The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

He worked in a bicycle repair shop and poured his every resource into making a three-hourlong documentary about the migratory patterns of North American geese. Entitled The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese, it was narrated in a voice completely free of artifice—that is to say, devoid of all expression. The film proved coma-inducing to all who attended the private screening Alfred paid for in Manhattan. Miles, a notorious insomniac, had to be forcibly roused when the film ended. Miles begged Alfred for a DVD of Geese to bring home to Chicago and watch at bedtime. Enraged and crushed, Alfred refused.

was billed as one of those old-fashioned snowstorms, the kind that had been predicted throughout Gregory’s twenty-eight years but never quite panned out (according to his father), always devolving into rain or half-rain, icing up or turning prematurely to slush, and leading, at the Sunday family dinners Gregory sporadically attended, to nostalgic reveries from his father—who’d walked New York a lot before he got famous—about what real snowstorms used to be like: the softness, the silence, the transformation of a frenzied city into a plush, whispery terrain. “You say that every single time, Dad,” Gregory would huff. “Word for word.” “Do I?” His father always seemed surprised.

Dennis sold vintage weed: Humboldt Homegrown, Eureka Gold, weed from back in the day when marijuana was leafy and harsh and full of seeds but delivered a high that was the weed equivalent of vinyl:

It was Athena who had first made them aware, in the workshop where Gregory and Dennis met, of word-casings and phrase-casings: gutted language she likened to proxies. “Find the eluder,” she instructed her rapt graduate students, narrowing gold-flecked eyes at them across the seminar table. “I want words that are still alive, that have a pulse. Hot words, people! Give me the bullet, not the casing—fire it right in my chest. I’ll die gladly for some fresh language.”