black bastard, and beside her was Susan—perfect Susan, who barely spoke to him—and her cheerful kiss-ass husband and their son, his grandson, clear-faced, in a miniature dark blue suit. His grandson. At three, the kid could already write his name; he could throw a softball hard enough to sting your hand. He had a precocious air of gravity, a personal importance. Here was the future Constantine had worked for, this sturdy, affectionate boy with a Greek jaw and wide-set American eyes. This one thread, at least, was coming out of the tangle straight and true and strong. At the altar Constantine knew a soaring happiness, the old kind, born of a piercing consciousness of the world's shifting and inscrutable order. He had suffered, maybe he'd even failed in certain ways, but here he was at the head of an immense church, big and proud as a lion in his tux, and he said to himself, All right. He said, Let it happen, all of it. As if in response to his silent command the wedding march started up and Magda walked toward him down the red-carpeted aisle in her shimmering lunar garden of a dress. He found that . . . Okay, maybe this was a little strange, but he found that he liked the idea of seamstresses going blind to create this, this huge moment of stained glass and music and the staunch white rods of all those gladioli, bright and clean as torches in the colored dusk of the church. It had something to do with resurrection, with liberation from the world of the small. It seemed regrettable but right that this plenty he'd created, this magnificence, should take something out of the world. Some people found love and an immense comfort. Some women went blind, sewing. That was the way of things. Matter can't be created or destroyed, only rearranged. A little more here means a little less over there.
1984/ Mary went to the window and looked out at the ruins of Constantine's garden. It was her single concession to rage, to whatever she possessed of an urge to do harm. The house remained immaculate, the beds made and the floors swept, the top of the dining-room table rubbed to a rich, burnished life even though she ate her meals in the kitchen or on a tray in front of the TV. But she did nothing to Constantine's garden. She watched with a slightly irritated indifference as the tomatoes ripened and burst on the vines, as the beans withered and the basil turned brown. She watched the zucchini vines grow and strangle the rest of the garden, the zucchini themselves swollen grotesquely, big as waterlogged baseball bats, their flesh turned to wood, inedible. Then she watched the zucchini die, collapsing leadenly onto themselves, shriveling, until finally there was nothing left but dead leaves crisped by the first frosts and the inert carcasses of the squash themselves, long and flaccid and utterly dead. Mary covered the rosebushes, bedded the perennial flower bulbs with peat moss, pruned the deadwood off the pear tree. She took perfect care of every other living thing and did not touch, did not so much as step into, the little deceased shrine of Constantine's garden. Snow, when it came, dusted the blackened heads of lettuce, whatever had gone too foul for the rabbits to eat. Wind blew the bean poles down, and once, on a blustery day in early December, Mary looked out the window just in time to see a little snake of vine, with one perfect fan-shaped brown leaf, blowing away over the fence and into the restless, icy gray.
1986/ Jamal was eating the sky. He opened his mouth so wide he felt a small crackle of hinges deep in his jaw as he sucked it in, the fat heavy whiteness that blew and twisted around him. It turned to nothing on his tongue. He ran in a circle, eating a patch of the dense white falling sky, and he saw himself filling up with it, the cold and distance, the big arcing empty space.
“Jamal.” It was Cassandra, coming in blue glasses and a white jacket. Jamal sucked in a last mouthful. He looked mournfully at all the sky he wouldn't eat.
“Let's go, baby.” Cassandra came, big in her boots. “Everybody's ready.”
Jamal stood waiting. He'd eaten some of the white silence, but there was so much more.
“Pretty, huh?” Cassandra said. She put her big hand on his head. “If you like nature.