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The thunderclap was so tremendous that it seemed to come not only from the sky but from the ground, too, as if heaven and earth were splitting open, announcing Armageddon.
” Danny frowned. “I go away from home for just a few hours, and while I’m gone we’re invaded by scaly, transvestite, British spies?”
” “You’re crazy about Star Trek, Star Wars, Batteries Not Included, all that stuff, so maybe what I’ve got here is the kind of background expert I seek out when I’m writing a novel. You’re my resident expert in the weird.”
That was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy.
Evidently the American children of the late twentieth century not only lived interior fantasy lives richer than those of children at any other time in history, but they seemed to have gotten from their fantasies something not provided by the elves and fairies and ghosts with which earlier generations of kids had entertained themselves: the ability to think about abstract concepts like space and time in a manner far beyond their intellectual and emotional age.
How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It’s like playing blackjack when the dealer is God.”
Even in those circumstances she held on to hope, largely because of a line from one of her own novels that had come back to her just a moment ago: In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization that the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.
Most publishers are happiest with a successful novelist when he or she writes the same book every time. They don’t care if he bathes only on the summer solstice, drinks himself into a stupor every day by 2:00 P.M., lives in sin with a llama, thinks SpongeBob SquarePants is the greatest actor of his generation, and spits on the floor—as long as, at the keyboard, he can slavishly repeat himself manuscript after manuscript.
