A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  There was one other car in the lot, a Ford Explorer parked directly in the center.

  “Is that his car?” I asked, but Mara didn’t answer. No one said anything, and I felt our collective breath get deeper and slower as I parked next to it.

  “What do you think?” Mara asked as soon as we were out of the car and watching the two older men pull themselves from the back seat. “About Sal’s story?”

  “What about it?”

  “Do you think,” she said, turning to make sure I was the only one who could hear, “that it sounds like a man with Alzheimer’s?”

  “Or?”

  “Or . . . like a man pretending to have Alzheimer’s?”

  “Jesus, Mara.”

  “Think about it, Arthur,” she said. “Really think about it. He led a car from Chicago to Ohio to exactly this spot, got out, and no one saw him again until he turned up dead the next day. Supposedly. Even though no one can prove that. If you were going to fake your own death, can you imagine—”

  “Um, I’m sorry.”

  Her insistence had forced her voice too loud. My father’s face hovered a few feet behind her, completely blank. “Did you say . . . faked his death?”

  “No.” Mara tried to recover. “No, that’s—that’s not what I think. That’s—that’s—”

  “It’s just this crazy theory,” I said, taking a step toward him. “Some people, crazy people, they think he was faking his Alzheimer’s, just so he could, I don’t know, make a clean getaway, and go live in peace with some buried treasure. It’s all ridiculous.”

  I had to strain to hear him. “They—they think he’s alive?”

  “Yeah, but that’s just Jack. He doesn’t know anything. I mean, he was confirmed dead, right? You saw him dead . . . right?”

  With barely any movement, my dad shook his head. “No, they . . . they just sent me the ashes. I never saw him.”

  “Yeah, but . . .” Now it was my turn for disbelief. My dry throat cracked. “It was from a hospital. The hospital called you?”

  My dad could barely speak. “I—I think so. I thought so. I don’t know.”

  “Well.” Sal leaned against the Camaro casually, like a spectator. “Now what are we looking for?”

  Mara took charge. “We’ll split up. You and I”—she pointed to Sal—“we’ll each take an Arthur Louis Pullman with us. If you find anything, you text us. If you see Jack, or any of them . . .” She paused, and all four of us looked around. “Then shout.”

  I looked at my father. He was still reeling. I’d never seen him so unsure of himself. Our eyes locked, and he gave me a feeble smile. “At least take Sal’s phone. So I can get ahold of you if . . . so I can get ahold of you.”

  I nodded in return, took the phone, and followed Mara to one of the concrete walkways.

  “Should we really be out here in the middle of the . . .” The wind carried my father’s whisper all the way to my ears, fading into silence as we moved in opposite directions.

  Our footsteps felt dangerously loud, and I began to breathe in rhythm with them, in and out through my nose. The farther we walked, the more it felt like the darkness would never end, like we were on the very edge of the world, and moving past the parking lot was just moving out into the infinite nothing. Occasionally, we’d hear a noise—a branch falling, a car starting, grass colliding with grass—and Mara would jump, spin, and settle herself with a single breath.

  We passed another empty parking lot, this one with no light to offer us. Past it were the buildings that had been in the distance, and we tiptoed around them, aware of all the places someone could be hiding. They were all surrounded by bushes, dressed up and professionally maintained. There were signs in front of some of the buildings, but they were too far from the sidewalk to make out in the dark.

  “What is this place?” she whispered once we were a few hundred feet from the streetlight. “I can’t make out what any of these buildings are. They seem . . . almost like . . .”

  “I tried to kill myself.”

  The words were out of my mouth before I felt myself speaking.

  “I’m sorry?” Mara hesitantly turned to me. “Did you say—”

  “A couple weeks ago. After I punched that wall, they pulled my scholarship so I couldn’t go to UCLA. And my girlfriend hated me so much that she fucked somebody else, and . . . a year ago, I remember thinking, This is it, I’ve got everything I ever wanted, because I earned it, and then all of a sudden, all of it was gone. And I didn’t have anything to look forward to, or even anything to do; I was just . . . nobody. So I started my car, in my garage, and I-I sat there. I didn’t move.” I took a deep breath. “I’m on suicide watch. That’s why my dad’s been so weird . . . and that’s why the police are so serious with me. That’s why I get those dreams about . . . It’s because I tried to kill myself.”

  The lines on her face didn’t move as she listened with her mouth hanging half open.

  “I, I don’t really know why I just told you that. I’m sorry for, for putting that on you. It’s stupid, and really, really fucking embarrassing, and, and I don’t really wanna talk about it, or anything, I just . . . I guess I needed to tell somebody. To tell you. I needed to tell you. I’m sorry.”

  Mara studied me without moving. “Did you . . . did you want to die?”

  “I didn’t.” I swallowed. “I don’t know, I didn’t decide anything. I just didn’t have a reason to move.”

  A tremor crossed Mara’s tiny face, but her expression held, fighting pity or disgust or confusion or whatever it was she was feeling.

  “I don’t actually send any postcards,” she said finally, her voice wavering.

  “What?”

  “The postcards I write to my dad? They’re not going to anyone. Leila used to send them, but after she died, he stopped speaking to me. Two years, and I haven’t heard anything from him. I think he sees me as part of this thing, this country, or . . . this stupid, naive idealism that killed her, so . . . I just write them. And pretend like they’re going to someone who would care where I am.”

  I watched her shift uncomfortably in front of me. She didn’t look at me while she spoke, instead kicking the cracks in the concrete between us. We were the farthest we’d been from any light, but I felt like I could see her the clearest, complete with the rips in the corners of her picture-perfect postcard.

  “Do you feel better? Since your . . . Are you feeling better?” she asked, using the end of her jacket sleeve to wipe her cheek clean.

  “I don’t really know what that means.”

  She nodded but didn’t look away from me, so I kept going.

  “I think, if I was sitting in my car right now, I would try to get out.”

  Without a beat or a warning or even a change of expression, Mara launched herself across the pavement and latched on to my neck, and for a moment, I was blinded by everything about her. The skin of her cheek was soft against mine, with warm life below it pulsing heat. I finally placed her smell; it was a candle, one I’d kept in my room when I was a kid, a Vanilla Wood-Fire that had burned through to the bottom in three days, but I kept relighting the recycled wax because it just smelled more and more like a fire. I could hear her nose over my right shoulder, a calm inhale and a sputtered “I’m sorry,” and for a second, she was the only thing that really existed; no trains or poems or clues or coincidences, no Jacks or Sals or phone calls from parents, no hallucinations of ex-girlfriends or cars in garages, no pain or danger or shame or disappointment, because in her world, those things didn’t exist; in her world, everything was ashes and vanilla and warm skin. I wasn’t feeling nothing; I was feeling everything.

  “We’re all ruined,” she whispered against my ear. “Everybody’s ruined.”

  Sal’s phone buzzed and the real world came back. Mara uncoiled herself from my neck, but stayed a foot away. I held my shirt to block the light and read a text from my dad:

  nothing here, heard voices. meet back at the car NOW. BE CAREFUL


  Mara read it over my shoulder and looked back in the direction we’d come.

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  She didn’t protest.

  We continued slowly down the walkways, now navigating between more buildings than grass.

  “Over there, I see them—” the wind whispered, but I pretended I didn’t hear it.

  “I can hear their foosteps—” I ignored it.

  “Quick, somebody get out and shoot them—”

  Mara didn’t react. The voices were in my head.

  We turned the corner and the largest grass field yet opened in front of us. It was ink black, and looked to be in a small valley, giving way to a tall, forested hill on the other side.

  “Actually,” Mara said softly, “I think we’re at a uni. A campus.”

  Across the grass field, a stone threw light in my direction, then disappeared.

  Without thinking, I turned toward it, stuck on the darkness where the light had just been. Automatically, I began to walk.

  “Where are you going?”

  I didn’t turn around.

  “Don’t walk in the middle of the field, Arthur—where are you going?”

  Another stone, this one from the top of the hill, caught a bare sliver of moonlight and signaled to me like a lighthouse. Something about the light, about the stones and the hill, felt loud and unignorable. The wind picked up, as it had in the chapel with my grandfather, and I ran toward the hill, toward the light, faster with every step. The breath drained out of me but I heaved for it anyway. Mara whispered something but I didn’t hear it, the wind forming an empty tunnel of noise around me. It felt ten degrees colder as I ran, but still I pressed forward.

  “Arthur, calm down! That could be them! That could be—”

  The picture formed more clearly as I ran, the rest of the world blurring in response. I reached the bottom of the hill, and what had been a stone became a bell, smooth, round, cast iron, and mounted in a brick structure. I ran my hand across its aged surface. Its name, and only its name, was inscribed below: Victory Bell.

  I recognized it from somewhere; this was an image I’d seen before. I could feel my grandfather.

  My legs collapsed beneath me, and I fell to the ground before it in prayer. I could hear his voice, too loud to understand a word. I could feel his breath, pumping air into my own lungs.

  “Arthur, what is this?” Mara had caught up. “What are you doing?”

  Light again flashed in my face. It was a small, temporary glare, but it blinded me. I looked to the top of the hill. The second stone was shining back through the trees, disappearing and reappearing between the branches as they swayed.

  I launched myself toward it. The light grew in front of me, larger as I went faster, my elbows clearing the low-hanging branches. I noticed other stones behind it begin to shine, signaling me in. I ran straight toward the one in the center, unflinchingly, crashing my hands against it, a stone structure taller than I was, perfectly smooth granite and bronze.

  There were words inscribed in the rock. Breathlessly, I traced them.

  The first time, I didn’t understand. The second, details began to form. The third, the whole truth crystallized.

  Mara reached the top of the hill, panting behind me, and read after I did. We both stood in silence, the wind howling from the top of the hill across the plain.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered.

  I would have sworn I heard the bell ringing mournfully in the emptiness, and my grandpa’s mirage became real.

  4.

  may 4, the 1970.

  i will write this once & never again.

  with ink, i will stitch the wound.

  with dirt, i will bury it.

  & with a lifetime of resolve, i will never dig it up again.

  today began in great joy.

  we looked out together, love & love, over this thing that we built.

  this beautiful army.

  & an army they were, all creeds & colors, students & alike.

  our rhetoric was violent but our hearts were love.

  we joined hands & we said no to cambodia.

  we said no to nixon’s death sentence for our brothers.

  we said no to the world’s death sentence to our distant & foreign brothers & sisters.

  we said no to hatred.

  we said no to war.

  we said it with the loudest words that we knew how to use.

  but now

  i wish i’d said nothing at all.

  now

  i want to die for ever having spoken.

  now

  i want to take back every word of resistance i’ve ever spoken & live in sweet, peaceful, terrible submission.

  because there, i can live with you.

  today, we walked ourselves into open fields, hand in hand.

  & we were met with violence, of the worst & deadliest, violence that asks no second questions, offers no second chances, punishes before trial. irreversible violence.

  & i stood with you, hand in hand.

  but somewhere in the chaos, somewhere in the swirling of the world moving too fast, i lost your hand, & when i found it, it was filled with blood.

  i was carried by waves away from you; terrible, violent waves.

  amazing how peaceful blue turns red with the movement of one finger,

  & the shift of one breeze was enough to carry you away from me.

  all i remember in the whirlwind was running.

  running nowhere,

  running because it was the only thing i could think to do

  & i knew that i wanted to be anywhere but where i was.

  & i found you, & nothing else existed.

  your arms were so weak in mine, your hand could barely clasp.

  you had three breaths left & you gave them all to me.

  you said,

  keep going.

  you said,

  i’ll be waiting for you.

  bullets are tiny.

  those who fire bullets are tiny.

  but you, you are big. you are so big.

  you are the sun, the source of all light that i’ve ever seen.

  you are so much bigger than today.

  you are so much bigger than a bullet.

  you are so much bigger than death.

  some days are best left in the distant past, so far away & behind that they can never be viewed again.

  no part of today, or who i was today, will be any part of tomorrow.

  but someday, i’ll make it back,

  & i pray you’ll still be waiting.

  —arthur louis pullman

  5.

  THE KENT STATE massacre. May 4, 1970. The lives of five students were taken when the National Guard opened fire on a group of peaceful protestors, the first time in American history that the government has knowingly executed its citizens for practicing their First Amendment rights.

  There was no light around us, just traces of moonlight through the trees.

  The long, open quad created a funnel for wind to whistle directly to the clearing where we stood. Leaves brushed across the sign, the monument, the bell at the bottom of the hill and the statues at the top of it.

  “Do you . . . do you think . . .” Mara was breathless. “This protest . . .”

  I nodded.

  “Five . . . five people died.”

  I nodded again.

  “And he was there. He watched five people . . . he watched what he did get five people killed.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you think that’s why . . . he had to come back? Because he watched someone die?”

  “It wasn’t just someone.”

  I nodded to a smaller stone behind the memorial, inscribed with the names of the deceased. The first name on the list:

  Jeffery Kopek.

  The weight of my grandfather’s life, both hidden and apparent, his trauma and loss and loneliness and disease, crashed onto both of us. At once, it made sense.

 
Jeffery was the protagonist of his novel. Jeffery was the hero of his Green River short story. Jeffery Kopek was the name next to my grandpa’s on the wall in Denver. Jeffery Kopek was Sue’s son, for whom my grandpa had been responsible.

  Jeffery Kopek had been more than a passing character in my grandpa’s life. He had been my grandpa’s life. When my grandpa wrote of great love, and great loss, great guilt and great pain, his great angel, finding what he was looking for, and letting it go, and making it back, it was Jeffery that he was writing about.

  And my grandpa had watched him die.

  I remembered Dr. Patterson’s description of trauma: the internal forgetting, the way our brains choose to block the things they couldn’t bear to remember. My grandpa hadn’t just forgotten Jeffery dying; he’d forgotten Jeffery’s existence, Great Purpose, his train trips, and his friends along the way. He’d forgotten everything, left it behind in a novel, and started a new life. But it never left him.

  “Do you think when he said ‘my great angel’—”

  I nodded.

  Mara sniveled loudly, holding herself together and squeezing tears back into her eyes. I put my arm around her and pulled her closer to me. She was warm, and her hair clung statically to my jacket. “‘Full speed to you.’ This was who he was looking for.” I paused for a moment. “This is who he was writing to.”

  She squeezed my chest. “Are you okay?”

  I thought about the question.

  This was the answer I’d been searching for, and I knew, face-to-face with the monument, that it was the only answer. There wasn’t a prize at the end of the maze. It hadn’t been a puzzle, set up to reward me for being brave enough to follow my grandfather’s clues; they hadn’t even been clues. They led to nothing but a terrible realization, a cry mourning the loss of a person and a love that I could have gone my entire life without ever knowing existed.

  When I thought he had been writing to me, he hadn’t—he’d been writing to Jeffery. When I thought he was describing a great treasure, he wasn’t—he was chasing a memory, something that was forty years behind him.

  And still, I felt full.

  “Because this is what he wanted,” I said, and I knew it was true, whether he knew it or not. I thought about Dr. Patterson’s assurance: It’s time to remember now.