3 But more on the smile is needed. It was a smile could be placed atop a lighthouse to illume troubled seas. One of those smiles that seems to form from the very soul of the person as if an innate palliative substance had excitedly overflowed its excess. A smile, in the final analysis, that seems less a property of the person than that person itself.
4 And if her soul itself were visible you might marvel as well at its flawless beauty. That such generous and optimistic kindness could emanate so consistently from such an adorably chubby package gave lie to the often popular notion that what prevails in this world is dark despair.
5 Understand also that these are not observations made following detailed analysis of a finished product. Rather these are truisms about a person that began to manifest themselves within mere minutes of that person’s birth.
6 —Acaba de nacer una sonrisa— the midwife had said and it was his audition of the feminine form of smile after the preceding harrowing events that began to cheer him.
7 And the world little appreciates how much the heartening the Man felt then was less a product of palpable events then present than it was a form of intuition. Because that’s all intuition is: the temporary release of a person from his restrictive spacetime prison to where he can in some sense experience what will be true and how it will make him feel and that amorphous and ineffable insight makes him feel a diluted version of what will later wash over him.
8 Selena often wore miniature versions of what her mother wore. Not in general either, at the same time. The result was as if the same person were being simultaneously viewed from wildly disparate distances.
9 Surround the hardest man in the world with love in this manner and the love is not repelled to die, not when the recipient is eminently aware of his undeserving nature. Instead it burrows in to erode the hard stone from within. And once it comes to the surface and is made tangible in the form of acts in the world it is then eligible to spread like a contagion.
10 For at the continued sight of his wife and daughter Man changed his relation to the world. Where before he’d viewed life as a constant succession of contests for limited resources he instead began to absorb the truth that the world is more our product than it is an unfeeling location for displays of enmity.
11 The soil surrounding their home for instance. Before Selena he viewed it as dirt, something to be brushed away before it could sully the clean. After the change, however, he saw for the first time its life-generating potential. The revelation struck him with the force of lightning and drove him to his hands and knees where in what looked like supplication he would diligently remove by hand the ground’s many stones, twigs, and anything else inhospitable to lively growth.
12 Once cleared the earth was ready for seeding, and meticulous care was employed in selecting and interring just the right combination of seeds which were then tended to in a painstakingly vigorous manner until the result was a colorful bounty of idyllic fruits and vegetables that nourished him, his family, and because the excess was sold at minimal cost, the loose collection of people that formed their community.
13 Nor was this the entirety of his such activities. For he did not altogether abandon his practice of the metallurgic arts, notwithstanding the decided change in the focus of that practice. So from where blades and instruments of blunt force once emerged more than one observer noted the sudden predominance of tools for cultivation and cooking.
14 The contagion part of this is the external effect his internal change had on those around him. The helped are more likely to then help, the fed to feed. A spirit of cooperative harmony is not created then used to animate actions; it is actions that create the spirit.
15 Whatever the source, the spirit permeated the area and one could say it was embodied in the rounded form of Selena who moved through her world like she owned it, laughing and spreading laughter as if such were mankind’s natural state.
16 And because her father once jokingly said it was the only part of his body that didn’t permanently hurt, she often gently rested her head on the spot just above his heart.
* * *
THE way at the extremely subatomic level the mere act of observing necessarily and incredibly interacts with the observed so it is true that a woman of great conventional physical attractiveness often does not get an accurate picture of the world and the human nature that populates it. So she’s likely to conclude that men are weirdly solicitous and women mostly mean instead of rightly concluding that to her men are weirdly solicitous etcetera.
2 So nothing in her twenty-two years had really prepared Nicole Grunderson for the experience of encountering a man who evinced no reaction whatsoever to her appearance. Not that he absorbed her appearance then chose to ignore it; that he literally appeared to detect no difference between her and any other human.
3 She knew enough to not enlist the help of anyone else at the coffee shop on the question of why their employer had had this unprecedented reaction or nonreaction for three months and counting. She also tried in vain to not be offended, finally settling on a strategy whereby he was, willingly or not, placed in a category of people who simply (now?) lack any interest in that area.
4 This was necessary because of the seemingly endless stream of indignities she had suffered since arriving in New York. That something happens so regularly it achieves cliché makes it no less painful for the person experiencing it. So it was with the pain of having your most salient quality weakened perhaps irreparably by a change in location. The sheer teeming multitude of people, a phenomenon that needed to be eyewitnessed to be truly believed. Unless his inattention did not constitute a further indignity because, as appeared to be the case, it was his consistent-without-fail reaction to any such stimuli.
5 All of which made the interaction she’d just witnessed so unsettling. Because wasn’t that their boss, an intimidating boulder of a man, gently thawing into liquid from the heat coming off what to her eyes seemed a rather plain-looking woman?
6 The sight was so odd and unexpected that almost as soon as it disappeared, because the plain woman slowly limped away, Nicole began to doubt her reading of it. And because a conclusion that she had misread had significant appeal due to the above, that likely would have been the anticlimactically tepid end of the affair if not for a look Nicole happened to spot as it moved across her boss’s face.
7 Because Nicole, who was studied in so few areas, was undeniably expert in at least one: the messy mechanics, ramifications, and symptoms of human, okay male, desire. So her expertise flashed diagnostic recognition at the curious combination of anxiety and excitement that comes from a sudden and strong attraction that, justified or not, goes beyond the merely physical. All from that one look.
8 Still, the look and its accurate interpretation were unlikely to result in any tangible conduct if not for a further development, this one occurring exclusively within Nicole.
9 At sight of the look Nicole experienced a sensation sufficiently uncommon to her that it startled her into a deeper realm of human understanding. The uncommon sensation was the skipping of a mental step. Until then her process varied little. When presented with novel data, whatever its form, Nicole processed the information by first straining it through a solipsistic filter. So, for example, someone informing Nicole that they had been diagnosed with a serious illness might mentally note with distaste how quickly the discussion moved into the question of whether she, Nicole, might not have the same illness. Yes, that bad.