What?
If something is to be revealed, it will be to you.
Oh no. No.
The revelation, if there is one, will be yours.
No, no, no, no, no! I still have options. Every living thing has options.
You are no longer corporeally equipped to have options.
Program, listen to me. Can you listen? You’ve made an error.
We’ll be the judge of that.
Please. I beg you—
You’ll feel better shortly.
Let me be nothing, I want to be nothing!
There is no nothing. If there were nothing, it would be something.
—
THE SKY HAS TURNED a deep blue. There is a stillness in the city. The air is warm. I feel the lightest, gentlest of breezes. I climb onto the terrace railing. I can see the stars emerging as clearly as if I were in Mongolia.
The night darkens, and the constellated stars seem to be greeting me. In a surge of joy that flows from my heart I lift my arms and greet the heavens. Welcome, sweet springtime!
My hand brushes against something.
This is the sky. I am touching the sky. I feel it with the tips of my fingers. It is hard, metallic, with the texture of the tiniest of nubs, little dots, like Braille, some of them aglimmer. But then they begin to soften and melt away. Or is it my hand that is melting away?
And I think, for a moment, that I have felt a reverberant hum, as of some distant engine.
BY E. L. DOCTOROW
Welcome to Hard Times
Big as Life
The Book of Daniel
Ragtime
Drinks Before Dinner (play)
Loon Lake
Lives of the Poets
World’s Fair
Billy Bathgate
Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (essays)
The Waterworks
City of God
Reporting the Universe (essays)
Sweet Land Stories
The March
Creationists (essays)
Homer & Langley
All the Time in the World
Andrew’s Brain
Doctorow: Collected Stories
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E. L. DOCTOROW’s fiction includes Andrew’s Brain, All The Time in the World, Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, and The Waterworks. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, awarded to an author whose “scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.” Honors in addition to those mentioned above include the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
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E. L. Doctorow, Doctorow
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