The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  RATHER THAN DISAPPEARING into neon bars with her strange, unmanicured men, Mom took longer and longer looks at herself in the vanity mirrors of our motel rooms, drinking her Seagram’s and 7UP, her Scotch and Tab, her vodka and Sprite. She wore her laciest lingerie and just sat there alone. Perhaps she would paint her face with very bright makeup, or contrast her pale cheeks with soft blushes and eye shadows, leaning forward, one elbow braced against a dimpled knee, one brilliantly manicured hand splayed gently against the top of the dresser, her other hand producing various vials and Maybelline from her handbag, which bristled with crumpled Kleenex, tattered road maps, plastic cutlery, and the various salt, ketchup, and NutraSweet packets she had lifted from fast-food restaurants. Her breasts were fully outlined against the sheer fabric of her lingerie; her long, slightly pudgy thighs (of which she was curiously ashamed, and over which she generally wore pants or thick cotton “middie” skirts); her legs glistening with dark nylons. Sometimes, as she watched herself applying makeup, she might take a few long slow breaths. I could feel her breath in the air; I could taste its warmth against my skin and face. Sometimes her nipples grew more prominent and stiff. She removed her left hand from the table and placed it against the inside of her left thigh. Lying on my side of the bed I watched her, and my body filled with strange, smoky sensations. She wasn’t looking at me. But I was looking at her.

  I began to feel a little out of breath, resting the open textbook against my thin, almost concave chest. Mom was a bird, a cloud, a car. Mom was something that breathed like me, that felt warm like me, that could move her legs like me. She wasn’t looking at me, but I was looking at her. Her face emblazoned with cosmetics, her body firm and distant and unbelievably warm. I was becoming her only man. No other men ever came around. I was watching Mom and, after a while, in the corner of my eye, Mom began watching me, her hand which held the lip gloss hovering against the edge of the dresser, her cool gaze directed at me now, as if she saw me and she didn’t see me, and I felt my entire body burning and pulsing with the light, the light, all the night’s darkness which was now turning into light, and all the sleepiness pulling at my face and filling my eyes with heat and softness and a sort of blurred and amorous detachment, and then I was falling asleep, and my body gave a sudden little kick. And as I slept I dreamed of Pedro. I dreamed of Pedro dreaming of me. Because Pedro and I understood one another perfectly now. We both loved Mom. And now we were all that remained of the strange and delusory world of Mom’s men.

  MANY OF OUR surviving Visa and MasterCard cards were beginning to reach and overreach their expiration dates, and Mom and I grew stingier with our fund of invisible credit. We pulled “runners” at restaurants, coffee shops and motels. While Mom flirted in the office with mechanics and gasoline attendants, I jimmied open cash boxes on the service island with a screwdriver and pulled out the large bills from under the steel change tray. We lifted food from grocery stores and clothes from clothing stores. We took magazines, beer and cigarettes from 7-Elevens, Stop ‘N’ Shops, Liquor Barns and Walgreen’s drugstores. One afternoon at the Van Nuys Motel 6 I was returning to our room after playing one of my slow games with a sharp stick and a dead, forlorn blackbird, and found Mom carrying the color portable television from our motel room downstairs to the car. We sold it that night to a pair of diminutive, portly Mexicans– very pleasant and smiling men, as I recall–for twenty-five dollars in the parking lot of Serra Bowl in Encino. “Value’s generated by the world, not by consciousness,” Mom said that night as we drove south to La Jolla. “The trick is to take the world and its values and generate better worlds inside. You’ve got a choice, baby, and it’s the only choice you’ve got. Either remake the world, or allow the world to remake you. Did that sign say 101? Look for my glasses–there, on the dash. And keep an eye out for Highway 101.”

  WE WERE DRIVING, always driving, and always it was night. Outside our hurtling car the darkness simmered with radio waves and the swirling, hot Santa Anas. Everything converged out there, even the heartbeats of other stars and galaxies. Pulsars, quasars, fissioning novas and supernovas, the radar of airplanes and control towers, the diminishing cries of crepuscular birds. I couldn’t look into that eternal night–and the oceans of static engulfing our AM radio every few miles or so–without thinking the question. The question surfaced like some underwater creature. It was learning to oxygenate. It was crawling from the sea’s burning muck.

  “Whatever happened to Dad?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. The question was like force, blood pressure, chemistry, light. “Where is Dad now? Is he alive? At night like this, when the night is just like this, does Dad ever think about us? Is Dad a person in the world, Mom? Or does he just lie in his bed and dream? And if so, Mom, are we his dream, or is he ours?”

  But Mom had already grown quiet, as if the question were not mine at all, but rather part of some thin formless lapse within the continuity of Mom’s diminishing world. She never said anything for hours at a time. She was going very far away.

  I merely traveled. But Mom journeyed.

  7

  THEN ONE DAY I awoke puffy and unbathed in the backseat of our car and Mom told me. The hot sunlight was filling the cracked vinyl upholstery, the warped, discolored dashboard and dirty windows. Mom was leaning inside and pushing my shoulder. “I’ve done it,” Mom said. “I’ve rented us a house.” So finally, after years without memory, Mom initiated time again. We had our own house now, and nobody lived in it but us.

  “I’ve learned some important things in the last few months or so,” Mom told me that night. “About myself, you, our world, the future. And about the sort of unrealistic expectations people can develop about one another. Everything’s going to be different this time,” she promised. “I’ve learned to be realistic about things. I’ve learned there are things we simply can’t expect from one another.”

  Every few minutes she took her glass into the kitchen and hacked at a bag of ice we had purchased from the local liquor store. The bag rested in the rusty and chipped Formica sink, thawing and reshaping itself. Then Mom returned to the living room with her icy glass and poured more Seagram’s and 7UP.

  “I don’t care, Mom,” I said, compelled by my own confessions too. “I just want you to know that I’m not mad at Pedro anymore. I have been very selfish and confused lately, and I don’t mind if Pedro comes to live with us again. I can’t keep you to myself. It isn’t fair. My love for you can’t be a selfish love if it’s to be honest and true. I have to let you live your own life because that’s what I love about you. That life you live apart from me. I’m learning a lot about myself as an individual, Mom. And if Pedro comes to live with us again, I promise to be nice to him. I won’t do anything I shouldn’t do.”

  Mom sipped her drink in the cold room, the candles flickering around us, impaling the mouths of Mountain Dew and Coke bottles streaked with ruddy wax. Mom just looked away. It was as if she didn’t hear me. It was as if she were listening to Pedro dream, the man whose name she taught me to say and then taught herself to never say again. I wondered if in Pedro’s dreams there were visions of Pedro dreaming, like the way angled mirrors reflect one another infinitely in department-store dressing rooms. In Pedro’s dreams there was Mom, me, and a dark gathering shape under the floors of our new house. The dark shape said, “The family environment is a very important place for growing children. A stable family unit environment determines whether a child will grow up feeling assured and self-confident, or undisciplined, slothful and insecure.” Whenever we heard that voice coming, Pedro and I knew Dad would be with us again soon.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between your conception of the world and the world’s conception of you,” Mom said, swirling ice in her glass. We slept on the shag carpet on rolled-up blankets and quilts lifted the previous evening from a Best Western in Van Nuys. “It’s very easy to fool yourself. The harder you think about things, the more confused you get.” She was lying on her back and gazing at our w
hite, water-stained ceiling. Her hands rested quietly on her breathing stomach. “When I was a little girl I would sit on the living room couch for hours sometimes, trying to figure out the simplest things. I couldn’t move. My mind grew fuzzy and dim. I felt as if my skull was inflating with chemical pressure. It grew dark outside. My mother returned home from work and fixed me dinner, but I wouldn’t eat. I just sat there alone until I could feel this black cloud slowly engulfing me. Inside the black cloud, I couldn’t think about anything. I couldn’t remember what I had been trying to figure out. Sometimes I couldn’t remember my own name, or the address where I lived. I couldn’t be sure if my mother was really my mother at all.” Stealthily, the gas heater gave a tiny kick in the kitchen. Outside, the city was filled with bright, airy noise, whispering against the walls of our house like something corporeal, filled with hissing and irreducible life.

  “Go to sleep, Mom,” I said, and placed my hand on both of hers. “Get some rest and we’ll discuss it in the morning.”

  “Lately, I’ve started feeling like that again,” Mom said. “I see this cloud of blackness coming up around me. I forget things. I can’t even tell if I’m dreaming or not.”

  Outside in the bright night, the full moon gazed over everything, gravid with implications.

  “Your father took me away from all that,” Mom said distantly, “and that’s why I’ll always be very grateful to him. I’ll always be very grateful to your father, Phillip. But that doesn’t mean I want him back.”

  MOM ALWAYS SAID we would buy furniture someday, but we never did. Instead we purchased a Hitachi color television, VHS recorder and remote control with one of our remaining credit cards on which time, like the vital current of some living creature, was gradually running out. We purchased a pair of springless Sta-Easy mattresses from a ridiculously exorbitant Salvation Army thrift store and placed one in each of our musty, divided bedrooms. We purchased an audiocassette recorder and various new tapes from Tower Records in Van Nuys, and a small unvarnished pine desk with a built-in bookshelf for my room, on which I assembled my various stained and pulpy textbooks, a new notepad, pink rubber eraser, plastic ruler, pencil sharpener and pencil case. These were my tools now, and like Pedro I kept them all in their proper place. There was something submarine about them, even anxious. Mom had recently determined that I would be a writer.

  “Take words and make them useful,” she told me. “Drain them of all the crappy meanings they used to mean, and make them mean something useful instead.” I assigned myself to my room for exactly two hours every morning, where I studied my books and wrote my clean words. With my elbows propped against my grainy desk, I plunged into books and histories and explicable mysteries like some hungry and federally-sponsored wilderness explorer. I made vast new areas of knowledge cultivable and known. I descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of presidents, tyrants and kings. I was learning what Mom had learned already: that there are journeys we make alone every day that take us far away from one another.

  Every morning I awoke in our cold house and padded softly into the kitchen, where I prepared Pop Tarts, hot chocolate and perhaps a bowl of cold cereal. Then I turned on all the stove’s gas jets to break the chill, and sat at the wooden breakfast nook perusing last evening’s Herald (I disdained the Times for political reasons). I might listen to some all-chat radio, fix a small pot of coffee and return to my study, always attentive as I passed Mom’s silent room, where she remained discreetly asleep or self-absorbed until mid-afternoon. Then I read alone in my room until at least noon, spilling the strange energetic words into my head. Geology, psychology, ancient history, applied linguistics, German, modern philosophy, South American etymology, Central American politics, Fourier, Rousseau, Marx–a vast boil and suck of words and languages. I recall little of what I learned then; the ideas didn’t really stick. Rather they seeped into my skin and belly. It was as if I were modifying the shape of my hunger rather than appeasing it. The only knowledge that really mattered to me then mattered because it was linked somewhere in my imagination with the emerging shape of Dad. I remember quantum physics because I felt that Dad, like the movement of planets, was not a fact so much as a quality of interpretation. I remember European revolutionary governments of the eighteenth century because their subversion of “Father” had never eliminated so much as merely redesigned his very real and persistent presence. I remember Hegel because I always imagined that the thisness which was Mom and I was always transforming itself into the thatness which would be life with Dad. Dad was the thatness towards which all our complicit motion yearned. In February he called for the first time.

  Is this Phillip? he asked. I had never before answered a phone to the sound of my own name.

  “Who’s this?” I didn’t need to ask. There was only one other person in the world who knew my name.

  This is your dad, he said. This is your dad who misses you both very much.

  I hung up. And he didn’t ring back.

  At least not that same night.

  WHEN I WENT to bed I tried to distinguish the different schemes of light that infiltrated my room. There was the lunar and the electrical, the stellar and the reflected. There was the light of ghosts and the light of living things. That night Pedro spoke to me for the first time since he began dreaming of those hard lightless objects which filled his somber toolbox.

  “I forgive what you did to me, but I’ll never forgive what you did to your mom. I’ll never forgive what you did to yourself.”

  “But what about the light, Pedro?” I asked. “What sort of light do you see now? Does the light make you feel warm, or safe, or sad?” But Pedro’s voice had grown silent again. He had said what he wanted to say. It was as if, while he dreamed, someone was keeping watch over him. Dreaming was a prison in which you were never alone for one minute, in which you were responsible to a legion of regulations, timetables and personnel. I couldn’t understand why Pedro said he would never forgive me. It had to be a code or a cipher of some kind. If he told me the truth about his new life, he might get himself in trouble with the people who gauged and monitored that life. I would have to ask him about it later. For now, effortlessly, I could only sleep.

  8

  DAD CALLED THE next morning around ten thirty.

  It’s been five years, he said. You guys are a hard act to follow but not so hard to trace. I may not always know where to find you, but I always know where you’ve been. You’ve left a trail that you might call a mile wide. Hearing my detective agency’s progress reports on your travels is more fun than watching television, and there are some pretty good programs on television these days, or so I’ve heard. I was worried when I learned you had the phone connected in your mom’s name. The electricity and the gas.

  Dad wasn’t a voice, not even on the phone. He surfaced as something vaster and more comprehensible than speech. I tried to convince him he had the wrong number. But Dad wasn’t buying.

  Your mom’s had some tough breaks, Dad continued. (I couldn’t imagine what Dad looked like, but I could envision his large body outside in some nondescript backyard wielding a long green garden hose. He sprayed the grass and flowers, the contented trees and saplings. Then he filled a large plastic bucket with soapy water and went out front to wash the car.) Your mom is a very good woman who doesn’t always do good things. She’s not what I’d call an appropriate role model for a young boy. What I’m trying to say, Phillip, is that it may be time for you to come home and live with your dad again. We can fix up
your old room. We can enroll you in school. Your mom’s welcome as well, Phillip. I still love your mom, no matter what she’s done. And so far as I know, she’s done some pretty bad things. There was that poor fellow, Bernie Somebody, in San Luis Obispo. And a year or so earlier, that architect in Simi Valley.

  A cold breeze was moving into my legs, my buttocks, my stomach. It reached into my chest.

  “What architect?” I asked. Other worlds were opening themselves to my inspection when I was seven years old–not just the worlds in books. “What architect in Simi Valley? Did he have a red beard?” I asked, not remembering so much as describing, as if I were the one making the world real with my voice. “Did he have a deep basso profundo singing voice? Did he drive a brand-new green BMW?”

  DAD CALLED EVERY afternoon and told me things Mom had done. Felonies, assaults, mild flurries of misdemeanors and traffic citations gone to warrant, suspected manslaughters in Burlingame, San Jose, Whittier. Mom was becoming even more glorious, transubstantial and unreal. She was moving further away from me and into the realm of raw, undifferentiated nature. Mom was a bat, a wolf, a bear, a tiger. Sometimes, as I grew to love her even more, I imagined her luring me into the nests and secret networks of her convoluted self. Alone in my bed at night, I heard myself talking like her, my mind working like hers. “The irregularities of the world’s body correspond with the map of our own brains, baby,” I said in my dark room, entangled by my dark and muddled blankets. Gently my hands stroked my stomach, my thighs, the stray black hairs beginning to emerge across my breathing chest. “We travel across the world and into the ways representation works. Trees aren’t trees, roads aren’t roads, moms aren’t even moms. The history of motion is that luminous progress men and women make in the world alone.” Sometimes I couldn’t even remember which words were mine and which words Mom’s. Whose voice was it, whose tongue and whose lips? Where did my flesh of words end and Mom’s words of flesh begin? Was this Mom’s face and stomach and beating heart, or was this mine? Was I becoming her, some mere reproduction of Mom, or had she so totally and unselfishly invested herself inside me that she no longer really existed at all? I tried to tell myself that I was still me and that Mom was still my mom, but never with conviction. I am myself, I whispered again and again in the dark. I live my own life. I imagine my own worlds. That’s what I kept telling myself.