Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

The lucky ones—untouched, unscathed so far by the myriad possible cruelties of life—were attending opera and eating noodles in fish sauce.

He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.

She’s at a threshold—hovering, diaphanous, all the selves she has ever been. In the playhouse there is a small child, smaller than Waldo. A teenage girl walks down a city street. A young woman falls in love. A wife becomes a mother. A bright, loving presence. The whole crowd encircles them. It isn’t scary. It isn’t anything at all. Maybe every person has an uncrushable heart a hundred billion times stronger than steel. He watches the dance of light and shadow on the walls. Someday, this will be helpful to him.

“Yeah,” Waldo says. He’s looking straight ahead, though not at anything in particular. “Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.”