Yet something happens to those pieces of coal under the intense pressures that they withstand beneath the surface of the earth. Buried and trapped for so many years, they emerge only after they have hardened into glowing, impenetrable stones. And then, captured by the mining cartels and gemologists of the world, they are classified and reclassified into smaller and smaller groups, each with its private level of refracting potential and its irreparable dents and flaws—and no one is able to recognize any longer that their source, miles and miles away so many years ago, was more or less the same.

JAKE COULDN’T remember the last time he had been to New York’s diamond district on Forty-seventh Street. Actually, that was a lie. He could remember, but chose not to. Whenever that distant moment was, he might as well have been a different person at the time. And it was certainly before they had put up those tacky gateposts at its Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue intersections, the ones with the giant plastic diamonds on top of them, or at least he hadn’t noticed them the last time. When he saw them, he laughed out loud, then stifled his own laughter as he found himself stared at by dozens of Hassidic Jews dressed in dark suits and black fedoras as they entered the plastic diamond gates.

Mad Hatters, Jake thought as he glanced at the passing Hassidim, remembering the tea party scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He had always found the phrase “Mad Hatter” pretty ridiculous on its own, but once he saw a museum exhibit about labor in the nineteenth century which set him straight about what made hatters mad in the first place. Long ago, hatmakers treated the felt for hats with mercury, and the exposure to mercury caused the hatters to develop neurological problems that sometimes led to insanity. Indulging a cruel thought, Jake wondered if the Mad Hatters of Forty-seventh Street suffered from a similar ailment. Something about black fedoras seemed to send people off the deep end. The Amish, he noted, had the same problem. Despite their fedora-induced risk of madness, however, the Mad Hatters did seem to know a lot about diamonds. For reasons yet unstudied, some amazing percentage of the diamond businesses on Forty-seventh Street were owned by Hassidic Jews—and despite their insanity when it came to things like hats, when it came to jewelry, the businessmen of Forty-seventh Street could not have been more sane.