A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  The television switched over to a pet food commercial.

  “Robbing them?” I asked finally, as quietly as my rage would allow.

  “Arthur—”

  “I robbed . . . them?”

  “Arthur, this is bad, I know, but we can’t make a scene—”

  “I will, I’ll, I’ll fucking kill him,” I stuttered, louder than I meant. Every head in a fifteen-foot radius whipped around, every body stumbled away from me. I felt their stares, intense and hot against my skin, judging me, undressing me.

  “Sorry, just play-acting.” Mara tried to push me outside but I didn’t want to move. “Practicing a little theater. Got a bit carried away, carry on.”

  “I’ll fucking—”

  “Arthur.” She grabbed my wrist and squeezed. “It’s a lie. You know it’s a lie. I know it’s a lie. Can we accept this and move past it, just for ten minutes? While we’re in public?”

  At that moment, I couldn’t move past it. I wanted with every ounce of me to scream, to strike something, to turn a boy nearby into Jack and lash out at him with a strong right hook, planting him on the ground, jaw unhinged, his face slamming against the concrete.

  But Mara was glaring at me, piercing the skin between my eyes, so I let her push me toward an exit door and out onto the Chicago street.

  As soon as we were outside, the sting of the air froze my brain. It was an overwhelming city, the downtown area packed with cars humming and people yelling and buildings groaning under the constant assault of the wind. My rage boiled, but I wasn’t the one to scream first.

  “Jesus!” Mara bent forward over the weight of her own voice. I’d never heard her so loud. “So we’ve got Jack, the whole of Great Purpose, the police, and now every citizen in the United States, all looking for us!”

  I didn’t say anything, but put my head down in the direction of the Tribune Tower.

  She turned it on me. “But no, we can’t wait a few days until it’s, you know, safe! It has to be today!”

  “Mara,” I said, spinning back on her. “Literally the only way things could be worse than the situation we’re in now would be if we didn’t do anything. There’s a clue waiting for us here, and I don’t know about you, but I’d rather shoot myself in the fucking head than let Jack find it before we do. So yes, it has to be today.”

  For a half hour, we walked without speaking, the wind pounding us every time we turned north. Paranoia gripped the back of my head and pulled; every body that approached us was Jack’s body, only at the last moment before they passed turning back into an old woman or a grocery store clerk. We kept our heads down, constantly adding entire city blocks to the trip just to avoid parked police cars. Finally, we came over the top of a cement hill and the Chicago River stretched in front of us. To our left, a beautiful old building shot upward, spires along the sides like a skyscraping castle. The lettering on the front was bold, old, and proud:

  CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  I stared up into the newspaper’s logo—sharp, medieval-style lettering, the T in Tribune cupped by a crescent moon—and watched the slide show in my head of all the times I’d seen it over the past week: in the Westwood Library display and the newspapers I’d spilled across the back room; in the stack hidden behind Henry’s record player; the subscription in Sue Kopek’s closet; the obituary in my uncle’s attic, the only one he thought was worth saving; and now, on the building in front of me.

  “Alright then,” Mara breathed. “I guess we go—”

  Without waiting for her, I set a course for the door. I elbowed past several old men outside smoking and walked directly to the front reception desk. On either side were security checkpoints, each with two guards, scanning IDs before the elevators.

  Mara grabbed me in the middle of the lobby. “Easy,” she said without moving her lips. “There are police everywhere.”

  “These people don’t watch the news. They read newspapers. They won’t find out about me until tomorrow.”

  Mara nodded to the three televisions in the lobby, each with a different news broadcast.

  “Can I help you?” the stern woman at the desk asked. The name tag that hung around her neck read CINDY.

  “Yeah, I’m looking for Lou Thurman at the Tribune.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but I need to see him.”

  She typed, scanned her screen, and frowned. “I’m sorry, I’m not finding anyone in our system with that name. That’s T-H-U-R-M-A-N?”

  I nodded, drumming angrily on the wooden desk. She retyped the name slowly, all of her fingers hovering above the keyboard but only the index fingers pressing keys. Twice she typed the name, deleted it, and started over.

  “Huh,” she mumbled finally. “Nothing. No one with that name.”

  “He doesn’t work here anymore?”

  “No.” She looked at me over the frame of her glasses. “He’s never worked here. Name’s not even in the system.”

  Mara’s hand gripped the back of my jacket, as if to keep me from flying forward. “Okay,” I breathed. “Well, what about Sal Hamilton?”

  Cindy didn’t start typing. “I’m sorry, is there a reason for your . . . insistence? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just search the name. Please.”

  “You know even if he’s in our system, unless you have an appointment—”

  “I know, I just have to talk to Sal Hamilton, okay?”

  “What’d you say?”

  One of the men from outside, a short one who’d been smoking a cigarette, stopped on his way to the security checkpoint. He had more skin drooping from below his eyes than the rest of his face, and his voice was hesitant, forced out through the remaining ash of thousands of cigarettes. “You need something?”

  It felt as though his physical form flickered, placed too perfectly in the lobby at the moment I needed him to be, half real and half coincidence, or half hallucination. I watched him carefully, noting the spots where his real form intersected the real world, like the scuffed brown leather of his shoes touching the floor, and the lapel of the jacket that hung in his hand brushing against the leg of the security guard.

  “Are, are you Sal Hamilton?”

  He examined me without expression, and I glided in his direction.

  “You are.”

  He took a step back, his bowler hat rocking slightly as he nodded.

  “I need to speak to you. It’s urgent. I’ve been across the whole country, looking for you.”

  He looked past me, around the room where I knew Mara and Cindy and maybe more were watching us.

  “Five years ago, a man named Arthur Louis Pullman came to—”

  “I’m sorry, son.” For the first time, his wrinkles animated and stiffened, worry creasing his forehead. He stumbled backward. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “About what?” Curiosity pulled me toward him and the guards stiffened their stances. “You knew him?”

  “Look, kid, I’m not the guy you’re looking for, alright?” He slid backward again, through the turnstile and toward the elevator.

  “What do you mean? I just want to—”

  I reached the checkpoint and both guards closed on me, their hands firmly on my chest. I caught one last glimpse of Sal Hamilton, and he called, “Please, go bother someone else!” before disappearing into the elevator.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, but now I definitely can’t let you up there without an appointment,” Cindy said, stiff and humorless. I stood for a long moment, burning holes at the spot where Sal Hamilton had just been.

  “We could try the hospital,” Mara offered as we returned to the front sidewalk. “Maybe see if there’s something near it that . . . Still, that was so . . . What do you suppose that was all about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s weird, right? Something must have happened, recently, or—there’s something about it that he doesn’t want to talk about. Or someone that he doesn’t want to talk to.” S
he spun to face me. “Do you think that means he knows where your grandfather is now?”

  “My grandfather is in a box, buried in a cemetery in Palo Alto.”

  “You know what I mean. But if he—”

  “Mara.” I shook my head and we marched forward in silence, the steady and mindless pattern of step after step after step keeping my brain from thinking about the fact that the steps didn’t have a direction.

  “Where are you going?” she called after me.

  “Walking.”

  “You know,” Mara said, jogging to catch up with me, “we’ve got to talk about Jack. Now that you’re calm.”

  “I’m not calm.”

  “You seem more calm.”

  “I’m pretending to be calm.”

  “Well, now that you’re pretending to be calm, we should talk about how we’re going to prove that you’re not a criminal, and how it was them who stole from us.”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and Mara rocked backward to face me.

  “Me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Me. They’ve stolen from me. You didn’t find any of these, I did. Stop acting like I’m some kind of . . . sidekick. Or like you had anything to do with this at all, really.”

  Her mouth hung open with no trace of a smile. “Arthur, I don’t—”

  “It’s fine.” I turned and started walking again.

  “Right,” she said, catching up. “I’m sorry, slip of the tongue—they stole from you. That’s what we have to prove.”

  “Why would we have to prove that?” My eyes were dead set forward, counting off block by block, the river getting bigger as we drew closer, the light at the end of the skyscraper tunnel. “They’re my grandfather’s. They have my name on them, for God’s sake.”

  “Because the police wouldn’t be this interested if they didn’t have reason to believe that you had stolen something valuable. And the only reason they would think that, the only reason Jack would come forward, is if he had some way of proving that the journals belonged to him.”

  We walked another two blocks in silence before I slowed to a stop.

  “What?”

  Like a brick to the face, out of my own mouth: “The stamp.”

  “What?”

  “He had that—” I shook with frustration. “That fucking stamp, the ‘only one in the world,’ remember? His father’s, and you said he . . .” I watched Mara’s eyes reach the end of my sentence before I did. “He’s gonna say they’re his because he’s the one with the stamp. And they’re gonna believe him.”

  I took off again away from her, my head down.

  “No, we can beat that!” Mara called after. “We could say that he stamped them after he stole them from—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “People will believe—”

  “No! No, they won’t. They have absolutely no reason to! Why would they? He’s the leader of my grandfather’s organization, and tall, and strong, and in control, and I’m a criminal, runaway fucking child! And every second longer that they don’t find me, the more it looks like I’m guilty, like I actually stole something.”

  “Okay,” Mara said, and she stopped walking. “I’m going to have a cigarette.”

  “I’m gonna walk,” I said, and I didn’t look back at her.

  For three blocks, I walked alone. There were moments where it felt like I was walking in place, every step forward counteracted by the wind blowing me three steps back. The walk was the whole trip, I realized. Moving barely, slowly, painfully forward, toward what might be nothing, while the world swirled and pulled just behind me. Every time I thought I was a step closer, something knocked me back, and I realized I didn’t even know what I was a step closer to. I wondered what it would be like to be back in Palo Alto, back in Kaitlin’s bed, back when things made sense, and I knew why I was where I was.

  I passed a small sign, with hand-placed block letters, in front of an unimpressive chapel, and I stopped.

  The FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST clung to a square lot in between a dry cleaner and a closed retail store of some kind, the water of Lake Michigan visible behind it. It wasn’t immaculate and enormous, as most churches attempt to be, as all of the churches I’d visited with my grandfather had been, but instead looked like a storefront with stained-glass windows. Three bodies crouched in front of it, two in sleeping bags, one underneath a cardboard sign that read: “VETEREN, PLEASE HELP.”

  The sign in front read, “WE WALK BY FAITH, NOT BY SIGHT.”

  Without thinking, I climbed the stairs. The door to the church was unlocked, the loose handle clicking softly to open. I pushed through an entryway and as the door slid shut behind me, Chicago was gone, the click echoing through the empty sanctuary.

  The atmosphere of the room felt heavy on my shoulders, exactly as I remembered every church I’d ever entered with my grandfather, and I stepped forward into it, like stepping backward in time.

  I was eight years old. I was at my grandma’s funeral.

  The pews were old, brown wood, smooth to the touch. Burnt-orange cushions rested on every seat. Vanilla incense filled the room, a smell that I loved. I could hear the preacher saying my grandmother’s name softly, my mother crying, my father coughing, the choir gently singing something in Latin, and in the second row, I could see the outline of a single figure.

  “Well,” it asked. “What is it you’re looking for?”

  3.

  may 3, the 1970.

  to me, chicago is something of a sickness.

  it’s no fault of the city itself, although the architecture does it no favors. stone gray buildings, overlooking a stone gray river, & my heart feels stone gray as i walk beneath them.

  but seeing you will warm it up. seeing you can save even chicago.

  the waves speak to me; tell me they’ve forgotten me. that they never cared if you or i lived or died, was or wasn’t. but they’re just waves, & what were they ever but reflections of light?

  what were any of us but reflections of light?

  i’ll see sal in a moment, & i’ll ask him to sound the trumpets, & he’ll tell me to do it myself. whether the tribune is a friend or enemy, i’ve never known,

  but at least it’s a loud one.

  we’ve disembarked, every one of us, here finally to seize our Great purpose, & for all the plans & people, all the numbers & figures, it still feels like a faint idea, that belongs to someone else.

  i feel like the main character in a stranger’s dream, standing at the helm of an unlikely & irrational revolution without any idea how i got there.

  this is what i wanted, right? you’ll tell me i’m right. you’ll remind me of the speeches in your living room; the dreams on your floor; the times i told you this is all that i want.

  but now i’ve become all that i want, & for that, i’m the one thing i will never understand.

  omaha set us off with a mighty charge & a hundred heads. their pulse connected to ours & carried outward to a mass of people, waving flags & screaming revolution, propelling us forward to be truly Great,

  & you smiled like you knew i’d done something right, & i felt everything.

  two hundred heads will join in chicago; you & me & them; we’ll load our chevys & greyhounds & zephyrs & march across the midwest with a rally cry too loud to be ignored. the idea of someone else will then be too large for any one person, & instead will belong to the beautiful youth of a once-beautiful country. the tide will turn, the mountains will move,

  & you’ll be there, joining me hand in hand.

  but for now, i feel stone gray, misplaced & alone.

  the curse of feeling everything,

  is that you’re painfully aware when you feel nothing.

  —arthur louis pullman

  4.

  “GRANDPA?”

  He didn’t move as I approached him, a statue in the second pew, but I could feel that it was him. His hair was light gray, backlit and angelic against the hazy pulpit in front of him
. The smell, the smoke, the gravity of the room, it all radiated outward from where he was sitting.

  I sat across the center aisle, only red-and-blue stained-glass sun to light the visible side of his face, fixed forward on the Bible in front of us. I didn’t need to look to know which book, which chapter was displayed.

  “Is this real?” I asked.

  He didn’t move. The one eye that I could see remained closed, and I worried he’d disappear, just like Kaitlin or Mason or Dr. Sandoval, another hallucination retreating back to the wildest part of my brain.

  But then he exhaled, softly and quietly, almost a laugh. “I think”—his voice was deep and slow, soft like mine but commanding like my father’s, just as I remembered it—“that I’m the wrong person to ask.”

  My finger twitched. I tried to control my heartbeat. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel, but if it was anger or sadness, I couldn’t find any.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “What is it you’re looking for?”

  I swallowed and my saliva tasted familiar, a reminder that I was still in the real world. “I was looking for you.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  I opened my mouth but didn’t answer right away, turning over his response in my head several times, trying to decide what it meant. He knew I’d run away.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” he repeated, louder, and I swallowed. The pew beneath me creaked as I shifted my weight toward him.

  “I was looking for you,” I said, the words crackling out, so much smaller and less important than his. “Why are you here?”

  No answer. Soft sirens and the anonymous chirping of birds found their way through the walls, but only for a moment, before the church returned itself to complete silence.

  “Why did you tell us you were dead?”

  He didn’t flinch.

  “Does this mean that you really . . . you spent your whole life pretending . . . for what? What could be worth that?”

  Silence.

  The clocks around the church ticked, but time didn’t move at all.