All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

Today let’s consider the whirling machinery, children, that must engage inside your head for
you to scratch your eyebrow
. . . They hear a program about sea creatures, another about the
North Pole. Jutta likes one on magnets. Werner’s favorite is one about light: eclipses and sundials,
auroras and wavelengths. 
What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic
spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children,
mathematically, all of light is invisible
.
Werner likes to crouch in his dormer and imagine radio waves like mile-long harp strings,
bending and vibrating over Zollverein, flying through forests, through cities, through walls. At
midnight he and Jutta prowl the ionosphere, searching for that lavish, penetrating voice. When they
find it, Werner feels as if he has been launched into a different existence, a secret place where
great discoveries are possible, where an orphan from a coal town can solve some vital mystery
hidden in the physical world.
He and his sister mimic the Frenchman’s experiments; they make speedboats out of matchsticks
and magnets out of sewing needles.
“Why doesn’t he say where he is, Werner?”
“Maybe because he doesn’t want us to know?”
“He sounds rich. And lonely. I bet he does these broadcasts from a huge mansion, big as this
whole colony, a house with a thousand rooms and a thousand servants.”
Werner smiles. “Could be.”
The voice, the piano again. Perhaps it’s Werner’s imagination, but each time he hears one of the
programs, the quality seems to degrade a bit more, the sound growing fainter: as though the
Frenchman broadcasts from a ship that is slowly traveling farther away.
As the weeks pass, with Jutta asleep beside him, Werner looks out into the night sky, and
restlessness surges through him. Life: it’s happening beyond the mills, beyond the gates. Out there
people chase questions of great importance. He imagines himself as a tall white-coated engineer
striding into a laboratory: cauldrons steam, machinery rumbles, complex charts paper the walls.
He carries a lantern up a winding staircase to a starlit observatory and looks through the eyepiece
of a great telescope, its mouth pointed into the black.

---

Fade
M
aybe the old tour guide was off his rocker. Maybe the Sea of Flames never existed at all, maybe
curses 
aren’t
real, maybe her father is right: Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean.
Gravity and time. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.
Her father returns to the key pound earlier in the evenings. Soon he is taking Marie-Laure along
on various errands again, teasing her about the mountains of sugar she spoons into her coffee or
bantering with warders about the superiority of his brand of cigarettes. No dazzling new gemstone
goes on exhibit. No plagues rain down upon museum employees; Marie-Laure does not succumb to
snakebite or tumble into a sewer and break her back.
On the morning of her eleventh birthday, she wakes to find two new packages where the sugar
bowl should be. The first is a lacquered wooden cube constructed entirely from sliding panels. It
takes thirteen steps to open, and she discovers the sequence in under five minutes.
“Good Christ,” says her father, “you’re a safecracker!”
Inside the cube: two Barnier bonbons. She unwraps both and puts them in her mouth at the same
time.
Inside the second package: a fat stack of pages with Braille on the cover. 
Twenty. Thousand.
Leagues. Under. The. Sea.
“The bookseller said it’s in two parts, and this is the first. I thought that next year, if we keep
saving, we can get the second—”
She begins that instant. The narrator, a famed marine biologist named Pierre Aronnax, works at
the same museum as her father! Around the world, he learns, ships are being rammed one after
another. After a scientific expedition to America, Aronnax ruminates over the true nature of the
incidents. Are they caused by a moving reef? A gigantic horned narwhal? A mythical kraken?