I am quite calm.
What do you want to know?
I have not believed in where I am for a long time. Why should I pretend otherwise?
Do you have a question that isn’t rhetorical?
Where is this? What city is this? Because it’s not my city.
We admit we achieved something less than perfection.
Is that an answer?
We didn’t, like you, have all the time in the world. Time was of the essence.
Why was time of the essence?
You already know the answer to that.
I do?
Of course. You saw what happened.
I did?
Yes.
Everybody else is gone.
True.
And now it’s just me. With only the phantom multitudes to keep me company.
Yes. We determined that procreation simply made no sense. It was cyclical and hadn’t gotten us anywhere.
Procreation hadn’t gotten us anywhere?
Correct. And because time was of the essence we chose the most logical course. Otherwise we would have been left no possibility of knowing.
Knowing what?
What we don’t know.
I can’t accept this. There have to be others.
We can’t confirm or deny. But, in fact, the enormous work was archival. And we ran out of time.
Then this is it? Then I am truly the only one? I’m the chosen one?
You could put it that way. Although who it would be was the least of our concerns. Once we had the means, and knew of what we were capable, everything fell away that wasn’t relevant. It was a glorious finale for us.
A glorious finale for you.
Glorious meaning having the quality of glory. Finale meaning final act.
Enough!
You said you were calm.
I am no longer calm — I wash my hands of this!
That may be a synecdoche.
That is not a synecdoche!
It may be a metonym.
It is not a metonym! I never consented to this. You have put me here without my consent! I have my rights! Are you listening?
Just a moment please. Just a moment please …
Yes? Talk to me!
Just a moment. Just — We don’t know if there is the possibility of an answer. But if there is, the revelation will be yours.
What?
If something is to be revealed, it will be to you.
Oh no. No.
The revelation, if there is one, will be yours.
No, no, no, no, no! I still have options. Every living thing has options.
You are no longer corporeally equipped to have options.
Program, listen to me. Can you listen? You’ve made an error.
We’ll be the judge of that.
Please. I beg you—
You’ll feel better shortly.
Let me be nothing, I want to be nothing!
There is no nothing. If there were nothing, it would be something.
THE SKY HAS TURNED a deep blue. There is a stillness in the city. The air is warm. I feel the lightest, gentlest of breezes. I climb onto the terrace railing. I can see the stars emerging as clearly as if I were in Mongolia.
The night darkens, and the constellated stars seem to be greeting me. In a surge of joy that flows from my heart I lift my arms and greet the heavens. Welcome, sweet springtime!
My hand brushes against something.
This is the sky. I am touching the sky. I feel it with the tips of my fingers. It is hard, metallic, with the texture of the tiniest of nubs, little dots, like Braille, some of them aglimmer. But then they begin to soften and melt away. Or is it my hand that is melting away?
And I think, for a moment, that I have felt a reverberant hum, as of some distant engine.
Acknowledgments
The stories that appear in this work were originally published in the following periodicals and books, sometimes in different form:
“Wakefield,” “Edgemont Drive,” and “Assimilation” first appeared in The New Yorker.
“Heist” was published in The New Yorker and later adapted for the novel City of God.
“All the Time in the World” was published in The Kenyon Review.
An earlier version of “Liner Notes: The Songs of Billy Bathgate” appeared in The New American Review.
“Walter John Harmon,” “A House on the Plains,” and “Jolene: A Life,” first published in The New Yorker, were subsequently included in the book Sweet Land Stories.
“The Writer in the Family,” originally published in Esquire; “Willi,” originally published in The Atlantic; and “The Hunter” were all included in the book Lives of the Poets.
About the Author
E. L. DOCTOROW’S works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, and The Waterworks. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction.