All Will Be Revealed
by Robert Anthony Siegel
Summary
An eccentric, exotic photographer is drawn to a beautiful psychic in a turn-of-the-century novel about love, possession, adventure, and greed. At the close of the nineteenth century, wheelchair-bound Augustus Auerbach’s only interest is his extraordinarily lucrative business: the manufacture and marketing of pornographic photographs. One of his models pressures him to attend a séance. The medium,Verena Swann, is a beautiful widow who gives voice to the long-dead spirit of his mother.
But Verena’s spiritual powers have begun to fail her, and now, forced to fake her public trances, she wonders if her ability to converse with the spirits was ever more than self-delusion.
Excerpt
PROLOGUE
Verena Swann sat beside her brother-in-law, Leopold Swann, writing with a pencil in a large leather notebook. Head to one side, eyes half-closed, she watched her hand move across the page, leaving behind line after line of small jagged letters— the nearly illegible scrawl of her late husband, Captain
Theodore Swann. She had no idea what it said; the deciphering was for later, after the rush of words. All she could think of right now was the pressure on the back of her neck, the tingling in her arm, the motion of her hand. All that mattered was the indescribable feeling of being borrowed, a sensation as strange as her first intimate kiss. She reached the bottom and Leopold turned the page for her.
At that very moment, Augustus Auerbach guided his wheelchair into the photographic studio behind his Fifth Avenue mansion. As big as a warehouse and built entirely of glass, the studio felt less like a building than a porthole for viewing the sky. Auerbach glanced upat the clouds, then wheeled himself across the floor to the bed at the center. As he did so, his two photographic models removed their dressing gowns and stretched themselves naked on the sheets. His assistant took up position behind the camera.
“Let us begin with a kiss,” said Auerbach, and watched as the models fit themselves together like the two halves of a broken cup. None of them could know that a dozen photographs later, despite careful precautions, an accident would occur: a child would be conceived. Auerbach put his hand to his chin. “A little more passion, please.”
Thousands of miles away, a group of men on dogsleds stopped before a canvas tent half-buried in snow. For weeks they had traveled the vast ice plain in search of that tent, till the size of the land and its utter emptiness shrank them to nothing. They had become like ants crawling over the surface of a mirror. Now the sky seemed made of ice, the ice around them made of sky. The sun burned beneath their feet.
One of them dismounted and walked over to the tent, then parted the flaps and crawled inside. After removing his glacier glasses he could make out a footlocker, a backpack, a pair of boots set in a corner, and a snowsuit laid out as if to dry. Eventually, he forced himself to look at the corpse lying on top of the sleeping bag, naked: the earthly remains of Captain Theodore Swann, missing three years and presumed lost.
At the table in her parlor, Mrs. Swann watched her hand move across the page:
You see, my dear, there is nothing other than this turning, round and round again. Everything is connected to everything else, everything moves in a great wheel, and the emptiness at the center is God.
Reprinted with permission of MacAdamCage Publishing. http://www.macadamcage.com
Reviews
“…a fascinating tour of a pornographer’s studio and a reluctant spiritual medium’s parlor…a richly detailed and seedily seductive narrative”--Publishers Weekly
"This well-crafted novel offers both an unusual plotline and richly atmospheric settings"--Booklist
"[A]s sly, funny, heartbreaking, and exquisite as any contemporary novel I know” – Alicia Erian, Towelhead
Author's Biography
Robert Anthony Siegel was educated at Harvard, the University of Tokyo, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. All Will Be Revealed is his second novel, following 1997’s All the Money in the World.