Real Americans: A novel

Time passes, indifferent to me. So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention. I notice it now, my present: my grandson’s kind face, his warm hand in mine, and the smell and sensation—here the words, in any language, fail—of being alive.

Nick was aware it wasn’t a real solution. The future was bigger than he was—bigger than the Maiers, even. Science would always move forward and not back—and that was good, of course. It meant less needless suffering. He couldn’t personally allow some progress and not others. If it wasn’t their company, it would be another. People would seek to cont

The thoughtless destruction that had happened, in those years, the erasing of who we had been. As though without a past we’d be unburdened, when in fact the opposite was true: In trying to leave the past behind, like a shadow, it followed you.

How thoughtless we had been, to believe that trees needed to be useful, or that usefulness was even the point.

Aren’t we lucky? Our DNA encodes for innumerable possible people, and yet it’s you and I who are here—winners in a stupefying lottery. We came at the exact right moment, a blip in the hundred million centuries of the universe: the Earth inhabitable, not yet engulfed by the sun, but not only molten magma, inhospitable to life. The planet cooled and

There were other stories being told now, an abundance of other stories, and yet this one persisted. Here were two adults making choices. But was it a choice, Nick wondered, when you were told, all your life, before your life, what it was you should want? If Nick was curious about immortality, it was only because he wanted to see whether, if given y

territory was being encroached upon. “Even eye color?” Rich’s eyes widened. “Boring,” Levi said. “Eye color, hair color, height, gender—those

I wanted to tell Betty’s granddaughter that it wasn’t too late. That I had been like her, once, resentful of any interruptions. Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely.

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.