The History of Luminous Motion (11 page)

“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.”

_________

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.

“I’m
not proud of the way I’ve been behaving,” I said. I was still staring at the
yellow lamp. My body seemed to be shifting. Or perhaps it was the house that
was shifting under me. “It’s not like I’m selfish. I know things haven’t been
easy for you either, Dad. What with Mom pregnant and all, and me just sitting
in my room feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t been helping much around the house.
I haven’t been keeping up the yard.” My first and only substantial memory of
Dad was much like this. We had been divided from one another by the thin fabric
of Mom’s stomach. He had said things to me in his deep voice. The words had
reverberated in my warm, amniotic placenta like chimes in an iron bell. “I’m
going to try and make it up to you,” I said. Now my words reverberated, now my
words filled things. The Formica table, the plastic chairs, the dishes in the
cupboard, the bills on the microwave. “I think it might make things better for
all of us.”

With
a flourish, Dad shook the leaves of his newspaper back into conformity and
refolded them. Dad’s face was flushed and slightly sunburnt. I was beginning to
suspect a sunlamp in Dad’s office. He was smiling. He, too, thought things
would soon get better for all of us. He suggested a movie that afternoon; he would
take off early from work. Or a baseball game. The Los Angeles Dodgers, as I
understood, were our home team.

Yes,
handsome. Very youthful.

I
told him I’d think about it–I had many errands to run that day. Maybe
tomorrow–or better yet, next week. Sometime that afternoon there were a
few things I needed to pick up at the hardware store. Dad loaned me his Visa
Gold card.

We
were both still smiling very energetically at one another when Dad left for
work.

THE
BODY, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those
things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They
emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or
simply discarded. The promise of the body is firm and intact. It’s the only
promise we can count on, and we can’t really count on it much.

“We’ll
need this,” Pedro said. We were touring the hard aisles of Ace Hardware and
Plumbing Supplies. I was pushing the Ace Hardware shopping cart, on which one
eccentric wheel wobbled and spun contradictorily. “We’ll need this, and this,
and this and this. We’ll need one of these. And we’ll need one of these.” Finally
we decided on a large steel toolbox with trays that extruded when you opened
the toolbox lid. I was very impressed with Pedro’s knowledge of tools. He knew
which ones had the sharpest blades and points. He knew which ones were built to
last.

“My,
my,” the checkout lady said. The checkout lady had very gray hair. She wore an
official red Ace Hardware apron and nametag. The nametag said her name was
Dora. “You look like you’re going to start your own little business.” She held
herself with such ardent restraint I knew she could barely prevent herself from
patting my “tousled” head. She took Dad’s Visa Gold card.

“Did
your father tell you you could use this?” Dora asked, still beaming her flawed
white dentures.

I
offered to show her my ID.

“No,
no. That’s fine.” Doris ran the card through the gutter of an electric scanner.
“You’re a very industrious young boy,” she said. “How old are you, dear?”

“I
was eight years old last November,” I said. Then I carried the toolbox back up
the street to my house.

The
tools fitted snugly into their appropriate compartments. The lid of the toolbox
closed securely. It was like a body with its tidy organs hidden inside by warm,
glistening envelopes of tissue.

“Where’d
you go, Pedro?” I asked.

“You
didn’t need me around. You had your dad’s credit cards. You had all you needed.
You didn’t need me.”

Only
after I urged him repeatedly did Pedro show me how to fit the gleaming hacksaw
blade into the firm steel handle. Outside it was hot and sunny. The sun-dazed
birds in the trees didn’t make a sound. Later I stored the pregnant toolbox in
my closet under a heap of new clothes Dad had been buying me over recent
months. When I closed the door I could still detect the gravity of it there. It
seemed charged with its own imminence. It cooked there, like the dashboard
lighter in the days of Mom’s luminous motion.

“IF
DAD’S BODY was a house, Mom, what kind of house would it be?”

“It
would be a very big, safe, well-built house with stone walls and turreted
balconies. It would be made from the best materials. It would be perfectly
designed to benefit the needs of its specific occupants.”

“Would
it have heavy doors?”

“The
heaviest.”

“Would
there be alarms? What sort of alarms, Mom? Sonic or wire? Would they be hooked
up to some private agency, or to one of those shrill fire bells? Would there be
dogs, Mom? Would private guards check the place out whenever people were away?”

“Sonic,”
Mom said. “Everything in this house will be clean and compact. There won’t be
any wires or cords to tangle or confuse you. Everything will be in its proper
place.”

“Will
I have my own room?”

“We’ll
all have our own rooms. Our own bathrooms and baths. We’ll have private brick
fireplaces and balconies. We’ll have well-equipped bars and portable color
televisions in every room hooked up to satellite-dish reception antennas.”

“Will
there be a yard?”

“A
vast green expanse of it. You won’t even be able to see let alone comprehend
its gate. There’ll just be a distant green vanishing point. You’ll think you’re
losing your sight. You’ll feel like you’re living on your own little planet, a
planet with abrupt horizons and green earth. Your eyes will strain and water if
you try to take in too much of it at once.”

“Is
it in the country?”

“It’s
in the city and the country. That’s how big it is.”

“At
night can you see the stars?”

“You
can see the white buzzing band of the Milky Way. Every star in the sky shining
at once. It won’t seem like light, but matter. It will weigh against you like
mass. It will shine like gold. You’ll be lying on the green grass at night and
try to reach out for it. You’ll try to touch it. Your hand will ache, just
thinking about it.”

“I
can enter Dad’s house any time I want.”

“Of
course you can. It’ll be your house too. You’ll have your own key.”

“I’ll
have keys to all the rooms.”

“Except
the secret ones.”

“But
even then, I can peer in the windows. I’ll be allowed in the secret rooms when
I’m older.”

“When
the time comes, you can discuss that with your father.”

“I
only want to go into rooms Dad’s already been in himself.”

“You’ll
have to be careful.”

“I’ll
find thick complex networks of lymph and artery and tissue there. Fatty
deposits, moist and cellular, like the eggs of fish or amphibians. The hard
moist marrow filled with yellow matter. Renal ducts and spongy scoops of liver.
The hard muscled heart. The body’s stringy muscles knitting ribs and shoulders
and stomach. Bones articulated with other bones.”

“That’s
all none of my business,” Mom said. She was staring at the television screen.
Neon cash amounts flashed on an enormous multicolored board. The faces of celebrities
beamed and flushed. One hugely happy and obese female contestant began to cry,
surrounded by gigantic photographs of all the wonderful, exotic places she
would soon be visiting. “That’s all something you’ll have to discuss with your
father.”

I
FELT THE cold strobing black atoms humming around me in the darkness as I
swayed back into my room through the swirling hallway. It was just Mom and me
again. Mom in her room with the baby growing inside her like a secret, like the
secret promise of bodies, and me in my room across the hall with Pedro,
spinning our thin schemes of savagery and mutilation, trying to push Dad into
the future again where he belonged, into the future’s deep dark earth where the
black atoms hummed and spun like elementary planets.
 
Mom and I had grown so far apart we could understand one
another again. Ours was a cellular complicity. Even when we lived in different
countries and spoke untranslatable languages we still knew each other. Mom knew
what I had to do and approved with a covert dense resignation. It was an
approval that made Mom’s body hard and perfect and safe.

“That’s
a Conready steel file,” Pedro said, showing me how to hold it. “Feel that
weight. There’s a lifetime guarantee on that sucker. You want to know how many
steel tool manufacturers offer a lifetime guarantee on their merchandise? I’ll
tell you. Not too damn many, that’s how many. Not too damn many at all.”

I
was suffering giddy delusions of grandeur. I considered writing the local
newspapers and confessing all my plans. Then later I would send them
photographs of what I had done to Dad while they stood helplessly by, pretending
authority over world events. I felt like an astronaut who had just returned
from deep space and the exploration of rich worlds inhabited by aboriginal
cultures and convoluted blue cities into which random asteroids regularly
crashed. My mind and knowledge were astrally privileged; I had returned to live
in a world of tiny, ineffectual ants. Just as the baby was assembling itself in
Mom, I now felt Mom assembling herself in me. Everywhere I went I went with
Mom’s implicit consent. Everything I did I did at Mom’s unspoken command. I
felt incalculably brave. I felt invulnerably correct. I felt like science or
politics. I had broken the cipher of eternal language; I was learning new words
about the real universe, and with this eternal language I would live forever. Words
were what mattered, not bodies, not things breathing, vulnerable and vile. Life
was a hard word, or a sentence filled with hard words. The process of living
was not a problem of biology but of grammar. One simply needed to know how to
arrange oneself within the proper sentence. One simply needed to comprehend not
one’s substance or actuality, but rather one’s relationship with the world’s
other hard objects. One night I was filled with such weightless soaring
arrogance I even called Beatrice and confessed everything.

“You
can’t fool me, Phillip. Don’t call me up at home just to hand me this line of
nonsense.” I heard the pronounced puff of Beatrice’s lips against her filtered
cigarette. She exhaled the smoke with a long theatrical sigh. “You love your
dad. You’d never do anything to hurt him.”

“I
hate him.” I was finishing the last of Dad’s Wild Turkey, garnished with a
splash of crushed ice. “It’s all going to work out perfect. I know exactly what
I’m doing because I’ve done it all before.”

“You
can’t
hate
him, Phillip. He’s your
dad
.”

“I’ve
worked it all out. I know exactly what I’m going to do.”

“You’re
going to kill him,” Pedro whispered, somewhere in the dark.

“Isn’t
that just like a man,” Beatrice said. “To say he knows what he’s going to do
when he hasn’t got any idea what he wants or who he is to begin with. Who the
hell are you, Phillip? That’s the question I’d like answered. Not what stupid
things you’re going to
do
.”

“Kill
him,” Pedro said. “Kill him, kill him, kill him.”

“I
hate him,” I said.

“
You
hate
him
, Phillip? That’s just what I mean, isn’t it? Man’s myth of
intentionality.
I
do things to
you
. Predication. Subject and object. The
dream of a perfect cosmic grammar. Well, dream on, kid. Dream on till you’re
old and gray. Because you’re old already, Phillip. You’re already older than
your own dad. If you want to know the truth, I think I like your dad better. At
least he tried to make things work without bullying everyone all the time, like
you or Rodney. In fact, Phillip, I think I like your dad a whole lot more than
I’m beginning to like you.”