A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  I kept nodding at the familiar names.

  “Now, late sixties, this thing started to really catch fire. Felt like every day there were five more spots where kids were gettin’ riled up, all over; weird cities, too, startin’ on their own, even without Arty saying so. Course, Arty ’n’ them kept secret through all of this, didn’t tell anybody who they were, so’s hard to tell what was them ’n’ what wasn’t. People’d know there was a protest on, but nobody’d know why, or who was behind it. As you can imagine, it all started to get a little . . . mystical, you know? Lots of rumors. Crazy shit.”

  My dad was staring out the tiny, triangular window in the back seat, his thumb rotating slow circles around his index finger, his eyes closed and his brows creased.

  “But, downside of being mysterious: people started asking questions, making connections. All of a sudden, there’s rumors about these government groups looking for ’em, pro-war types, Nixon-heads, starting to figure out what’s causing all the ruckus, trying to snuff ’em out. As I’m hearin’ these things, I realize I’m startin’ to hear from ’em less and less. At this point, I’d set Arty up direct with the editor, so he could publish without me, ’n’ I wouldn’t even see him when he was in town. He was printin’ every couple days.

  “Then all at once, it just stopped. None of us heard from ’em again. Tried a couple times to get in touch with Arty, but he was off the map. All of ’em were. Five years after that, a book comes out. Arthur Louis Pullman. Tried to get in touch then, say congrats, but I got nothing. Forty years of radio silence.”

  He let the blackness outside take over the car. It didn’t seem right. Not with the path that he’d left behind, not with the way that he’d retraced it before his death, not with the way it tormented him throughout his life. A slow, paranoid, fearful retreat from a life of activism wasn’t the kind of thing that forced reliving.

  I felt my hand lift from the gearshift; Mara had picked it up, and was running her thumb down my finger. “Where’s your ring?” she asked. A streetlight ran light along my hand. As I had left Dr. Patterson’s office, the ring had stayed behind. I looked around, but didn’t see Kaitlin anywhere. I couldn’t feel her either, and my hand didn’t feel broken.

  All I could see was what was ahead of me out the front windshield.

  “So.” Sal spoke up from the back seat. “Then, ’bout five years ago, I’m sitting in my office, when I get a call from security at the front. ‘Sal, there’s some guy in the lobby, he’s not talking, just sayin’ a couple of names over and over, and one of ’em’s yours. You wanna come have a look?’ I say sure, come down, and who should it be but my good friend Arthur Louis Pullman, wandering like a fuckin’ lost duckling. I say, ‘Arty! What the hell, what’re you doing in Chicago?’ and he doesn’t say nothing. That’s when I realized he looks bad. I mean, real bad. He’s not showered, his clothes are torn up good, and—God, his face. It was just . . .” He checked my father before finishing his sentence. “It was like there was nobody home. He just wasn’t there.”

  Sal’s eyes found mine in the rearview, but I knew that it wasn’t me he was looking for.

  “Did he have anything on him?” I asked.

  Sal thought about it for a moment. “Uh, yeah. Come to think of it, he had a little red Bible he kept pulling out.

  “So I bring him up to my office, and we have a little chat. Well, no, no, we don’t, because he’s not saying anything. I’m asking him all these questions, how’s life?, how’s the family?, what are you doin’ in Chicago?, why are your clothes torn up?, and he doesn’t answer a single one of them, just keeps looking around, like he’s looking for something. Finally, out of nowhere, he asks me if Lou’s in today.”

  “Lou Thurman,” Mara breathed.

  “Exactly. He says Lou Thurman, he’s gotta talk to Lou Thurman, and that’s when I knew that something was very wrong.”

  “He was one of your writers, right?” Mara asked. “For the Tribune?”

  “I think my grandpa knew him,” I said.

  Sal nodded. “Yeah, kid, your grandpa knew Lou Thurman real well, on account of he was Lou Thurman. It was an alias, the one we used back when he needed something published and I was too chickenshit to say it was mine. Arthur Louis Pullman, rearrange that, you’ve got Lou Thurman. Not even that creative.”

  Mara squeezed my hand.

  “Anyways, I got real worried. I mean, he publishes all of these articles under this fake name, and now here he is, forty years later, straight as an arrow, asking if he can talk to the guy? I tried to tell him, ‘Arty, that’s you! You were Lou Thurman, don’tcha remember?’ But he’s just not getting it, so I say, ‘How about I get you some of the stuff he wrote?’ and he nods. So I dig into our archives and get out all the papers from around that time.” Sal slapped a cardboard box sitting next to him. “I even took ’em home for myself, just to see if there was something I was missing, but it’s a lot to get through, and most of it makes no goddamn sense. Three years’ worth. Arty wrote for us in secret from ’67 all the way up to . . .”

  “May 1970,” I interjected.

  “Yeah, sounds about right. But it got confusing, because they had all these articles from him saved that they kept publishing, even after anybody’d heard from him.

  “Anyway, he starts reading the papers and sayin’ he wishes he could talk to the guy, asking if I know him. At this point, I don’t think he even knows who I am, he’s just staring out the window like there’s something happening out there. It starts getting dark, I start figurin’ out what I’m gonna do with him, looking for you guys’ number and all, and he looks up at me and says, ‘Sal, ya head, can you take us to Ohio? Gotta march across the Midwest, come on, take us to Ohio.’”

  I swallowed. “‘Us’?”

  “Yeah, kid. Us. Multiple people. God fucking knows who he thought he had with him. But I said sure, ’cause at this point I was too curious to say no. So we load up into my Camaro and I start driving him across 80. I ask him, ‘Where we going, where in Ohio?’ and he just says drive, says he’ll know it when we see it.

  “So we’re driving, and he’s not saying anything, just got his head buried in that Bible of his. I keep asking him questions, he keeps just acting like he doesn’t hear ’em. All of a sudden, he just pokes his head up from the Bible, says, ‘Take this exit,’ and then it’s ‘Turn left here,’ and then ‘Turn right here,’ like he’s just picking streets at random, driving through all kinds of little towns.

  “At this point, I’m starting to get excited, because it feels like he’s got a specific place in mind, somewhere he’s gotta get before he kicks it, and I’m thinking he might be leading me to . . . well.” Sal lowered his voice. “There is one rumor about your grandpops I’ve always been a little curious about, ’bouta loada secret writing—”

  “It exists?” Mara blurted.

  “See, I don’t know! Seems a little crazy, but the more I think about it . . . I mean, what else would make a man go so quiet for so long, if it wasn’t some secret he didn’t want anybody else being a part of? I’m thinking maybe he’s got it hidden somewhere, and now that he’s knockin’ on heaven’s door, he’s decided it’s time to go dig it up. And I’m the guy goin’ with him.”

  The car began to shake as I slid onto rumble strips, easing around construction. “Where did he lead you?” I asked, correcting back onto the road.

  Sal cleared his throat. “Uh, nowhere. I realized it after we took a couple of circles; he had no idea where we were going. He was lost . . . in the head, I’m sure you know what I mean. So somehow, we fumble our way into some city—Kent—and he says, ‘Pull over, this is my stop.’ And he gets out in some parking lot, and I ask him if he needs anything, or wanted me to go with him, he said no, said I’d done enough, and said thank you. And he starts walking off, and I follow for a while, but he’s gettin’ real agitated about me bein’ there, so I give him my cell phone number, tell him to call me when he’s ready, and I leave. And that was it.”

&n
bsp; The car was silent for a full mile.

  “That—that was it?” My father spoke for the first time, his voice breaking midsentence.

  “Yeah. That was it. I got a room in Kent, ’cause I figured he’d probably need a ride back, called in to work and all, but I didn’t hear from him. Then I woke up the next morning, and the news was saying that he was dead.”

  More silence.

  “I know it’s terrible to say now, with what happened n’ all . . . but I started working on his obituary that night. Before I even heard that he had passed. I just knew, you know? That Arty, he was . . . he wasn’t dead, but he was gone.”

  For what felt like the millionth time on my trip, I imagined my grandpa pulling himself through anonymous, foreign streets that to him were a labyrinth of confusion and regret. I remembered the morning we’d found out, the crass Facebook headline that had told me before my father had, the reality of the world without him.

  We sat in silence for what felt like an hour. We’d reached rural Indiana, and there were no other cars to interrupt the empty blackness of the road ahead.

  “He was a great man, you know,” Sal offered from nowhere, like a consolation prize. “Really good guy. Real tough . . . and—and passionate, too. Loved what he loved.”

  My dad exhaled loudly, sarcastically, and Sal noticed.

  “What? What’s that all about?”

  “Great, maybe,” my dad said. “But passionate? Not for most of his life. I spent forty years watching him give up on his job, his writing, on me, on my mother, on—on everything.”

  Sal sighed. “You gotta understand—and I can say this because I’m an old man now, and I knew him when—but you gotta understand, there’s a difference between not knowing and not caring. Your dad didn’t give up, he just—well, he just forgot to keep going.”

  My father didn’t respond, and no one said anything as Indiana passed.

  I wondered where he was in his head. In thirty minutes, he’d learned more about his father’s history than he had in thirty years. He’d taught himself to stop asking questions by teaching himself to stop caring, and now answers were being dumped on him, answers he probably wasn’t sure he even wanted anymore, answers that would just lead to more questions.

  But even as resentful and dismissive as he was about it now, there must have been a time when my grandfather was great in his eyes. Even when I was a kid, I remember stories, real stories, moments when he wasn’t missing in plain sight. I hoped my father had seen the man that Sal described, brilliant and passionate and loyal. I wished my father and I could have seen him in that way again, just once before he passed. I wished there was some way that twenty-year-old Arthur Louis Pullman could have been preserved—

  “Wait.”

  Everyone looked up at me.

  “Open the box of newspapers.”

  My dad did as I instructed. “What are we looking for?” he asked. The kaleidoscope behind my eyes clicked into place.

  “You said he asked for Lou Thurman, you gave him the articles, then he asked for the ride, right?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Sal said. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Mara sat up. “Why?”

  “Because every newspaper I looked at had an article by Lou Thurman in it.” I swallowed. “That’s how he was figuring out where to go next, when he couldn’t remember. He was communicating with himself. It’s like he was following his own bread crumbs, forty years later. And if he found something in one of those that told him to go to Ohio, we can find it, too.”

  The car became a flurry of newspaper. Mara smiled at me, and I heard my dad mutter “brilliant” under his breath. I smiled, leaning into the accelerator, and we flew faster into the darkness.

  2.

  may 4, the 2010.

  cold evening in

  midwest wind like a

  wandow i’ve seen threw before

  sal’s tribute,

  we’ve been here before.

  whare i lost my breath

  underessed before myself

  in a midwest march

  a civilization baried 100 of years ago

  & i hear voices in the graund,

  music scream siren explode gasp

  like applause

  whare

  perfect black & nothing nite

  & i feel these theings

  i feel everything & see nothing

  cold evening near the

  i’m crying but do not know my tears

  i’m running but do not know my legs

  i want so badly

  to know

  to bellieve

  to see threw the darkness

  —arthur louis pullman

  3.

  WE EXITED THE interstate at Ohio State Route 8, near Hudson. In the back seat, Sal mumbled the directions, often just seconds before we got to them. “It’s harder in the dark,” he complained as we corrected and recorrected, off, then on, then back off another exit ramp.

  Mara was cross-legged on the passenger seat with a stack of newspapers up to her belly button, and had been scanning up and down every page with a single finger.

  “Left here!”

  I jerked left, the back wheels of the Camaro skidding out into the middle of an intersection, Sal flying into my father in the back seat. The rubber found the asphalt, the car shook, and I corrected us back onto Graham Road.

  My father had been silent for most of the drive, pulling through copies of the Tribune, and announcing every time he found something that might be of interest—like the report of a protest, or the arrest of a protestor, or an article about the Vietnam War. But by the late sixties, we discovered, everything was about the war, and it was impossible to separate what might be relevant from the hundreds of other op-eds and exposés and profiles and conspiracy suggestions the Tribune had chosen to run.

  It was strange, the way they all talked about Vietnam. It was like it was a profound part of every person writing about it, but it had become so big and mysterious that they could only talk about it in the abstract, like it was an idea. “Ever since the war,” “hard to imagine with the war,” “divided by the war.” No one knew what to say about it, or what was really going on, and still, no person or part of American culture was unaffected by it.

  I’d always believed that modern America was incapable of being wrapped up in something so all-consuming; I had figured that the ability to know everything had given us the ability to avoid everything. Thousands of poor teenagers could be dying in a jungle, and images of it could be hitting us faster and more often than ever before, but as long as they were running on a front page or a Twitter feed next to a politician’s sex scandal or a Kardashian baby, we’d find ways of avoiding it. I figured being the land of the free had made it difficult to be brave.

  But hearing the clips aloud, listening to the headlines as Mara shuffled through them, I realized I might be wrong. The way they talked about Nixon, about the war, about the dissent, it all was strangely reminiscent of the way people talked about the age of Twitter. Abstractions had consumed us again; every celebrity felt the need to speak on “the state of the world these days”; every institution and event had to adjust their mission to account for how “crazy things are right now.” Maybe Jack wasn’t so far off; maybe there was a war buried just beneath the surface of everyday American life.

  “Arthur, can I ask a question?” My dad was folding another Tribune over neatly in his lap.

  “Um, sure.”

  “Why are there people who want to hurt you?”

  Mara and I exchanged a look. “Well,” she answered. “The political group—the one your father was a part of—they’ve had something of a . . . resurgence, and they believe that your father is still”—I shook my head quickly to stop her—“they believe that your father left something, and they believe they are entitled to it . . . by any means necessary.”

  “Huh.” He clicked his tongue nervously. “And these are the people who—” He pointed to Sal, who nodded. “And now th
ese people know exactly where we’re going?”

  “Yes,” Mara said. “And they have a gun.”

  “Good to know,” my father said.

  The streetlights got closer as we entered a town. Kent, Ohio. It looked like every Midwest town, with buildings like hand-me-downs, too big for the businesses that filled them: First National Bank of Kent, Herren-Schempp Supply, Lindy’s on Main, all three-story storefronts standing like skyscrapers in the tiny town.

  “Take a right—that street right there, past the bank. Keep your eyes open.” Sal pointed past a digital clock that read 11:35. We were the only headlights on the road.

  My dad sat up. “What are we even looking for?”

  “Anything Grandpa would have noticed,” I said, scanning the area as I slowed to twenty-five miles per hour. “Anything he would have wanted us to see.”

  The buildings began to thin and disappear, farther from the road. A sign told us that the speed limit was fifteen miles per hour.

  “Things that might have been there a long time ago, also,” Mara added. “Back when he was first making this trip. He must have had a reason for coming to this spot.”

  Sal pointed ahead. “That was it. That’s the parking lot. That’s where I dropped him.”

  The lot was remote. A single streetlight hung over it, the only light in the area. From what I could tell, we were in a park of some kind, with wide stretches of open grass extending from all four sides of the concrete. Walkways cut across it, twisting and curving out from the lot like endless veins, disappearing into darkness. In the distance, buildings surrounded the grass, covered in dozens of perfect square windows; offices, or apartments, I imagined.