A bomb vest is but a means to achieve divine elevation. The same for the knife drawn across the neck of the sacrificial lamb. The rocks hurled at the martyr. Tools. I have been wondering if the men who killed my husband were properly prepared. An airplane’s aluminum fuselage is no more divine than a horse cart unless the pilot has prepared himself for the metamorphosis. Did they transform?
I will seek out the remnants of Mohamed Atta. I will seek out the remnants of my husband. For I have prepared properly. Of that much I’m sure. I have been preparing for so long! What is a complication but a preparation for its end? Once I am free, I will create infinite complications within my complication. Surely I am already free. Surely I will never be free. I am everywhere and nowhere. Permutations upon permutations for three hundred sixty generations. Blood and bone, iron and steel, disease and cure, atoms enjoined and split asunder.
I am ready.
Soon I will exist outside the boundaries of what my father wrote, outside of Albert, Vik, this building, my life.
I will follow the path of Lazlo Brunn. I will don the headphones and press the keys. I will listen, and once I have slowed myself sufficiently, I will close my mouth around the strand of heavy-gauge copper wire, thick as a thumb, that is poised on the wooden stand like a cobra before me, and I will inject myself into the Apelles via the heavy current converter I have affixed to her electrical conduits, having secured the connection with the hex nut my father gifted me, and my being will be transformed into a flowing stream, all sense and sensibility erased, all memories flayed to shreds, cohesion rent asunder, and I’ll pass into her foundation, and from there into the Hartland schist.
Yes, my body will smolder and die, but don’t mistake this for suicide. It’s simple sabotage, a pinprick to the foot of an elephant. A pinprick, but I am one of many. I will exist, reconstituted on the same plane as Vik, reduced, reformed, a free radical passing through stone and air, burrowing in, reconstituting in a leaf, superheated at the core of the earth, a part of everything living, dead, fired like a shot out of the sliver of existence we call humanity into the wilderness of natural time. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. But, of course, I didn’t have to think of anything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the gifts of time and space to work, and for bringing me into contact with extraordinary artists and scholars, thank you to the American Academy in Rome, and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for awarding me the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize for Literature. My deepest thanks also to PEN America and the family of Robert Bingham for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and for the financial support attached to the prize.
My thanks to Lee and Cynthia Vance, and to Carol Paik and Daniel Slifkin, who have over the years repeatedly lent Jennie and me quiet places to write. And my love and thanks to Larry and Mary Yabroff, whose dining room table is its own writer’s retreat.
Thank you, Jason Siebenmorgen and Christoph Meinrenken, for friendship and generosity beyond compare.
Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya’s snow crystal classification system was a constant companion as I wrote, as was the snowflake photography of Wilson Bentley. The work of Dr. Charles Merguerian, Professor Emeritus of Geology at Hofstra University, on subterranean Manhattan was invaluable in creating the world under Hazel’s feet.
Of the many helpful documents and books I consulted, several proved to be indispensable: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Disaster Survey Report 78-1, which was key in building the novel’s chronology and was a fascinating account of the meteorological science behind the storm itself; the SOE Secret Operations Manual; the Field Manuals of the Office of Strategic Services, especially No. 3, which describes the methods of simple sabotage; The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945, by David S. Wyman; and Herr Krupp’s Berthawerk, by Theodore H. Lehman, essential for its descriptions of imprisonment at Fünfteichen and of labor at the munitions foundry.
I am grateful to the supporters and staff of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive Online and to the British Library Sound Archive’s National Life Stories / Living Memory of the Jewish Community project, both of which provide free online access to their many interviews with Holocaust survivors.
For your intelligence and infinite patience, thank you to everyone at Farrar, Straus and Giroux with a hand in the publication of this book, especially Gretchen Achilles, Rodrigo Corral, Hannah Goodwin, Olivia Kan-Sperling, Alexis Nowicki, and Stephen Weil.
Thank you to Sean McDonald for wading through multiple drafts and thousands of pages, and for fielding endless questions with grace and generosity. Thank you to Antoine Wilson, whose friendship and enthusiasm have forestalled countless crises of the spirit. And thank you to Anna Stein for always answering, always humoring, always looking forward.
To my children, who are, in ways mysterious and undeniable, at the center of everything I write, and to Jennie, who is in every sentence, every word, my love.
ALSO BY JACK LIVINGS
The Dog: Stories
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Livings is the author of the short story collection The Dog, which was awarded the 2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Rome Prize for Literature. He lives in New York City with his family. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part II
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part III
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part IV
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgments
Also by Jack
