The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  The locking mechanism on my side of the door was fastened with heavy black electrician’s tape. My bureau was braced against it. On the bureau in a small brown bag was the new bolt lock I had purchased at Walgreen’s just that morning. I would install it later that night, after Dad was firmly asleep.

  THE BOOKS ON my shelves stared down at me like statues or awards, mementos of some former life. They seemed cold to me now. Books were just the raw matter of education. They were stuff, like coal or minerals. They could be accumulated, quantified and known. I was no longer concerned with the known, but with the process of knowing itself: pure motion, which did not render things known or visible. It did not transport you to any fixed location on a map. It was into the very function of the self that I journeyed now, and like Mom I could only journey there alone. Misery enveloped me with soft black robes. They were warm and clinging. They held me in place so I wouldn’t get lost. Misery was my map, my boundary. It held me in place in this world of constant motion.

  Whenever Mom started screaming again, I knew that inside she felt warm and safe like me. Sometimes I could hear other voices in there, hidden in that moist miserable world of my private suffering, the voices of other people Mom and I might have been.

  “I’m not a monster,” Dad said in my hallway after the lock stopped rattling. “It’s not like I don’t have any feelings too, son. I know I’m the outsider. I know it’s going to be hard for you to get used to having me around. I’m not trying to rush things. When I first arrived and everything seemed to be going so well, I knew this would happen eventually. You had to make a lot of heavy psychological adjustments. I just want you to understand I’m doing the best I can, under the circumstances. I’m trying to do what’s best for everyone. So I’m not saying you should feel any different. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go right on hating me, if that’s how you feel. I would never violate your privacy like that. I’m just saying try to respect my position as well. Things aren’t any easier for me than they are for you or your mother.” Times like this I thought Dad was a lot like Jerry Lewis on the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy. Like Jerry, Dad was prepared to go to the most grotesque and inhuman lengths simply to prove his own humanity.

  FOR THE FIRST time in my life I was utterly alone. I examined the desultory, overinflated images of naked women in men’s magazines. I bought a harmonica that I liked to hold in my hand and imagine myself playing. Sometimes I danced alone in my room, listening to Bruce Springsteen or Joe Cocker on my Sony Walkman. I preferred Jim Beam, but I cultivated a taste for gin as well. I drank and danced until I grew dizzy and surfeited with a thick, swollen stomach, and collapsed on my unsheeted mattress, beating my feet in the air, watching the room swirl around. When it started swirling I knew I might throw up at any moment. That’s what the plastic-lined trash bin was for. I lay very still and tried to make the room stop moving. It required an act of intense concentration. It was as if this swirling room was itself a mockery of movement, pulling up through my stomach while the alcohol moved through my blood, lifted into my brain and skull and sinuses and teeth. I wanted more to drink and tried to sit up. I knocked over bottles and ashtrays. The gray ashes spilled across my clothes and sheets. There were beer cans everywhere. Everything reeked of gin and cigarettes. The floor of my room looked like the high school parking lot. The world seemed to be growing darker and more desperate. “I don’t know where I’m trying to go, Mom,” I whispered, as if she could hear me. “Maybe I’m already there and don’t know it.”

  Whenever I was this drunk I couldn’t sleep, though that didn’t stop me from dreaming. The alcohol seemed to drive my blood and adrenalin as if I were a car, and I experienced strange visions of my progress through the world of light. I proceeded through dense green bushes and foliage. Insects chittered and flashed in the air, glancing off my face, biting my arms and neck. I was wearing a large khaki explorer’s hat. Native drums beat in the air, and the tortured cries of captive white slave women. I was moving towards a secret road. The road was white and powdery, like the beach of some pristine sea. It extended in two directions. It might take me anywhere. It might take me nowhere at all. The roaring of an airplane filled the blue sky, the beating of helicopters. Everything was blowing around me, even the road’s white dust. The plane was descending to take me away, but I didn’t want to go.

  I would sit up in bed and reach for my cigarettes, sometimes pulling the glass ashtray or half-empty bottle of Beefeater’s onto the floor. I grew obsessed with the idea that dreams were trying to communicate something very real to me, perhaps even the secret advice and admonitions of Mom herself. Dreams were life’s base or undergrowth. They were the rich earth from which real life blossomed. The white road, native drums, women crying. The arrival of planes and helicopters, and then the sudden disavowal of everything, the whirling dust and drums and sky. In the world, perhaps, my progress had been halted indefinitely. But I could still move in my dreams, and in my own desperate recollections of them. I was learning what Mom had been trying to teach me all along. When I could no longer live in the world, I could live the world alone in my heart.

  “It’s time you started thinking about somebody other than yourself,” Pedro said. “You’re not the only person in this world who’s lost somebody he loved.” Pedro’s face was out of focus. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of the things Pedro had seen or I had seen that made his face so indefinite like that. “Just think about your dad for a minute. Just think about me, even. Try thinking for one minute about how I must feel.” Pedro was drifting away. We were all drifting away.

  “There’s only one thing I’ve learned in my entire life, Pedro,” I told him, though Pedro didn’t exist as a body anymore. Pedro existed in the country of my imagination like deep buried formations of rock and basalt. Vast geothermal plates shifted and moved down there. The heat was unremitting. “And I’ll tell you, Pedro. I’ll tell you what that one thing is.” I had spilled Jim Beam down the front of my shirt. I took another long drink from my glass. “I don’t care who lost what. I don’t care who’s gone without love. I don’t care about money, or people, or countries, or politics. I only care about me now, Pedro, because now I’m like Mom. Because now I’m not thinking about anybody except myself.”

  LIKE MOM I journeyed now into my own artificial country–a country much like California, I thought. This country had fields and trees. It was divided into counties, towns and cities. Several languages had developed over the centuries that, like the landscape, were broken, discontinuous and unreal. There were, however, no other people to be found anywhere. No other people dreamed of other countries like mine. Nothing moved here at all, in fact. Not even the wind, or the intricately sculpted and often sentient clouds.

  If I were to meet that other woman here, that special person in my life without a name, she could not speak to me. She might not even recognize me. In this privileged country my imagination had translated everything, even sensations and appearances, into solid matter, things, atmosphere, nature, earth. That other woman might try to read to me from books I remembered from childhood. Big red and green books with pictures of bears, zebras and pelicans in them. That other woman might try to speak to me, feed me, smell me, touch me, but she couldn’t do anything about it. She had lost all pretensions to form and become only a force, a dream of falling. She could only run through her accustomed routine–combing and petting my hair, stroking my warm stomach, clipping my toenails–while I drank my gin and tonics and contemplated the walls of my country. My country had developed fissures and cracks, exposed plaster and wiring. The doorknobs didn’t always correctly articulate with their locks. The windows were often painted shut, their curtains torn and dingy. Dishes were chipped, and glasses were filled with spongy cobwebs. None of the silverware matched. If you stood on a chair and gazed into the highest cabinets of my country you could just see, in its furthest, dingiest corner, something tiny that didn’t move. It was gray and shapeless. It possessed no smell or
texture. If you looked at it too long, it wasn’t even there at all.

  I NO LONGER wanted to live forever. I only wanted to burn intensely in the sun and extinguish, seedless and unforlorn like some unpopped pinecone. I began taking foolhardy walks at night into the worst parts of town, where strange dark men and women stood in doorways which were often plastered over with promotions for rock concerts and record albums. If I possessed no home, then logically my only home lay everywhere. The streets were filled with refuse. Garbage cans were overturned, and the wild dogs did not approach you. The dogs always looked at you over their shoulder as they paced anxiously away. They seemed to be calling you. Perhaps they were just hoping you would call out to them. They suffered terrible skin rashes and limped, like many of the strange men and women who stood loitering in doorways, or pushed large shopping carts about. These parts of the city were like some postnuclear landscape. These broken people had survived the extinction of an entire civilization. There was something admirable about them, about their rashes and strange growths and misshapen features. They drank very cheap wine out of paper bags. Sometimes I stood and watched, and they offered me some. I always refused. It was not because I was afraid of contamination. It was because I was afraid I might contaminate them.

  “How you doing, Johnny? How you doing, baby?” The sexless old woman had a faint gray beard and a pale face. “You coming home tonight? I’ll fix your bed. You come home tonight and I’ll fix your bed.” Her fingernails were dirty and untrimmed. She held in her hands a gruesomely stained and tattered paperback copy of The Hite Report on Female Sexuality.

  “Johnny’s dead,” I told her. “Johnny died last night in the hospital of tuberculosis. He asked why you weren’t there. He asked why you weren’t even there to say good-bye.”

  Sometimes I walked all night through unmapped and remote parts of the city that might have been only dreams. I remember long dark alleys filled with yowling cats. I remember men dressed as women, and women dressed as men. I remember bodies asleep or dead, and when I touched them with my foot they didn’t stir or respond in any way. Every few blocks or so I might find a well-lit liquor store open where I could purchase cigarettes from an indifferent clerk who watched X-rated movies on his videotape machine. I remember horrible-looking men who called out to me when I passed. Sometimes they might follow me. Their bodies seemed to have collapsed inside their matted gray clothes. Sometimes they emitted terrible, half-human sounds, and I would run away. I don’t remember what was real and what wasn’t during those long restless walks I took far away from my home. I only remember moving deeper into the buried countries of my imagination, where one found one’s way purely by instinct. I could never be sure where I might arrive next. By now, of course, I had said good-bye to California altogether.

  “IT’S NOT A plot or anything, Phillip,” Beatrice told me. “You’re not history. You’re not what things happen to. You’re just a little kid, Phillip, who’s got a number of severe personal problems right now. I’ve never suggested this sort of thing before, but maybe you should see a counselor. Perhaps you should seek professional help.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. This was the rage I loved. I could drink and rage like this for hours, if only someone was there to inspire me. “Fuck you, Beatrice. I know what I’m fucking doing. I don’t need any fucking body. I don’t need you or Rodney. I don’t need any fucking body to tell me what I should be doing.”

  I wasn’t even listening for the click of the extension. Silence emerged suddenly from the telephone line like an official statement. It was the world of electricity. It was the world of pure force.

  “Fuck you, Beatrice,” I said. “Just fuck, fuck you.”

  EVENTUALLY OF COURSE even Beatrice stopped returning my calls, and at night I nervously explored my neighborhood and the dark, abandoned playground of the local elementary school I had never attended. On this grass, and among these swings and monkey bars, children my own age played every day at appointed times. They ate their lunches on these splintering wooden benches, underneath these deliberately shady (and smog-tarnished) elms and sycamores. They took their school textbooks home and, after they had completed their homework, they were permitted to watch TV, or invite friends over. In class they constructed synonym wheels with colored paper, scissors, paste and a dictionary. They banged wooden blocks together. They presented staged dramas about ecology, history and tooth decay in the echoing, cathedral-like auditorium. Tanbark and blacktop, hopscotch and four-square diagrams, softball diamonds and backstops, volleyball chains whispering against tarnished steel poles. At night, encircled by the sloped hills and hedges and the higher streetlamps, the shadows were gigantic here. For me childhood seemed like a sort of ghost town. It was ancient history. Its remnants hung about me like some forlorn and noble calculus, Stonehenge or the pyramids.

  It was as if I didn’t even exist anymore. I didn’t have a home. I didn’t have friends. I didn’t even have a mom. I just had the shadow of him, him in my house, him with the key to my car, him with the checking account now, and my mutual funds, and my T-bill account, and my government bonds and silver certificates. The emerging shadow of him with the MG, the beeping calendar watch, the Filofax, the Ralph Lauren cologne.

  It was hot out here, even at night. The smog and city lights of the San Fernando Valley extended into the sky, absorbing stars, galaxies, even notions about the way worlds worked. It didn’t even feel like loss anymore. It didn’t feel like dispossession or grief.

  “I can’t go back there,” I said out loud. “But I can’t go anywhere else.”

  On the suburban streets and avenues surrounding the schoolground car doors slammed shut. Entire families were coming home together from movies, pizza parlors, bowling alleys. The doors of houses and garages opened and closed as well. Lights went on and off. A dog began to bark.

  “Hush, Luke!” someone shouted.

  “You can mope and feel sorry for yourself all you want,” Pedro said, obscured by the bristling darkness. “But I don’t think that’s going to change anything, do you? I think it’s time you started taking responsibility for yourself, and stopped blaming everything that happens to you on everybody else.”

  “I don’t hate him,” I said.

  “But you want him out of the way.”

  “I understand how he feels. I know he just wants to help.”

  “But look what he’s done to your mom.”

  “He transferred most of my stocks into money market accounts at just the right time. He saved me almost a thousand dollars.”

  “You can’t even control your drinking anymore. You can’t control when you drink, or how much.”

  “I’m just like him. Beatrice is right. Dad and I are exactly the same man. I’m like a homunculus, Pedro. It’s like Dad’s the body, and I’m the DNA. That’s the unit measurement of life. That’s where all the most complex, unconscious decisions are made. They’re made every day when we’re not looking down inside the DNA.”

  “He’s taken the keys to your car. He’s locked your car in the garage.”

  “He’s a very successful businessman.”

  “He won’t let you touch your own money.”

  All of the sky’s stars were invisible tonight. The sky was only a haze of city lights. And this bristling noise–the noise of high crisscrossing power lines and tall streetlights.

  “I don’t know what to do, Pedro.”

  “You know what to do.”

  “I’m completely confused. I can’t think straight anymore.”

  “You know what to do.”

  I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasn’t like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated everywhere. Hidden technicians monitored, taped, replayed and edited. Truth could be collapsed and disarranged. Life was not fact, but montage. I might even be an actor playing somebody else’s role. My mind might be the stage upon which some cultural drama played.

  “You tell me, Pedro.” I couldn�
��t see him anywhere. “You tell me what to do.”

  The entire universe took a long deep breath. I was part of that universe. These planets, these stars. This was my real home.

  “Kill him,” Pedro said. “Kill him. Kill him tonight in your mother’s bed, just like Hamlet. Kill him at breakfast–I’ll show you how. You can run him down in your car. You can poison or cut him. You can strangle him in his sleep. But kill him. Kill him anyway you can. Kill him now, Phillip. Kill him now. Kill him now.”

  CHEMISTRY

  _________

  19

  “GOOD morning, Phillip.”

  Dad was wearing a three-piece pinstriped navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit. He was wearing leather Rockport shoes, a white knit tie, matching 24-carat monogrammed cuff links and tie pin. Everything looked really good on him. My father, I had to admit yet again, was a very handsome man. He looked much younger, in fact, than I felt. He took up his folded cloth napkin and sat down. Each morning I would begin setting the breakfast table as soon as I heard Dad’s shower start up in the master bathroom.

  “Decided to join us back in the real world again, huh, son?” Dad poured ringing Cheerios into his blue ceramic bowl. “I’m glad.”

  Cheerios are a happy cereal, I thought. I hadn’t slept all night, and was sipping my fourth cup of black coffee. Cheery Ohs. Cheerios.

  Dad opened the massive Times and deftly disengaged the Business section. I was gazing dully at the muted yellow standing lamp in the dining room. My mind was keen with adrenalin, but my body sagged.

  “Gold’s up,” Dad said behind his paper.

  “I’ve been thinking, Dad. I’ve been thinking a lot about us lately. You know. You, me. Mom.”

  Dad’s paper minutely rustled. The rest of the Times lay massive on the table like a fish tank. The front page said things about the Middle East, unemployment, presidents, Taiwan. Someone had survived an attempted assassination. Someone else had just been born.