And maybe here is where we should end—Ames renewed, Ames with a girlfriend he met on the job, Ames hosting his brothers and their families each August at the old house, where they roasted a suckling pig in the backyard. Why follow him all the way to his final years in an upstate nursing home, the last of the Hollander brothers to survive? We have these facts—creamed spinach, Go championships, a Jamaican nurse named Annalise who would have been Ames’s true love had they not been fifty years apart in age （she said so, too, her firm hands holding his shaking ones）， a robin’s nest outside his window one spring containing four blue eggs, “H-a-p-p-y B-i-r-t-h-d-a-y” spelled out in sparkling cardboard letters across the door to the common room the day he turned ninety. Thanks to Bix Bouton, that genius, all of this is in our reach.
Even so, there are gaps: holes left by eluding separatists bent upon hoarding their memories and keeping their secrets. Only Gregory Bouton’s machine—this one, fiction—lets us roam with absolute freedom through the human collective.
But knowing everything is too much like knowing nothing; without a story, it’s all just information. So let us return to the story we began: Ames rounding the bases to a roar of jubilation that approaches the meteorological. People charge onto the field as he crosses home plate: a throng of ecstatic parents and teammates and siblings mobbing him in a way that would be frightening if not for their merry faces. His teammates hoist him into the air like ants lofting a stick and carry him around the bases a second time before they set him down and dump a cooler of Gatorade over his head.
Miles towels off Ames’s lime-smelling hair because Miles loves winning and a family is a team, and the coach gives a lecture to the radiant boys and their radiant families about patience and hard work and believing in yourself, and there are hugs and goodbyes among the giddy parents, but Miles insists they can’t leave, not without finding the ball—Come on, it’s our trophy! So the Hollander family stays on after everyone else has driven away. In the hush, they circle the field to its farthest perimeter and disperse among the whispering pines in that scrap of ancient forest. They browse separately among pine needles in the deepening dark until their mother finds it—she’s expert at finding their lost things （she finds two baseballs, in fact, a few feet apart, and hastily shoves one under a bush before shouting, “Got it!”）。
Trophy recovered, they walk to their station wagon, the only car left in the lot, crossing asphalt that glitters like stars under the parking lights. Miles has commandeered the lucky ball, tossing it into the air and catching it. Ames walks between his parents holding both their hands, Miles and Alfred right behind, an orb of happiness enclosing them as they move together into the sonorous black aquatic night.
When they reach the car, his father pulls off Ames’s baseball cap and kisses his sweaty head.
“What now, slugger?” he asks. “Anything you want.”
Acknowledgments
With each book, I become more dependent on the people who help me to do this work—or perhaps just more keenly aware of how dependent I’ve always been!
First and always, David Herskovits—for decades of reading, conversation, and everything.
Our sons, Manu and Raoul Herskovits, for luring my attention into realms essential to this book.
My mother and stepfather, Kay and Sandy Walker, for believing in me always.
My agent and partner, Amanda Urban, and her teams at ICM and at Curtis Brown: Sophie Baker, Ron Bernstein, Felicity Blunt, Daisy Meyrick, and Charlie Tooke.
My editor, Nan Graham, and everyone at Scribner: Dan Cuddy, Ashley Gilliam, Erich Hobbing, Jaya Miceli, Katherine Monaghan, Mia O'Neill, Sabrina Pyun, Stuart Smith, Kara Watson, and Brianna Yamashita.
Alex Busansky, Ken Goldberg, Barbara Mundy, and Dr. George Carlo for expertise legal, tech-historical, academic, and military.
Finally, my readers, some of whose frank perceptions I’ve been relying upon for decades. In addition to my writing group, to whom I’ve dedicated this book, they are Monica Adler, Genevieve Field, James Hannaham, David Herskovits, Don Lee, Gregory Pardlo, Gregory Sargeant, Ilena Silverman, Deborah Treisman, Kay Walker, and Stephanie Weeks.