The History of Luminous Motion (13 page)

I
placed my hands in the pockets of my Levi’s jacket. Concealed there were the
chemicals I had wrapped in baggy sandwich bags. I couldn’t even remember what
they were anymore.

Just
chemicals, I thought.

I
asked Beatrice if she wanted me to walk her home.

“That’s
OK, Phillip.” She didn’t take her eyes off the turning pages in her magazine. “I
think I’ll stay here with Rodney a little longer.”

Rodney
didn’t look at me either. His arm remained awkwardly draped around Beatrice’s
neck. Rodney and Beatrice posed there like lovers grown bored of both themselves
and friendly cameras. They had moved out of the world of motion where I once
adored to watch them kiss and pet. They had entered the realm of family
photographs now, but it was not my family. It wasn’t even really my camera.

I
let myself out the front door without encountering Ethel. The light was still
on in her room, however, yellow and bright, and I could see it from across the
street, where I stood for almost an hour, wondering how cold she was in there
and whether she was listening, as I always suspected, for every movement Rodney
made, for every sound and every breath her cautious silence might elicit. The
light in Ethel’s room was hard, like space, not air at all. I stood on the
street corner near a flickering, buzzing lamppost. The light was already out in
Rodney’s room, and I figured they must know I was out here. It seemed to me
implicit in our relationship that I would be standing on a street corner
watching the dark window of Rodney’s room while Ethel’s light burned cold and
useless alongside it.

After
a while, Ethel’s light went out too, and, abandoned even by the abstract
movement of contrasts, I returned again to my real home.

DAD
WAS LYING on the living room sofa with the television on. Johnny Carson was
saying, “I don’t know about you, Doc, but I’ll be damned if I’ll spend the
night with Ed in a urinal, mirrored ceilings or not!” Dad chuckled feebly. One
hand was propped behind his head, the other pressed against his stomach. An
open blue glass bottle of Maalox stood beside Dad on the mahogany coffee table.
As I stepped slowly into the room, my reflection crossed the Panasonic’s dusty
screen. Dad cocked his head to see me. Then he looked back at the television.
“Hi, son. I didn’t hear you come in.” Dad took a swig from his Maalox and
replaced it on the coffee table, which showed a few faint white rings where Dad
had placed the bottle before. “I think I’ll sleep in here again tonight,” Dad
said. “I’ve been restless lately. I don’t want to wake your mom or the baby.”

“Do
you want a blanket?”

“Sure,
maybe before you go to bed. How were your friends?”

“OK,
I guess.”

“You
should bring them by sometime. I’d like to meet them.”

I
was staring at the television. “I’m sure they’d like to meet you too,” I said
emptily, without any enthusiasm. Johnny was talking about Ed’s drinking. Johnny
didn’t want to say Ed drank a lot but. Johnny’d been out with Ed a few times and
wow-a-wow-a-wowa.

“How’s
your stomach?” I asked Dad.

“I
don’t know. I think it may be getting a little better.”

I
fixed Dad strong black coffee laced with tannic acid, brought him a blanket and
a pillow from our well-stocked linen closet (stocked, incidentally, by an
invisible maid who always arrived and departed before I was out of bed in the
morning). Then I went down the hall to Mom’s room, where Mom was watching
Johnny Carson too.

Mom
was radiant, propped up by the brown corduroy backrest. On a handsome tray
beside her bed was an ice chest, bottles of Perrier, orange juice and a small
untouched bell glass of rosy port.

“Hi,
Mom,” I said.

I
could see the flickering television reflected in Mom’s eyes. Mom’s protuberant
stomach underneath the taut, tucked blanket was filled with movement, just like
Dad’s. Mom’s movement, though, was the movement of life. Molecules assembled,
deploying minerals, proteins and enzymes. Routine circulatory, digestive and
pulmonary processes were beating inside the still gelid mass of it. You could already
see the tiny red eyes. You could already hear the tiny mind learning to click,
click.

“Dad’s
sleeping on the couch tonight,” I said, crawling onto the bed beside her,
touching her blanketed stomach. “So he won’t wake you or the baby.”

“That’s
nice, dear.”

“I
want you to know I’m taking full responsibility for everything that happens
from now on.” I took Mom’s fair freckled hand between my hands. The skin was
soft and faintly translucent, knitted with fine blue veins. “I’m not going to
go drifting off again when things get too confusing or complicated. I know I
went pretty far into myself for a while there, but I’ve come out the other side
now. I’ve grown up, Mom. That means I can be a lot more help to you from now
on.”

Mom
transferred the glass of icy Perrier to her right hand. Her left hand touched
my wrist. For the first time since Dad’s arrival, Mom was wearing her expensive
wedding ring and engagement band that used to lie neglected in the bottom of
her big black purse among crumpled gum wrappers and Kleenex. “I’m sure you will
be, baby. I’m sure you’ll be a lot of help to me and your father. You always
meant well. I never thought for one minute that you didn’t mean well.”

I
fell asleep that night in Mom’s bed, with the warmth of her hand on my wrist.
This was the vital current. Beatrice’s hand, mine, and now Mom’s. It was like
genealogy, race, intertribal culture, migrating birds, evolution. The warmth
traveled from one person to another; it changed people and people changed it. It
grew warmer, it grew colder. Sometimes it grew warmer again. Soon Dad would be
a part of it too, I thought, pulling the smoky dreams into my body and face. Soon
Dad would be the warmth I shared with other people and there was nothing,
really, nothing he could do about it.

22

“THE
OCCULT IS that relative half-world into which we journey to make our own world
more real,” Beatrice said, while Rodney and I squirted Hansen’s airplane glue
into our Kleenex. I kept my eye on Rodney. “I don’t think the occult dimension
is necessarily any more invalid than our own, or more valid either. It’s just
that big black gap of things we don’t know. I think we should learn to accept
the things we don’t know on their own terms, without wondering things like, you
know. Whether we’re
really
talking to
our departed great-grandmother or not. Or whether it’s
really
the devil out there, or demons, or goblins. We have to
accept life’s gaps and lapses as well as its hard promises. I think that’s your
problem, Phillip. You need answers to everything. Something’s not real to you
unless you can use it exactly the way you want.”

Rodney
pinched shut his left nostril and applied the wadded Kleenex to his right. Then
he inhaled a long whistling rough breath and the Kleenex popped. I followed his
example, though perhaps with less ardor.

“I
mean, if you guys could just see yourselves,” Beatrice said, overturning her
book on her knee. The book was Nietzsche’s
The
Genealogy of Morals
. “Shoving that crap up your nose so you can feel less real.
Trying to move into the half-lit world of the doped, the dreaming and the
insane. Now, if you guys were just trying to experience it, I might have a bit
more sympathy for you. If you were just charting maps, trying to move to the
edges of the experiential precipice, so to speak, then I’d say you were kids
stretching your wings. It would just be another part of growing up–and a
good
part, so far as I’m concerned. But
you guys don’t think that way. You want to move into the unreal so you can turn
it into property. You want to build houses there, motels and swimming pools,
convenience stores and parking lots. You want to find escape, pleasure, pain,
spirits, things. Things you can use, just like you use those chemicals,
Phillip. You don’t care about chemistry. You don’t care about abstract knowledge–no
matter what you say. You’re just using those chemicals to kill your dad. And
that’s what this whole occult thing is all about too. So you and Rodney can
take control of everything, because that’s how you see life. Use or be used. That’s
so goddamn male, Phillip. That’s so goddamn hopelessly… oh, I don’t know. So
goddamn
penile
of you. It makes me
want to throw up. You notice I’m talking to you, Phillip, and not to Rodney. That’s
because I always expected more from you. It’s not like Rodney’s ever listened
to a word of sense in his entire life–certainly not if it would do him
one bit of good. But I always expected more from you, Phillip. I thought you
and I shared a certain unexpressed sympathy for the unknown world. I thought you
loved it as much as I did. But you’re no better than Custer. You’re no better
than the goddamn Mormons. You just want to make the unknown profitable. I guess
I’ve been disappointed in you lately, Phillip. I’ve been disappointed in you ever
since your dad came.”

A
hot burning sensation lifted high into my skull. It was not unpleasant, and
quickly diminished to a soft convincing whisper. I rested the wadded Kleenex on
my knee. I felt very good and relaxed. It was not as if I was under the
influence of anything at all. It was a sensation like breathing or drinking
cool water. A thin fog entered Rodney’s room. I heard Rodney taking another
long sniff, and when I looked at him again he was withdrawing the Kleenex from
his nose. Fragments of pink tissues were attached to the rim of each nostril
like stray confetti at the Mardi Gras.

“Pretty
heavy, huh?”
 
Rodney’s voice was
nasal and rough. He leaned back on his bed, adjusting pillows, then crossed his
arms and looked at me, grinning remotely like a forgotten relative at some
tedious family get-together. “Do you dig this stuff, dude, or what?”

Beatrice
was wrong. I did not feel more distant from the world so much as more firmly
rooted in it. I was caught among its tangled whispering earth and dense folds
like a sparrow in a blanket. Small animals hypnotize themselves when trapped by
a predator. It’s not so painful then, life’s last moment.

“Just
keep pouring more fuel on the fire,” Beatrice said, as if she were reading my
mind, or I were reading hers. “Keep acquiring more property. Keep buying more
nice pretty things and stuffing your bodies with more burgers and cheesecakes
and candy bars and bonbons. And don’t stop just because you don’t want any
more, or even because you don’t need any more. Because you always want more. You
always need more.”

I
sniffed. Rodney sat across the table from me. His expression was remote and
diffuse. He sniffed.

“She
never shuts up, does she?” he said. “All day and all night. Yap yap yap. Even
in bed when you’re doing it to her, she talks right through it. She doesn’t
shut up for one minute.” Rodney sniffed, and ran the back of his hand across
his nose. His eyes were red and bleary. “It can get pretty frustrating
sometimes.”

We
joined hands around the table, Beatrice with her armed and petulant silence,
more ominous even than her most dire predictions. Rodney and I shared our gazes
with the flickering candle flame.

“Now,
I’ve been reading up a little bit more on this stuff,” Rodney said.

I
sniffed (or was it Rodney who sniffed?)

“Now
what I should’ve done first is gone off and purified myself by drinking pure
water and meditating,” Rodney said. “But since we didn’t do it last time, I
figured we might as well skip it this time too.”

“You’ll
both end up in reform school,” Beatrice said. “You think you’re a couple of
real rebels or something. But when I look at you all I see are a couple of
little kids.”

Rodney
sniffed noisily. After a moment, I sniffed too, but more succinctly, as if to
dissociate myself from Rodney.

“Now,”
Rodney said, switching off the light and taking our hands, “let’s get down to
business.”

OVER
SUCCEEDING DAYS and weeks the three of us settled into our new routine with a
sort of grateful complacency. It was like the days of our burglaries, only more
patient and informal. I would spend the day at home watching TV with Mom on the
big bed, while Dad was either at work or sleeping fitfully on the living room
sofa. If Dad was home, I would hear him go into the bathroom every twenty
minutes or so, then the flush of the toilet. Mom and I watched the game shows
and soap operas together, and sometimes I tried to explain the rationale of
these programs to Mom’s baby.

“The
woman’s voice you’re hearing now,” I said, “is the voice of Victoria Morgan,
the youngest and very spoiled daughter of Joshua Saner Morgan, the richest man
in Creek Valley. Victoria is used to getting her way, and she’ll get it no matter
who tries to oppose her. She’s not really the mother figure in this. She’s sort
of the evil-twin type, though she doesn’t look at all like her sister, Felicia
Morgan, who’s actually a nice person. Felicia’s daughter, Jeremy, is the
illegitimate daughter of the police inspector, David Rampart. I think of her as
the sort of heroine of the show, because she’s really pretty–almost as
pretty as Mom–and she’s always trying to help her friends get out of
trouble, like when they tried to frame Tad Stevens for murder that time. When
you get out, we’ll probably watch “Heartbeat County General” every afternoon,
so eventually you’ll catch on to all the names and faces, though you don’t
really need to know all the characters and plots that well to enjoy the show.
Also, I better warn you. People are always extra serious about how they feel on
this show. They’re either
really
happy, or
really
sad, or
really
having a good time. It can get on
your nerves after a while. But it’s something you’ll get used to, I guess.”

Late
in the afternoon I would tuck Mom into bed after she had fallen into one of her
dozes, then slip down the back stairs to avoid Dad on the living room sofa, and
arrive at Rodney’s around four o’clock. Ethel would present me a small snack. We
would exchange light banter about weather and current events. If I waited long
enough, she would try to engage me in conversation about Rodney.

“Is
there anything bothering Rodney that you know about?” she might ask, while I
munched my carrot sticks, or contemplated my hot black coffee. “Is there
anything Rodney’s not telling me?”

I
tried to remain as noncommittal as possible, but confronted by Ethel’s strained
and withering sadness I could not help but offer her at least a few tiny gifts.

“It
think it’s just school,” I might reply. “He’s having trouble adjusting.” Or: “I
think it’s just his age, Ethel. You know he’s practically a teenager and all. Everybody
starts acting a little weird when they go through puberty, or so I’ve heard.”

“I
don’t know where he goes at night,” Ethel said. “People call on the phone for
him. Sometimes they’re grown men. I don’t trust their voices. They want Roddy
to meet them places. Some nights, Roddy doesn’t come back at all from these
meetings. Sometimes he’s gone for days at a time, and won’t tell me a word
about where he’s been. He won’t even call to tell me when he’ll be back.”

“He’s
just practicing a little independence, Ethel, that’s all. It’s perfectly normal
for kids his age. Especially for young men.”

“When
he’s in his room alone at night I can hear him talking to himself, saying the
strangest things.”

“He’s
just exercising his imagination. Rodney,” I assured Ethel, “has a very active
imagination, as you well know.”

“Sometimes
I get very worried, Phillip. I can’t sleep at night. I start thinking, well… I
start thinking terrible things about Rodney. I’m embarrassed to admit it. But I
start thinking maybe he’s not turning into a very nice person. I can’t help
myself. I know it’s a horrible thing to say…” Ethel turned and looked away.
Tears formed in her eyes. Her voice grew rough and swollen. “I just don’t know
sometimes.” One tear ran down her cheek.

“It’s
OK, Ethel.
 
I understand.” I
reached across the table and took her hand. “I really do understand, Ethel.
Don’t cry. Sometimes we hate the people we love. Freud said that. It’s
perfectly normal. Whatever you think, for God’s sake don’t think there’s anything
wrong. There really isn’t.”

“I
don’t mean hate.” Ethel took her hand away. She abruptly stopped crying. Her
voice had returned to normal. She gazed off at chrome fixtures on the stove,
her hands nestled together in her lap like lovers. “I mean I start having these
terrible thoughts. Roddy’s a
good
boy, and I know that. I really do. But sometimes I think, well, he may have gotten
in with the wrong crowd. I don’t mean you, Phillip, or Beatrice. I mean the
sort of crowd he hangs around with when you’re not around. Like the boys at the
bowling alley, or the boys who hang around at Shakey’s Pizza. Then there’s
those strange boys I always see outside on the street at night. There’s usually
just one of them. I can see him from my bedroom window. Sometimes he’s staring
up at me, like he knows I’m watching. They frighten me, Phillip. I’m so worried
about Roddy I can’t sleep or go to the bathroom sometimes I’m so worried. I
think it’s happened. You know, Phillip, I think Roddy may be doing it. He may
be experimenting, you know. With drugs, marijuana. Or maybe even worse.”

“Ethel,
look at me.” My voice was very firm and direct. I leaned earnestly across the
table, pushing aside a depleted wooden bowl of corn chip fragments. “Ethel,
look me in the eye.” Her hands began to fidget as her eyes rested on mine. The
hearts of her eyes were fractured and simian. Her hands began pinching at one
another, like quarrelsome crabs. “Rodney has a cigarette every once in a while.
Maybe a beer or a drink.
 
But he’s
not crazy, Ethel. He’s got his feet planted firmly on the ground, and you
know
that. I’m Rodney’s best friend and
I
know that. OK, so he likes to wear
some offbeat clothes–but that’s Rodney. He’s a trendsetter, he’s his own
man. I’m telling you–all the kids at school look up to Rodney. They’re
always imitating him. If Rodney’s going to keep one step ahead of the pack,
he’s got to go for the more courageous sorts of styles, you know? But, Ethel,
now listen to me carefully. Don’t ever,
ever
think
that
about him again. It’s just
plain wrong, that’s what it is. It doesn’t do you any good. It doesn’t do
Rodney any good. Just trust him, and trust me. Rodney’s a good kid, Ethel, and
you know that. He’s good inside–he’s good inside
here
”–I thumped my chest affirmatively with my fist–“in
here where it matters. He’s going to turn into the sort of man you’ll be very
proud of one day, Ethel. I promise.”

I
got up from the table, took the bowl to the sink and rinsed it in cold water.

“You’re
right, Phillip. You’re right. I shouldn’t doubt him. You’re right, Phillip. Oh,
you’re so, so right.” Her eyes were filling with tears and admiration for me,
even longing. Our conversations always ended this way, with her palpable desire
for me filling her eyes with tears. She wanted to keep me here, I could tell. She
wanted to keep me here forever, her adoring and adored second child. She wanted
to lift me up and hold me in her arms as tightly as any lover. I couldn’t stand
it–I finally understood how Rodney felt. I had to get away from her. I
had to get far, far away. I had to get as far away as I possibly could from
Ethel’s oppressive arms.