“Are you writing?” Athena asked, startling him.
“Not a lot,” Gregory admitted, which sounded better than Not at all. “I’ve been too drained.”
“Maybe not-writing is what’s draining you,” she said. “Maybe you’ve severed your energy source.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot,” he said, to scuttle the topic.
Athena turned to him. “Finish your fucking book, Gregory,” she said mildly. “It’s been bloody years.”
“Are you trying to piss me off? Or is it happening by accident?”
She shrugged. “I’m your writing teacher. What did you expect?”
There were many possible answers to that question, none especially kind. Gregory summoned a defiant memory of Athena going down on him among the stacks of canvases, but her teasing golden eyes seemed, in retrospect, to proffer an identical goad: Finish your book!
Now she glanced at her phone and stood up. “Barney’s here,” she said. “Out you go.”
In the lobby he passed a silver alpha with a handsome goatee, brushing snow from a baguette. He decided to take the C downtown and fumbled through blizzardy wind to Central Park West. Once there, he stepped inside the park. The wind dropped magically away. In the stillness, Gregory noticed that every twig and branch held a delicate stack of snow. Snow swarmed like honeybees in the golden glow of the old-fashioned streetlamps; it slathered tree trunks and sparkled like crushed diamonds at his feet. He heard a whispering noise and saw two people glide from among the trees on cross-country skis. A lavender lunar radiance filled the park. It was a world from childhood: castles and forests and magic lamps and princes scaling walls of brambles. That world.
He would tell his father!
No. And with that thudding refrain, the drag of Gregory’s exhaustion returned. He looked around for a bench but saw just snowdrifts and occasional human shapes blurred by the falling snow into shadows, or ghosts. Two people were lying down, making angels. Now, there was an idea: Gregory let himself fall backward into a drift that caught him like a featherbed, so light and dry that he couldn’t feel its cold.
He found himself staring up into a gray-white void. It disoriented him: Was he looking up or down? Only near his face did its contents reveal themselves in spiraling motes of cold that pricked his eyeballs and twanged in his throat when he inhaled. There was something familiar about all of it. He’d done this before: lain on his back in a snowstorm, gazing into a depthless, empty sky. But when? It must be déjà vu. And then, with a rush of comprehension, Gregory recognized his father’s Anti-Vision: that bleak blank vista that had harried and tormented him, driven him in disguise to this same neighborhood twenty-five years ago. The Anti-Vision had never been an absence—the opposite! It was a density of whirling particles. His father just hadn’t gotten close enough.
Gregory gazed, transfixed, as snow swarmed down upon him like space junk; like disarranged flocks of birds; like the universe emptying itself. He knew what the vision meant: human lives past and present, around him, inside him. He opened his mouth and eyes and arms and drew them into himself, feeling a surge of discovery—of rapture—that seemed to lift him out of the snow. He wanted to laugh or shout. Finish your book! Here was his father’s parting gift: a galaxy of human lives hurtling toward his curiosity. From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.
Middle Son （Area of Detail）
There’s no mystery about this creature: a human boy. Eleven years old, a little shrunken-looking in his beige uniform, nothing to hook your gaze if he isn’t your brother or son, but all eyes on him now because he’s the one at bat, bases loaded, his parents and two brothers in the stands, his mother wringing a lump of yarn because it’s agony watching him hit （or try to hit, he never hits）， her emotions cliché to anyone who’s read a book or seen a movie about children playing sports and how their mothers feel, and yet—how is this possible?—fiercely specific: a wish to pluck him from that spot and spirit him away to a place where she can protect him; a craving to hold him like she did when he was newly born and smelled like milk （his first smile, a tiny sputter of lightning across his face, a thing she often recalls）; a hope that he won’t be dwarfed forever by his older brother, who moves through the world as if it were a receiving line; a plea to someone, something, that her boy’s uniqueness, so manifest to her lovestruck eyes, be revealed to all: a singularity that, were there justice in the world, would rearrange the present scene and cause a beam of light to fall directly onto his head.