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They were standing by the truck that way men do when they like each other, standing about a foot apart, shoulders back and chests thrown out so their hidden hearts could pound at one another.
In Tennessee, along the river, within the limits of the flood plain, the coffins of the dead are known to surface on the flood, rising with the waters like fish eggs, packets of ancestral spawn. The Tennessee at flood is a graverobber, voracious as a vulture in its talent to pick bones. In spring and autumn at the flood along the Tennessee souls rise as fast as griddlecakes only to sink again into the mire farther down the river. Along the Tennessee the dead, like landed gentry, seek high ground—the hills belong to mansions and to mausoleums.
Wherever love comes from, whatever is its genesis, it isn’t like a quantity of gold or diamonds, even water, in the earth—a fixed quantity, Fos thought. You can’t use up love, deplete it at its source. Love exists beyond fixed limits, beyond what you can see or count. It isn’t something measurable, something you can say okay, this is love from here to here.
He wore that expression Fos had come to recognize in certain kinds of people of an iron reserve who never cry. They end up looking like they’ve cried too much.
People living on the shores of lakes since time began have conjured creatures from those depths. If you believe a thing is something different from the evidence before you, if you believe something is hidden by the wall or in the woods or beneath the surface of the lake, then that belief gives power to the darkness and the depths—power to enchant; to terrify.
Oh, Opal heard herself say out loud. That’s the nature of a revelation: it makes its own pronouncement. It says: the world you see before you is brand-new. The world you’ve known is gone. And you’re left there, a hatched chick, to contemplate that broken egg behind you.
Because the world is not designed for keepsake. It’s too cruel a place, and most things go to ruin. Name one thing that doesn’t.
So for good or bad, she knew, to call yourself a mother the only thing you had to do was show up for the job. And stay. And some are saints and some are martyrs. Some are victims. Some are vanished. Some are walls. Some emit more light than they absorb, creating their own planetary systems. Some are sole survivors of the war against themselves. Some are slaves. And some are furies. Some are cold, and some are tender. Few are blameless. All have names. Each must answer for her child’s existence.
Youth never sees its shadow till the sun’s about to set: and then you wonder where the person went who you were speaking to in all your thoughts for all those years.
THE EYE WILL SELDOM SEE WHAT THE MIND DOES NOT ANTICIPATE, a sign in the men’s room in one of the top-secret buildings warned. Above which one of the physicists had written “Isn’t this The 1st Principle of Magic?” Fos thought it was. Even though he knew he ought to worry more, he knew that if he harried every motive, guarded every move, that he might be safer, sure. But then he’d miss the magic—wouldn’t he?
He had probably looked at all these faces through the camera at least once—probably met most of these men and women sometime in the last two years, but until this moment he had never seen the way a shared emotion transforms every face. Despite their differences—the different widths between their eyes, their different coloring—their common joy transformed them, joined them in a single family. Elation, like a dominant gene, turned them into kissing cousins, every one resembling every other.
The past doesn’t hold the answers for you about who you are—the future does. Life doesn’t progress the way a story does, each chapter leading neatly to the next. Life is a series of collisions, for fucksake. It’s not a narrative experience. My advice to you is to stop trying to make it one.
