Touching Everything, Holding Nothing

About the Collection

The title comes from "The Atomic Man," the seventh story in the collection, where a teenager named Calvin Reece understands what he has become. He has become light: the loneliest thing in the universe, touching everything, holding nothing. But the phrase describes all twelve protagonists. Each one reaches the world in some remarkable way and finds that the reach itself prevents the grasp. They affect everything around them and possess nothing of what they most need: ordinary human closeness, the unremarkable warmth of being known without being studied, feared, worshipped, or fled from.

These stories were written over the course of twenty-five years. Some began as voices that arrived uninvited and would not stop talking until they were written down. Others grew from clinical questions, historical curiosities, or scientific facts that seemed to contain a human story nobody had told yet. The neurological literature on aphasia and the preservation of poetic speech patterns. The establishment of the first postal route between New York and Boston in 1673. The physics of gravitational lensing and frame-dragging. The chemistry of medieval textile dyeing. The mechanisms of bureaucratic fraud documented in municipal records. Each story is grounded in research and each one uses that research to illuminate the same paradox: the distance between extraordinary and alone is shorter than we think.

If there is a thesis to this collection, it is this: the bridge between extraordinary and alone is not built by reducing oneself but by finding someone willing to stand in the heat.

The Stories

The Limerick Ward · An elderly man's neurological condition leaves him able to communicate only in verse. What begins as a clinical curiosity becomes a meditation on whether a constraint can become a vocation.

The Thermodynamics of Feline Ignition · A dragon kitten who burns wrong and too hot for its own kind discovers that failing at the expected form might be the first step toward a form nobody anticipated.

The King's Rider · Set during the actual establishment of the first postal route between New York and Boston in January 1673, a rider carries other people's connections across frozen wilderness while having none of his own.

The Highest Boy · A retelling of the Icarus myth, stripped of its traditional moralism. The sea was not named as a warning. It was named as a witness.

The Fold · A physicist in Duluth, Minnesota, discovers he can perceive and manipulate the corrugations of spacetime. The distance between two people in the same room exceeds the distance between galaxies.

The Alchemist's Regret and Return · A medieval dyer whose hands can transmute matter watches her neighbors recoil from the miracle. Changing the world's substance does not change its opinion of you.

The Atomic Man · Built on real condensed matter physics, a teenager becomes a walking nuclear reactor whose greatest danger is also his greatest tragedy. The story that gave this collection its name.

The Man Who Knew Too Much · An archivist with eidetic recall uncovers systematic municipal corruption and discovers that the one person who cannot forget is the only person who noticed.

The River's Ledger · A detective lieutenant in 1923 New York City investigates waterfront corruption in journal form, a structure that reveals not only what a person discovers but what they choose to record.

The Passage of Names · A ship's doctor navigates catastrophe in the Drake Passage where every triage decision about who lives becomes a verdict about who matters.

The Zenith: Buried Alive in Luxury · A billionaire ascends to an impregnable mountaintop fortress and discovers that the burial began the moment he stopped hearing human voices.

The Woman Who Vanished in Plain Sight · An intelligence operative masters the art of invisibility and then spends years trying to become ordinary enough to be seen.

Excerpt

The problem with raising the most terrifying apex predators in the known world was the scooping.

Maren Ashvale stood in the nursery of the Third Crag Hatchery, a municipal facility carved into the basalt cliffs above the Dawnbreak Sea, holding a broad copper shovel and contemplating the philosophical dimensions of fecal management. The shovel was regulation Guild-issue: reinforced handle, heat-resistant blade, a slight concavity designed by some long-dead metallurgist who had clearly understood that dragon waste did not behave like the waste of any other creature. It smoldered. Not metaphorically. The stuff actually produced a faint thermal signature for up to three hours after deposit, a fact that Maren had committed to memory during her Guild certification exams and which she now recalled with the weary precision of someone who had been scooping since dawn.

The nursery held fourteen hatchlings in various stages of post-emergence development. They ranged in age from two weeks to eleven months and occupied individual stone enclosures arranged in a semicircle around a central observation pit. Each enclosure was fitted with a basalt floor, a ventilation shaft connected to the cliff face, and a thermal regulator that maintained the ambient temperature at what the Guild's Handbook of Standard Hatchery Practice called "species-appropriate developmental warmth," which in practice meant roughly the temperature of a bread oven.

About the Author

David Boles has been telling stories about people who don't fit since 1975, when he founded his publishing house and began the work that has occupied him for fifty years: writing, directing, producing, and refusing to separate those responsibilities. He holds an MFA from Columbia University. He has studied medicine and law, not because he wanted to practice either, but because understanding how bodies break and how systems argue seemed prerequisite to writing about human beings with any seriousness.

He is the author of novels, short fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic works, including the Fractional Fiction series, the EleMenTs trilogy, Beautiful Numbness, and Passage Land. He hosts the Human Meme podcast, publishes literary journalism at PrairieVoice.com, and maintains a web constellation that has been active since 1995.

He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, Authors Guild, and PEN America. He lives in New York City.