#millhauser

Chang-rae Lee Reads Steven Millhauser

For hours we would sit in darkness, watching cartoons and pirates, and then the lights would go on, dimming the luminous red EXIT signs. The yellow overhead lights of the vast emptying theater filled us with a sense of lamplight and evening, and as we made our way slowly up the slope of the side aisle in an air-conditioned chill, we encouraged the illusion, thinking how cool it was, how tired we felt, how late it must be, imagining as vividly as possible the cool darkness outside, the headlights, the glowing blue BAR & GRILL sign across the street, the shadows of passing people growing longer and shorter in the light of the streetlamps, and in a black satin sky, just over the horizon, a luminous orange moon – and suddenly we had passed through the door and were standing on a crimson rug in a flood of sunlight, beyond the glass doors the white sidewalk glittered under a blue sky, on all sides of us we felt the harsh hot gleam of glass and silver, and though we had known it would be exactly like that, still the delightful illusion of evening that we had created kept its force, so that for a moment we felt, in the heat and light of a radiant afternoon, a distinct sense of confusion, loss, of bitter disappointment.

Guest Post, Doug Cornett: The Reader Who Knew Too Much

Exactly where am I when I stand there and look both ways? Who can say? It’s just for a little while, before I move on.

Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself will become elements of a final masterwork—a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park in which every exploding star and spinning electron is part of the empyrean choreography.

I laid out my towel, with my bottle of suntan lotion in one corner and my book in another, and then I set out on a walk along the wet sand by the low waves. Farther out the water solidified into patches of deep purplish blue and streaks of silver. In the shiny dark sand I saw my footprints, which stood out pale for a moment before the dark wetness soaked back. I tried to imagine a second pair of footprints walking beside mine, first pale and then dark, vanishing in the frilly-edged sheets of water thrown forward by the breaking waves.

On a brilliant afternoon in July, under a sky so blue that it seemed to have weight, the beach towels on the sand reminded me of the rectangles of colors in a child's paint box.