Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

He doesn’t get to see the kids enough. David and Maggie both agree on this, though they fight about it regularly. Which is to say, she raises the issue and he gets defensive, even though, at heart, he feels the same. But then isn’t that what marriage is, two people fighting for land rights to the same six inches?

Everyone is from someplace. We all have stories, our lives unfolding along crooked lines, colliding in unexpected ways.

but eventually she’d done what most wives do and just gave up. So now it was she who had to make the extra effort to ensure that social engagements went well.

He understands that they want him to be special. It’s important to people that he be special, because we need special things in our lives. We want to believe that magic is still possible.

Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.

To be an artist is to live at once in the world and apart from it. Where an engineer sees form and function, an artist sees meaning. A toaster, to the engineer, is an array of mechanical and electrical components that work together to apply heat to bread, creating toast. To the artist, a toaster is everything else. It is a comfort creation machine, one of many mechanical boxes in a dwelling that create the illusion of home. Anthropomorphized, it is a hang-jawed man who never tires of eating. Open his mouth and put in the bread. But poor Mr. Toaster Oven. He’s a man who, no matter how much he eats, is never truly fed.

In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

She liked to read books about wayward girls, girls who fit in nowhere, then discovered they had magic powers. Hermione, Katniss Everdeen. She’d read Harriet the Spy when she was seven and Pippi Longstocking, and they were competent, but in the end simply human. As she grew, Rachel felt she needed more from her heroines, more teeth, more fight, more power. She liked the thrill of danger they faced, but didn’t want to have to actually worry about them. It made her too anxious.

This is what motherhood was, one fear eclipsed by another.

Night is night and morning is morning and to confuse the two can lead to lingering displacement.

“what I mean is, people can say all kinds of things without ever opening their mouths.”

He knew that the world was an impossibility, that the state of Israel was an impossibility, that every day men woke and put on their boots and went off to do the impossible no matter what it might be. This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm.

They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.

The Restoration of God’s Commandments

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on?

True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces. To take a thing we see every day, a thing we take for granted as normal—a child’s bedroom—and transform it into something sinister, untrustworthy—is to undermine the very fabric of life.