The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  “It’s very simple, really,” Dad said, not even looking up at me in the dark hallway. “You just need to fiddle this little doohickey inside. It’s vertical when locked. You’ve got to fiddle it around until it’s horizontal.” Dad was sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing only his finely-woven and partially unzipped navy-blue trousers and a white Hanes T-shirt. He had an icy, fresh Manhattan in his lap. “Your mom used to do this to me all the time. She was always locking me out when she was upset, but she wanted me to come in and comfort her. It was a little game we played.” He held an untwisted paperclip in one hand, and peered into a tiny round hole of the rattly aluminum doorknob. “These stupid doorknobs are designed to be picked. You used to accidentally lock yourself in rooms all the time when you were little.” Dad inserted the paperclip, fiddled around a bit. I couldn’t hear another single sound in the entire world. “I’ll never forget how scared you used to get. By the time I’d get the door open you’d be hysterical. You’d just be standing there, clenching your tiny red hands, the tears pouring down your little T-shirt.”

  “Mom,” I said, as gently as I could. “Mom, it’s Dad. He’s coming in.”

  At that moment the tinny doorknob clicked, and Dad turned it. Dad was still sitting cross-legged on the floor with his Manhattan, and I was standing looking over his shoulder, when the door of Mom’s bedroom finally opened.

  15

  “SHE’S BEAUTIFUL,” DAD said.

  “I don’t think she’s awake.”

  “Her eyes are open.”

  “Sometimes her eyes are open but she’s not awake.”

  “Has she been eating properly?”

  “I do my best.”

  “What about vitamin and mineral supplements?”

  “I started leaving them out for her, but I don’t know if she’s been taking them.”

  “What about cigarettes?”

  “I think she’s stopped. She’s still drinking, though.”

  “That’ll have to stop too. We’ll want her eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, more salads. Hot soups and plenty of juices and mineral water. Mainly she needs exercise, sunlight, a few less worries. She’ll need to see a good doctor, perhaps a nutritionist.”

  “I think she’s better off staying at home.”

  “I’ll find a doctor who makes house calls.”

  “Mom needs her own space, Dad.”

  “Everybody needs their own space, son. But sometimes their space isn’t just theirs. Sometimes their personal space infringes on the personal space of other people. That’s just a way of saying we all have responsibilities, son. I’ve told you before. We all have responsibilities to people other than ourselves, whether we like it or not.” Dad was cautiously approaching Mom like some aborigine trying to console an electric light bulb.

  “Dad. I don’t understand.”

  Finally, gently, Dad sat down on the edge of Mom’s bed. The springs emitted a tiny, querulous creak. He wasn’t looking at me either. He was looking at the empty bottles of Jack Daniel’s and Wild Turkey piled in the corner beside some tattered, outdated issues of TV Guide. The neglected vitamins lay heaped on the untidy bureau. Dad’s hand gently stroked Mom’s stomach underneath the blankets. Mom’s face was flushed and serene, like the face of a Madonna. She really was just as beautiful as ever, I thought.

  “What I’m trying to say, son, is that very soon you’re not going to be alone anymore. You’re going to have a little brother, or maybe even a little sister, to take care of. Your mother’s going to have a baby.”

  For a few moments, nothing moved in the entire universe.

  “Just look at your Mom’s smile and you’ll know,” Dad said. “Just look at her. Your mother always did have an unforgettable smile.”

  UNDERSTANDABLY, I GREETED Dad’s arrival with mixed emotions, to say the least. Because he was my dad I loved him, but because Mom was his wife that meant he loved her too. There were enough men in Mom’s life already, I thought, preparing breakfast for four now instead of two. Dad’s laptop IBM computer was equipped with a modem, which he usually plugged into the telephone line about the same time I began frying bacon and eggs. Dad sat very erect and deadly serious at the new dining room table he had bought us while strange graphs and data flashed on the amber screen. The laptop made beeping sounds every once in a while. “What’s the dividend yield on that?” Dad asked the phone, when his computer wasn’t on it. “Why can’t we convert to unit trusts? Sure, sure, but I can’t make a living on theories, Harry. I can put credit in the bank. I can invest future expectations. But I can’t buy a meal with theories. I can’t even buy a good song.” Sometimes Dad just sat there and listened. He always wore freshly laundered, pressed striped shirts and pure wool slacks. His face was always closely shaven. He wore a mild, minty cologne. “All right,” he told the phone. He punched buttons on his laptop, reengaged telephone and modem. “You can start transmitting now.” Additional figures and charts emerged from the bright screen. Sometimes Dad paused for a while, watching cool articulate data emerge from the humming monitor.

  Dad communicated all over the world with stock investment analysis coordinators, banking investment consultants, corporate holdings portfolio advisers, industrial efficiency maintenance engineers, agents and brokers and realtors and accountants and bankers. While I set the table and prepared our meals, while Mom lay in her bed growing my young, immaculate and ethereal sibling in her womb, Dad spoke words not with other people, but with the system of language itself. Dad didn’t speak things, he spoke systems. Just as systems, I was equally sure, spoke him.

  “One of these days we’ll get you started managing your own money,” Dad told me one day, drinking Dos Equis and reading the Dow figures as they unreeled from his ink-jet Epsom printer.

  “I’ve got a little money put aside already,” I said. I was pouring green soap powder into the soap dispenser of our new Whirlpool dishwasher. I closed the lid, cranked it shut, and engaged the first rinse cycle. “You know, in case of emergencies.” The spraying water sounded like static on the radio.

  I brought Dad the latest Sears money market statement. I brought him the Dividend Reinvestment figures for my 200 shares of San Diego Gas and Electric. I brought him the joint savings account Rodney and I held at Bank of America. I brought him the savings deposit key. The savings deposit box contained a number of gold and silver coins, some small diversified holdings in various California utility companies, and Mom’s diamond wedding band.

  Dad examined the various documents for a while. Figures were flashing on the screen of his laptop, but he wasn’t watching them. Every once in a while he whistled a tiny, indefinite melody, not with his lips but with the tip of his tongue against the hard edge of his palate. Ever since I could remember, I always wanted to whistle like that.

  When Dad finally looked up at me, his eyes held that reflectionless, distracted expression they usually held whenever he spoke about Mom. He gestured with the various papers in his hand.

  “This isn’t too bad,” he said after a while.

  “WHEN’S HE LEAVING?” Rodney asked. “I thought you said he was leaving yesterday.”

  Dad was in the shower. I had detached the phone from the laptop, which had emitted a treacherous little beep.

  “That’s what he told me.”

  “Why don’t you tell him to leave?”

  “I can’t just do that. He’s my dad.”

  “Your mom doesn’t want him around, does she? What’s your mom think about all this?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what Mom thinks about anything anymore.”

  In fact, Mom seemed a lot more peaceful and happy now that Dad was back to take care of us again. Because Mom refused to take the lithium Dad’s doctor prescribed, every afternoon around four o’clock a private nurse named Syd arrived and gave her an injection. Mom didn’t resist with anything but her eyes. “Now be a good girl,” Syd said, and officiously posted me from the room. When I returned later, Mom was hold
ing a tiny ball of cotton against the inside of her arm.

  “It’s OK,” Mom told me afterwards. Her right arm was growing more and more tracked with tiny scabs. “It didn’t hurt at all.”

  I brought Mom cool pitchers of water, fresh apples and citrus fruits, carrots and hummus sandwiches. Her stomach seemed taut and smooth when I touched it, like the expanded tube of a tire.

  EVERY MORNING DAD worked on the dining room table with his laptop and made phone calls. In the afternoons he took trips into Westwood, Hollywood, Burbank, and often returned long after I was asleep. Mom, meanwhile, lay in her bed, awaited her daily injections and grew more placid and content. This was the only movement left us now, the movement in Mom’s stomach. Sometimes she let me place my ear against her smooth and ageless skin. I felt its tiny kick at the world outside. Kick. Kick again. I liked to place my lips against Mom’s stomach and speak to it. “When you come out here, don’t expect any free ride,” I said. “I think I’m working through a lot of the anxieties and insecurities your arrival may bring. By the time you get here, I hope I’ll be able to treat you with love and respect for your individuality. I hope I won’t burden you with a lot of silly resentment you won’t even understand.”

  Kick, it said. Kick kick.

  “That other noise you hear is just the TV,” I said. “Those aren’t real gunshots, but just fake gunshots on TV. Sometimes you’ll see men fall over dead on TV, but they’re not really dead. They’re just pretending. That’s the way TV works. People get paid to act like they’re people in real life. But they’re not, really. They’re just actors. On the news, sometimes, you’ll see real dead people. I’ll have to explain that part all over again when you come out. That stuff about dead people on TV always confused me when I was little.”

  I didn’t want any child of Mom’s to be confused about anything. Even though Mom had retreated into her formal silence, I wanted our baby to enjoy all the warm immanent attention I had enjoyed, to find itself enveloped by that same constant and imperturbable voice of Mom’s that had once enveloped me. “In a minute, you’ll hear the vacuum cleaner,” I told it. “I use the vacuum for cleaning the rug. The suction sucks all the dirt and grime and lint from the floor through this long rubbery hose, and then puts it into this big blue paper sack. Every once in a while, you have to put a new vacuum sack in it. Now that I’ve finished cleaning, I’m going to be leaving you and Mom for a little while so I can cook us all a good dinner. A pot roast. I roast it in the hot oven. I serve it with vegetables and gravy. That’s what you’ll be tasting later when it arrives through Mom’s umbilical cord. Pot roast and gravy.” I never left until the baby had given me some response. A kick, perhaps, or a hormonal grumble. Then I patted Mom’s warm stomach in telegraphic farewell. I wanted the baby to know I wasn’t just talking at it. I was talking with it. We were family already, with our without Mom, with or without Dad, with or without the entire universe of motion and light.

  I RARELY SAW Mom and Dad together during the day, but often at night I would awake to the sound of Mom screaming. She wasn’t screaming words, she was just screaming. This was another world that emerged in our dark house at night, the screaming of Mom’s voice. It was even comforting in a way, formalized by the grammar of our household, by the deep structure of our seemingly eternal and regenerate family. Mom’s scream was just a word, like Mom herself, Dad, Dad’s laptop and car, the garage, Mom’s TV, and the tiny rough scabs sprinkling Mom’s arm like crushed white grains of salt. Covert in my room, I awaited Mom’s screams each night like a kiss on the forehead or a glass of warm milk. She’d start screaming for what seemed like hours and hours some nights, as if with her screams she were trying to inflate some enormous circus balloon. One night I went to my bedroom door and peeked across the hall into Mom’s room. All the lights were on. The TV was blaring. Mom’s face was twisted and angry, flushed and mottled with tears. She gestured wildly with the jeweled compact Dad had bought her from Westwood two days before. She screamed and threw it, and I heard things breaking. She was wearing the white hospital robe Syd made her wear. The robe hung open, revealing her quaking breasts and pale concave chest. And Dad in the doorway too, turning to look at me. He was still wearing his three-piece suit. The buttons of his vest were all undone, and his hair mussed. “Go back to bed, Phillip,” he said. Dad’s voice was the sternest word. Dad’s voice was the world’s first word. “Everything’s all right. Your mom and I are just talking.” Then I closed my door again and lay in my cold bed listening to her screaming until Dad finally gave her one of her injections, a sedative prescribed by one of Dad’s “specialists,” and then presumably they went back to bed together and fell asleep.

  16

  SUDDENLY I BEGAN to feel different and talk different, as if a different person entirely were developing from my thin body. Dad’s arrival really had begun to teach me things about personal responsibility. Every morning I padded softly into Mom’s bedroom where I found only the impression of Dad’s body lingering in the mattress and pillow beside her. She didn’t even look like Mom anymore, but more and more like one of those crepuscular figures who emerged from Mom’s dark bed in my most feverish nightmares of Mom. Her mouth hung open, revealing cold crowns and silver cavities. This was Mom’s skull, that deep interior world into which Mom could retreat whenever she wanted, and where I could never follow. Mom snored deep in her throat. Her eyes were lashed with milky sleep. “Mom,” I said, pushing her shoulder. Her entire body shook with the force of my hand. “Mom, it’s me.”

  The drained hypodermics with their needles snapped off lay in the wicker basket, bedded by bloody Kleenex and balls of cotton. I could hear Dad in the living room, his fingers clacking against the dull cushioned keys of his laptop. Every once in a while the laptop beeped or the phone range. Dad’s dark, muffled and sinewy voice would sometimes turn underneath Mom’s bed like a buried stream or a shifting geological plate.

  “Before your dad came I thought everything was starting to work out,” Mom said. She slurred a lot. With a Kleenex I wiped flecks of saliva from the corners of her mouth. “Before your dad came I was beginning not to be afraid anymore. The spell of my blood actually made sense to me. Sometimes I even looked forward to having the darkness take me places. It took me down luminous rivers on large rotting rafts and barges. I saw strange birds flying overhead, and the eyes of other creatures emerging from the mucky water. I traveled down the river where twisted houses sat on shores filled with dark men who wouldn’t come outside. The dark men were inside whispering about me. They held heavy spears and weapons by their side while their addled women cooked large pots of gristly meat and hung their washing out to dry. The men wore loincloths and streaks of paint on their arms and faces. A few mangy dogs lay around outside, contemplating the dim fire. One of the dark men was my father.”

  Mom sat there and stared into space. She clasped the half-pint bottle of Seagram’s against her breast. The bottle was almost empty. Every few nights or so I would go down to our local Liquor Mart, purchase some milk and beef jerky and request cardboard boxes from the bespectacled elderly clerk. While he was out of the store I stuffed bottles of gin and whiskey under my blue Derby jacket. Later, while Dad was away on business, I smuggled them into Mom’s room. The bottles, I hoped, would keep Mom company when I couldn’t.

  “That’s not your dreams, Mom,” I said. “That’s Conrad. That’s Apocalypse Now. Don’t you remember? We saw Apocalypse Now at the Sunset Drive-In in San Luis Obispo last summer. At the end, Martin Sheen kills a bull with an ax.”

  “My father was always a very gentle man with my mother,” Mom said. “He had big soft hands. Sometimes he placed one of his hands on my knee when he drove me places in the car. He drove me to doctors mostly. We used to sit together in the waiting rooms and read slick magazines. I always liked Vogue best, but my father preferred Popular Mechanics. Sometimes it seemed like we were sitting in those waiting rooms for days and days, and all the time my father’s hand was on my knee. It lo
oked like some sort of animal. I was never really sure if I liked my father’s hand there on my knee or not.”

  “IT’S OK TO be a little confused,” Beatrice told me one night on the phone. “It’s even all right to be a little afraid. Give your emotions some credit, Phillip. Stop trying to be in control of everything all the time.”

  “I’m not afraid or confused,” I said. “I’m not trying to control anybody. It’s just that I feel there are a lot of decisions being left up to me, and frankly, Beatrice, I don’t know if I’m up to them. I love my mom, but I love my dad too.”

  “You love the idea of your dad, Phillip. You don’t love him. You love what you want your dad to be. What you want to make him.”

  “I don’t want my dad to be anything, Beatrice. He’s just there. I didn’t ask him to come.”

  “Yes you did. You asked him to come.”

  “No I didn’t. He just came, Beatrice. I swear. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “You’re afraid it’ll all turn out exactly the way you want it to. You never loved your mom, Phillip. You only loved the idea of your dad.”

  “I love my mom,” I said.

  “You never loved her, Phillip. You’re a man. You’re weapons, notions, deeds. You’re technology. Your mom’s the earth. She’s the woods. Your mom’s the rain and the wind. Your mom’s nature. Your mom’s what men’s words wreck. Your mom’s abundance, but men are cold and hungry. Your mom’s life, while men aren’t even death, they’re just nothing. They’re just the cold gray void death presumes to be. Men are the end of space and the beginning of metal.”

  “I never hear from Rodney anymore,” I said. Beatrice’s words swirled in my head. I felt dizzy and weightless, like a space-walking astronaut. I leaned against the wall and tried to find assurance in my house’s body and mass. I considered tying myself down to something–the kitchen cabinet, or the dining room table. I might float off the face of the planet otherwise, and then I’d never have any idea where I was. A dull ache began to throb in my head. “I call and leave messages, but Ethel says he’s out with his friends. She says he’ll call me soon. He’s just going through a stage, she says. It’s just a stage he’s going through.”