The Illumination

by Kevin Brockmeier

  This time he wasn’t the only one who noticed it. His teacher saw it, his mom, even his pretend dad. He and his parents were watching TV when it started. There was a gymnastics competition happening on the sports channel. Girls in leotards were tucking and whirling like amazing machines. They hopped lightly, toe by toe, along a balance beam. They ran leaping onto a springboard and flipped over backwards. Then one of them broke her leg doing a cartwheel. She fell down, and a gasp spread through the audience. Her shinbone glittered like a mirror full of camera flashes. The couch springs creaked noisily as Chuck’s parents leaned forward. At that moment, he realized they could see it, too.

  Later, he watched his mom bite one of her hangnails loose. Right away, her cuticle began to sparkle along the curve. (That was the white horseshoe around her fingernail: a cuticle.) His pretend dad nicked himself shaving, and the cut shimmered. And when Chuck pinched himself, a test, it worked perfectly. A cloud of light danced and quivered over his skin.

  On Monday, his teacher, Mr. Kaczmarek, was late to school. Rushing inside, he accidentally banged his hand on the door. The whole class watched it flicker like a slow fire. Later, at recess, Mr. Kaczmarek divided them into Bombardment teams. Todd Rosenthal stalked Chuck with one of the red balls. He said, “Let’s see you dodge this, you dumb bastard.” The ball hit Chuck hard and square on the forehead. The other kids gathered around, watching the light spread open. Every single one of them reacted exactly the same way. They began running and hurling their dodgeballs at one another. When the recess bell rang, they all filed back inside. Everyone’s skin was printed with glowing white plates of light. It took almost the whole day for them to disappear. The last one winked out just before the buses arrived.

  As usual, Chuck sat at his desk and never spoke. Technically, a “dumb” person was just someone who stayed quiet. Chuck was dumb, and everybody knew it, including Mr. Kaczmarek. But he gave Todd Rosenthal two checkmarks for saying “bastard.”

  A week passed, and still nothing had returned to normal. The president appeared on the news to give a speech. He used words like no obvious harm and further study. An awful bright silver cavity kept flashing from his mouth.

  Chuck got bored and wandered outside while he was talking. A black sports car was tilted forward onto the street. The car’s front tire had gotten wedged inside a manhole. It was lodged underground, smoking and wailing as it spun. The driver was punching the window and screaming curse words. His nose was leaking blood, shining onto his upper lip. Some of Chuck’s neighbors stood on their lawns watching him. A man in gray sweatpants shouted, “Put it in reverse!” Someone else said, “Want me to go get my winch?” The car’s engine just kept howling like a wounded animal.

  There were similar accidents, similar horrible scenes, all the time. Chuck saw stories about them on the TV at night. A bus might tip over speeding around a steep curve. The passengers would stumble from the wreck like gleaming torches. A chef might slice her hand open carving a turkey. The wound would cast a bright light over the counter. A model in high heels might fall on the runway. Her face would come up glittering from the wooden floor. Light kept pouring out of people whenever they hurt themselves.

  At first, all the grown-ups were upset by these accidents. Car crashes and mistakes with kitchen knives were nothing new. The strange glow—that was what bothered them so much. Nobody knew what to call the thing that was happening. Soon, though, within days, people began talking about “the Illumination.” The name was everywhere suddenly, a kind of secret agreement. It made the changes in the world seem less frightening.

  Chuck heard two strangers gossiping about it in the supermarket. They were old men with thick glasses and rubbery earlobes. He liked the way their teeth clacked in their mouths.

  “That war injury of mine’s lit up like Independence Day.”

  “You should’ve seen my Emmy with the arth-a-ritis this morning.”

  “And look at my trick knee shining—the damnedest thing.”

  “She can’t hardly make the coffee her hands clench so.”

  “It’s this Illumination is what it is, don’t you know.”

  One of them picked up a jar of peanut butter. “Five big ones!” he complained, and slammed it back down. Nobody but Chuck seemed to notice the way it glowed. Even objects felt pain if you struck or ignored them. Jars of peanut butter could be hurt just like people. Dirt bikes, toys, shopping carts, cereal boxes: they all could. Chuck knew—and had always known—that it was true.

  Once, at age five, he had kicked his toy train. He remembered how it hit the wall and flipped over. The chimney, made of plastic, broke off with a crack. The train looked like a hand with a missing finger. It looked like an empty shack standing in brown dirt. Chuck sat down and tried his best to repair it. The face on the front stared up at him sadly. The very worst part was the way it kept smiling. Chuck could tell that it had not stopped trusting him. It still liked him and wanted to be his friend. He had to pat its head and say, “There, there.” His mom found him crying and jamming the pieces together. How could he explain the horrible thing he had done?

  That was the day he began treating everything so gently. He never threw his toys or knocked them together anymore. He made sure that both his shoes were always tied. (The right one was a boy, the left a girl.) Once a week, he washed and dried his rock collection. He used all sixty-four crayons when it was coloring time. The trees he drew might be blue, black, or yellow. It didn’t matter, as long as every color was happy. Chuck had eight stuffed animals—mostly bears, plus one elephant. At night, he arranged them all carefully on his bedspread. He stroked the animals softly and smoothly on their backs. Then he slipped his body delicately into place beneath them. He wished them eight separate goodnights before closing his eyes.

  Wherever he looked, he could see the light in things. Everything looked silver when you saw it in a mirror. Everything was helpless and needed to be saved from harm. There was the big plastic upside-down water jug at school. There was the stone birdbath in his next-door neighbor’s yard. There were metal coins and the chrome handlebars on motorcycles. Trees gleamed with sap, and rocks sparkled with hidden crystals. Some tennis balls glowed bright green in the ordinary sunlight. Lamps, clocks, and televisions all shone with an inner light. Was it impossible that what they shone from was pain?

  Chuck’s duty, he believed, was to watch over it all. He was big, strong, noble—the Superman of lifeless objects. Objects did not understand how dangerous the world could be. They were simple, childlike, and they could not protect themselves. He hated to see them hurt, hated it beyond words. And that was why he had to steal the book.

  It belonged to the man who lived down the street. According to Chuck’s parents, he had undergone a terrible accident. One rainy day his car had slid into a pillar. He survived the crash, barely, but his wife did not. Afterward, he spent a whole month recovering in the hospital. He came home oozing light from his knees and stomach. He was like a thin white skeleton on his crutches. “The poor son of a bitch,” Chuck’s pretend dad said.

  One night Chuck noticed the man carrying a book inside. The book ached with the hard light of something broken. Chuck could see its unhappiness melting straight through the covers. It was like a little sun shining across the street. The man walked past a window into his living room. Then he stopped and sat down and the light vanished. The next day, Chuck decided to get a closer look. He waited until his parents were arguing and went outside. The sky was the watery blue of a robin’s egg. A dragonfly landed on the rim of a Coke bottle. The bottle captured the sunlight, firing it into the air. It was an afternoon for coasting downhill on a bicycle.

  Chuck looked both ways, paused, and ran across the street. He followed the stepping-stones through the man’s front yard. He slipped sideways through the bendy twigs of his bushes. Then he pressed his forehead to the wide cool window. He spotted the book right away, sitting on a table. Its pages were a thick stack of brilliantly glowing squares. The whole house shi
mmered, but the book was something special. Chuck wished he could tell what was wrong with it.

  Later, at home, he could not stop thinking about it. His curiosity grew stronger and stronger as the day passed. Eventually, he returned to the window to look at it. The next day, and the next, he went there again. He began living behind the bushes as often as possible. He lived there secretly, usually in ten- or fifteen-minute stretches. Week by week, the book shone with its secret pain. Chuck was amazed it didn’t set the table on fire. Every so often, the man drifted past like a sailboat. Twice he caught Chuck standing outside peeking in at him. The first time, Chuck didn’t think he was even home. Suddenly he just appeared, walked over, and touched the glass. His fingers landed with a rat-a-tat-tat, and Chuck ran away.

  The second time was a warm, dark, breezy midsummer night. Chuck watched the man shout at a group of teenagers. One of them, a girl, was living with the man. Chuck was almost completely sure she was not his daughter. She had glinting cigarette burns on her arms and legs. They looked like the holes in Swiss cheese, but silver. Once, outside walking, she had called Chuck her “main man.” She had mussed his hair and given him a Whatchamacallit. “Chin up, little guy,” she’d said, blowing him a kiss. That was a whole month before, minus a few days. Now the teenagers, the whole skinny crowd, left the house. The girl was the last of them to step outside. Afterward, the man sat on the couch, motionless, breathing hard. He was clutching the book shakily in his slender hands. When he spotted Chuck, he hurled it at the window. Light came whipping out of it in long white ribbons. As Chuck took flight, the bush’s twigs scraped his face.

  That night, he lay in bed watching the scratches flicker. He kept picturing the book twisting wildly through the air. He wondered what it thought as its pages skittered open. Whether it imagined it was being punished for its mistakes. How it felt without a good solid table underneath it. If it believed the world would always be so frightening. Right then and there, he decided he would rescue it.

  Another month went by before the chance came his way. He knew the man’s habits, and knew the girl’s, too. He had spent the summer watching them like a detective. They both left the house for several hours every afternoon. At night they usually ordered a pizza and watched TV. They slept late most mornings and ate leftovers for breakfast. The man took pictures of the girl with his camera. The girl posed with her arms crossed over her head. Occasionally she rubbed the man’s back through his polo shirt. She taught him how to use a knife against himself. Their bodies were both marked with hundreds of narrow cuts. The wounds covered their skin, every inch, in glittering ladders.

  One day, shortly after two-thirty, Chuck snuck across the street. He was feeling courageous, invincible (which meant unbeatable, not see-through). He crept into place and waited behind the tall bushes. Around three, the sun turned the window into a mirror. The sight of Chuck’s eyes staring into themselves surprised him. He was blinking the image away when the man exited. The girl came with him and off they walked together. Neither of them noticed Chuck standing against the bricks, fortunately. After their footsteps faded away, he crept out of hiding. He took the spare key from beneath the fake rock. He opened the door—first one lock, then the other. The house smelled like bread dough mixed with tennis shoes. The floor was a glossy white with scattered black knots. Chuck made it a rule to tiptoe between the lines. He passed a table with a wooden clock on it. He turned a corner and went into the living room. The book was sandwiched between some magazines by the couch. The pages were buckled, the cover scuffed, the letters faded. When Chuck gripped it, his bones showed through his fingers.

  Chuck bumped the table in the hallway as he left. The clock teetered and fell with an awful splintering noise. Immediately, it lit up inside, its pieces throbbing with pain. He wanted to hold it to his forehead and cry. But he was scared of getting caught there, scared crazy. He held the book to his chest and ran home. No matter how Chuck tried, he just kept hurting things. That was how the world worked—he couldn’t change it.

  His mom was mixing cookies and burning a plain candle. A wax-and-sugar smell like birthday cakes hung in the air. Big important things always happened to Chuck on his birthday. On his second birthday, for instance, he finally started walking. On his seventh birthday, he got sick with chicken pox. He used to have a cat named Alley Cat Abra. On his fifth birthday, she was killed by a car. On his ninth birthday, Chuck decided he would stop talking. He never said anything right, so what was the use? He hadn’t spoken since, and it wasn’t—wasn’t—a phase. On his fifth birthday, he went to Chuck E. Cheese’s. Chuck E. Cheese shared Chuck’s name, which made them alike. Chuck decided he was his friend, his smiling buck-toothed friend. One was Chuck the Boy, the other Chuck the Mouse. Chuck the Mouse handed Chuck the Boy some gold tokens. Chuck the Boy followed Chuck the Mouse into the kitchen. Chuck the Mouse carried him back outside by the armpits. His giant head bobbed around like something inflated with helium. Later, Chuck the Boy got trapped inside the crawling tubes. His pretend dad yelled, “Climb the hell out!” at him. He coaxed him slowly through the maze, pointing and shouting. “To the car!” he demanded, and Chuck’s birthday was over.

  Now he was ten: ten years and seven months old. His last birthday party was already a whole half-year ago. He thought about the presents his parents had given him. His favorite was the picture box with the multicolored pegs. His second favorite was the tic-tac-toe game with the beanbags. His least favorite was the robot with missiles for arms. He remembered kneeling on the dark green living room carpet. He remembered clapping his hands during “Happy Birthday to You.” Then his mom set down a cake with burning candles. “How does it feel to be another year old, Chuckie?”

  His pretend dad touched the softest part of his neck. “Your mom and me paid serious money for this cake. That means no throwing up this time, you hear me?” He turned and smacked Chuck’s mom playfully on the butt. “Things sure were different ten years ago—weren’t they, honey? We had a lot more money before that little accident.”

  “Frank!” she said and gave Chuck a little nervous glance. She looked away, and after that everything came in tens. There were ten flames that disappeared in threads of smoke. There were ten fingers squeezing Chuck’s shoulder as he swallowed. There were ten pictures on the wall in the hallway. There were ten steps between his bed and his dresser. There were ten birdcalls from the trees, then another ten. There were ten houses on each side of the street. There were ten boys in his class, and ten girls. There were ten checkmarks by his name on the chalkboard. There were ten words in every sentence—yet another rule. There were ten soft beats in every moment of time.

  ——

  Chuck took the book and hid it in his dresser. That night, he leafed through it quietly in his bedroom. It seemed to be a diary of miniature love notes. Each one was a single sentence written in blue ink. They all began with the same two words: I love. I love the smell of your perfume on my shirts. I love the way you curl up against my body. I love watching the sunset from the roof with you. I love seeing your number appear on my cell phone. The notes stopped suddenly in the middle of a page. The blue ink threw a glare up from the paper. It danced on the ceiling like sunbeams reflecting from water. The man must have been writing to someone very special. Were they for the girl with all the cigarette burns? The one who had been teaching him to cut himself? No, no, they were for his wife, his dead wife. The one who had passed away in the car accident. The one who went away and left him all alone. Who turned him into a poor son of a bitch. The answer was obvious once Chuck gave it some thought.

  All summer long, he read the book bit by bit. After a while, he felt like he knew the man. The night he finished, he started again from the beginning. He got a Magic Marker and highlighted his favorite sentences. I love the poems you wrote in junior high school. I love how you fumble for words when you’re angry. I love holding you tight when you ask me to. I love knowing exactly how crazy I am about you. I love sensing you beside me on long roa
d trips. I love the idea of growing old and forgetful together. I love how skillfully you use a pair of scissors. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you. I love your “Cousin Cephus and his pet raccoon Shirley.” I love the mess I made of braiding your hair. I love your ten fingers and love your ten toes.

  Chuck liked the sound of the words in his head. Not every sentence made good sense, or not right away. Some of them were bizarre or mysterious, some downright baffling. It was fun trying to figure out what they meant.

  I love your terrible puns: “Miró, Miró, on the wall.” What was a “Miró,” Chuck wondered, or a “Miró, Miró”? Were there really supposed to be two on the wall? Or were they like tom toms or yo-yos or BBs? Were they a single thing that had a double name?

  I love the “carpet angels” you make after I vacuum. Chuck decided that carpet angels must be like snow angels. He tried to make one with his arms and legs. He lay down, scissored them open, then stood back up. The carpet looked just the same—green, without any angels. Maybe the trick only worked right after someone had vacuumed.

  I love that little outfit you wore on my birthday. Chuck pictured a cowboy outfit: hat, gun, bandana, and all. Once, in kindergarten, Todd Rosenthal had worn one to school. He kept pretending to fire his gun at Mariellen Chase. Finally, Ms. Derryberry had to send him to the office.

  There were many other strange, confusing sentences in the book. Yet it seemed gentle to Chuck, not sad or angry. He wished he could understand why it shone so brightly.

  At the beginning of September, he started the fifth grade. He went to the normal school, not the special one. Both his psychiatrists had 100 percent agreed: Chuck was normal. He was normal, not special, and definitely not a retard. His pretend dad was just plain wrong about some things. Chuck was five when he began seeing his first psychiatrist. His name was Dr. Diehl, and he called Chuck “Charles.” Chuck liked him anyway because of his glass octopus bowl. Inside it he kept lollipops with gum in the middle. He always let Chuck take one before they began talking. Chuck would suck the lollipop, rolling it over his tongue. The hard globe of candy would become thin and pitted. Sometimes it would taste like strawberry, sometimes like root beer. Eventually, he would crunch through it with his back teeth. Then came the part where he would chew the gum. Sandlike grains of candy would crack open in his mouth. A sweet powder would coat the insides of his cheeks. Eating the lollipop was the best part of Wednesday afternoons. He truly missed it when he stopped visiting Dr. Diehl.