The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.

And the same thing will happen. And the same thing will happen. And the same thing will happen.

She looked small, older than we remembered. Her entire person appeared to be a single hazel-olive tone: clothes, skin, hair, eyes—all registered on that same narrow spectrum. She smelled faintly of charred wood. How could this small monochromatic woman be our mother? Then she gathered us into her arms and we held her, feeling the heat from under her skin, and we were the three-headed monster again, with its three yearning hearts. We held our mother as long as we could, and then longer, until she started to laugh. My beautiful grown-up daughters, she said.

the Anti-Vision: a vacancy where a new idea refused to appear.

Gregory took the joint and inhaled a vapor so noxious that his affronted lungs ejected it in an explosion of coughing. “You paid for this?” he gasped, wiping his eyes. “It’s harsh,” Athena conceded. “But wait for the high. It’s … effortless. Cordial. Like ripe peaches.”

From a distance they faded into uniformity, but they were moving, each propelled by a singular force that was inexhaustible. The collective. He was feeling the collective without any machinery at all. And its stories, infinite and particular, would be his to tell.