state
between one life and the next. Saunders’ bardo is the cemetery itself, a little city of ghosts who
loiter in the vicinity of their former bodies, unwilling to face the fact that they are dead. This is
pretty conventional ghost-story material, but for Saunders it’s an opportunity to work in what has
always been his most fertile comic territory, that of wishful self-deception carried to absurd
extremes. The ghosts here refer to their corpses as “sick-forms,” their caskets as “sick-boxes.”
They are ill and will eventually recover. The word dead is taboo, and never uttered until the
novel’s climactic scene. The story is told in many voices, in snippets from historical documents,
some real, some invented, but the key formal innovation here is a kind of literalization of
empathy: the dead can enter the bodies of the living, and when they do they gain access to the
45
living person’s thoughts and feelings. In effect they become an army of mini-narrators, allowing
the author to outsource the daunting responsibility that comes with narrating the mind of
Lincoln. The trick has never worked the other way—the dead can’t influence the living—but as
the plot progresses they find that they have to try. Near the close of the novel, the body of the
president is briefly occupied by nearly the whole population of the cemetery at once, including a
contingent of Black ghosts from the segregated burial ground just over the fence. One of these
ghosts, a formerly enslaved man named Thomas Havens, lingers after the others have left.
Havens died before Lincoln came on the scene, and so he doesn’t know whose body he inhabits,
but he has a dim intuition that the man is a powerful figure—that he may even be (dare he say
it?) the President. Havens further intuits that this possible president is sympathetic to the plight
of Black Americans. Armed with this partial, uncertain knowledge, he attempts to sway the great
man’s mind:
Sir, if you are as powerful as I feel that you are, and as inclined toward us as you seem to
be, endeavor to do something for us, so that we might do something for ourselves…turn
us loose, sir, let us at it, let us show you what we can do. (312)

Up to this point, Saunders’ formal ingenuity and aburdist humor have been enough to circumvent
most of the problems endemic to historical fiction about well-known persons and real events, but
now, as a magical Black ghost is planting the seeds of the Emancipation Proclamation in the
mind of Abraham Lincoln, it’s clear that the author’s ambitions have collided disastrously with
the limitations of the genre. This is a haunting in the form of a memorial: a fictional haunting
that seeks, presumptuously, to unhaunt the real. “What haunts are not the dead,” say the
psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “but the gaps left within us by the secrets of
others…the burial of an unspeakable fact…like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within.”
xxxii
It
perhaps goes without saying that, with regard to slavery and the endlessly varied permutations of
46
white supremacist violence that developed in its wake, the collective American psyche bristles
with such unspeakable facts, with specific horrors that fell in particular lives and were never
recorded anywhere except in the form of a potent omission, a lacuna giving rise to what
Abraham and Torok call “transgenerational haunting.” These are the specters that continue, in
Derridean fashion, to disjoin the living present.
xxxiii
But Thomas Havens speaks only in heroic
abstraction, on behalf of all Black Americans, seeking to fix the meaning of their lives and
deaths in the very public actions of this one great figure, the President. There’s a chain of
ventriloquism at work here, but the voice that ultimately speaks is not the unsettling voice of “the
stranger within.” It’s the authoritative, public-facing voice of settled history. What comes across
most clearly is the author, with his fine moral sensitivity and his good intentions, reaching back
across two centuries to say, “I know how you must have felt. Here, let me say it for you.”
47
Human Beings who Feel Pain

The belief that literature exists to generate empathy, or to teach it, leads to a
corresponding belief that the most appropriate subjects for literature are the people (or peoples)
most obviously in need of empathy—that the writer’s job is to rectify the inequities of the
empathy economy. For writers representing oppressed and marginalized communities, this
imperative can present itself as a demand. “Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale,”
says the poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong. “If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If
it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.”
xxxiv
For writers from comparatively privileged
demographics, it can lead to some awkward casting about for material. At its worst, the empathy
defense allows writers and publishers to apply a veneer of consciousness-raising righteousness to
what is actually exploitation—what the writer Myriam Gurba calls “trauma porn that wears a
social justice fig leaf.”
xxxv

The latter quote comes from Gurba’s viral review of Jeanine Cummins’ 2020 novel,
American Dirt. It’s probably not necessary to rehash the controversy around Cummins’ mega-
bestseller here. Briefly, the story centers itself around the plight of Lydia, a bookstore owner in
Acapulco, who flees with her young son to the United States after her entire family is murdered
by narcos. A well-educated, middle-class professional, Lydia at first thinks she has disguised
herself as a migrant in order to escape her pursuers. Soon, however, she realizes that she isn’t
pretending:
She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all
the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her
life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of
detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must
be wherever they come from, that this is the better option.
xxxvi

48
She was one of us, in other words, and now she’s one of them. Lydia and Luca’s journey
proceeds from one harrowing experience to the next, in prose that, depending on your
perspective and maybe your mood, either “calls its imagined ghosts into the reader’s real flesh,”
(Lauren Groff in the New York Times)
xxxvii
or merely flatters the reader, “giving us the saintly to
root for and the barbarous to deplore—and then congratulating us for caring” (Parul Sehgal, also
in the New York Times)
xxxviii
. Or maybe just “sucks. Big time” (Gurba). Cummins’ stated
intention was to force her readers to realize that “these people are people.”
xxxix
The early hype
around the novel fixated on its capacity to do just that. We might ask who these imagined readers
are who don’t know that people are people. Surely they aren’t the people the book is about. In a
representative blurb, the novelist Julia Alvarez wrote, “If a book can change hearts and transform
policies, this is the one!” In numerous subsequent reviews and articles, Alvarez’s slight
skepticism was curiously edited out, and her quote was rendered as a straightforward declaration:
“This book will change hearts and transform policies.” Which sounds quite a lot like George
Saunders in Dubai, saying, “If everyone in America could see this, our foreign policy would
change.”
“The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project,” says Cathy Park Hong
in Minor Feelings, “in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.
Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a
whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” (49). Implicit on
the other side of this question is the colonizer’s familiar demand for legibility: We will accept
your claim to moral standing in the human community only if you can render your suffering in a
form we’re familiar with. The burdens of learning and translation fall on you, not on us. Worse
49
still if the colonizer, stricken in latter days with a guilty conscience, says Never mind, no need to
speak, we’ll do it for you.
In the title story of her recent collection The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle
Evans frames another version of the same question.
xl
Describing what it’s like to move through
the world in the company of her white boyfriend, the Black narrator says:
It was in some ways the thing I liked least about him, even less than things that were
actually his fault: when I went places with him, things were easier; when I was with him,
the do they know I’m human yet question that hummed in me every time I met a new
white person quieted a little, not because I could be sure of the answer but because I
could be sure in his presence they’d at least pretend. (208)

Later, describing the frightful ascendency of a white supremacist group known as the Free
Americans, she says:
It was the way they always seemed to be around the corner, the way, however lacking in
general insight they might be, they could somehow hear the ticking clock of the question,
the Do they know I’m human yet? the way they took delight in saying no, the way they
took for granted that it would always be their question to answer. (229)
___

In response to the medical students who insist, again and again in the same formulaic
language, that they know how she feels, Leslie Jamison writes:
“Why not just say I couldn’t even imagine?”
One of the patients she pretends to be is a woman named Stephanie Phillips, who suffers
debilitating seizures “with no identifiable medical origin.” This fictional patient’s brother
drowned in a river two years before, and the seizures began shortly after that, but the would-be
doctors don’t know this. Their job is to ask the questions that will unearth the physical
symptom’s hidden psychic origin.
50
“I’ve thought about Stephanie Phillips’s seizures in terms of possession and privacy,”
Jamison says. “That converting her sadness away from direct articulation is a way to keep it
hers” (6).
To be human in the moral sense—in the sense that one’s suffering has moral weight—is
not nothing. It’s certainly preferable to the alternative. Still, it’s not the same as being real. Being
real means that one’s pain is not always readily legible to others, or even to oneself, that every
identifiable source of pain is part of “a root system of loss that stretches radial and rhizomatic
under the entire territory of [one’s] life” (5). More than that, being real means being more than
just pain.
___

“The little mare munched, and listened, and breathed on his hands.” Whatever transpires
between Iona and the horse in this moment, it’s not the kind of understanding Iona has been
asking for. It’s not the kind that literary fiction often seems to ask for—in which I take in your
story, imagine myself in your place, and attempt to comprehend your subjective experience by
considering how I would feel “if I were you.” We do that too, of course. If we’re reading
attentively and well, we are continually building and maintaining the bridge of metaphor that
leads from self to other and back again. But the story’s real life takes place elsewhere, among the
bats that make their home underneath that bridge.
In an interview conducted at Syracuse University and later collected in her book Framer
Framed, the filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha discusses the technical challenges of
filming people’s domestic lives in rural Senegal, where the typical dwelling is small and unlit,
and where in the daytime the contrast between the brightness outside and the darkness inside is
51
such that one enters a dwelling in a state of temporary blindness.
xli
For the camera, the effect is
even more pronounced, and the interviewer points out that most directors would have felt the
need to light the interiors of those houses in order to render them filmable. Trinh’s explanation,
or defense, of her choice not to do so draws from the same well of metaphor that Jamison draws
from in The Empathy Exams, when she defines empathy etymologically as “a kind of
travel…border crossing by way of query” (6). But Trinh does not talk about empathy, and her
images of travel and border crossing go beyond what can be accomplished merely by asking
questions. To move toward other people, Trinh says:
one has to accept to take the jump and move ahead blindly at certain moments of inquiry.
If one is not even momentarily blind, if one remains as one is from the outside or from
the inside, then it is unlikely that one would be able to break through that moment where
suddenly everything stops; one’s luggages are emptied out; and one fares in a state of
non-knowingness, where the destabilizing encounters with the ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘unknown’
are multiplied and experienced anew.

To cross the threshold of another person’s life is to step out of one’s previous self, to come
empty-handed and without a map. Paradoxically, it may also mean to be cast back on oneself in
the same empty-handed condition, to carry the sensation of estrangement back into the well-
mapped territory of one’s own life. The poet Max Ritvo, dying of cancer at twenty-five, talks
about reincarnation in terms that could just as easily be used to describe the experience of total
immersion in a story or a poem. “It takes a ton of chutzpah to reincarnate,” he says. “You leave
behind not only your loved ones, but your memory of them.”
xlii
At the same time, to read well is
to encounter oneself anew. How do you know when a poem is listening to you? “When your
memories, things you’ve never disclosed to anyone, start appearing in your mind as you read the
poem. When you discover that a poem links up to a chain of images from your life like a song
links up to its music video.” What is described here is not a redemption of the unknowable other
through metaphor—I can imagine what it would be like to be this other person—but instead a
52
kind of intensely generative intimacy, mediated through language, between separate privacies
that remain essentially private and separate.
Iona’s horse does not speak, does not necessarily understand human speech, in any case
has no way to make known the degree to which she understands what her master tells her. In this
way her non-humanness only makes visible the real conditions—of unknowingness, of
impenetrability—in which all human beings meet one another. She cannot take in the story and
imagine herself in his place, and if she could she could not say so. The metaphor cannot be
validated. It’s exactly like coming to another country with currency in one’s pockets that can’t be
exchanged, speaking a language that can’t be translated. There is the metaphor—“Imagine that
you had a little foal, and that foal died…”—and there is the reality of two lives lived side-by-side
in incommensurable, non-overlapping epistemological and ontological contexts. Across that
chasm, she breathes on his hands. If there is anything in the story that acts as a balm for the pain
of Iona’s loss, it is not the imaginative collapsing of difference that we call empathy, but this
embodied intimacy, this contact within and across difference.
Like many of my favorite stories, this one instantiates in the mind of its reader what it
describes in the life of its protagonist. For Iona, the mechanism of this embodiment is that
sacramental breath. The mare breathes on Iona’s hands, rendering in physical, tangible form the
invisible thread of blind faith that binds speaker to listener. She asks no questions, expresses no
impatience, makes no claim to understand. This is mercy. For us as readers, the mechanism is
language. We read the word listened and hear it (at least at first) as no different from the other
statements of fact in that sentence: “The little mare munched, and listened, and breathed on his
hands.” Woven into the highly specific context of this fictional life—which is not ours—the
familiar word is made new. The word meets the world at an unaccustomed juncture, both ours
53
and not ours, as if by accident we had gotten off our usual bus at a different stop and lost our
bearings. And despite all this fruitful estrangement, nothing in the story has any meaning for us
except what it draws from the well of our own lives—our knowledge of these words and what
they mean and how they work together, our memory of what a horse is, what winter is, what
grief and indifference and patience feel like. In this way the story reads us, makes us legible to
ourselves, reconfigures and renews our understanding of what it has always meant to listen, to
grieve, to speak and to keep silent.
If this, too, is mercy, it isn’t really mercy for Iona, who is made of words and doesn’t
need our help. And if the illusion of our mercy for Iona teaches us to be merciful toward the real
people in our lives—or compassionate, or even merely empathetic—this is an incidental benefit
at best. Reading is not practice for real life; it’s how we live. The mercy is for us. We’re the ones
who need it. It comes in the form of a reprieve from loneliness, a furlough from the prison of the
ego. It makes tangible what is otherwise an abstraction: that we are human and not merely
ourselves.

___

One more story, called “White Heart Bar,” from Sara Majka’s strange, incandescent
collection Cities I’ve Never Lived In.
xliii
The narrator is a young writer who lives with her artist
husband in a section of Portland, Maine that seems poised between gentrification and collapse.
They share a loft apartment in a former factory, a building that looks abandoned from the outside
and feels that way even on the inside. The apartment is huge and empty, less divorced from its
industrial origins than the chic loft apartments of larger cities, and in an effort to generate some
54
semblance of intimacy and comfort the couple has fashioned a makeshift living room out of
“Chinese screens,” but it hasn’t really worked. “It was silly, really, like something the Red Cross
might have set up as a triage area if Chinese screens had been considered appropriate” (38). She
reads in the local paper that a young woman has gone missing near the waterfront. It turns out
that the missing woman was a student in the night class the narrator’s husband teaches at the
local art school. He’d given her a ride to the bar after class that night. The story seems to take on
the outlines of a work of detective fiction. The narrator becomes consumed with the question of
what happened to the girl. She asks her husband to tell her what he remembers. She questions
another male acquaintance who saw the girl that night. She reads the paper, the police transcript,
a blog put together by friends of the missing girl. From all this fragmentary information, she
says, “I began to piece together what had happened,” (39) but as we read on it becomes clear that
she isn’t so much piecing it together as making it up, imagining, through the avatar of this other
woman, how she herself might fall or jump into the harbor and drown without anyone noticing—
how it would feel, what she would think about. She begins to tell the story of the girl’s last night
as if she had witnessed it, and then as if she had a power beyond ordinary witnessing: she
becomes an omniscient third-person narrator with access to the missing girl’s thoughts and
feelings and even her memories:
She remembered living on an island years ago and lying on the dock, the stars overhead
and jellyfish in the water, the rowboats tied with rope that dragged with seaweed. She had
lain down with some of the other people from the farm, and thought, The world opens
immeasurably. She would have felt it like something opening inside of her. Then she had
slipped into the water while the other people from the farm talked on the dock. The little
dipper, someone said, count the stars. The water was so cold that she gasped. Louise?
Someone had said. She was in between the rowboats, in the space where one was missing
and the others swayed to meet but didn’t. She kicked out. Cold? Someone asked. So cold,
she said, kicking away. She hadn’t even been wrong that the world opens
immeasurably—it does—but it also does something to you, all those jolts and shocks.
(44)
55
This is the missing girl sitting on a rock at the edge of the water, drunk, remembering another
night on another beach where she hung suspended between presence and absence. This is all
taking place in the imagination of the narrator, who is not this girl and has never met this girl.
The story does not ask us to empathize with the missing girl, about whom we learn almost
nothing concrete or reliable. Instead it asks us to witness how porous the border can be between
empathy and solipsism, between what’s hers and what’s mine and what’s everyone’s. Many of
the details here—the too many drinks, the way everything unfolds under the gaze of a rotating
cast of men who seem variously threatening but who in the end are merely indifferent—belong
precisely to the mythology of wounded womanhood that Jamison describes, which doesn’t make
them less specific or less real. When the body of the missing girl is found in the harbor, the
narrator finds her husband crying on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. “I’m very
sorry,” he says, though it’s not clear what he could have done or whom he’s sorry for. They may
have been talking past each other all this time, seeking different answers to different questions
that only happen to have found expression in the same words. Still, the phrase makes a bridge
between them, and the contact it establishes is enough to break the spell the narrator has been
under and return her to her own concrete, specific life:
He put one hand over his eyes and I sat behind him and placed a hand flat on his back and
stayed like that for some time, while rice cooked in our alcove kitchen. I felt a sudden
enlarging of space, with sacks of half-put-away groceries on the counter, the sagging bag
of rice scattering kernels everywhere, everything acquiring significance, more beautiful
than the many beautiful things I had seen, more beautiful even than the harbor had ever
seemed to me. (46)

56
Notes

i
Hemon, Aleksandar. “Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump.” The Village Voice, 17 Jan. 2017,
online.

ii
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska Press, 2015. p.3

iii
From a speech delivered at the dedication of Ebert’s plaque on the sidewalk outside the Chicago Theater, 23 June,
2005

iv
From an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, 9 Dec. 2015

v
Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson. “A Conversation in Iowa.” The New York Review of Books, 5 Nov. 2015,
online

vi
Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings. New York, One World, 2020. p.49

vii
Bernhard, Thomas. The Voice Imitator, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
p.39

viii
Bernhard, p.25

ix
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York, Putnam, 1958. p.308

x
Hoffman, Michael J. (Editor); Murphy, Patrick D. (Editor). Essentials of the Theory of
Fiction. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2005. p 120.

xi
Bull, Malcolm. On Mercy. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019. p.2-3

xii
Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Saint Paul, Graywolf, 1997. p.86-8

xiii
From Culture and Value, rendered here as paraphrased by Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts. Minneapolis,
Graywolf, 2015. p.1

xiv
Blanchot, Maurice. The Instant of my Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, Stanford University Press,
2000.

xv
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders. London, Verso, 1983. p.6

xvi
Hale, Kathleen. “First I Got Pregnant. Then I Decided to Kill the Mountain Lion.” Elle, 14 Feb. 2017, online.

xvii
In this case, it’s “Heartache,” in: Chekhov, Anton. Forty Stories, trans. Robert Payne. New York, Knopf, 1963.

xviii
Tasioulas, John. “Mercy.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 103. 2003. p. 102

xix
See Budziszewski, J. Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 2017. p.159

xx
Maxwell, William. All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories. New York, Knopf, 1994. pp.3-39

xxi
Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New York, Crown, 2006.

57

xxii
For just one example, see Jonathan Haidt’s article, “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been
Uniquely Stupid,” published April 11, 2022 in The Atlantic.

xxiii
Martignano, Alison Jane, et al. “Virtual Reality Improves Emotional but not Cognitive Empathy: A Meta-
analysis.” Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 17 June 2021, online.

xxiv
Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams. Minneapolis, Graywolf, 2014.

xxv
Fischer, Michael. “Literature and Empathy.” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, Oct. 2017. pp.431-64.

xxvi
Saunders, George. “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” The New Yorker, 4 July 2016.

xxvii
Saunders, George. Pastoralia. New York, Riverhead, 2000. p.21

xxviii
Saunders, George. Tenth of December. New York, Random House, 2013. pp.169-201

xxix
Saunders, George and Jeff Salamon. “Enemies, A Love Story.” Texas Monthly, Feb. 2017, online.

xxx
Saunders, George. “The New Mecca.” GQ, 31 Oct. 2005, online.

xxxi
Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. New York, Random House, 2017.

xxxii
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. University of
Chicago Press, 1994. p.176

xxxiii
See Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. London, Routledge, 2006.

xxxiv
Hong, p.49

xxxv
Gurba, Myriam. “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca With Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature.” Tropics of
Meta, 12 Dec. 2019, online.

xxxvi
Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. New York, Flatiron, 2020.

xxxvii
Groff, Lauren. “‘American Dirt’ Plunges Readers Into the Border Crisis.” The New York Times, 19 Jan. 2020.

xxxviii
Sehgal, Parul. “A Mother and Son, Fleeing for their Lives over Treacherous Terrain.” The New York Times, 17
Jan. 2020.

xxxix
From the author’s note included in the first edition of the novel. The note was removed from the second printing.

xl
Evans, Danielle. The Office of Historical Corrections. New York, Riverhead, 2020. pp. 163-266.

xli
Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Framer Framed. New York, Routledge, 1992. pp. 111-133.

xlii
Ritvo, Max. Interview with Sarah Ruhl in The New Republic, 28 Sept. 2016, online.

xliii
Majka, Sara. Cities I’ve Never Lived In. Minneapolis, Graywolf, 2016. pp.37-46
58
Bibliography

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis.
University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Saint Paul, Graywolf, 1997.

Bernhard, Thomas. The Voice Imitator, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott. Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1997.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Instant of my Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 2000.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock. University of Nebraska
Press, 2015

Budziszewski, J. Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics. Cambridge University Press,
2017.

Bull, Malcolm. On Mercy. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2019

Chekhov, Anton. Forty Stories, trans. Robert Payne. New York, Knopf, 1963.

Cummins, Jeanine. American Dirt. New York, Flatiron, 2020.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. London, Routledge, 2006.

Evans, Danielle. The Office of Historical Corrections. New York, Riverhead, 2020.

Fischer, Michael. “Literature and Empathy.” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, Oct.
2017. pp.431-64.

Groff, Lauren. “‘American Dirt’ Plunges Readers Into the Border Crisis.” The New York Times,
19 Jan. 2020.

Gurba, Myriam. “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca With Fake-Ass Social Justice
Literature.” Tropics of Meta, 12 Dec. 2019, online.

Haidt, Jonathan. “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” The
Atlantic, 11 April, 2022, online.

Hale, Kathleen. “First I Got Pregnant. Then I Decided to Kill the Mountain Lion.” Elle, 14 Feb.
2017, online.

59
Hemon, Aleksandar. “Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump.” The Village
Voice, 17 Jan. 2017, online.

Hoffman, Michael J. (Editor); Murphy, Patrick D. (Editor). Essentials of the Theory of
Fiction. Durham, NC, USA: Duke University Press, 2005.

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings. New York, One World, 2020.

Jamison, Leslie. The Empathy Exams. Minneapolis, Graywolf, 2014.

Majka, Sara. Cities I’ve Never Lived In. Minneapolis, Graywolf, 2016.

Martignano, Alison Jane, et al. “Virtual Reality Improves Emotional but not Cognitive Empathy:
A Meta-analysis.” Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 17 June 2021, online.

Maxwell, William. All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories. New York, Knopf, 1994.

Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders. London, Verso, 1983.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York, Putnam, 1958.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Minneapolis, Graywolf, 2015.

Obama, Barack and Marilynne Robinson. “A Conversation in Iowa.” The New York Review of
Books, 5 Nov. 2015, online.

Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. New
York, Crown, 2006.

Ritvo, Max. Interview with Sarah Ruhl in The New Republic, 28 Sept. 2016, online.

Saunders, George and Jeff Salamon. “Enemies, A Love Story.” Texas Monthly, Feb. 2017,
online.

Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. New York, Random House, 2017.

---. “The New Mecca.” GQ, 31 Oct. 2005, online.

---. Pastoralia. New York, Riverhead, 2000.

---. Tenth of December. New York, Random House, 2013.

---. “Who Are All These Trump Supporters?” The New Yorker, 4 July 2016.

Sehgal, Parul. “A Mother and Son, Fleeing for their Lives over Treacherous Terrain.” The New
York Times, 17 Jan. 2020.
60

Tasioulas, John. “Mercy.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 103. 2003.

Trinh, T. Minh-Ha. Framer Framed. New York, Routledge, 1992.

61
Part II—Creative Dissertation

Gladness

I ’ve wakened to your muttered words
spoken light- or dark-years away
as if my own voice had spoken.
—Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems

1

It was a fasting day, and looked it, though they didn’t always. Arnold never knew when
such a day was coming. He had learned by then that it could happen just as easily right in the
honeyed throat of summer, bees humming in the dogwood blossoms. He would never plan it,
never do it on purpose, but some days the thought of food was loathsome to him, made him
loathsome to himself. Not that there was much in the house to eat anyway. Some crackers in the
cabinet with nothing to put on them, some hot dogs in the freezer, long forgotten, scarred by
frost. Absurdly decadent, to have meat ready to hand all the time like that, conveniently
processed into neat little cigars of flesh that could be thrown in the microwave and consumed
three minutes after he began to form the vaguest notion that he might be hungry. Almost evil.
Actually evil, if you thought for half a second about what went into making something like that
possible. Which, on any other day, he wouldn’t.
The dog, Hildy, was missing again. He’d skipped breakfast searching for her, walking
carefully along the side of the Post Road, keeping to the gravel and frozen mud at the edge of the
crumbling pavement, avoiding the road itself, where any shadow might harbor a patch of black
ice that would put him in the hospital. After an hour in the cold, walking and calling the dog’s
62
name into the silence of the morning, he’d given up and headed home, but by then his hunger
had settled and quieted, a deep, still pool, familiar, always with him. It was a cool, prickly
vibration in his fingertips, almost imperceptible, a heaviness in his feet and a lightness in his
head. The familiar revulsion at the thought of doing anything about it came back to him.
Mid-December already. Remnants of the last snow—the first of the year—lay desiccating
in the shady places, almost as hard now as the packed earth beneath them. More snow was on its
way. Ten a.m., and the temperature of the air had dropped three degrees in the last hour. All
morning, clots of sparrows rose from the grass for no reason and then descended again,
chattering.
Daniel and Sarah would arrive late in the afternoon, and Daniel’s boyfriend and Sarah’s
husband and their children, and the cupboards and the fridge were empty. He’d have to get to the
store to fill them. He’d have to do it soon, before the snow began to efface the roads. For now
though, the thought of a supermarket was enough to send a current of dread down his spine all
the way to his fingertips.
“We’re coming,” his daughter had said on the phone. Insistent. Her voice laced with an
unaccountable urgency, as if somehow she knew how much he needed to see her. Her and the
children. “We’ll make it, don’t worry.”
But he did worry. By tomorrow morning the snow would lie in windblown drifts against
the side of the house, high as the downstairs windows. For now the sky was pale gray and quiet,
the grass matted and brown as winter fur.
There was a pasture for horses at the top of the hill. When he passed that place in his
search for the dog this morning, Arnold saw the creatures standing still in the frozen mud, ears
63
flattened against their patient heads. They could smell it, as even he could—the air strangely
purified, cleansed of all earthly influence, the celestial intention gathering.
To see the natural world in symbolic terms was a sign of unhappiness, surely. A sign of
spiritual poverty, Mattie would have said. Of desperation. She used to tease him for the flurry of
activity that overtook him every year in April and May, when he went to more openings and
exhibitions in a week or two than he would the whole rest of the year, when he spent his days in
the city, tracking down friends and acquaintances he’d been avoiding and ignoring for months.
“It’s a time of renewal for the plants, Arnold, not for us. We only age in one direction.”
Still he couldn’t help loving the hiddenness and inwardness of life in winter. He couldn’t
help identifying with it. Crows in the fields, bare branches, the salamander he couldn’t see but
could imagine at rest in the purl of cold water bending around some rock in the stream, his
ancient lungs outside his body, fernlike, drawing oxygen from the water as it passed over them.
For months now, through the shortening of the days and then their lengthening, the creature
would hardly need to move. Some of the smaller mammals—bats for example, and mice—
would sleep all winter long. Not sleep, really. Something beyond sleep. Something closer to
death—the heart beating three or four times each minute, the temperature of the body hovering a
few degrees above freezing. The trees had stopped growing. All winter they would live on the
energy their leaves had harvested from the sun before they lost them. The deer neither ran nor
leapt, but stood watch over one another, browsing in the dead grass, walking great distances
slowly in search of what lived and would sustain them. Everything dreamed. Even the trees
dreamed. Everything hoped to survive by austerity until the time of abundance returned.
___

64
What would it be like to starve as Mattie had starved? He hated the question, hated his
need to know, and so it was his body and not his mind that asked. Or so he told himself. His
inability to eat was his body’s way of posing a question his mind was too afraid to ask. Or too
conscious of the futility of asking, of the morbid, voyeuristic edge the question took on as soon
as it was acknowledged. Even if you could know, which you couldn’t, how would that help?
Anyway, in truth it was only the mind that did anything. Or between body and mind there was no
division. The body’s needs and frailties hobbled the mind and set its paths just as surely as a bad
knee might force you to take the easy way home instead of the long way. To say nothing of the
many ailments that could begin in the body, take up residence in the depths of the brain, and then
persist years after the body, by all observable evidence, had healed itself.
He lit a flame under the kettle for tea. The stove was old and broken down, and he had to
hold a lit match into the invisible stream of gas to ignite it. That steady blue flame in the dim
room, another tiny pleasure that now was apparently killing us all, and always had been. Even
his strong preference for it—his feeling that he’d rather eat tuna salad for dinner every night for
the rest of his life than cook over an electric coil—was suspect, conditioned by decades of
clandestine marketing conducted on behalf of the oil and gas people. Now you’re cooking with
gas—a seemingly harmless, archaic expression recently revealed to have been an advertising
slogan all along.
Tea was the only thing he could drink on a fasting day. Tea and plain water. It was
Mattie’s thing, the tea. Something she’d turned him on to, long ago when they first came to know
each other. Something he’d teased her for at first. He was a coffee drinker, as any normal,
modern person with work to do had to be. Was there even caffeine in that stuff? How many pots
65
would you have to drink to get your head buttoned down in the way it would be after one decent
cup of coffee?
But the tea she drank was nothing like the supermarket Lipton he was used to. She
trekked to the far corners of the city to buy it from a handful of purveyors who all knew her as
the only customer they had who didn’t live in their neighborhoods or speak the languages they
spoke with their other customers. There were so many kinds—rattling seedpods that burst open
in the hot water, spilling forth tiny seeds; dark leaves that smelled like the floor of some distant
forest and like the warmest corner of your childhood home at the same time. It wasn’t enough to
make him give up coffee, as she had years before, but it was something new, something of hers
that became his too. They were both in their early thirties already when they met. Not so old in
hindsight, but at the time it felt to him like the first decade they should have lived together had
been stolen from them. He was hungry to absorb all he could of her, to make up for that loss.
___

In his inbox that morning there was a message from a woman named Wilma Lewis, of
Pheonix, Arizona, who wanted to ask a question about Matthea’s work. About one of her
photographs in particular—an image of the moon in which the moon appears as a thin white line
against the black sky, like an accident. As if a sheet of black, glossy paper had simply been
scratched by an errant fingernail. It was a stupid question, but no more so than most. He was in
no position to answer it, and as politely as he could he told Ms. Lewis so. He got two or three
emails like that every week, and by now he could practically copy and paste the same answer
from one to the next. People were always trying to position him as the authority on what Matthea
Sanders was really thinking, what she was really trying to do. It was a promotion he wasn’t
66
willing to accept. Still, she’d cared enough about that image to look up his contact information
and email him about it. He had to remind himself to be grateful for the attention she had paid to
Matthea’s work (and for the fact that, unlike everyone else who’d contacted him about Mattie in
the past month and a half, she either didn’t know or didn’t care about the latest gossip). He tried
to imagine who she might have been, sitting in her pleasant house with the huge Taschen edition
of Matthea’s late photographs open like a monument on the kitchen table, her cat walking over
the pages and shedding hair on them. He thought with a name like that she must have been even
older than he was. Certain names did that. They told everyone right away what generation you
came from. His own name, Arnold Lepore, was not much better in that regard.
There were demotions in the pipeline, too. He’d had to delete all his social media
accounts just to keep from reading at any random moment that he’d murdered his wife, driven
her to suicide or to near-suicidal recklessness, that she’d stranded herself on that snowed-in
mountainside in a desperate bid to escape the inescapable sphere of his influence. His critical
authority. The demotions were in a weird way also promotions. They elevated him to the stature
of a natural law—something that could neither be resisted nor altered, setting the limits to what
Matthea’s work could mean and be. Versions of this story proliferated in the corners of the
internet where people cared about such things. They spun off one another in endlessly clever
variations, a kind of folk literature. They were conspiracy theories. They lived wholly on the
internet, sealed off from the moral chaos of the actual human world, able to take in any
information that emerged from that chaos and convert it to their own narrative ends. All they
needed was an omnipresent, all-powerful villain. The critic, the husband, himself.
In truth he had written about her once when they were dating (a violation of his own self-
imposed professional ethics, but a slight one, since at that point he hadn’t expected things to last
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between them) and then never again for many years. But she had been largely unknown at the
time of that first article, and shortly thereafter she rose to minor fame, which was seen in some
circles as his doing. A gift and a curse, in certain versions of the myth. A gift bestowed with
strings attached.
And then late in her life she’d asked him to write the foreword to a retrospective book of
her landscape images, and he’d done it. He couldn’t refuse her. He couldn’t let the job fall to
someone else when she’d entrusted it to him. He wrote a more personal form of criticism than
he’d ever done before. He wrote about what those images meant to him—the sea breaking in a
long, thin line against a wall of ice, for instance, the horizon nowhere in evidence, the scale
unknowable—not as any viewer but as someone who loved the person who’d had to disappear
for weeks and risk her life to reach that place. He tried to imagine what they meant to her, and he
made it as clear as he could that she had told him no more than she told anyone, which was
nothing. He was guessing. The water was black in that picture, scudded with foam, the ice an
opaque, dull whiteness, billion-year-old dirt trapped in black streaks across its face. Like all her
pictures it had a title that contained no information but the place and the date. Greenland, May 3.
No allusions, no metaphors. Not even the year but only the month and day.
Earlier in her career she couldn’t have reached those places. It took too long and was far
too expensive. She had to spend a long time looking for absence and silence in the New England
hills before she could get the Lannan Foundation to put up seventy-five thousand dollars so she
could go to Greenland to take one picture. More than once—half teasing, half concerned—he
had interrogated her about it: why was she using her hard-earned power to deny herself comfort
and throw herself into danger?
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He wrote about that in the foreword too—how often he had asked and received no
answer. Whatever answers he needed he had to find in the pictures themselves. He couldn’t look
at them without trying to imagine what it was like to be her, standing on some ice-strewn beach,
seeing the world as material for the image she would make of it. He couldn’t forget that what he
thought was her mind composing the image was really his mind imperfectly reconstructing hers,
reverse-engineering it from the finished product. He couldn’t disentangle his eye from hers.
She had gone to such lengths to exclude any trace of the human. She had hired guides to
take her to places hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement—places fewer people had been
to than had been to the moon. The guides always hated her. She didn’t know what she was doing.
She was so bent on getting the picture she wanted that she pushed them to do things they
considered reckless. Sometimes they asked her to photograph them against the backdrop of the
places they’d brought her to, which she always refused to do. If a bird flew across the piece of
sky her camera gathered, she mentally discarded that exposure and made another one. Too easy
for the viewer to identify with the bird. She wanted to force the eye to become vagrant. She
wanted to leave it no place to feel at home in the world.
Even before she was gone, he could see that he should never have written that foreword.
Her refusal to speak for her work meant that he became its voice. Other critics had written about
those same pictures, but because he had lived with her for so many years it was taken as a given
that his was the final word. As he could not disentangle his eye from hers, soon neither could
anyone else. People looked at her pictures and saw what he had said he saw. They might have
pitied him, the husband abandoned for the sake of art. They might have resented his authority,
but they couldn’t escape it. After she was gone the problem became worse, as there was no
longer anyone who could claim to have known her better than he did.
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___

Now the story was getting away from him, leaving him behind, and soon it would sweep
him up again in a new position, a hapless and pitiful secondary character where before he had
been the half-secret, inescapable author.
Dolores Eider had sent to Artforum a clumsy scan of a photograph that she claimed was a
previously unpublished work by Matthea Sanders. There were more, she said, and she was trying
to decide whether and how to release them. There had been the predictable frenzy, which, six
weeks later, had still not entirely abated. Art journalists and gallerists had contacted him, asking
for comment. What could he say? He knew nothing, and any speculation on his part would read
as an attempt to reassert his ownership of Matthea’s career, a status he had never claimed. Even
if he said nothing he would be saying something.
The photograph showed a woman’s hand, presumably Dolores’s, resting palm down on a
wooden table beside an almost empty coffee mug. Crumbs of bread or cake were strewn across
the table, catching the light and glowing like tiny gems. The pages of a newspaper covered the
top right corner of the image, spreading downward like a tide toward the hand, which was
unadorned, the nails almost painfully short, as if bitten, dirt lodged at the broken cuticles—a
gardener’s hand. Bright, oblique light saturated the image—the morning sun from an unseen
window. It was trite, sentimental, like a student project. If it really was Mattie’s, it wasn’t
something she would have wanted published. Still, there was something about it. The hand was
so wholly at rest that it looked almost inanimate, like another discarded object left behind at the
scene of their shared breakfast. The mug, a well of shadow darkening toward the gleaming pool
of leftover coffee at the bottom, looked more menacingly alive. The camera spared nothing. It
70
saw the greasy smudge on the rim of the mug where lips had been, the crumbs on the table, the
chapped and reddened skin on the back of the hand, the liver spots, the gathering of wrinkles
around the knuckles. There was the suggestion of an almost unbearable intimacy, not only
between seer and seen but between living and non-living. Whatever fraught conversation had just
taken place at the table seemed obscurely recorded in the patterns the light made as those objects
blocked and gathered it.
He couldn’t pretend he didn’t see Mattie’s eye in it, even if it was a gaze she had never
turned on him. It looked in some ways like her older work, like the stuff she’d done before she
met him—though in those days she’d worked in color, and this was black and white like all her
recent work. And back then—in fact throughout her whole career—she’d never photographed a
human being or any part of one. Still, the similarities between this last, secret work and her early
stuff were obvious, and in some people’s eyes would be further evidence of the totality of his
influence, of everything she’d given up in order to be what he’d said she was.
___

Dolores lived a quarter mile down the hill from Arnold’s house, which in this thinly
settled place made her one of his nearest neighbors. She’d been there for decades—since long
before he and Mattie had moved in—but he’d never known much about her. No one seemed to.
Best he could tell she was slightly older than he was, but she’d never had children. She didn’t
work. She’d been married once, long ago, and at some point in that unrecorded era her husband
had died and left her the house and, presumably, enough money get her by. She was tall and thin,
with hair that had probably once been red but had faded to the color of tall grass in winter. Either
she wore the same plaid flannel shirt and the same evenly faded jeans every day or she had a
71
closet full of clothes that all looked the same. If the weather was cool she wore a turtleneck
under the flannel. In this way she was like a lot of his neighbors—people whose whole lives took
place in private, people who’d long since stopped caring what they looked like since no one else
cared. Still, somehow Dolores’s privacy was more complete, less brittle than theirs. Other houses
sat far from the road, behind thick hedges and long gravel driveways, sheltered by the enfolding
branches of old trees. More and more often lately there were high stone walls with gates you
couldn’t open unless you knew the passcode. Meanwhile Dolores’s house sat smack against the
road as it had two hundred years ago, without even a fence, so that anyone passing by in a car
could look right in her windows. It didn’t matter. She could have lived in a glass box in the
middle of Times Square and her privacy would have been no less inviolate. She had no need to
guard it as others did, nor did she seem to wish, as others did, for a public life to offset the
private one and make it glamorous.
Mattie had come to know her better than Arnold had. A few years before she died, she’d
begun to spend time at Dolores’s house. At first it was only that she went out to walk and think
as she always had but came home hours later instead of the usual thirty or forty minutes.
“How far did you walk?” he said when at last she came singing in the front door.
“Not far,” she said, like it was a joke she was telling herself.
Soon she was spending whole days away from home, and then nights too. She came like
a visitor to her own house and he asked her where she’d been.
“I told you,” she said. “I’ve been with Dolores.” She wasn’t going to explain, nor was she
interested in hiding anything. He thought at first she was punishing him for something, and for
days he wondered what it might have been. There was plenty to choose from, though never that.
He’d never been unfaithful, at least not in the way people usually mean when they use that word.
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Still, he’d been absorbed in work, abstracted, talking endlessly about his inability to understand
the things certain younger, more fashionable critics claimed to love. She knew what he meant
when he said he didn’t understand. It was something they’d argued about before. How refreshing
it would have been if he’d been willing to admit a genuine bafflement in the face of the new.
That would be somewhere to start. But what it meant was that he’d set himself against it, that
he’d decided it wasn’t worth understanding. She had to remind him that, anxious as he might
have felt about the new generation nipping at his heels, he was still the one with the institutional
power. His blessing could still change the trajectory of a nascent career. I don’t understand
wasn’t good enough.
“Fear makes you lazy,” she’d said. “Lazy and obsessive at the same time. The worst
combination.”
Insecure, afraid of getting old, afraid that the culture was leaving him behind, he’d
ignored her, and now, he thought, she was showing him the error of his ways. It took him weeks
to realize it wasn’t about him. Not that she hadn’t told him so.
“What?” she’d said. “Am I violating my marriage vows?”
“Yes!” he’d said.
“Where does it say I won’t ever love anybody else, or sleep with anybody else? You
assumed that was what it meant. We never talked about it.”
For a little over a month she more or less lived with Dolores. Then it ended with as little
outward turmoil as it had begun. She had found something beautiful in an unexpected place, and
she needed to find out what it was. Having found out, she had no more need for it. At any rate
that was how Arnold understood what had happened, eventually. She came home, cried quietly
and wanted to be left alone for half a day, and then went on as if nothing had happened. She
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invited him to do the same if he was able, though she said she would understand if he wasn’t. It
turned out eventually that he was.
___

As soon as the little ceremony of the tea was done, he was lacing his boots and pulling on
his coat to go out after the dog again. He couldn’t help himself. It was the hunger that did it.
Stripped of its name and its place in the ordinary chain of cause and effect—you are hungry
because you haven’t eaten; therefore you eat—his hunger had become a loitering stranger,
unsettling his mind, making him strange to himself. There are some people who, having suffered
an injury to the brain, lose the ability to recognize parts of their body as their own. The patient’s
left arm, for example, becomes the arm of a stranger imposing itself on him, weighing him down,
disturbing his sleep. Arnold had no better analogy for what was happening to him. At the level of
logic, he understood that he must be hungry, as the patient, whose mental faculties are otherwise
unimpaired, must understand that the arm growing out of his left shoulder can only be his. But he
couldn’t recognize his hunger as hunger, or as his. Divorced from its cause and its remedy, the
feeling resolved into a constant sense of low-grade emergency, prodding him as soon as he sat
down to get up and do something, however pointless, however wildly disconnected from what
was actually bothering him.
It was a temporary stage in the course of a long day. It would pass by the time the sun
began to set.
It was the second time this month he’d been out traipsing after Hildy, calling her name as
loudly as he could every minute or so, listening for her voice to come back to him from wherever
she was. The third time now, if you counted the early morning search and this one separately.
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Mostly what snapped back to him was the echo of his own voice, laden with worry and
embarrassment. There weren’t many neighbors, but still most of them were strangers to him, and
the price of giving your dog a human name was that people heard you calling her and thought
you’d lost your child. Or your wife. Even if they knew it was your dog you’d lost, they made
assumptions about what that name must mean to you and whom you must really be looking for,
with what degree of hopeless self-delusion.
Even Dolores might have heard him. He’d managed to avoid exchanging more than three
or four polite words with her in all the years since her affair with his wife had ended. If he saw
her at the grocery store or the post office, as in a small town was bound to happen sometimes, he
smiled tightly and said, “Hi Dolores, how are you?” and she smiled back and said she was fine
and turned away from him. They were strangers to one another, but each of them must have
wondered what the other had learned about them from Matthea. Neither was willing to
acknowledge the degree to which their lives had become entangled. Arnold took long detours,
both on foot and in the car, to avoid the sight of her house. Still, he thought, very likely she had
known Mattie well enough that she could guess why he’d given his dog the name he had, and for
all he knew the growing desperation in his voice as he called that name might have secretly
thrilled her.
He didn’t name his dog after his wife. He named her after Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-
century abbess whom his wife had loved almost as a living person. It embarrassed him later, to
have given the dog that name. He couldn’t say why he had done it. If he meant to bring about
some kind of magical embodiment, it didn’t take. Hildegard the dog would not be a home to
anyone’s ghost. She refused to be anything more or less than her own headstrong self, for which
it turned he was grateful to her. One of many things to be grateful to her for. One day he would
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have to learn to leave her be and let her find her way own way home. She’d been with him more
than four years, and the vet’s best guess was that she was six years old already when he took her
in. Who knew what lost people and things she herself might have been looking for? Or it might
have been only that she could feel the time coming when her body would no longer carry her so
far.
Calling for her, hearing the late-morning silence broken by the awkward lunge of his
voice, he saw a flock of geese heading south across the brightening sky, calling to one another as
they flew. It was as if he heard his own voice, fractured and multiplied, coming back to him from
the bodies of those strangers. He called again, louder than before, just to hear the voices overlap
and combine in the air, human and animal. Neither voice belonged to him, or both or all did.
They meant the same thing—love, fear, the constant need for contact and for reassurance.
Are you there? Are you still there?

76
2

Alone in the little kitchen, Daniel Lepore waited for the strangeness of the night to fade
and the world to become real again. He’d slept probably five hours altogether. Better than
average lately, for him. Some emergency had ripped him from sleep right in the pulp of night.
Four a.m. on a Tuesday. Neither night nor morning. Oblivion time. Threads of dream clung to
him as he rose and went to the window. He’d been looking for something. He’d been walking a
long way through the discarded city, among empty buildings that looked down at him from
unlighted windows. He’d lost his sense of smell, his sense of taste. He was trying to remember
where he’d put them. From his own, real window he watched the sirens storming the boulevard,
pushing the traffic out of their way on a wave of light and sound. One gleaming ladder truck and
then another, another, another. A line of police cars streaming past for whole minutes, the walls
of his neighbors’ buildings pulsing with red and blue light, the avian scream of the sirens
emanating from every surface at once.
By morning, just another fragment of dream. Someone else’s catastrophe. Tomás slept
right through it. He was still sleeping as Daniel drank his coffee and searched his phone for news
of horror and devastation, finding nothing out of the ordinary. Put the phone away, he told
himself. He nearly said it out loud. Too early to get stuck in that ghost world, wandering among
the disembodied, hungry egos of friends and strangers. He was grateful to Tomás for sleeping so
soundly and waking so late. Resentful and envious too, yes, as usual, but still. He needed the half
hour of solitude and silence to anchor himself in the concrete world. His own apartment,
cramped and dim and familiar. The long row of stolid prewar buildings across the street,
hunched under the low ceiling of clouds. The Payless Shoe Source and the Bagel Depot where
77
someone was noisily hoisting the iron gate from the windows, startling a crowd of pigeons so
they burst upward all at once from the ground where they had been milling among paper bags
and cigarette butts, opened their wings at the level of the rooftops and became suddenly
beautiful.
“Morning,” Tomás said, more an observation than a greeting.
“So it is,” Daniel said. He slid the coffee pot across the table toward him without shifting
his gaze from the window. Clinging to his solitude for one more minute. Leave me alone. Take
the hint. But Tomás never took that kind of hint. If you wanted him to leave you alone, you had
to say so explicitly. Some days, it was one of the things Daniel loved most about him.
“Sleep okay?” Tomás said.
“No worse than usual.”
“Babe?”
Daniel glared up at him, eyes shining, inexplicably persecuted. “I’m fine,” he said.
“Really. Just give me some space.”
“Okay,” Tomás said, but he couldn’t do it. “How long have you been up?”
“Not that long. Maybe half an hour.” He didn’t mention the hour after the sirens had
passed, when he’d lain awake watching headlights sweep across the ceiling and listening to the
steady, gentle rhythm of Tomás’s snoring.
“Look,” Tomás said, “We don’t have to go. You could make some excuse. You could say
you got slammed at work—which wouldn’t exactly be a lie, by the way—or, I don’t know, just
point out that it’s going to start snowing soon and nobody is really supposed to be heading out
for an eighty-mile drive right now. Your father would understand.”
“No,” Daniel said. “He would understand, but we still have to go.”
78
How could he explain? Tomás had seen, for days now, how the approach of the visit had
diminished him, though he wouldn’t have expressed it that way. It was the loss of sleep, yes, but
not only that. He was anxious, irritable, prone to hours of moody silence followed by fits of wild
overcompensation. Two days ago, trying to make up for his bad mood the day before, he’d gone
to the store while Tomás was at work, bought saffron and special imported rice and seven kinds
of seafood and spent the next three hours making paella, which Tomás, tired and preoccupied
with the problems of the office, ate without comment.
“Food okay?” Daniel said, passive-aggressively.
“Oh,” Tomás said, realizing. “Oh, yes! It’s magnificent, love. How did you do it?”
But it was too late. Daniel pushed away from the table and left the room, waving his hand
spasmodically beside his ear as if trying to swat away the sound of Tomás’s protesting voice.
Later he emerged, sheepish, full of apology. His embarrassment was so acute he could
hardly sit still. To have been so openly needy, to have allowed his wounded ego to betray him in
that way. Like a child. It was dread that did it. He did dread the visit, as much as he looked
forward to it. Soon they’d be sleeping together in his childhood bedroom. In the presence of his
father and his older sister and the memory of his mother like a living spirit shining forth from
every inanimate thing, he would be transformed. He would revert—not all the time, but often
enough so that anyone paying attention would notice—into his neediest, most awkward and
pitiable thirteen-year-old form. And Tomás, this man whom he loved and admired, whose
reasons for staying with him he already could not fathom, would be there to see it.
He did love Tomás. He hadn’t known for long that he loved him. He hadn’t been looking
for that. He’d met him seven months before, at a party his bosses had thrown at the restaurant.
He’d been drawn to him for the same reasons everyone else was. Because he was young and
79
beautiful and magnetic, more openly thrilled to be there than anyone else would have dared to
be. People drifted into his orbit and spun away again, renewed. Tomás made them remember
why they had come—not to that particular party, to which most of them had come out of social
or professional obligation, feeling anxious and tired and already planning how they would say
hello to the seven or eight people they needed to say hello to and then make an early, unobtrusive
exit—but to the first party they had ever gone to, which had never ended and of which that
particular night was only one small part. Daniel couldn’t believe someone like that wanted to talk
to him. Much less to keep talking to him even after all the professionally-obligated partygoers
had gone home to their children and it was only the die-hards left. They walked back to Daniel’s
apartment together in the changing of the guard, as the sky turned pale and the streets quiet, the
sidewalks empty of anyone but stumbling all-nighters and lycra-clad early-morning exercisers.
The next day they woke late and went walking. It was June then, unseasonably hot, the
city half emptied out already. They walked in a way Daniel hadn’t done in years, since he was a
kid barely out of college, when he used to head out from his rented room on a whim and walk in
no particular direction, descending into the warm, dark interior of the earth to catch the subway
where he found it, getting off at any random stop, following an impulse he could never have
traced to its source but always trusted. The city like an intricately interlocking puzzle you could
put together in endless combinations, so it was always new. They ended up right in the middle of
Central Park just as the heat was draining from the air. There was hardly anyone. They walked
along a wide path toward the lake, under the enfolding canopy of trees. Daniel’s internal map
was so deeply engraved by then that he could tell when they stepped into the interrupted path of
sixty-ninth street, seventieth, seventy-first.
“I haven’t been in this part of the park in years,” Daniel said.
80
He felt ashamed of the words as soon as he’d spoken them—the disavowal they half
intended, the insistence that he, unlike these others, was too smart to be taken in by all this: the
broad green center of everyone’s dream of New York, the steps of the Met, the moneyed hush of
Park Avenue with its penthouse windows gazing down serenely over the tops of all those trees.
There were too many romantic comedies in which the climactic scene took place within sight of
the spot where he was standing. Imitations of life in which everything took on the sheen of
money and aspiration. Nothing could happen here now except in imitation of those imitations.
“Too bad,” Tomás said. “I come here all the time.”
He called the trees by name. There was the black tupelo, Nyssa sylvatica, named for the
water nymph who nursed the infant Dionysus. Maple, white oak. The lone evodia, thin-limbed,
austere in its architecture, towering over the lesser planetrees. He steered them through a grove
of huge maples and pointed to where the leaves were turning brittle and brown in patches, the
branches sagging earthward as if under the weight of those dry leaves.
“The roots are rotting here,” he said. “They water the grass too much. These trees are
over a hundred years old, and we’ll lose them because people can’t decide what they want. You
can have lush, thick grass or you can have old trees, but trying to have both sets you up for
trouble.”
It was something Daniel would never have seen, and now he couldn’t unsee it. Tomás
said it without anger, merely as an observation. There was no distinction between the natural
world and the human one—neither here, where nearly every growing thing had been planted in
painstaking imitation of a nineteenth-century pastoral ideal, nor in the remotest wilderness.
Human beings were nature’s chance to know itself. Only we also had bodies to feed and house,
and there were too many of us, and so much of our knowledge was just hunger by another name.
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Tomás pointed up at the twisting branches that reached over the path, spreading a ceiling of
green a hundred feet above their heads, like the ceiling of a cathedral.
“Elms,” he said. “Some of the last ones left in North America.”
Daniel had never had a name for them. Having no name for them, he had never seen them
at all. Now Tomás told the story of the disease, a fungus that had come across the Atlantic in a
shipment of lumber meant for the Ohio furniture factories and then spread decade by decade,
across the span of the twentieth century, until it had nearly wiped out one of the largest and most
distinctive trees in the North American landscape. In most places, elms were a memory. In the
Midwest there were whole towns that had lost the covering of trees that shaded them just as they
had lost the industries that sustained them.
Years earlier, Tomás had begun a degree in forestry that he had never finished. It turned
out he didn’t like being alone in the woods, and he didn’t like thinking about anything in
isolation from the whole complicated world of which it formed a part. But he had this way of
seeing. Listening to him talk, Daniel felt his world coming into focus. Had he ever seen a tree
before? He had seen trees, all the same, an undifferentiated mass of greenery, harboring bugs,
signifying “nature.” How much else had he failed to notice?
Still, about some things Tomás could be maddeningly oblivious.
“You didn’t hear the sirens last night?” Daniel said.
“No,” Tomás said. “What sirens?” He was already moving efficiently around the
apartment, opening drawers, gathering all the easily forgotten things they would need to have
with them: the chargers for their phones and laptops, toothbrushes, toothpaste. He spent multiple
minutes pouring shampoo and conditioner into reusable mini-bottles he would rinse out and put
away again at the end of their trip.
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“You know,” Daniel said, “We’re only staying for two nights. I’m sure there’s shampoo
at my dad’s house.”
“I don’t know what kind he uses. What sirens?”
“Something happened last night,” Daniel said. “Something bad. I’ve been trying to find
out what it was, but I can’t find anything online.” He could hear the edge of panic in his voice,
betraying him. “How could you not have heard it? There were like a half-dozen fire trucks,
police cars, ambulances. They went right up our street, right under our windows.”
“It’s a city,” Tomás said. “Isn’t there always something bad happening somewhere?”
And good things too, yes, fine, babies being born and people falling in love, always at the
same instant that someone else was tilting his body into the pull of gravity and falling backward
from some high place into the empty air. But this was different. He couldn’t have said how.
Maybe only because he’d seen the penumbra of the disaster with his own eyes. Maybe because
he’d been sleeping and without warning had opened his eyes into the world of the disaster. It
touched everything, whatever it was. Nothing was the same now as it had been before whatever
happened had happened, and to refuse to see that, as Tomás was now doing, seemed willfully
obtuse. It soured him. What a gift it must be, he almost said out loud, to sleep so soundly, to be
so undisturbed
___

It was past noon by the time they got on the road, but still they had plenty of time. The
parkway was as free of traffic as Daniel had ever seen it. One of the great things about a made-up
holiday: no need to compete with everyone else for the resources the day demanded. Not that this
one demanded much—an almond cake he’d picked up at the bakery in Long Island City the night
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before, and beyond that nothing more or less than his presence in Connecticut, which meant a
working car and a road to drive on. Two things he hadn’t always had, and yet one way or another
he’d always managed to get there.
Tomás drove—too fast, as usual—though it was Daniel’s car. It was easier for Daniel just
then to trust his life in someone else’s hands than in his own. Certainly in Tomás’s hands, which
rested lightly on the wheel as his gaze rested lightly on the road ahead, always scanning for any
surprise that might come up and yet not tense or nervous in the slightest. It was at the core of his
personality—that deep, abiding attention to the task at hand. It was like a superpower. He could
hold up his end of a conversation about whatever you might want to talk about while weaving
through traffic or running through a crowd to catch a bus. Even an argument. He’d look right at
you and speak with total control and consideration, saying exactly what he meant to say, and all
that time nothing would distract him from the physical space his body moved through.
It fell to Daniel to be nervous. He listened to the engine and watched the gauges as if
scanning his own body for signs of illness. He’d filled the tank the night before. He’d checked
the oil and the coolant and the tires. Now he watched the temperature gauge, which rested
imperturbably right in the middle of its range but at any moment might start creeping upward.
The car was a Volvo 240 that had rolled off the assembly line in Gothenburg the same year
Daniel had started kindergarten. He’d had it so long it was like an extension of himself, and he
forgave its shortcomings and worried over its hidden problems as if they were his own. Once,
years earlier, the radiator had cracked on a desolate stretch of the Taconic in winter—a sudden,
catastrophic failure that had left a permanent mark in his psyche to match the permanent damage
that rush of uncontrolled heat had likely done to his engine.
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The car was a feedback loop. He worried about what might be invisibly wrong with it,
which made him worry about what might be invisibly wrong with everything else in his life,
which made him worry even more about the car.
What did he really know about Tomás? The problem with an unflappable demeanor was
that you could never be sure whether someone like that was really unflappable or merely
repressed. Or merely performing calm for your benefit, because you yourself were such a
basketcase.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“I don’t think I ever even asked you if you wanted to come on this trip. I just told you the
dates and said ‘We’re going.’”
“I’m pretty sure you did ask,” Tomás said.
“Not really though,” Daniel said. “You know what I mean.” He meant that if he had
asked, it hadn’t really been a question. He hadn’t given Tomás a way out, and so he was trying to
give him one now, when it was too late and could only lead to bitterness. Which was just like
him. Even worse to be excused so casually. How could he apologize if the person he’d wronged
wouldn’t even admit that he’d wronged him?
“Daniel, it’s fine,” Tomás said. “I want to meet your family.”
“Please,” Daniel said before he could stop himself. “Does anyone ever really want to
meet anyone else’s family?”
“Okay,” Tomás said. “I guess I’ll keep that in mind, for future reference.”
“No,” Daniel said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just…”
“I know.”
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“They’re people you have to get along with for no good reason. I’m not sure I’d want to
meet my own family, if they weren’t mine.”
His father lived little more than an hour away, in the same house Daniel had grown up in,
and he was in the city at least twice a week, and still six months or more had passed since the last
time they’d seen each other. His father sent text messages—“In the city all day tomorrow.
Lunch?”—and Daniel replied tersely “Busy, sorry. Next time” or waited hours, until it was far
too late, and said, “Damn, just saw this now. Sorry. Next time?”
He couldn’t explain why. He sent those replies and felt a brief stab of guilt, followed by a
wave of huge relief. The day was his—sunlit, labyrinthine, stretching on illimitably into the
morning of the next day if he so desired. Anything could happen, and whatever happened he
would meet it as his true self, the Daniel of that particular day. No one would expect him to
reprise his role as the Daniel of twenty years ago. The truth was that he loved to get those texts
from his father. Even the guilt was delicious. The day became a gift he had given himself, and he
went around with his senses keen to take in everything, his belief in newness and possibility
restored. Whereas if he had agreed to have lunch with his father, even if it had only been an hour,
his day would have become divided between the hours spent dreading the encounter and the
hours spent painfully reliving it, remembering all the little ways in which his father had failed to
know him and all the ways in which he had betrayed himself, trying to please his father. It wasn’t
even his father’s fault. It was family. It was the sheer fact of having to see these people who had
known you when you were five years old, before whom your present self—meticulously
constructed over many years from materials acquired at great cost—could seem like the thinnest
layer of sand loosely strewn by wind over the ancient bedrock.
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“We should be like seahorses,” he said. “Lovingly tended until we’re old enough not to
get eaten by the first big fish that comes along, then sent off never to think of that time again.”
“Okay,” Tomás said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about but I’m sure it will be
fine.”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “Sorry. It will be fine.”
“Are they mean?”
“Who?”
“Your father and your sister.”
“And my sister’s husband and their children, who are adorable,” Daniel reminded him.
“Actually, I only know the older one. Sammy. I haven’t met the baby yet. Are they mean is not
really a fair question. I mean, who isn’t? I wouldn’t say any of them are meaner than most
people. I wouldn’t say meanness is a notable trait among them.”
“Will they hate me for being your boyfriend and not your girlfriend?”
“Tomás,” Daniel said.
“What?” Tomás said. “Is that not a reasonable question?”
“It’s just that I’ve already told you they’re not like that.”
“Okay,” Tomás said. “But in my experience lots of people who say they’re not like that
turn out to be really, really like that.”
“Fair,” Daniel said. “But they’re not.”
“How do they feel about miscegenation?”
“Well,” Daniel said, “it’s not like we’re going to procreate.”
“That’s funny?”
“No,” Daniel said. “No, I guess it’s not. Sorry.”
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“Okay,” Tomás said. “They’re not racists, they’re not homophobes, they’re not
uncommonly mean, so what are you worried about?”
Where to begin? The parkway ribboned ahead over low hills until it disappeared into the
mouth of a tunnel, beneath a road whose name Daniel did not know and would never learn.
They’d passed from the Hutchinson River Parkway to the Merritt. They’d come that far already.
No one wanted to drive far from home into the advance of a snowstorm, and so for now their
progress through the ancient commuter corridor was as unencumbered as in a dream. Though
driving the Merritt always felt dreamlike—returning to the scene of his childhood along a
passage that was as much a groove worn into the depths of his brain as it was a part of the actual
world. It felt ancient too, with its narrow lanes and huge trees, its needlessly beautiful art deco
bridges passing over them one after another, no two the same. No one would build something
like that now. As late in the long day of modernity as it surely was, the scale of time had become
dizzyingly compressed. From 1940 to now, an aeon. The Merritt Parkway was one of the
crowning achievements of a civilization that had nothing to do with the anxious and distracted
world in which he lived.
___

What are you worried about? Sarah used to ask him that, when they were kids. She was
the only person he’d ever heard ask that question with genuine interest—not to dismiss your
worry but to discover it. She was four years older, a difference that meant nothing now except
the memory of what it had once meant. When he was seven or eight she was practically an adult
in his mind. What must she have made of him then, watching his hands twitch at his sides like
timid birds as he silently touched the tips of his fingers together one by one in a precise order,
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again and again, trying to ward off some unspecifiable disaster? He was worse in winter, when
the days were shorter. She sat beside him on the couch as his body shook, as he gulped air into
his lungs like a fish on the deck of a boat, thinking no one noticed. Not noticing it himself, half
the time. “What are you worried about?” she said, and to the extent that he could answer the
question, he did answer it. Most of his worries were nonsensical back then. He was worried
about contracting some hideous disease he’d read about somewhere, something that existed only
in pockets of West Africa or in the fifteenth century. He was worried about alien abductions,
serial killers stalking the woods, the rapture. Spoken aloud and patiently listened to, his worries
dissipated. The effect never lasted long, but it was the best medicine he had.
No one could say why he was like that in those days. He had theories now, but they were
too obvious, too deterministic to be wholly plausible. Too easy to blame our parents for whatever
is wrong with us as children. In a fairy tale his constant, shattering anxiety would have been
simply one among an array of possible curses, part of the invisible web of magic in which all
children were snared at birth. Parents in those stories were bystanders. If they had the necessary
connections, they could beg various powerful actors to intercede on your behalf. If they had
nothing to give you, they could leave you in the woods to starve. Either way, the outcome was
mostly out of their hands. Only the modern world, stripped of magic, assigned all invisible
causes to mom and dad.
Now it was Sarah whose life was consumed with worry. Though worry wasn’t the right
word for it, really. Worry implied a state of hypervigilance against impending danger. Which
was what came naturally to Daniel—a mere habit of his brain, vestigial, left over from childhood
or from some even deeper prehistory—the persistent sense that his car’s engine was always
about to seize, that his beloved was always forming irrevocable, unspoken judgments against
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him, that there was a mutiny afoot among the cells of his liver or his pancreas, asymptomatic for
now but ready at any moment to announce itself. Even in its most extreme forms it was
essentially reactionary, a fear of losing the good life he had, whereas for Sarah the problem was
that everything had already been lost. The disaster was already underway. Every day brought
fresh news of its infinitely varied manifestations—droughts, floods, a million acres of old growth
forest on fire in California, masses of people already on the move, fleeing ancestral lands that
could no longer support them. Like a black hole, the disaster bent time toward its center. There
was no end to its unfolding, no limit to its reach. Everything that happened in the future would
belong to it. Meanwhile, seen from the vantage point of the disaster, the whole span of post-
Enlightenment history became nothing but a chain of interlocking mistakes—humanity’s long,
blindfolded walk to the slaughterhouse.
It started weeks after Sammy was born. She called Daniel on the phone one night, late,
waking him from the depths of sleep.
“I’ve made a mistake,” she said. Her voice sounded flat, like the voice of an android in a
bad movie. Alarm thrummed electrically in the silence left behind when she stopped speaking.
“Okay,” Daniel said, putting aside his objections to the late-night call. “What kind of
mistake? What do you mean?”
“I never should have had a child.”
He tried to talk her around to a different conclusion, saying all the usual things about
what a beautiful baby Sammy was, how happy and healthy she seemed, how lucky to have such
devoted parents and so on. He felt the feebleness of his arguments. In a panic, he dug in his
pockets for any magic coin that might break the spell, but the pennies he threw at her were worse
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than worthless. She had already considered the evidence and rendered against herself a judgment
that could not now be revoked. Her certainty was monumental.
“Think, Daniel,” she said. “What will the world be like by the time she’s twenty-five?
The other day Jeff and I were talking about what college she would go to.” She made a wounded
little noise in her throat. “College! Can you imagine?”
They stayed on the phone for over an hour. Mostly they sat in silence, listening to the
sound of one another’s breath crackling over the line. It was something they used to do, twenty
years earlier almost, when Sarah was away at Berkley and Daniel was still at home. It unnerved
their parents. Hurt their feelings too, most likely, since what they got was a perfunctory fifteen-
minute call every Sunday, whereas Daniel got these multi-hour sessions in which he and Sarah
watched a movie together or just went about their separate lives while holding their phones
against one ear, speaking only briefly and at long intervals, saying nothing much.
“Is that Sarah?” their mother would say. “Hang up if you don’t have anything to talk
about.”
But the whole point was that they didn’t need to have anything to talk about. Who else
but a sibling could you have that with? It was exactly what they’d meant to each other through
all those years growing up in the same house—someone with whom you could be almost but not
exactly alone. After a while, as both their lives became fuller and more complicated, and they
drifted farther from the uterine closeness of childhood, in which they’d known each other by
instinct, the calls became less frequent, shorter and more normal. They talked when they had
something to talk about. The sudden return to this lost mode of communication thrilled and
frightened Daniel.
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There was nothing he could say. He was alone in his apartment, holding onto the fragile
thread that tied him to his sister, who sat silently in her own room a hundred miles away. The
street three floors below his window was nearly silent at this hour. A single car passed slowly, its
headlights sweeping the walls.
It wasn’t that Sarah was looking at the problem in the wrong way. It was that she had
looked at the problem at all—something most people’s self-protective instincts prevented them
from ever doing. The presence of the baby had thrown off her equilibrium. Some sleepless night,
between the 1 am feeding and the 3 am, she had gone down the rabbit hole. She had learned
everything, and having learned it, she couldn’t unlearn it.
When her twelve-week maternity leave was up, she didn’t go back to work. How could
she return to that arena of pointless competition—jockeying humiliatingly for promotion to
what? Assistant VP of burying your head in the sand? Second mate on the Titanic? They didn’t
really need the money her job brought in. Jeff’s work as a corporate lawyer was more than
enough to support and damn them all. Cut loose from the civilizing demands of the workplace,
she was free to neglect herself entirely. She cared for the baby to the exclusion of all else. Jeff
called him up finally, asked him to come over.
“Look, man,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t reach her. Maybe you can.”
It was a two-and-half hour drive from his apartment in Queens to their house in the
suburbs of Philadelphia. He arrived while Jeff was at work. He found her tranced out on the
couch, unwashed, dressed in clothes so wrinkled and stained she might have been wearing them
for weeks. The baby, six months old then, lay splayed out and faintly snoring across her chest.
“Look at her,” Sarah said. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?”
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And truthfully he hadn’t. He understood completely the impulse to burrow down into the
child’s wordless life and stay there forever, in the dim subterranean rooms with their warm,
mammalian smell, responding to no questions and no demands that couldn’t be expressed in the
form of a cry.
He called his boss and said there was a family emergency and he wouldn’t be back for at
least a week. The boss made no promises that his job would still be there, but it didn’t matter. He
was young then and had a crappy, unremunerative job, and he could find another one just as
good in a day of searching. Anxious as he was by nature, he’d made sure he always had enough
money in the bank to pay the rent through at least two workless months. In the end he stayed at
his sister’s house for nearly a month, sleeping on the couch at first and later in the child’s room,
on a folding mat he’d set up next to the crib. He didn’t try to talk his sister into becoming her old
self again. He understood that she would have to become someone else now and that this ascetic
period, in which she almost never spoke, in which she shoved dry triscuits mindlessly into her
mouth all day instead of eating meals, in which she had to be begged to take a shower once every
three days, was part of the process. He mostly stayed close to her, adopted her custom of silence,
cared for the baby when she would let him.
Three weeks after he’d arrived, the baby began to speak. “Mama,” she said. Then she
began to say it all day long, in lieu of crying, more a habit of the body than a word.
“Mamamamamama.”
Sarah looked up one day from the couch where she was nursing and saw Daniel passing
through the room with a basket of laundry.
“I’m going to have to learn to live with the idea of the future, aren’t I?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Eventually. That’s all it is—an idea.”
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“You should go home,” she said. “Get your job back.”
When she did begin to emerge, it was in the manner of Saul, struck blind on the road to
Damascus. Years earlier, when she was still a kid more or less, she had marched and carried
signs for a ban on fossil fuel exploration, a ban on fracking, a halt to the logging of various old
growth forests. This was not that. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been serious then, that her conviction
had been mere performance, but back then she had believed something could be done. The real
crisis, whatever it would mean, was years off and could still be averted if enough people
demanded change, which surely they would. Who would consent to the end of the world? It
made it easier for her to move on, develop other interests, relegate the apocalypse eventually to a
little room in the back of her mind, where she could live with it, as everyone had to. Other young
people were coming along behind her and would pick up the signs and take her place in the line
of marchers.
Now that bedrock, survival-level faith—other people will do what needs to be done—had
abandoned her. She saw that she had failed. She had turned away from the crisis at a time when
massive, collective effort might still have been enough to stop it. She had bowed to pressure and
turned instead to the cultivation of her own petty life—her family, her career. Now it was too
late.
Sammy pointed at everything she saw and demanded to know its name. She learned to
walk. She stumbled and lurched around the house and yard, grasping at whatever she could
reach, calling its name, stuffing it into her mouth, frantic to know the world. Every day, a little
more of the brief part of her life that could be made good was already over.
Sarah switched to cloth diapers, which she washed by hand in the bathroom sink, using
the smallest possible amount of water. She built an outhouse with a composting toilet in the yard,
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which only she used. She made an arrangement with the supermarket half a mile away to come
by an hour after closing every Wednesday and collect the bruised apples and wilting lettuce and
molding loaves of bread they couldn’t sell. Sometimes there was so much that it took her an hour
after she got home to put it all away. Jeff gazed into the fridge, stuffed with hideously rotting
things, and wondered what wrong turn he had made to arrive in this strange country, and how
long he would have to stay. He didn’t help much with the work, but he was tolerant.
“That’s my wife,” he said once when Daniel was over for dinner, watching his sister peel
the slime of decaying leaves away from the core of good lettuce, tossing all the unusable scraps
into the compost bin. “She’s going to save the world all by herself.”
But she wasn’t trying to save the world. Having known her longer than Jeff had, Daniel
could see that without having to ask her. She didn’t think the world could be saved. She took a
certain degree of pleasure in other people’s bafflement at her actions. Mostly she was just trying
to save herself. She had discovered what any number of religious ascetics had discovered before
her—that if you filled the hours with enough self-punishment, you could get across the chasm of
the day without falling in.
___

They hit traffic ten miles into Connecticut, just as they crossed the line dividing Stamford
from New Canaan. Brake lights blinked on a hundred yards ahead, near the crest of a low hill.
Tomás slowed and the cars started to pack in around them. Forty miles an hour. Thirty. When
they reached the top of the rise they saw the line stretched nose to tail all the way to the next
overpass. As far as they could see. Tomás almost drove off the road trying not to slam into the
car suddenly parked in front of them.
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“Fuck,” he said, after they’d both recovered from the adrenaline rush of the near
collision.
“It’s okay,” Daniel said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”
“No, it’s just that I have to pee,” Tomás said. “I should have stopped at the rest area we
passed like five miles ago, but I thought, ‘Nah, no traffic. We’ll be there in half an hour—I can
wait.’”
Daniel laughed and Tomás looked vaguely hurt, like the seriousness of his problem
wasn’t being acknowledged.
“Sorry,” Daniel said. “We can take the next exit if you need to. There should be a
Dunkin’ Donuts or something.”
“We’ll see,” Tomás said. “Depends on how long it takes for this to clear.”
He switched on the radio and started scanning for traffic reports, something Daniel hadn’t
seen anyone do since he was a kid riding in the car with his father. A habit that had been obsolete
for a generation. Where had Tomás learned it?
“You know we have the internet now, right?” he said. “Maps right inside our phones?
Continuously updated with real-time traffic conditions?”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket. Normally it would have been clipped to the
dashboard already, interrupting their conversation with robotically mispronounced commands,
but in this case Daniel knew the way well enough that he hadn’t thought to use it. As soon as he
got the route loaded he saw the thick red line stretching ahead of them to the edge of the map.
They were near the tail of it still, but the tail seemed to be growing. “Hazard ahead,” the machine
voice intoned. “You are still on the fastest route.”
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“I hate that lady,” Tomás said. “She always sounds like she knows something she’s not
telling me. I want some guy in a helicopter seeing everything, relaying it all to us earthbound
schmucks with a sympathetic tone and a bunch of folksy expressions.”
They crept forward thirty, forty feet, then stopped again. People nosed out onto the
shoulder, trying to see ahead. Tomás changed the station every few seconds—static, static, a man
shouting in Spanish about the wrath of God, Nothing Compares To You, Like a Virgin, Eagles at
the twenty yard line, third down, static like wind hurtling unbroken over miles of snow.
“This is like torture for you, isn’t it?” Daniel said.
“I’m fine,” Tomás said. “I just have to pee.”
“No,” Daniel said. “It’s killing you because you can’t control it.”
The sudden reversal of roles was delicious. For Daniel, all worry had disappeared the
moment the car came to a stop. There was nothing for him to do. The jam would last as long as it
lasted. There wasn’t even an exit for three quarters of a mile, a distance that at this rate could
take hours. Whatever happened in the meantime was out of his hands. He luxuriated in the gift of
all that irresponsible time.
Meanwhile Tomás squirmed in his seat, pestered the radio relentlessly, made little
throttled noises of contempt for himself and his fellow man. Impossible to tell how much of that
was his bladder, but not all of it. He wanted to rage. If he had been alone in the car he would
have been pounding the steering wheel and shouting pointless obscenities at no one. He was
holding himself in check because he was aware of Daniel watching him.
It was an aspect of his personality that Daniel had never seen before and would not have
expected, though now that he saw it he could easily see how it fit with everything else he knew
about the man. Of course, this person who effortlessly mastered every contingency could not
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abide a situation in which mastery was irrelevant, in which there was nothing to do but sit and
wait.
Daniel could have done that with any revelation. Give him ten seconds and his brain,
acting on its own initiative, would weave the new information into its image of the beloved other
so that the seams would never show. He made no effort to hide his amusement—surprised all
over again at the simple, self-renewing mystery of another person.
“Do you always act this way in a traffic jam?”
“Sorry,” Tomás said.
“There’s nothing you can do.Why can’t you just relax and see what happens?”
“I can, eventually,” Tomás said. “If this lasts long enough. It just takes me a while.”
“Why?”
“Hard to explain.”
Daniel gestured broadly at the endless column of blinking taillights, the condensation
rising from all those exhaust pipes, white in the cold air, vanishing among the branches of the
leafless trees. The low-slung belly of the sky growing heavier. “Plenty of time,” the gesture
meant. “Give it a try.”
“It’s just depressing, I guess,” Tomás said.
“Because you can’t control it.”
“No,” Tomás said. “Well, yes, but not exactly.”
The cars were moving again toward the obscurity of the overpass, docile and slow as
sheep in a field. A woman walked slowly up the median, toward them and then past them, her
hands in the pockets of her long coat and her eyes on the ground like she was looking for
something.
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Tomás shrugged. “You wake up in the morning thinking you’re a person,” he said.
Best he could do. Up to Daniel to fill in the rest, if it mattered to him. Easy enough to
imagine how it was for Tomás. No different really from how it was for him, if he thought about
it. You make your plans, all the little decisions that make sense in the context of your own life.
Filling up the little shampoo bottles because once, ten years ago, you took a trip to an out-of-the-
way place and had to go a week without washing your hair. Leaving at ten in the morning for a
forty-five minute drive even though it will be awkward to arrive at your boyfriend’s father’s
house hours before everyone else does, with nothing to do, because you don’t want to get caught
in the snowstorm. Okay, maybe you don’t really want to go to Connecticut at all. But you’re
doing it for someone you for some reason love. Then something like this happens and you have
to see yourself as these others see you. As you are in the context of their lives. An obstacle. An
object in the way. Exactly what they are to you. Collectively, these hundreds of people were all
causing their own problem, and there was nothing they could do about it. They didn’t have even
the flimsy fiction of a common cause or an inciting event, as in a protest or a riot, for a way to
know each other. Most pitiful of all were the scattered bumper stickers, “My cat is a
communist,” “I’m so gay I can’t even drive straight,” “Don’t believe anything until it has been
officially denied,” which all said the same thing—There’s a unique, irreplaceable personality in
here—exactly what everything else about the scene made clear was irrelevant.
Go a little distance in search of the other and you meet yourself, every time—empathy
always looping back into solipsism. Pushed to explain himself, Tomás had said something
cryptic, something incomplete, and Daniel had drawn the rest from the well of his own
experience.
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He’d been thinking about the apocalypse. How many films and TV shows had he seen in
which the great unraveling begins in just this way, with a traffic jam that goes on too long,
ripening into horror? Everyone leaning out their open windows, trying to see, inching forward
toward the tunnel that blocks their view of what lies beyond. Everyone’s theories limited to the
ordinary—unannounced road work, jackknifed tractor-trailer—right up until the bloody arm hits
the windshield.
Except in real life, zombie apocalypse is the first thing you think of. It took Daniel’s
imagination ten seconds to get there. Primed by television. Interpreting real events according to
the rules of television. Even his mind—his capacity to take in information about the present and
extrapolate the future—stuck in a traffic jam, converging on the same spot as every other isolated
mind on the northbound side of the parkway.
___

A year ago, he’d been in the thick of it still, as had everyone here. The Day of Midge, his
mother’s holiday, and for the first time since her death he’d missed it. He’d left his father alone
in the empty house, with only the dog for company. Not that his father would have wanted it
otherwise. They did an abridged version over Zoom, him and his father and pregnant Sarah and
Jeff and Sammy. Flattened little faces, flattened rooms behind them, flattened voices. He hadn’t
met Tomás yet. He’d been alone almost continuously through all those days. After they said their
goodbyes and passed through the awkward moment in which no one wanted to be the first to
leave the virtual room, he went to the window and watched the lights of the cars passing slowly
up the narrow street and away like a procession of torches. The stage of acute fear had passed
months before. The stage of panicked speculation about the end of days, of waking in deep night
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to the whalesong of distant sirens, pouring a glass of water from the tap and feeling it turn sour
and then salty as blood in his throat. Even fear becomes habitual, ordinary. If the water always
tastes like blood, it doesn’t take long to forget that water isn’t supposed to taste like that. He’d
found he could get used to anything, even the shock of how normal the city looked in May, a
block from the idling morgue trucks. He watched a lot of movies and television. In movies the
apocalypse arrived in the form of some sweeping, cleansing violence, on the other side of which
the lucky and the strong emerged, dreaming of a better world. Television, as always, understood
things better. Television had seasons and seasons to fill, just like the world did. Redemption had
to be deferred indefinitely so the story could continue. The apocalypse meant one loss after
another, each new diminishment of life one more thing to get used to. After a while no one could
say when it had happened, or that it wasn’t still to come.
___

“Why don’t you just go off in the woods to pee?” Daniel said. “I don’t think we’re going
anywhere for a while. I can take over driving for now.”
“Are you crazy?” Tomás said.
“What?” Daniel said. “I’ve seen like three guys do it already.”
“White guys,” Tomás said.
Daniel shrugged his shoulders like what difference does that make? A reflex he was
struggling to unlearn. He knew what Tomás meant: a dark-skinned man emerging from the trees
in the black jacket Tomás was wearing, cutting a path through the snarled traffic to open the
driver’s side door of a random car and beckon the white driver out—surely among the dozens of
people who might witness that scene there would be some who would misread it.
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But it didn’t matter, because then the cars were moving again, the glacial enormity
broken briefly free of whatever had snagged it, all the packed-together fragments of human
debris flowing onward together, and in half a minute they had passed from the pale gray light of
day into the darkness of the tunnel and then stopped again, stuck. No way even to open the door,
nowhere to go.
Though it was hardly a tunnel. As soon as they’d entered Daniel had seen the light slicing
in from the other side, still three-fourths occluded by the angle of the ground—a shard of
dazzling brightness within which nothing was visible but the ghostly shadows of branches spread
like veins across the sky. Somewhere behind them someone blasted his horn for several seconds,
as if that might help. Then someone else, someone else, the lengths and pitches slightly varied, as
if they were talking to one another.
“Fuck it,” Tomás said. “At least it’s dark in here.”
He grabbed the stainless-steel canteen that was the one provision Daniel had thought to
bring, dumped its contents out the open window, and in a moment Daniel heard rather than saw
his pants unzipping, heard the sound of water rushing with tremendous force into the ringing
cistern.
“What the hell?” he said.
“Sorry,” Tomás said when he was done. “No choice.” He screwed the cap back on the
bottle and set it gently on the floor behind him, something in him too responsible, too considerate
still to dump a liter of fresh urine on the side of the road where everyone else was as trapped as
he was.
“That was my water bottle.”
“I’ll buy you a new one.”
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The frozen river lurched forward again, slower than walking, and the picture on the other
side of the tunnel began to develop. The sliver of sky widened, the branches gaining solidity, the
sky itself dimming as their eyes adjusted. The ground came into view, and the red flames of the
road flares someone had placed in a long line to block the right lane, and the troop of boy scouts
standing in a tight little clot just within the boundary of the flares. A pool of some clear liquid
spread across the road up ahead—water or gasoline. There were pieces of something, big
sheered-off chunks of metal and plastic. One by one, the cars at the front of the line picked their
way through the field of debris to the empty, open road beyond it. Whatever had happened was
still in the earliest stages of its happening. Something Daniel had never experienced before—
arriving at the scene of an emergency ahead of the professionals. When the police and the
paramedics came, their presence would seal the scene off and it would become—for the people
in the cars behind, who would reach this spot fifteen or twenty minutes from now—something
happening in another world, the world of catastrophe that runs alongside the ordinary world but
is not contiguous with it. It would be awful but it wouldn’t touch them. They would know—one
day you slip through the transparent membrane that divides those worlds and find yourself
trapped on the other side, but not today. But for Daniel now there was no membrane. A man who
judging from his clothes must have been the boy scouts’ troop leader was on his knees in the
road, his face obscured by the jostling crowd of boys, his body heaving. Performing CPR, Daniel
realized, and as soon as he understood that much he saw the body lying on the ground beneath
the scout leader, legs clad in some kind of armored leather motorcycling outfit that made them
look like the legs of a fallen superhero, feet bouncing helplessly an inch off the ground with each
heave of the other man’s shoulders.
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The ambulance arrived minutes later. It came from the opposite direction, up the
uncongested Southbound side of the parkway, three police cars fanned out behind it like the
bride’s attendants in some medieval wedding. The distance at first made it look like they were
moving slowly, formally arrayed, as in a procession. Then in seconds they were close enough
that Daniel could hear the engines laboring over the antiphony of the sirens. They parked in the
grass, against the guardrail dividing the northbound lanes from the southbound. Pockets of
frenzied, purposeful activity irrupted everywhere, and instead of watching any of them Daniel
watched the waves of red and blue light washing over the branches of the huge trees and
rendering them alien, unknown to themselves. Or maybe newly known, as if this eerie perfection
of form—leafless and pulsing with the light of emergency—had been latent within them long
before the road had been built around them.
Tomás rolled the window down.
“Why are you doing that?” Daniel said. “It’s cold.”
“Shh,” Tomás said. “I want to hear what they’re saying.”
The police were going around interviewing anyone who’d seen any part of what
happened, but they were still too far away, there was too much noise and it was impossible to
understand anything. A woman was gesturing angrily at the feet of the ruined man, and whatever
she was saying it looked from this distance like his presence offended her, like she was
demanding that the officer remove him at once. The scout leader had been dislodged from his
position at the head of the disaster, and now he stood towering among the throng of his scouts,
looking deflated, while the scouts—twelve-year-old boys who’d maybe just witnessed a man’s
violent death at close range—oscillated between horror and giddy joy, bursting into gales of
laughter, throwing surreptitious little punches at one another’s sides.
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Daniel remembered the sirens that had woken him, streaming beneath his own window at
four in the morning. There was some substantial fragment of his brain that could not be
dissuaded from its belief that these were the same ones and that now, hours later and dozens of
miles away, he had found their destination. His map of the world and its workings, his
understanding of the links between cause and effect, slipped subtly into disarray. Or maybe it
had been that way for months and he was only now realizing. The disaster, the absolute rupture
in the life of this stranger, perhaps the end of his life, had happened on this particular stretch of
the Merritt Parkway at this particular moment. How could it be for any other reason than because
Daniel Lepore would be there? Time and distance bent around the fact of his witnessing. The
sense of his own centrality—to this scene in which he was one of hundreds of anonymous
onlookers, caught in traffic, utterly passive—was dizzying. He turned to look at the line of cars
behind him, and the sight gave him vertigo. The dream he’d been having when the sirens woke
him, and which he’d since forgotten, came back to him. He had been looking for something.
What was it? He walked a long way up a narrow street where there were no intersections, only
banks of houses standing flank to flank on either side, watching him. He opened a door and
stepped into a house that wasn’t his. He walked right past the family who lived there, who sat on
couches and watched him, saying nothing, moving nothing but their heads, which swiveled
slowly on their necks so that their inexpressive eyes were always on him. He rattled the
silverware in the drawers, looking for something. He lit the stove and looked for it in the flames.
He took off his clothes and burned them, looking for it in the smoke. When he went back out into
the street he was naked.
Tomás rolled up the window and turned off the engine. Fifty yards ahead, at the far end
of the debris field, the police had strung yellow tape across the road.
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“Might as well save the gas,” he said. “We won’t be going anywhere for a while.”
“We’ll freeze,” Daniel said.
“We’ll be fine,” Tomás said. “It’s not that cold out.”
But Daniel was always afraid that the car, once turned off, wouldn’t start again.
Especially in the cold, it was a real possibility. He was angry with Tomás for making the
decision—which to him must have felt like simple common sense, nothing that required
deliberation or discussion—without consulting him.
“They could let us through any minute,” he said.
“They won’t, though.”
“How do you know that? How could you possibly know that? What is it like to go
through life always thinking you know things you can’t possibly know?”
The paramedics had placed a stretcher on the ground beside the man, and now with a
brief, tremendous concentration of effort they were lifting his body onto it. Daniel didn’t want to
see any of this and yet he was powerless to stop himself from looking. Another self-betrayal.
Even his eyes had their own perverse will and greedily drank what his mind knew perfectly well
was poison.
“If they just wanted to hold us back for a minute they’d have put some cones out, or
parked one of their cars across the road,” Tomás said. “The tape means we’re going to be here
for a while.”
Already they had slipped back into their familiar roles. Whatever it was that had so
unsettled Tomás minutes earlier—whatever he had meant by, “You wake up in the morning
thinking you’re a person,” he had made his peace with it. A man was dead, or on the verge of
death. A stranger. It was perfectly appropriate that he should relinquish some of his sense of
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agency and personal uniqueness under the circumstances. Perfectly appropriate that he should be
stuck in traffic. It was like a kind of magic, the way Tomás could always tell immediately, and
with finality, which things were about him and which weren’t. It was, Daniel realized, what he’d
always understood the word sanity to mean—a gaze that didn’t always have to involve the ego.
And yet he could hardly think of anyone else he’d ever met who had that gift. Least of all
himself.
The paramedics raised the stretcher on its folding wheels to the level of their chests, and
Daniel saw the body of the man in full now, his leather outfit torn away from his chest, his skin
the color of marble. He was still alive, or they wouldn’t have been rushing the way they were,
they wouldn’t have had that one woman cradling his head with such urgent tenderness.
Tomás made the sign of the cross, touching first his forehead, then his sternum, then his
shoulders one by one. He muttered something in Portuguese, a prayer worn smooth by years of
repetition, from earliest memory. Daniel had seen him do that before in similar circumstances—
never for himself, but whenever he saw someone else suffering, even if it was just on the news.
He was an atheist and couldn’t have believed in the words he was saying, which was maybe why
he said them in Portuguese—for him the language of memory, the language of his family
thousands of miles away, not the language he used in daily life. For two weeks in July he’d
spoken Portuguese every day on the phone with his family in Sao Paolo, where he had an aunt
who was in the hospital with the virus, but he never prayed then. He said almost nothing about it,
and Daniel asked no questions. After two weeks the aunt got better and went home and the daily
phone calls ended.
Tomás only prayed for strangers. It was for his own benefit, he acknowledged when
Daniel first asked him about it, and not for theirs. A seven-story apartment building had caught
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fire in the Bronx, and they were watching on the news as firefighters sprayed useless jets of
water at the inferno and tried to determine whether anyone was inside, though given the size of
the building and the lateness of the hour it seemed impossible that no one was. There was no
God to whom Tomás could appeal on behalf of these hypothetical people, who at any rate, from
his perspective, were hardly less imaginary than God. Absurd to believe that God would decide
whom to burn alive and whom to spare on such a basis, like all the angels and saints were
nothing more than government functionaries tallying signatures on a petition. Sorry, Ms.
Rodriguez, only seven-hundred and twenty-nine Hail Mary’s; I’m afraid the threshold for divine
intervention is a thousand.
“Of course it doesn’t help them,” he said, “whoever they are. It helps me.”
There was a disorientation that came from watching real people suffer and die when you
didn’t know them and couldn’t help them. A feeling of not fully belonging in the world, of not
fully belonging in your own body, whose senses had to take in this horror in such an attenuated
form. Of being less real, because these others are so unreal to you. The ritual touching of the
body at certain fixed points, the speaking aloud of the little snippet of prayer, however quietly,
was a reminder—I’m still here. It’s the same world, theirs and mine. It was like pinching your
arm to reassure yourself that you aren’t dreaming.
“Plus,” he said, “If my mother saw me not do it, she’d think she’d failed in raising me.”
Tomás’s mother had been dead for more than twenty years. Though he’d never said this
to Tomás, Daniel had always thought it was one of the things that drew them together, that
they’d both lost their mothers while they were still relatively young. Truly young in Tomás’s
case. His mother had suffered a massive stroke in the middle of a clear and ordinary November
day, when previously no one had known there was anything wrong with her. She’d hit her head
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on the corner of a glass-topped table on the way down and bled out all over the linoleum, but by
the time Tomás got home from school all the blood and broken glass had been cleaned up so that
there was no sign that anything had happened except that his mother wasn’t home and his uncle
and aunt and cousins—the ones who lived nearby in White Plains and not in Sao Paolo with the
rest of his family—were all sitting around in the living room looking at him like it was their
fault, like they had done him some terrible wrong and needed to apologize. He’d kissed her
goodbye that morning and gone off to school, and while he was gone it was as if she’d opened a
door that had never previously been there and simply stepped out of the world. For years Tomás
had half believed he would find that door one day, and wondered what he would do when he did.
But she wasn’t in the world, this one or any other, and she couldn’t see him. Whatever he
imagined at fifteen, at thirty-one Tomás was certain: the living world, messy and violent, full of
exits, was the only world there was. There was no plane of existence from which his mother
could watch to see that he’d become someone she could be proud of, and yet in his actual
experience of the world she was always watching.
“You can’t shake these things,” Tomás said. “Even if you know they don’t make sense.”
___

Daniel’s own mother had left the world five years ago. The anniversary had passed three
weeks before, though he did nothing to mark it. He let it pass in silence as always, like a shark
passing under the bow of his tiny boat in dark water.
She’d found the door in a hidden place, somewhere far from her home or from anyone’s.
From any human’s home, is a distinction she would have insisted on. In the context of her life, it
shouldn’t have been entirely a surprise. Whenever she was out of contact, traveling for her work,
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Daniel and Sarah had sent one another worried messages, asking when they’d last heard from
her. If their father worried too, he never let them know. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “She knows
what she’s doing.” She died in a backpacker’s shelter in New Hampshire, in the White
Mountains, a place not nearly as remote or forbidding as most of the places she’d been to and
returned uneventfully from in the last twenty years of her life.
For Daniel, five years had not been enough to acquire the layers of memory that would
insulate him from the violence of that rupture. Most of the time he tried not to think about it
directly. He had work to distract him and to keep him tired—a strategy he’d known how to use
since grade school. It takes a certain amount of energy to panic. Even ordinary worry required a
degree of mental focus that he could exhaust and outlast by directing it elsewhere. Hence the
restaurant where he worked as a waiter. Head waiter now, practically the face of the institution.
It was an institution—tiny and venerable though it had been around only a few years, in what had
once been a garden apartment, half sunk underground on a quiet street in the West Village. He
had no higher ambitions. The job required his total investment in the transcendent fiction of fine
dining—he had to become his warmest, most engaging public self and stay that way for hours,
all the space in his mind occupied by the present and the immediate future. The place was open
late, and there was work to do after closing, getting ready for the next day, and then after that he
was always invited to parties, so that without even having to resort to dangerous drugs he could
fall into bed at four in the morning, his mind a perfect blank.
His mother was not in heaven watching over him. Not even in some vestigial remnant of
his childhood mind could he see her that way. She was in that cabin—really a shed—snowed-in
and starving, waiting for him to find her.
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She used to play a game with him when he was very small, lying beside him in his bed,
waiting for him to fall asleep.
“What if I hid among the crowd in a market in Timbuktu?” she said.
“I would find you.”
“What if became an emperor penguin in a penguin colony in Antarctica?”
“I would find you.”
“How? That’s like thirty thousand penguins,” she said, reciting a fact from one of his
books, “and they all look exactly the same. And I can’t even talk—I only speak penguin.”
“I’d still find you,” he said, laughing.
“What if I shrank myself down to the size of a flea and hid inside your ear?”
“I’d still find you.”
When the first of the spring hikers found her body, it had been almost two months since
her family had heard from her. Still, it wasn’t the first time. They’d been only a little worried—
or they’d all hidden the intensity of their worry from one another, the way they’d always done.
She’d left a note on the outside of the door—Please do not open. Call search and rescue. So it
was the search and rescue people who had to see the body. She’d dated the note, and they
assumed she must have died soon after that date, three weeks and two days before they found
her. It wouldn’t have taken more than one person and a snowmobile to save her, they said, if
anyone had known where she was. After he learned what had happened, Daniel had to revise his
understanding of all those previous days, which had been defined by uncertainty and worry and
could then, in retrospect, be filled in with certainty: the days in which she had been already gone,
and the days in which he could have found her and brought her home but didn’t.

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3

Hildy hears the sound shearing off the rocks above her head, and distorted as it is by the
terrain and the distance she recognizes her own name, her master’s voice.
She can ignore it a while longer. This far from home, that name hardly applies to her.
With him she is Hildy. Out here she is something else, something nameless—reader of signals he
can’t read, signals that he, poor creature, is too dumb even to know how to look for. The air
smells of the coming snow. Delicious. Also the ice forming in thin, brittle sheets at the edges of
the stream where the water slows, held back by rocks and fallen branches. Bird musk, musk of
the badger, whom she knows enough to avoid. Some vole or shrew in its den beneath the
hardened ground, just there. By her foot.
A whole family of them, mother and children in their warm small rooms, the air around
them damp with their wet breath.
The ground is soft enough still. She can still nose through and gobble them all, blood fur
and bone.
She does.
She smells the sharp metallic smell of the cold stone.
Earth and dry leaves, pine bark, sap.
It’s good sometimes to forget that she is Hildy—to forget Hildy’s patient, friendly ways,
tail wagging, nose pushing up under the hand for a pat. Good girl. Kind to children, careful.
Never makes a mess, stays out of trouble.
Good to forget.
Good to remember.
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Geese call to one another across the thin, clear pane of the sky.
Delicious.
The sky has hidden depths just as a pond does. There is the surface one sees and what
skims or drifts across it—birds, clouds, the moon and stars at night. Then there are the depths
beyond, invisible. What lives there?

113
4

Arnold could have told Wilma Lewis how it was when Mattie made that photograph of
the moon. Not how she made it, which was an alchemy he would never try to describe, but what
was happening then, what that day and its night were like.
They were in New Hampshire, borrowing a friend’s unoccupied summer house, having
left the Connecticut house behind for a week to retreat even further into rural isolation. Sarah and
Daniel were there, though at the time when the picture was made Sarah had gone out, having
made some townie friends at the lake the day before. She was seventeen, two weeks away from
the already booked flight that would take her to college and freedom in California. She’d spent
the day picking strawberries with her mother in a wide golden field full of tourists, paying more
for the privilege of doing their own labor than they would have paid for the fruit if someone else
had picked it.
“Can you stop being a critic for five minutes?” Mattie said to him back in the kitchen,
late in the afternoon, when he mentioned the economic irony of the strawberry situation. She
placed a bowl of freshly rinsed berries on the table before him, and as soon as he tasted one he
understood. He could imagine how it must have been, his wife and his daughter, almost a grown
woman then, walking carefully over the sun-hardened soil, reaching deep into the tangled shade
of the vines to extract the berries and lay them, huge and heavy with juice, in the wicker baskets
they carried. Their bare arms and shoulders warm in the late-morning sun, the sky and the distant
mountains enfolding them. He wished he’d been there, but he recognized that what was
transpiring between mother and daughter in those few days was something inviolable, secret
even to them, and he’d wanted to give them space.
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All day Sarah clung to her mother’s shadow like a toddler, needy, oblivious of herself.
“Mom,” she said. “Remember Madrid?”
“Yes.”
“Remember Shanghai, and that Greek man who wanted to buy your latest picture for like
twice what the gallery was asking, but only if you would deliver it to his hotel room in person?”
“And alone,” Mattie said, not looking up from the counter where she was slicing
strawberries. “He actually said that part out loud. Why remember things like that? I’d rather not.”
“He was in love with you,” Sarah said.
“How could he be? He’d never met me.”
“He fell in love with you through the medium of your work. It’s a beautiful story.” Half
joking. Speaking in a sarcastic tone that only partially hid the fear and confusion she must have
felt then, the dizzy mixture of disgust and wonder: Was it really possible to make art that,
without including any legible trace of yourself at all, would make strangers love you? Would
make a man want to spend two hundred thousand dollars to get close to you?
“No,” Mattie said. “He was in love with himself and what he thought he could buy.”
Sarah was driving in wedges wherever she could with these reminiscences, trying to draw
her mother into confidences, trotting out whatever memories she could think of that didn’t
include her father or her brother. Maybe hoping that Arnold would feel alienated by the slight
whiff of romantic intrigue—which was not romantic or intriguing at all despite how a fifteen-
year-old Sarah may have seen it—and retreat from the conversation into moody silence. Hoping
that Daniel, who had been too young to go on either of those trips, would be jealous. Arnold kept
mostly silent anyway. His daughter had only these few poor tools to get what she needed from
her mother before it was too late.
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And then at other times she flashed into sudden rages. Mattie hadn’t wanted her going off
on her own to hang out with those local kids, and she’d said so, carefully, in her hedging way,
and that had been enough.
“You just don’t like them because they’re from here!” Sarah shouted. “Why did you even
want to come to a place like this if you hate the people who live here? You’re such hypocrites,
you and Dad and all your friends!”
“I like them fine,” Mattie said calmly, “but I don’t know them. Neither do you.”
Mattie’s unshakeable calm was its own weapon, though she wouldn’t have thought of it
that way. She wasn’t trying to wound anyone. She only wanted to preserve her own peace. She
was almost never angry with her children, and if she was she almost never let them see it. She
might have thought she was offering them stability, trustworthiness, being always the same with
them no matter what was happening. A parent’s hurt feelings shouldn’t be her children’s
problem, she said. Mostly she was right. But then she was gone sometimes for weeks at a stretch,
and even when she was home she was absorbed in work and the obligations of work—locked
away in her darkroom all day, not to be disturbed, or in her office responding the endless stream
of emails inviting her to speak at some event or to be interviewed for some magazine—and Sarah
must sometimes have felt that if she couldn’t reach her mother even with insults, how could she
reach her?
The town kids came up the driveway, a boy and two girls in an ancient 4-Runner, just
before seven. Sarah pressed her cheek against her mother’s shoulder and held her hand for a long
moment before she pulled away and ran for the car. The sun had just gone down behind rim of
the mountains, and the sky was cooling, heat and color draining from the air like water from a
basin. The sound of crickets rose from all directions, inescapable the moment you noticed it.
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There were more of them, probably, within the radius of Arnold’s hearing than there were human
beings in a hundred miles.
After they’d left, Mattie brought a jug of chilled Gallo Chablis and two plastic cups out to
the deck where Arnold was sitting. “In a few weeks she’ll be spending all her time with people
we don’t know,” she said. “I guess we might as well get used to it.”
“Right,” Arnold said. “This is like practice. Nothing bad can happen if it’s just practice,
right?”
“I think I’m scared to go home,” she said, laughing.
“Sure,” Arnold said. “I know what you mean.”
There was the part of what she meant that he could admit to knowing—Sarah would
disappear again into her busy life, the packed circuit of friends she had to see before leaving, and
then in no time at all she would be gone, not to return until Christmas. On top of which Mattie
had a new collection of photographs from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic set to debut at her
gallery in the city the week after Sarah’s departure. Under the circumstances, the always
exhausting metamorphosis into her public self would be more arduous than ever.
And then there was the part he couldn’t acknowledge—the fear he felt and could only
guess she shared. In a few years, Daniel would go too. How would it be between them then,
without the needs of children to distract them from each other? More than twenty years, by the
time Daniel moved out. Report cards, music lessons, the children’s complicated interior lives
always bursting unintelligibly into the open, growing like a lattice of vines over everything. For
Arnold it felt suddenly as if all that life had happened to someone else. He watched his wife
leaning against the railing, the thin, even light smoothing the lines of her face until she looked
like the hazy, ageless impression of herself that lived in his memory when he wasn’t looking at
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her. Weren’t they still the same two people who had lived together all those years ago? He could
hardly remember all that intervening time now. What was real was the apartment on 2
nd
Avenue,
writing alone at his desk all morning and then waiting all afternoon to watch her walking home
to him, their dinner—a baguette and a wedge of soft cheese from the corner grocery—swinging
in a canvas tote from her elbow. From the bedroom window he could see her coming from
blocks away—the long black thrift-store coat she wore in all seasons back then, the angular force
of her stride, as if at any moment the strangers she was passing might try to slow her down,
demanding her time and attention, which she would not give. They made love in the middle of
the day, sunlight streaming in through the west-facing windows, like it was a secret between
them—other people are still at their jobs and look what pleasure we can have, unbeknownst to
them. Then they ate the baguette still naked and sweating, tearing the bread with their hands.
Sentimentally he longed to take himself back to that apartment, to find her there and say,
“Meet me in twenty years and we can carry on exactly as we are now.” But the woman who lived
there wouldn’t recognize this version of him and wouldn’t like him—well-fed, stylishly dressed
old man, carrying the mantle of his authority everywhere. Art-world written all over him.
Tenured professor at some college where he’s barely required to show his face, probably. All his
opinions already long-since in print, needing only to be defended, like a house whose property
value has become the only true core of his politics and his morality. Just the kind of man who,
back then, they both would have considered it their urgent business to take down. And now he
seems to believe himself entitled to the rest of her life for some reason. What a nightmare.
She hadn’t changed in any fundamental way in all that time, where he had lost himself
entirely. It was a difference of temperament, a difference in the kind of work they did. Success
had made her more sure of herself, but it hadn’t softened her. She looked the same as she had
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then, only her dark brown hair had turned mostly gray over the last—what was it? Two, three
years? She had let it go instead of dying it. A dye job meant hours at the salon, subjecting herself
to chemical treatments that made her feel like she was the negative someone else was
developing.
“Besides,” she said, “People are finally treating me like an adult. Who knew all I had to
do was wait until I’m over fifty for people to stop talking to me like an undergraduate?”
She had the same wild, dark eyebrows punctuating her expressions, the same long thin
line of a mouth that turned down in the left corner when she was thinking. She had the same
nervous hands, which gestured wildly in the air beside her face when she was speaking and
turned restless and destructive when she wasn’t using them. Lately she had taken up crocheting
just to occupy her hands so she could sit and think without absently picking all the skin off her
lips. She never wore makeup. She made no effort to hide the lines that had developed at the
corners of her eyes and her mouth. It wasn’t that she didn’t notice. It wasn’t that she was
heedless, abstracted from her physical self, as people who didn’t know her might have guessed.
She knew every change far more intimately than he did. Her body was staging its own drama of
transformation, vulnerability and endurance. The least she could do was to give it the bare stage
and the straightforward lighting it seemed to want.
____
Arnold watched his wife push away from the railing to make her way unsteadily down
the few wooden steps into the yard, as if she’d broken into the Chablis some time before she
brought it out to share with him. The moon was full but hidden behind clouds, and her body and
the patch of grass where she stood were bathed in a dim, cold light, just enough so he could
make out the form of her standing twenty feet away, gauging the height of the clouds. The back
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yard was tiny and at night it felt precarious, hemmed in on all sides by forested hills, like the
moat around a sandcastle as the tide is rising. It must have cost Peter constant effort to keep the
woods from overwhelming the house. They were in a residential development, concentric rings
of streets named after wildflowers, little houses built in the clapboard style of old New England
but four or five years ago, with the latest amenities, for the wave of retirees and vacationers
who’d lately begun to arrive in greater and greater numbers. Transient folk, moderns like
himself. Soon they would forget what they’d liked about this place and move on. In a generation
or two, at any rate, human beings would be in retreat everywhere. It would take the woods no
time at all to erase all this.
Peter was an old friend, a poet who, late in life, had become poetry editor of a magazine
with a fairly substantial readership. Hence the second home, however modest, however tucked
away in a tract of buggy woods seven hours’ drive from the city, in a place where less than a
decade before there had been only farmers and farmers’ disaffected children, planning their exits.
Arnold and Mattie had known him as long as they’d known each other. He was one of the first
friends they made together, as a unit, though at the time their unit was newly formed and they
hadn’t known how long it would last. They were at an artist’s retreat just a few miles up the road
from here, and though they had learned that they lived less than three blocks from one another in
the city—a bizarre coincidence—it might still have been one of those things that flare up in
cloistered places, far from one’s daily life, and then burn away as one re-enters the ordinary
atmosphere.
It was summer then too. Arnold was trying to write a memoir, struggling with the
realization that he could not render his own life—endlessly interesting to himself—in a way that
would interest anyone else. He didn’t show her any of what he was working on. Not for the first
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time he felt envious of the ease with which visual artists enter the world in the form of their
work. Asking someone to read something you’ve written is imposing a chore on them. And then
there’s always the question of what you’re supposed to do with yourself in the time it takes them
to read it. Meanwhile the prints of Mattie’s photographs were just there, lined up along the walls
of her studio, speaking for her. The work she did then was nothing like the physically demanding
work she began to do years later, the work that would eventually become her public identity.
Back then she worked mostly in interiors, producing vividly colored images of ordinary
objects—an ash tray, a half-finished glass of orange juice with a dull smudge of lipstick on the
rim. The way she framed these objects slipped them somehow from the net of language in which
the mind normally held them. You knew what common object you were seeing but for an instant,
transfixed, you lost your ability to name it.
They went walking together near the end of every day, after they’d finished working, she
in triumphant exhaustion and he in a cloud of self-reproach. He couldn’t imagine what she liked
about him. Swarms of blackflies hung like clouds of smoke over the lake every evening. At night
there were lightning storms, and in the daytime they saw the bald granite peaks high above them,
and the cloudless sky, and forest covering all the land below those peaks, whole and unbroken as
the skin of some single creature breathing in the summer air.
There had been a blight among the poplars the year before, and the skeletons of the dead
trees, still standing, made holes in the canopy where the sunlight fell in milky shafts to the forest
floor.
They hiked in the woods every day. They climbed to the peak of Mount Monadnock, as
Emerson and Thoreau once did. They ate peanut butter sandwiches on a small granite dome
called “Emerson’s Seat.”
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At the used bookstore in town she bought a paperback collection of Emerson’s essays and
carried it with her everywhere, though whatever she found in its pages she kept to herself. She
had plenty of time to read on their hikes as she waited for him. She was much stronger than he
was. She kept disappearing into the green up ahead and then calling back to him, concerned.
She wasn’t making fun of him. She would save that for later, when they were both back
in the car and safe.
“Arnold?” she called.
“Here,” he called back, as loudly as he could, as if his voice was a weight he had to hurl
up the slope to her.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
Again and again like that, a ladder of call and response that led them all the way to the
top of the mountain.
___

Awkwardly, he hauled himself up from the too-low chair where he’d been reclining, the
plastic cup of wine still clutched in his right hand, and walked to the top of the steps. The lawn,
with its dark fringe of trees and its silvery light, might have been a stage or an altar. She was
waiting for him to join her there. Why had she wanted to come here? It had been Peter’s
suggestion, but she had jumped at it. A chance to return to the scene where they first met, to
recover something of who they were to each other then. Whatever he’d been worried about, she
might have been wondering the same of him—would he be there, waiting for her after all this
time? Had it been only the children that had held them together? It hadn’t. He would. He wanted
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to show her that he would, and so he gathered his courage—not knowing why he suddenly
needed courage—and walked softly in his bare feet across the distance that separated them. He
took her hand in his and she flinched. She hadn’t seen or heard him coming, absorbed as she was
in looking at the sky.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Instead of answering he stared dreamily into her eyes, aiming for an expression of
romantic ardor and deep compassion that in any case she probably couldn’t see at all in the dark.
“Can you go check on Daniel?” she said. “I want to try to photograph this.”
He couldn’t imagine what she would photograph or how, but he knew enough not to
second-guess her.
___

Daniel was upstairs with a headache and a slight fever, which would turn out to be a flu
that would pass from one member of the family to another for weeks, nearly causing Sarah to
miss her flight to San Francisco. At the moment, though, he was trying to guess how many
mosquitoes had bitten him over the past week in order to estimate the chance that he’d contracted
encephalitis.
“How’s it going?” Arnold said, knocking on the frame of his open door. “Need
anything?”
Daniel looked up from the bed where he was reading, his eyes for an instant exactly the
eyes of his seven or eight-year-old self, abject and beseeching. He used to come into his parents’
room late at night, driven by panic, having already lain awake for hours building towering walls
of logic around himself, proving that he was doomed, that they were all doomed. By then he’d
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been seeing a therapist for a while who’d taught him some methods for interrogating his fears,
for considering the odds against whatever doomsday scenario had gripped his imagination. How
many devastating wildfires have you heard of in Connecticut? Do you know anyone who’s ever
lost a loved one to the bubonic plague? But his mind was infinitely more skilled at refuting those
sensible arguments than it was at constructing them, and his efforts to talk himself out of his fear
left him more afraid than ever. His parents always spoke to him kindly at first, full of empathy
for the helpless terror he clearly felt, even though it made no sense, even though it was
interrupting their sleep. It was usually Arnold who lost patience eventually, and it was usually
only when he snapped at Daniel, mocked him, told him how ridiculous he was being that the
spell broke, and Daniel laughed at himself and went back to sleep.
Now, though, he was almost fifteen and couldn’t beg to be rescued anymore. He closed
his eyes for a second and when he opened them again he was calm, self-contained as always.
“I’m fine, Dad,” he said. “I just want to finish my book.”
Arnold retreated to the master bedroom. Peter’s bedroom—Peter’s books on the shelves
in no particular order, last year’s Scandinavian detective thriller next to a crumbling old
hardcover edition of Anna Karenina next to a non-fiction book on the history of chewing gum,
Peter’s tattered clothes in the closet—probably his second or third-string wardrobe, the stuff he
wore only when he was here, when he gave himself a vacation from caring what he looked like,
the computer where Peter wrote his poems standing sleek and silent as an obelisk on the too-
small desk. It was a schoolboy’s desk—made of soft, old wood, with drawers that sent little
showers of sawdust down onto the floor when you opened them. It looked like it had been in his
family for generations, but less like an antique or an heirloom than a hand-me-down.
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Arnold tried to imagine what it would be like to be living Peter’s life. He had never
married, had never had a child. He had a studio apartment on the Lower East Side, two floors up
from a beloved falafel shop, and a tiny house in the farthest reaches of New England. In New
Hampshire probably no one knew anything about his life in the city. In the city there were the
interlocking circles of people who knew his face, his mordant humor, his party mood, his ear
keenly attuned to the minutest shifts in the culture, guiding his little corner of the magazine as if
by magical intuition. Somewhere out there were the handful of people who actually read his
poems, though mostly he never knew who those people were. He dated a string of aspiring young
writers who expected nothing from him and mostly got nothing, other than that they came to
know his friends, some of whom were aging eminences in the literary world like he was. The
fact that he was gay might have made it easier to keep getting away with this. At any rate no one
had yet publicly accused him of leveraging his little allotment of power for sexual advantage. He
had a slow-growing tumor in his liver, which for the moment didn’t bother him at all but which
his doctor had said would probably kill him in twenty to thirty years, if something else didn’t get
him first. He’d be in his seventies or eighties by then. No worse off than anyone, except that he
had to live all that time with the knowledge of what was coming. Not death in the abstract but
this specific form of it—the almost imaginary illness becoming real at last, the vital organs
shutting down one after another, like rooms going dark in a ship as it sinks. He wouldn’t let it go
that far. He had all his arrangements made. He knew which friend would help him with the
suicide drugs when the time came—an old friend but not a close one, someone he could trust but
who didn’t love him. Easiest that way for everyone. Best chance of success, of avoiding
accidents of the heart and other forms of ugliness.
____
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From the window of this other man’s life Arnold watched Matthea Sanders at work in the
back yard below. He could see more clearly from the second floor how thick the trees were, how
far back they went into the houseless wild. The moon was visible now through a gap in the
clouds, huge and radiant, infinitely remote, infinitely familiar—like a twin who shadows you all
your life and never speaks to you. Its light was not cold, simply without heat. It was the moon
that Matthea wanted to capture—something she’d never tried to do before. She had her boxy
tourist’s camera—three quarters of a century old, a hand-me-down from her dead father—set up
on its tripod, and to fit her eye to the viewfinder she had to contort her body horribly, bending
and twisting in a way Arnold felt in his own hips and spine. She stayed that way for minutes on
end, far longer than seemed physically possible. Then she stepped away, watched the sky,
watched the movement of the clouds, lowered her eye to the camera again though it was too late
to change anything.
Impossible for Arnold to watch her work as someone else might watch her, as a stranger,
as a fan. He knew hardly anything about how to make even ordinary photos, let alone the
inexplicable art she made. His photos of the children when they were younger were all so
compositionally awkward as to look deranged. And yet he knew the habits of her body in
relation to the camera better than she did. In different conditions, in brighter light, she sometimes
gazed at a scene for minutes in silence, and then at last lifted the camera to her eye so briefly it
was as if she only passed the instrument across her face in benediction, to bless that small piece
of the world as it lay before her. Somehow it seemed to him that he always knew when she
would raise the camera the instant before she did it.
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He couldn’t watch her as Peter might. He was himself, watching her, and at the same
time he was Peter, this thin shell, imagined too fully out of too few details, watching himself
watch her. How far they had all traveled from one another. From where he sat, he could see the
whole tableau of solitude and estrangement laid out before him: Matthea wholly absorbed in this
single instance of her work, all her human faculties concentrated in this particular, momentary
intersection of her mind and the image-making machine and the world. The image she made
would be a record not of the world itself but of that meeting. For now she was both more and
vastly less than her whole self. If he spoke to her she might not hear him at all. Daniel alone with
his fear, taking his temperature every half hour, wondering if his headache was getting worse or
if he was imagining it, too grown-up now to ask for help. Sarah who-knows-where, very possibly
dead or maimed in some drunk-driving incident, and him having to convince himself every
minute that the reasonable thing was not to run in a panic to the car and go out looking for her.
He who at fifty-three had never been less at ease with himself, half in his body now and half
above, hovering somewhere near the ceiling in miserable embarrassment, watching himself like
a voyeur as he watched his wife in the vast isolation of her work.
___

Her isolation didn’t last long. In another moment he saw the tension lift from her
shoulders as she rose from her awkward crouch and stepped away from the camera, this time
decisively. She had made all her thousand choices, small and large, conscious and unconscious,
and now there was nothing to do but wait for the exposure to finish. Matthea loved a long
exposure. She wasn’t after the illusion of accuracy, as another, more common kind of
photographer might be, trying to dazzle with images of the milky way, dense with stars and
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swirling nebulae as no plain human eye had ever seen it. She had no interest even in working
with the kind of camera that could do that. She loved the way a long exposure thrust chance and
accident into the foreground. She loved how much was out of her hands. The shutter would close
at its preordained moment, having taken in whatever changes might pass across the field of the
camera’s vision in all that time and compressed them all into a single fictitious, disorienting
instant. She sat on the deck railing, half her weight perched on her palms as if she might jump
the six or seven feet down to the ground at any moment. She rocked slightly, full of happy,
nervous energy.
Arnold left his solitary room and went out to join her, but he didn’t speak to her. He opened the
screen door slowly so as not to break the spell of giddy expectation she was under. He sat in a
chair a few feet away, and together they watched the fringes of clouds passing over the face of
the moon, the tops of the trees swaying together under the influence of a breeze he couldn’t feel.
How stupid he had been, believing that in the children’s absence she might suddenly appear as a
stranger to him. He had watched her work for so many years that now he was conscious on some
level of every continuity and every slight alteration in her habits. He could see the whole history
of her way of being and working in the world, the past alive and pulsing darkly behind the clear,
bright screen of the present. It was the same in the things they did together. The same in their
intimacy, in the strange cadences of their conversation, full of old jokes that had grown so
layered with new iterations over all that time that no one else would have understood them,
bristling with old hurts that they each knew how to avoid and how to press on when they wanted
to. Even if they separated, there would never be a time when they wouldn’t know each other.
___

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There was a sound of soft, deliberate footsteps from behind the screen of trees, where no
light reached. Arnold thought at first it was a single person, and then as he listened it became two
or three people walking carefully over the leaves and fallen branches. He wanted to call out to
them, to find out who they were and what they needed, but he didn’t, because who would be
traipsing through the woods, hours after dark, without even a flashlight? He couldn’t tell what
Mattie thought. She sat in the same place on the railing but stopped rocking and leaned forward
toward where the sound had come from, where now a fragment of shadow had disentangled itself
from the larger darkness and stepped forward into the open, into the dim light. It was a moose.
Of course it was. He could see the antlers now, the huge black slab of the body on its
preposterous legs, the shoulder higher above the ground than his own head would have been if he
had been standing beside the animal. It was thirty or forty feet away, at the edge of the lawn, and
hadn’t noticed them. They’d been still and silent so long that it hadn’t known they were there and
had stepped out into the clearing to browse on the overgrown grass.
“My God,” Mattie said.
“I’ve never seen one before,” Arnold said. “Have you?”
She didn’t answer. He’d spoken so softly he might have been talking to himself. He
couldn’t be sure she’d heard him. The moose kept moving farther from the safety of the trees,
oblivious of them. It was close enough now that it was no longer a lumbering shadow but an
actual animal. Arnold could see the grain of its coarse fur, silvery-black in the moonlight, and the
oddly formal-looking wattle that hung from below its chin. In the context of the little yard, the
little house with its deck and fire pit and hot tub, the creature was so implausible, so out of scale
with its surroundings as to be almost comical. A quarter mile away in the woods, with no houses
in sight, it would not have seemed so. It lived in unimaginable hiddenness and silence, in deep
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pools of shadow at the edges of ponds where no one went. For a creature so huge to be so seldom
seen was itself almost a religious mystery. Peter had said that in more than a decade of summers
here he had never seen one. Now it walked its unhurried way across the lawn like a monk in a
shopping mall, a living fragment of the unremembered past, bearing the alien grace of its life into
a world that couldn’t help but render it suddenly ridiculous.
Arnold saw the problem in the instant after Mattie saw it. The moose was blundering
obliviously toward the tripod, would reach it in seconds, its head down and its enormous antlers
sweeping the ground so widely that even if it missed it would not miss.
“HEY!” Mattie shouted.
“What are you doing?” Arnold said.
“HEY LOOK WHERE YOU’RE GOING!”
The moose looked up, briefly startled, then took stock of the awkward creature waving
and shouting at it from the shadows and went back to grazing.
“Don’t be crazy!” Arnold whispered.
But she was already leaping down to the ground and running toward the massive animal,
still shouting.
“Motherfucker get away from my camera! Get! Go!”
The moose looked up again and didn’t move but stared at her. Arnold thought she was
going to run right into it, fling her body shoulder-first into its side and try to tackle it, but she
stopped short, much too close. She had committed herself. There was nothing to do but keep
shouting.
“Get!” she said. “Go back to the woods you stupid fuck!”
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From where he sat Arnold could see perhaps more clearly than she could the absurd
danger of her predicament. Six or seven feet of open ground separated her from an animal that
could run as fast as a horse and had rows of twelve-inch daggers growing out its head and
weighed enough to crush a car. It towered over her, watching, assessing. It could have covered
the space between them faster than she could even have turned around. But Arnold could see that
she wouldn’t have turned around. She had her feet planted on the ground, one behind the other as
if to brace herself. She waved her hands above her head and shouted. The standoff couldn’t have
lasted more than ten or fifteen seconds, but within it there was no such thing as time. There was
no future beyond the question of whether the moose would charge or not charge. The future
waited to be born, funny or horrible. When finally the moose turned and trotted casually away to
melt into the shadows of the trees again, the tension left Mattie’s body in such a sudden rush that
she nearly collapsed.
“Did you see that?” she shouted.
“Yes,” Arnold said. “You almost died. That thing decided not to kill you the way you
might decide not to eat the last slice of pizza. Could have gone either way.”
“You’re laughing?” she said, but he wasn’t, and she was.
“It’ll be funny later,” he said.
“You were a lot of help.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“No, I know,” she said. He was beside her now, and she was steadying herself against
him as they walked back toward the house. “I know. What is wrong with me? Why did I do
that?”
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He wasn’t sure what she meant by I know. What did she know? He would have to wait to
see whether the memory of this incident would change her view of him. More likely it only
confirmed what she already knew—he wasn’t the sort of person who would throw himself into
danger to save her from it. She wouldn’t have wanted to be sentimental about it. It wasn’t the
death of love. There had never been a time when he would have done that. It wasn’t cowardice
exactly, just that he was always watching and thinking so busily that the time for action came
and went without his noticing. What he’d thought at the time was that the contest of wills had
been so delicately balanced that any further input might have tipped the scales toward
catastrophe. But as soon as he articulated that theory even to himself it sounded like an excuse.
____

The exposure finished, Mattie detached the camera from its tripod and carried it into the
house like a child. She set it down softly in its place on the kitchen table and he followed her
upstairs, past the closed door of Daniel’s room and the open door of Sarah’s empty one, toward
the room at the end of the hall where half an hour ago he had sat alone and watched her at her
work. A sudden wind had torn and scattered the clouds, and the moon came in through the open
window and stood beside them like another lover, vulnerable and unashamed in its nakedness.
Arnold watched Mattie with straightforward fascination as she undressed. She had the same thin,
strong arms she’d always had, though when she bent to pull the legs of her pants inside-out over
her ankles, her belly hung over her thighs with a heavy softness that had come from having
children and from growing into middle age. He loved that too, and the thin pink scar almost
hidden in the upper reaches of her pubic hair, from when the doctors had cut her open to pull
Daniel out. Routine, they’d assured him, but he’d been terrified. Standing beside her head, with
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the curtain of sky-blue surgical cloth shielding them both from the sight of what was going on
below, he’d almost fainted. Now she stood naked before him in the moonlight, meaning nothing
by it. Just on her way to the shower, to wash off the sticky heat of the day and the residue of
adrenaline from her near-death experience.
“I wish you wouldn’t watch me like that,” she said. “It makes me nervous.”
He felt ashamed in her presence, like one who has come all unclean to the temple. She
could still do that to him. Solemnly he crossed the little space of moonlit floor that separated
them.
“Sorry,” he said, placing an unclean hand on her hip.
They fell into each other then, and she tore the clothes from his body with an urgency that
caught him by surprise. She had surprised herself, earlier. She had done something she would
never have thought she would do. She had forfeited her life and then received it again, a gift
from fate. They made love hungrily, each reveling in the familiar strangeness of the other,
unsurprised, undisappointed. Afterward they lay on their backs side by side while the wind dried
the sweat from their skin.
When she had recovered and could speak again Mattie said, “What do you think Sarah is
doing now?”
“Dancing naked in the forest with a coven of witches,” Arnold said. “Sacrificing kittens
to Beelzebub.”
“Don’t make everything a joke,” she said. “It’s beneath you.”
“Is it?”
“Well,” she said, “it’s beneath me anyway. First of all, you’re just as worried as I am.
Also I wasn’t asking out of worry. I just wish I knew. I used to know everything she did. Even
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when she was in school she couldn’t wait to come home and tell me everything. That lasted for
years and years. Now, I just wish I could have a window into her life sometimes. I wish I could
know what she’s thinking.”
“The last thing I want to know is what she’s thinking,” Arnold said.
“No, you’re right of course,” she laughed. “Most of the time.”
Arnold remembered Daniel then and wondered whether he’d been asleep all that time or
whether, more likely, he’d heard his mother screaming obscenities in the back yard and gone to
the window to see her squaring off against the moose like a lunatic. He wondered whether Daniel
had felt the same paralyzed hesitation he had, needing to do something and yet convinced that
anything he might do would bring on disaster.
What must their children think of them? He could see how Sarah worshipped her mother,
how she craved her approval, studied her life and her career for hints about how to live and be in
the grown-up world, how she pushed her away sometimes as a defense against her indifference.
What must have felt like indifference to her, though Mattie was never indifferent. On some level
she was always thinking about her children, as he was too. Even the work she made that seemed
to have nothing to do with them was haunted by their absence. Though she never said so, and
though if Arnold did say so it would mean that he was staking a claim about her work on the
basis of his insider knowledge, staking it on the most suspect form of authority—exclusive,
proprietary, inherently subjective. Sarah had been her mother’s whole world once. Her mother’s
only child, for years. Hard to let go of that, even when you want to. Hard to realize—as Sarah
began to do, Arnold thought, when she was still quite young—that your parents are people, with
lives that began long before you were born and extend far beyond your vision. The only remedy
for it is to start building a life that extends far beyond their vision too.
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Mattie rose from the bed and wrapped herself in a towel and he watched as she walked
away down the hall toward the one bathroom. She was beautiful and strong and moments ago
she had won out over death itself, by sheer will or sheer luck. Their children hadn’t known them
when they first came to know each other. They hadn’t seen how they clung to one another then,
unprotected as they both were, knowing how the world loved to tear people away from each
other and even away from themselves. How strange to live with these people who thought your
whole history began only when theirs did. Daniel and Sarah had known them only in the bloom
of their success, when nothing could frighten them. How would they make sense of the
unraveling that old age would bring?
Arnold heard tires on the gravel driveway, music, laughter, and then the front door
opened and closed and Sarah called up from the living room, “I’m home. I’m not dead,” just as
her mother shut the bathroom door.
_____

Days later, back home in Connecticut, sick with the flu she’d caught from Daniel, she
made the first small print of that image. Arnold stood beside her in the dim red light of her
darkroom, which normally she never allowed. They had lived through the strangeness of that
night together, and she must have felt that the image itself should come into the world in his
presence.
She’d been in bed all day with the curtains drawn and the lights off, drifting in and out of
sleep, soaking the sheets with sweat. Arnold was sick too, but it didn’t affect him the way it did
her. He brought her water when she asked for it and made her tea, left her alone when she
wanted to be alone and lay beside her when she didn’t. Late in the afternoon she couldn’t stand
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her immobility any longer, so she gathered her energy and went to work. She left the door to the
walk-in closet that had become her darkroom open and waved him in, surprising him. He shut
the door behind him and shuffled past her to the far corner, to be out of her way as much as he
could. As tight as the space was, he had to keep his hands in his pockets to avoid bumping into
her or causing accidents. Mattie had arranged everything according to her own inscrutable logic,
and her hands found what they needed without the help of her eyes, as if they had eyes and
infallible, unhesitating minds of their own. For Arnold, any careless move might have ruined
years’ worth of work. She turned out the light and for a moment he couldn’t tell whether his eyes
were open or closed. Then she switched on the safelight and the visible world returned
transfigured, every object having found its place in a spectrum of red that was also somehow
heatless, bloodless, incorporeal as a dream. With inhuman dexterity her pale red hands laid the
negative in its carrier and slid the carrier into place in the enlarger. The device was like another
camera—like a camera in reverse, projecting back out into the world the image her camera had
gathered in. As she had done with the camera, she looked, made a series of minute adjustments,
looked again. When finally she laid the paper in its chemical bath and the image resolved,
ghostlike, out of the paper’s emptiness, he thought at first it must have been a mistake.
“That’s the picture?” he said.
“That’s the picture.”
There was only an unbroken field of black, thicker somehow, deeper along the bottom of
the image than it was near the top, punctuated just above and to the right of center by a thin
white line that tapered at one end until it disappeared like the tail of a comet. The moon, huge
and alive as it had been to them that night, had been only the remotest trace of light to the
camera’s eye. It was a camera made for taking photos of your kids on their first day of school,
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not for capturing distant objects in the night sky. Clouds had drifted across the face of the moon
in the several minutes Mattie had exposed the film, leaving this attenuated line, a record of
movement.
It looked like an accident. He couldn’t say to what extent it was one, how far the final
product might have drifted from her expectations. Probably she had no expectations except to be
open to surprise. An infinite number of accidents had gone into the production of the image, but
she had built the arena in which those accidents took place, so that as soon as they were recorded
they became chosen, deliberate. There was the world, in which the present was always laying
down its burden of meaningless, irrevocable incident and passing on forever, and there was the
human eye, full of intention, choosing what to see and how to see it. The picture recorded the
precise juncture where Mattie’s eye—hers and no one else’s—met the world at that particular
place and time. No one who gave it more than a passing glance could dismiss it as mere accident.
Years and years after it had first entered the world, people asked him about it more often than
about any of her other pictures. Prying. Pleading for details, for the thickness of lived experience
behind the image, which was resolute in its refusal to convey anything that could be expressed in
words. Like all her other work from that period, she gave it a title that scrupulously avoided
metaphor and allusion, communicating only the barest facts: Full moon, Harrisville, New
Hampshire, August 2004.
Wilma Lewis of Pheonix, Arizona was no different from any of the others—polite,
wholly earnest in her gratitude for Matthea’s work, craving knowledge of the messy human life
that must surely have been there, somehow inside all that austerity and silence, making it as
eloquent and as uncannily alive as it was. What could he tell her? When he looked at that picture
it seemed to him to contain the whole unfolding of that day: the banal concerns that had such
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importance for them then; the sudden emergence of the sublime, already decaying into comedy
and teetering on the edge of violence; the moon with its eerie intimacy and its infinite
remoteness. But that was a trick. He thought the image contained those things because they’d
been part of that day as he remembered it. If he’d said that to Mattie she would have laughed at
him. The camera recorded light. That was all. It didn’t know what a day was. What could he
know about what anyone else saw?

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5

The baby’s open mouth in the half-light, crying. Hungry. Easy to know what he wanted,
easy to give. For the moment there was nothing else. Sarah remembered now how it had been in
the first months of Sammy’s life. She had almost forgotten. You couldn’t know how that time
was unless you were in it. You couldn’t even really remember. Like trying to remember the pain
of a broken bone after it’s healed. The pain of childbirth. You could remember that it was awful,
frightening, not at all beautiful or joyful as people had said it would be—those feelings came
after—but you couldn’t recover the exact sensation, not ever again, until you were back in it.
Then it came back to you in absolute precision, past and present side by side. Now she
remembered, because it was happening again, how it had been to wake at night to the sound of
Sammy’s ragged voice, some mineral scrape and hum in it older than memory, older than
language, the substratum of the human. Easy to know what it meant. Easy to get up in spite of
the deepest exhaustion and go alone into the cool, empty room to be what she needed.
The boy now, Jonah, whose face had just begun to become his own and not the pinched
and wrinkled face—half-animal, devoid of personality—that every newborn shares with all the
other ones. He had his father’s long, feminine eyelashes framing eyes whose color shifted from
gray to sea-green depending on how the light hit them, as his grandmother’s eyes had. Sarah’s
mother, who would have cherished him as she had his sister. Who would have caused Sarah pain
once again by seeming to care more for her child than she’d ever cared for her. Not true, of
course. Only Sarah’s long-standing tendency to feel what she’d lacked much more acutely than
what she’d had. That and the urgency that must come with being a grandparent, living far from
these children and knowing that you won’t be with them long enough even to see them begin
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their grown-up lives. Sarah’s mother would miss everything now. Much more than she could
have known. Awful, to have felt even momentarily jealous of the love she would have given her
grandson, had she lived to meet him.
Sarah gathered the child to her breast and he quieted. She could hear Jeff downstairs
grinding coffee, running the tap to fill the kettle, rummaging in drawers. The house was old and
small and the walls thin. Sounds carried, muffled and distorted by the layers of soft old wood and
fiberglass insulation, or echoing through the heating vents. She heard his heavy footsteps on the
hundred-year-old floorboards. She could always hear his presence in the house, wherever he was,
wherever she was. Sammy’s too, as they could hear hers. It was comforting, most of the time.
How porous the border was between herself and her family. Even alone she was with them.
Her other family too—her first family. More than a hundred miles away now, still they
were always with her. Even her mother, whose place in the world was all interior now,
immeasurably distant, close as the breath in her lungs. Her mother existed now only in ways the
senses couldn’t verify. Only in memory, probably. Only in the past, which more and more was
where Sarah wanted to live. What did the future hold but one loss after another? On the phone
last night her father sounded so old and tired, so unlike himself that she had to struggle for
several seconds to fit the two voices—the real one she heard on the phone and the other, the one
she remembered—to her image of the one man.
“Don’t worry,” he said, meaning the weather. “We’ll be fine if you can’t make it. I’ll be
fine.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” she’d said. “We can make it.”
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“I can remember how it was trying to get two kids into the car and out the door on a
schedule. Your mom took the brunt of that of course, but I remember. I’m just saying. If it gets
too late, stay home. I’d rather have you stay home than get in an accident.”
She needed to get there, and she dreaded being there. She’d heard that thin, flattened tone
before, that long hesitation between one word and the next, as if he had to fish blindly with his
hands in a cold dark pool for the words before he could bring them up and show them to her. She
knew what it meant. She’d sounded like that herself for a long time after Sammy was born,
sometimes so distinctly that even she could hear it.
Carefully, she rebalanced the baby’s weight on her left arm and reached down with her
right to take the blanket from his crib. She draped it across her shoulders and around his, which
took what felt like whole minutes to do with one hand, without disturbing him. There was a
spider at rest in its dusty web in a corner of the room: a plain brown house spider, almost
mammalian in its furry drabness, waiting for breakfast. She spoke out loud to it, wishing it well,
then reluctantly she left the silence of the little room and walked downstairs with the child still
latched to her breast.
The world’s creator, Kishelamakank, had fallen asleep and dreamed the world. When he
awoke to the emptiness that was all that had ever been, he set about the work of making real
what he had dreamed. This according to the Lenape people on whose stolen land her house had
been built.
___
Sammy was up already, playing a video game on her iPad at the kitchen table. Sarah
watched over her daughter’s shoulder, but she couldn’t make sense of it. Shining objects rained
from a neon sky while a vaguely human, vaguely female figure had to climb and jump over
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impossible Escher staircases and floating islands trying to catch them, or to avoid them, or to
catch some of them and avoid others.
“That doesn’t stress you out?” Sarah said.
“No,” Sammy said. “It relaxes me.” What did her mother know? Maybe deep in the game
zone her mind had become so alienated from her body that she did feel relaxed, even as her jaw
clenched and her neck turtled down into the tense knot of muscles between her shoulder blades.
“We need to leave by seven thirty,” Jeff said, “if we want to be safe.” He turned his
laptop around to show her the latest radar screen from the National Weather Service, a map of
the eastern seaboard overlaid with pixelated fields of color even less comprehensible than
whatever Sammy was doing.
“What time is it now?”
“Six forty-five.”
“Great,” she said sarcastically. “Forty-five minutes. No problem.”
“I’ve got everything packed already.”
“No you don’t,” she said.
He looked up at her, his feelings already hurt, his expression performatively open to
whatever instruction she might be about to dish out—All right then, show me what I’ve missed. It
was the aspect of his personality she was most tired of lately, his tendency to do one third of a
job—only the obvious, visible aspects, the tip of the iceberg—and then declare it done and wait
for praise and thanks. She was supposed to be grateful that he was out of bed, that he’d made the
coffee and digested the weather forecast and taken whatever other half-measures he’d taken.
Probably at work this habit served him well. He came up with some clever idea, some novel
theory of the case, a way to explain the origins of whatever conflict had been brought before him
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so that all the hidden causes revealed themselves, obvious all along, just happening to align
conveniently with his clients’ interests. All squared away, folks. Nothing to worry about now.
Then a cadre of secretaries and paralegals took care of the details, the much larger volume of
work that no one else saw or thought about unless it was left undone or done wrong and that,
once it was finished, had to be begun all over again.
Jonah had fallen happily back to sleep. Gently she lifted him upright and laid his head on
her shoulder, closing her shirt over her still-dripping breast with the other hand. She patted his
back until he burped in his sleep, then laid him down in the cradle they kept in the living room,
beside the couch. With his head pressed against the cushioned bumper at the head of the cradle,
his feet nearly reached the far wall. He wouldn’t fit there much longer. Six months old and
already he was outgrowing all the things they’d set aside for him. He would be tall like his
father. She could see it already in the way he outgrew his clothes sometimes before he’d had a
chance to wear them, in the muscled length of his legs, which looked not at all like pudgy baby’s
legs but like the legs of a grown man, an athlete, miniaturized. She could see it in how hungrily
he drank from her, how greedily he ate the avocadoes and mashed peas they’d just begun to give
him.
Jeff had overfilled the kettle and left the extra water in it as he always did—it needed to
be emptied and left open to dry or it would mold. She lifted the lid and the steam scalded her.
She felt it, but she didn’t react. She didn’t care. The pain was merely physical—the nerves
sending a signal to her brain about something mildly bad that had happened to someone. It was
as if she had said to herself, “That woman’s hand is going to hurt now.”
She’d been losing faith in the realness of her life. She wouldn’t have thought of that, until
recently, as a faith you could lose. Or as faith at all. When Sammy was younger—four or five—
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she’d worried whenever she felt unusually happy that she was dreaming. Sarah had forgotten that
aspect of her own early childhood—how easy it was to lose sight of the border between dreams
and reality. Her daughter reminded her. Now she was feeling that same disorientation again. Her
life felt too familiar, like a movie she’d seen too many times already. It wasn’t like watching
herself in a dream. Her dreams were a chaos of disconnected, half-remembered images, erotic
and comic and terrifying. They were far more real than her life—her charming antique house and
her well-meaning oblivious husband and her too-bright-for-her-own-good child. Even her work,
with its heartbreakingly measurable, tiny gains and its huge setbacks. If someone had asked her
to render her life in the form of a dream, she could have done it easily. She daydreamed
metaphors for her life all the time. Lately it was a fire raging out of control while she tried to
stop it, clearing the brush and digging trenches, every little hard-won victory swiftly erased by
the wind, which drove the sparks bullet-like through the sky and into the trees behind her. Her
children were back there in the trees behind her, in her house in the trees, screaming for her to
save them.
But that was a daydream, not a dream. No one really had dreams like that. Dreams
weren’t metaphors, and the fact that her life, as she understood it, lent itself so readily to
metaphor made it impossible for her to trust either the metaphor or the life.
A house finch landed on the edge of the open casement window, its tiny body exactly the
color of dawn as she’d seen it that morning—the dark gray sky flushing pink over the roofs of
her neighbors’ houses. She watched the tiny pulsing of its throat as it sang. Though that word
was wrong, wasn’t it? The voice was as delicate and as full of urgency as the body it emerged
from, but it had nothing to do with music.
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Around the world, some four million people had died of a disease that had not even
existed two years before, and yet she didn’t personally know a single one of them. How could
that be? How then was she supposed to believe that she lived in the actual world at all?
And what had happened was only one more piece of the larger thing that was always
happening: the transformation of everything, gradual and then sudden, and seemingly always
into something worse. It was people who had brought this outbreak of death on themselves by
living as they did. Everyone understood this intuitively, even if no one could pinpoint the actual
mechanism. The internet understood, in its floridly inchoate way, as it always did. It was
impossible to have a thought without discovering ten minutes later that it was already a meme:
The old world is dying and the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters—the
ominously twentieth-century-sounding words superimposed in white block letters over a cartoon
image of a chubby unicorn with a pastel-colored rainbow arcing suggestively out of its horn.
When she saw that image, scrolling Instagram late last night, she had the familiar, uncanny
sensation of hearing her own inmost voice emerging from the unseen body of a crowd of
strangers. Googling, she found only a venomous and arcane debate, conducted on Twitter and in
the comments sections of various philosophy blogs, about whether the quote—attributed by
Zizek to the imprisoned Marxist hero Antonio Gramsci—had actually come from the Nazi
propagandist Josef Goebbels. By then, maybe twenty minutes after she’d first seen it, she’d
already started to hate that unicorn—with its smug apocalyptic smile, its saucer eyes gazing
serenely into the far future, when the wonderful unimaginable new world would be real and all
those dead people would be one more sad passage in the history books.
She looked away from the window and back at Jeff, sitting hunched over his laptop at the
kitchen table. “Did you pack a bag for Sammy?” she said.
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“She did it herself.”
“I did it, Mom,” Sammy said with exaggerated weariness.
“But did you check to see that she did it right?” Sarah said, ignoring the theatrical groan
this elicited from her daughter.
“Three pairs of underwear, three pairs of socks, shirts, shoes, jacket…” said Jeff.
“Should be four pairs of underwear, at least,” Sarah said.
“In case she what, has an accident? As hasn’t happened since she was in kindergarten?
Your dad has a washing machine.”
“Did you pack her inhaler?”
“Okay,” he said. “That I did forget.”
There was no leaving the house behind. She was a wholly domestic creature. To the
children she was synonymous with home, and not only in some abstract metaphorical sense, but
also in the concrete sense that wherever her body went, the accoutrements of home went with
her—animal crackers, wet wipes, medications, favorite books and favorite toys. Traveling with a
baby and a small child meant extracting from half a dozen random, hidden places the
innumerable nameless objects only she knew existed and assembling them all into a mobile
house whose center was a canvas L.L. Bean tote so gargantuan that even at nine Sammy could
still scrunch her whole body inside it and demand that her father lift her into the air and swing
her down the hall to her bed, where she would land as an astronaut on the moon. Likely she
would never have thought to do that now, except that she had done it often when she was much
smaller, and now like an old woman she was sometimes swept away by waves of nostalgia for
what she called, dramatically, “my childhood.”
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Whole chambers of Sarah’s mind were given over to inventories of obscure, utilitarian
objects and their locations. She couldn’t even blame Jeff for not knowing what was needed or
where to find it. What bothered her was that he didn’t even know he didn’t know.
How had they become such a cliché? They could have been characters in a sitcom from
half a century ago. The husband whose sphere of competence lies elsewhere, in the world of
consequence that exists offscreen, so that he blunders haplessly into comic misadventures, a
tourist in his own home, and it doesn’t matter because his work in that other world is the reason
the home exists. And then the wife and mother whose mastery of her environment goes unseen
and unacknowledged by everyone but the audience.
Sarah had a job. Her work consisted mostly of writing letters to foundations, asking them
for money, but it mattered. The money mattered, and she was good at getting it. She’d been
doing it a long time. She knew how to work within the confines of a genre that demanded bland
formality, to fulfill those demands and somehow still to reach some human being who had
maybe forgotten what he was supposed to be doing in that office, sorting all those applications
and reading all those same-sounding letters. She knew how to make that person feel the enormity
of what was being lost. The thousands of species swept into oblivion every year without anyone
ever having even seen them. Every day another possible future flickering out, becoming part of
what she called the historical future—the future that had been possible once and now existed
only in the imagination of the past. She knew how to make other people feel the despair she’d
felt—not all of it, just enough—and then to kindle in them the hope she wasn’t sure she had.
Surely it was easier for them to have hope—they had the money.
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Still, the money she raised was not for her. Not for her family. The job paid hardly
enough to cover the cost of the childcare she could have provided for free had she not been
working.
_______

Sammy had paused her game and was kneeling on the floor beside the cradle, watching
the baby sleep. She cocked her head to one side and murmured so cute and who’s a cutie? again
and again like a mantra, the pitch of her voice rising higher and higher until it ascended beyond
the range of human hearing. She was performing, though she didn’t seem to be aware that
anyone was watching her. Six months in, she had two modes of relating to her brother. There
was this prescribed one, full of strange ritual, in which she understood him as an icon of
cuteness, in which her role as a still-small girl, and as his sister, was to perform a kind or
worshipful, ecstatic, deeply possessive appreciation for his cuteness. And there was the other,
deeper one—a bedrock hostility that led her to stomp angrily out of the room when he cried too
long, to glare and even sometimes actually hiss at him as he sucked at her mother’s breast.
Asleep, he needed nothing, posed no challenge to her own needs. His face stopped cycling
between wild metamorphoses, stopped trying to communicate, and became the mask of pure
innocence that was the closest thing Sammy had to a religious idol. Sometimes in his sleep he
laughed, and then her quiet murmuring spilled over into ecstasy. Sometimes he began to cry, and
she turned away in disgust.
“I wish we could just stay home,” she said.
Sarah drew her head out from the back of the linen closet and looked at her, surprised.
“You don’t want to see Grandpa?” she said. “And Uncle Daniel?”
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“No, I do,” Sammy said. “But Jonah doesn’t want to go.”
“He doesn’t?” Sarah said. “Did he say why?”
Sammy had stepped away from the cradle so that the sound of her voice wouldn’t wake
her brother. She stood with one foot poised on the single step that divided the living room from
the dining room and looked at her mother impatiently, as if she was being willfully obtuse.
“Mom, he doesn’t talk. You know that. He doesn’t say anything. He just lets me know
what he’s feeling. He can’t tell me why he feels the way he feels. He would need to be able to
talk for that.”
For a couple of weeks now Sammy had been doing this—believing that she could read
her brother’s thoughts through some conduit of pure empathy that stretched from his infant brain
to hers. Not his thoughts—she seemed to recognize that language was a prerequisite for thought
as she understood it—but rather his feelings, his memories, his desires and aversions. The
conduit wasn’t always active. Sometimes when her brother’s mind had been closed to her for a
long time she grew sullen. “He doesn’t want to talk to me today,” she would say, and however
imaginary their communion had been, her mother could see that the loneliness she felt at such
times was real, and new to her. At other times she took great pride in her secret knowledge.
“Jonah was just remembering the goldfinches we saw in the backyard this morning,” she might
say. “He loves them. He hopes we’ll see them again.” Like a friend who divulges secrets about
your other friend to show you that she knows him better than you do. Sammy watched her
mother’s expression to see whether it stung her, to receive the news about her own son’s mind
from another.
Of course her mother understood that the secrets Sammy told in this way were her own.
She was the one who didn’t want to go, not Jonah, who didn’t know how to want anything but to
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be held and fed and kept clean and dry and warm. She wasn’t surprised. Who could blame the
child for not wanting to endure once again the three-hour drive to that crowded, drafty house,
miles from anywhere, her mother trying to interest her in a past she had no part of, saying for the
hundredth time, “Your uncle Daniel and I grew up here,” as if she might have forgotten. As if
she could know what it meant. Nothing is harder than communicating the sensation of memory
to another person. Like extracting the yolk from an egg without breaking the shell. She couldn’t
keep herself from trying. She pointed out landmarks, objects, appending little fragments of story
to them and willing herself to forget that none of it could mean anything without all the rest. She
was plucking stray threads out of the weave of her life and offering them to her daughter,
solemnly or with a false joviality that was worse than solemn, as if a bit of thread, connected to
nothing, had any value. Her father did it too. Even Daniel did. Most incomprehensible of all, to
Sammy, must have been the ceremony itself. The Day of Midge, which they all thought of now
as belonging to Sarah’s mother, as being something they did for her, when in truth it was Sarah
who had invented it and then embellished it year after year until it became the absurdly bloated,
multi-day collection of rituals that it was now.
It had begun as a celebration of that first return, the winter of her thirteenth year. The
previous winter, a spider had built its web in the corner above her bed as she slept, terrifying her
until her mother gave it a name—orb weaver—and showed her how to notice its alien beauty, the
bright bands of yellow and white across its abdomen, the patient skill with which it built its web
over again every night. Sarah named her Midge, after the tiny flies she lived on. Every morning
she swallowed her web and disappeared into some crevice between the crown molding and the
wall, and every evening she came out and built the web again, until one day she didn’t. They
only live one season, her mother said. She’d already made it much farther into winter than they
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normally do. Then the next year the same spider returned, or one just like her. Neither Sarah nor
her mother could decide which explanation was the more unlikely. That second Midge lasted
twelve days longer than the first, and the day of her arrival—December 14—became an annual
holiday in their house, one dedicated to the unexpected return of the past within the present. It
was Sarah who had thought of that and made it happen. Her mother had merely indulged her. It
had been good parenting at first, and Sarah had held onto it so long and assigned so much
importance to it that she had made it ridiculous. In recent years, in their mother’s absence, it had
declined into decadence. Its symbols had all become too obvious, too labored in their efforts to
recover the irrecoverable. The almond cake that could only be found at one particular bakery
way out in Long Island City that was always in danger of closing. The game of spoons that was
always hilarious at first but then went on too long because no one wanted to admit they were
tired of it. Soon it would all be wholly depleted, no use to anyone. Sarah wondered which of
them would be the first to admit that it was time to stop.
What must Sammy have made of any of it? She’d been four when her grandmother died.
Probably she couldn’t remember at all how different it had been before that. Lighter, funnier.
Full of inside jokes she couldn’t understand. Someone always ready to puncture with irony any
moment that threatened to become too serious. Really it was just an excuse to get the whole
family together once a year, plus whoever Daniel happened to be seeing in any given January.
The rule had been the same for Sarah, before she married Jeff: bring anyone you want to keep,
anyone you hope will still be around at the same time next year, even if, in the course of things,
it may turn out that they’re not. A private holiday for a family of committed agnostics who had
deep reservations about nearly all the official holidays. She must have noticed on some level how
it changed after Matthea was gone—how it ossified and became heavy with significance it had
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never been designed to bear. It must have been like trying to learn the grief-stricken customs of
another country, the country all these exiles had come from and which they kept trying to tell her
was hers too, though it wasn’t and never would be.
_____

“Look,” Jeff was saying. He had followed Sarah to where she was rummaging in the hall
closet. He had the laptop resting precariously on his outstretched hand, like a waiter with a tray,
while he pointed at the image on its screen with the other. “See how the storm front is swelling
along its southern edge here? It’s going to start dropping down right into our path. It’s going to
swallow Trenton by eleven. We need to be past it. We need to be out of New Jersey by noon or
we’re not going to make it.”
“We’ll be ready when we’re ready,” Sarah said, but there was no hostility in her voice.
His keyed-up state, his hapless need to take charge of what he couldn’t control, was just another
thing for her to manage. “Go make some sandwiches if you want to help. That way we won’t
have to stop for lunch.”
Happy and relieved to have something to do, he closed the laptop and headed for the
fridge.
Sammy watched them over the top of her tablet’s screen, casually, with less than a tenth
of the attention it took to keep her avatar twirling in her scarlet pinafore and her pointed scarlet
cap through the evening air, which teemed with enemies. Twinkling stars, falling toward her
from the top of the sky, from unimaginable distances, were poison. They would freeze the blood
in her veins and cause her body to shatter and fly apart if they touched her. She would not let
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them touch her. She moved expertly, with economy and grace, trusting her virtual body again
and again to find its way across the abyss to the next tenuous foothold.
Her mother and father were not extensions of herself. They were not fragments of her
own personality broken free and set loose to wander the world outside herself. They were whole
and separate people, hard as it was—still!—to really know that. They loved each other, and the
form their love took was an ongoing argument about nothing, which no one ever won. Her
mother had been ill for a long time, and now she was well again. Her father had helped her to get
well again. Her uncle Daniel had come all the way from New York to help too. He’d stayed for
weeks and weeks. Sammy had no memory of any of that. It had all happened when she was a
baby, but her mother had told her. Now she had a brother, Jonah, who was a baby as she had
been. He couldn’t speak. Still, he knew much more than anyone else—anyone who was not his
sister—would have believed he could know. Sammy knew because it hadn’t been long since she
had been a baby too. She could remember still—not that she could have told anyone about it.
She’d had no words then, as Jonah had none now. Having had no words, she had not retained
even the things the words would have stood for. What you could not name you would not
remember later. What she remembered now was endless silence, the rise and fall of her mother’s
body beneath hers, the rush of air into her mother’s lungs and out again. The rush of air into her
own lungs. The steady rhythm of her mother’s heartbeat in her ear, enormous, like a flame that lit
the tiny candle of her own heart. When her mother walked away the candle guttered and grew
dim, and she didn’t cry. She held herself still and quiet so the flame would not go out before her
mother could return and hold her close again to kindle it. The living world. The pink velvet
curtains shutting out the light, keeping it greedily to themselves so they glowed as the tissue of
the body must glow when seen from within. The lamp on the bedside table with its stained-glass
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shade casting fragments of colored light against the wall. She couldn’t say how much of all that
she’d invented later. She wanted to be what her brother would remember. She wanted to see
what he saw and put words to it, so later when he asked her what his life had been back then she
could tell him.
As soon as they were on the road Sammy remembered how much she loved the trip—the
long arc they traced eastward along I-276 over the top of Philadelphia, descending out of the
northern suburbs just to kiss the city’s shoulder before crossing the Delaware on the edge of
Levittown, turning north on 95, the warehouses and factory outlets receding into pastureland, the
river spreading in feathery tendrils across the lowlands, sunlight ringing up from the black
surface of the water. She knew the way so well she could have done it herself if she’d known
how to drive. She could have taken them the whole way there. It was the longest trip she’d ever
taken from home—unless you counted plane trips, which she didn’t because a plane took you out
of the world and then set you down again in some other part of it so that you learned nothing
about where you were or how you’d gotten there—and she’d done it so many times that she’d
worked every inch of it down into her memory, a narrow corridor of the known world cutting
right through the middle of the infinitely greater world she didn’t know at all.
Now she could show it all to Jonah, whose experience of the world extended hardly
farther than the end of their driveway in Malvern. It almost didn’t matter that he seemed
uninterested in anything beyond the windows. The inside of the moving car he loved. Strapped
into his thickly padded seat, he laughed and kicked. The car was their warmest, smallest room,
clean-smelling like new leather, quiet and safe. If she tried to see it as her brother did, she saw
that the car stood still as a stone while the world flowed on around it, the green flat land beneath
the gray sky, other cars and trees and buildings sweeping into view and then away again faster
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than his mind could form an image of what he’d seen. She would help him. If she could read his
mind then maybe he could read hers too. She would let him know that he was safe and all was
well. Their parents had run out of things to argue about for the time being and now sat side by
side in peaceable silence. There were miles and miles of open road ahead of them, and then they
would swing north out of the countryside to touch the hem of another city’s skirt. Then out again
into another kind of country—not fields but woods, narrow roads, slower going. What she knew
by heart he would come to know. What was hers alone would be theirs together.

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6

In the beginning was the word, and within the word was the breath of the word. Wind
that sustains the wind, flame that kindles the fire. This was before the beginning, really. Before
the word was spoken. Four thousand years—plus another fourteen billion or so—before the word
became flesh and dwelt among us. Everything was one thing then—the beautiful infinite
undifferentiated life which is God, which has neither beginning nor end. Being human, we have
to clothe it in symbol if we want to see it. To Hildegard, the infinite divine breath appeared in the
form of a woman. She was treading a monster beneath her feet, her wings extending upward to
form a luminous circle over her head, her face so radiantly beautiful that it was easier to look
directly at the sun than at her.
This was in the uplands at the mouth of the River Glan, three quarters of the way through
the twelfth century. Hildegard had lived a long life by then. At twelve years old, disciple to a girl
six years older than she was, she had been entombed with her mentor in a cell with only a single
interior window through which to pass food and waste and conversation with the world outside.
The understanding was that they would leave that room only when they died. Ostensibly this was
not a punishment but a choice—one that, once made, could not be unmade. Her mentor, called
Jutta, may have made it for her. The range of choices available to girls in their world was not
infinite. Jutta’s niece, also called Jutta, was walled in with them to act as their servant, though
what a servant could have found to do all day in a cell that didn’t even have a door is hard to say.
Maybe she knew even then that she wouldn’t be there forever. Otherwise, how to imagine
a degree of faith that could contain the fear she would have felt as the monks sang their canticles
and cemented the stones into place. The elder Jutta had a talent for penance and self-denial. She
wore a hair shirt day and night, ate only scraps left over from the monks’ poor table, went
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without shoes in winter. By the time she died at forty-four—in her hair shirt on a mat of hair—
she had made the sisters and the monastery famous. The wall of the cell had long since been torn
down to accommodate the many other women who had come to join them, bringing with them
large financial gifts to the monastery. Who better to take Jutta’s place as leader of the sisters than
her first disciple, Hildegard?
We would not remember Jutta now if it hadn’t been for Hildegard. Nor would we
remember Hildegard. Like nearly all the other holy women of her time, Jutta wrote none of her
wisdom down. Make what you will of the fact that, when she received the first of her divine
revelations, Hildegard was less than two years younger than Jutta had been when she died. “O
fragile human,” God said, “ashes of ashes, and filth of filth. Say and write what you see and
hear.”
She saw the fiery light of uncreated God shining forth from the perishable forms of the
created world. The world was continuously born anew, its irrecoverable past and its
unimaginable future born along with it. So what if the world we lived in was always an
infinitesimal fraction of a second past the moment of its perfection, the moment that went on
endlessly at the edge of time, just before it became the world? She heard the music of that
continuous birth. Music within music, like the breath within the word. She transcribed it so that
others could hear. She wrote whole plays whose conventional narrative forms and conventional
moralities stood within that otherworldly music like tents in a hurricane.
If she saw that light in herself, she never said so. God’s gifts came piled high with insults
and she, no fool, transcribed them faithfully in her letters to the church leaders. I am a poor
woman, she said, of low education, ashes of ashes, filth of filth and so on, but for some reason
God has shown me the true meaning of all the scriptures and here, fathers, let me explain it to
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you. God commanded her to move all her female followers to a new monastery, which was to be
built specifically for her. When the monks didn’t like this idea, she fell ill and grew steadily
more so, hovering on the edge of death until the monks relented, at which point she experienced
a miraculous recovery. Which is not to say that the illness wasn’t real. She was often ill, and
always had been—"the mind’s perfection bent upon the bow of the flesh’s frailty,” she said. It
didn’t matter. As a child she had renounced the world, and at length it had been given back to
her, radiant in all its particulars with the undiscriminating light of God.
____

His mind’s perfection bent on the bow of his flesh’s frailty, Arnold steered his empty cart
among the oranges, the stacked plastic boxes of listless, out of season strawberries, the wall of
green things gleaming with dew in the flat, undiscriminating light of the supermarket’s overhead
fluorescent bulbs.
Not that there was anything perfect about his mind, or ever had been. There was no mind
without the body—no perfect instrument of pure reason, or pure spirit, continually knocked out
of whack by the clumsy flesh, with its aches and pains and its stubborn, pointless desires. The
body was the instrument. The body was the senses together with all the messy, imperfect systems
half a billion years of evolution had devised—one awkward, inefficient workaround giving rise
to another—to keep the senses functioning. The body was fragile and gruesome and knew from
the beginning that it wouldn’t last. It wanted one thing—not merely to preserve and reproduce
itself as the evolutionary biologists insisted, but to take in the world, as much of it as possible,
and to understand it. All the evolutionary biology stuff, the struggle to stay alive and pass the
whole human mess on to another generation was for that—to take in more world, to know the
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world a little more, a little longer. Everything served the senses—the heart and lungs and liver
and so on that kept them alive and the mind that constantly assembled and reassembled the
illusion of a coherent world from all the random bits of data they took in. If your liver failed and
you were sick and in pain, the sickness and pain became part of the world your senses took in.
Naturally they also changed the way your mind made sense of that world—your mind became
part sickness, part pain. Just as it had always been at various times part hunger, exhaustion,
horniness and so on. Who could tease apart the world from the mind observing it, or the mind
from the body? It was all a mess. Why shouldn’t it be?
He remembered what Daniel had been like as a child—his constant, vigilant monitoring
of his own body for signs of betrayal. He had tried to help, but nothing he’d said had been at all
helpful. He tried to say the kinds of things doctors said to their neurotic patients. Think horses,
not zebras. Headaches are common, childhood brain tumors are rare. Citing statistics whose
basic outlines would have been obvious even to Daniel at nine or ten. If you are going to be the
one child in several hundred thousand who develops an inoperable brain tumor, there’s nothing
you can do to stop it from happening, so why make yourself sick worrying about it? Worry when
you have a real decision to make—don’t worry helplessly, endlessly, talking yourself in circles.
None of it helped. He was appalled at his own smug, hygienic advice. As if the mind could be
managed like an employee, trained to focus its energy only on productive tasks. Daniel’s
hypochondria was narcissistic, self-indulgent, yes, as why shouldn’t he be? He was afraid of
losing the world before he’d had a chance to know it. His most potent nightmares were always
about diseases of the brain: fatal insomnia, mad cow disease, African sleeping sickness. Worse
than dying would be to lose yourself while you were still alive, to look at the world and not be
able to trust that what you saw was real. Or that your thoughts and actions were your own.
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Yes, Arnold should have said, that’s how it is. You get used to it
The cart’s right rear wheel wasn’t spinning as freely as the others. The bearings were
worn out or screwed down too tightly. It was subtle enough that he hadn’t noticed it at first, but
now he felt the muscles tightening in his lower back, his hips and his spine twisting to
compensate for the imbalance.
How many artists could he think of who’d died struggling to finish their work as their
bodies gave out? Not that anything was ever finished. The first illustrated guide to the nests and
eggs of North American birds was the work of one Genevieve Jones, who’d grown up in Ohio in
the midst of the Civil War and was haunted by nightmares afterward. Before the war, she’d gone
with her doctor father on his country rounds and gathered tiny, speckled eggs from the nests of
birds she couldn’t identify. The Audubon guide had hundreds of birds rendered in glorious detail
but made no mention of the way they entered the world. Crippled by anxiety and depression in
the war’s aftermath, she set out to fill that gap in the record. She worked for nine years,
producing images so patiently observed and so gracefully rendered that when Arnold first saw
them he felt as if he were watching God meditating on the work of his own hand, before she died
of typhoid fever in 1876, at the age of 32.
The link between art and early death was a myth, he knew. People died young all the
time, tax accountants no less often than painters or poets. Anyone could get typhoid in 1876, and
lots of people did. Genevieve Jones didn’t even think she was an artist. She thought of herself as
a skilled stenographer, recording the world as she found it. She wanted to be useful, and she was.
Still it was impossible for Arnold to look at those images and not see the artist’s mind restlessly
turning over its past in a search for peace. What troubled his sleep was how badly she’d needed
to see the work finished. Lingering in death’s vestibule for weeks, she’d somehow found the
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energy to teach her mother to draw so that her mother could finish it. Her mother, Virginia,
eventually went blind in the effort. When the book was finally published, a decade after
Genevieve’s death, it sold fewer than ten copies.
It was a myth, but it was a potent one. There were certain names and figures he could not
extract from it. Genevieve Jones. Tony Lambert, beside whose hospital bed he had sat two hours
a day for three weeks as Tony was dying of AIDS in 1987. Tony was a friend from art school,
from before Arnold had realized he was better at seeing what others had done than he was at
doing. In the hospital, Tony was twenty-six and just coming into his own as a painter. He was
painting the colors he saw when he closed his eyes, colors that had never existed in the world he
shared with other people. He painted fields of color overlaid with grids of intersecting lines that
he scratched into the paint with a plastic hospital fork. He tried to make the lines as straight as he
could, but he was weak by then and his hand shook. Every day he picked up the same small
canvas and did another layer of color, another net of lines obscuring and complicating the layers
beneath, drawing fragments of the old layers up into the new, until he couldn’t anymore. Arnold
had written about that painting and the way it was made, but he was just getting started as a critic
then and the article ran in a minor press, and no one paid much attention. Tony’s parents took the
painting from his room after he died, and Arnold never learned what happened to it after that.
Matthea Sanders. Fragile as he was just then, he couldn’t think about her. As soon as his
mind began to form an image of her it turned away involuntarily, a self-protective instinct, like
trying to look at the sun. He walked the wide path at the back of the store, beside the refrigerated
displays of packaged cheese and yogurt and orange juice, where he felt least watched. He was
aware of how strange he looked, pacing the store in slow motion with his cart empty, like some
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huge aquatic creature forlornly circling its tank at the aquarium. One by one he peered down the
aisles, trying to imagine what anyone could find to want there.
It was a true supermarket, in the ancient mold—vast and blank, with harsh lighting that
gleamed off the polished linoleum, bad music playing from tinny speakers that stopped every
other minute so someone could call for help in a crackling voice over the intercom. It was the
only grocery store within ten miles of his house—uncrowded now, which surprised him. There
were only the employees pointlessly moving things around on the shelves and two or three
solitary old people like himself who’d ignored the weather warnings and gone out too late.
There’d been a run on batteries and bottled water and milk for some reason, but otherwise the
shelves were full. He had the whole American cornucopia to choose from.
Outside it was nearly as dark as night though it was mid-afternoon. He could see nothing
in the huge, distant windows but the reflection of the registers. His children were out there
somewhere, presumably, on separate roads in separate cars, traveling toward him through the
same darkness. Anything could happen. Inside the store was pure light, clean-washed and
shadowless. Boxes of instant rice loomed before him like a row of cenotaphs. Uncle Ben’s.
Zatarain’s. Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat. The names and images had each been meant to
summon the spirit of another time and place, and instead, like a black hole of language, they’d
swallowed up what they meant to describe. They were powerful nonsense syllables, latent with
erasure. The San Francisco Treat and San Francisco could not exist in the same mind at the same
time. He had an image of himself swallowing mouthfuls of uncooked rice right there in the aisle,
choking on it, breaking his teeth.
The woman who’d been standing beside him, the store’s logo embroidered on her sleeve,
reached across his body to adjust one of the boxes and he stepped back, muttering apologies.
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“Why’re you sorry?” she said.
She had stopped what she was doing and was looking right at him, actually waiting for an
answer. He didn’t know why he felt guilty. He couldn’t even discern who was to blame for the
sudden strangeness of the situation. He wanted only to be done with this interaction as quickly as
possible, and yet he had no choice but to explain himself.
“I just didn’t mean to be in your way,” he said, talking too low and too fast. “Sorry.”
Now he was apologizing for having apologized. He realized how long it had been since
he’d spoken to anyone other than his children over the phone. He sucked his teeth in the pain of
his own awkwardness, which she must have heard. He was already backing away but she kept
talking, looking increasingly worried now, trying to mend the rift she’d inadvertently created in
the smooth fabric of prescribed interaction that, a moment earlier, had safely held them both.
With her mask covering the lower half of her face he couldn’t tell how old she was. Much
younger than he was, but not a kid. She seemed to have some kind of Midwestern accent,
Northern Plains maybe, and he wondered what she was doing in this part of Connecticut, where
no one had much reason to be unless they were from here or had a job in the city.
“I didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” she said. “I just meant, you know, we like people
shopping here. You don’t have to worry about being in the way. You don’t have to apologize for
shopping.”
“Sorry,” he said again, like a stroke victim. Walking backwards, he almost tripped over
his own feet, then slammed the front of the cart into the wall of shelves as he spun it around to
speed his exit.
He was sorry. At the entrance to the shopping plaza there’d been a sign written by hand
in sharpie on white posterboard. A friend might be waiting behind a stranger’s mask, it said.
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Someone had thought of that sentiment and spent time trying to find the right words in which to
express it. More likely they’d seen it somewhere else and copied it, but still—they’d gone to
their supply closet to find a giant sheet of posterboard and written their message in a careful hand
and gone out in the cold to staple it to a telephone pole, just in case someone needed to see it. It
couldn’t have been there long. It wouldn’t have survived the weather. Surely the coming
snowstorm would ruin it. Why couldn’t he be human? What had happened to him?
“Uh, folks,” said a man’s voice hesitantly over the intercom, “we’re gonna be closing in
about five minutes here. Just wanted to let you all know. Looks like the weather’s about to get
pretty, pretty bad, and I’m sure we’d all like to get home safe. Sorry for the inconvenience. Um,
but if you could please finish up your, make your final selections and, make your way to the
registers, we’d all really appreciate it. Thank you.”
Arnold had waited too long. Of course he had. He looked down the long corridor at the
back of the store and then down the aisles one by one and saw nobody but the one cashier
patiently standing by the one open register. The manager on the intercom might have been
speaking directly to him, using the plural just to spare him the white hot shame he was feeling
anyway.
What did his children like to eat? Daniel would accept only Lucky Charms for breakfast
while Sarah, with an instinct for wholesomeness and health that had been with her almost since
birth, ate bran flakes. But surely this wasn’t right. Surely this information was decades out of
date and hadn’t been true since they were children. It didn’t matter. His fingers were so thick
with panic he could hardly lift a box from the shelf without knocking all the others over. A
gallon of skim milk for Sarah, a gallon of whole for Daniel. Was that right? If they wanted
something in between they could always mix the two together. He found an enormous box of
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frozen chicken nuggets shaped like dinosaurs and he put that in the cart, thinking it might feed
them all. His mind was stuck in childhood. Well, after all there was one child coming, along with
a baby. Did the baby need anything? Surely her mother would have seen to it.
There was a whole list of things he was supposed to procure for the Day of Midge, but he
hadn’t written it down. He had trusted his memory, and now panic had shaken his mind clean
like an Etch-a-Sketch. He could remember only Welch’s white grape juice, and so he half-ran up
and down the aisles searching for it like it was the holy grail, swinging the shopping cart
heedlessly around the corners. He nearly collided with the back of the same shop employee who,
minutes earlier, had startled him by asking what he was sorry for.
“Sorry!” he shouted.
“Anything I can help you find?” she said, and though at this point he was ready to
abandon the cart where it stood and run screaming into the night, he told her what he was
looking for and allowed her to lead him to it like a child. It turned out to be nowhere near the
regular grape juice or any other fruit juice but instead tucked in between the tonic water and the
ginger ale, one shelf up from the powdered fiber mixes. A whole section for things old people
drank to settle their stomachs or mixed into cocktails everyone under eighty had forgotten how to
make. He had no use for any of these things, and still it seemed to him such an act of generosity
and empathy to have arranged the store this way that he was suddenly overwhelmed with
gratitude. He wanted to clasp this woman’s hand in both of his to thank her, but surely she would
have misconstrued the gesture, and surely it hadn’t been her doing anyway. He wanted to find
the man who had spoken a moment ago over the intercom and thank him too.
“Anything else?” said the woman. She wanted him out of the store, and she was prepared
to become his personal shopper if that was what it took.
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“No,” Arnold said. He wanted to ask her name but saw that she was wearing it. Sara
without the h, his daughter’s name but not his daughter’s name. The thought occurred to him that
it would have been disrespectful to use her name without first having asked her for it, and stupid
to ask for it when it was right there on her shirt. “No, I think I’m good. I’ll head for the exit now.
Thanks so much for your help.”
At the register he watched in embarrassed silence as a Latino man who looked even older
than he was scanned his sad assortment of useless items one by one and slid them down the
counter to Sara, who had appeared there as if by magic to bag them. He could see that he was the
last customer left in the store. Most of the workers had gone home. Outside, the darkness pressed
against the windowpanes. Inside everything had become suddenly beautiful—the bright, flat
light, the cereal boxes and detergent bottles in endless rows, in reds and blues that had no analog
in nature except maybe in the skin of some poisonous tropical frog. The gleaming linoleum, the
mylar balloons printed in more of the same bright colors, saying happy birthday and happy new
year. He wanted to stay there forever. At least through the passage of the storm. He and Sara and
this other man—David C. according to his nametag—and anyone else who hadn’t left yet. Surely
they could find blankets of some kind in the back somewhere, and piles of broken-down
cardboard boxes to use as couches and beds, and right there on the shelves was everything they
could possibly want or need, and row upon row of it.
“Don’t go home,” he wanted to say. “Stay here and let’s be host and guest to one another
and entertain each other with the stories of our lives and share in all this abundance. There’s
plenty of time. There’s nowhere we have to be.”
He remembered another day, almost two years before, when the aisles had been full of
people and the shelves almost empty. The sheer visual shock of that. All through the previous
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day he had listened to the news and thought, “Maybe this really is going to be bad after all,” and
then by nightfall it was clear that the disaster was already well underway and he had utterly
failed to prepare. In the supermarket the next morning were all the others who had failed in the
same way. People wandered among the empty shelves in a daze, not speaking, or made feeble
jokes and laughed performatively, imitating the good humor and fellow-feeling they must have
thought the situation called for. “You really learn what people consider inedible,” he heard
someone say, too loudly. “People would rather starve than eat cream of celery soup, apparently.”
And it was true—the canned soup section was completely cleared out except for dozens and
dozens of cans of cream of celery, many of which had been knocked on their sides as people
fished among them for things they could imagine eating.
You couldn’t take in the whole disaster at once. At that stage, there wasn’t even an image
that could serve as a metonym for what was really happening. In 2001, he’d understood that the
nightmare images on his screen were only the outward sign of a disaster whose causes reached
back untraceably into the past and whose effects would stretch even more untraceably into the
future. Still, the event itself was discreet. It happened in one place. It had a before and an after.
This disaster had no beginning and no end. By the time he’d learned it was happening at all it
had already been happening, elsewhere, for weeks. Then there were the days in which it seemed
that elsewhere might become everywhere, and then the days in which it was increasingly clear
that it already had, but no one would admit it. There were timelines—two weeks to flatten the
curve and so on—but the timelines were obvious lies, meant to offer the collective mind no more
bad news than it could take in at once. Since you knew that the timelines were lies, what could
you suppose about the truth? Life would not go back to the way it was before. The disaster had
no end. It was always elsewhere, nowhere in particular, and at the same time it was always right
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where you were, maybe already inside you, moving with you, sending out spores to seed new
arms of the disaster wherever you went. Elsewhere, people were dying. Arnold had received
word that his classes would be remote for the time being. In truth the bulk of his work had
always been remote. There would be no more studio visits, no more openings to attend for the
foreseeable future, which if he was being honest was a relief. Meanwhile other people were
losing their jobs or having to risk their lives to keep them. Anyone might kill him just by
speaking to him. Anything he touched might kill him. He might kill someone else just by
standing near them. A kind gesture, a friendly greeting, and he might set off a chain reaction of
death that would leave his legacy on earth worse than that of a serial killer. Every tiny choice had
become unbearably serious, and yet the things he was forced to think about weren’t serious at all.
There he was with all those others, friends and strangers, having pushed death to the back of his
mind so that the front of his mind could be free to worry about where he would find toilet paper.
_______

Outside it was colder than before. Not nighttime dark as it had seemed from inside, but
dim in a way that had nothing to do with night. Like someone had turned the brightness all the
way down on the screen of the world. Like twilight, but without the purpling sky and the soft
light. The cold reached him right through his down jacket and the flannel shirt and thermal tee he
had on under that. His fingers went numb before he had a chance to pull his gloves on. Hildy was
a big dog, well insulated. She was part border collie and part Bernese mountain dog, among
other things. She had long, thick fur and a hearty disposition and was never bothered by cold.
Still he worried. Would she find a place to keep warm?
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He’d parked on the far side of the lot because it was easier not to have to slot his car into
the narrow space between other cars, but now the lot was empty and the distance felt enormous
and threatening. He had to take off his right glove to find the key, but then with his bare hand he
could hardly hold it. It took him several seconds, fingers stiff and shaking, to press the little
recessed button that unlocked the car. It was a big sedan, and the trunk was cavernous—a well of
soft light and deep shadow. While he was behind its raised lid, tucking the groceries into the
back corners where they wouldn’t slide around, it was all he could see. Then he closed the trunk
and saw the blank expanse of the parking lot, the supermarket with just one bank of lights on
way at the back now, and on the other side of him Route 7 bending away into the converging of
the forested hills on its way to the Merritt. He could hear geese somewhere, still, but he couldn’t
see them. He heard a woman’s voice calling his name, but alone as he felt he couldn’t imagine
where it might have come from.
“Arnold!” she said again, whoever she was.
He turned slowly, tracing the sound, and found its source inside the one other car in his
section of the lot, an aging green Corolla he had assumed belonged to someone who worked
there, though now he recognized it as Dolores Eider’s car. She had her window open and her
engine running, and she was looking at him like she was trying to decide what kind of help he
might need.
“What are you doing out here?” she said.
“Looking for my dog.” It was the answer that came to his mind and so he said it, though
it wasn’t at all what he was doing.
“Hildy, right?”
“Yes.”
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“Good name.”
He didn’t ask how she knew the name of his dog or why she thought it was a good one.
He knew and didn’t want to know. He stepped away from his car and toward hers so he could see
her better. Her hair was whiter and more wild then he remembered it, her skin red with the cold,
almost translucent, spidered with thin, livid veins across the cheeks. When you see someone only
occasionally, you are conscious of watching them age. Mattie’s appearance had changed too over
the years, but most of the time he had hardly noticed, as he had hardly noticed the expansion of
his own waist, the thinning of his hair and the sprouting of new hair from his ears, the deepening
lines at the corners of his mouth, which lately had become troughs sometimes disconcertingly
damp with sweat or spit. Dolores looked radically different from the image of herself in his
memory, which must have been years out of date. It made him feel like a voyeur, like he was
witness to some process of the body he wasn’t supposed to see. She might have been thinking
much the same of him.
“You’ll find her,” she said, not unkindly.
“It’s not the first time,” he said. “She seems to need to disappear once in a while. She
always finds her way back, but the storm worries me. What about you? What are you doing out
here?”
“I wanted mint chocolate chip,” she said. She held up an open pint of pale green Breyer’s
ice cream, which she was eating with an actual metal spoon she must have brought with her for
the purpose.
“Do you always eat your ice cream in the parking lot?” he said.
“Don’t shame me, Arnold. There’s enough bitterness in the world. People have to take
pleasure where they find it.”
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It was a talent some people had—the ability to leapfrog over the prescribed period of
small talk without causing offence. They didn’t know each other at all. In the last three minutes
they might have spoken more words to one another than they had in thirty years of being
neighbors. He wasn’t surprised she had that talent, as his wife had too, but he thought there had
to be a reason she’d decided to use it just then. He’d forgiven her years ago for temporarily
stealing his wife. He didn’t hate her—it was just awkward, and so he’d avoided her. He’d
assumed she’d been avoiding him too. Now they were talking like friends. He’d almost forgotten
the bomb she’d dropped on his life six weeks ago by sending that photo to ArtForum.
“I’d been meaning to knock on your door,” she said. “It’s weird running into you here.”
He thought she meant to acknowledge the guilt that, in his view, she should have felt.
The photo belonged to her. She was, presumably, its subject as well as its rightful owner. She
had a right to do what she liked with it. Still, he thought, she should have consulted him. She
should at least have shown it to him first, warned him so he could prepare himself. But she didn’t
feel guilty. When she said it was weird running into him, she meant only that it was a strange
coincidence, the kind of thing some people—though not her—would ascribe to fate.
“I could use your help,” she said. “I don’t know anything about developing film. I have
some undeveloped film your wife—Matthea—shot and I don’t know what to do with it.”
Mattie never used the word shot like that, Arnold thought. He winced when he heard it,
even more visibly than he had half a second earlier when he heard Dolores’s voice speaking his
wife’s name. Mattie had hated the violence that word implied, the association of the camera with
the gun, a metaphor of such long standing that people had ceased to register it as metaphor and
carelessly used it as an ordinary verb. Still, in spite of herself Mattie had believed in the power of
that metaphor too—once language binds one thing to another, no power can unbind them. Once
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the camera had become a gun—around the first time a man pointed one at a woman, probably—
it would always be a gun. It was why she never aimed them at people.
“I can recommend some good developers,” Arnold said.
“She would want it done her way, at home,” Dolores said. In my home, was what Arnold
heard. “You must know her process. You must have seen her do it.”
Whether she’d set the trap on purpose or not he couldn’t tell, but she’d caught him. He
couldn’t admit that he’d seen her do it only once, or that she’d taught him nothing about how she
did it. He knew so little about what had passed between Dolores and his wife. How impoverished
might his intimacy with Mattie have been in comparison to the intimacy that had sprung up
between her and this strange woman in a few weeks’ time?
“When?” he said.
“I’m asking you for a favor,” she said, “so you decide when. I’m almost always home.”
She dug a pad of paper and a pen out of her glovebox and wrote her number down for him, as no
one had done since the invention of the smartphone. “Call ahead if you want,” she said, “or just
come by and knock on my door when you feel like it.”
He took the scrap of paper from her hand and turned to walk back around to the other
side of his car. Isolated snowflakes, tiny, deeply frozen, were drifting down out of the dimness of
the upper air. They’d both waited far too long to leave.
“Dolores,” he called as she rolled up her window.
“What?” she said.
“Will you keep an eye out for Hildy? She might wander your way. Call me if you see
her.” He told her his number, and she wrote it down on her pad.
“Is she friendly?” Dolores said.
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“Friendly but stubborn.”
“Will she come if I call her?”
“If she feels like it. She will if you offer her something to eat.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.”
___

He shut himself inside his car and waited until the cabin light went out and the world
outside the windows came into focus. Snowflakes, fine as ground glass, whirled beneath the
streetlights. It was still the same world Mattie had lived in. Somewhere, she was still in it. The
world contained all of time as well as all of space, so no one was ever gone, and nothing was
ever finished happening. It was only that he was stuck in the part of the world where she wasn’t.
Nothing he could do to dislodge himself from the flow of human time. In the part of the world
where he was stuck, she existed only in his imperfect memory, and if he remembered her wrong
or spoke falsely of her there was nothing she could do to correct the record. She couldn’t fight
with him as she used to, insisting that he’d misunderstood, guessed wrong, judged her once again
according to a rubric that properly applied only to him.
Somewhere else she was still standing beside him in the darkroom, the first and only
time, and he was watching the deft movements of her hands, watching as the image of the moon
resolved out of emptiness into inexplicably potent form. And somewhere else she was four
months pregnant with their first child, bent over to shave her legs in the shower and yelling at
him because he’d borrowed her razor again and left it face down in a puddle so the blades had
rusted. Strange what the mind remembered. Never enough, never what it needed. The versions of
these scenes that lived in his memory were only distorted shadows of the real events, which were
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still part of the world even if he—the version of himself that was sitting right then in his car with
the engine running, almost too dizzy with hunger to drive, the only self he could be—would
never see them again as they were when they were happening.
Somewhere she was lying on a cot in that cabin, far hungrier than he was now or had ever
been. Having forgotten what hunger was after a while, probably. She was sick. The fact that she
was trapped in the cabin was the cause of her sickness. After the first snowfall she’d been able to
get out of the cabin still, but she hadn’t been able to get far in the steep terrain, in the deep snow.
She’d struggled until she was almost too far from the cabin to make it back. When finally she did
get back she closed the door for shelter against the cold, and the snow rose then little by little
until it shut out the light from the windows and blocked the door. He hadn’t been there to see any
of that. He had to imagine it. He imagined it as if it had happened to him, as if he had been her. It
didn’t matter that it hadn’t happened to him. Imagination was no less real than memory. The real
event was out there, objectively in the world even if no one could see it. You could see its
effects, as you knew the wind was there because the leaves were moving.
If not for his vigilance, this imagined memory would have swallowed everything else he
knew about her life. It was the problem of human time again. Once the disaster had made itself
known, it tended to stretch backward, colonizing the past. Every other moment of her life—of
their life together—became a moment in which it hadn’t happened yet, but was going to—every
happiness seemed like a trick, since it fell into a life that was always going to end in that awful
way. Which of course was not at all how it worked, not at all how life was lived. He didn’t
believe in fate or astrology or predestination. Nothing was written in the stars or the tea leaves.
Maybe from God’s perspective all of time existed at once, not a line but a wide, treeless plain in
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which it was possible to see forever in all directions with equal clarity. From our perspective
nothing was going to happen until it had happened.
The fasting helped, somehow. He couldn’t know what it had been like for her in the
fourth week without food. Because the question was unanswerable, it became huge in his mind,
dense with irresistible gravity like a collapsing star, too bright and hot to look at. But he could
contain it in his body in diluted form, a candle lit from the larger fire. That way he could look at
it and feel its heat without the fear that it might consume him. Lately it had been happening more
and more often. He needed to feel the knife edge of his hunger sharpening inside him, passing
through the brief period of urgency into the longer patience, until he forgot he was hungry. Then
the hard, sharp edge was not his hunger but himself. He didn’t know how long that patience
could last. He’d never tried to outlast it. At some point he would feel like eating again. It was
never that he needed food, but that he no longer needed hunger. When the need for hunger
passed, he ate. There was no ritual about it. Nothing deliberate. He fixed himself a turkey
sandwich or whatever he felt like eating, whatever he had on hand, and ate and enjoyed
mindlessly, accepting once again that there would be no limit to succession of his days.
___

Sometime in the last hour he had crossed the threshold into the time of patience. There
was no longer the alarm ringing in his brain, demanding that he get up and do something every
time he tried to sit still and think. It had been eighteen hours since he’d eaten. He had less
physical strength than he would normally have—moving the few groceries from the cart into the
trunk of his car had exhausted him—and his eyes were having trouble focusing, or else they
focused with senseless tenacity on some random object, as if they had their own will, their own
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hunger. It felt clearly unsafe to drive. At least the road was empty and quiet. Already he was
away from town, tucked between hills and watched over by the scattered houses. All the way
home he could follow these narrow roads where no one else would be. Even if he missed a stop
sign, the chance that there would be anyone there to collide with had to be less than the chance of
a lightning strike. He could hit a patch of unseen ice and go spinning across both lanes into a
steep ravine and still he would hurt no one but himself.
He went slowly. He watched the ice crystals swirling in his headlights. There was less of
him now. Not less of his body—as far as he knew he had never gone long enough without food
to lose weight—but less of the life-long accretion of meaningless habits, inclinations and
aversions that made up his personality. All that would come back. Only for now it was in
abeyance. He had a headache, but it wasn’t the sharp, insistent kind. It wouldn’t distract him. It
was a dull weight at the back of his skull, like there was some viscous, heavy liquid pooling
there. The feeling was familiar to him, like a friend. It kept his mind clear. His hands had stopped
shaking. The car was a good one, a Mercedes-Benz he’d bought in happier times to reward
himself for professional accomplishments he couldn’t imagine caring about now. It was almost a
decade old, but still the engine did its work without fuss, and in the cabin there was almost no
sound at all. He turned off the heater to stop that sound too. He could hear the blood rushing
inside his ears. He could hear the rough, wet stone of his hunger scraping away the metal of
himself, removing one microscopic layer after another until what remained was sharp enough to
cut whatever touched it.
He thought of Daniel and Sarah and hoped they weren’t still out there, driving through
the dark as he was, on roads that were growing more dangerous by the minute. Daniel had texted
him that morning to tell him about some kind of accident slowing him down, but that was a long
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time ago. In the best case he and his sister might both be at home already, with all the other
beloved people, small and large, who came with them. Waiting for him to arrive. Worrying. He
hoped fervently that they were, though if so he wasn’t sure he would know how to explain
himself, or how to speak to them at all.
Half a mile from his house was the train station. The crossing gates were down when he
reached it, and the commuter train stood blocking his view of the platform, waiting for
passengers though most likely no one was there. It was 4:07, probably the last train that would
pass through the station before the storm shut the tracks down. As far as he could tell there was
no one aboard. The train started up again and he watched it pass before his eyes and then away, a
container of light receding into the darkness. When the alarm bells stopped there was a moment
of absolute silence, then a motorcycle engine bellowing in the distance, then the barking of a dog
from somewhere among the shabby backyards and fragmentary woods that ringed the station. He
crossed the tracks, parked in one of the empty commuter spaces, and got out. With the car all
sealed against the cold, he’d barely heard the dog, but he’d thought it sounded like Hildy’s voice.
It was crazy to think that, he knew. Probably there were almost as many dogs within reach of his
ears as there were people. Still, he was near enough to his own house that it might have been her.
It had never occurred to him that he might be able to tell her voice apart from that of any other
dog her size. But the human brain was made for such impossible distinctions, wasn’t it?
Whatever made might mean. When his children called him on the landline phone, which had no
caller ID, didn’t he always know them by their voices within a word? Mattie too. He’d forgotten
what her voice sounded like. His imagination couldn’t summon it at all anymore. Still he was
certain that if he ever heard it again he would know it was her without having to look. Why
shouldn’t it be the same with Hildy, who was with him far more than any human was these days?
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He called her name softly, embarrassed. Then he called it louder. The same dog
answered, and he was certain then that it wasn’t Hildy. It was just some stranger’s dog, unsettled
by the sound of his hollering, warning him away from the master’s house. He would have known
if it had been her. He couldn’t say how, but then he couldn’t have said how he recognized any
voice, or any face. He couldn’t have described what his own children looked like with enough
precision to distinguish either of them from millions of other people. To know another person
was to rely on a form of knowledge that had nothing to do with language, or with thought.
The light was almost wholly gone now. The sun was close to the ground, making the
clouds glow like embers from behind the screen of bare trees. He could just make out the shop
signs on the other side of the parking lot: the Video Emporium, the Ace in the Hole Package
Store, the dental offices of Alan Lao, D.D.S. Maybe he couldn’t make them out. Maybe it was
only that he knew what they said. How any of those places stayed in business he had no idea.
They’d all been there longer than he had, in the center of what had never been a real town and
over time had become even less of one—one of the least frequented stops on a lesser tributary of
the MTA’s New Haven line. The lights were off in the windows, and there were no cars parked
in front. The only artificial light he could see came from the fluorescent bulbs in the platform’s
ceiling , casting a veil of milky light over the raised concrete floor and the metal benches there.
From where he stood, it looked eerily like a stage. He could almost see himself—girded for
battle, middle-aged rather than actually old as he was now—pacing behind that veil. For years
he’d stood there almost every morning, waiting for the train like a businessman. It had been a
long time since he’d done that. Lately his trips to the city were infrequent enough that he figured
he might as well drive.
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Friends and colleagues had given him a hard time, predictably, for moving out to the
boonies after Sarah was born. They’d done it, he and Mattie, for the usual bourgeois reasons.
They didn’t want to pay rent their whole lives, and at that point they couldn’t afford to buy in the
city. The schools were highly rated, and you could just send your kids there without having to
enter the scrum of anxious parents jostling for entry into the city’s elite public schools. And then
truthfully it had been what Mattie had always wanted—to tuck her life away like a secret in an
unknown place, to do her work somewhere far from the people and institutions that valued it.
A dog again, not the same one, farther away now. He had no idea whether it might be his
dog. Only wishful thinking had convinced him that he could even begin to know. Ten thousand
generations had honed our brains for the task of recognizing one another. What could be more
central to the definition of humanity, with all its hopeful connotations of morality and decency,
than knowing that one human is not interchangeable with another? And yet the blessing extended
only to humans. It helped that Hildy was a mutt. No other dog could have the same precise
alignment of genes from the various intersecting breed lines as she had. If she were pure Bernese
Mountain dog and placed in a pack of dogs of the same breed, he wasn’t sure he’d have been
able to pick her out, but he knew it would take her less than a second to spot him in a crowd of
people. Of course, Mattie would have said. As always, it was the animal world that was forced to
accommodate us, in our weakness.
A payphone stood at the entrance to the parking lot, beside the road. Another thing so
nearly invisible in the darkness that he saw it as much with his memory as with his eyes. Surely
it didn’t work anymore, and it was just that no one had gotten around to removing it. It had been
years—how many?—since he’d seen anyone use it. He’d used it once himself, in mid-winter
more than thirty years ago, when he’d come home from a day of confrontations in the city to find
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that his car wouldn’t start in the cold. This was before he had a cell phone. Before anyone did,
probably. By luck he had two quarters and a dime in his pocket—change leftover from buying
lunch—and he dialed up Mattie and asked her to come to his rescue. He waited in the cold
through the coming and going of the next train. It was rush hour still, and when the train arrived
the station came briefly to life before descending again into desolation. There were still cars in
the lot after that batch of people had departed, but the world was so silent and still it was hard to
believe anyone would ever come to claim them. He saw Mattie’s headlights coming from a long
way off in the dark, but he wasn’t sure it was her. Then she pulled in and honked once as if he
hadn’t seen her. She was vaguely angry, though she said nothing. He could imagine how it
was—how she’d spent the whole day searching among the chaos of the children’s lives for some
scrap of time she could use for herself only to see him steal it from her. The kids were there in
the car because she couldn’t leave them at home—Daniel who was maybe two years old then,
strapped in his rear-facing child seat, eating cookies from a zip-lock bag, Sarah beside him
crowing about how their father had been lost or trapped and they’d had to undertake this
adventure to save him. “We saved you, Daddy,” she sang in varying melodies, in her loudest
voice, all the way home.
He had come unstuck in time, and now he was nowhere. It was the hunger, which by now
had severed him from his body and severed his body from the world it moved through. The
children as children, sitting together in the back seat of a car driven by their mother, singing
through the dark to gather him from where he was stranded, were no less real to him than his
grown children who were just then driving their own separate cars to his house to meet him,
trailing the comet tails of their grown-up lives behind them.
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He walked the little distance to the payphone and picked it up. He couldn’t have said
why. His fingers rose toward the keypad and he realized they were ready to dial the house, as if
calling the house from this phone might mean calling the house as it was thirty years ago, with
his wife and children still living in it. There was no dial tone. He wasn’t sure he remembered
how payphones worked. Maybe you had to put your money in to get the dial tone. He dug a
quarter out of his pocket and pushed it into the slot and it dropped straight down into the coin-
return tray. The water-logged and frozen phonebook dangling on its chain below the phone said
2007. He pressed the receiver more firmly against his ear and heard the rush of his blood echoing
among the hollow spaces and the tangles of wire inside. The plastic felt warm against his cold
skin, and he kept it there, holding a hand over the other ear to warm it too and to shut out the
sounds of the outside world, which had seemed unsettlingly silent a moment ago and now felt
cacophonous.
After a while he heard a sound in the receiver that he knew hadn’t come from him. It was
a high, fine ringing, so faint he couldn’t be sure it was real at first—the way a star can disappear
if you look right at it. The sound was continuous, but for long periods of time he lost it and was
forced to wonder whether it had been there at all. He heard his blood surging like a tide among
the wires. He heard the outside sounds—a screen door slamming somewhere, a voice raised in
some distant kitchen, calling to the beloved in the next room. Then he found it again, ringing
along the dead wire from thousands of miles away across the plains and prairies. He found that
he could focus on it so completely that he stopped hearing anything else. Then it was loud where
it had been quiet. Undertones revealed themselves in layers—a low, mineral rumbling; a frenetic
chatter that danced along the unbroken filament of the upper register. It was one sound, but it
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was also multiple, as if it were carrying on a conversation with itself from which he was wholly,
irrevocably excluded.
Eventually he understood that Mattie was there, somehow inside the sound. It wasn’t at
all that she was speaking to him. It wasn’t that he sensed her presence by some mystical intuition
either. If anything, his mind was less capable of picturing her face or conjuring the sound of her
voice than it had ever been. When he tried to imagine what the sound itself might look like, he
saw stalks of wheat sheared off four inches above the frozen ground, a cloud comprised of
hundreds of starlings banking in unison, performing the unfathomable geometry of their
collective mind in the air just above that field, the straight white line of a high-altitude jet’s vapor
trail cutting the evening sky in two. None of that had anything to do with her, but he recognized
her. It was neither more nor less explicable than the process by which he would have recognized
her face if she’d been standing beside him.

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7

The sky is low and heavy now, like a sheet thrown across the air and drifting downward
to cover the earth.
The color of the sky is the color of water just before it freezes.
Hildy can’t see the sun at all anymore. The world is nearly as dark as it as at night,
though she knows that night must be a way off still because she isn’t tired or hungry.
Between her and the sky there are the interwoven branches of the pine trees, small birds
chattering unseen in the hidden places, fat snowflakes settling down through the air among the
trunks of those trees.
She can smell the smoke someone’s wood-burning stove, faintly, miles away it must be.
She uses that to navigate. That and the smell of cold, running water clotted with the slick, black
bodies of dead leaves, ice forming at its edges.
The sound of that water.
Delicious.
Sound of tires on the road ahead of her, though she can’t see them. It would take no time
at all, no real effort to walk to the edge of that road and then to cross it and be almost home. She
knows by now how to cross the road without getting killed, especially in low light, when usually
you can see the headlights coming over the crest of the hill before the car itself appears.
Smell of some dead thing rotting in some nearby pocket of the earth, the crows having
been at it already, the body frozen now. Frost dulling the scent some, stripping away some of its
finer textures, but still—delicious. She wants to know what it is. She wants to get close to it.
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There is only one world, and all these things are part of it: her master’s house no less than
the lowering sky and the cold, fast-flowing stream and the smell of death.
Her master’s house, which is her house.
Hand that feeds her.
Though she can feed herself, can’t she?
Arnold will be angry with her when she does get home. He will scold her.
Still, even that is delicious: his anger and then the way his anger recedes from him,
almost right away, like a stream that floods and then settles back into its narrow bed, easy and
calm again.
Smell of that dead thing again. She will find it. She will run at the crows and watch them
scatter. Maybe she’ll catch one.
All of it is the world—the bloody woods, the heating vent beside her bed, the road and its
cars, the smell of those logs burning. Arnold’s voice, his hand in her fur.
All of it is hers.

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8

How disorienting it was, for Sarah, to stand at the kitchen window in what was not her
home, what hadn’t been her home for twenty years, and watch her father’s car pull into the
driveway, tires crunching the gravel, headlights bleaching the trunks of the bare trees and
flooding the lawn with brightness. He might have been coming home from a day of work in the
city, and she might have been stuck in the years of painful emergence from childhood, waiting to
unload on him the confusions of her day. He was the one she shared those things with back
then—the social circles that would not open to welcome her, the unrequited crushes and the
crushes requited in ways that turned out to be not at all what she’d wanted. She couldn’t say
exactly why she’d confided in her father and not her mother. He’d seemed more human in that
way, somehow. More apt to remember what it was like to care above all about being liked by
strangers. Her mother was infinitely remote from such concerns. She had her work and needed
nothing else. She would have dismissed Sarah’s problems as petty.
These family gatherings always shook her in the same way. She needed it no less than
she feared it—the past selves crowding the threshold of her consciousness, jostling for the
chance to step out into the stage lights.
When her father opened the car door and rose from behind it, lit now by the house’s
floodlights, it was clear that he was not at all the man she’d been expecting, but even this
surprise was by now familiar. The father that lived in her memory was always more or less as
he’d been when she was fifteen or sixteen, and every time she saw him now he was a little less
like that man. Still, this time was worse. He seemed to have aged several years in the months
since she’d last seen him. Even in the dim light she could see how his jacket hung like a tent over
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his thin frame and how carefully he placed one foot in front of the other on the loose, uneven
ground, as if he couldn’t quite trust his legs to hold him. The snow was coming faster now than it
had been even five minutes before. Already it was thick enough on the ground to erase the grass
and pebbles. She couldn’t think why he’d gone out so late, or why he’d been gone so long. She
and her family had arrived to an empty house almost two hours ago, and she’d answered
Sammy’s questions in a voice meant, she realized, to reassure herself—I’m sure there’s a good
reason. If there were anything wrong, we would have heard about it. He’ll be here any minute.
Counting the minutes then, wondering when the moment might arrive in which she would have
to translate concern into some kind of action, and what the action might be. If he’d been gone
any longer, he might not have made it home.
“Dad’s here,” she called to Jeff. “I’m going out to help him with the groceries.”
“Hold on,” Jeff said, “I’ll go too.”
“No,” she said. “It’s fine. Doesn’t take three of us. Watch your movie.”
He was watching some animated film with Sammy on the huge TV her father never used.
Sarah wasn’t sure what this one was about. One of the spate of interchangeable recent Pixar
films in which teens go on quests to reconnect with their dead fathers. She’d been mostly hearing
it from adjacent rooms rather than watching it, and so she’d experienced the film as a series of
cloying songs separated by explosions. Jonah had fallen asleep in the car and stayed that way,
which was convenient for the time being but guaranteed he would be fully awake just when
everyone else was ready to go to sleep.
She thrust her feet into her father’s snow boots. Several sizes too big, they hung like
shackles from her ankles as she walked. She nearly tripped on the stone steps, which were slick
with snow and would have sent her bouncing on her bruised tailbone all the way down to the
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driveway. She hadn’t even taken the time to find a jacket. The mothering impulse, once kindled,
was always ready to attach itself to anyone she loved. Anyone but herself. What was her father
thinking? He looked tentative, almost confused, blinking up into the floodlights that bathed him
in warm light but from where he stood must have made of her a shadow. She felt for a moment
like she was looking into the future, a glimpse of her life as it would be in fifteen or twenty
years, when she herself would be old and would have to be at her father’s side all the time,
helping him down the long hallway to the door she hadn’t seen yet, though she knew it was
there. When her father reached it, then she would see it. It would be waiting for her too.
Daniel would not be suited for that job. It wasn’t his fault. That kind of patience wasn’t
something he could access. That ability to sit still in the face of fear and disgust and
embarrassment. She didn’t have those powers either, most of the time, but she could find them
when she needed to. Daniel would want to send him to a care home when the time came, which
would be perfectly reasonable, the modern thing to do, what their father would want, even. And
she wouldn’t be able to do that, which would mean that the task of caring for him would fall to
her. Not that she would have to bathe him and wipe his ass for him as she did for her own
children and as he had once, presumably, done for her. They would be able to hire someone for
things like that, thank God. Still it would mean a suspension of her own life in the world, once
again. It would mean an intimacy with the offices of dying that she had been spared when her
mother died alone, far away, unknown to anyone.
“Dad,” she said. “What are you doing? Here, give me those. Get inside.”
“I’m fine,” he said, almost hostile. He turned his body aside so she couldn’t grab the bags
from his hands. “There’s three more in the trunk. You can get those.”
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She did as she was told, and just like that the image was reversed, and from the future she
swung back dizzyingly into the past, where she was trailing after him, accomplice to his folly,
the too-big boots weighing her down as she climbed the stairs to the door he’d left open, pausing
to test her weight on each step before she trusted it.
By the time she got inside he had his coat and shoes off and the bags half unpacked.
Sammy was helping, or thought she was, dancing around him as he moved between the counter
and the fridge, getting in the way, talking ceaselessly about the trip, about her friends at school
whom she loved though they were still such children, about her baby brother who was asleep just
then. “Go see him, Papa,” she said. “Go see him while he’s sleeping.” While he’s his best and
truest self, she meant. A privilege so few people get.
“Dad,” Sarah said. “You haven’t heard from Daniel? I thought he’d be here by the time
we got here.”
“Daniel,” her father said, pausing for a long moment as if he’d forgotten the name of his
son, “texted me this morning. Accident on the Merrit. I guess a pretty bad backup. I told him not
to worry. Told him to turn back or pull off and find a place to stay if he needed to, but he said
he’d get here.”
“Well,” Sarah said. “He’s not going to get here now.”
“Not his fault. Take it easy on him.”
“I didn’t say it was his fault, Dad.”
Stupid—unforgivable, really—to be fighting already. Off on the wrong foot practically
the moment she stepped into the house. As usual. Out of her control. In the fertile soil of her
childhood home she was like a mushroom shedding spores, seeding the ground with regrets and
embarrassments that would develop later, when she was back at home and her faculties of
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discretion and self-reflection were working again. Her father wasn’t bothered at all—didn’t even
notice the sharpness creeping into her voice. He would keep on magnanimously failing to notice
no matter how angry she got, until his fatherly equanimity backed her into a corner and forced
her to say something she wouldn’t be able to get out of her head later. At this late date, she didn’t
like being told to take it easy on Daniel. She’d had years and years to learn what forgiveness,
what leeway her brother needed. She knew his adult self far better than their father did. She
hadn’t even meant what she’d said as a criticism. She was worried about him. And yet here her
father was interceding between them, taking Daniel’s side like they were children again. And
why wasn’t he worried? Why hadn’t he even tried to find out what was going on? Surreptitiously
she texted Daniel, her tone mock-angry, a form of play he would know how to recognize. Hey
dumbass where are you? Don’t leave me alone with Dad. Then a moment later, worried, she sent
another message. JK! If you’re safe where you are then stay there, obviously.
There was no reply, and she had to keep reminding herself that it had only been a minute,
two minutes, three. She had to keep forcing herself to think of all the safe, happy things he could
be doing so that she wouldn’t picture him unconscious and freezing in his overturned car on the
side of some winding narrow road where no one would find him. Between the parkway and her
father’s house there were miles and miles of roads like that. It made it hard to listen to her father,
who was talking about Daniel’s job and his new boyfriend and his happy life as if it was all an
unexpected gift—a gift meant more for himself than for Daniel.
“And you, too” he said, speaking to Sarah but resting a hand on his granddaughter’s head
to show what he meant. “Look how lucky you are.”
His children’s lives were taking shape, was what he meant. What a blessing, to live to see
that.
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When Jeff came in from down the hall with a bottle of champagne she walked all the way
around the kitchen island to stand beside him, to press the side of her body against his and
squeeze his hand in gratitude. She didn’t understand how he always seemed to know his cue, but
she was grateful. She hadn’t said anything, and somehow he’d sensed the exact moment when
her irritation and sadness were about to spill over into anger. He’d come along to call attention to
his inconsequential self so that the moment could pass on into forgetfulness. She couldn’t blame
her father for wanting to talk as if everyone was happy and fine. She often did the same herself.
Sorrows and difficulties were everywhere in plain sight. She couldn’t expect him to go looking
for them under the veil of happiness.
“This is a new one,” Jeff said, placing the bottle on the table, “And I’m warning you now,
it’s as bad as it looks.”
It did look terrible. It was half the size of a normal wine bottle, like it was meant for
someone who planned to drink alone. It had a screw cap and the little orange sticker reading
$2.99 was still on it, but Sarah couldn’t remember how it tasted.
“Hold on,” Arnold said. “Somewhere I have the right kind of glasses for this.”
“No,” Jeff said. “Don’t bother. When Sarah and I drank it the first time all we had was
paper cups.”
“Which you’ve also brought, I bet,” Sarah said.
He left the room again and came back cradling a stack of tiny paper bathroom cups with
pink and lavender hearts printed on them—pilfered from Sammy’s bathroom, Sarah noticed.
He poured a cup for each of them and Sammy wanted to know why she didn’t get any, so
he poured a taste for her, just enough to coat the bottom of the cup. “You won’t like it,” he said.
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“To Mom,” Sarah said, because it was her job to say it. The wine tasted awful, like soda
left out in the sun for hours, gone flat and feral at the same time, the sweetness blossoming into
funk, the smell of a gas-station dumpster at three a.m. somehow latent within it. She had no
memory of it. It did nothing to evoke the one other time she’d tasted it, six months earlier in the
hospital, after the endless night of Jonah’s birth.
“Holy shit,” Sarah said, laughing. “How did you drink this?”
Sammy drained her one sip and wanted more.
“Absolutely not,” Sarah said. “I’ll get you some apple juice.”
It was the eve of the Day of Midge, and for this year the wine was Jeff’s contribution to
the ceremony. Something new, which at this time next year would be no longer new and would
still be part of it. The rule was that everyone had to contribute, every year, at least one new thing.
For Daniel and Sarah the difficulty had usually been one of restraint—how to choose what to
leave for another year, how not to overwhelm. There are years and years ahead, Sarah had to
remind herself. Nothing was ever subtracted, so that over the years the Day of Midge had grown
into the day before, and the collection of its accoutrements—the non-perishable and non-
consumable things that didn’t have to be replenished every year—had come to take up two
whole walls of shelving and probably several hundred square feet of floor in their father’s
basement.
Jeff told the story of the wine, but Sarah could tell he wasn’t doing it right. He wasn’t
telling all of it. You had a choice—you could either tell the story or not tell it. You could let the
thing be just a thing, opaque to everyone else, its significance known only to you, and that was
fine. But if you told the story you were supposed to tell it all.
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Jeff told about the ridiculous late-night hunt through the deserted Philadelphia streets for
a bottle of champagne he could smuggle back into the hospital. All the decent shops were closed
at that hour, which must have been two or three am, and Jeff was on foot and therefore confined
to the few blocks around the hospital, which were mostly occupied by other hospitals—
enormous buildings, endless parking lots, nobody on the sidewalks but people who looked like
they’d just escaped from the wards. He told about the tiny liquor store he found at the edge of
this wasteland, the dusty, sticky shelves, the proprietor who watched his reflection in a series of
convex mirrors as he walked up and down the aisles. There were three types of champagne in the
place, each less than five dollars, and he chose this one because the bottle was small enough to fit
unobtrusively into his jacket.
He left out the reason he’d gone out there in the first place. He’d come back with his
prize and Sarah had humored him. Jonah had fallen asleep for the first time in the fourteen hours
of his life thus far. Her breasts ached. She’d had an epidural, and her body was still waking to the
shock of what had happened to it. She swallowed a purely symbolic sip, smaller than the sip he’d
given to Sammy tonight, and she retched. Then she had to imagine even that drop of alcohol
wending its way through her bloodstream to her milk ducts and poisoning her child. Meanwhile
Jeff sat there on his fold-out cot for the next hour, watching the baby sleep while slowly draining
the whole bottle. What he’d wanted was a drink. He’d been scared. The hours of sweating and
screaming, the drugs they’d given her, the way her body seemed torn open, and then the
boundless, dizzying love he suddenly felt for someone who hadn’t even existed previously. All
of it had spooked him. And then he was afraid, too, that what had happened to Sarah the last
time, after Sammy was born, would happen again. He couldn’t talk about how much all that
scared him, couldn’t even admit to feeling scared, and so his solution was to get mildly drunk on
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three-dollar champagne and wait for the fear to pass. He would have preferred whiskey, but he
had chosen champagne because of what it signified: that the birth of this child was a good thing,
a cause for celebration and not the beginning of the end of his happy life. He needed to make that
claim into something tangible and then to taste it, to swallow it, to feel it tingling down his throat
into his stomach. This at any rate was the sense Sarah had made of his behavior that night, which
otherwise would have pissed her off. What pissed her off now was that he was breaking the
rules, cutting out the story’s heart and serving up this zombie version, in which he had merely
gone out on a gallant, quixotic errand, evidence of the spontaneity and fun he liked to pass off as
his personality.
It didn’t work if you did it that way. Jeff had been coming to these gatherings every year
for twelve years running, and still in her mind he was an outsider, so she let it slide. Even to
choose something tied to such an obviously significant event as the birth of a child was not really
in keeping with the spirit of the ceremony.
Now that their mother was gone, Sarah and Daniel were the only two people on earth
who understood the spirit of the ceremony. The idea was to gather the tangible fragments of the
past that bobbed up at random from the depths into the light of the present. The randomness was
the point. You never knew when it might happen. You might stop into the hardware store
looking for picture hooks or cleaning supplies and find a box of Necco Wafers in their wax-paper
wrappers beside the cash register, alongside the other antique candies certain hardware stores
make a point of carrying. When you’re back in your car in the parking lot, place one gently on
your tongue like the bread of communion, and while it dissolves it might bring back the whole
sensation of a day in 1986 when the metal playground slide burned the backs of your legs and
there was the smell of chicken cooking on a charcoal grill somewhere and your mother sat alone
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on a bench all morning and watched you play, and when she took you home there was a wall
between you. You asked her why she was mad at you and she said she wasn’t, and bent down to
look you in the eye and tell you, but the wall remained all day and into the next. Nothing special
about that day. No reason to remember it, but there it was in your mind, whole and corporeal as it
might be in the next world. What waited for you on the other side of death might be just that—all
the moments you’d already lived present at once, and you free to move among them at will, as
you might move among the rooms of your own house.
Even common objects could do it. Even things you saw every day and never thought
about could suddenly appear with all the precise sensations of some forgotten day ringing within
them. Hold such a thing in your hand, or taste it, and you could touch and taste all the time that
had passed between that moment and the time you first saw that thing, when it meant nothing to
you. You could make time into an object, and you could turn it over in your hands and watch it
change in the changing light. Things you could eat and drink were the most reliable. Mass-
produced objects were the most likely candidates, for obvious reasons, since they were always
around, often exactly the same as they were thirty years ago. Some years her whole life oriented
itself around the task of gathering. She tried not to plan, not to will herself to remember anything,
but she couldn’t help herself sometimes. She moved through the world looking for fragments of
time she could break off and hold.
Jeff had mistaken the outward form of the day—which was incidental, an accretion of
habits that might just as well have turned out otherwise—for its invisible substance. He’d
mistaken cheapness for the randomness that was the mark of the real thing. And clearly he’d
done the whole thing backwards—he hadn’t stumbled on the same champagne and been
reminded of the day his son was born, but instead had wanted to commemorate that day and so
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had gone looking for the champagne. Still she could hardly blame him. The real thing happened
so rarely that even she was always negotiating with herself, trying to engineer serendipity. And
being an outsider, he must have felt a certain pressure to perform. He’d come along just in time
to stop her from yelling at her father and spoiling the visit. She wasn’t about to start yelling at
him.
Subtly as she could, she slid her phone out of her pocket to check for a reply from Daniel,
but there was nothing—only a news alert about rising caseloads in some distant country,
information she would have to absorb and process later.
Her father rang the little brass handbell, with a leather loop for a handle, that her mother
had bought at a tag sale because it was identical to the one her fourth grade teacher had kept on
her desk. He placed Daniel’s pina colada-scented Yankee Candle in the center of the dining table
and lit it, and instantly the smell filled the room, sweet as a Jolly Rancher, reminiscent of nothing
but the same time last year and the year before that and on indefinitely into the past. It had been
part of the ceremony for years and years, almost from the beginning. Daniel had never told
anyone why he’d included it, and the truth was that even if he had it would have been his
memory and no one else’s. In his absence the candle seemed useless, orphaned, like a story with
no one to read it.
“Should we be starting without Uncle Daniel?” Sammy said.
“I think he’d prefer it that way,” Arnold said. “Don’t you?”
Sammy said nothing for a moment and then nodded, “I guess so.”
“Don’t worry,” her mother said. “He’ll be here when you wake up in the morning.” Once
again trying to will herself to feel the certainty her voice, she hoped, conveyed.
“Who can share something they’ve learned?” her father said.
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This was the part her mother had liked best, her own invention. It sounded like the kind
of thing you would say to a classroom full of ten-year-olds, which was because her younger
child, Daniel, must have been only nine or ten when she’d invented it. Over time the scope of the
question had expanded. You were supposed to say something you’d learned about the world in
the past year that made it feel like a different world than it had been when you hadn’t known that
thing.
But in December 2021 the answers to that question were too obvious, and for a long time
no one said anything. Sarah thought of Daniel again. Even in this impossible year, he would have
known how to answer. He always had something. The last time they did this, he’d told them
about a French rock climber who scaled the tallest buildings in the world using only his hands
and feet, with no safety equipment. Later, she’d lost hours scanning the man’s Instagram
account, transfixed. He’d been doing it for decades. Over sixty years old now, he was still doing
it. Sometimes, thirty or forty feet above the ground, he lost his grip and ended up in the hospital
for weeks with gruesome injuries—shattered pelvis, crushed vertebrae, ruptured spleen. But
higher up, where the consequence would have been certain death, he never fell. He liked to post
clips of moments when, for example, he suddenly found at six hundred feet that the gap between
two panes of glass was no longer wide enough to fit his toes in. Having nowhere to go, he
paused, hung suspended by the tips of his fingers, and then as if by magic found another way and
kept going. A person who could do that, she thought, must have been able to draw on reserves of
patience and calm so deep as to approach the divine—and yet on Instagram the man was so
transparently desperate for fame and attention that she felt embarrassed for him. He was bitter at
the greater renown of other, younger climbers, panicked at the thought of becoming old and
irrelevant, and in the overlong captions attached to his posts he was powerless to hide any of
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that. She couldn’t get the mystery out of her head for weeks—how those two diametrically
opposed ways of being could exist in the same person.
She kept watching the window, waiting to see Daniel’s headlights coming up the
driveway, but they didn’t come.
“Has anyone ever heard of the Hubble Constant?” she said finally.
Jeff had heard quite a lot about it from her lately, but he didn’t say so. No one else said
anything. She already wished she hadn’t brought it up. The way she’d asked the question made it
sound like the setup to a campfire ghost story.
“Basically it’s the rate at which the universe is expanding. There are two different ways
of measuring it, neither of which I understand, but one of them has it at seventy-three kilometers
per second per megaparsec—a megaparsec being the distance light travels in a little over three
million years—and the other one has it at sixty-seven. Scientists are trying right now to figure
out which of those numbers is right. It doesn’t seem like it should matter, but it does.”
“Why?” Sammy said.
“Is this something you want to talk about in front of her?” Jeff said.
“Gravity,” Sarah said. “If there weren’t some force propelling everything in the universe
farther and farther away from everything else, then gravity would pull everything together. The
number tells the future. If it’s closer to sixty-seven, it means the expansion is slowing down.
Eventually it will stop, and gravity will take over, and the universe will collapse. Which is at
least an ending. Some scientists think the universe passes through cycles of expansion and
collapse, so in that kind of ending there’s even the possibility of a new beginning. If it’s closer to
seventy-three, then there is no ending. Expansion continues, faster and faster forever. Galaxies
break apart into single, isolated stars, and then stars and planets and everything else breaks apart
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into single, isolated atoms floating alone in infinite emptiness. There’s a kind of telescope going
into orbit next year, called Euclid, that can measure the energy that propels cosmic expansion. It
may give us a better idea of where we’re headed.”
“We?” Jeff said. “This is billions and billions of years after the last living thing on earth
is dead anyway. There is no we. Why does it matter? Why think about it?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t matter, obviously.”
Her father slid a chair out from the table and sat heavily down in it, as if all at once the
burden of his body had become too much for him.
She’d been reading about beginnings lately. She wanted to learn every way there had
ever been to describe the moment when nothing became everything. Theories of the end were
everywhere now, unavoidable. A good creation story was an antidote to that. She was thinking of
using some of them in her fundraising work. The world was such a fragile, humble thing when it
was made. A heap of clay plucked by God’s fingers from the water and pinched into the shape of
a hill. A heap of dung. A bit of the dust and grime that accumulates on God’s sweating skin as he
walks through the emptiness, which if you’re a desert people you might imagine as a desert not
much different from the world as you find it. God scrapes the crud out of the folds of his skin
with his fingernails and shapes it into a world. A world that began like that was a world you
wanted to care for.
Ask any modern cosmologist to tell you about the beginning, though, and they’d
invariably point you to the likely end. The scientists were far more comfortable with endings
than they were with beginnings. They could look at what was and make informed predictions
about what was to come. They could even look directly into the past, as through a telescope.
They had instruments that could measure the heat of the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago. They
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had that famous, partial theory of the beginning, first articulated by a priest who was also a
professor of physics and confirmed again and again in the nine decades since, by instruments
whose observational capacities usurped more and more of the prerogatives of God. The primeval
atom, infinitely dense, taking up no space at all, flung itself outward to become everything. But
where had the primeval atom come from? What had surrounded it? Flung itself outward into
what? The scientists had no language that could describe nothing.
No one else said anything in answer to her father’s question, which was her mother’s
question and which he had merely repeated out of duty. They reheated the meatball pizza and
fried mozzarella that Sarah and Jeff had managed to pick up from Tonelli’s on their way into
town, just as the place was closing. The traditional meal of the eve of the day, mediocre in
exactly the same way it had been when she was twelve and didn’t know better. Her father sat
with them at the table but ate nothing. When the meal was over he disappeared upstairs, leaving
Sarah and her husband and daughter alone as if it was their house. Much later, long after Sammy
had gone to bed, he emerged and sat before the big TV to watch the news. They’d heard nothing
from Daniel, still. On the television screen there was a river, seen from high above, in darkness.
It was the Rio Grande or some other border river. A man was wading up to his neck in the dark
water, holding a little girl high above his head to keep her out of the current. The helicopter’s
spotlight held them. Sarah knew she would see them again in bad dreams. The image stung her.
Who were they? How many miles had they traveled, and what losses had they incurred already?
What did they want? Maybe only to stay alive a little longer.

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9

Arnold sat alone in the dark and watched the snow falling through the aura of the porch
light. One a.m., the peak of the storm according to the weather service. Even then it looked
gentle. For the moment there was almost no wind. Cold and crystalline now, the snow fell
against the outer darkness like a shower of sparks. A wall several inches high had accumulated
on the porch railing, beyond which he could see nothing, but he knew how it was—the world
subdued, wiped clean of its boundaries, the lines between field and forest and road erased.
He had the familiar urge to go out there, to lie down in the middle of his wide front
yard—half-dressed as he was—and let it bury him. It had scared him badly the first time he felt
that pull, the first snow that came after he learned what had happened to Mattie. It didn’t scare
him anymore. He understood that it wasn’t real. What he had in mind was a fantasy—the snow
erasing the boundaries of his body as it erased all other boundaries, his heart slowing down, his
senses quieting, by morning his whole self indistinguishable from the clean abstraction of the
snow’s unbroken surface. Not having eaten made it easier, somehow, to believe that fantasy—
but it was still a fantasy. It had nothing to do with what it would really mean to lie down in the
snow and not get up again. Try it, he told himself, and you’ll be running for the front door in
your wet clothes fifteen seconds later. He didn’t want to die. The wish was self-effacing, not
suicidal. Who didn’t wish sometimes for a way to turn off the noisy machinery of the self and
become something quieter, something more expansive? And yet the self was all he had. It was a
cracked and grimy window through which he could see only a fraction of the world, but he had
the vague sense that there were others behind him elbowing for a turn, and he understood that
once he gave up his spot at that window he would not get it back.
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Daniel had found a bed for the night, he hoped, but why didn’t he answer his phone?
Hildy was out there somewhere, but he told himself that if the deer and coyotes and other
houseless mammals could survive in these conditions then so could she.
____

Go looking in any woman’s life for reasons why she might want to kill herself and you’re
bound to find some. People who hadn’t known Mattie at all dug up what they could from the
fraction of her life that was public knowledge—the complaint she’d filed in art school against a
famous male professor who’d propositioned her in office hours, the nothing that had been done
about it, the long silence in which she’d lain fallow after the birth of her first child, the sheer
daily burden of being married to a critic. There was less of that talk now. Less talk about her life
in general, which she would have seen as a blessing. At the beginning he’d had to resist the
constant temptation to write anonymously in the forums and comment sections, throwing more
pointless words onto the pile of words, trying to correct the record. With his name attached, his
words would have had more reach but even less authority. There was nothing he could have said
without making himself the topic, without wading into an argument he could never win.
The worst, for him, were the people who read all her work retroactively in light of the
death they thought she’d chosen. He understood that her work lent itself to being read that way—
the fixation on absence and silence, the disorienting, horizonless landscapes of ice and black
water and slick black rock. They thought she was reproducing an interior landscape. One well-
respected critic even said in the Boston Review that her whole body of work for the last thirty
years had to be seen, “in hindsight, with shame, as a cry for help.” It would have infuriated her—
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another male critic assuming that a woman’s art is always autobiographical, confessional, the
female gaze turned intractably inward.
___

He could hear Jonah crying upstairs, which meant that his daughter would be up too,
tending to the child. Cradling her baby in the same room where her mother had cradled her. It
felt miraculous to Arnold, a gift no one could deserve, just to hear the sound of a baby crying in
his house again.
The snow would not let up for hours. It seemed to pass through cycles as he watched it—
slow and quiet and clean for a long minute, then dense and whirling, driven by wind into frenzy
before it calmed again.
Did the cabin where Mattie was trapped have a light outside the window? Surely not. No
electricity, inside or out. Still he liked to imagine that it did somehow, so she could turn off her
flashlight and watch the falling snow as he was watching it. It spoke a wordless language as it
fell, a steady murmur that flashed into rage or wheeled away in play and laughter and always
settled back into that patient, even cadence that didn’t care whether or not you listened. She
would have been with it so long she would have heard its intimacies as no human does. She
would have felt privileged, even knowing what it meant.

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10

For miles now there had been no tracks ahead of them. The road was nothing but a blank
white space between the lines of trees, fence lines, lines of little orange flags people had placed
at the edge of their yards to warn the plow. As long as Daniel kept the car equidistant between
these markers he could be sure there was pavement beneath it. There was no one else out. He
didn’t care which side of the road he drove on as long as he was on the road.
He was remembering something—a skill he’d almost forgotten he had through all those
years in the city, where he hardly drove at all. Hours ago, when the wreckage of the accident was
out of the way and the parkway finally opened again, they’d resigned themselves to waiting out
the storm. They’d found a room at a Motel 6 in Norwalk, bedded down and wasted the day,
watching the storm gather, thinking they’d start again in the morning after the roads were
cleared. Then the weather people revised their forecasts. The snow would keep falling into the
middle of the next day, which meant the roads might not be clear until hours after that, when it
would be truly too late. There were two inches on the ground in the motel parking lot when
Daniel changed his mind.
“I’m not missing it,” he said.
“Is there a choice at this point?” Tomás said.
“Let’s go.”
“What do you mean? Go where?”
It was after ten pm by then, and no one was out. They made their way out of town
through the deserted streets, Tomás watching nervously for cops—though they weren’t breaking
any laws, only behaving foolishly—until within minutes they had left the outer ring of the city
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and found themselves on roads so thin and houseless that the presence of a police cruiser seemed
unimaginable, like a distant memory from another world. A minor miracle, Daniel thought, that
he had never stopped carrying tire chains in his trunk though he hadn’t used them in over a
decade. It had taken him less than five minutes to install them on all four tires. He still
remembered everything he’d learned in high school and college, driving those perilous New
England roads in winter, exhausted and giddy, strung between ecstasies. Now he heard the
chains biting into the packed snow. He felt that rumbling vibration through the seat and the
floorboards. He knew the instant the tires broke loose, and how to control his slide through the
corners and coax the car into forward motion again. It was like holding a kite in the wind by a
length of spider’s silk. It took a sensitivity and finesse that could never be taught, only developed
through practice. Tomás could never have done it, and in fact he sat in nervous silence, gripping
the handle on the side of the door tighter every time they started sliding sideways. They’d been
driving for almost two hours, in which time they’d gone maybe twenty miles. The snow was
coming faster now than when they’d started. He guessed it was at least four inches deep on the
ground already. Before long the roads would be impassible, even for him. But they were nearly
there.

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11

Sammy was winning. As far as she knew the game had no end, and so she would never
be able to say that she had won, but for the moment she was winning. She’d made it farther than
she ever had before, and she was nowhere near the limit of her abilities. She could feel it. The
game world was a puzzle she’d been working for months, and now she understood its hidden
rules. She understood how its pieces fit together, and she could anticipate the consequences of
every move she made, how if she leapt across the chasm where the bridge had been, using the
last of her energy, it would expose her to danger but would also open new possibilities, choices
that hadn’t been there before. If she made the right next choice there would be food to replenish
her energy—bright, fat berries that flashed in the light like diamonds when she turned them in
her hand.
Uncle Daniel and his new boyfriend had arrived last night while she was sleeping, but
they hadn’t gotten up yet. They’d had a long day and needed their sleep. She hadn’t met the
boyfriend yet. She was eager to meet him. She always loved whoever Uncle Daniel loved. They
were always kind and took the time to talk to her because they knew she was important to her
uncle, and when they disappeared from the margins of her life it wasn’t sad. It was like coming
to the end of a good book, knowing there would be another one.
“Are you going to stare at that screen all day?” her mother said.
“No,” she said. “Not all day. Just until Uncle Daniel gets up.”
She didn’t look up to meet her mother’s gaze. Her answer was carefully calibrated to
prevent additional conversation. She was descending from a cloud by leaping onto the backs of
dragonflies as they traversed the sky, jumping from one to the next as on a moving staircase. Part
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of the game was learning to gauge the frustration in other people’s voices—her mother and
father, her friends—to know when she could safely keep playing and pretend to have heard and
when she had to pause the game and shift her focus back to the world outside the screen, a
transition that had to be carefully managed, like surfacing from the depths of the ocean.
Whenever she was forced to make that shift abruptly, it left her out of sorts for hours.
Her grandfather came in from his office down the hall and stood behind her, placing a
hand lightly on the top of her head and leaning down to kiss her hair. It was a gesture she could
remember from before she could remember anything. He must have kissed her in just the same
way when she was an infant, smaller than Jonah. She didn’t have to look up from her game or
say anything—he understood her well enough not to take it personally.
“Dad,” her mother said, standing in front of the open fridge, “where’s all the food?”
“Oh,” he said sadly, “I’m sorry. I got to the store too late.”
“So they were out of food?”
“They were closing. Everyone was trying to get home before the storm. I didn’t have
time think. I really am sorry. It’s my fault.”
Sammy watched her mother as her mother watched her own father. She looked mad, but
also worried. Sammy could see her working internally to restrain herself, checking the impulse to
yell and then checking also the impulse to ask more questions, to invade his privacy with her
concern. It was the same way her mother looked at her sometimes—more and more often,
actually—trying to gauge the situation, trying to determine which were the appropriate emotions
to feel and keep hidden, and which were the appropriate emotions to express whether she felt
them or not. She wondered how it would be when she had children of her own one day. She
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would have at least two of them—that much she knew. Would she find it harder and harder to
talk to them as they grew up?
“It’s okay,” her mother said. “You should have let us know if you needed help. We could
have stopped at the store on our way here.”
“I didn’t think I needed help,” her grandfather said. “It was just an error. The time got
away from me. If they clear the road soon I’ll go back and get whatever we need.”
“It’s okay,” her mother said. “At least we have milk and eggs. Do you have flour
somewhere? I can make pancakes.”
Among other things amiss, Sammy had noticed that the dog was absent. She didn’t know
whether her mother and father had noticed too and just weren’t saying anything, or whether in
fact they might already have known the story. It seemed unkind, somehow, to ask her
grandfather, so she didn’t. Anyway he might lie to her out of his own kindness. If Hildy was
dead he might not want to tell her. She would get the truth from her mother later. Her mother hid
things from her all the time, but when asked a direct question she never lied.
Her father was out shoveling a path from the front door to the snowed-under driveway.
Her grandfather had told him not to, had said he was a guest and wasn’t there to work, but her
father hadn’t listened. Being a guest made him nervous. He had to make himself useful to relieve
the nervousness. Plus it kept him out of the house for a while, gave him an excuse to avoid all
that familial bonding. He wasn’t used to it. He was an only child who spoke to his own elderly
parents over the phone on holidays and brought his wife and children dutifully to New Jersey to
visit them once a year.
Sammy’s other grandparents. She could hardly conjure an image of them in her mind—
two sullen old people who never laughed except at the expense some disgraced celebrity, who
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always cooed extravagantly over Sammy for half an hour when she first arrived and then ignored
her for the rest of the trip, who played the TV at full volume all day long.
She could hear the shovel scraping the stone, slow and rhythmic. She wondered whether
he would dig out the cars and shovel the driveway too. The driveway was so long she could
barely see the end of it through the trees. At its near end, in front of the house, it made a wide
circle around a little garden. Even the garden was fully buried under the snow except for the tops
of the bare rosebushes. To clear the driveway would take all day, but at least the snow was no
longer falling.
She heard her uncle’s voice before she saw him. He was speaking to her by speaking
instead to everyone.
“All right,” he called, “there’s only one person here I want to see, so all you other jerks
stay out of my way.”
She paused the game and set the iPad face-down on the table, and by the time she stood
up he was there, holding her up by her armpits, lifting her so high off the ground her head almost
hit the ceiling.
“I don’t understand how you got here,” Arnold said to Daniel, “but “I’m glad you made
it.”
“He could have easily died,” Sarah said.
“You’re the one who taught me how to drive in the snow,” Daniel said.
“Well,” Arnold said, “clearly you’ve surpassed me. The student has become the master.”
Arnold remembered those lessons, the winter of his son’s seventeenth year, seven months
before he was to leave for Bennington. The white-knuckled fun of it, pushing the car to the edge
of traction on those empty roads, pulling on the wheel until the tires broke loose and the car
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started to drift sideways through those sweeping turns, then figuring out how to tame and
befriend that queasy, weightless slide, how to find a new kind of control in the loss of control
and to get where you wanted to go on a line threaded between will and chance. He’d had to
repress the impulse to hoot and whoop. It wasn’t supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be you
need to know how to do this in case you find yourself in a situation where you have to do it. But
he realized now that Daniel must have done it plenty once he was away at school, out of
necessity and just for the sheer irresponsible pleasure of it.
He couldn’t imagine himself driving like that now. A few minutes ago, when no one was
watching, he’d nearly fallen down the stairs. His foot had found empty air where it had expected
the top step to be, and he’d caught himself by twisting his body around and clutching the railing
with both hands. He’d had to stand there for what felt like a full minute, waiting for his heart to
stop heaving itself against the walls of his chest and his knees to stop shaking, before he could
continue. The Arnold Lepore who’d taught his son to drive in the snow was so unlike this Arnold
it was impossible to believe they were the same person.
“Where’s your new boyfriend?” Sammy said.
“Oh,” Daniel said. “He’s upstairs. I’m sure he’ll be down soon. We didn’t get in until
almost two last night.”
“Two o’clock in the morning?” Sammy said, incredulous.
“Well, if you want to call that the morning. You’ll have to forgive Tomás. He’s not used
to sleepless nights like you and I are. He’s one of those weird people who sleep for eight hours
every single night.”
“Oh,” Sammy said. “I think my dad is one of those, right Mom?”
“Right you are,” Sarah said. “And he snores the whole time, too.”
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When Tomás did come down moments later, groggy and busily apologizing to everyone
for having slept so late, Sammy assaulted him with a barrage of questions she’d been saving up
probably for weeks in anticipation of this meeting.
“Why are you so much handsomer than Uncle Daniel? Doesn’t his bad breath bother
you? Don’t you want to find someone cuter? Taller at least? If you could have a billion dollars
right now, but you had to give up all your teeth and you’re not allowed to get replacements, ever,
would you do it? If you had a billion dollars because you gave up your teeth, and you could bring
one dead person back to life but it cost a billion dollars so after that you’d be toothless and broke,
would you do it? And who would the person be?”
“Sammy,” her mother said, “leave him alone, he just woke up.”
It was Sammy’s way of getting to know this new person, testing his sense of humor, his
patience, his readiness to be thrown off balance without getting flustered or defensive. It was
how she knew whether to trust him with her uncle, whom she loved with a fierce protectiveness.
Tomás sat down at the table where Sammy was and spoke conspiratorially, just to her.
“It’s always good to have one beautiful person and one not-so-beautiful person in a relationship,”
he said. “It works out for both of us. People think he must be extremely interesting, and then they
think I must be interesting too for wanting to date someone so…”
“Ugly?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Maybe they think he’s rich and you’re with him for his money.”
“No one thinks that,” Tomás said. “Look at his shoes. Look at his haircut.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows in mock-outrage.
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“Now your other question is harder. Do I know about the whole bringing someone back
from the dead thing before I decide whether to trade my teeth for a billion dollars?”
Sammy thought about it for a minute. “Yes,” she said.
“So I’m really just trading my teeth for a person then.”
“I guess so. Unless you’d rather just keep the money.”
“No, that’s easy then. My mom died when I was twelve. If I had to eat nothing but
protein shakes for the rest of my life to have her back I’d do it in a second.”
“Are you sure?” Sammy said. “She’d be pretty old by now, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t
get to live forever or anything. Just until the end of her normal lifespan. Maybe not that much
longer at all. You’d have to lose her all over again.”
“Sammy,” Sarah said, her tone meant to warn her daughter that she was crossing a line
she might not have known how to see.
“It’s fine,” Tomás said, and then turning back to Sammy he said, “I’d do it just to talk to
her one more time.”
It was a talent she’d inherited from her grandmother, Arnold thought. Cutting through
small-talk, setting the kinds of verbal traps that could lure a stranger into revealing his deepest
sources of pain and joy in the space normally reserved for idle getting-to-know-you chit-chat.
Though really her mother had that talent too—she’d just learned not to use it. It was a talent that
could only be used in conjunction with the license that came with being nine years old. Or the
license that came with being a famous artist. Mattie had claimed that license for herself all her
life. Decades before anyone knew who she was. When she was old and illustrious people found it
charming—what a privilege, to have one’s carefully guarded vulnerabilities pried out into the
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open by Matthea Sanders, the living icon. When she was younger she’d done it anyway, on the
assumption that people would let her get away with it, which mostly they did.
He’d made the mistake of asking her about it, early in their acquaintance. “You’re not
worried that people will find you presumptuous?”
“Why do you want me to worry?” she said, and though she didn’t say it angrily she was
cold and wary of him for days afterward. She wasn’t sure she could trust him. He might have
been someone who would plant worries in her mind to slow her down. The world was full of
people like that. Over time he learned what she had meant by that question. Life is not long. God
has given each of us a little bit of time, not enough. Everything you do now is preparation for
what you’ll do later, and has been made possible by the preparation you did before. Every time
you pass up a chance to learn, you’re depriving your future self of necessary knowledge.

Sarah stood at the counter, beside the stove, expertly cracking eggs into a bowl with one
hand and piling up the shells on a paper towel she’d laid out to catch them. She had her back to
everyone, and Arnold could see the effort she was making not to turn around, to pretend that the
mixing of eggs and milk demanded her full attention. She busied herself with the whisk, making
as much noise as possible, trying to build a wall of noise and activity between herself and the
conversation taking place behind her.
She’d lost her mother too. Not at such a young age, thank God, but not so long ago either.
So had Daniel. Arnold wondered whether that was what held him and Tomás together—that
shared devastation. Early in 2020, before everything shut down, he’d seen an exhibition of
photographs by a Japanese photographer who took pictures of living families sealed in plastic in
front of their shrink-wrapped homes and gardens. The photographer spent hours meticulously
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arranging each scene, then vacuum-sealed the people and did all the actual photographing in less
than twenty seconds so they wouldn’t suffocate. Hearing the work described, you might expect
some kind of literal-minded commentary on the commodification of the nuclear family, and
maybe that was part of it, but that wasn’t how Arnold experienced it. He saw those families
encased in grief, just like his own—sealed forever at the moment of loss, cut off from past and
future. After ten minutes he’d rushed blindly out of the gallery and stood on the sidewalk gulping
air like a man who’d just been saved from drowning.
___

Jeff got the snowblower out of the shed and somehow figured out how to gas it up and
start it, and for the next thirty minutes they all had to raise their voices to be heard over the drone
of its engine. He used it clumsily, letting the plume of snow fly anywhere, undoing the work the
machine had done. When he came in he brought the smell of gasoline with him, and he had to
stand in the mudroom for whole minutes theatrically brushing snow from the folds of his jacket,
removing one layer of insulation after another until he emerged in jeans and sweat-soaked t-shirt,
making little hooting sounds to convey the exhilaration of hard work in cold weather. The
driveway was clear enough, but the road it led to was still buried under a foot of snow.
“Go clean up,” Sarah said. “Breakfast is ready.”
There was no maple syrup, and so they ate the pancakes with strawberry jam, which
Sammy hated. They were strange, extraordinary pancakes—thick as a grown person’s hand and
yet somehow ethereal, crisp and light and tasting of fresh-baked bread. A new trick Sarah had
learned somehow in the time since he’d last seen her.
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Jeff came back downstairs in dry clothes and set about trying to make friends with
Tomás. Trying to make friends with Daniel too—a task he’d been working at for eleven years. It
wasn’t that Daniel didn’t like him, but somehow they’d never really been friends even though
they’d once lived in the same house for weeks, tending to Sarah together. Arnold’s theory was
that Jeff was too self-contained, too much at ease in the center of his little circle of work and
home and family for Daniel to feel he had anything to offer him. Once, when there was a genuine
crisis, he’d needed Daniel, because Daniel had always been at home in the state of crisis. But
when the efficient machinery of Jeff’s life was humming along, what could they talk about?
When the dishes had been cleared and the adults were all sitting around the table with the
last of the coffee going cold in their cups, there came a silence in which everyone looked
expectantly at Arnold. Tomás, who hadn’t yet learned to read the secret language of the room,
started to say something and then stopped himself. Ahead lay the tricky passage from breakfast,
which was secular, into the catechism of the day. Ever since Matthea’s death it had fallen to
Arnold find the words that would make that bridge for them, but on this occasion he wasn’t up to
it. There was nothing to say. It wasn’t even that he felt repelled by the thought of what he might
have said. He could remember all the times before when he’d made a little speech in praise of his
children and grandchildren, noting how much they’d grown and changed and what they’d
struggled through and how proud Matthea would be of them. He wasn’t ashamed of any of that.
He’d risen to the occasion, even in the year of her death, when he’d been so blind with grief the
day before that he’d forgotten to feed the dog and had picked up a hot skillet with his bare hand
and burned his palm. Now it was as if some invisible angel had stolen his power of speech to
save him from misusing it. Even in the silence of his mind he could not lay one word on top of
another. He stood up so abruptly that he almost knocked the chair over. There was a fire
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smoldering along the length of his nerves, as fire spreads across the forest floor by burning
through the tree roots. It was Sarah, finally, who delivered him by speaking in his place.
“I don’t know how many times in the last five years I’ve thought to myself, I’m glad
Mom isn’t here to see this,” she said. “And of course I always feel terribly guilty afterward,
because it’s like I’ve said I’m glad she’s dead, which of course I’m not.”
“We know,” Daniel said. “It’s okay.”
“But now millions of people are dead who shouldn’t be, and I don’t know how she would
have lived with that. I don’t know how any of us are supposed to live with it, but for her it would
have been different. There would have been none of the protective numbness that comes with
death on such a large scale. She would have felt every bit of it. Still I know she would have
found a way to live with it. She would have found a way to incorporate that grief into her art,
which to me feels like the worst sin—to make art out of someone else’s suffering, especially in
such an abstracted way as she would have done it, where there’s no trace of them or their
suffering left but only this impersonal, grief-stricken beauty. I’m mad at her sometimes, because
it seems like she kept so many secrets from all of us, and now we can have no secrets from her. I
can’t help feeling that she knows everything about me. Everything about the world too, including
the future. I keep thinking that if I could talk to her she could tell me what’s coming. At least she
could tell me whether it makes any sense to hope anymore. But she wasn’t omniscient. I thought
she was wrong all the time when she was alive, and I told her so. I don’t know why we always
imagine that the dead know everything. Probably just because they’re not here to open their
mouths and prove they don’t. I wish she were here most of all so she could be wrong again—too
optimistic, too willing to make beauty out of devastation instead of trying to change it, too
complacent—so I could tell her so, and she could tell me how I’m wasting my energy fighting
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things I can’t change, how like a child I turn everything into a contest between good and evil.
Without her to argue with, I don’t know how to be.”
Jeff placed a hand on her arm in sympathy. Daniel wiped his eyes with his napkin, and
Tomás held his hand tightly under the table. Sammy sat puzzling out the meaning of what had
just transpired, running down the speech again in her mind like someone trying to understand
words spoken in a foreign language. There were tears in her eyes too, but they were tears of mere
empathy, a reflection of her mother’s sadness.
There was a precise interval that had to pass, long enough to welcome the collective grief
Sarah had called into being, not long enough to let it curdle into private anguish. Daniel knew by
instinct when to break the silence.
“I have something new,” he said quietly.
From the tattered Jansport backpack he’d left in the corner of the room he retrieved a pale
pink bottle of Coppertone sunscreen, SPF 15, with the picture of the cocker spaniel pulling down
the little blonde girl’s bikini bottoms to reveal the paleness of her skin beneath, as if the purpose
of a sunscreen were to help you get a tan. The expiration date was years in the past, but still it
had the same smell. Daniel had found it in a friend’s apartment and stolen it because of what the
scent contained for him: a day on the Cape in what must have been ‘94 or ’95, wet sand stuck to
the backs of his legs, sand hopelessly intermingled with the cold McDonald’s French fries he
was eating so that he crunched the grains of it between his teeth and felt he was taking the beach
and the sea and the day into his body along with the stale greasy softness of the fries. Mom and
Dad arguing about whether to phone some old friend who lived nearby, whom neither of them
really wanted to see. Sister elsewhere in her mind when she wasn’t physically elsewhere. Too
old for family vacations. Lost in her plans. Daniel watching two slightly older boys playing catch
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with a bright orange frisbee, looking like they lived year-round on that barren strip of beachgrass
and stunted white oaks, their hair bleached by sun and salt water, their skin golden and
glistening, their bodies lean and gently muscled and covered with the fine white down of youth.
He looked down at the dark, coarse hair and pallid skin of his own arms and felt ashamed. All he
wanted was to become a node in the flight of that frisbee, to make it a triangle with his own
gravity anchoring one corner, but he wanted it with a crackling electric need that ran along the
length of his bones and down into the secret core of himself. He was twelve, or maybe thirteen,
and just beginning to discover that feeling and the way it attached itself to other boys, their faces
and their voices and the way their bodies moved. It was a secret, and he didn’t know quite what
it meant but it made him feel afraid and excited, like an intimation of destiny.
He said all that, and then he daubed the sunscreen thickly on his nose and cheeks, not
bothering to rub it in, like war paint or holy oil. Laughing. Sarah asked if she could have some
and did the same, and then they passed the bottle around and everyone did it, even Sammy.
“What about you Papa?” she said.
“Oh, that’s okay love,” Arnold said. He hadn’t moved from his perch against the counter,
where he could see and hear everything without having to be fully part of it. He thought Daniel
looked slightly hurt by his refusal, but he might have been imagining it. At any rate there was no
option. He wasn’t sure he could move at all, or that if stepped away from the counter his knees
wouldn’t buckle under him.
The room smelled like a beach in summer. Sammy plugged her mother’s phone into the
stereo and played Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” which she said had come on the radio by
chance in her mother’s car a week ago, and which she hadn’t heard since she was a baby, though
no one really knew what she meant by “a baby.” It wasn’t clear that she knew. Whatever
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memory it was for her, it was a happy one. She danced across the middle of the room and sang
along with the chorus, and then they were all singing, all except Arnold, and Daniel got up and
danced Sammy’s spastic flailing dance with her, and none of them could sing, but they were off
key in so many different ways that the disharmony was somehow beautiful, a joyful chaos
Arnold desperately wished to join, and he tried, but when his voice finally came it sounded so
thin and strange, so unlike the voice he knew as his own that he stopped in the middle of the first
word he sang. No one else seemed to have heard at all, but Sarah glanced over at him and then
turned away, looking spooked.
Ahead lay the sacrament of the almond cake. Ahead lay the long day, with its rituals and
its sacred relics. The things Daniel had found when he was a little child. The things Matthea had
found—the York Peppermint Patties; the rusty sewing thimble that was exactly the same kind
her mother had used; an ancient copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier, with the robin’s-egg blue
cover faded almost to white, the same edition she’d played in Mrs. Green’s music class in 1963,
though there was no piano in the house and none of the surviving Sanders-Lepores could read
music—which would be brought forth and explained with reverence, as if they were they were
the shadow of her eye and memory falling on the living world and not mere things.
Arnold was not going to be able to stand it. He didn’t know what his problem was
exactly. He’d never had a problem before, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand it and so he
detached himself with terrible finality from the counter and walked slowly on his unsteady legs
out of the room. The skin of his palms had gone white and his knuckles stiff from gripping the
edge of the counter. His left foot had fallen asleep, so that every time he took a step with that
foot he had to swing his weight over it in an anxious leap as if it didn’t belong to him.
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“You okay, Dad?” Sarah said, and to stop her from following he said as cheerily as he
could that he was fine and would be right back, though he knew he wouldn’t.
More than thirty years before, he’d installed rubber seals around the door to his office so
he could work in relative quiet while the children were home. Now he shut the door and retched
desperately into the wastebasket, hoping the seals were still tight enough that no one could hear
him outside. He was on his hands and knees on the floor, his stomach convulsing so violently
that he was afraid he would throw his back out. Sweat dripped from his brow and chin like rain
from the eaves of a house, but nothing came up except a white, foamy bile he had to spit into the
wastebasket or swallow back down into his rioting core. When it was over, he rocked back and
sat on his heels like a dog, wiping the slime from his chin with the back of his hand. He felt cold
in a way that had nothing to do with the cold outside. Whenever Sarah was at home she turned
the heater up full blast—something he’d given up arguing with her about. He could feel the dry,
stagnant heat of the air around him, but he was freezing. The cold was internal. Some interior
weather had been gathering in his spine for hours and now was radiating outward, freezing what
it touched.
He couldn’t remember the last moment he’d spent in Matthea’s presence. He could
remember pieces of that day, out of order, intermingled with pieces of other days so he couldn’t
be sure what belonged and what didn’t. Waking at four am with a full bladder and not being able
to sleep again after emptying it. The long vigil at the kitchen table with his coffee, waiting for
her to wake and the sun to rise. Same as most mornings. Could have been any day. An email
from his editor at the magazine—some event he was supposed to cover the following month in
Prague, cancelled. “Sorry,” she said, “I know you were looking forward to the trip.” The editor
was new, some recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence or some such place, younger than his
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daughter. He’d met her once and could hardly attach a face to her name in his inbox. He’d hardly
remembered he was supposed to go to Prague, much less why. There was no disappointment—
only mild relief that this irritating smudge at the periphery of his consciousness had been wiped
away. A sliver of dazzling orange cleaved itself from the whiteness of the sky and landed on a
branch just outside the kitchen window—midday, an oriole.
“Nobody loves you,” Mattie said, which was what she always said when she meant that
she did.
She poured herself a glass of water and drank it all in one long swallow while her phone
lay ceaselessly chiming on the little table beside the door.
“Motherfuckers,” she said. “What do they want?”
Dim light then, night or morning, the phone’s screen illuminating the corner of the room
like a feeble lantern.
Nothing fit together. There was no timeline, no ending, only random fragments of
memory without context or order, such as the mind gathers aimlessly on any ordinary day when
it doesn’t know what’s coming.
In the context of her absence, he understood for the first time that it was possible to know
and not to comprehend. He knew he would never see her or speak to her again, but he couldn’t
comprehend it. He tried to imagine it, and he thought how long a time forever would be to wait
for that reunion. As if time had anything to do with it. As if it were possible to wait for what no
future could hold. It was the opposite of the usual problem of language: what his imagination
could see as simply and clearly as his own face in the mirror, he could not describe without
resorting to language that made no sense. And what he knew to be true and could express in the
clearest and simplest language—You will never see her again—he couldn’t imagine at all.
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He had to move. The urgency of the previous morning came back to him in a new form—
more durable, more focused. It wasn’t going to go away this time. It would keep growing.
Hildy was out there in the actual world somewhere, maybe lost, hurt, half-frozen. She had
trusted him to care for her and keep her safe, which couldn’t have been easy for her to do given
the life she’d had to live before she met him. It was his job to uphold that trust, even if she made
it hard sometimes.
He felt some new intuition growing in him, along with the urgency. Hildy was still out
there in the actual, present world, not only in the past where no one could go. How hard could it
be to find the part of the world where she was? He would take the car and drive in whatever
direction his intuition told him to, and when he was as close as the road could take him, he would
walk. The weakness in his body was gone. It was as if all the soft parts of himself, the skin and
muscles and organs, had been stripped away by wind and what remained was an animate
skeleton, dry and insensate and durable. His eyes told him otherwise, but he didn’t believe them.
He couldn’t move quickly, but he could place one foot deliberately in front of the other for as
long as he liked. He took a spare coat from the closet in the back hall so no one would see him.
He was glad he’d absent-mindedly left the car key in his pocket all that time. It felt like a gift
from fate, like a sign and not an accident. They would hear the car start, but by then he would be
on his way, tires punching through the wall of snow at the end of the driveway. He’d put the
snow tires on last week, earlier than he’d planned, and that was fate too: the future reaching back
into its own past and arranging things as it needed them. He trusted himself. This distance he
could bridge.

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12

Daniel did hear his father’s car—not the almost silent engine but the low, solid thud of
the slammed door. He got up from the living room sofa and looked out the window in time to see
the black Mercedes fishtailing slowly out of sight, plumes of snow rising from the spinning rear
tires.
“Dad’s leaving,” he said.
“What do you mean, leaving?” Sarah said.
“I mean he left. In the car. That’s weird, right?”
“Maybe he went back to town to get more food,” Jeff said.
“What do you mean?” Sarah said. “Do you think the grocery store is even open?”
“I’m sure the roads in town have been cleared by now. It’s just these little back roads in
the middle of nowhere where people have to wait all day to be able to leave their houses.”
“What is wrong with this family?” Sarah said. Jeff was reclining in her father’s armchair
in the corner of the room, and she turned away from him and back to face her brother, who was
standing at the window. “The two of you,” she said. “Is it a male thing? You need to prove your
masculine prowess to each other? Some kind of weird psychosexual bonding through
competitive recklessness?”
Daniel looked hurt for a second and then recovered. “If it is, Dad wins,” he said. “I
wouldn’t try to drive in this.”
“I’m just saying,” Jeff said. “Don’t you think it’s odd that there’s no food in the house?
It’s not like he didn’t know we were coming. And what does he eat when we’re not here?”
“So you want him to risk his life so you can have a sandwich?” Sarah said.
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Jeff raised his hands in surrender and Sarah disappeared down the hall to find her phone.
“I texted him,” she said when she came back. “Hopefully he won’t try to answer it while he’s
driving.”
For a long time no one said anything, as if they were all expecting him to reply
immediately. A single-engine propeller plane passed unseen over the house, the drone of its
engine growing slowly louder and then fading into a newly uncomfortable silence.
“Tomás and I saw a man die on the parkway yesterday,” Daniel said.
Tomás had gone out for a walk in the snow and so wasn’t there to object as he surely
would have, to clarify that the man had presumably been alive when loaded into the ambulance.
Daniel was suddenly, inexplicably certain that even if he hadn’t been quite dead then, he was
now.
“What?” Sarah said. “What are you talking about. Why would you tell me this now?”
“A motorcyclist,” Daniel said. “It’s why we were so late getting here. They closed the
road and didn’t let anyone through for hours. By the time they opened it again it was starting to
snow and we decided to get a room for the night and start again in the morning. But then the
storm wasn’t letting up and I realized we wouldn’t be able to make it in the morning, so I
changed my mind.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” Sarah said again.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sorry, bad timing.”
He had no way to answer her question. He couldn’t explain it even to himself—why he
hadn’t spoken of the previous day’s horror until now, of all times, when of course to Sarah it
would feel malicious, like he was trying to scare her, which he would never do.
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He wasn’t worried about his father. He couldn’t explain that either—when normally it
was his role to worry even when there was no good reason, as here there clearly was. Lately his
worry had changed in character, become vast and nebulous, almost beyond human scale. It was
as if the insidious disease he’d feared in himself all his life had taken root in the world at large.
He didn’t have it in him anymore to worry about any single person, even himself.
The storm was long over. Outside, the sky was blue and clear and the sun much too small
and far away to warm the earth. Snow lined the branches of the bare trees and lay deep enough
on the ground to hide its every feature. By all the evidence of the moment, the snow would last
forever. Nothing but experience suggested otherwise.
He wanted to tell her about everything—his dream of vagrancy from the night before, the
sirens that had broken him from it, the way those same sirens had followed him fifty miles, down
the Hutchinson River Parkway and then the Merritt, to their destination in deep Connecticut. The
way pieces of that dream kept erupting into his waking life, his thoughts continually broken by a
panicked certainty that he had lost something he could not afford to lose, that he would have to
go knocking at strangers’ doors to look for it. She was his sister. She would know what to say as
she always had, or she would know how to say nothing, just to give him space to speak his fears
aloud so he could hear how little sense they made. He wanted her to ask him what he was
worried about as she used to.
But she didn’t even know he was worried at all. At thirty-six he was not the open book he
had been at seven. To her he might have looked callously happy, too flush with his recent run of
good luck—exciting job, charming and handsome lover and so on—to care that their father
might get himself killed on the same day they were supposed to be remembering their dead
mother.
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Sarah’s phone chimed in her pocket.
“There he is,” she said. “I’m fine, don’t worry. Main roads clear. Be back soon.”
“He doesn’t say what he’s doing?” Jeff said.
“No.”
“Grocery shopping, like I said.”
“Okay, whatever,” Sarah said. “I guess he’s fine.”

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13

Arnold kept to the back roads because he knew Hildy wouldn’t go near the big ones. It
might have been true what he’d said about the main roads being clear. He wouldn’t have known.
Where he was, the conditions ranged from unsafe to impassible. He headed east on Cross
Highway and down into the valley of some nameless hills, tracing the course of the Saugatuck,
which he could see in the woods below the road when he dared to glance over, rocky and fast-
flowing beneath the skin of ice that had nearly enclosed it. Then he rose into the hills again on a
road threaded between multi-million-dollar properties and named Poverty Hollow, a road so
winding and narrow that even without the snow you had to honk your horn each time you
entered a corner to warn whoever might be coming the other way. Some neighborly volunteer
had come through with a plow on the front of his pickup at some point, but too early. The last
two inches of snow had fallen over a scraped-down bed of ice.
He didn’t bother with the horn. He nosed around one hairpin and then another, keeping
his momentum up so as not to get stuck. Come to a stop on an incline and he wouldn’t be able to
start again. He might slide backwards off the road and into the trees. On the other hand, press too
hard on the accelerator in a corner and the car would spin like a top. It was like keeping a tiny
flame burning in a vacuum—he had to feed it oxygen constantly through a bellows. Go too fast
and he would blow it out. Too slow and it would go out instantly on its own. He didn’t feel
graceful or expert as he had hoped he would. As he remembered having felt once. He felt
ponderous, his hands slow and thick-fingered on the wheel, his brain always lagging half a
second behind the demands of the moment and his body half a second behind his brain. The car,
with its intricate computerized traction-control system, covered for the sloppiness of its driver.
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He kept his eye tuned to the image of Hildy in his mind. His intuition had led him here
and was leading him on toward the broad stretch of Rte 124 that glided down from the top of the
ridge in both directions. He knew already that he would turn right when he got there, south
toward the reservoir. Because he knew the next turn he had to make, and the one after that, he
knew he wouldn’t find Hildy here, but still he had to watch for her. The ground he had to scan
was disorienting—the skeletal black trunks of the trees against a field of blank white that
stretched down below him as far as he could see. He couldn’t judge the slope or the distance.
Every time he had a chance to take his eyes from the road he looked down into that dizzying
terrain for the white flag of her tail, the black Rorschach blot of her body, which he saw many
times—each time with a momentary rush of joy and trepidation (Is she alive? How will I get
down there? How will I stop the car and get her into it and then get it going again?)—though
each time it turned out to be a rock or a log.
Rte 124, when he reached it, was hemmed in on both sides by dense woods, but so wide
and straight and high-up that he could see ahead of him all the way to the county reservoir,
hundreds of feet below and half a mile away, visible now only as a flat white level, stretching to
the far horizon, in which there were neither roads nor trees nor houses. Some clever men had
made that lake eighty years ago by damming the Connecticut river, submerging a valley and the
town that stood in it. The vanished town was called Valley Forge, as a lot of places in that part of
the world were and are. It was built around an ironworks that ran on the power the river
generated. For more than two centuries the region had needed the rifles and horseshoes and
wheelbarrows that were made there. In 1939 the region needed water, and more and more
forever afterward.
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Now the lake looked as wild and real as if it had been there since the retreat of the
glaciers. Because it was the county water supply, no one could build on its shores, and so it was
ringed on all sides by acres of rocky, unpeopled woods, like an Eden. In certain out-of-the-way
places there were still crumbling roads that led straight down to the water and disappeared. Every
few years the water company drained the lake, not all the way but just enough to perform some
vital maintenance on the dam, and then for a month or so the water’s surface would lie some fifty
feet below its ordinary level. Islands of mud and slick black rock would emerge in the middle of
the lake, and the whole length of the shore would be divided by a line that stood out more
sharply the farther you stood from it, between the living, terrestrial world above and the drowned
one below. Here and there you would see the remnants of an old stone wall, a stone chimney
standing houseless and alone in the muddy ground, among the skeletons of dead trees.

All through the long descent the car gathered speed almost without his noticing. It felt
good after the tense half hour he’d spent negotiating the two-mile climb up from the hollow. The
road was white against the white ground, and so smooth he couldn’t feel it under him. He felt as
if he were gliding out of the sky in a tiny airplane. He was strong again. Sharp. There was no
hunger in him, no fatigue. There was nothing he needed. The slowness he’d felt a few minutes
earlier, the lag between intention and action, was gone. The nausea and the cold sweat he’d felt
back in the house were a distant memory. He was calm, full of purpose, wholly in control. He
was in the world, not floating above it. The car zinged down out of the sky, faster and faster until
the rocks and trees at his side blurred together. It made a sound like a flung arrow quivering from
the bow. When the ground leveled out, the road curved gently to the right and the car kept going
straight ahead, fifty feet across a broad white field and into a stone wall.
228
14

The day had almost nothing in common with its counterparts in prior years. To the list of
vital elements missing from this iteration, Sarah could now add her father. He’d been gone more
than two hours. She was still working to convince herself that there was nothing to worry about,
since no one else seemed worried. Every few minutes she took her phone out of her pocket to
look again at the text in which he’d said he was fine and would be back soon.
They’d heated up all the frozen chicken nuggets, and together with the leftover pizza it
had been enough for everyone’s lunch, but now there was nothing left in the house to eat. Not
that she was hungry, but other people’s hunger was one more thing for her to worry about.
Daniel had stepped down from his post as official worrier, so now it fell to her. She was a
married woman, and a mother, so she was always in line for that job anyway, however little it
suited her.
Normally food was at the heart of the day. There would have been pastrami sandwiches
elaborately recreated in the style of the Tuesday special served twenty-five years ago at the local
middle school cafeteria, because once as an adult Daniel had found the exact same sandwich at a
diner on East 14
th
Street. Utz potato sticks, not chips. Almost impossible to find those now. A
whole list of obscure, finicky things, and then later for dinner the obsessively detailed takeout
order from the only Thai restaurant in the county, fourteen miles away, which surely would not
be possible this year but which nonetheless she kept imagining her father would somehow bring
back with him when he returned.
Of all the perishable foods that should have been there, they had only sweetest things—
the Welch’s white grape juice that sat in its sweating glass bottle on the counter now, half empty,
229
the diamond pattern of the glass refracting the sunlight in intersecting slashes of brightness on
the polished granite. The almond cake Daniel had picked up in Queens the day before he’d left
the city, which they would eat later—after dinner or in lieu of it—though it was surely already
stale and growing staler by the minute.
The sun had used up the last of its strength in reaching the top of the sky, and now it hung
there precariously, tipping westward, ready to fall.
She couldn’t tell what Sammy was thinking, how the unsettled quality of the day might
be affecting her. It was easier when she was little, when her feelings made no sense, most of the
time, but she couldn’t hide them. For now she had put down her iPad to participate in a
conversation Daniel and Tomás and Jeff were having about the pandemic, and she sounded
happy.
“My friend Ella’s other friend,” she was saying, “who goes to another school, her mom
almost died from it.”
Everything Sammy knew, she knew because a friend of a friend had told her. As far as
Sarah could tell her daughter had maybe three friends, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible
supply of other nameless children lined up in rows behind them like sharks’ teeth, ill-informed
opinions and misremembered facts at the ready.
“Who almost died?” Jeff said. “The mom?”
“Yeah, the mom,” Sammy said. “Her two kids got it too, but they just got like a cold.
And the husband got it but he only knew because he took a test. He wasn’t sick at all. But the
mom—Ella said they had to hook her up to that machine that breathes for you.”
“But she lived?” Daniel said. “She got better in the end?”
“I guess so,” Sammy said.
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He felt the need to ask, Sarah thought, because he knew the statistics about how few
people came back from that stage of the illness. He had other questions, surely—about what
underlying conditions, what omens of ill-health might have been present in this stranger’s life to
explain what had happened to her, but Sammy wouldn’t have answers to those questions, and
very possibly no one did.
What was most appalling about the story was that, unlike most of the stories Sammy
heard from her friends, this one might well have been wholly accurate. If it hadn’t happened in
exactly that way to that particular family, it had happened to countless others. It didn’t matter
that it made no sense—that the same virus should register in one person not at all and send
another to the brink of death. Nothing had made any sense in at least five years. Much longer
than that, surely, but that was how long it had been since she’d begun to notice. Half a decade,
during which she’d learned to recognize what was real by its incoherence. If a story made
sense—if she could discern in it a moral or philosophical theme of any kind, if its key players
seemed to act according to any principal at all—then someone was lying. Lies could be senseless
and incoherent too, of course, but the real was senseless and incoherent in its own way, a
signature she could neither explain nor describe but which she’d learned to recognize by its mere
familiarity.
If the mother had died, the children would have remembered that mild illness forever.
They would have remembered it as death, having taken their mother from them, laying its hand
on their heads in greeting.
“I almost lost my aunt that way,” Tomás said. It was clear he was speaking to the whole
room, though he addressed himself to Sammy.
“What happened?” Sammy said.
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He glanced over at Sarah, like is it okay to tell her this? She nodded and so he went on,
speaking to the room now. “My mother’s younger sister, in Sao Paolo. She’s fifty-four years old
now, so not exactly young, but not so old that you would expect her to be in that much danger.
And she was always healthy. She never even got colds. My family didn’t tell me she was sick
until she’d already been in the hospital for a week, so I don’t know what the progression was
like. By the time I got to talk to her she was obviously struggling. She had an oxygen tube in her
nose, and she was speaking that way that people speak when it’s bad, you know, like they have
to stop and take a breath after every few words. The next day they intubated her. Nobody was
allowed to be in the hospital with her. We were all on a computer screen, telling her we loved her
in case it was the last time we got to talk to her.”
“And then she got better?” Jeff said. He was prompting him to fill in the happy part of the
story, probably afraid of how all these details might affect Sammy—though surely she had heard
the same details elsewhere dozens of times already.
“She got better. Nobody really could say why. They gave her tons of drugs, but they were
the same drugs that didn’t work for a lot of other people. After a week she was breathing on her
own again, and she stayed in the hospital for two more weeks after that, a little better and a little
better until finally they sent her home.”
“A miracle,” Jeff said.
“I mean that’s the thing,” Tomás said. “It felt like a miracle, but it wasn’t. If she had died,
it would have felt like a curse, but it wouldn’t have been that either. My uncle, her brother, lit
votive candles in front of a framed picture of her in his house and prayed for hours, every single
day. He’d tell you that’s what did it. But what would that mean about all the people who died?
Their brothers didn’t pray enough? A couple of hundred million people catch a virus. Most of
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them don’t even notice. A small percentage, amounting to many millions of people, get very
sick. Some get so sick they have to be hooked up to breathing machines. Of that tiny fraction,
which is still millions of people, most die, but an even tinier fraction—tens of thousands of
people—gets better. It’s all just numbers. If they were points on a graph instead of people it
would make perfect sense. You’d look at the graph and go ‘There it is, randomness in action.’
None of it means anything, except to us.”
“I just meant…” Jeff said.
“I know,” Tomás said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to attack you. It’s just, that’s what makes it
all so confusing, isn’t it? We want the world to love the people we love. Certain people are
important to us, and so we want their importance to be some kind of objective fact, which is what
the idea of God is for: to make objective what is subjective. Then something like this happens
and you realize none of it makes any sense.”
The plow came around the corner and slowly passed the house, scraping the ice clean of
snow, scattering salt behind it.
“Does anyone know where Hildy is?” Sammy said.
“Oh God,” Sarah said. “Hildy! I forgot she existed!”
“I didn’t,” Jeff said, “but I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah said. “Why not?”
He held her gaze and shrugged his shoulders, and Sarah understood what he was still
trying not to say out loud: The dog was old. What possible reason could there be for her not to be
at home unless she was dead?
Sarah sent another text to her father. They’ve just plowed the road in front of the house.
When are you coming back? Where is Hildy?
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“Uncle Daniel,” Sammy said, “how did you and Tomás meet?” She seemed to realize no
one wanted to talk anymore about Hildy. She was doing her best impression of an adult,
changing the subject as unobtrusively as she could.
“We met at a party,” Daniel said. “At the restaurant.”
“This was,” Tomás said, “in that moment last summer when people were just starting to
think it was okay to get together again.”
“Which it turned out not to be,” Daniel said.
“No,” Tomás said. “But for a minute there was such a feeling of relief. People were so
happy just to be near each other again. But your uncle was standing all by himself in a corner,
not talking to anyone.”
“I was tired,” Daniel said. “I’d just worked a long, busy shift.”
“No,” Tomás said. “That’s not it. I mean I’m sure that was part of it, but that’s not all of
it.”
Daniel knew what he meant, but he wasn’t sure he liked being seen so clearly. At work
he loved everyone, especially strangers. It wasn’t even that he’d learned to hide his nervousness,
his shy and wary private self. He hid nothing. From the start of his shift to the end of it he was
nothing but the work, which was all social. He was all surface, all good humor and bonhomie,
eager to please as a friendly dog, tail wagging. He felt no shame about the performance when it
was over. That self was as authentically his as any other. In fact he seemed to need it—the
chance to place himself at the center of that charmed circle, to become the gravitational center
that held it all together. It could go wrong. There were nights when some minor snag at six
o’clock would have him running a step behind until two in the morning. There were customers
who insisted on remaining aloof and supercilious no matter now he tried to draw them into the
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convivial atmosphere of the restaurant. But for the most part he was always in control, or always
seemed to be. Even when he felt catastrophically incompetent, he knew how to make sure no one
else noticed. When the shift was over he always felt the same—hollowed out, vulnerable, like a
snake that’s just shed its skin.
And then that night there was also his sense that the ice had just closed over the abyss and
everyone was standing on it, and dancing and jumping up and down on it, much too soon. For
more than a year the restaurant had gotten by on takeout orders and limited outdoor seating. He’d
thought at the beginning that it would be sadly diminished, but in fact it had taken on a new kind
of wartime dignity—serving Michelin-starred meals on plastic plates with plastic lids to people
who needed that kind of nourishment. People had been let go, and that was terrible, but the ones
who hadn’t found other jobs could be hired back. He should have been happy, as everyone else
clearly was. Why did he seem to be the only one who couldn’t stop himself from seeing all that
happiness as the brittle shell of catastrophe? When Tomás came to him as a stranger, leaning in
close so he could speak softly, touching lightly with his fingertips first his wrist and then the
small of his back, he felt it as a blessing. It called him back from the nightmare of the future to
the present, which—Tomás kept finding ways to remind him—was the only reality.
“Is that what you always do?” Daniel said, teasing. “Talk to whoever looks sad and
lonely at the party?”
“You didn’t look sad or lonely,” Tomás said. “You just looked like you didn’t want to
talk to anybody. So how could I not want to talk to you?”
“I don’t get it,” Sammy said.
“Neither do I,” said Daniel.
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He held his glass of white grape juice up to the light like wine and drank it all in one
swallow, trying to taste the shape of time, but he tasted only sweetness. He couldn’t even
remember whether it was he or Sarah who had first introduced that item, or when, or why, only
that it was a very long time ago. There were objects laid out across the table—a little hand-
cranked music box, the kind you put in the goody bags at a kids’ birthday party; a red matchbox
Porsche he’d owned when he was eight or nine and then seen again, exactly the same, at the flea
market in Brooklyn when he was twenty-three; a reproduction of the first edition of Wallace
Stegner’s Angle of Repose, which none of them had ever read but which Sarah had seen looming
menacingly on her parents’ bookshelf as a child and then much later found at the public library
in a town she was passing through and borrowed with no intention of ever returning. None of
these things had any power to bend time or to reveal it. They were just objects—inert, silent, as
trapped in the present as the people who had brought them here.
“Mom would hate this,” Sarah said.
“Hate what?” Daniel said, but he knew what. It was like she’d been reading his mind.
“This,” she repeated. “How we’re all sitting around trying to make this stupid fake
holiday work—without her, without Dad now. Forcing it, because it used to mean something to
us and we don’t want to admit that it doesn’t work anymore. Who is it for? It’s not for the kids.
Do you enjoy this, Sammy?”
“I like the cake and the pizza,” Sammy said. “I like getting to see Grandpa and Uncle
Daniel.”
“What about me?” Tomás said, pretending to be wounded.
“Sorry, Tomás” Sammy said. “You too. I hope you come back next year, if we do this
next year.”
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“All holidays are fake,” Daniel said. He didn’t know why he was suddenly arguing for
the preservation of a tradition he’d thought was sad and ridiculous ten seconds ago. It was the
fact that his sister had called it stupid that made him feel bound to defend it. “We’re the kids,” he
said.
“Dad has been gone for hours,” Sarah said, more quietly. She didn’t want to argue. It was
her holiday now and if she didn’t have the will to hold it up anymore then she wouldn’t.
“I know,” Daniel said. “What do you think he’s doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what you mean by ‘Mom would hate this’? You think she would want us to be
out looking for him? Calling the cops? Not sitting around drinking grape juice and playing with
toys?”
“There’s nothing to do. He’s not senile. It’s too soon to call the cops. Anyway Mom is
hardly an authority on filial obligation, which is a two-way street if you ask me.”
“Sarah,” Jeff said quietly, touching her shoulder, aware probably that whatever she was
about to say would cause her pain to remember later.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” Daniel said. Which was a stupid thing to say. Who
wouldn’t feel that way, some of the time, among all the other things she must have also felt? Five
years, and maybe only now enough time had passed since the disaster that it had become
possible to speak ill of the dead.
“She abandoned us,” Sarah said.
Sammy got up and walked out of the room with her iPad, but she didn’t look upset. It was
impossible to tell what she was thinking. She settled herself just out of sight, where Daniel could
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still hear the thin electronic music of the game, somehow mournful and throbbing with
adrenaline at the same time.
“We weren’t children,” Daniel said. “We were practically middle-aged.”
“But she’d left us so many times already when we were children, Daniel. Didn’t you
always think she was never coming back? There was never a set date for the return trip. She went
to places where there weren’t even phone lines. I used to mark an X on the calendar after two
weeks. After the X I stopped counting days and just assumed she was dead until she proved
otherwise. That way if she turned out to be alive I’d be relieved, and if she turned out to be dead
I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“I didn’t know that,” Daniel said stupidly. Of course—he hadn’t known because she’d
kept him from knowing. When they were kids and his worry had been uncontrolled, spilling out
of him, making a mess of his life, she had kept hers so contained in his presence that he’d
thought she was above worry. As no one is—not even the dead. A consequence of being
consumed all the time by worry is that you can’t see anyone else’s.
And now that she was trying to tell the truth, he was arguing with her.
“It was her work,” he said quietly. “What was she supposed to do?”
“Why are you defending her?” Sarah said.
He didn’t know that either. Everything she was saying, he might have said himself on a
different day, but because his sister was saying it he felt the need to take his mother’s side.
“Parents are supposed to care more about their children than anything else,” she said, but
she spoke more quietly now, as if she knew how like a child she sounded.
“I don’t even know why I’m saying all this,” she said. “It’s not what I really think. Don’t
listen to me.” She called to Sammy in the other room, “Sammy, if you can hear me, don’t listen.”
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“I never do,” Sammy yelled back.
“It’s okay,” Tomás said. “It is what you really think. It’s what you think right now, not
what you always think. Tomorrow you’ll feel differently.”
“Ten minutes from now I’ll feel differently,” Sarah said. “I already feel differently. I
never know what I think or how I feel when it comes to her.”
From somewhere inside the wall there was a pop and then a series of high-frequency
clicks, diminishing in volume for several seconds and then lapsing into silence—the house
settling under the weight of accumulated snow on its roof.
“They should never have had children,” Daniel said.
“What?” Sarah said.
“Who?” said Tomás.
“Our parents. What were they thinking? They had each other, they had their work. They
could have been happy like that forever. What did they need us for? Some people have children
just because they think they’re supposed to.”
Jeff shifted constantly from one awkward position to another in his chair, looking like a
trapped animal, but Tomás listened avidly.
“Was she supposed to stop being who she was because she was our mother?” Daniel said.
“Yes!” Sarah said. “Yes, you do. You become someone else, don’t you? I certainly did.”
“You never put your work ahead of your kids?” Daniel said.
“My work is for my kids. They’re the reason I do anything. Because I want them to have
a future. Mom’s work wasn’t for us. It had nothing to do with us. It was all her. Her and her
finely-tuned, sensitive eye—which if you were drowning would be deeply moved by the way the
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sun glinted off your hair as it fanned out over the surface of the water and wouldn’t help you at
all.”
“She was obsessed,” Daniel agreed, speaking to everyone now. “With what, I’m not sure
anyone could really say.”
“In her mind she had no audience,” Sarah said. “God was the audience, whatever she
thought God meant. And in the art world you only need like six people to care about your work if
they’re the right people, and Dad made sure that happened.”
“It wasn’t all Dad.”
“It was mostly him,” Sarah said. “But she didn’t even need that. If it hadn’t happened, if
she hadn’t become famous, she would have spent her whole life walking through the woods near
home, making pictures of frozen lakes and glacial erratics and so on, and she would have been
just as happy.”
“Actually I don’t know what anyone is thinking, having children,” Daniel said.
“Excuse me?” Sarah said.
“Daniel,” Tomás said. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying what is it, an ego thing? Some kind of medieval preoccupation with making
sure your bloodline doesn’t die out? Nobody’s bloodline is anything special. Most people’s
bloodlines should have died out a long time ago.”
“Okay, speak for yourself,” Tomás said.
“Daniel,” Sarah said. “Nobody asked you. Nobody is trying to force you to have
children.”
“No, on the contrary, they would make it almost impossible for me, wouldn’t they?”
“Who’s they?” Jeff said to Sarah.
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“Is it so you won’t be lonely?” Daniel said. He needed to shut up, and he knew it, but he
couldn’t stop himself. He was as surprised as anyone to find that these were his opinions. He
wasn’t even sure whether he believed what he was saying. Maybe it was just that he was
searching for ways to explain what he’d already said, and all the explanations only made things
worse.
“Surely no one thinks the children themselves are the beneficiaries of their parents’
choice to make them,” he said. “There they were, enjoying the perfect, platonic bliss of non-
being. Formless. Infinite. Incapable of feeling pain or fear. They could have stayed that way
forever. But people are so bad at just letting things not be, which should be the easiest thing in
the world, shouldn’t it?”
“Okay,” Tomás said, standing up.
“Beloved,” Daniel said.
“No, I’m sorry, it’s just so tiresome,” he said, and left the room.
Jeff, seeing that the show was over, left too.
Sarah sat at the other end of the table, her eyes red around the edges and glistening.
“I didn’t know you felt that way,” she said.
“Neither did I.”
“I think you need help, but not from me.”
“Who then?” he said, almost desperately.
She held out her hands, palms up as if to show their emptiness. “Tomás?” she said. “He
seems like a good one.”
“There’s only so much of that kind of help you can ask of your partner, if that’s even
what he is.”
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“There’s only so much you can ask of your sister,” she said.
The baby whose existence Daniel had just denounced was crying upstairs, and she went
away to comfort him.

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15

Hildy walks on what was once the water. She knows where she is, though now there’s no
water but snow and snow, driftless, unmarked by any other creature’s feet, stretching on as far as
she can see. Wild animals don’t like such openness, such eerie flatness, but she does. She likes
the clean sharp smell of the air, the long uncluttered view. She wants to turn and keep walking on
to where the floor opens wider and wider under her feet, but she doesn’t do that. She keeps
within sight of the trees, crossing the narrow end of the reservoir from the woods she’s just left
to the woods on the other side, closer to home. She’s been out all night, and now it’s nearly night
again. She’s hungry. She’s barely slept. She’s cold.
The sky is huge above her—clear and cold and swimming with stars. She watches them:
still, scentless, emitting a high, fine sound like the ringing of a bell. She would take the stars in
her teeth if she could, but no one can. No teeth can reach them.
The storm tried to rip her away from herself but she held herself close—tail curled
around her body, head tucked down behind her haunches, sheltered from the wind behind a wall
of rock while the snow whirled around her. She was something growing on the skin of the earth
then, low and compact as a stone. Rooted, immobile. Now the air is still and she can move again.
She’s been moving for hours, and now the day is ending and she has to choose. There are two
possible dogs, one who walks out farther and farther onto the floor of that great hall, under the
ceiling of stars, and one who turns toward home. For a moment she is both.

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16

The sun hung red as an ember over the tops of the bare trees, and there was almost no
light outside.
Having no idea what else to do with herself for the moment, Sarah was reading. She was
caught between an overwhelming need to act and an awareness that the time for action had not
yet come, that whatever she might do now would be both useless and unreasonable. She had
chosen the book, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, almost at random from the shelf in her room, which for
years had been her mother’s study.
Before the beginning, Ovid said, there was chaos. The problem with chaos was that it was
boring. It was too stable. There was no distinction between one thing and its opposite, and
because nothing was different from anything else, nothing could change. “The whole of nature
displayed one face,” Ovid said. “A crude, unstructured mass, nothing but weight without
motion.” This was eight years after the birth of Christ, in the tiny Black Sea town of Tomis, on
the periphery of the periphery of the Roman Empire. Ovid had pissed off the Emperor. Augustus,
who had once considered the poet a friend, sent him there to live out his days in obscurity instead
of killing him.
That was in the book too. There was an introduction that told the whole story of the
poet’s life and his world. She slid the book into her bag to bring it home with her. She had letters
to write, foundations to inspire, and she could use that story—this aged, illustrious man toiling in
a stone shack among goats and chickens, working with nothing but myth and intuition,
describing the origin of the cosmos almost exactly as Georges LeMaitre would describe it
nineteen centuries later.
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When the beginning came, it was because nature took pity on the elements, locked as
they were in that void in which everything was present and nothing was distinct. Nature
“disentangled the elements, so as to set them free from the heap of darkness.” Henceforth desire
was the engine of the world, and transformation was the means by which it moved. Apollo
pursued Daphne, and Daphne begged her father the river to save her and so was transformed into
a laurel tree rooted in the river’s bank. Apollo’s mortal son begged his father to lend him his
chariot and, losing control of it, set the clouds on fire and forced the stars to dive into the sea to
cool themselves. Actaeon stumbled on the grove where Diana was bathing and by accident took
in the holy sight of her naked body, which no mortal man was meant to see. In her fury the
goddess transformed him into a stag so that his own dogs could tear him to pieces. His voice in
that agony could not have been a human voice, coming as it did from a stag’s body. Nonetheless,
the poet said, “It was a sound no stag could have made.”
___

Nothing was the same as it had been before, nor had it ever been. The last of the light
drained from the sky, and Sarah saw her face as it looked now—her middle-aged face reflected
in the window of her childhood bedroom. Her brother had spoken in a voice not his own. Not the
voice of the brother she’d relied on when she had no faith in her own choices. It was fear
speaking through him, pouring itself into the shape of his life. She understood how it was that
those ancients thought of fear and love and anger and so on as beings separate from ourselves,
with their own intentions. After Diana transformed Actaeon, she “injected” panic into him, to
make him run.
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Jeff came in with the baby, who was sleeping, and laid him in his crib at the foot of the
bed.
“I’m with Sammy,” he said. “I like him best when he’s sleeping.”
“That’s because it’s the only time when he doesn’t need anything,” she said.
“You don’t agree?”
“I like it when he needs me,” she said.
“He looks like you when he’s sleeping,” Jeff said.
“Not when he’s awake?”
“I think he has your face but my expressions, if that makes any sense.”
It didn’t, but she wasn’t going to argue about it. When Sammy was a baby everyone had
agreed that she looked like a clone of her mother. Their friends had asked, joking, whether Jeff
had been involved at all in the conception. It didn’t bother him, as she knew it would have
bothered her. He could love his children without needing to see them as reflections of himself.
She was never sure whether that made his love more real than hers or less.
“Sammy’s been saying she’s hungry,” he said. “I’m gonna go see what there is to eat.”
“Good luck.”
Alone, she stood over the crib and watched the baby sleep. It’s hard to see your own face
in someone else’s, even if everyone says it’s there. Now, though, she found she could imagine
it—herself transformed, shrunk down and hung on the frame of this tiny, male person, this
radically other self who would travel much farther into the future than her native form could. He
would carry the past into the future. Not only her mother’s face but her grandmother’s—and her
bony knees and poor circulation and beyond that who knew what was inherited and what was
learned and what, by whatever untraceable mechanism, was remembered? A taste for black
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licorice. Trouble sleeping, unease in a crowd. Maybe Daniel was right and it was only the fearful
ego that wanted children—the flimsy, provisional little shantytown of the self, watching the
water rise and trying not to get washed away. She had known it was a mistake to have even one
child. She had faced that certainty, she thought, bravely. And then eight years later she’d had
another one. It wasn’t an accident. It was what she wanted.
She lay down on the bed and looked up into the corner of the room where, a quarter-
century in the past, Midge the spider had lived and died and lived again. There were two possible
explanations for what had happened. Either it was the same spider, who hadn’t died but merely
wandered off to live elsewhere and then returned, aged far beyond the biological limits of her
species, or it was another spider, exactly identical, appearing at random in the same unlikely
place. The answer depended on whether you found it easier to believe the improbable or the
impossible.
The first time, she stayed for thirteen days. Every morning, methodically, she swallowed
the web she’d built the night before. Sarah’s mother explained how it was. She was a garden
spider. She wasn’t meant to live inside a house. Out in the garden or the yard, her web would
have gathered the moisture from the early morning air, and that would have been her water for
the day. In the house there was no water for a spider. Very little, meagre food. She had already
lived much longer than she was supposed to. Born in the spring, she should have died before
winter. She was supposed to have found a mate, consumed his body as soon as she had received
his sperm, and then used up the last of her strength and all the available protein in her body
weaving a silken purse in which to lay her eggs. Depleted and starving, she would have watched
over the purse for a few days, moving only to repair any tears that might appear, and then died.
Matthea’s theory was that Midge had never found a mate. Having avoided that prescribed death,
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she had lived past the season her body was made for. She came into the house to escape the cold,
and there found warmth and nothing else she needed.
At first it was merely frightening. Nameless, the creature hung above Sarah’s face as she
tried to sleep, huge and alien, as far from human as any animate thing could be. What did it want
from her? She asked her mother to kill it, and instead her mother helped her to give it a name and
to spin out of simple facts, gleaned from the Gardener’s Almanac, this elaborate story.
On the sixth day Sarah thought of moistening the web with water from a spray-bottle, and
every morning after that she woke before the sun came up to do it. On the thirteenth day, she
rose to find both web and spider gone. There was no body to be found, so it was possible to
believe she’d simply moved on to wait out the winter elsewhere. Then, on exactly the same day a
year later, she returned. Or her doppelganger, a twin who had no concept or herself as something
impossible, the living echo of a vanished life.
Sarah was the echo of her own past life then. She slept in the same bed, wore the same
clothes, spoke in what other people must have heard as the same voice, but she was not the same.
Nothing had happened. Her best friend had moved away, and her second best friend had made
new friends. She had loved Nate Wooster for weeks, with a hopeless, unspeakable love that
burned away the texture of her life until there was nothing in it but his face and his voice and the
way she thought she must look to him. She never spoke to him. In the end she snuck out of class
to write Nate Wooster I love you in huge blue chalk letters on the sidewalk outside the school on
an afternoon threatened by rain. She was so sure he already knew how she felt that she forgot to
sign her name. An hour later the rain came and reduced her confession to a vivid smudge only
she could read, and when she left school at the end of the day there was only a fine blue powder
laced into the stream of water running toward the storm drain.
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Once, long before, she had looked up into the branches of the trees in summer and felt
that she could hear them thinking. Not about her, and not in words, but she understood. Her
senses were there to take in the world because the world wished to be known. Her body was
there to carry her senses and to protect them. Her father had taught her that. And then one day
the world outside herself was closed to her. Her senses fled their home and stood just outside,
looking back at that unsound, drafty house. Not enough windows, not enough light. There was
the before time, the dream time she could only dimly remember, in which she’d had no self. And
then there was the time after, when her self was all she could see.
Her mother was on a boat somewhere in the Bering Sea, outside the range of any
communication device that had yet been invented. When the sun began to set, Sarah turned out
the light in her room so as not to confuse Midge. She needed the dimness to know when to build
her web. Somehow, in the stillness of that room, she arranged her body so that she could launch
herself into the current of the air, trailing a line of silk behind her, from the molding at the top of
one wall to the end of the iron curtain rod perpendicular to it. Then from the center of that line
she dropped another one straight down, forming a Y. Then another line and another, radiating out
from the center of the Y like spokes on a wheel. With another kind of silk—the thin and sticky
kind, fatal to insects—she traced a spiral that widened outward from the wheel’s hub. The whole
process took her thirty minutes from start to finish.
It was cold, then as now, the chill seeping in through the thin walls and thin windowpanes
so that even wrapped in her blanket Sarah was never warm. Midge hung upside down from the
thread she was weaving, twisting her body and moving her legs with such speed and precision
that even after cumulative hours of watching, Sarah could never follow them. Like trying to learn
to play Rachmaninoff by watching the pianist’s fingers. Midge was thinking with her body,
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tracing the shape or her thought in the air. The form was the same every time, millions of years
old, but the particulars changed according to the demands of the moment—the space she had to
work in, the movement and direction of light and air. Her memory came to her whole and
continuous through a hundred thousand generations, and she wove that unfathomable ancientness
into the present so seamlessly that there was no distinction. It wasn’t that she remembered those
other lives. She didn’t remember her own life, probably. She had no self, only the need for food
and shelter and the knowledge of how to meet those needs and, with luck, to pass the thread of
that memory beyond the limits of her body.
___

Human beings had been around less than a tenth that long, and in that time had learned
nothing but how to take from the world more than it could give and how to leave the party before
the check came. When Sammy was born and Sarah was swamped by a tidal surge of regret at
having brought another diner so late to the banquet, her mother was the only person on earth to
whom she could have posed the question—did I make a mistake? To Jeff she said nothing. If
Sammy was a mistake, she was his mistake too. He would have felt accused. He would have
heard her saying she didn’t want the child, didn’t want to be a mother, which wasn’t it at all. And
with Daniel she couldn’t ask the question as a question. She was his older sister, and she couldn’t
come to him for advice or absolution. She couldn’t ask him to help her figure anything out, only
to listen. That was the way it had always been. Whatever doubts she felt became certainties when
she spoke to him.
She could have asked her mother. Not that she would have trusted her mother’s answer,
but with her mother at least it would have been possible to talk about it. Even to argue about it
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would have done her good, but her mother was thousands of miles away then too, doing the same
work she’d been doing twenty years before. She would never stop. Someday she would die
stepping off a float plane in the middle of some frozen ocean named for some forgotten Danish
prince. Of natural causes, probably. Of whatever mundane stroke or heart attack would have
killed her in her bed if she’d been someone else.
When she learned of her mother’s actual death, just four years later, there was yet another
question that only her mother could answer. Her father and brother must have thought of the
same question, but they never talked about it. In the art press, which she tried never to read, the
question was asked immediately and then endlessly elaborated, hedged about with theories and
qualifications, the same answer arrived at by a thousand twisting, overlapping paths. The same
dull, opaque wall of fact decorated again and again with a constantly shifting array of meanings.
Her mother knew what she was doing. She would have known the snow was coming, and
she would not by simple carelessness have missed her chance to escape it. She’d had to make the
same choice again and again, every minute for many hours—stay or go. She’d kept on choosing
to stay until it wasn’t a choice anymore. How was that different from suicide?
___

When the search and rescue people found her body, they found her camera too. By then it
was as cold inside the cabin as it was outside, but she’d filled a thermos with water heated on her
gas stove and had laid the camera next to it, deep in her backpack and swaddled in sweaters and
jackets, and somehow that warmth had lasted long enough to keep the film from freezing. She’d
left no instructions on what to do with it. Sarah’s father kept the camera on top of his dresser
with the film still in it, like some kind of magic charm. Every time she asked him what he
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planned to do with it he changed the subject. It had been in its place, unmoving, for almost a year
when she finally stole the film canister when he wasn’t looking and took it to the developer
herself. She wasn’t acting against his wishes, since he had never said what his wishes were.
Her mother had taken only one roll of film up the mountain with her, and she’d used it
all. Thirty-six exposures, of which only the first four were made outside the cabin. The rest she
must have done after she was already trapped. It wasn’t like her. She must have understood that
she wouldn’t have another chance to use that film, but so what? She’d never had any qualms
about wasting film. The real sin was making something just to make something. She had a whole
closet stocked with rolls and rolls of film, most of which she would never use. The scattered
crystals of silver salt lay fixed in their gelatin bath, in perfect darkness, waiting for the reflected
light of the world to imprint itself on them. Better by far to let that infinite potential rot than to
use it carelessly. It wasn’t wasted that way. At rest in the canister it was already everything it
could become, and it stayed that way until it degraded and became nothing. No shame in that.
Nothing could be more natural. It was the mantra the world repeated as constantly as it
breathed—nothing, nothing, nothing. But an ugly or false image could be reproduced billions of
times, stored on servers that gobbled up whole forests every day in their ever-growing demand
for energy. It could go on lying about the world until there was no world left.
As usual, Sarah had lost sight of the line that divided her mother’s mind from hers. She
was trying to imagine what her mother would have thought, what strange intuitions would have
guided her unaccountable choices, but her own concerns kept bleeding in. Her mother wouldn’t
have cared about the server farms. She hated the waste of effort and attention that came from so
many people talking just to talk. The world was drowning in thoughtless images. But she would
have burned down the last rainforest on earth if that was what it took to make one good picture.
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No matter where Sarah looked, she saw only herself. It was the present—the conversation
with Daniel just now in the kitchen, what he’d said about the wish for children, what he’d said
about letting things not be—imposing itself on the past, casting the past in its own image.
___

She got the prints back from the developer one day before the anniversary of her
mother’s death. She hadn’t planned it that way. She hadn’t known how long it would take to
make them. She hadn’t consciously been thinking about that anniversary at all. Then when she
noticed the coincidence she had to consider the possibility that some hidden self might have
planned it all along, unbeknownst to her.
She waited until she was alone in the house to open them. She thought at first it would be
hard to look at those interior photos—all the carefully composed images her mother had made to
record the room in which she surely knew she was going to die. But it wasn’t hard. There was no
fear in the pictures. There were only objects—the portable gas burner with its base wrapped in
foil on the little table, that wrinkled mirror breaking the light of the flame above it into hundreds
of scattered fragments. One boot on its side in the corner of the room, near the door, the well of
shadow at its opening, the long, dark laces running out over the floor like twin rivers flowing
down from the hills and across the plain. A plastic fork at rest against the rim of a can of tuna.
There were no memories attached to them. Their human meanings were secondary. Even the can
of tuna and the rumpled wax-paper tube of Ritz crackers spoke only to themselves, in their own
private language, of things that had nothing to do with any human need. The speech of these
objects was untranslateable, wholly enclosed and interior, and went on all the time regardless of
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whether anyone was listening. It was her mother’s genius to make that speech audible, but no
one could make it intelligible.
The few photos from outside the cabin were harder. She could see her mother’s mind
working, calculating at first—how long before the snow starts falling, how long to hike down to
the road, how long before the sun is gone and the snow obscures the trail and renders the ground
too slippery to walk on. How long can I stay? Then forgetting every consideration that wasn’t
part of the image she was making, the belly of the sky slung low over the earth, the earth
trembling, waiting to be transformed. In the last image the sky was an ocean hung upside down
over the valley, the steep sides of the mountains overlapping so there was no way to gauge the
level of the earth, the trees in the foreground blurred behind the screen of falling snow. The last
light flashed in through a narrow gap between the cloud ocean and the valley’s throat. She
understood how her mother had needed to be there so her camera could see that. She had chosen
it, regardless of what it would cost. It wasn’t suicide. It was something like the opposite: she
needed so much to be alive in that exact time and place that she had no room in her mind to
consider the future. By then it would have been too late to change her mind anyway.
She had her Emerson with her in the cabin—the same old copy she’d bought in the same
town thirty years before, in the time when she had just met the man who would become Sarah’s
father. She’d carried it up the mountain despite its bulk, as another piece of the equipment she
would need for the work she was doing. Not long after everything happened, Sarah and her
father and brother had gone to the police station in Harrisville to claim those recovered things,
and the book had been the only thing Sarah wanted. Looking at the photographs, she tried to
guess what passages her mother might have had in mind as she made them. She opened the book
and read aloud in the empty house, as if to bless her mother’s work: From the mountain you see
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the mountain. Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. We wake and find
ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us and stairs above, many a one, which go upward out
of sight. But the Genius which stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to
drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy
now at noonday.
___
Sarah had been ready to kill herself once. She couldn’t say for how long. It was because
of the baby that she felt that way, and it was only because of the baby that she didn’t do it. For
the first several months of her life, Sammy refused to sleep in her crib. She would sleep only
sprawled face down across her mother’s body, head against her chest where she could hear her
heart beating. Sarah was afraid to sleep that way herself, because it was dangerous for the baby,
so whenever the baby slept, she was awake. Or stayed awake as long as she could, exhausted as
she was. By the time her twelve weeks’ maternity leave had dwindled to six, she’d stopped
counting. In her mind she’d already turned in her resignation. Every time she had to end an email
with the copied-and-pasted block of nonsense that was her professional identity—Sarah Lepore,
Assistant VP for New Markets, Proformiti Analytics—she found herself trying to guess whether
it would be easier to swallow pills or bleed herself out in the bathtub. Both at the same time
would be safest, probably, but too unkind to Jeff, who would have to find her that way.
The baby didn’t know her own name yet, so Sarah never used it. She called her baby.
When she was with her, she had no need for her own name either. Lying beneath the baby as she
slept, she could almost forget she had a name—a mother and father of her own, a husband, a job.
She’d heard somewhere that every living thing maintained its life by borrowing or stealing heat
from something else. Now she was nothing more than that—a living body sharing its warmth
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with another, more vulnerable body. Even the milk in her breasts was just warmth in another
form—fuel the baby’s body would burn to make its own warmth. How good it would have felt to
relinquish everything that wasn’t that—everything her memory clung to, everything her name
meant. The engine of waste that was called a personality, with all its endlessly varied, ingenious
ways to embellish and magnify the needs of the body, to support the insupportable fiction of the
self.
Weeks before the baby was born, in Philadelphia, three thousand migrating songbirds had
broken their bodies in a single night by flying into skyscrapers. More than fifty thousand birds
had passed through the city that night, hundreds of species traveling together down the spine of
the Atlantic flyway, most so small and so high above the ground that no one saw them in the
dark, but if she’d been in her office on the 498
th
floor of the Comcast tower after midnight she
could have looked down and seen a river of birds beneath her feet, flowing around the building
as if it were an island and stretching backward as far as she could see in the diminishing light.
They’d flown from the Arctic tundra, some of them, navigating by memories thousands of years
older than they were, by whatever landmarks remained from before there was a Comcast tower,
from the time when nothing marked the confluence of those two nameless rivers but a broad, flat
stretch of marsh and sand that flooded when the tide came in. By some unknowable method they
used the moon and the stars to navigate, but now there were lights below them as well as above,
and the clear sky could turn solid at any moment and smash their bones.
The baby would have no choice but to become a human being, and what could her
mother teach her about how to be one of those? Her memory was only her own, leaky as a sieve,
prone to amnesias both selective and random, just as prone to dwell for no reason at all on
whatever caused her pain. Her knowledge of even recent human history was spotty at best, full of
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errors so huge and obvious she couldn’t even see them. And now the world was changing faster
than it had at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs. The last time there had been as much
carbon in the atmosphere as there was that year, there had also been crocodiles in Saskatchewan.
No ice anywhere on the face of the earth. The oceans seventy feet above their current level. The
shape of the world hadn’t even caught up to the transformations humans had already imposed on
it. She was sending her daughter, who after all had not asked to be born, into a future she could
not prepare her for.
At six weeks old the baby was not yet human in any real sense. She was just another
fragment of the living world trying to keep itself warm. She remembered things she’d never
learned—how to find comfort in the feel of her mother’s skin against hers, how to drink from her
mother’s breast, skills that belonged to the collective mammalian mind, learned and remembered
through a hundred and seventy-eight million years of birth and death. Alone in the shower, Sarah
scoured her body with the sponge until her skin was raw. She wanted to scrub away the poison of
the self—everything that was extraneous to that wordless exchange of warmth and comfort. She
wanted to be nothing but that, as the baby was. But she couldn’t shed the rest without losing that
too, and the baby needed that. So she stayed alive, which was not the same as wanting to live.

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17

Every time he returned to his childhood bedroom, Daniel was amazed all over again at
how cramped it was, tucked into the slope of the roof so only on the north side of the room could
he stand without stooping. Tomás, who was two and a half inches taller, had to bow his head like
a penitent even as he paced along that wall, close enough that Daniel could have reached out
from the bed against the opposite wall and grabbed his hand.
“There’s not enough room in here for both of our bad moods, Daniel. I wish you would
give me some space.”
“It’s my room,” Daniel said, but he said it sadly, as if he wished it were otherwise. “And
I’m not in a bad mood.”
“Oh, no?”
“No. I’m perfectly fine. Why, because of what I said about not wanting kids?”
“Among other things, yes.”
“I don’t want kids when I’m in a good mood either. It’s not something that changes
depending on what kind of mood a person is in. Why is this a big deal? Do you want kids? You
never mentioned it before.”
He was fooling no one, least of all himself. Tomás had gone upstairs to be alone and
Daniel had followed him like a child, ready to beg forgiveness, ready to admit to every fault his
beloved would surely see in him. Ascending the steps to the upper hall he’d yearned for that
brutal clarity. He’d wanted to be told exactly what made him as unworthy of love as he knew
himself to be. But now that he had reached the place of judgment he could admit to nothing.
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“If you don’t want to have kids that’s fine. No one is going to force you. Quite the
opposite, as you said. But you don’t have to put down people who do. You didn’t have to say all
that to your sister. And in front of Sammy, who adores you. What is going on with you?”
“Nothing,” Daniel said. “I’m fine.” He wasn’t fine, but he needed Tomás to force it out of
him. Whatever he needed to say, he would only be able to find the words under duress. “Why
didn’t you tell me your aunt was that sick?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“You acted like everything was fine.”
“No,” Tomás said, “you acted like everything was fine. You assumed everything was fine
because you couldn’t deal with it otherwise.”
And there it was, the end already. Not that Daniel was surprised, of course, but he hadn’t
thought it would come so soon. Every relationship he’d ever been in had ended with some
version of this same return to the beginning, this same deconstruction of every happy, early
memory to reveal the pettiness and cowardice—always his own—already latent within it. It was
no different with Tomás. Of course it wasn’t. While he, Daniel, had been falling in love so
precipitously that it scared him, afraid to name his good luck aloud lest it vanish like a mirage,
Tomás had been barely tolerating him, bargaining with himself probably, trying to decide how
much longer he had to extend the benefit of the doubt and pretend to be happy before he could be
sure of his judgment. He was right, of course. It was one thing to talk about how they’d both lost
their mothers and how that might constitute some kind of bond between them. Those were old
wounds, as fully healed by now as they were ever going to be. Daniel wasn’t prepared to handle
a fresh crisis, so he’d pretended it wasn’t happening.
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“How am I supposed to know how you feel if you don’t tell me anything?” he said. It was
a stupid question. It was a weakness that had always been with him—the need to keep defending
himself even when he knew he was wrong, even when it meant saying things that made no sense
even to him.
“You’re supposed to ask,” Tomás said. “If you had asked, I would have told you.”
“Sorry,” he said, but he couldn’t decide whether he meant it sarcastically or sincerely and
so his voice came out wrong, flat and thin, as if there were no human personality behind it. It
startled Tomás.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t know her that well, honestly. I didn’t see her that often,
since she lived in Sao Paolo and I lived in White Plains. But she was my mom’s best friend. I
guess I thought someday she could help me figure out who my mom was—like as a grown-up
person, not just as my mom. When I thought we were losing her it was maybe like I was losing
my mom all over again.”
Daniel could imagine how it was, but imagining always meant getting it wrong, getting
his own life—his own grief—confused with the life of this other person. He tried to picture
Tomás’s aunt in the hospital and he saw his own mother in the cabin in New Hampshire, which
was an imaginary cabin since he’d never seen the real one except in disconnected fragments, in
the pictures his mother had taken. He’d never had to face what Tomás had faced with his aunt—
the daily alarm, the desperate, relentless need to do something when there’s nothing you can do.
By the time Daniel had learned there was anything wrong, it was already all over. Now Daniel
thought how alone Tomás must have felt. Even if he could have reached Sao Paolo, they
wouldn’t have let him into the hospital. So he closed the door to their shared bedroom, opened
his laptop and entered the other world, where all his aunts and uncles and cousins lived alone in
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separate little boxes, none of which could be reached from any other, one of which contained his
mother’s younger sister, silent and still among the forest of machines that were keeping her alive.
Then he had to come back into his body, feel the coldness of the room, the hard back of the
wooden dining chair pressing into his spine, and go out to join his boyfriend, who would ask him
no questions about what had transpired on that call. Or would say, “Everything okay?” and hear
“Yeah, fine,” and accept the word fine as a token meaning that things could continue as they
were, that nothing was required of him.
“I can’t help the way I am,” Daniel said. “I’m selfish. You should have left then. It would
have been easier.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” Tomás said. “You’re just making this all about you. Why do
you have to do that?”
The moon was nearly full, and its bluish light adhered to the snow, lighting the world
from the ground up. The one window in Daniel’s room faced south, out the back of the house
where there was no road, no other houses, nothing to see but the sloping lawn and then the
woods that in another season would have been tangled and dark but now, with the trees bare and
the undergrowth hidden by snow, looked like the nave of a cathedral whose many columns held
up the sky.
His father was out there somewhere. Already he’d been gone much longer than he could
have had any practical reason to be, and still Daniel couldn’t bring himself to worry. Instead he
worried about his inability to worry in the normal way—in the way that was normal for him. It
was like some crucial faculty—the primary sense he used to orient himself in the world—had
been mysteriously damaged. He remembered something Sarah had told him once—about birds
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that, dosed with DDT, lost their ability to navigate and ended up dying in the middle of the
ocean.
“And what is wrong with wanting children?” Tomás said.
“You do want them,” Daniel said. “Why did we never talk about this before?”
“Why would we have? Maybe now is the time to talk about it.”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” Daniel said.
“I’m not trying to change your mind, Daniel. I just don’t understand you. I can
understand not wanting to bring more people into the world. The world is too crowded already,
yes, I know. But there are babies alive now who need parents. Are you against adoption too?”
“I’m not against any of it. I just don’t want it.”
How could he explain? Already he was defending a version of himself that belonged to
the past, even if the past in this case had transpired just an hour earlier. Before that he’d never
really thought about it. It wasn’t a question he needed to answer. Then he saw the baby asleep in
its mother’s arms and remembered the dream in which he’d wandered the empty streets under
the gaze of strangers, the sirens, the dead man with his life spilling out from under his helmet and
flowing like a stream across the Merritt Parkway.
All his life, he’d had to constantly adjust his image of the world to account for the
distortions his fearful imagination imposed on it. If disaster seemed imminent and inevitable, it
meant that disaster was a remote possibility, not worth the energy he wasted in trying to prepare
for it. At some point he understood that he hadn’t been wrong about the nature of the world, that
it was only his good fortune—as a human being born right in the generous bosom of an empire
not yet in obvious decline—that made it seem otherwise. Now the world itself was shifting to
match his image of it. It wouldn’t be easy to prepare for that. He would have to become less
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precious to himself, to be ready to release himself into the flood when it came. He had spoken his
condemnation out of simple, selfish fear: If he had children, if he loved them as much as his
sister loved hers, how would he be able to let go when he needed to?
The problem now was that he’d spoken with such finality, he’d left himself no room to
change his mind. Had he ever changed his mind in the presence of someone trying to change it?
Weeks or months later, maybe, he’d be able to bring up the topic again and make it seem as
though he’d reconsidered on his own and not as a result of Tomás’s objections. The question was
whether Tomás would wait that long. Already all his certainty had evaporated. Because what was
his beloved saying?
“It’s not that I necessarily want children. Certainly not right now. It’s just that I’d like to
think it’s a possibility, someday.”
Which meant—did it not?—that Tomás was tallying his options for the future on the
assumption that he would share that future with Daniel. Daniel couldn’t imagine why, but there it
was, and to his surprise he found that any possible future that included him and Tomás together
was one he wanted. He couldn’t repeat his refusal then. He couldn’t bring himself to exclude
anything. But he couldn’t admit that yet either, so he got up and left the room, saying, “Have all
the space you want. I’m going for a walk.”

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18

No trains now, nor for many hours on either side of the present moment, in which even
the station parking lot remains unplowed since no one has a reason to park here. This branch of
the New Haven line is so remote, so little used, that the snow may melt away on its own before
the snowthrowers get around to it. For now, away from the crossing gates and the signal lights,
nothing shows that the track is there at all but a blank white corridor between the walls of trees.
Arnold doesn’t want to go that way, stumbling over the hidden railroad ties, watched by man and
beast. He tells himself that if Hildy had gone that way he would see her footprints in the snow.
But she wouldn’t have kept to that straight path long anyway, before some sound or smell pulled
her into the woods, where how could he hope to follow her?
He’s come back to the station without intention, but not by accident. His intuition led him
here, on foot since he’d abandoned the broken car, one step at a time so he never knew where he
was going until he got there. Now his intuition has left him, and he doesn’t know where to go
next.
He calls for Hildy again, his voice a startled yelp because of the pain in his chest.
Something is torn and broken there. When he breathes deeply he feels the cracked ribs bending
like pines in a windstorm, the muscles straining to hold the bones in place. His wrist is broken
too, or sprained maybe—what he knows is that he can’t draw the fingers of his right hand into a
fist. He leaves that hand in the pocket of his down jacket, as if it were an injured bird he’d found
on the side of the road and hoped to nurse back to health. Blood is dripping into his right eye
from somewhere above, but the mess of blood-slicked hair under his wool cap is so tangled and
wet that he can’t find where the blood is coming from.
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He holds himself still and listens, but no dog barks now, and what other sign could he
hope to hear? A military helicopter passes high overhead, bound who knows where for who
knows what secret reason, its massive rotor vibrating the air like a bandsaw. A cat stands at the
door of its owner’s house, he guesses, asking to be let in, having learned by long habituation how
to speak in a voice so nearly human that at first he thinks it’s the voice of a child calling softly,
“Hello? Hello?” Half the stars he can see are manmade objects, but he has no way to know
which ones. One of them might be the telescope Euclid, setting out to learn how the universe will
die.
He’s not hungry. He’s forgotten what it feels like to want food. He feels hollow inside,
dry and clean as a canyon scoured by wind, the stream that carved it running invisibly in the
shadows far below. Even the pain of his injuries is remote, as if he were standing on the moon
and saw from that distance that his home on earth was burning.
He picks up the payphone again because what else is he going to do?
As before, he hears the rush of his own blood through that hollow chamber, like holding a
shell to his ear and hearing the ocean. That sound is quieter this time, slower. There’s no
adrenaline in him as there was before. He can hear it speaking calmly, steadily, but it’s his own
self speaking back to him, and he ignores it. He focuses his mind on that tidal sound until it
dissolves at its edges and disappears, and then he can hear what is not himself. It reaches him all
at once, not in layers as it did before. He hears the high, steady tone refracted into a spectrum of
sound, ringing and quivering and rumbling in conversation with itself. The sound speaks in
images. The voice is wholly its own, ancient, utterly separate from him, but the language in
which it speaks is new, born out of the meeting of signal and receiver. White mycelium tendrils,
fine as human hairs, reach into black soil and wrap themselves around the roots of trees. The
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trees stand in a line at the edge of a field in winter, the grass white with frost, the branches bare
and stark against the gray sky. They are dreaming together, but the form of their dream is not his
to know. A city burns in the distance, at the mouth of a bay. The moon’s reflection rests on the
water and the flames consume it.
There is less and less of him. Less of his memory, less of the life he might remember.
Less of Mattie too. The self that might remember her dissolves in the cold air with his breath,
which rises from his body as a single thing, visible and real, and then disperses into the black sky
until every particle stands alone, having no memory of the body it was once a part of.
A distant siren calls him back to his body. Someone has crashed his car on one of these
icy roads, most likely. Someone else besides him. His own car is miles away, and even if some
stranger has noticed it by now and called the police, he wouldn’t hear that siren from where he is.
His phone is still in his pocket, almost fully charged. He should call home at least, ask Sarah or
Daniel to come and round him up, but he doesn’t want to give them a reason to put themselves at
risk. Anyway he hasn’t done what he set out to do, and anyone who comes to get him will take
him straight to the hospital. He’ll turn toward home, but he’ll walk. A compromise. Hildy may
well have gone that way herself. She may have hurt herself or lost her strength along the way,
and he may yet find her. Maybe they can help each other home.

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19

Even as she was proudly defying Athena, Arachne must have understood that she was
trapped, that even if she won she would never win. She was the greatest weaver who had ever
lived, and she knew it. Unwilling to humble herself, she had allowed herself to be goaded into a
contest against the god from whom all weaving came.
When the contest began, she wove images from lives like her own—confounded by the
gods’ deceptions and by their jealousies: Leda in the clutches of the swan, Bacchus disguised as
a cluster of grapes to seduce Erigone. In the end, Arachne’s weaving was at least as good as
Athena’s, and the goddess rewarded her by beating her until she hung herself. Then she gave her
back her life, but condemned her to hang forever, always weaving. Ovid is unsparing in his
description of the body horror involved in this transformation—the hair falling out, the nose and
ears melting away from the face, the long, slender fingers attaching themselves to the woman’s
sides to become legs grotesquely protruding from her huge, distended belly.
What Sarah wonders, in the second hour of her walk in the cold, is whether the spider
remembers the woman she was. The spider’s body in the story is only horrible because it’s a
human body mutilated and hideously rearranged. On its own, it’s as beautiful and strange as any
other body. As for her labor—the curse of all that endless, compulsive weaving—you could say
it’s a gift. How else to separate the pure pleasure of the work itself from the burden of its
metaphors? For the greatest weaver in the world to remember nothing except how to weave, to
repeat the process each evening, wherever she finds herself, to weave protection and good
fortune and nothing more—no symbols, none of those awful stories—well, it’s hard to know
how to measure what is loss and what is gain.
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Sarah has gone out to find her father, though at this point she’s only half admitted to
herself that that’s what she’s doing. She told Jeff she was going for a walk, which at the time was
not a lie since she believed it. Still, she’d taken half the almond cake with her, cut into six equal
slices wrapped individually in plastic—food to sustain her for many hours. She hadn’t let anyone
see her do that, because they would have asked questions she wouldn’t have been able to answer.
Now she rests her weight on the heavy crossbeam of some stranger’s fence and takes off
her gloves to dig the first slice out of her bag. She knows she looks like a vagrant, without even a
dog to walk as an alibi. In a town like this, no one would come out to talk to her if they were
curious. They’d just call the cops. Not for the first time she feels how inhospitable a place this
is—all private property, no place where a walker can linger for more than a minute without
arousing suspicion.
Hardly any difference, here, between the locked-down early days of the pandemic and
any other time. Any plague might come, however horrible, and this town would look the same as
she remembered it from childhood—closed doors, lighted windows seen from far away across
huge lawns. Every family tucked away in its own pocket of dappled shade and birdsong,
dreaming its own complicated dreams.
The cake is stale, yes, but so richly laden with butter and sugar that it melts in her mouth
anyway—she just has to let it rest there a little longer. Some frozen chamber of her brain thaws
in sympathy, and the past floods her. She remembers the first time she tasted that cake, when she
was maybe twelve and Daniel was eight and the four of them, mother and father and children,
had gone as a unit to the opening of a show at P.S. 1. Not her mother’s work, but a friend of her
mother’s, a man whose photographs of ruined Appalachian houses their mother loved. All those
art events blend together in her mind so she remembers nothing but the images themselves—
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those farmhouses, in this case, with their collapsing, moss-covered roofs and broken windows,
the land around them thick with briar and vine, all their straight lines and right angles breaking
down, sliding back into the chaos of the vegetation. There was an argument after they left the
show. The primary medium of the argument was an icy silence between mother and father, about
which she understood almost nothing except that their father hadn’t liked the show and their
mother had loved it. He was at that moment forming the unkind opinion he would publish later—
the photos were sentimental, exploitive even—and she couldn’t make him see it otherwise or
stop him from saying what he wanted to say. She had promised her children a treat after the
show, and so they walked north until they found a tiny, crowded Polish bakery where, being
children, Sarah and Daniel chose what they thought they could recognize. They took the cake
across the street to a park and sat away from their parents, a unit unto themselves then, insisting
on this simple pleasure in spite of the adults and their made-up problems. The cake tasted strange
and familiar at the same time, and the summer smell of the park was strange and familiar too—
cut grass, car exhaust, the indescribable tang of the East River with the sun on it.
It was Daniel who found that bakery again, wandering in Long Island City from his first
apartment in Brooklyn, almost fifteen years ago now. Astonished, to find the same cake still on
its glass stand in the window, with its dusting of powdered sugar. It was mid-July, and it must
have been almost physically painful for him, having to wait the whole five months until the Day
of Midge, when he could buy that cake and bring it home. Mentioning it to no one in the
meantime, hoping the cake would still be there when its time came. But it turned out to be the
bakery’s specialty, and it was always there. That same taste on her tongue every year since,
though she couldn’t know what it meant for her brother, who had brought it to her. Like a
migration—coming back to the same random, hidden place every year. What it took to braid
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past, present, and future together. One day the bakery would close, replaced by a Starbucks,
probably, and there would be one less home for her in the world. Not that she had ever even been
there, after that first time. The taste of the cake was itself a home.
___

Now, whatever else it is, it’s also mere food, exactly what it never was before, meant to
sustain her for however long the search might take. After that first bite she gobbles the rest,
hardly aware of what she’s eating. Inexplicably ravenous already. She has to stop herself from
unwrapping the next one. She pushes away from the fence and walks on, following the road,
going nowhere in particular.
When the lights are off in the houses, it’s easy to imagine the wilderness that used to be
here. Far above her, the tops of the pines stand huge and formless as clouds in the moonlight—
below them the chaotic tangle of oak and maple branches, like a scene from some medieval
battle. Among the trees there is a battle for space and light, surely, but also endless untraceable
linkages, communication and cooperation everywhere, as ubiquitous as violence. The northern
face of every stone is covered in lichens, some of them hundreds of years older than the oldest
tree, each comprised of three or four wildly different kinds organisms—plant, algae, fungus—so
wholly intertwined that none can exist without the others, and their only name is the name they
share.
There’s so much of the world that no one sees, nor ever will. The metaphysicians and
theologians of long ago were right about the true world being invisible, hidden behind a veil,
giving rise to the forms of the world as we see it. Except nothing is supernatural. It’s all right
there, all part of the same world, waiting to be seen. Every day we see a little more, but it doesn’t
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matter, because long before we’ve seen more than a fraction of what there is to see, we’re going
to extinct ourselves. Taking with us into oblivion huge swathes of the living world, seen and
unseen. Even what survives us will never be seen again. Not by us.
That’s the part she can’t get past. Can’t make sense of. Surely in every way that matters
the world will be better off without us. Hundreds of thousands of years after we’re gone, it will
still be the world we made by accident in the span of a couple stupid centuries. Our spilled
carbon still clogging the atmosphere, making rainforests where once there were glaciers. But
there were rainforests there before the glaciers, too. It makes no difference from the world’s
perspective. New forms of life will flourish in the spaces others have vacated, as they’ve always
done. The world doesn’t need us to be its chroniclers or its guardians or for God’s sake to give it
meaning, to make it beautiful by noticing its beauty and writing poems about it. For all she
knows the lichens sleeping on the shady side of the rocks and trees sing a hymn of praise that
pleases the world’s creator more than any human prayer. If the world wants to be known—and
she can’t shake the idea that it does—there are other ways of knowing it than the human way.
She knows this, but she doesn’t know it. She can’t believe in it, any more than she can believe in
reincarnation. What does it mean to come back to the world in another form if you can’t
remember the life you lived before? What good is it to know that consciousness extends beyond
the boundaries of the human if you can’t imagine it? As far as she’s concerned, a world without
people is a world that’s already over and gone, as dead as Mars.
If there had been an ulterior motive buried beneath her straightforward desire for
children, it was this: The children were a hedge against extinction. It’s not rational, but there it is.
She can long for her own death—she has, at times, and surely she will again—but not for that
death of deaths. Death of memory, death of possibility. The children were a way to reassure
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herself that the future would have people in it. It was even more selfish than Daniel thought.
From the perspective of that wish, it didn’t matter what their lives in that coming world would be
like. They could be miserable every minute of every day—what mattered was that they be there
to witness their misery.
___

Another road empties into hers from the left and she takes it, though there’s no more
reason to go that way than any other. She doesn’t know where her father might be. There’s no
intuition guiding her, no special knowledge. She’s out here freezing, wasting her time and her
strength because she has to do something, and it’s still too soon to get the cops involved. She
knows this new road better than the other one. She used to ride this way on the bus to middle
school, back in that other, vanished life. She tries to inhabit that other self for a moment, to visit
that other world, but it’s impossible. Everything looks exactly the same as it did then, only her
eyes are different. On the school bus, she remembers, the road seemed to heave itself upward and
then fall away again over an endless series of short, steep hills. She and most of the other kids
used to cluster in the rear seats just to feel their bodies turn weightless over the tops of those hills
and then heavy again at the troughs, as on a boat tossed by swells. On foot, the hills are merely
laborious, a strain to climb and then a treacherous sideways shuffle to get safely down the other
side. There’s no shoulder. If a car comes her way, the pitch of the road may block its lights from
her view until it’s almost on top of her. She’ll have to leap into the shin-deep snow to keep from
being run over.
She shouldn’t have come this way. She can’t think why she did. The road goes on like
this, she knows, for at least another claustrophobic mile with no exit, climbing little by little until
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it falls in a straight line out of the highlands to join the main road near the middle school. Easier
going then. She’ll pass the school and then the train station and then on into town, because where
else is there to go? At least there might be someplace open where she can warm up. On her
phone she types another message to her father—Where are you, I’m coming to get you—but she
doesn’t expect him to answer. She tries to picture him, because who knows but maybe if she can
form a mental image of him that’s accurate in all its particulars, she can somehow summon his
actual, physical presence. Maybe that’s the way to find him. But she can only picture him as he
was thirty years ago, when he was almost a young man and she was a child. She doesn’t know
whether it’s the man or the child she’s looking for. The world splits in two and stands beside
itself, the old world shimmering behind the veil of the new.

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20

Only the present is real. Only the little world Daniel can see and hear from where he
stands right now, feet encased in Gore-Tex and buried in powdery snow, watching the world
pause to regard itself in its new, blue coat of moonlight. His walk is over, and the world he’s
walked through—other people’s lighted windows gazing down at him, cold hands, cold breath
trailing behind him, cars passing slowly, one at a time at long intervals—exists now within the
present world only as memory. Now he stands with his back to his own front door—his father’s
front door—hoping no one sees him. The wide lawn stretches out before him toward the
enfolding screen of trees he can barely see in the distance. When a car passes on the road
beyond, it lights the trees, and they appear much closer than he had thought they were. Then the
car is gone and they’re far away again.
He doesn’t know the names of the trees, and there is no one here to teach him, so in this
world they have no names. It doesn’t matter. He can still see them, each one singular, a world
unto itself, inseparable from everything else. Containing in tangible, lasting form every passing
thing, including the time it’s taken the tree to grow and the time in some unknowable future
when it will die—of age or fire, drought or flood.
When did this ordinary day become so laced with dangers? At any moment, the weight of
accumulated snow and ice might snap a power line and cast the house into darkness. He’s
surprised, in fact, that it hasn’t happened yet. Would the heater still work? There’s a fireplace,
but as far as he knows there’s no wood to burn in it. There’s a child and a baby and nothing to
eat and no safe way to go anywhere, and his father is an old man far from home, no one knows
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where, maybe trapped in the cold, his car broken down, his phone dead, no way to call for help
and no one coming.
Still he isn’t worried.
He has a nephew now, Jonah, sleeping in the same room where his sister slept when she
was a child herself, even before he was born.
There is no future worth worrying about. There is only the present with its burden of
possibilities, happy as well as terrible. The present in which everything is already disappearing
so it can appear again in some other form. No way to prepare for anything. Nothing to do in that
present but choose what you want to hold and try to hold it.
The door creaks open and he hears Tomás’s voice behind him, “It’s late, my love. What
are you doing out here in the cold?”

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21

Arnold watches his own trembling hands, pink against the room’s deeper reds, as they lay
another sheet of paper—already invisibly pregnant with its image—into the acid bath that will
develop it. The right hand is working again, barely, but better than before. The pain he feels is far
away, a problem for future Arnold, not for him.
Shadows emerge from underwater—borders between light and shadow, between shadow
and deeper shadow—and his mind files the things he sees into their categories. This is a cigarette
resting on the edge of a plate, foliate cone of ash about to fall from the paper. This is the aurora
of sunlight refracted through a glass of water onto the white tablecloth.
“Okay,” Dolores says, checking her watch.
Only his left hand is strong enough to hold the tongs, but it’s so clumsy he has to involve
his whole conscious mind in the task of gripping the edge of the paper, lifting it up into the light
and air, shaking it gently so the droplets of acid water fall back into the pool below, then laying
the paper down again in the next tray without dropping it.
“You’re doing great, Arnold,” Dolores says. “I couldn’t do this without you.”
But of course she could. She could do it far more easily without him, with fewer
mistakes. She has everything ready, and she knows what she’s doing. He doesn’t want to ask
how she knows, whether it was Mattie who taught her. He can’t imagine why she wants him
here, why she’s waited to develop these images until she could get him to participate. He doesn’t
know why he agreed to come. Agreed isn’t the right word. There was no conscious choosing
involved. Her house was on his way home, so he knocked on her door. But there was more than
one way home. Why did he go the way that led past her house?
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Even before he’d seen himself in her bathroom mirror, he could tell by the expression on
her face how bad he looked. She spoke his name aloud and then visibly swallowed whatever
other words she was going to say. She took hold of his one good wrist and led him to the
bathroom, where she sat him down like a child on the closed lid of the toilet and dabbed the
blood from his head and his face with a wet cloth that came away deeply stained with blood that
she wrang out again and again into the white porcelain sink. He sat silently and watched the
blood and water swirling down the drain, and then she wrapped his head in gauze bandages and
only then he stood and looked in the mirror, but by then the mess she’d seen was gone and he
looked sanitized, like a cartoon image of an injured man.
“What happened?” she said.
“Crashed my car.”
She seemed to hold that information in her mind like an awkwardly weighted object,
trying to figure out how to balance it. He realized she was trying to decide whether to ask more
questions, and what they might be.
“I think you should go to the hospital,” she said. “But I’ll leave it up to you. I’m not
driving in this mess, but I’ll call someone if you want me to.”
He shook his head, and she asked him what he was doing there. Unable to think of a
better answer, he said, “I came to help you with those pictures. You asked me to come, didn’t
you?”
Her house was as small and ramshackle on the inside as it looked from the outside. It had
been built centuries in the past, when people were shorter. He had to duck slightly to get through
the doorways, and even standing in the center of a room he found his neck and shoulders always
slightly tensed, ready for his head to hit the ceiling. There were books jammed so tightly together
277
on the shelves that their spines were crushed, and then more books stacked on the counters and
the floor and the coffee table. Here and there were model airplanes—fighter planes from the
middle of the last century maybe, as miraculously free of dust as everything else in that
overcrowded house. He picked one up in his good hand to test its weight. It was much lighter
than he expected. One of those plastic models you glue together and paint yourself, something
boys must have done for entertainment in some forgotten era, though now he finds he can’t quite
imagine the boys who would have wanted to do that.
“Those are Nick’s,” Dolores said.
It took him a minute to realize she meant her husband, who had been dead for at least the
thirty-odd years Arnold had lived in this town.
“His father died flying one of those things in Korea when he was four years old. He never
really knew him.”
“He built these as a kid?” Arnold said.
“No,” Dolores said. “He started building them after I met him. I think it was therapeutic.
He never really talked about why. He hated the idea of machines like that. He hated war and
violence. But I think it was a way to get a handle on it, to make it something he could hold.”
Gently, he put it back in its place on top of a stack of gardening books. Now that he knew
to look for them, he saw them everywhere—almost identical except for their different liveries.
They weren’t on display. They were just tucked away in odd corners, as if someone had set each
one down absent-mindedly in a random place and never picked it up again.
He’d died of cancer, was the story Arnold had heard around town. They must have been
young people then, newly married. Now Arnold had to think of Dolores alone in this unfriendly
278
town all those intervening years, keeping the dust off his model airplanes. What other traces of
his life did the house contain?
___

He raises his hands above his head to clip the last print onto the drying line, sending
molten rivers of pain cascading along the length of his ribs on both sides. There are maybe a
dozen hanging there already. They’ve been working a long time. He doesn’t know how long
exactly, but he knows he doesn’t have the strength to keep going. Dolores seems to want him out
of her house anyway.
“I have more,” she says, “but…”
“I’ll come back another time.”
“You’ll walk home from here?”
“It’s nowhere near as far as I’ve walked already,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”
She switches the safelight off and then the room lights on so they can see what they’ve
done.
The pictures hang in the air before them, alive and luminous, broken out of time and
space. They’re the work of Mattie’s eye, and they make her more real and more present in that
room than either of the two living people standing there.
Her rule against photographing people almost holds. Here and there a hand at rest on the
edge of a table or a counter. Once a naked shoulder, freckled and bony, a cascade of wet, dark
hair flowing over it. Never a whole person. Never a face. For the most part they are photographs
of rooms and objects—a high-backed chair pushed out at an angle from the table, a window with
the curtains drawn on one side, light streaming down in milky bands to pool on the bare wood
279
floor. Everything—even the light—has its own hidden life and carries on its secret conversation
with everything else around it. All things hum with the echo of Mattie’s eye as it passed over
them, bearing whatever mixture of surprise and joy and desire and grief she was feeling then.
Arnold has no place in any of this, except that now he has stood beside Dolores and
worked with her to bring these images into the world, out of the light-excluding canisters where
they were no more real than they had been in Mattie’s mind as she made them. Probably why
Dolores asked him to help her—so that he would feel himself a part of these pictures and maybe
then wouldn’t want to suppress them.
“I’m not mad at you, you know,” Arnold says.
“Why should you be?” she says. “Did I do something to you?”
“Well, I mean conventionally, most people would say yes.”
“We had something together that had nothing to do with you. So what? It doesn’t make
what you had any less. She loved you. She could have loved both of us, but she knew you
wouldn’t have been able to accept that.”
Could he have accepted it? Not then, surely, but whoever he was then is long gone now.
No telling when that person might return. All day he’s been shedding pieces of himself, names
and titles—critic, professor, husband, father—streaming away from his unprotected body like
scraps of cloth in the wind. Even his memories belong to that other person, Arnold Lepore, and
not to him. What is most durable, closest to the clean unfeeling bone, is Mattie. For now he
remembers nothing of his life as his except the hour he’s just spent standing beside this other
person Mattie loved, in a tiny room that flashed from perfect darkness into strange, disembodied
light and back again, working according to her instructions, bringing Mattie’s memory of that
other love into the world of things, where it can be seen and touched and shared. He has the urge
280
to touch Dolores, just to see how far behind he can leave himself, whether he might shed his
clothes and become nothing but this broken body, as unknown to himself as he is to her, but he
knows enough, even now, to know she wouldn’t want that. Even if she did, there isn’t enough
strength left in his body to share with her.
“I really do want your advice,” Dolores says. “She entrusted these to me. She never told
me what she wanted done with them. I was going to keep them just for myself. But now I keep
feeling like they’re part of her work, like she would have wanted them seen.”
Just what he had come prepared to tell her she was wrong about. Not that Mattie would
have thought of anything as a secret or a scandal, but she had worked so hard to separate her life
from her art, to make art that had its own life, independent of the life of its maker. She had made
those pictures for herself, not to share with anyone. Not as art but as her way to be present in her
own experience. Now, though, how can any of that matter? He runs through the words in his
mind and hears how hollow and fraudulent they sound. Whatever she might have wanted then, or
feared, she’s beyond it now. To hold himself out as her representative on earth is only to hold her
back, and he doesn’t want to do that anymore.
“It doesn’t matter what she would have wanted when she was alive,” he says. “Now that
she’s dead, what does she want? They’re your pictures. Do whatever you think you should do.”
It makes him a bit sad to realize that now that she has his permission, she’s unlikely to
ask for his involvement again. On the other hand, he feels less and less the need to be involved in
anything. He walks out the door of her house on legs that feel unnaturally long, his body
cantilevered perilously over the distant ground. His feet hardly belong to him at all, yet somehow
they find their way down the ice-encrusted steps from her front door to her gravel driveway. He
stands still for a long time, taking his bearings, learning to trust his balance. A car passes unseen
281
on some nearby road, making a sound like retreating surf drawing stone over stone. Then it’s
gone and he can hear his own heartbeat, loud and slow. Blue light shines upward from the
ground and bathes his body in the same blue glow, as unearthly in its way as the red light of the
darkroom. Somewhere in all this silent world is his own home, but which way is it?

282
22

Having lived through so many winters, the possum knows the sound of a dog in the snow
long before it reaches her.
Old marsupial, misfit creature, stuck on the wrong side of the fault line sixty million
years ago when everything else like her went drifting away across the Pacific to the other side of
the world.
Not that she knows that history. She knows what is hers to know, what is right in front of
her: the clumsy way of a dog, how it brushes and bullies the snow aside, bounding toward her,
not creeping as the coyote does. She knows what to do. Even long ago, before she had learned,
her body knew. The dog is twenty or thirty of its own long steps away. Almost close enough to
see. Near as the horizon is for a creature whose eyes are four inches above the ground, she has to
act before vision confirms what’s coming. By the time she can see what means to kill her, it will
be too late. Her body performs death without her conscious choosing. Her legs go limp and she
falls in an awkward, twisted pile on the snow. Her heart slows way down, and then she needs
less breath to feed her heart, so her breathing slows. Her tongue turns blue. She voids her bladder
and her bowels and now she’s lying in a pool of her own spent warmth, melting the snow
beneath her. Her own reek. From the same lower opening comes the smell. Not the smell of
excrement, but something far more potent—smell of what no longer moves and never will again.
One eye is pinned against the snow, and with the other she watches the clear, dark skin of the
world far above her, pierced with light. Only at times like this she sees it. She is close to the edge
of herself. It’s good now and then to visit that boundary. The smell is disintegration and
recombination, smell of things that are no longer themselves and are becoming everything. Other
things that smell like that are hardly recognizable as what they once were—fur sloughing off and
283
blowing away in the wind like dandelion fluff, mushrooms pushing up into the clean air from the
slime beneath their torn-open bellies. Only she can make that smell and then get up and return to
her own short-legged, shambling life. But not yet. For now this interlude during which, in the
long stillness between exhalation and inhalation, she feels the edges of her body dissolving into
the cold snow. To feel cold is to feel the difference between herself and what is not herself. Time
stretches out, and she feels it less and less. The stars breathe. The dog passes near enough to see,
a huge black shadow where snow and sky meet, but it comes no closer. The smell repels it.

284
23

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, says Emerson, is the suggestion
of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles,
at twilight, under a clouded sky, he was glad to the brink of fear.
And even now, Sarah thinks, the world still does that.
Almost certainly the field she’s crossing now is no common but some stranger’s property,
far enough from the stranger’s house that she can pretend not to know she’s trespassing. There’s
almost no snow here, on what must be the leeward side of the nearby hills, only a windblown
dust laced like seafoam among the rootholds of the frozen grass.
In most ways it must look more or less the same here, now, as it did in Concord,
Massachusetts in 1835.
More and bigger houses maybe. Fewer stars.
The most visible changes have all happened elsewhere, kept at bay by zoning laws quite
possibly more elaborate and formidable than those that govern the Vatican.
Put your Costco, with its parking lot the size of a minor airport, in some other town, this
town says. Not too far away. It’s not that we don’t want to save on bulk toilet paper, but nothing
must disturb the Emersonian tranquility we have husbanded here on our little patch of
Manhattan-adjacent earth (once highly sought-after, with nowhere near enough houses on their
three-to-five-acre lots for all the mid-level executives who wanted them, now emptying out an
alarming and ever-increasing rate).
Those transformations that cannot be contained by local ordinance are mostly invisible.
285
And of course, everything is always in the midst of transformation. If we define nature as
that which is neither made nor altered by human hands, then nothing is natural, nor ever has
been. Much is made of the decline of the passenger pigeon, whose flocks in Emerson’s day were
so numerous that they blotted out the sun, who descended on the fields at harvest time like a
horde of avenging angels, bringing loss and famine.
Except that they were fat and succulent, and easy to kill, so that in saving your corn from
plunder you also supplied yourself, conveniently, with meat.
Gone forever now. When the last of them died it was the first most people had ever heard
of the blasphemous notion that human beings might have the power to erase something God had
made.
Now we lose a species every day, on average, as everyone knows and most of the time
almost no one notices. Sarah tracks the rate of loss in a monthly newsletter she sends out to the
foundation’s mailing list, and she wonders whether the information inspires more people to give
or to unsubscribe.
But the implausible abundance of the pigeons then was itself an aberration, the result of
the near-total eradication of the human beings who had once hunted them. Before Europeans
began to populate the eastern edge of the continent, they had already depopulated it, mostly by
accident, by importing germs they didn’t know they carried. Much that seemed out of joint in the
landscape, to those early settlers, seemed that way because it was. The explorers and traders who
came before them had made it so.
“The good hand of God has favored our beginnings,” wrote William Bradford in his
History of Plymouth Colony, “by clearing away great multitudes of the natives, that He might
make room for us.”
286
Still, Sarah thinks, in certain moments it’s easy to forget all that. It’s quiet here at night,
especially in winter, when the frost renders each blade of grass in the fields individual,
crystalline, and the branches of the bare trees stand out against the gray sky, black as letters,
moving slightly as if alive in the living air. As if language had existed before human beings—
even written language a latency in the breath of God on the earth’s body.
She has to be here to see that.
It’s taken fourteen billion years to put her here, give or take a few hundred millennia.
First there was nothing. It was beautiful, or it would have been, if there had been anyone
to see it. But there was no one, so it saw itself.
Nothing looked at itself and cleaved in two, seer and seen, and this cleaving begat a chain
of other cleavings, an endless elaboration on the theme of opposites: subject and object, positive
and negative, attract and repel, rolling outward into all that is.
Things took shape. Matter disentangled itself from energy. Planets cooled, condensed,
and began to wander, hence their name: planitis—wanderer. Here and there, something strange
began to happen. Well, whoever might know about there is not here to tell us, so let’s stick with
here. Cells divided, opened up, swallowed one another whole. They got organized. Grew eyes,
grew gills, grew teeth. Climbed up out of the sea onto dry land and grew huge. Grew hair. Grew
small again. Stood up on two legs and looked around. Spoke.
Bestowed on each of God’s creations its true and proper name.
Human beings, God bless them. They saw that it was good. They wanted so badly to hold
onto it, to remember and be remembered, that they sent one another into death and oblivion,
again and again, in greater and greater numbers, as if it was what they had been born to do.
287
That, and figure things out. They told stories, made maps. The world was an ocean
resting on the spine of a trout. The world was the body of a dead god—the wind his breath, his
blood the rivers, the sun his left eye and his right the moon.
She feels the weight of her body pressing down through her cold feet into the cold
ground, reaching far down into the soil, like she’s rooted there, slowly growing. Now here you
are, she thinks. Knowing infinitely more and less than any previous human generation. Your
generation among the last in line, most likely. When you look at the stars you see them not as
they are now, but as they were hundreds of years ago, when the light that’s just now reaching
your eyeballs left them. You aspire to abstract, universal love, but what you actually have is
concrete, desperate, grasping love for a handful of singular, essentially random individuals, half
of whom are dead already, all of whom will be dead soon, including you. That you share this
problem with every other person who has ever lived doesn’t make it feel any less like your own
lonely burden.
The fundraising email she’ll never write:
Here is the little pocket of peace and abundance that is yours; here is the mountain of
bones on which it rests.
In some single, quivering blade of the frost-sharpened grass—but which one—the holy
speaks, patiently, waiting for you to listen.
I am glad to the brink of fear.

288
24

Level two hundred and six, and Sammy has gone as far as she’s going to go. It’s beautiful
here. She can almost discern the pattern that determines when and where the lethal raindrops fall,
when the hornets come like flung darts out of the forest behind her. There must be a pattern. That
it hovers just out of reach of her understanding is what makes it beautiful. It’s like music. If she
could hear it, it would move her to tears.
Each level is a world. In this world, she’s died nine times already. She has three lives left
from the stockpile she’s collected on her way through all those prior worlds. A life comes in a
glass bottle, stopped with a cork, small enough to fit in a pocket. It’s a luminous water, the color
of the sky at sunrise. It tastes awful. You find them under the caps of mushrooms, in the hollow
trunks of dying trees, sewn into the lapels of defeated enemies. She’ll use the lives she has left,
because she’s earned them and it would be wrong to waste them. Because it would be wrong to
waste those lives, she’ll try her best. She’ll use everything she’s learned, all her powers of
concentration and foresight and all her deft maneuvering, but it won’t be enough. She doesn’t
even know how many levels there are, whether she’s nearer to the game’s end or its beginning.
What’s hard is knowing she won’t get to see those other worlds, but she’s used to it. The
world she lives in opens everywhere into other worlds she’ll never see. She sets the tablet on the
coffee table, face down so she won’t be tempted, for now, to turn it on again. She’s still in her
deep, soft chair in the living room, where she’s been almost all day. Away from home especially,
she tends to fall through this kind of gap in time. The game absorbs her, and she looks up what
feels like minutes later to find the sun is down and everyone else has gone to bed. The house is
quiet now: Daniel and Tomás entwined on the couch, Tomás asleep, Daniel watching over him.
289
Her father is upstairs answering emails probably, her brother sleeping beside him. How good it
must feel to sleep all day as her brother does, and not to know the difference between dreams and
what exists outside them. She turns out the light to see more clearly the world outside the
window—the incandescent earth, the tangle of trees and shadow beyond the back yard. The same
and not the same, as it is in her own dreams. A shadow as big as a man disentangles itself from
the tree shadows and comes crawling toward the house, and for a moment she can’t breathe.
When did the border collapse between the real and the unreal? How did she not know? Then the
floodlights come on and she sees that it’s Hildy. She goes out barefoot in the snow to lead her the
last twenty yards to the open door.

290
25

The train station is not his home, but here it is in the place where his home should be.
The outer world is not the same as the world inside his mind, but it’s the outer world he
has to move through, with only his mind to guide him. The tracks are still there, invisible beneath
the snow. Only the example of the past tells him that they’ll be visible again, soon or ever, or that
the train will return by tomorrow afternoon to reconnect this outpost to the city where it earns its
daily bread.
All the things of the world were known to God, says Hildegard, even before He clothed
them with form. They stood in the mind of God as trees growing beside still water stand reflected
in the water’s surface. In that eternal instant before the beginning, everything that would ever be
was present at once, incorporeal, outside of time. It must be going on still, that momentary firing
of synapses in the divine brain, endless, motionless, right alongside the created world in which
things are born and beget other things and die forever.
Wherever his home might be, his body won’t take him there. He doesn’t know how
much farther his body might take him now, but he knows it’s not far enough to do anything but
collapse in some stranger’s front yard. He can hardly remember what the phone in his pocket is
used for. He has no desire to use it. He’s come to the time of holding still. He has no desire to do
anything but pick up the disconnected payphone again and hold it to his ear and listen.
As before, he hears the miles and miles of silence ringing along the dead line. He waits
until the silence refracts into sound, endlessly varied, form out of nothingness. Form having
always been there invisibly within nothingness, like salt in water. He did it himself once in
chemistry class, in maybe fourth or fifth grade: stirred salt into hot water until there was more
291
salt dissolved in it than the water could hold, then tapped the pitcher and watched the clouded
solution turn clear all at once, the crystals falling through it like snow.
He dreams his life. Grass seeds split their skins just beneath the earth’s skin and green
pours out of them, pushing toward the light. Birds skim the insect-swarming tips of the grass,
hungry, then rise against the sun until the light swallows them. From wherever he is, he sees all
this. He has no body and no name, and he wants nothing. Because he wants nothing, he knows
he’s not alive. Not a living thing. Which is not to say he’s dead. There’s another he carries with
him, and whatever he sees he inscribes with her name, invisibly. He can’t read the name, nor
does he know it. The sun descends and the sky darkens. The sun lands in the tops of the distant
trees and catches fire among them, and the light that rises in place of the sun is a flickering
firelight.
He doesn’t have to go anywhere. He doesn’t have to move ever again. He remembers the
words cold, hungry, tired, but he can’t imagine what they mean. The fire will consume the world
and him with it, but the moment of its approach is infinite. Whole aeons have room to unfold
within it. Everything bears the name now—the tiny nameless flies that buzz among the grass
stalks, the birds that swallow them, the dirt, the rocks, the coming fire. He needs nothing.
Nameless, bodiless, he can rest in the name forever.
Someone comes up behind him speaking softly, carrying a name she wants to give him.
“Dad,” she says. “Is that you?”

Abstract (if available)

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Asset Metadata

Creator Powers, Michael Tod (author)

Core Title Mercy and metaphor: the empathy era and its discontents

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/23/2022

Defense Date 05/20/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag compassion,Cultural studies,domestic realism,Empathy,Fiction,humanities,immigrant fiction,Literature,Mercy,OAI-PMH Harvest,realism,Value,virtual,virtual empathy,virtual reality,virtue

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Deverell, William (committee member), Everett, Percival (committee member)

Creator Email michaeltodpowers@gmail.com,mtpowers@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375225

Unique identifier UC111375225

Legacy Identifier etd-PowersMich-10940

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Powers, Michael Tod

Type texts

Source 20220728-usctheses-batch-962 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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