So he vows silence, seeking a return to the womb of all words, finding “the unborn world” a place of total radiance: “Into the sun. The sun.”

The next section, “Impossible Architectures,” builds shaping frames out of tool kits of varying adequacy. “The Dome” covers individual houses, towns, and eventually the country. And then—or so we dream—the planet and perhaps the universe. In “In the Reign of Harad IV,” a miniaturist devotes himself to the realm of the invisible, rendering an exact replica of the whole of the known world in a structure beyond the naked eye. “The Other Town” visits a municipality’s shadow-self, updated nearly instantaneously: “Replicators can reproduce the precise grain of a weathered shingle, the pattern of mud spray on the side of a car...” Though “a more difficult challenge lies in the realm of Nature,” residents realize “we can’t feel our town, cannot know about it, until we’re there, in the other town...”

“Heretical Histories” ends with “A Precursor to the Cinema” and “The Wizard of West Orange.” The former’s a Magic Lantern alternative about living paintings that first recreate the known world, then surpass it; the latter is an Edison riff centering on the “haptograph,” a kind of sensory phonograph, that allows its user to experience perfect approximations of everyday sensations, and then unknown ones, blissful ones. Rather than “liv[ing] off to one side, like paupers beside a railroad track,” it’s a sensation like “Paradise,” or more accurately Nirvana, with all possible feelings “flowing into you” at once.Re

These are the collection’s most elaborately wrought parallel universes, and not coincidentally, the ones inspired by human invention at its most magic-mystic. They portray the past––from fabric textures to opposing schools of new painting––at a higher resolution than the often fabular, general sketches of the shorter stories. “Here at the Historical Society,” the book’s sole previously unpublished story (rounding out the symmetry) concerns a local organization whose preservation efforts tend to the extreme. Inventory lists of historical artifacts––a Millhauser specialty––contrast with lists of yesterday’s litter––arrowheads to gum wrappers. The “New Past,” that is, the world, “stands before us in a nearly unfaded richness. It tempts us with the promise of total precision. Yet even as we record it, even as we reach out to touch it, we see it dissolving before our eyes.” It sounds rather like “The Other Town,” down to the first-person-plural narrator pervasive throughout Dangerous Laughter––sometimes branching off into an “I,” sometimes not––giving the stories the aura of collective memory.

Indeed, Millhauser recombines elements and images throughout––and why not? If you have the right words for something, you have the key to unlocking its essence. His favorite recurrent image is of sunlight through a window, filtered by blinds or curtains. In a 2003 BOMB Magazine interview, fellow author Jim Shepard asked Millhauser about the “luminous” nature of perception in Edwin Mullhouse. Millhauser answered: “When things are going well... It’s the feeling that I’m at the absolute center of things, instead of off to one side [“like paupers beside a railroad track”?]––the feeling that the entire universe is streaming in on me.” He suggests a way of seeing so attuned to the internal radiance of all objects that they brighten and join, like the mug and the table: Fade to white. That’s all, folks.