DEBORAH EISENBERG (1945–) is the author of the short story collections Transactions in a Foreign Currency, Under the 82nd Airborne, All Around Atlantis, and Twilight of the Superheroes. She has been awarded numerous awards and fellowships including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The grandchildren approach.
Nathaniel can make them out dimly in the shadows. When it’s time, he’ll tell them about the miracle.
It was the dawn of the new millennium, he’ll say. I was living in the Midwest back then, but my friends from college persuaded me to come to New York.
I arrived a few days ahead of the amazing occasion, and all over the city there was an atmosphere of feverish anticipation. The year two thousand! The new millennium! Some people thought it was sure to be the end of the world. Others thought we were at the threshold of something completely new and better. The tabloids carried wild predictions from celebrity clairvoyants, and even people who scoffed and said that the date was an arbitrary and meaningless one were secretly agitated. In short, we were suddenly aware of ourselves standing there, staring at the future blindfolded.
I suppose, looking back on it, that all the commotion seems comical and ridiculous. And perhaps you’re thinking that we churned it up to entertain ourselves because we were bored or because our lives felt too easy—trivial and mundane. But consider: ceremonial occasions, even purely personal ones like birthdays or anniversaries, remind us that the world is full of terrifying surprises and no one knows what even the very next second will bring!
Well, shortly before the momentous day, a strange news item appeared: experts were saying that a little mistake had been made—just one tiny mistake, a little detail in the way computers everywhere had been programmed. But the consequences of this detail, the experts said, were potentially disastrous; tiny as it was, the detail might affect everybody, and in a very big way!
You see, if history has anything to teach us, it’s that—despite all our efforts, despite our best (or worst) intentions, despite our touchingly indestructible faith in our own foresight—we poor humans cannot actually think ahead; there are just too many variables. And so, when it comes down to it, it always turns out that no one is in charge of the things that really matter.
It must be hard for you to imagine—it’s even hard for me to remember—but people hadn’t been using computers for very long. As far as I know, my mother (your great-grandmother) never even touched one! And no one had thought to inform the computers that one day the universe would pass from the years of the one thousands into the years of the two thousands. So the machines, as these experts suddenly realized, were not equipped to understand that at the conclusion of 1999 time would not start over from 1900, time would keep going.
People all over America—all over the world!—began to speak of “a crisis of major proportions” (which was a phrase we used to use back then). Because, all the routine operations that we’d so blithely delegated to computers, the operations we all took for granted and depended on—how would they proceed?
Might one be fatally trapped in an elevator? Would we have to huddle together for warmth and scrabble frantically through our pockets for a pack of fancy restaurant matches so we could set our stacks of old New York Reviews ablaze? Would all the food rot in heaps out there on the highways, leaving us to pounce on fat old street rats and grill them over the flames? What was going to happen to our bank accounts—would they vaporize? And what about air traffic control? On December 31 when the second hand moved from 11:59:59 to midnight, would all the airplanes in the sky collide?
Everyone was thinking of more and more alarming possibilities. Some people committed their last night on this earth to partying, and others rushed around buying freeze-dried provisions and cases of water and flashlights and radios and heavy blankets in the event that the disastrous problem might somehow eventually be solved.
And then, as the clock ticked its way through the enormous gatherings in celebration of the era that was due to begin in a matter of hours, then minutes, then seconds, we waited to learn the terrible consequences of the tiny oversight. Khartoum, Budapest, Paris—we watched on television, our hearts fluttering, as midnight, first just a tiny speck in the east, unfurled gently, darkening the sky and moving toward us over the globe.
But the amazing thing, Nathaniel will tell his grandchildren, was that nothing happened! We held our breath . . . And there was nothing! It was a miracle. Over the face of the earth, from east to west and back again, nothing catastrophic happened at all.
• • •
Oh, well. Frankly, by the time he or any of his friends get around to producing a grandchild (or even a child, come to think of it) they might well have to explain what computers had been. And freeze-dried food. And celebrity clairvoyants and airplanes and New York and America and even cities, and heaven only knows what.
Lucien watches absently as his assistant, Sharmila, prepares to close up the gallery for the evening; something keeps tugging at his attention . . .
Oh, yes. It’s the phrase Yoshi Matsumoto used this morning when he called from Tokyo. Back to normal . . . Back to normal . . .
What’s that famous, revolting, sadistic experiment? Something like, you drop the frog into a pot of boiling water and it jumps out. But if you drop it into a pot of cold water and slowly bring the water to a boil, the frog stays put and gets boiled.
• • •
Itami Systems is reopening its New York branch, was what Matsumoto called to tell Lucien; he’ll be returning to the city soon. Lucien pictured his old friend’s mournful, ironic expression as he added, “They tell me they’re ‘exploring additional avenues of development now that New York is back to normal.’ ”
Lucien had made an inadvertent squawklike sound. He shook his head, then he shook his head again.
“Hello?” Matsumoto said.
“I’m here,” Lucien said. “Well, it’ll be good to see you again. But steel yourself for a wait at customs; they’re fingerprinting.”
Mr. Matsumoto’s loft is a jungle of big rubbery trees, under which crouch sleek items of chrome and leather. Spindly electronic devices blink or warble amid the foliage, and here and there one comes upon an immense flat-screen TV—the first of their kind that Nathaniel ever handled.
Nathaniel and his friends have been subletting—thanks, obviously, to Uncle Lucien—for a ridiculously minimal rent and on Mr. Matsumoto’s highly tolerable conditions of catsitting and general upkeep. Nathaniel and Lyle and Amity and Madison each have something like an actual bedroom, and there are three whole bathrooms, one equipped with a Jacuzzi. The kitchen, stone and steel, has cupboards bigger than most of their friends’ apartments. Art—important, soon to be important, or very recently important, most of which was acquired from Uncle Lucien—hangs on the walls.
And the terrace! One has only to open the magic sliding panel to find oneself halfway to heaven. On the evening, over three years ago, when Uncle Lucien completed the arrangements for Nathaniel to sublet and showed him the place, Nathaniel stepped out onto the terrace and tears shot right up into his eyes.
There was that unearthly palace, the Chrysler Building! There was the Empire State Building, like a brilliant violet hologram! There were the vast, twinkling prairies of Brooklyn and New Jersey! And best of all, Nathaniel could make out the Statue of Liberty holding her torch aloft, as she had held it for each of his parents when they arrived as children from across the ocean—terrified, filthy, and hungry—to safety.
Stars glimmered nearby; towers and spires, glowing emerald, topaz, ruby, sapphire, soared below. The avenues and bridges slung a trembling net of light across the rivers, over the buildings. Everything was spangled and dancing; the little boats glittered. The lights floated up and up like bubbles.
Back when Nathaniel moved into Mr. Matsumoto’s loft, shortly after his millennial arrival in New York, sitting out on the terrace had been like looking down over the rim into a gigantic glass of champagne.
So, Matsumoto is returning. And Lucien has called Nathaniel, the nephew of his adored late wife, Charlie, to break the news.
Well, of course it’s hardly a catastrophe for the boy. Matsumoto’s place was only a sublet in any case, and Nathaniel and his friends will all find other apartments.
But it’s such an ordeal in this city. And all four of the young people, however different they might be, strike Lucien as being in some kind of holding pattern—as if they’re temporizing, or muffled by unspoken reservations. Of course, he doesn’t really know them. Maybe it’s just the eternal, poignant weariness of youth.
• • •
The strangest thing about getting old (or one of the many strangest things) is that young people sometimes appear to Lucien—as, in fact, Sharmila does at this very moment—in a nimbus of tender light. It’s as if her unrealized future were projecting outward like ectoplasm.
“Doing anything entertaining this evening?” he asks her.
She sighs. “Time will tell,” she says.
She’s a nice young woman; he’d like to give her a few words of advice, or reassurance.
But what could they possibly be? “Don’t—” he begins.
Don’t worry? HAHAHAHAHA! Don’t feel sad? “Don’t bother about the phones,” is what he settles down on. A new show goes up tomorrow, and it’s become Lucien’s custom on such evenings to linger in the stripped gallery and have a glass of wine. “I’ll take care of them.”
But how has he gotten so old?
So, there was the famous, strangely blank New Year’s Eve, the nothing at all that happened, neither the apocalypse nor the failure of the planet’s computers, nor, evidently, the dawning of a better age. Nathaniel had gone to parties with his old friends from school and was asleep before dawn; the next afternoon he awoke with only a mild hangover and an uneasy impression of something left undone.
Next thing you knew, along came that slump, as it was called—the general economic blight that withered the New York branch of Mr. Matsumoto’s firm and clusters of jobs all over the city. There appeared to be no jobs at all, in fact, but then—somehow—Uncle Lucien unearthed one for Nathaniel in the architectural division of the subway system. It was virtually impossible to afford an apartment, but Uncle Lucien arranged for Nathaniel to sublet Mr. Matsumoto’s loft.
Then Madison and his girlfriend broke up, so Madison moved into Mr. Matsumoto’s, too. Not long afterward, the brokerage house where Amity was working collapsed resoundingly, and she’d joined them. Then Lyle’s landlord jacked up his rent, so Lyle started living at Mr. Matsumoto’s as well.
As the return of Mr. Matsumoto to New York was contingent upon the return of a reasonable business climate, one way or another it had sort of slipped their minds that Mr. Matsumoto was real. And for over three years there they’ve been, hanging in temporary splendor thirty-one floors above the pavement.
They’re all out on the terrace this evening. Madison has brought in champagne so that they can salute with an adequate flourish the end of their tenure in Mr. Matsumoto’s place. And except for Amity, who takes a principled stand against thoughtful moods, and Amity’s new friend or possibly suitor, Russell, who has no history here, they’re kind of quiet.
Now that Sharmila has gone, Lucien’s stunning, cutting-edge gallery space blurs a bit and recedes. The room, in fact, seems almost like an old snapshot from that bizarre, quaintly futuristic century, the twentieth. Lucien takes a bottle of white wine from the little fridge in the office, pours himself a glass, and from behind a door in that century emerges Charlie.
Charlie—Oh, how long it’s been, how unbearably long! Lucien luxuriates in the little pulse of warmth just under his skin that indicates her presence. He strains for traces of her voice, but her words degrade like the words in a dream, as if they’re being rubbed through a sieve.
Yes, yes, Lucien assures her. He’ll put his mind to finding another apartment for her nephew. And when her poor, exasperating sister and brother-in-law call frantically about Nathaniel, as they’re bound to do, he’ll do his best to calm them down.
• • •
But what a nuisance it all is! The boy is as opaque to his parents as a turnip. He was the child of their old age and he’s also, obviously, the repository of all of their baroque hopes and fears. By their own account, they throw up their hands and wring them, lecture Nathaniel about frugality, then press spending money upon him and fret when he doesn’t use it.
Between Charlie’s death and Nathaniel’s arrival in New York, Lucien heard from Rose and Isaac only at what they considered moments of emergency: Nathaniel’s grades were erratic! His friends were bizarre! Nathaniel had expressed an interest in architecture, an unreliable future! He drew, and Lucien had better sit down, comics!
The lamentations would pour through the phone, and then, the instant Lucien hung up, evaporate. But if he had given the matter one moment’s thought, he realizes, he would have understood from very early on that it was only a matter of time until the boy found his way to the city.
It was about four years ago now that Rose and Isaac put in an especially urgent call. Lucien held the receiver at arm’s length and gritted his teeth. “You’re an important man,” Rose was shouting. “We understand that, we understand how busy you are, you know we’d never do this, but it’s an emergency. The boy’s in New York, and he sounds terrible. He doesn’t have a job, lord only knows what he eats—I don’t know what to think, Lucien, he drifts, he’s just drifting. Call him, promise me, that’s all I’m asking.”
“Fine, certainly, good,” Lucien said, already gabbling; he would have agreed to anything if Rose would only hang up.
“But whatever you do,” she added, “please, please, under no circumstances should you let him know that we asked you to call.”
Lucien looked at the receiver incredulously. “But how else would I have known he was in New York?” he said. “How else would I have gotten his number?”
There was a silence, and then a brief, amazed laugh from Isaac on another extension. “Well, I don’t know what you’ll tell him,” Isaac said admiringly. “But you’re the brains of the family, you’ll think of something.”
And actually, Russell (who seems to be not only Amity’s friend and possible suitor but also her agent) has obtained for Amity a whopping big advance from some outfit that Madison refers to as Cheeseball Editions, so whatever else they might all be drinking to (or drinking about) naturally Amity’s celebrating a bit. And Russell, recently arrived from L.A., cannot suppress his ecstasy about how ur New York, as he puts it, Mr. Matsumoto’s loft is, tactless as he apparently recognizes this untimely ecstasy to be.
“It’s fantastic,” he says. “Who did it, do you know?”
Nathaniel nods. “Matthias Lehmann.”
“That’s what I thought, I thought so,” Russell says. “It looks like Lehmann. Oh, wow, I can’t believe you guys have to move out—I mean, it’s just so totally amazing!”
Nathaniel and Madison nod and Lyle sniffs peevishly. Lyle is stretched out on a yoga mat that Nathaniel once bought in preparation for a romance (as yet manqué) with a prettily tattooed yoga teacher he runs into in the bodega on the corner. Lyle’s skin has a waxy, bluish cast; there are dark patches beneath his eyes. He looks like a child too precociously worried to sleep. His boyfriend, Jahan, has more or less relocated to London, and Lyle has been missing him frantically. Lying there so still on the yoga mat with his eyes closed, he appears to be a tomb sculpture from an as yet nonexistent civilization.
“And the view!” Russell says. “This is probably the most incredible view on the planet.”
The others consider the sight of Russell’s eager face. And then Amity says, “More champagne, anyone?”
Well, sure, who knows where Russell had been? Who knows where he would have been on that shining, calm, perfectly blue September morning when the rest of them were here having coffee on the terrace and looked up at the annoying racket of a low-flying plane? Why should they expect Russell—now, nearly three years later—to imagine that moment out on the terrace when Lyle spilled his coffee and said, “Oh, shit,” and something flashed and something tore, and the cloudless sky ignited.
Rose and Isaac have elbowed their way in behind Charlie, and no matter how forcefully Lucien tries to boot them out, they’re making themselves at home, airing their dreary history.
Both sailed as tiny, traumatized children with their separate families and on separate voyages right into the Statue of Liberty’s open arms. Rose was almost eleven when her little sister, Charlie, came into being, along with a stainless American birth certificate.
Neither Rose and Charlie’s parents nor Isaac’s ever recovered from their journey to the New World, to say nothing of what had preceded it. The two sets of old folks spoke, between them, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Rumanian, Latvian, Czech, and Hungarian, Charlie had once told Lucien, but not one of the four ever managed to learn more English than was needed to procure a quarter pound of smoked sturgeon from the deli. They worked impossible hours, they drank a little schnapps, and then, in due course, they died.
Isaac did fairly well manufacturing vacuum cleaners. He and Rose were solid members of their temple and the community, but, according to Charlie, no matter how uneventful their lives in the United States continued to be, filling out an unfamiliar form would cause Isaac’s hands to sweat and send jets of acid through his innards. When he or Rose encountered someone in uniform—a train conductor, a meter maid, a crossing guard—their hearts would leap into their throats and they would think: passport!
Their three elder sons, Nathaniel’s brothers, fulfilled Rose and Isaac’s deepest hopes by turning out to be blindingly inconspicuous. The boys were so reliable and had so few characteristics it was hard to imagine what anyone could think up to kill them for. They were Jewish, of course, but even Rose and Isaac understood that this particular criterion was inoperative in the United States—at least for the time being.
The Old World, danger, and poverty were far in the past. Nevertheless, the family lived in their tidy, midwestern house with its two-car garage as if secret police were permanently hiding under the matching plastic-covered sofas, as if Brown-shirts and Cossacks were permanently rampaging through the suburban streets.
Lucien knew precious little about vacuum cleaners and nothing at all about childhood infections or lawn fertilizers. And yet, as soon as Charlie introduced him, Isaac and Rose set about soliciting his views as if he were an authority on everything that existed on their shared continent.
His demurrals, disclaimers, and protestations of ignorance were completely ineffective. Whatever guess he was finally strong-armed into hazarding was received as oracular. Oracular!
Fervent gratitude was expressed: Thank God Charlie had brought Lucien into the family! How brilliant he was, how knowledgeable and subtle! And then Rose and Isaac would proceed to pick over his poor little opinion as if they were the most ruthless and highly trained lawyers, and on the opposing side.
After Charlie was diagnosed, Lucien had just enough time to understand perfectly what that was to mean. When he was exhausted enough to sleep, he slept as though under heavy anesthetic during an amputation. The pain was not alleviated, but it had been made inscrutable. A frightful thing seemed to lie on top of him, heavy and cold. All night long he would struggle to throw it off, but when dawn delivered him to consciousness, he understood what it was, and that it would never go away.
During his waking hours, the food on his plate would abruptly lose its taste, the painting he was studying would bleach off the canvas, the friend he was talking to would turn into a stranger. And then, one day, he was living in a world all made out of paper, where the sun was a wad of old newspapers and the only sounds were the sounds of tearing paper.
He spoke with Rose and Isaac frequently during Charlie’s illness, and they came to New York for her memorial service, where they sat self-consciously and miserably among Lucien and Charlie’s attractive friends. He took them to the airport for their return to the Midwest, embraced them warmly, and as they shuffled toward the departure door with the other passengers, turning once to wave, he breathed a sigh of relief all that, at least, was over, too.
As his senses began to revive, he felt a brief pang—he would miss, in a minor way, the heartrending buffoonery of Charlie’s sister and brother-in-law. After all, it had been part of his life with Charlie, even if it had been the only annoying part.
But Charlie’s death, instead of setting him utterly, blessedly adrift in his grief, had left him anchored permanently offshore of her family like an island. After a long silence, the infuriating calls started up again. The feudal relationship was apparently inalterable.
When they’d moved in, it probably was the best view on the planet. Then, one morning, out of a clear blue sky, it became, for a while, probably the worst.
For a long time now they’ve been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise or even just making macabre jokes or wondering what sort of debris is settling into their drinks. These days they rarely see—as for a time they invariably did—the sky igniting, the stinking smoke bursting out of it like lava, the tiny figures raining down from the shattered tower as Lyle faints.
But now it’s unclear what they are, in fact, looking at.
What would Charlie say about the show that’s about to go up? It’s work by a youngish Belgian painter who arrived, splashily, on the scene sometime after Charlie’s departure.
It’s good work, but these days Lucien can’t get terribly excited about any of the shows. The vibrancy of his brain arranging itself in response to something of someone else’s making, the heart’s little leap—his gift, reliable for so many years, is gone. Or mostly gone; it’s flattened out into something banal and tepid. It’s as if he’s got some part that’s simply worn out and needs replacing. Let’s hope it’s still available, he thinks.
How did he get so old? The usual stupid question. One had snickered all one’s life as the plaintive old geezers doddered about baffled, as if looking for a misplaced sock, tugging one’s sleeve, asking sheepishly: How did I get so old?
The mere sight of one’s patiently blank expression turned them vicious. It will happen to you, they’d raged.
Well, all right, it would. But not in the ridiculous way it had happened to them. And yet, here he is, he and his friends, falling like so much landfill into the dump of old age. Or at least struggling desperately to balance on the brink. Yet one second ago, running so swiftly toward it, they hadn’t even seen it.
And what had happened to his youth? Unlike a misplaced sock, it isn’t anywhere; it had dissolved in the making of him.
Surprising that after Charlie’s death he did not take the irreversible step. He’d had no appetite to live. But the body has its own appetite, apparently—that pitiless need to continue with its living, which has so many disguises and so many rationales.
A deep embarrassment has been stalking him. Every time he lets his guard down these days, there it is. Because it’s become clear: he and even the most dissolute among his friends have glided through their lives on the assumption that the sheer fact of their existence has in some way made the world a better place. As deranged as it sounds now, a better place. Not a leafy bower, maybe, but still, a somewhat better place—more tolerant, more amenable to the wonderful adventures of the human mind and the human body, more capable of outrage against injustice . . .
For shame! One has been shocked, all one’s life, to learn of the blind eye turned to children covered with bruises and welts, the blind eye turned to the men who came at night for the neighbors. And yet . . . And yet one has clung to the belief that the sun shining inside one’s head is evidence of sunshine elsewhere.
Not everywhere, of course. Obviously, at every moment something terrible is being done to someone somewhere—one can’t really know about each instance of it!
Then again, how far away does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it?
• • •
Sometime after Charlie’s death, Lucien resumed throwing his parties. He and his friends continued to buy art and make art, to drink and reflect. They voted responsibly, they gave to charity, they read the paper assiduously. And while they were basking in their exclusive sunshine, what had happened to the planet? Lucien gazes at his glass of wine, his eyes stinging.
Nathaniel was eight or nine when his aunt and uncle had come out to the Midwest to visit the family, lustrous and clever and comfortable and humorous and affectionate with one another, in their soft, stylish clothing. They’d brought books with them to read. When they talked to each other—and they habitually did—not only did they take turns, but also, what one said followed on what the other said. What world could they have come from? What was the world in which beings like his aunt and uncle could exist?
A world utterly unlike his parents’, that was for sure—a world of freedom and lightness and beauty and the ardent exchange of ideas and . . . and . . . fun.
A great longing rose up in Nathaniel like a flower with a lovely, haunting fragrance. When he was ready, he’d thought—when he was able, when he was worthy, he’d get to the world from which his magic aunt and uncle had once briefly appeared.
The evidence, though, kept piling up that he was not worthy. Because even when he finished school, he simply didn’t budge. How unfair it was—his friends had flown off so easily, as if going to New York were nothing at all.
Immediately after graduation, Madison found himself a job at a fancy New York PR firm. And it seemed that there was a place out there on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange for Amity. And Lyle had suddenly exhibited an astonishing talent for sound design and engineering, so where else would he sensibly live, either?
Yes, the fact was that only Nathaniel seemed slated to remain behind in their college town. Well, he told himself, his parents were getting on; he would worry, so far away. And he was actually employed as a part-time assistant with an actual architectural firm, whereas in New York the competition, for even the lowliest of such jobs, would be ferocious. And also, he had plenty of time, living where he did, to work on Passivityman.
And that’s what he told Amity, too, when she’d called one night, four years ago, urging him to take the plunge.
“It’s time for you to try, Nathaniel,” she said. “It’s time to commit. This odd-ball, slacker stance is getting kind of old, don’t you think, kind of stale. You cannot let your life be ruled by fear any longer.”
“Fear?” He flinched. “By what fear, exactly, do you happen to believe my life is ruled?”
“Well, I mean, fear of failure, obviously. Fear of mediocrity.”
For an instant he thought he might be sick.
“Right,” he said. “And why should I fear failure and mediocrity? Failure and mediocrity have such august traditions! Anyhow, what’s up with you, Amity?”
She’d been easily distracted, and they chatted on for a while, but when they hung up, he felt very, very strange, as if his apartment had slightly changed shape. Amity was right, he’d thought; it was fear that stood between him and the life he’d meant to be leading.
That was probably the coldest night of the whole, difficult millennium. The timid midwestern sun had basically gone down at the beginning of September; it wouldn’t be around much again till May. Black ice glared on the street outside like the cloak of an extra-cruel witch. The sink faucet was dripping into a cracked and stained teacup: Tick tock tick tock . . .
What was he doing? Once he’d dreamed of designing tranquil and ennobling dwellings, buildings that urged benign relationships, rich inner harmonies; he’d dreamed of meeting fascinating strangers. True, he’d managed to avoid certain pitfalls of middle-class adulthood—he wasn’t a white-collar criminal, for example; he wasn’t (at least as far as he knew) a total blowhard. But what was he actually doing? His most exciting social contact was the radio. He spent his salaried hours in a cinder-block office building, poring over catalogues of plumbing fixtures. The rest of the day—and the whole evening, too—he sat at the little desk his parents had bought for him when he was in junior high, slaving over Passivityman, a comic strip that ran in free papers all over parts of the Midwest, a comic strip that was doted on by whole dozens, the fact was, of stoned undergrads.
He was twenty-four years old! Soon he’d be twenty-eight. In a few more minutes he’d be thirty-five, then fifty. Five zero. How had that happened? He was eighty! He could feel his vascular system and brain clogging with paste, he was drooling . . .
And if history had anything to teach, it was that he’d be broke when he was eighty, too, and that his personal life would still be a disaster.
• • •
But wait. Long ago, panic had sent his grandparents and parents scurrying from murderous Europe, with its death camps and pogroms, to the safe harbor of New York. Panic had kept them going as far as the Midwest, where grueling labor enabled them and eventually their children to lead blessedly ordinary lives. And sooner or later, Nathaniel’s pounding heart was telling him, that same sure-footed guide, panic, would help him retrace his family’s steps all the way back to Manhattan.
Blip! Charlie scatters again as Lucien’s attention wavers from her, and the empty space belonging to her is seized by Miss Mueller.
Huh, but what do you know—death suits Miss Mueller! In life she was drab, but now she absolutely throbs with ghoulishness. You there, Lucien—the shriek echoes around the gallery—What are the world’s three great religions?
Zen Buddhism, Jainism, and Sufism, he responds sulkily.
Naughty boy! She cackles flirtatiously. Bang bang, you’re dead!
Passivityman is taking a snooze, his standard response to stress, when the alarm rings. “I’ll check it out later, boss,” he murmurs.
“You’ll check it out now, please,” his girlfriend and superior, the beautiful Princess Prudence, tells him. “Just put on those grubby corduroys and get out there.”
“Aw, is it really urgent?” he asks.
“Don’t you get it?” she says. “I’ve been warning you. Episode after episode! And now, from his appliance-rich house on the Moon, Captain Corporation has tightened his Net of Evil around the planet Earth, and he’s dragging it out of orbit! The U.S. Congress is selected by pharmaceutical companies, the state of Israel is run by Christian fundamentalists, the folks that haul toxic sludge manufacture cattle feed and process burgers, your sources of news and information are edited by a giant mouse, New York City and Christian fundamentalism are holdings of a family in Kuwait—and all of it’s owned by Captain Corporation!”
Passivityman rubs his eyes and yawns. “Well gosh, Pru, sure—but, like, what am I supposed to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Princess Prudence says. “It’s hardly my job to figure that out, is it? I mean, you’re the superhero. Just—just—just go out and do something conspicuously lacking in monetary value! Invent some stinky, profit-proof gloop to pour on stuff. Or, I don’t know, whatever. But you’d better do something, before it’s too late.”
“Sounds like it’s totally too late already,” says Passivityman, reaching for a cigarette.
• • •
It was quite a while ago now that Passivityman seemed to throw in the towel. Nathaniel’s friends looked at the strip with him and scratched their heads.
“Hm, I don’t know, Nathaniel,” Amity said. “This episode is awfully complicated. I mean, Passivityman’s seeming kind of passive-aggressive, actually.”
“Can Passivityman not be bothered any longer to protect the abject with his greed-repelling Shield of Sloth?” Lyle asked.
“It’s not going to be revealed that Passivityman is a double agent, is it?” Madison said. “I mean, what about his undying struggle against corporate-model efficiency?”
“The truth is, I don’t really know what’s going on with him,” Nathaniel said. “I was thinking that maybe, unbeknownst to himself, he’s come under the thrall of his morally neutral, transgendering twin, Ambiguityperson.”
“Yeah,” Madison said. “But I mean, the problem here is that he’s just not dealing with the paradox of his own being—he seems kind of intellectually passive . . .”
Oh, dear. Poor Passivityman. He was a tired old crime fighter. Nathaniel sighed; it was hard to live the way his superhero lived—constantly vigilant against the premature conclusion, scrupulously rejecting the vulgar ambition, rigorously deferring judgment and action . . . and all for the greater good.
“Huh, well, I guess he’s sort of losing his superpowers,” Nathaniel said.
The others looked away uncomfortably.
“Oh, it’s probably just one of those slumps,” Amity said. “I’m sure he’ll be back to normal, soon.”
• • •
But by now, Nathaniel realizes, he’s all but stopped trying to work on Passivityman.
Thanks for pointing that out, Miss Mueller. Yes, humanity seems to have reverted by a millennium or so. Goon squads, purporting to represent each of the world’s three great religions—as they used to be called to fifth-graders, and perhaps still so misleadingly are—have deployed themselves all over the map, apparently in hopes of annihilating not only each other, but absolutely everyone, themselves excepted.
Just a few weeks earlier, Lucien was on a plane heading home from Los Angeles, and over the loudspeaker, the pilot requested that all Christians on board raise their hands. The next sickening instants provided more than enough time for conjecture as to who, exactly, was about to be killed—Christians or non-Christians. And then the pilot went on to ask those who had raised their hands to talk about their “faith” with the others.
Well, better him than Rose and Isaac; that would have been two sure heart attacks, right there. And anyhow, why should he be so snooty about religious fanaticism? Stalin managed to kill off over thirty million people in the name of no god at all, and not so very long ago.
• • •
At the moment when all this—as Lucien thinks of it—began, the moment when a few ordinary-looking men carrying box cutters sped past the limits of international negotiation and the frontiers of technology, turning his miraculous city into a nightmare and hurling the future into a void, Lucien was having his croissant and coffee.
The television was saying something. Lucien wheeled around and stared at it, then turned to look out the window; downtown, black smoke was already beginning to pollute the perfect, silken September morning. On the screen, the ruptured, flaming colossus was shedding veils of tiny black specks.
All circuits were busy, of course; the phone might as well have been a toy. Lucien was trembling as he shut the door of the apartment behind him. His face was wet. Outside, he saw that the sky in the north was still insanely blue.
Well, superpowers are probably a feature of youth, like Wendy’s ability to fly around with that creepy Peter Pan. Or maybe they belonged to a loftier period of history. It seems that Captain Corporation, his swaggering lieutenants and massed armies have actually neutralized Passivityman’s superpower. Passivityman’s astonishing reserves of resistance have vanished in the quicksand of Captain Corporation’s invisible account books. His rallying cry, No way, which once rang out over the land, demobilizing millions, has been altered by Captain Corporation’s co-optophone into, Whatever. And the superpowers of Nathaniel’s friends have been seriously challenged, too. Challenged, or . . . outgrown.
Amity’s superpower, her gift for exploiting systemic weaknesses, had taken a terrible beating several years ago when the gold she spun out on the trading floor turned—just like everyone else’s—into straw. And subsequently, she plummeted from job to job, through layers of prestige, ending up behind a counter in a fancy department store where she sold overpriced skin-care products.
Now, of course, the sale of Inner Beauty Secrets—her humorous, lightly fictionalized account of her experiences there with her clients—indicates that perhaps her powers are regenerating. But time will tell.
Madison’s superpower, an obtuse, patrician equanimity in the face of damning fact, was violently and irremediably terminated one day when a girl arrived at the door asking for him.
“I’m your sister,” she told him. “Sorry,” Madison said, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” “Hang on,” the girl said. “I’m just getting to that.”
For months afterward, Madison kept everyone awake late into the night repudiating all his former beliefs, his beautiful blue eyes whirling around and his hair standing on end as if he’d stuck his hand into a socket. He quit his lucrative PR job and denounced the firm’s practices in open letters to media watchdog groups (copies to his former boss). The many women who’d been running after him did a fast about-face.
Amity called him a “bitter skeptic”; he called Amity a “dupe.” The heated quarrel that followed has tapered off into an uneasy truce, at best.
Lyle’s superpower back in school was his spectacular level of aggrievedness and his ability to get anyone at all to feel sorry for him. But later, doing sound with a Paris-based dance group, Lyle met Jahan, who was doing the troupe’s lighting.
Jahan is (a) as handsome as a prince, (b) as charming, as intelligent, as noble in his thoughts, feelings, and actions as a prince, and (c) a prince, at least of some attenuated sort. So no one feels sorry for Lyle at all any longer, and Lyle has apparently left the pleasures of even self-pity behind him without a second thought.
A while ago, though, Jahan was mistakenly arrested in some sort of sweep near Times Square, and when he was finally released from custody, he moved to London, and Lyle does nothing but pine, when he can’t be in London himself.
“Well, look on the bright side,” Nathaniel said. “At least you might get your superpower back.”
“You know, Nathaniel . . .” Lyle said. He looked at Nathaniel for a moment, and then an unfamiliar kindness modified his expression. He patted Nathaniel on the shoulder and went on his way.
Yikes. So much for Lyle’s superpower, obviously.
“It’s great that you got to live here for so long, though,” Russell is saying.
Nathaniel has the sudden sensation of his whole four years in New York twisting themselves into an arrow speeding through the air and twanging into the dead center of this evening. All so hard to believe. “This is not happening,” he says.
“I think it might really be happening, though,” Lyle says.
“Fifty percent of respondents say that the event taking place is not occurring,” Madison says. “The other fifty percent remain undecided. Clearly, the truth lies somewhere in between.”
Soon it might be as if he and Lyle and Madison and Amity had never even lived here. Because this moment is joined to all the other moments they’ve spent together here, and all of those moments are Right Now. But soon this moment and all the others will be cut off—in the past, not part of Right Now at all. Yeah, he and his three friends might all be going their separate ways, come to think of it, once they move out.
While the sirens screamed, Lucien had walked against the tide of dazed, smoke-smeared people, down into the fuming cauldron, and when he finally reached the police cordon, his feet aching, he wandered along it for hours, searching for Charlie’s nephew, among all the other people who were searching for family, friends, lovers.
• • •
Oh, that day! One kept waiting—as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real—the intended—future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened.
• • •
Most likely on the very mornings that first Rose and then Isaac had disembarked at Ellis Island, each clutching some remnant of the world they were never to see again, Lucien was being wheeled in his pram through the genteel world, a few miles uptown, of brownstones.
The city, more than his body, contained his life. His life! The schools he had gone to as a child, the market where his mother had bought the groceries, the park where he had played with his classmates, the restaurants where he had courted Charlie, the various apartments they’d lived in, the apartments of their friends, the gallery, the newsstand on the corner, the dry cleaner’s . . . The things he did in the course of the day, year after year, the people he encountered.
• • •
A sticky layer of crematorium ash settled over the whole of Matsumoto’s neighborhood, even inside, behind closed windows, as thick in places as turf, and water was unavailable for a time. Nathaniel and his friends all stayed elsewhere, of course, for a few weeks. When it became possible, Lucien sent crews down to Matsumoto’s loft to scour the place and restore the art.
A memorandum hangs in Mr. Matsumoto’s lobby, that appeared several months ago when freakish blackouts were rolling over the city.
Emergency Tips from the Management urges residents to assemble a Go Bag, in the event of an evacuation, as well as an In-Home Survival Kit. Among items to include: a large amount of cash in small denominations, water and nonperishable foods such as granola bars, a wind-up radio, warm clothing and sturdy walking shoes, unscented bleach and an eyedropper for purifying water, plastic sheeting and duct tape, a whistle, a box cutter.
Also recommended is a Household Disaster Plan and the practicing of emergency drills.
A hand-lettered sign next to the elevator says THINK TWICE.
• • •
Twenty-eight years old, no superhero, a job that just might lead down to a career in underground architecture, a vanishing apartment, a menacing elevator . . . Maybe he should view Mr. Matsumoto’s return as an opportunity, and regroup. Maybe he should do something—take matters in hand. Maybe he should go try to find Delphine, for example.
But how? He hasn’t heard from her, and she could be anywhere now; she’d mentioned Bucharest, she’d mentioned Havana, she’d mentioned Shanghai, she’d mentioned Istanbul . . .
He’d met her at one his uncle’s parties. There was the usual huge roomful of people wearing strangely pleated black clothes, like the garments of a somber devotional sect, and there she was in electric-blue taffeta, amazingly tall and narrow, lazy and nervous, like an electric bluebell.
She favored men nearly twice Nathaniel’s age and millions of times richer, but for a while she let Nathaniel come over to her apartment and play her his favorite CDs. They drank perfumey infusions from chipped porcelain cups, or vodka. Delphine could become thrillingly drunk, and she smoked, letting long columns of ash form on her tarry, unfiltered cigarettes. One night, when he lost his keys, she let him come over and sleep in her bed while she went out, and when the sky fell, she actually let him sleep on her floor for a week.
Her apartment was filled with puffy, silky little sofas, and old, damaged mirrors and tarnished candlesticks, and tall vases filled with slightly wilting flowers. It smelled like powder and tea and cigarettes and her Abyssinian cats, which prowled the savannas of the white, long-haired rugs or posed on the marble mantelpiece.
Delphine’s father was Armenian and he lived in Paris, which according to Delphine was a bore. Her mother was Chilean. Delphine’s English had been acquired at a boarding school in Kent for dull-witted rich girls and castaways, like herself, from everywhere.
She spoke many languages, she was self-possessed and beautiful and fascinating. She could have gone to live anywhere. And she had come, like Nathaniel, to New York.
“But look at it now,” she’d raged. Washington was dropping bombs on Afghanistan and then Iraq, and every few weeks there was a flurry of alerts in kindergarten colors indicating the likelihood of terrorist attacks: yellow, orange, red, duck!
“Do you know how I get the news here?” Delphine said. “From your newspapers? Please! From your newspapers I learn what restaurant has opened. News I learn in taxis, from the drivers. And how do they get it? From their friends and relatives back home, in Pakistan or Uzbekistan or Somalia. The drivers sit around at the airport, swapping information, and they can tell you anything. But do you ask? Or sometimes I talk to my friends in Europe. Do you know what they’re saying about you over there?”
“Please don’t say ‘you,’ Delphine,” he had said faintly.
“Oh, yes, here it’s not like stuffy old Europe, where everything is stifled by tradition and trauma. Here you’re able to speak freely, within reason, of course, and isn’t it wonderful that you all happen to want to say exactly what they want you to say? Do you know how many people you’re killing over there? No, how would you? Good, just keep your eyes closed, panic, don’t ask any questions, and you can speak freely about whatever you like. And if you have any suspicious-looking neighbors, be sure to tell the police. You had everything here, everything, and you threw it all away in one second.”
She was so beautiful; he’d gazed at her as if he were already remembering her. “Please don’t say ‘you,’ ” he murmured again.
“Poor Nathaniel,” she said. “This place is nothing now but a small-minded, mean-spirited provincial town.”
One/two. On/off. The plane crashes/doesn’t crash.
The plane he took from L.A. didn’t crash. It wasn’t used as a missile to blow anything up, and not even one passenger was shot or stabbed. Nothing happened. So, what’s the problem? What’s the difference between having been on that flight and having been on any other flight in his life?
Oh, what’s the point of thinking about death all the time! Think about it or not, you die. Besides—and here’s something that sure hasn’t changed—you don’t have to do it more than once. And as you don’t have to do it less than once, either, you might as well do it on the plane. Maybe there’s no special problem these days. Maybe the problem is just that he’s old.
Or maybe his nephew’s is the last generation that will remember what it had once felt like to blithely assume there would be a future—at least a future like the one that had been implied by the past they’d all been familiar with.
• • •
But the future actually ahead of them, it’s now obvious, had itself been implied by a past; and the terrible day that pointed them toward that future had been prepared for a long, long time, though it had been prepared behind a curtain.
It was as if there had been a curtain, a curtain painted with the map of the earth, its oceans and continents, with Lucien’s delightful city. The planes struck, tearing through the curtain of that blue September morning, exposing the dark world that lay right behind it, of populations ruthlessly exploited, inflamed with hatred, and tired of waiting for change to happen by.
• • •
The stump of the ruined tower continued to smolder far into the fall, and an unseasonable heat persisted. When the smoke lifted, all kinds of other events, which had been prepared behind a curtain, too, were revealed. Flags waved in the brisk air of fear, files were demanded from libraries and hospitals, droning helicopters hung over the city, and heavily armed policemen patrolled the parks. Meanwhile, one read that executives had pocketed the savings of their investors and the pensions of their employees.
• • •
The wars in the East were hidden behind a thicket of language: patriotism, democracy, loyalty, freedom—the words bounced around, changing purpose, as if they were made out of some funny plastic. What did they actually refer to? It seemed that they all might refer to money.
• • •
Were the sudden power outages and spiking level of unemployment related? And what was causing them? The newspapers seemed for the most part to agree that the cause of both was terrorism. But lots of people said they were both the consequence of corporate theft. It was certainly all beyond Lucien! Things that had formerly appeared to be distinct, or even at odds, now seemed to have been smoothly blended, to mutual advantage. Provocation and retribution, arms manufacture and statehood, oil and war, commerce and dogma, and the spinning planet seemed to be boiling them all together at the center of the earth into a poison syrup. Enemies had soared toward each other from out of the past to unite in a joyous fireball; planes had sheared through the heavy, painted curtain and from the severed towers an inexhaustible geyser had erupted.
• • •
Styles of pets revolved rapidly, as if the city’s residents were searching for a type of animal that would express a stance appropriate to the horrifying assault, which for all anyone knew was only the first of many.
For a couple of months everyone was walking cute, perky things. Then Lucien saw snarling hounds everywhere and the occasional boa constrictor draped around its owner’s shoulders. After that, it was tiny, trembling dogs that traveled in purses and pockets.
New York had once been the threshold of an impregnable haven, then the city had become in an instant the country’s open wound, and now it was the occasion—the pretext!—for killing and theft and legislative horrors all over the world. The air stank from particulate matter—chemicals and asbestos and blood and scorched bone. People developed coughs and strange rashes.
• • •
What should be done, and to whom? Almost any word, even between friends, could ignite a sheet of flame. What were the bombings for? First one imperative was cited and then another; the rationales shifted hastily to cover successive gaps in credibility. Bills were passed containing buried provisions, and loopholes were triumphantly discovered—alarming elasticities or rigidities in this law or that. One was sick of trying to get a solid handle on the stream of pronouncements—it was like endlessly trying to sort little bits of paper into stacks when a powerful fan was on.
Friends in Europe and Asia sent him clippings about his own country. What’s all this, they asked—secret arrests and detentions, his president capering about in military uniform, crazy talk of preemptive nuclear strikes? Why were they releasing a big science fiction horror movie over there, about the emperor of everything everywhere, for which the whole world was required to buy tickets? What on earth was going on with them all, why were they all so silent? Why did they all seem so confused?
How was he to know, Lucien thought. If his foreign friends had such great newspapers, why didn’t they tell him!
• • •
No more smiles from strangers on the street! Well, it was reasonable to be frightened; everyone had seen what those few men were able do with the odds and ends in their pockets. The heat lifted, and then there was unremitting cold. No one lingered to joke and converse in the course of their errands, but instead hurried irritably along, like people with bad consciences.
And always in front of you now was the sight that had been hidden by the curtain, of all those irrepressibly, murderously angry people.
• • •
Private life shrank to nothing. All one’s feelings had been absorbed by an arid wasteland—policy, strategy, goals. One’s past, one’s future, one’s ordinary daily pleasures were like dusty little curios on a shelf.
Lucien continued defiantly throwing his parties, but as the murky wars dragged on, he stopped. It was impossible to have fun or to want to have fun. It was one thing to have fun if the sun was shining generally, quite another thing to have fun if it was raining blood everywhere but on your party. What did he and his friends really have in common, anyway? Maybe nothing more than their level of privilege.
• • •
In restaurants and cafés all over the city, people seemed to have changed. The good-hearted, casually wasteful festival was over. In some places the diners were sullen and dogged, as if they felt accused of getting away with something.
In other places, the gaiety was cranked up to the level of completely unconvincing hysteria. For a long miserable while, in fact, the city looked like a school play about war profiteering. The bars were overflowing with very young people from heaven only knew where, in hideous, ludicrously showy clothing, spending massive amounts of money on green, pink, and orange cocktails, and laughing at the top of their lungs, as if at filthy jokes.
No, not like a school play—like a movie, though the performances and the direction were crude. The loud, ostensibly carefree young people appeared to be extras recruited from the suburbs, and yet sometime in the distant future, people seeing such a movie might think oh, yes, that was a New York that existed once, say, at the end of the millennium.
It was Lucien’s city, Lucien’s times, and yet what he appeared to be living in wasn’t the actual present—it was an inaccurate representation of the past. True, it looked something like the New York that existed before all this began, but Lucien remembered, and he could see: the costumes were not quite right, the hairstyles were not quite right, the gestures and the dialogue were not quite right.
• • •
Oh. Yes. Of course none of it was quite right—the movie was a propaganda movie. And now it seems that the propaganda movie has done its job: things, in a grotesque sense, are back to normal.
Money is flowing a bit again, most of the flags have folded up, those nerve-wracking terror alerts have all but stopped, the kids in the restaurants have calmed down, no more rolling blackouts, and the dogs on the street encode no particular messages. Once again, people are concerned with getting on with their lives. Once again, the curtain has dropped.
• • •
Except that people seem a little bit nervous, a little uncomfortable, a little wary. Because you can’t help sort of knowing that what you’re seeing is only the curtain. And you can’t help guessing what might be going on behind it.
Nathaniel remembers more and more rather than less and less vividly the visit of his uncle and aunt to the Midwest during his childhood.
He’d thought his aunt Charlie was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And for all he knows, she really was. He never saw her after that one visit; by the time he came to New York and reconnected with Uncle Lucien she had been dead for a long time. She would still have been under fifty when she died—crushed, his mother had once, in a mood, implied, by the weight of her own pretensions.
• • •
His poor mother! She had cooked, cleaned, and fretted for . . . months, it had seemed, in preparation for that visit of Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie. And observing in his memory the four grown-ups, Nathaniel can see an awful lot of white knuckles.
He remembers his mother picking up a book Aunt Charlie had left lying on the kitchen table, glancing at it and putting it back down with a tiny shrug and a lifted eyebrow. “You don’t approve?” Aunt Charlie said, and Nathaniel is shocked to see, in his memory, that she is tense.
His mother, having gained the advantage, makes another bitter little shrug. “I’m sure it’s over my head,” she says.
When the term of the visit came to an end, they dropped Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie at the airport. His brother was driving, too fast. Nathaniel can hear himself announcing in his child’s piercing voice, “I want to live in New York like Uncle Lucien and Aunt Charlie!” His exile’s heart was brimming, but it was clear from his mother’s profile that she was braced for an execution.
“Slow down, Bernie!” his mother said, but Bernie hadn’t. “Big shot,” she muttered, though it was unclear at whom this was directed—whether at his brother or himself or his father, or his Uncle Lucien, or at Aunt Charlie herself.
Do dogs have to fight sadness as tirelessly as humans do? They seem less involved with retrospect, less involved in dread and anticipation. Animals other than humans appear to be having a more profound experience of the present. But who’s to say? Clearly their feelings are intense, and maybe grief and anxiety darken all their days. Maybe that’s why they’ve acquired their stripes and polka dots and fluffiness—to cheer themselves up.
• • •
Poor old Earth, an old sponge, a honeycomb of empty mine shafts and dried wells. While he and his friends were wittering on, the planet underfoot had been looted. The waterways glint with weapons-grade plutonium, sneaked on barges between one wrathful nation and another, the polar ice caps melt, Venice sinks.
In the horrible old days in Europe when Rose and Isaac were hunted children, it must have been pretty clear to them how to behave, minute by minute. Men in jackboots? Up to the attic!
But even during that time when it was so dangerous to speak out, to act courageously, heroes emerged. Most of them died fruitlessly, of course, and unheralded. But now there are even monuments to some of them, and information about such people is always coming to light.
Maybe there really is no problem, maybe everything really is back to normal and maybe the whole period will sink peacefully away, to be remembered only by scholars. But if it should end, instead, in dire catastrophe, whom will the monuments of the future commemorate?
Today, all day long, Lucien has seen the president’s vacant, stricken expression staring from the ubiquitous television screens. He seemed to be talking about positioning weapons in space, colonizing the moon.
• • •
Open your books to page 167, class, Miss Mueller shrieks. What do you see?
Lucien sighs.
The pages are thin and sort of shiny. The illustrations are mostly black and white.
This one’s a photograph of a statue, an emperor, apparently, wearing his stone toga and his stone wreath. The real people, the living people, mill about just beyond the picture’s confines, but Lucien knows more or less what they look like—he’s seen illustrations of them, too. He knows what a viaduct is and that the ancient Romans went to plays and banquets and that they had a code of law from which his country’s own is derived. Are the people hidden by the picture frightened? Do they hear the stones working themselves loose, the temples and houses and courts beginning to crumble?
Out the window, the sun is just a tiny, tiny bit higher today than it was at this exact instant yesterday. After school, he and Robbie Stern will go play soccer in the park. In another month it will be bright and warm.
So, Mr. Matsumoto will be coming back, and things seem pretty much as they did when he left. The apartment is clean, the cats are healthy, the art is undamaged, and the view from the terrace is exactly the same, except there’s that weird, blank spot where the towers used to stand.
“Open the next?” Madison says, holding up a bottle of champagne. “Strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, strongly disagree.”
“Strongly agree,” Lyle says.
“Thanks,” Amity says.
“Okay,” Russell says. “I’m in.”
Nathaniel shrugs and holds out his glass.
Madison pours. “Polls indicate that 100 percent of the American public approves heavy drinking,” he says.
“Oh, god, Madison,” Amity says. “Can’t we ever just drop it? Can’t we ever just have a nice time?”
Madison looks at her for a long moment. “Drop what?” he says, evenly.
But no one wants to get into that.
• • •
When Nathaniel was in his last year at college, his father began to suffer from heart trouble. It was easy enough for Nathaniel to come home on the weekends, and he’d sit with his father, gazing out the window as the autumnal light gilded the dry grass and the fallen leaves glowed.
His father talked about his own time at school, working night and day, the pride his parents had taken in him, the first college student in their family.
Over the years Nathaniel’s mother and father had grown gentler with one another and with him. Sometimes after dinner and the dishes, they’d all go out for a treat. Nathaniel would wait, an acid pity weakening his bones, while his parents debated worriedly over their choices, as if nobody ever had before or would ever have again the opportunity to eat ice cream.
• • •
Just last night, he dreamed about Delphine, a delicious champagne-style dream, full of love and beauty—a weird, high-quality love, a feeling he doesn’t remember ever having had in his waking life—a pure, wholehearted, shining love.
It hangs around him still, floating through the air out on the terrace—fragrant, shimmering, fading.
The bell is about to ring. Closing his book Lucien hears the thrilling crash as the bloated empire tumbles down.
Gold star, Lucien! Miss Mueller cackles deafeningly, and then she’s gone.
Charlie’s leaving, too. Lucien lifts his glass; she glances back across the thin, inflexible divide.
From farther than the moon she sees the children of some distant planet study pictures in their text: there’s Rose and Isaac at their kitchen table, Nathaniel out on Mr. Matsumoto’s terrace, Lucien alone in the dim gallery—and then the children turn the page.