The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

“I don’t think this case is exactly cut out for your usual foster home.”

  “What do the parents think?”

  “The father wants to take him to his home in Bel Air. He’s pretty well off. He says he’ll bring in hired help. He promises to keep a close eye on the kid for the next few years or so. He’s going to hire private tutors and keep him out of school. He’s going to bring in clinical psychologists. One doctor he’s hired already wants to try some things on the kid with insulin. I say we give the kid back to his parents.”

  The men grew silent for a while. I sat quietly in my chair, trying not to look at any of them.

  “What do you think, Phillip?” the most self-confident of the men asked me after a while. He crossed his hands on the thick manila folder. His hands formed a wedge that was aimed at my heart. “You’ve heard us discussing your future. Have you any ideas about where you’d like to spend the next few years of your life?”

  I looked at the man. His dark hair was cut short in a bland, official style. He wore thick plastic-framed glasses.

  “I guess I don’t really,” I said. “I guess I’ll be happy to do whatever you gentlemen think best.”

  THE WARM REALITY of my small, institutional room was growing dimmer and more fluid each day while I lay on my bed, contemplating my freshly designed mantras and the world’s annihilation and rebirth in the form of pure, rarefied and immaculate spirit. I was no longer concerned with what crimes I had committed, nor what penalties I might suffer for them. Life itself is a penalty of sorts, and the whole world its own infallible crime. We were all in it, we all lived it. Perhaps we weren’t responsible for this awful mess, but if we weren’t responsible, then I thought it pretty safe to assume that responsibility in itself didn’t really mean anything. Like Mom, we did not die or cease to exist so much as awaken to a more enduring and unfathomable life. Once we awoke, this world wouldn’t matter anymore. We wouldn’t even know where we were. We wouldn’t remember who we had been, or care too much about what we were to become. Being would only matter then, and nothing else. Now that I was saved, now that Mom had sacrificed herself in exchange for my firm redemption, I believed salvation was possible for the world too. I believed anyone could find ultimate happiness, just like my mom had, just like I was finding it now.

  “Tall,” Officer Henrietta told me.

  “Short,” I said quickly. I liked this game because when I played it I could feel myself starting to disappear, leaving behind nothing but my automatic words. I could briefly glimpse the world into which Mom had vanished. If you played the game long enough, you completely forgot you were playing any game at all.

  “Big.”

  “Little.”

  “Dog.”

  “Cold.”

  “Friend.”

  “Suffering.”

  “Hurt.”

  “House.”

  “Desire.”

  “Warmth.”

  “Father.”

  “Blood.”

  Officer Henrietta put down his stack of file cards and made a succinct notation on the plywood clipboard. He took his cigarette from the ashtray and looked at me.

  “Mother,” he said. He took a long drag from his cigarette. He did not exhale right away. He squinted a little, as if he were trying to peer inside me.

  I looked at Officer Henrietta. I deeply desired one of his menthol cigarettes, but I had recently decided to give up nicotine, as well as all earthly substances that left me indebted to mere matter.

  “The history of motion,” I said after a while.

  Officer Henrietta exhaled the smoke slowly. A fine, gritty mist expanded in the flat spaces between us and then evaporated. “What’s that?” he asked. He was talking more slowly now. We had begun playing a different sort of game entirely.

  I held my folded hands braced between my legs. This room was very cold all of a sudden. I suspected someone in some deep, secluded and inviolate security nexus had activated the formidable air-conditioning.

  Officer Henrietta and I continued to gaze at one another for almost a full minute.

  “Nothing,” I said. I watched Officer Henrietta crush out his Kool in the glass Denny’s ashtray. “Can I please go back to my room now?”

  Officer Henrietta sighed. At times like this I felt very sorry for Officer Henrietta.

  ONE MORNING I was escorted not to Officer Henrietta’s office but rather to a wide asphalt parking lot where a gray, nondescript car awaited me. Without further ceremony or discussion I was transported to the busy corridors of a Valley hospital, through avenues of pale sunlight and fading adobe shopfronts and streets filled with cars and potholes and roaring buses. From outside the hospital appeared very dark and ominous, like some corporate office building with dark cement walls and reflecting glass windows. I was taken into a cool lobby and then into an elevator’s tinkling Muzak. Women and nurses smiled at me, then frowned at the stern obdurate guard beside me who gripped my pale hand. I was taken to a private room where a beautiful woman lay exhausted in a bed, and a man and another woman stood at the window beside the bed. When I entered the room, everybody looked at me.

  “I’ll be right outside,” the guard said. She was a woman. She went outside and closed the door.

  “How are you, Phillip?” the man said. The man wore a large bandage across the right side of his face, and there were a few visible lines of stitches across the bridge of his nose and down one side of his neck. A second woman with sun-blonde hair stood beside him, her arms folded, and glared menacingly at me. This was her room, she seemed to be telling me. These were her friends, this was her family. I wasn’t wanted here. At any moment, she could ask me to leave.

  The man stepped forward, and I heard other bandages brushing dryly underneath his clothes. He stepped with a slight limp. He held his body stiffly. He took my hand and sat down with me on a pair of chairs beside the bed. “Your mother’s still asleep,” the man said. “She’s all right, though. Don’t be frightened. At three thirty this morning your mother gave birth to a nine-and-a-half-pound baby boy. Isn’t that exciting, sport? I wish you could have been there. It’s such a miracle, watching a baby being born.”

  The man sat there staring at me, but I just looked at the sleeping woman in the bed. She was very beautiful, for those who like women with dark hair and fair skin. Her hair was a mess, though. And without any makeup she probably looked a lot older than she really was.

  “This is my sister,” the man said, indicating the severe woman beside the window. “This is your Aunt Sally from Phoenix.”

  Aunt Sally hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She was packing a cigarette against the ledge of the window, just sitting there and looking at me. Her cigarette went tap tap tap. A sign over the sleeping woman’s bed said NO SMOKING PLEASE. If Aunt Sally doesn’t like the way I look, maybe she’s the one who should leave, I thought.

  Aunt Sally showed the man her cigarette. “I’m going outside for one of these,” she said. It was as if she had read my mind.

  The man nodded at her and she left.

  “I’ll be right outside,” Aunt Sally added, and closed the door behind her.

  The man and I sat together for a while and watched the sleeping woman. The man held my hand in his, and I didn’t mind. I knew he was trying to tell me something. He was waiting for the right moment. He thought he might be able to detect that right moment in the pulse of my hand.

  “We’re all going home together, sport. It’s a great house. It’s in the best part of Bel Air. I’m sorry you’ve had to spend so much time in that awful place, but I didn’t really have any choice. I’ve had a couple of good lawyers on it, and you should be able to come home with your mother and me tomorrow. I know things have been very confusing for you, sport. No hard feelings, I promise. But if we’re going to sort things out, we’re going to have to sort them out together, if you know what I mean. We’re going to have to work through things together in our own house, just between us three–us four now, I should say–and not give up un
til we get it right. You follow me, sport? Are you with me on this?”

  I didn’t answer. I was already growing bored with looking at the sleeping woman, so instead I gazed out the window at the white, cottony sunlight suffusing the San Fernando Valley. There was no color out there today, I thought. It was one of the Valley’s white days.

  “Would you like to go with me and see the baby?” the man asked. “We could do that right now, if you want. Before they take you back.”

  I didn’t like this man very much. I knew that right away. I didn’t really dislike him that much, either, though. I tried to be as tactful as possible.

  “Let’s not rush things, OK?” I said. Out in the distance, an oblique dark shape began to emerge from the white sky. After another moment, I recognized it. It was the Goodyear blimp.

  TWO DAYS LATER Officer Henrietta shook my hand and gave me a little lecture about growing into manhood and all the responsibilities a young man faces. Growing up is never easy, and young men face difficult problems every day, problems like sex and drugs and peer pressure. It was important to remember, Officer Henrietta explained, that a young man must learn to find truth within himself and his family, and that if a young man only knew that the people around him really did love him, he’d also know that no matter how hard the problems or how difficult the choices, he would still find his way safely through any unpleasantness the world might have to offer. “Even when you’re an adult,” Officer Henrietta said, “it doesn’t get any easier. You keep thinking it’s going to get easier, but it doesn’t. I think you just get used to the pressure after a while. I think you just become a better judge of your own character.”

  In the long pause that followed, I said, “I’m sure you’re probably right, Officer Henrietta. And I’ll keep your good advice firmly in mind. I really will.”

  “Good boy, Phillip. Now go along and pack your things. And if you ever have any problems, or if you ever have any questions and you don’t know who to turn to, you can always call me. OK? Now get going. And keep in touch.”

  “I will, Officer Henrietta,” I said, gazing for the last time around his blithe, cluttered office. I would miss it here, where the games were always clearly games, and never really mattered that much. “And I will keep in touch. I promise you. I really will.”

  28

  BEATRICE WAS RIGHT, of course. I was going to grow up.

  I moved to the big house in Bel Air with the man and woman from the hospital and was enrolled in a private school. I was given my own room, color television and VCR, and three times a week I was visited by a battery of psychologists and dieticians who examined me with clinical smiles. I grew accustomed to the spaces and geometries that lay around my large house, and for the first few months I was occasionally allowed to explore these spaces, by foot or by bike. I was never alone, however, for wherever I went covert men and women followed me in slow, very obvious automobiles. Sometimes I even saw these men and women parked beside the schoolyard where I would sit during lunchtime recesses and watch my addled, utterly inefficient classmates run their races and enact their imaginary dramas of pirates, cowboys and tycoons. The covert men and women never bothered or oppressed me. I knew they were only there to protect me. Eventually they stopped coming around and I felt a certain calm emptiness surround me; I even missed those covert men and women in a way. It was as if I had lost the only authentic family I had ever known.

  This was my home and this was my family where I did not live so much as circulate among things, events and strangers like a sort of atmosphere. Here was the man in the chair by the fire. Here was the woman in the bed near the TV. Here was the baby in the room filled with bright plastic toys. The baby was very remarkable and everybody always said so. It never cried or raised a fuss, and whenever you spoke to it, it seemed to know exactly what you were saying. “My name is Phillip,” I would say some nights after everybody else had fallen asleep, standing alone over the baby’s dark crib. “I live in the next room. Your parents support me and see to my education. When you grow up, you will be very happy. You will exercise and eat right, and be involved in all sorts of extramural sports at your school. You will fill this room of yours with many sports trophies and citations of scholastic excellence. You will eventually become involved with a pretty girl from your high school, and you will often bring her by the house. I will always live here, too, but I won’t bother you. I will always be in the next room. I will always be a moment away, in case you need anything, or an emergency arises. But otherwise, I think, it would be best if we didn’t see each other too much. I’m not trying to be antisocial. I’m just considering all the complicated logistics involved in people living together over a long period of time.” The small, intelligent baby would look up at me as I talked. Its dark, attentive eyes concentrated on my moving lips. This was a baby the man and woman of my house would eventually be very proud of. They would never feel nervous about a child like this. They would always know where it was, and generally what it was thinking. They could engage in casual conversations with it, without worrying so much about what they said, or what it might say back.

  I HAD A future now, as firm and incontrovertible as my house and my family. I would complete grammar school, junior high, high school. Perhaps I would attend USC or UCLA, and earn my degree in law, medicine or journalism. I would marry a lovely, patient woman who would bear me no more than three lovely children. I would acquire a job, my own big house, and two cars in a two-car garage. A Pontiac and a Volvo. My wife and I would send the kids to summer camp every year, to give us a little time to be together. On Christmas, we would take everybody to the house of the man and woman who had raised me in Bel Air. We would drink and sing Christmas carols. Every other year or so either I or my wife would have an affair with someone, usually someone I worked with or my wife met at one of the various regional political and charity functions she often attended. We would consider calling everything off. The house, the marriage, the formal avowals. But then we would start to grow more anxious and uncertain the further and further we grew apart from one another. We would begin to feel ourselves verging on vast unlabeled places that seemed to open up out of the earth under our feet. We would come to tearful and sudden reconciliations, reconciliations that grew quickly more formal and sensible as succeeding weeks passed. Our children would grow up. Just like me, they would raise families of their own.

  I HAVE NEVER been truly unhappy since settling down to a more normal childhood, but perhaps, at times, I do feel a little restless. On these nights, when my parents are asleep, I take out the little red sports car the man recently purchased, an MG convertible with a hard, racy little engine and quick catlike traction. I drive it out along the coast highway, or across Sunset into Hollywood, where the tacky streets are empty and somehow magical late at night after all the hookers and junkies have gone home, like the stage of an abandoned movie set. Some nights I drive south to Orange County on Highway 5, or even as far as San Clemente. The air is always pleasant at night that far south, clear and warm. There are still a few rolling hills and green pastures that have not been converted to barnaclelike condominiums, shopping plazas, hotels or bowling alleys. It is always nice just to drive and relax and not feel in a hurry to be going anywhere. It’s nice just to drive aimlessly around for a while with my own abstract thoughts and dim, fading memories of a life that has always seemed to me rather formless and abstract to begin with.

  Some nights, though, I drive to the San Fernando Valley and the house where Mom and I once lived together. The front yard has been reseeded, and a number of pine and fig saplings have been planted around the front yard, where they have already grown into substantial trees. The basement window-latch can still be slipped open with a flat screwdriver and, inside, the garage has recently been swabbed out with solvent. Cleansed of its familiar smells, even the familiar angles and architecture of that garage seem strange and unfamiliar to me now. A large Ford Galaxy automobile stands in the middle of everything like an animal presence,
rusted and spackled with Bondo, serene and almost majestic. A cat with luminous green eyes observes me from the perfect darkness between a matching washer and dryer. I go up the back stairs. The stairs have been carpeted with individual strips of green shag; the strips have been fastened down with bright red and yellow thumbtacks. I unlock the back door with a paperclip. Then I’m standing in the redecorated kitchen. Everything gleams in the darkness, aided by moonlight that falls through the cafe-style curtains. Nothing looks familiar here either, and I move into the living room.

  We learn the rules when we get older, and that’s what helps us get by. We’re not uncertain anymore. We’re not startled by the slightest sounds. As I step into the living room the only thing I find familiar here are the floorboards, which do not creak when I don’t want them to. I feel like a spider on its home web, exerting texture, balance and pressure, gliding across the surface of spaces and silver fabric. Small children never know. They don’t know why people do things, or even what they’re going to do next. Small children invent their own reasons for things and things that happen. Children are reasonable too, just like adults. It’s just that children don’t know the acceptable rules of reason yet. Children can get lost. They need someone strong to lead them. Otherwise, they can be easily led astray by the convolutions of their own minds. Childhood is not a glorious thing. Childhood does not comfort or instruct. Childhood isolates people. Sometimes, children make mistakes that they regret later on in their lives.

  This living room was not filled with fine furniture, but it was clean and functional and what is often referred to as homey. Flowers in vases, framed photographs on shelves, a crushed velvet family portrait of the Kennedys, dull paisley wallpaper, a large waiting television console, the whirling dust and fading, sun-bleached curtains. Only this linked me with the past, this whirling dust. This was the vast sound into which Mom had vanished. I thought I heard something and I turned. A tiny rectangle of light escaped from underneath one of the bedroom doors.