The Illumination

by Kevin Brockmeier

  At work, Carol Ann took to scouring the Internet for images of political and business leaders with the angry flush of renal disease, the barbed-wire knot of a blocked artery, or any of the hundreds of other telltale patterns of resplendence she had learned to recognize. She included these pictures in her news packets without comment. And if her hand flared with pain while she was delivering a hard copy to her boss, and if the silver light of a toothache shone from his mouth as he said thank you, the two of them might make a small motion of their heads in sympathy, but they would not say a word. It was important that the workplace remain professional. They all tried their best not to acknowledge one another’s suffering. Even when one of the receptionists came in with belt-strap bruises radiating through the front of her shirt, wincing each time she reached to open the filing cabinet, the rest of the staff avoided saying anything to her. It was almost noon that day before Carol Ann found the woman inspecting her stomach in the bathroom mirror and was forced to ask her if she was all right. She met Carol Ann’s eyes in the glass, shook her head in disbelief, and repeated the question: “Am I all right? Am I all right? Am I all right?” It was like a chant or a song, four hard beats, and for the rest of the day, as Carol Ann sat hunched over her computer, surveying the leaders of the world, in all their wounds and illnesses, the phrase kept replaying itself in her mind: Was she all right? Was she all right? Was she all right?

  Nearly a month had passed since she sliced through the tip of her thumb. One evening she arrived home to discover another package from her ex-husband waiting by the front door. This time the seams were covered by only a few strips of masking tape. Even with her good hand cramped from typing, she was able to steady the box against the kitchen counter and open it. Immediately beneath the lid was the front section of the Financial Times, and beneath that was a magazine called How to Spend It, and beneath that were hundreds of red plastic drinking straws. She knew how his mind worked, knew that wasting her time was a favorite mean little game of his, and right away she guessed what he had done. She still had to sort through forty or fifty straws, though, blowing into each of them with a hard blast of air, before she found the one into which he had rolled her alimony check. It shot out with the quiet phut of a spitball, landing upright between the ribs of the dish drainer. His usual petty degeneracy. She could picture him leaning back in a chair somewhere, grinning triumphantly, bowing his hands out to crack his knuckles. I love the way your face falls whenever you see my handwriting on an envelope. I love how easy it is to aggravate you. I love waking up next to someone else in the morning. For a moment she allowed herself to contemplate leaving an angry voice-mail message for him—she could threaten to file suit against him for her medical expenses, or for malicious wrongdoing—but the truth was she had injured her thumb by her own carelessness, she and no one else, and anyway he had changed his phone number, and she did not know the new one.

  That Friday, she had an appointment to get her stitches removed. They were the dissolving kind, designed to be absorbed into her body, but her physical therapist had noticed that the tissue around the threads was inflamed and suggested that she look into having them taken out by a professional. On the highway a car had wrapped itself around a bridge stanchion, spilling blue cubes of windshield glass over the carpool lane. Carol Ann merged into the long line of drivers slowing to gape at the light show, creeping past the police cars, the ambulance, and the curve of orange cones, until her exit opened up and she could punch the gas and speed free of the fold. The hospital revealed itself through the flowing green of the pine trees. She parked and went inside. Soon an orderly in brown scrubs came to escort her into an examination room. The doctor who had lectured her about missing her follow-up appointments, Dr. Miss-Ann-Page, Dr. Misanthrope—she could not remember his real name—arrived to inspect her amputation. In a tone of weary reproach, he told her, “Fortunately for you, the wound has already sealed itself,” and, “Some people have a negative reaction to the proteins in the suture. The result is a poor tissue response. That’s all I’m seeing here, not the world coming to an end,” and finally, as he braced her hand and picked at the knot with a pair of angled scissors, “Now I don’t want any flinching from you, Miss, understand? This won’t hurt a bit.” Surprisingly it didn’t. She watched the thread sinuate through her skin, flashing in and out of sight like a black snake moving through white sand. The first time a doctor ever took her blood, she was not yet three years old, and he had pacified her by telling her that her body was filled with red water, asking, “Did you know that? Would you like to see some?” She had sat there fascinated while he pricked her arm and his syringe filled with cherry Kool-Aid. She felt a similar fascination as she followed the surgical thread passing out of her thumb. Afterward, she was left with only a pale impression of stitches on her skin, barely glowing at all. A few lambent blood-vessel blotches traced the edges, and a checkmark of scar tissue rose above the knuckle. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes.

  She was on her way out when Dr. Alstadt chased her down, placing a hand on her wrist. “So how did everything go with Dr. Kimberley?” he asked.

  “Kimberley! That’s it. I think he was angry with me about something.”

  “People always think that. He just has this manner. But your thumb is feeling better? You can get back to doing the things you love?”

  “Like tying my shoes and brushing my teeth.”

  “Exactly.”

  She found herself adopting the pose of the woman she wished to be, someone coolly self-deprecating, confident, willing to puncture her own seriousness with a shrug and a wry remark. “My plan is to take it slow, start with one tooth and work my way up.”

  “Good idea,” he said.

  He smiled nervously, looking down at the chart in his hands. She could tell that he was mustering up the courage to continue.

  “Is there something else, Doctor?”

  “Actually, yes. We’ve transferred you over to primary care. Officially, you’re no longer on the A&E registry, which means I’m not your doctor anymore. So I was wondering …” He cleared his throat. “We’re not supposed to do this, but I was wondering if you would consider letting me take you out to dinner sometime.”

  “Doctor! I don’t even know your first name!”

  “It’s Tom. Thomas. Dr. Thomas Alstadt.”

  “Dr. Thomas Alstadt.” She indicated the file he was holding. “Is that me you’ve got there?”

  He nodded.

  “Does it have my phone number in it?”

  He nodded again.

  She tapped the chart and shifted on her heel and did not glance back until she had left the building. She happened to spy him at the exact moment he stopped watching her. He was turning his face away as an orderly in mocha-colored scrubs approached him with an outstretched hand, and so he did not see the call-me gesture she threw him. But it didn’t matter—she was sure he had gotten the message.

  Her legs carried her beneath the blue sky and the pine trees with that drifty roller-skating feeling she remembered from the sunlit summer Fridays of her childhood. She kept replaying the sound of his voice—It’s Tom, Thomas, Dr. Thomas Alstadt—and laughing to herself. Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

  That it was too big for her to contain.

  That it would ebb as quickly as it had risen.

  And sure enough, late that night, she woke to find that she had not yet finished healing. Her hair was pasted to her forehead, and her hand shone with a sharp pain. She was afraid that it was starting all over again, all the hurt and debility. She could hear the high sustained note of a fever in her ears. Her life was a waste and a failure, and she had never loved another human being, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the planes of her skin and appear in some other place
. The world was unreliable. The world could turn on a dime. It was a joy to be alive when it was a joy to be alive, and it was a terror to be alive when it wasn’t. What else had she ever learned?

  It was several hours before the light subsided and she was able to fall back asleep. In the morning she drank an extra cup of coffee to clear her head. She did the dishes and watched a few hours of television, and at noon Dr. Alstadt—Thomas—called her to ask if she would be free for dinner that night. She had no other plans, and she started to give him her address, but he interrupted with, “Actually, I already have it. Your chart, remember. I hope that isn’t creepy.”

  “I never want to hear from you again. So six-thirty, did we say?”

  “Six-thirty.”

  That day, grocery shopping, her eye was caught by one of the newsweeklies in the checkout lane. The headline read, “History Is an Angel,” and beneath that, in smaller print, “Bringing Light to the Past.” She decided to buy it. When she got home, she sat down to read the cover story, a long essay about the pictorial history of the twentieth century and how it might have differed had the Illumination commenced a hundred years earlier. It was illustrated with a four-page foldout of famous photos, digitally altered to show new varieties of light emanating from them. A Spanish soldier reeling from a bullet strike, his head ringed in a silver corona. A man in a naval uniform crying as he played the accordion, a bright cloud of grief surrounding his face and fingers. The motorcade in Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963: the president leaning into the eruption of light at his temple. A group of civil rights marchers hunching against the blast from a fire hose, the tightly contained spray of pain from their bodies matching the tightly contained spray of the water. A young girl with napalm burns running naked in a dazzling aurora. A famine victim staring out of the radiance of her hunger. A dozen men in fire helmets floating like lanterns in a field of smoke. There was a terrible beauty to the images, and Carol Ann found it hard to look away from them. Her job had made her a student of popular imagery. The pictures would be reprinted in all the papers and on all the current affairs sites, she was sure of it, broadcast again and again on all the cable news networks. She began to feel uncomfortable with herself. Maybe she was just another driver who couldn’t stop gawking at a car crash. But then, in this case, wasn’t the car crash hers—or not hers alone, but hers in part, hers along with everybody else’s: the great shared car crash of modern history?

  Her thumb was still aching a little, but by that evening the glow was weak enough that she could cover it with a Band-Aid and ignore it. Dr. Alstadt arrived promptly at six-thirty. He was wearing a green silk tie, a blue oxford shirt, and bull-nosed brown shoes with a rolling pinprick pattern on top. With a comb and water, he had attempted to flatten the lock of hair on his forehead, and though he had not quite succeeded, she found the effort endearing.

  She made a gesture that encompassed his entire outfit. “Spiffy.”

  He wrinkled his lips. “Thank you very much. So are you ready to go? I’ve made reservations for us at Jacques and Suzanne’s.”

  “Just give me five more minutes.”

  She showed him into the living room and left to brush her teeth and reapply her lipstick. She looked herself over in the full-length mirror, kicking her leg up to tug a thread from her skirt, then smoothing a ruck out of the fabric. It was years since she had been on a date, and though he had already seen her at her worst, or at least what he must have presumed was her worst, high on narcotics and stained with her own blood, she said a prayer that if she presented herself to him with enough poise and self-possession she might erase that other woman from his mind.

  She returned to the living room just in time to see him taking the journal up from its spot on the walnut table. “What’s this?” he said.

  “That—it’s not mine.”

  He let the book fall open and read aloud the first lines that met his eyes: I love the concavities behind your knees, as soft as the skin of a peach. I love how disgusted you get by purées: “Who would do that to a poor defenseless soup?” I love waking up on a wintry morning, opening the curtains, then crawling back under the covers with you and watching the snow fall. “I know what this is,” he said. His voice quieted as he spoke. He shut the book and looked up at her. “An orderly told me you had this, but I told him it wasn’t possible. Carol Ann, Mr. Williford has been looking everywhere for this book.”

  “Wait. Mr. Williford? Jason Williford? But he died. He died in the accident.”

  The prickliness in his voice made her stomach tighten. “Obviously he didn’t die. Obviously if he had died he wouldn’t be phoning the hospital all day long asking if we’ve found his wife’s book yet.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “His wife asked me to take it. She said he was dead and she couldn’t bear to read it again. That’s what she said, those words exactly. I told her it wouldn’t be right, but then she died, too. Right there in front of me. I watched her go, and I thought it was what she would have wanted.”

  “Well—” He shook his head. “All that may be true, but I still have to tell him we’ve found it. Excuse me a minute,” and he tucked the journal protectively under his arm and flipped his phone open. Within seconds he was talking to someone at the hospital. “Hello, this is Dr. Alstadt. I need you to get a patient’s number for me. His name is Jason Williford. That’s Williford, spelled W-I-L-L … yes, that’s right. Thank you.” She tried hard to listen as he dialed the number, but the sound inside her head was so much louder than the sound outside that she could barely distinguish his voice. It was like a rainstorm beating against a tin roof, thousands of drops landing like little round stones, and by the time the storm faded, she was sitting next to him on the sofa and he was repeating her name, meeting her gaze while he cocked his head to the side. He waited until he was sure he had her attention before he said what he had to say.

  “Mr. Williford wants to come over right away. I gave him your address. He’s a mess, Carol Ann. I don’t know whether he plans to build a shrine to this thing or burn it,” he told her, brandishing the journal, “but one thing I’m sure of—if he’s ever going to move on, he needs it back.”

  He was silent for so long that she thought he might have finished, but eventually, pausing to take the weight of his words, he continued. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m sorry about that. I believe you when you say it was an accident, and I’m sure you never intended to hurt anyone. But you need to know that you’ve taken the most terrible month of this man’s life and made it that much worse.”

  He gave her hand a consoling squeeze. She felt as if he had slapped her face.

  For a while the two of them waited on the sofa. She thought, This is not really happening, and also, In an hour this will already have happened, the same phrases she had found herself repeating as the orderly wheeled her onto the elevator to have her hand disfigured.

  Soon enough a taxi arrived in the driveway. Its motor halted, and she heard a pair of crutches tapping up the walk. A few seconds later the bell rang. She followed Dr. Alstadt down the front hall, rushing ahead of him at the last second to open the door. Outside there was the flexing coolness of a spring breeze. She stood there in it with her hand on her chest, the doctor beside her in his shirt and tie, before them a man with a look of breaking sadness in his eyes, all of them glowing in the darkness.

  Jason Williford

  The reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound; there is something more important than this wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.

  —Whittaker Chambers

  In the accident he had cracked his sternum and three of his ribs, dislocated his right shoulder, fractured his pelvis, and knocked identical wedge-shaped fragments out of his front teeth. The steering column had crushed his right knee. A ballpo
int pen, flung loose from the coin tray, had perforated his stomach. The side-curtain airbag had bruised his left eye, and at first, after the swelling went down, he presumed that the light he saw leaking from his injuries was a result of the contact lens the doctor had prescribed, designed to keep the scab beneath his eyelid from scratching his cornea. Then someone told him about the Illumination, and he understood that the same thing was happening all over the world. Everywhere, everywhere, in bars, locker rooms, parks, and emergency wards, the wounded were burning with light.

  He could see his own lesions shining through the bandages on his shoulder, the cotton compress on his abdomen, the pins and netting of his leg harness. He was aware of the pain, but ever since he woke from surgery, his senses had been buoyed up on a sea of narcotics, and as he lay there staring at the contours of his limbs, it seemed to him that he was watching a distant cloud bank flashing with lightning. Somewhere far away the rain was falling straight and hard. The sand was pockmarked with raindrops. It was all so lovely and mysterious. And yet for the nurses who came every few hours to change his dressing and adjust his drainage tubes he had only one question: “Can I see my wife? Will you check on her for me? Her name is Patricia. Patricia Williford. Patty.”