All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

I cannot wait to leave, fuck this place
. He remembers the LeBlanc house,
his house! Tall and narrow with the staircase spiraling up its center like a spire shell stood on end,
where the ghost of his brother occasionally slipped between walls, where Madame Manec lived
and died, where not so long ago he could sit on a davenport with Marie-Laure and pretend they
flew over the volcanoes of Hawaii, over the cloud forests of Peru, where just a week ago she sat
cross-legged on the floor and read to him about a pearl fishery off the coast of Ceylon, Captain
Nemo and Aronnax in their diving suits, the impulsive Canadian Ned Land about to hurl his
harpoon through the side of a shark . . . All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.
Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading
river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.

---

Captain Nemo’s Last Words
B
y noon on the twelfth of August, Marie-Laure has read seven of the last nine chapters into the
microphone. Captain Nemo has freed his ship from the giant squid only to stare into the eye of a
hurricane. Pages later, he rammed a warship full of men, passing through its hull, Verne writes, like
a sailmaker’s needle through cloth. Now the captain plays a mournful, chilling dirge on his organ
as the 
Nautilus
sleeps in the wastelands of the sea. Three pages are left. If Marie-Laure has
brought anyone comfort by broadcasting the story, if her great-uncle, crouched in some dank cellar
with a hundred men, tuned her in—if some trio of Americans reclined in the nighttime fields as
they cleaned their weapons and traveled the dark gangways of the 
Nautilus
with her—she cannot
say.
But she is glad to be so near the end.
Downstairs the German has shouted twice in frustration, then fallen silent. Why not, she
considers, just slide through the wardrobe and hand the little house to him and find out if he will
spare her?
First she will finish. Then she’ll decide.
Again she opens the model house and tips the stone into her palm. What would happen if the
goddess took away the curse? Would the fires go out, would the earth heal over, would doves
return to the windowsills? Would Papa come back?
Fill your lungs. Beat your heart. She keeps the knife beside her. Fingertips pressed to the lines of
the novel. The Canadian harpooner Ned Land has found his window for escape. “
The sea’s bad,
”
he says to Professor Aronnax, “
and the wind’s blowing strong . . .
”
“I’m with you, Ned.”
“But let me tell you that if we’re caught, I’m going to defend myself, even if I die doing it.”
“We’ll die together, Ned my friend.”
Marie-Laure turns on the transmitter. She thinks of the whelks in Harold Bazin’s kennel, ten
thousand of them; how they cling; how they draw themselves up into the spirals of their shells;
how, when they’re tucked into that grotto, the gulls cannot come in to carry them up into the sky and
drop them on the rocks to break them.

---

Visitor
V
on Rumpel drinks from a bottle of skunked wine he has found in the kitchen. Four days in this
house, and how many mistakes he has made! The Sea of Flames could have been in the Paris
Museum all along—that simpering mineralogist and the assistant director laughing as he slunk
away, duped, fooled, inveigled. Or the perfumer could have betrayed him, taking the diamond from
the girl after marching her away. Or Levitte might have walked her right out of the city while she
carried it in her ratty knapsack; or the old man could have jammed it up his rectum and is just now
shitting it out, twenty million francs in a pile of feces.
Or maybe the stone was never real at all. Maybe it was all hoax, all story.
He had been so certain. Certain he had found the hiding spot, solved the puzzle. Certain the
stone would save him. The girl didn’t know, the old man was out of the picture—everything was
set up perfectly. What is certain now? Only the murderous bloom inside his body, only the
corruption it brings to every cell. In his ears comes the voice of his father: