The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  Where Mom had once lived her life in the world she now lived her world in the mind. It was a secret world filled with dark speculation and sober intricacy. Vast and comprehensive theories were worked out down there, enthralled by senseless reason. Complicated chiaroscuros of reflection like magnificent Venetian tapestries. Extensive logarithms of interpretation like sculpted white clouds. Mom’s secret self sat there in its immaculate kingdom, merely dreaming of other kingdoms like mine. “We’ve started your college fund,” Mom said, enthroned on the edge of my bed, her cool hand petting my sweaty brow. “Pretty soon we’ll start looking into a few of the better prep schools. When Pedro retires we’ll look for a larger house. You can travel in the summer. You will always have a home to come to, always a little money in the bank. Then you’ll be free to be anybody you want to be. You can go to medical school. You can be a rock star. You can be a stage actor or a vice-president. You can shoot drugs or hire hookers. You can become homosexual or a hired assassin. It’s your life, baby, and you live it anyway you choose. I’ll always love you, no matter what. Just always remember–you need to play the game if you want to break the rules, and even if you play by all the rules, deep in your brain you’ll always be playing your own game. You are immaculate. You endure for numberless centuries. You persevere in a world of pure gravity and sound. You are like light, baby. You are like a sea of air. You are history, and make all of history something else.”

  I could hardly sleep at all anymore, tossing and twisting among my feverish sheets, hearing Mom’s steady breath in the bedroom adjoining mine, Pedro’s antiphonal and staggered snores. When I did sleep I dreamed I was awake. I dreamed Mom was sitting in my bed. I dreamed Pedro was building and hammering in the backyard. I dreamed the teachers and other schoolchildren were telling me I had done a very good job. I was easy to get along with, they all liked me a lot better now that I tried, now that I made some effort to be fun to be with. A spectral puppy licked my face. The ghosts of my delirious life assembled around me in the dark, compensatory, half-lit world of my dreams.

  Pedro built me a sturdy lap tray so I could eat my meals sitting up in bed. He built me a bookshelf and a large wooden toy chest, and filled them with board games, jigsaw puzzles, woodburning and constructor and Lego sets, sacks of green faceless plastic army men, a variety of baseball mitts and a solid, unscratched hardball, seamed and dense. I could feel the foundations of our ranch-style open-plan house beginning to creak and kneel–I and my room full of things poised to abrupt through the floor, through the earth’s crust and mantle, rejoining that infinite and unseen history of strange misshapen creatures with rattling carapaces and stunned, minuscule brains. I was becoming pure weight now, hard matter. I couldn’t move; some nights I couldn’t breathe. “You stay in bed all your life if you want to,” Mom said, after a bespectacled psychiatrist suggested I go away for a few months. He was a member of the advisory board to a “special” ranch where children like me conventionally responded well to treatment. This hypothetical summer camp was filled with ponies and swimming pools and campfires; young boys and girls of my own age slept in tents, sang campfire songs and traveled down whitewater rivers on rafts. But Mom wouldn’t let them take me; Mom told them I would be all right. That was my mom. Even while she was destroying me, she would take care that nobody else destroyed me. “There’s nothing wrong with a few months of uninterrupted reflection,” she told me that night. “As long as we’re happy. As long as we’re all happy in our house together, there’s no reason why we should be in any rush to go anywhere.”

  5

  I KNEW WHERE they kept the Seconal. On the top shelf of the master bedroom’s medicine cabinet in an amber child-proof bottle. You had to depress and crank the lid with the heel of your hand. Then you held it there, a sweet unconscious turning in oval gelatin capsules. Sometimes I might take one, letting the capsule dissolve on my tongue, tasting the grainy barbiturate seeping through, bitter and full of life. Then I would replace the pills in their container and step quietly back through Mom and Pedro’s room. Mom lay on her side, facing me, her eyes glassy and volitionless, watching me without deliberation, permitting me my secret life. I saw myself reflected in her eyes, and the moonlight where we converged. “I’m going to do it, Mom,” I whispered. “I don’t want to make you unhappy but I think about it every night.”

  Mom didn’t say anything. Perhaps, absently, her right hand might gently stroke her left shoulder. Her dark eyes might follow me to the door.

  “I know you’ll let me,” I said. “I just want you to know. I don’t want to hurt you, but I can’t stand to let myself be hurt any more, either. If it was between you and me, Mom, you’d make the same decision. You’d always choose to hurt me rather than hurt yourself.” And then I crept silently back to my room, tracking a spoor of glowing red ash across the carpet of Pedro’s dreadful house, dreaming my inviolate dreams of motion again. In my dreams I was moving, with or without Mom, across lawns and galaxies, streets and stars, suburbs and unraveling solar winds. The Seconal was my ticket out and I was going to use it.

  MOM WAS WORKING late that night due to a last-minute change in her schedule.

  “Hey, sport.” Pedro was watching a Dodgers and Giants game on TV and drinking his customary Budweiser. “Out of bed tonight, I see. Good game here, if you want to watch it.”

  Mike Marshall had just fouled a hard sinking fastball off his right foot.

  “Now Marshall’s walking away from the plate and boy has that gotta hurt,” Vin Scully said.

  “Used to play a little pro ball myself.” Pedro was digging into his ear with the little finger of his right hand. After he finished he shook his head slightly, as if he heard something rattle. “Some double-A in the Texas League. That was back in sixty-two.”

  It was funny, because suddenly I didn’t even hate Pedro anymore. In fact, as I sat and talked with him that night–or sat and allowed him to talk to me–the world of menace I once associated with Pedro’s name began to withdraw a little. Grow lighter and more gaseous, its molecules quicker and more excitable. Pedro. I was suddenly convinced of the fact that Pedro was a very nice man, and that conviction filled me with an impossible sadness.

  “That’s where I got my nickname, see.” Pedro’s eyes dimly apprehended Marshall on first, Guerrero on second. Atlee Hammaker was pitching for the Giants. I really liked that name. Atlee Hammaker. “I never said a lot when I was a kid, and everybody thought, because I had really black hair then, that I was Mexican. I really did look Mexican. I looked about as Mexican as you could expect a Mexican to look.” Pedro ran one hand through his gray and thinning hair. Hammaker struck out Bill Russell on four pitches. “Damn,” Pedro muttered. “Damn it, Billyboy.”

  “Sometimes you just have to get up every day and make the effort,” Pedro consoled me later. The game had gone into extra innings, tied 2-2, and Pedro had turned the volume down with the remote control. He was on his sixth or seventh Budweiser, and I was preparing to fetch him another from the fridge. “I mean, it’s not like I ever had these big ambitions, you know, to run a hardware store, for chrissake. I mean, opening a hardware store wasn’t something that, you know, woke me up excited every morning. Like I’d wake up thinking, Hey, I own a hardware store! Hey, I’m on my way to work in my very own hardware store! Hell, no. It wasn’t like that at all, kiddo. I mean, running a hardware store was just a lot of hard work every day, believe you me. There were plenty of days when I just wanted to lie in bed too. No lie. I would have loved to just lie in bed and watch TV and listen to ball games on the radio. But back then, you see, I couldn’t afford to hire any help, and if I had stayed in bed all day, just who do you think would have paid my mortgage so I could lie in bed all day? Nelson Rockefeller? Think again, kiddo. Howard Hughes–my good old buddy Howard? Well, I doubt it. I can’t say for sure, but somehow I doubt my old buddy Howard Hughes would’ve come round to help pay off my mortgage.”

  He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the sto
ve. Pedro ate most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy Wonderbread. “This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo–and I’m telling you this as a friend. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself childhood crap just doesn’t work–doesn’t work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your mom wants you to have this idyllic childhood and all. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up ‘idyllic’ in the dictionary and I wouldn’t hold my breath. I wouldn’t lie in bed all day waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

  I know, I wanted to tell him. You’re right. Love often requires sacrifices which simply aren’t worth it.

  “So maybe you’ve had a few hard knocks. So maybe you’ve lived a fly-by-night existence. That’s just the breaks, kiddo,” Pedro said, and for once I listened. For once I wanted us to hear each other. “That’s just life. And believe you me, we sure live it a damn sight better than we do lying in bed all day feeling sorry for ourselves. That’s the truth, kiddo, and…” He gave a tremendous yawn. “Jesus.” He blinked his eyes. His crumpled Budweiser cans lay toppled around him on the table, sofa and floor like crude chess pieces. “Boy. I guess I’m really bushed.” Pedro pushed himself to his feet, slouched, pot-bellied and creased by the rough sofa cushions. “You take care of yourself, kiddo,” Pedro told me, and shuffled in his wrinkled suede slippers toward the master bedroom. “I think I’m going to hit the hay.” And then I heard him groaning into the squeaky bed, drifting into his slow aimless dreams of the soft red barbiturate haze that filled him like warm air fills a balloon. Meanwhile the ruptured gelatin Seconal capsules lay scattered on a sheet of Kleenex on the desk in my room.

  I finished my diet soda and went in to see how he was doing. He looked warm and peaceful, his face flushed and puffy, his vital bodily organs sailing along gently and intrepidly and slow. All the long steel kitchen knives were unsharpened and dully glimmering in the kitchen cabinets. There was no heavy cord or rope anywhere to be found, and though I suspected there might be some in the basement, it was dark down there, cold and damp, and I wasn’t wearing shoes. Then, like weather, I felt it, just the heavy simplicity of it, a faint steel resonance underneath Pedro’s bed. For a while I stood and appreciated that strange, almost tactile presence. It was very solid. It was useful and perfectly designed. It had been there all along. And clearly it would do the job.

  After a while I pulled Pedro’s toolbox from under the bed where it waited for me like history. I lifted it to the foot of the mattress. The toolbox contained hammers, screwdrivers, ratchets, Allen wrenches, hacksaws and spare, gleaming new replacement hacksaw blades. I knew that Pedro wanted a world as secure as the things he constructed in the backyard, a world with perfectly articulated joints and level, sanded surfaces. I knew that Pedro deserved a world like the worlds he built out there, like the worlds he built inside himself and Mom. “Death is the hard song, Pedro,” I told him. “We only sing it once, and none of us ever sings it exactly right.”

  Even as I inaugurated my secret ceremonies of redemption that night, I knew something vaster and more important than myself was responsible for all my actions. Me, Mom, Pedro, and Mom’s vast world were all just fragments of a process that would soon consume us all. I didn’t want to give into that process, you see. I wanted to leave something behind, like the pyramids of Egypt, or the heads on Mount Rushmore. I wanted to build something formidable and good for all of us, but especially for Pedro. All that long night as I feverishly worked, what I wanted more than anything was to build something for Pedro that would last forever.

  LIGHT

  __________

  6

  I thought when Mom saw what I had done to Pedro she might stop loving me, but from that night forward she may have started loving me even more. When she emerged expressionlessly from the master bedroom I was sitting on the living room sofa, gently stroking my wet clean hair with a brown towel, still stippled and muggy after my long mournful bath. She didn’t pause or speak to me. She just began packing our few belongings into pillowcases, and after a while I dressed and helped her carry everything out to the garage where our old Rambler had sat gathering dust these many months, sluggish and thick with its unstirred oils and rusty water. It started up on Mom’s first try. Then she held down the accelerator for a while and we sat there sleepily in the dark garage, staring out at the brighter and more opaque darkness beyond the roar of our Rambler’s V-8. We were lifting off. In a moment, we would be hurtling through space. Mom released the emergency brake and the V-8 subsided to a rough, hesitant idle. Then we glided down the long cement driveway while Pedro lay asleep in his calm and remorseless home, dreaming his dreams of barbiturates, beer and the soft biting blades of tools and things. God, I was filled with light that night. I was filled with Mom’s voice and the very light of her. We were moving again. We would never die. We would travel together forever in the world of inexplicit light, Mom and I.

  “The history of motion is that luminous progress men and women make in the world alone,” Mom said. “We’re moving into sudden history now, baby. That life men lead and women disavow, the sure and certain sense that nothing is wrong, that life does not beat or pause, that the universe expands relentlessly. You can feel the source of all the world’s light in your beating heart, in the map of your blood, in the vast range and pace of your brain. That’s the light, baby. You don’t need any other. Just that light beating forever inside of you.” We were turning onto the freeway, which was filled with other, hurtling headlights, enormous menacing trucks and buses. “We are like astronauts, we are like wheeling planes and spaceships. We are like swaying birds with soft stroking wings like oars. We beat against the heavy air, and carry our silent and regenerate light with us wherever we go.”

  It was nice Mom telling me that the light was mine too. But I knew the light was Mom’s and nobody else’s. For months I had seen nothing but my own interior darkness, and now, against the glare of Mom’s resumed motion, I could sense the entire world again as something far outside the reach of myself. No, all the light we gathered was Mom’s light, Mom’s progress into places I could only dream about. I was just a passenger, and like all passengers, unconcerned with landscape and plot, enveloped only by the simple movement, the cumulate graph of those coherent points along which we ate, slept, went to the bathroom, and awaited movement again. We could live together forever and ever, again and again, life after life. Mom didn’t have to lie anymore. She didn’t have to run or hide, she didn’t have to journey further away from me in order to remain with me as she did, deeper into her dreams of me and further away from my untrained arms. I didn’t know it then, but I was soon to learn that I couldn’t follow Mom everywhere.

  THESE DAYS I was intent on immortality, because I knew Mom’s only hope of redemption lay in some expansion and unfolding of time that would swallow Mom and all her imaginings into one formless shape and sound, not a place or location so much as a dispersion of force. “Low-cholesterol diets, Mom,” I told her, browsing through a college nursing text entitled Health and Our World: 32nd Edition. “Then there’s the DNA, those complex looping signals beeping in our blood and lymph. Death’s a program, Mom. Like eating, sleeping, sex and hate. Our bodies generate death like fluids, waste, carbon dioxide, anticoagulants, marrow. DNA’s the beeping clock, unraveling time in our bodies like smoke from your cigarettes. It’s the tiniest force; it responds with information, not blood; it circulates raw and genetically contrived data, not life exactly. The heart–we’ll leave that to the regular scientists. There’s some oils in fish that cleanse the body of fatty tissue and keep the rich blood pumping. But down into the DNA is where I’ll go, Mom. When I grow up I’ll have a laboratory. I’ll invent lots of stupid consumer junk so I make lots of money. Then I’ll sink everything I’ve got into the DNA. I’ll climb down into its bristling helical nets like a spelunker. I’ll dig out every secret, and they’ll be our secrets, Mom, and we’ll live forever. We’ll buy a house overl
ooking the beach, and I’ll keep my laboratory in the basement. And we’ll live together without anyone bothering us for thousands and thousands of years.”

  Most of the time Mom just drove without looking at me, wearing her tortoiseshell sunglasses and a floppy straw hat. She was listening, deep in her brain, but watching other roads now besides the 101. “This is King City,” she might say. “I think we’ve been to King City.” Mom’s face was very pale without makeup, but very beautiful as well. “Let’s try it anyway,” and pulled onto the next off-ramp. Soon we were winding down into a Burger King, a Wendy’s, a Motel 6, a King’s Bowl Bar and Grill. I always insisted on a salad bar in these days of Mom’s disaffection. I urged her to eat plenty of raw vegetables and fresh fish. We would pull into the parking lot and she would turn to me. “It’s got to be better than San Luis, doesn’t it? It’s got to be better than that hellhole.” Then she gave the fleshy thigh of my arm a squeeze and smiled. Only she wasn’t looking at me in a way. She was looking at me, but she wasn’t looking at me at the same time.