Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart - Tapa dura

Seven stories of the Earth turned topsy-turvy, of Atlanta in flames, Florida under ice, of Adams, Eves, Pythagorean rock bands and Martin Heidegger's shortest speech, of rising into love, falling apart, of semihemidemiquavers, dodecahedrons, eigenvalues, quarks, of Milton's blindness, of sin's light, here in the Milky Way galaxy where whatever you fear might happen already has. During the great Pensacola blizzard a geometry teacher solaces his shattered heart building trapezoids from the floorboards of his snow-filled home; on his thirtieth birthday Harry Sneltzer wakes to discover he's been metamorphosed into his own dad. An executive turns to terrorism, his wife turns to dust, and a Chicago physicist reassures us that, despite the disequilibrium of space travel, anyone going round in circles long enough will come home young. All these affairs take shape just above the dark plane of seem and be, in the heart's interstice, within a geometry book as convoluted as desire, where each constellation becomes another, where ends are all beginnings, where everything is up in the air.