The History of Luminous Motion

by Scott Bradfield

  “The history of motion,” I whispered. “The history of motion. Light, sound, heat, gravity, mass, life. Motion, the history of motion,” I whispered, over and over again, but I couldn’t remember, the fundamental weight of the words didn’t work. “The history, the history of light. Light and history, history and motion, motion and history…” The words were like the dust. They whirled without the frame of sentences or that dark ritual meaning which would call her forth again, out of the shadows of this lost house. The words would make the house ours again. The words would bring Mom back to earth. “The history of motion. The history of motion, Mom…” My family was very far away and inaccessible to me now. But I didn’t want to be with them. I wanted to be here. I wanted to stay here forever. I couldn’t stop crying, but I didn’t have to stop crying either. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t that I didn’t know my life had turned out for the best. But I was growing up now, so I could cry all I wanted to, even while my hands filled with the tears, even while I felt the icy wet turning in my stomach and my heart. “The history, the history of motion.” And then, as if by magic, the door in the hallway opened. A mist of pale yellow light poured out.

  The child rubbed its eyes with its fists and looked at me.

  “¿Quien es?” she asked. She was a dark formless shape, looking for the bathroom. I must have looked enormous to her.

  She pulled her tiny fists away from her dark eyes, peering at me, incredibly tiny and perfect like a tiny robot. “¿Eres tu mi padre? ¿Eres tu?”

  This was it. I was about to find what I could not find in my own big house with all the strong, independent and well-designed furniture I possessed there. If only I could remember, I could stay. I wouldn’t have to go back. Everything would be better again, it would all make perfect sense: the history, the history of motion, something about light, and living one’s life in a world where everything is always moving, and the way time takes you away from people, even people you love… But I couldn’t remember how it went. I couldn’t remember the tone or the light of it, the chords or the melody… The words wouldn’t come and I couldn’t make them.

  We stood looking at one another in the dark hallway. She was not that much smaller than me. In some ways, however, she was very much smaller.

  “Mi madre esta en la cama. La cama de mi madre es azul.”

  There was no way back unless I could remember. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember.

  “Carmelita?” a woman’s voice said. “Carmelita? ¿Qué pasa, pobrecita? What are you doing?” The woman’s voice was growing larger and more indistinct.

  I continued to cry, without any reason. I wasn’t even sad. I didn’t feel lost or lonely or forlorn. I just stood there in the heavy darkness and saw the light click on in the open doorway down the hall. I heard slippers being pulled onto feet, then the feet on the floor. In a moment, the child’s mother would appear at the bedroom door.

  Afterword to the Revised Edition, April 2013

  The History of Luminous Motion was written during one of the happiest periods of my life, which may not be apparent during some of the book’s darkest passages. I have never been a quick learner, and it took me a long time to learn how to write the sort of fiction that gave me pleasure; but after publishing a few stories in the late seventies and early eighties (each of which I found incredibly difficult, and time-consuming, to complete), during the mid-eighties I made a series of clumsy, poorly thought-out and fortunate decisions: I moved to London, a completely messy and disorganized city where I could walk endlessly and burn off all the wasted energies that often prevented me from focusing on the scenes and stories I was trying to create; I began making a precarious living writing reviews and book-reports for London publishers, newspapers and literary journals; and I discovered a series of fairly inexpensive and unstable accommodations which were just large enough for me to establish space for some books, a breadbox-sized black and white television, and my first word-processor–a large, bulky, British-built Amstrad with a blinking lime-green cursor and text which, to this day, I can still see buzzing away in my corneas whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, sort of like those weird interstellar communications Philip K. Dick claimed he was receiving before he died.

  By 1987, I was writing every day, with joy and conviction; I was always broke; and I managed to produce a series of good short stories, and the first chapter of History, over a period of about sixteen months–about the same amount of time that it had taken me to complete just one of my previous stories, such as “The Dream of the Wolf,” or “The Flash! Kid”. The first draft of History was begun in the sublet-bedroom of Colin Greenland’s house in Chadwell Heath, and completed in a dire Camden bedsit where, at one point, the kitchen was filled over with redbrick rubble from the explosive impact of London’s first (and only) recorded hurricane in October 1987. Revised over the next six months, History was, like all of my books, difficult to find a publisher for; but I was represented by my one genuinely indefatigible literary agent, Anne McDermid, who kept at it. And once it was published in New York–with some heavyweight support from Sonny Mehta of Knopf in 1989–it received many good reviews, and a respectable number of truly negative reviews, but didn’t sell as well as the publishers (or I) had hoped. After a couple of paperback editions, it went out of print. Occasionally, I receive a note from someone who claims to have fond memories of the book, but otherwise, it feels to me like a largely forgotten–or unremembered–novel. I often wish otherwise.

  History creeps up on all of us, and retyping the Knopf edition into my now far more congenial (and often far too distracting) Apple desktop, I can’t help noticing how dated this book has become over the decades–despite the fact that it was set in a sort of “timeless” suburban world and anchored to as few concrete historical references as possible. I haven’t made many corrections, stylistically or otherwise. I can’t say I find my first novel as good as I had hoped to find it–but at the end of the day, it still gives me pleasure, which is all I ask of anything I write, or read.

  It gives me almost as much pleasure to believe that now, after twenty years, readers other than myself can read it.