Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

WELL, THE SUN WAS SHINING. THEY FELT THAT BODED WELL—people turn any old thing into an omen.

She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself.

Perhaps that was a fundamentally American desire, or just a modern urge, to want a house, a car, a book, a pair of shoes, to embody these contradictions.

Step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind.

There was some stirring, watching his hands at work, but vacations did that, didn’t they, made you horny, made everything seem possible, a life completely different than the one you normally inhabited.

Or they’d talk about nothing, the other pleasure of a long marriage.

It was pleasant to sit outside, near naked, the sun and air on your skin reminding you that you’re just another animal.

The key to success was having parents who had succeeded.

What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

She could see him as he was, but she loved him.

The world was vast but also small and governed by logic.

There was a knock at the door. A knock at the door of this house, where no one knew they were, not even the global positioning system, this house near the ocean but also lost in farmland, this house of red bricks painted white, the very material the smartest little piggy chose because it would keep him safest. There was a knock at the door.

Her whisper was built for the stage. Surely whoever was on the other side of the door could hear her.

It was funny, how quickly the eye could register: benign, or harmless, or instantly reassuring.

There was wind, and it sounded like a chorus of voices. The trees swayed, their heads tossed with abandon. A storm was coming or out there somewhere.

If calluses meant honest labor, did softness imply dishonesty?

The city was as unnatural as it was possible to be, accretion of steel and glass and capital, and light was fundamental to its existence.

A city without power was like a flightless bird, an accident of evolution.

Once you were past a certain age, this was how you learned—you had to master technology or be mastered by it.

“I wish I had your faith in other people.”

Morality was vanity, in the end.

“A blackout could be something. It could be a symptom of something bigger.”

Cars and planes made time travelers of all of us.

Perhaps that was why, in his estimation, true intelligence was accepting how limited one’s intelligence always is.

Sometimes distance showed a thing most clearly.

In the space beyond that, Rose saw a deer, with abbreviated velvet antlers and a cautious yet somehow also bored mien, considering her through dark, strangely human eyes.

She knew that childhood was a temporary condition.

G. H. once had faith in the institutions of American life, but he had less now.

THE SUN CREPT ACROSS THE SKY AS EVER IT HAD. THEY WELCOMED it; they worshipped it.

You could fake your way to a lot.

She knew it wasn’t fair, not to have a vice. The modern world was so joyless.

Children sided with one another, the future against the past.

Random circumstance had brought them together, but wasn’t everything random circumstance in the end?

Maybe no one, however much in love, cares about the minutiae of someone else’s life.

All these years debating the objectivity of fact had done something to everyone’s brains.

Maybe it was a folly to assume anything happened without someone—God, sure, why not him—willing it.

They wanted something to happen, but something was happening. They did not know it, and it did not involve them, not really.

Symbols don’t mean anything; you invest them with meaning, depending on what you most need.

Nothing matters to children but themselves, or perhaps that is the human condition.

Their bodies knew what their minds did not. Children and the very old have this in common.

A noise, but that didn’t cover it. Noise was an insufficient noun, or maybe noise was always impossible to describe in words.

You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it.

Understanding came after the fact.

Epiphanies. They were the end of a chain of events invisible until that epiphany had been reached. You had to walk backward and try to make sense.

Sometimes you could will yourself to believe what you said.

The sky was quite blue and very pretty, but the out-of-doors seemed somehow untrustworthy.

Amanda was trying to reconstruct it, but a noise was like pain: your body couldn’t remember its specifics.

Parenthood required pretending bravado, derring-do, courage, conviction. It was just instinct, it was just love.

Amanda was searching for friendship or humanity or reassurance or relief.