[...] It had started at a dinner party in Gordon’s house, a memory Ellen hoarded, allowing it to open only rarely, at special times, like a music box whose tune fades imperceptibly with each playing: herself standing by a windowsill crowded with African violets, looking out at the yard. Gordon touching the small of her back and saying very softly, close to her ear, “I think about you constantly.”

Ellen had never repeated that phrase to Dr. Alwyn in therapy because she knew how cheap it would sound, and refused to hear it that way. At the time, the words had ricocheted through her like a box of marbles flung against a wall, had initiated nearly a year of surreal, pornographic encounters in locations that only rarely featured beds, and then only guestroom beds; she and Gordon were both too squeamish to offer up their connubial beds or the beds of their offspring for such purposes, though Gordon had once dropped to his knees and brought her to orgasm inside her bedroom closet. And yes, he had made her happy, or rather, the agony of guilt and eroticism he’d brought to her life had given it a new, exquisite focus. [...]

She lit a second cigarette, narrowing her eyes at the lawn, the very same lawn where she’d played as a child. Here she was, at thirty-six; with the brutal efficiency of a Greek tragedy she’d been thrust into the very life she had sought to escape. Ellen had dragged Harris back to Rockford—true, true—when the children were young, Ricky just a baby. She’d done it for Moose, to be near him after his unspeakable disaster. But Moose, it soon became clear, didn’t like to be near Ellen anymore. For years, she’d made regular detours in the course of her days to look for her brother’s car, tracking his movements from the college to Versailles to the public library. It had relieved her, somehow, just to know where he was. But nowadays she rarely did that. Almost never.

A machine pulled the grain in buckets out of the railroad cars, a machine weighed the grain and a machine poured it into bins to be stored, which meant that no one had to haul those heavy sacks of grain around a dock anymore, because no one even put their grain in sacks anymore …

Moose felt a sharpening in the room, a quivering intensity that excited and confused him.

There were no more sacks of grain because now grain was sold by weight and poured like a liquid and mixed together with other grains from other farmers. Now it was not this farmer’s grain and that farmer’s grain, it was just Grain, capital G, everyone’s grain mixed together, and this was a very big change.

“Oh-ho!” Moose cried, bolting from his chair. “Yes, it was! A very big change. Abstraction; standardization; the collapse of time and space … it was the beginning of modernity!”

And in that moment, Charlotte, too, experienced a falling away; her life fell away, her friends—they fell away. She’d been clinging to them these past weeks, wanting to be like Melanie Trier, like other people. But now she saw, or felt, that this wasn’t possible. She made her choice: Moose, and Michael West. Her secret life. She gave up the rest. The relief was physical, like releasing a long tight breath that had crowded her lungs for too long, letting it go because it was stale, the oxygen was gone. Her uncle looked younger, lean and eager under his slight growth of beard: the boy in the picture again, the water-skier grinning, half submerged. And Charlotte had done it, made him that way again. She was his special student—she felt this. Knew it.

“Not at all,” Thomas said, leaning into this challenge with such relish that he actually shoved the table an inch in my direction, rattling our water glasses. “But with all due respect, Charlotte, I think you may be the exception, here. Most of us are desperate for raw experience. We work in offices, dealing with intangibles; we go to lunch and talk to other people surrounded by intangibles. No one actually makes anything anymore, and our so-called experiences are about climbing Mount Kilimanjaro on our two-week vacations or snapping a picture of the Dalai Lama in Central Park. But we’re so powerfully aware of all the stuff we’re missing! It creates this frustration, this craving to get out of ourselves. TV tries to satisfy that, books, movies—they try, but they’re all so lame—so mediated! They’re just not real enough.

“It sounds expensive, all this,” I said. “Who pays for it?”

“Well,” he said, reluctantly. “Most of the start-up equity comes from Time Warner and Microsoft. But we’re completely independent, all that means is that they’ll have access to certain kinds of media options before anyone else.”

“I guess it makes sense,” I said. “Between the two of them, don’t they own just about everything?”

I made a brief, meticulous study of Thomas Keene: his smooth self and his fat shadow self, his olive Armani, his sandy hair and small round eyes. I scrutinized him for one granule of cynicism, a scintilla of evidence that at bottom he didn’t believe a word he was saying. I found nothing. This ex—fat kid with a penchant for crocodile truly believed he was making the world a better place.

And maybe he was. What did I know?

He gazed through his windshield at the fake red-brick exterior, the debased shrubbery surrounded by wood chips. Beijing, Moscow—they were all over the world, McDonald’s, colonizing, anesthetizing, and it was said that no country containing one had been at war since. Of course, they were already defeated.

Harris put his arm around his wife and pulled her close. There was so much he wanted to say. Courage! Look around you! The makings of happiness are before us! When Demographics in America first began to thrive, when he launched his focus groups of disenfranchised machine tool workers and reconstructed farmers, when the politicians started showing up, Ellen had been electrified. If all these people were coming to him here, she’d said—here in the middle of nowhere—imagine what would happen when they moved somewhere central! By then, Harris had glimpsed the truth that his wife still could not accept: this was the center. This. The center of the world. The place everyone turned to learn what American voters and moviegoers and worshipers, investors and sports fans, dieters, parents, cooks, drivers, smokers, hospital patients, music lovers, home-builders, drinkers, gardeners really cared about. What they would buy, yearn for, dream of. Harris had those answers. Or knew how to find them. The Lord had given him this gift.

She set down her pen and looked at me. “Charlotte, we know this thing is rotten,” she said. “But it’s still in our hands, we can still walk away. All we will have lost is some time!” I saw the martini in her eyes—the heat, the conviction. And a strange feeling overtook me then; it flared at the word “we,” a kind of vision—myself and Irene moving together into another kind of life: a life in which my choices were all different, in which I was different. The life of someone else. I glimpsed that woman rushing somewhere, engaged, engrossed, and a fat knot of hope snaked through me and jammed in my throat. And then she vanished. I was thirty-five. I’d made my choices long ago.