Steven Millhauser: We Others: New and Selected Stories

Yesterday the Wizard spent ten hours in metallurgical lab. Adjustments in ore-separator. “It’s a daisy!” Expects it to revolutionize the industry. Bring in a handsome profit.

The haptograph awaits its time. In a year — ten years — a century — it will return. Then everyone will know what I have come to know: that the world is hidden from us — that our bodies, which seem to bring us the riches of the earth, prevent the world from reaching us. For the eyes of our skin are closed. Brightness streams in on us, and we cannot see. Things flow against us, and we cannot feel. But the light will come. The haptograph will return. Perhaps it will appear as a harmless toy in an amusement parlor, a playful rival of the gustograph and the odoroscope. For a nickel you will be able to feel a ball in the palm of your hand, a hat sitting on your head. Gradually the sensations will grow more complex — more elusive — more daring. You will feel the old body slipping off, a new one emerging. Then your being will open wide and you will receive — like a blow — like a rush of wind — the in-streaming world. The hidden universe will reveal itself like fire. You will leave yourself behind forever. You will become as a god.

I will not return to these notes.

Snow on the streets. Bright blue sky, a cloud white as house paint. Rumble of dynamos from the machine shop. Crackle of hickory logs, a shout from the courtyard. An unremarkable day.

Steven Millhauser’s first novel, Edwin Mullhouse , was published in 1972 and received the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. He has published eleven works of fiction, most recently Dangerous Laughter , which The New York Times Book Review named a Best Book of the Year, as well as the novel Martin Dressler , which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He is a recipient of the Lannan Award and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s , and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction , and other collections; his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist . Mr. Millhauser’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. He teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.