The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  Rodney was right–we had unleashed strange forces tonight. Severe black things that had moved up from the caverns of the dead. Every once in a while I felt them bustling invisibly past me in the street, obloid and featureless, like faintly disembodied laundry hampers. You could hear tires careening on Sepulveda Boulevard almost a mile away. Everything in the world seemed to be aligning itself with these invisible forces, assembling like military units or pieces in an intricate, vast puzzle.

  “I don’t think evil’s such a bad thing, really,” Rodney said. “It’s just something we’ve got to get used to. It’s certainly been around a lot longer than we have. It’ll certainly be here long after we’re gone. During our séance tonight I heard it speaking to me, Phillip. It said, Get on with it. Live your life. Make things happen. If you listen to Beatrice you’ll never go anywhere, you’ll never do anything. For some reason, when I heard that voice, I wasn’t really excited or anything. I felt sort of bored, really, like everything had already been figured out. It wasn’t something I enjoyed, just something I had to get over with. Frankly, that’s what it was like the first time I went to bed with Beatrice. It was like I just had to get this over with. I couldn’t get into it that much, once we’d started and I was getting the hang of it. It was like mowing the lawn or putting away groceries. I guess it’s because I’m evil, Phillip. Ethel told me that once when she was really angry. Even a teacher once–even a teacher told me once I was evil. That I’m no good, a bad seed, a black sheep. Evil is just mechanical activity, Phillip. That’s what I think, anyway. There’s no thought behind it. It just goes on and on and on. They say the universe started from a tiny ball of matter, no bigger than this toolbox. I always thought the universe would be a lot more various than that, but now I see it’s just the same stuff, stretched out all over space and eternity, filling everything.”

  We had arrived outside my house. I felt the rushing formless shapes hurrying faster around me in every direction. There was no wind, no sound. In the living room window, the light was on. The colorless heat of the television glowed steadily.

  “You can probably tell I’ve never been that big a fan of women’s lib,” Rodney said. “I say let women stay at home and talk all they want. Men are the ones that get things done.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the toolbox, which he rested against his knee. The ropes and cords were wrapped around my neck like the bandoliers of some South American revolutionary. Rodney was right. I felt bored, inanimate, sleepy. Quietly I opened the garage door, and we carried our materials up the basement staircase. Mom would be asleep by now. If we hurried, we could be finished by morning.

  25

  DAD HARDLY STIRRED on the sofa when Rodney and I entered the living room. I closed the back door and turned the dead bolt. Both the radio and television were on. On the radio Rosemary Clooney was singing:

  So kiss me once, then kiss me twice

  Then kiss me once again,

  It’s been a long long time…

  Dad lay contentedly asleep, one arm across his chest, his head tilted to one side. The bottles of Maalox stood empty on the coffee table. Dad seemed posed and forlorn, like an expired romantic youth in some pre-Raphaelite painting. On the television Tom Snyder was discussing the secret lives of “sexual deviants” with a transvestite. “Though of course if you look at it from their perspective, I guess,” Tom said, “it’s probably the rest of us presumably normal people who seem like deviants. I mean, we all do our own thing, right, and when somebody doesn’t like us they call us deviant. But for want of a better term, and since such people are often linked in our minds with the term deviant, I guess I’ll rudely refer to our next guest as just that, and hope they can understand and bear with be for a little while…” Tom Snyder chain-smoked and gestured vigorously at the camera with both hands. The close up of Tom’s head framed by his easy chair made it appear as if he were in the living room with us. The transvestite’s back was to the camera, and his voice was being distorted by the sound engineer. “It’s like waking up every day knowing somebody will find out,” the transvestite said. “Somebody close to you. Somebody who loves you and believes she knows you, and yet she doesn’t really know you at all.”

  You’ll never know how many dreams

  I dreamed about you

  Or just how empty they all seemed

  without you

  So kiss me once, then kiss me twice

  Then kiss me once again,

  It’s been a long, long time…

  Should we wake him?” Rodney asked.

  Dad’s laptop, his briefcase, his stacks of printout and papers were on the dining room table. Some coffee in a mug splotched with scummy cream. A moldering and half-eaten French-style donut on a sheet of corrugated paper towel.

  “It’s up to you,” Rodney said. “He’s under a spell I cast back at my house. I call it the Spell of the Sleeping Man. When men sleep, their souls travel around the world, trying to reshape themselves into other things. I’ve had your dad’s spirit held incommunicado. He won’t wake up again until I let him.”

  I switched off the radio. “I want to check in on my mom,” I said, and led Rodney down the hall. Mom’s bedroom door was open, and Mom was sitting up in bed. Her face was brilliant with bright cosmetics and white, grainy talcum. Her hair was bundled up in a black net cap. The light from the television flickered across her face, like radar scanning the moon. She looked like Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

  My hand rested on the cold doorknob. I wanted to pull it shut before Rodney saw her. But Rodney was already standing beside me. It was important to me not to appear ashamed. Now that Rodney saw her, I wanted him to take his time.

  “Jesus,” Rodney said after a minute. I was starting to tremble, awaiting Rodney’s judgment concerning the truest, most secret part of me. “For some reason I thought your mom was good-looking.”

  “She used to be,” I said. “She used to be really good-looking. She’s been letting herself go lately. I think it’s because Dad came back. Or maybe because of the baby.”

  Outside Mom’s bedroom window a searchlight flashed through the alley. Out of the city’s general white noise emerged the hard beating sound of a helicopter in the air. The searchlight flashed again.

  “Does she just watch TV all day?”

  “No.” I shrugged. “She talks to me sometimes. Sometimes she talks to Dad.”

  “What sort of programs does she watch?”

  “Old movies, usually. Game shows and soaps. That sort of thing.”

  “It doesn’t like give you the creeps to have her sitting there all the time with that look on her face? I think it would me. I think it would really give me the creeps.”

  “Long ago Mom and I came to a sort of understanding,” I said, and realized suddenly it was not the sort of understanding one could easily explain to a third party.

  On the television the transvestite was saying, “It was nice just to meet people who understood how I felt, and didn’t make me feel like some sort of weirdo or something. It was nice to know I wasn’t alone, and that what I was doing was perfectly normal to a lot of perfectly normal people like myself. Many of these people had prominent careers in business, advertising and even television broadcasting.”

  Rodney struck a match and took a long hit off a joint. He took two more quick hits, just to get the ember flaring. Then he handed it to me, speaking deep in his chest while he held his breath.

  “She’s knocked up, isn’t she?”

  I looked at the bright ember. A hard green seed blackened and spilled onto the rug. I stepped on it.

  “I know,” I said. “She’s really knocked up.”

  Then I pulled shut Mom’s bedroom door.

  WE BOUND DAD on the sofa with the clothesline and electrical extension cords and gagged him with a pair of his white monogrammed handkerchiefs. Dad didn’t move or make a sound or open his eyes. His face was flushed and pouting, like the face of a small child who has just awakened in the l
ap of its parents at some endless holiday party. There was something very warm and innocent about Dad now–if I still believed in innocence, that is. Occasionally, when his head lolled to one side, he momentarily snored or kicked. Dad was definitely very far away. Perhaps Rodney really had managed to arrange his spiritual kidnap. I had a pretty good idea what we had to do now.

  I was high on the marijuana and my first few sips of a Budweiser I had found in the refrigerator. Rodney was drinking Jack Daniel’s on ice, crushed glittering rattly ice from the freezer’s automatic icemaker. “It’s not what we do that matters,” Rodney said, opening the toolbox on the floor. “It’s our frame of mind when we do it. This isn’t another person, Phillip. The person inside your dad’s already dead. This is just a body filled with energy. This is a body filled with energy that we can join ourselves with and use to make ourselves stronger. We can shape, funnel and redirect it. We can use it to our own purposes.” Rodney handed me one of the sharper tools. “All right, Phillip? Do you understand? How do you feel? You ready to go?”

  The tool felt firm, like the edge of a desk, or the fender of an automobile. The weight was reassuring, in a way. But there was something in its dull edges that disturbed me for reasons I couldn’t articulate. “I don’t know,” I said. I waited for a moment. Already I felt his presence in the room, as if a large window had opened to admit a soft cold wind. He deserved to be here, I thought. It was perfectly fair. I turned and looked over Rodney’s shoulder. Pedro was sitting at the dining room table beside a stack of Dad’s business papers. “Do it,” he said. “Do it, do it, do it.”

  I looked at Rodney again just as Rodney turned to look over his shoulder at me. He didn’t look like he trusted me.

  “I feel good,” I said quickly. I didn’t want him to see Pedro for the same reason I didn’t want him to see Mom. It seemed a sort of violation. “I think we feel all right.”

  I leaned over Dad with the sharp tool in my hand.

  “This has nothing to do with your dad,” Pedro said loudly. “I don’t have a single bad word to say about him. It’s your mom we’re thinking about now, Phillip. It’s time you stopped worrying so much about your own damn self and started paying more attention to her feelings. You shouldn’t have done what you did to me, Phillip. I was good for your mom and you knew it. You only loved your dad because you knew he wasn’t any good for her. Your dad didn’t threaten you. Maybe he could destroy your mom, but he couldn’t destroy your mom’s love for you. That was all you cared about, Phillip. Your mom’s love. You don’t care what happens to other people. You just care about maintaining those private temperatures inside yourself.”

  My hands were shaking as I handed the tool back to Rodney and he handed me another, like a surgeon and his faithful, highly qualified nurse in a long intricate operating theater while young students observed from a high balcony. I felt Rodney’s hand on my shoulder.

  “You all right?”

  “I’m all right.” I took the next few tools without examining them. I felt hot and dizzy. Magnified and eccentric, the motes swirled around me in the dim light of the television. The television volume was turned down low, and someone was whispering about Islamic fundamentalism. I applied the tools, one at a time, to Dad’s flushed, warm skin. Gently, at first. My skull throbbed with a low dull ache that intensified with every move I made. It was a sharp, shooting pain at times, into my sinuses and eyeballs.

  “You know what you did, Phillip,” Pedro was saying, without bitterness and without remorse. “You did it, and now you have to know you did it. You have to know you did it, Phillip. Otherwise it doesn’t mean anything. Otherwise it’s like it never happened. Then I’d hate you, Phillip. Then I’d never forgive you.”

  My knees buckled slightly as the blood rushed to my feverish head. Pain expanded in my skull like the skin of a balloon. I handed the tool back to Rodney. I touched Dad’s hot flushed skin with my trembling fingers. There was a large blue vein under his neck.

  “He’s still breathing,” I said. “He’s still got a pulse.”

  “Of course he does. You haven’t done anything to him yet.”

  “I haven’t?” The room was turning slowly around me. “I haven’t done anything?”

  I heard the tool clatter into the steel box. Then Rodney said disgustedly, “I thought you knew how to do this.”

  “He does,” Pedro said.

  “I do,” I said, stepping away from the ambient warmth of Dad’s trussed body. “I do, I really do.” I was gesturing with both hands, trying to make the room stop moving. I heard something kick. Weight was pouring from the mouth of the Budweiser can into the thick pile carpet at my feet. “I just need a drink, that’s all. I think I’m coming down with something.” I brushed my forehead with the back of my hand. “I may be coming down with a fever. Maybe a cold or something.” Tears were forming in my eyes, and I wiped them against my shoulder. I was backing out of the living room. I didn’t look at Pedro as I passed him. Suddenly I was in the bright latex kitchen. All the lights were on. One of us had left the refrigerator door open, and the engine was humming, generating an icy mist. One of the eggs in the egg rack was cracked and exuded a yellow, inflating gel.

  “Hey, Phillip! We gonna get this over with or what?”

  I wanted Rodney to go away, but I knew he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t go away. I grasped the open door of the refrigerator and braced myself against it. The cold air rushed over me, like water in a bath. I needed this. I reached for a liter bottle of 7UP and took it to the beige-tiled kitchen counter. As I was reaching a glass down from the cupboards, I saw Dad’s note on the counter beside the matching flour, rice and sugar bins. An empty pharmaceutical vial rested atop Dad’s letter like a paperweight. The letter was printed on Dad’s Epson printer, like junk mail advertising some new MasterCard Card Bonus Club Service. The empty vial said, “Phenobarbitone 50 mg. Take one every evening for sleep.” Inside the vial was a thin white powder, like the powder you find at the bottom of an extinguished loaf of Wonderbread. I picked up Dad’s letter. Dear son, it said,

  I hope this is something you’ll understand better than your mother, who has a lot of other things on her mind right now. I just think that perhaps things will be much better for both of you when I’m gone. Please do not feel guilty about this even a little bit, since it is a decision I have made without you knowing it or having anything to do with it. I think this is the only way to provide a quick resolution for everybody, since I am certain I am suffering from some irreversible stomach cancer or maybe even something worse, since I can’t sleep and my stomach feels terrible all the time and there are worse symptoms I won’t really go into right now. Just remember that whatever happens wherever in your life, that your parents really did the very best they could to make you happy, it’s just sometimes they couldn’t stop themselves from being selfish, stupid or confused. All parents fail their children and we all have to get used to that, I guess. You’ll have children of your own someday and maybe then you’ll understand. I’m counting on you to take care of your mother after I’m gone. I know you can do it since you did very well without me before I came to make both your lives so miserable. Everything is in good shape with my lawyer, whose business card you will find attached, and whom I have carefully informed as to your mother’s condition so he will keep a good eye on her from now on. There is $5,000 cash in my wallet.

  Love,

  Dad

  I put the letter down on the counter. Immediately it began absorbing a semicircle of 7UP, causing many of the words to expand into nervy blue blotches. My hands were trembling, and I felt a slow descending warmth in my stomach. I felt insecure and dizzy. Rationality had abandoned me like a boat or a train. I wanted to grasp hold of something, but I couldn’t find anything firm enough. I heard the letter crumbling in my fist, the thin computer paper like something you’d wrap around steaks at the butcher’s. I was hot with sudden steaming rage. Dad thought he was going to leave me. He was going to abandon me and Mom and the baby.
He didn’t care what happened to us, or what sort of place we might end up. He wouldn’t even take us with him. Suddenly I recalled a solitary moment from my childhood. I was standing on the front lawn, watching Dad’s car pull out of the driveway. I was holding something in my hand–a toy truck, or a plastic soldier, or perhaps a partially macerated baseball card. It was an offering, but he wouldn’t take it. He was climbing into his big automobile and slamming shut the door. He was pulling out of the driveway, looking over his other shoulder, not seeing me. Then I was watching the taillights of his car fading in the gray dusk. I called his name but he didn’t turn around. I started to run after him. The streets were boundless, punctuated by simple trees and hedges. His car was pulling further away, he didn’t see me. I was running into the darkness. I didn’t know where I was, or where Dad was. From that day forward, Dad stopped being Dad altogether. From that day forward, Dad became somebody else entirely.

  “Hey, Phillip! This is your party, guy. We’re still waiting in here. Bring me a little more Jack Daniel’s–and while you’re at it see if you’ve got anything munchable, you know? Pretzels, or sardines or something.”

  I returned to the living room with Ry Krisp, beer nuts, Hershey’s chocolate kisses and a renewed sense of purpose. Dad thought he could go places without me. Dad thought he was a man and I was just a boy. Dad thought he was special and I was nothing. I reached into the toolbox and removed something that looked interesting. Then I stood again over Dad’s unconscious and fleeting body, like a surgeon conducting life’s most sacred rites.

  “There you go,” Rodney said. He was flicking beer nuts into his mouth with one hand; his left hand embraced his can of 7UP, into which he had poured prodigious whiskey. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Ease up–we’re in no hurry, right?”