A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  “And why was that? Was he a plumber in a half-remembered life, searching for the perfect toilet drain?”

  I shook my head against the pillow.

  “Then what do you think he was doing?”

  It hurt to swallow, but I smiled through it. “Looking for clues.”

  She looked at me, surveying the fractured pieces of a new puzzle, then smiled, like she’d found a few pieces that fit together and was starting to see the picture on the box more clearly. “Alright, then, Sherlock. Read it.”

  I folded it open.

  “Aloud,” she insisted, and bounced onto the bed next to me, slouching at the same angle, the back of her neck against my pillow. She closed her eyes, and I stared at her, her face too close for me to think about anything else.

  Her eyes opened again. “Well? Are you going to . . .”

  I looked down at the page. Her eyelids fluttered shut once more, and I read aloud.

  april 30, the 2010.

  i first felt you

  at thirty secands old.

  i was intraduced to the world

  & you were thare,

  color & breath & warmth

  growing up was

  growing towards you,

  pieces of you in every word.

  learning the language just so i could speak it for you,

  learning words just so they could fall short with you.

  color & breath & warmth

  arthur

  i felt you in

  our souls colliding,

  i was eighteen,

  you a year older.

  like discovery of what i’d known all along.

  you were breath.

  you were color.

  you were warmth.

  & finally you were there,

  & i felt you still, when

  that warmth disappeared,

  the world was gray,

  my breath was gone.

  & words that failed me were all i had

  to remember you,

  to re-create you,

  arthur

  color & breath & warmth

  & i created you

  out of words that were never enough.

  i’ve written

  this dream,

  this room,

  this great,

  this love,

  a thaosand times,

  envisioned us meeting in

  life after life,

  body after body.

  face to face finally

  when all the words have failed.

  but this morning,

  i woke up a million miles from you

  familiar trumpets reminding me that i’m not what i used to be

  & angals spoke to me in your voice,

  they said,

  this road gets steeper,

  & the curves get sharper,

  & the tread on my tires will ware down

  thin like the skin on my fingertips,

  but if i keep going,

  i’ll find myself in paradise.

  & i’ll find you there.

  —arthur louis pullman

  6.

  WHEN I RETURNED my eyes to Mara’s, there were tears beneath hers. “Shut up,” she said, wiping them. “It was really nice, okay? I’m allowed to be a little emotional.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Did you not like it?” Her voice still watery from the drops under her eyes.

  “No, it’s, it’s really nice, but I . . . I don’t, I just don’t really notice anything right away, as far as, like, a clue is concerned—”

  “Oh, shut up about that for a second!” She smacked me in the arm. “Just enjoy the poem! I mean, can you even imagine? Someone writing about you like that? That kind of love? Your grandmother was a lucky woman.”

  I felt a lump in my throat. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “‘Yeah, maybe’?”

  “It’s just that he says, ‘I was eighteen and you a year older.’”

  “So?”

  “So he didn’t meet my grandmother until he was twenty-five.”

  “Oh.”

  “So this means there was another woman. That he was writing to.”

  We sat in silence, the alarm clock ticking to let us know that it was now 4:00 a.m. Mara sat up and spoke properly.

  “‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’”

  “Oscar Wilde?”

  “Close. Vincent van Gogh.”

  “He cut off his own ear.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “For love—”

  “Yes, but—”

  “—of many things.”

  Mara’s face was close to my own. Six inches of air separated us, both our cheeks against the shared pillow. The dim overhead light was painting the room yellow and her skin a soft gold. I’d never looked so closely into her face, but I realized now that it was all perfectly placed: her small eyebrows and small ears and small lips. Her eyes glowed green in their frame and flashed around the room. Down the bed, up to the ceiling, out the window, and finally resting on me, reaching directly into mine.

  “Okay.” She leaned her face toward mine and kissed me, softly, quickly, before I could react. “Read it again.”

  And so I read.

  7.

  January 5, 2010

  Dear Journal,

  Our house almost burned down today. Some of it did, so now we’re at a hotel.

  My whole family hates my grandpa except for me. My dad isn’t talking to him and he’s not talking at all, of course. So the only sound in our hotel room is the A’s game. I haven’t decided if I hate him or not. I don’t know how I feel about him.

  Let me explain.

  Everyone in my family says that my grandpa needs help. Ever since my grandma died, he just walks around the house looking for things and never finds any of them. And if you ask him what he’s looking for he raises his hands and says “don’t bother.” I don’t think he means to be mean but sometimes it feels like it.

  Every day, he makes himself a sandwich and most days, he just walks away and leaves it in the kitchen. Some days he leaves it on his desk, or on the toilet. It doesn’t really bother me; I think it’s pretty funny.

  Yesterday, he wanted to make himself soup. But he didn’t know how to make it, or where to find the broth, so he gave up after step one.

  The problem is, step one was turning on the burners of the stove. That’s why I’m writing from a hotel room right now.

  My dad told me that the difference between a good person who does bad things and a plain old bad person is that the good person feels sorry about the things they did, and the bad person doesn’t understand that they were bad. He said my grandpa didn’t feel sorry about almost burning our house down. He said my grandpa was mad at everyone else for making the house so confusing.

  I can’t tell if he’s actually not sorry, or if he just forgot he was supposed to be.

  Either way, that’s not why no one is talking to each other. That’s because of what happened afterward.

  My grandpa is a little rich. He made a lot of money for writing a book that everyone loves—everyone except for me, I tried to read it and it was too boring. Maybe I’ll try harder when I have to read it for school, but probably not. My dad figured that because my grandpa burned down the kitchen, he should pay for a new one. So he went into my grandpa’s bank account.

  And that’s when everything got really bad.

  My dad never screams in front of me, but he did today. I guess my grandpa had been taking money from the account and my dad was screaming about it. Even while my grandma was alive, he was writing checks for “thousands of dollars a year,” my dad said. He said it wasn’t illegal, technically, because it was my grandpa’s money, but he’d been secretly spending it for so long that it had “driven us into the ground.”

  And now that we’re in the ground, I guess we don’t know what we are going to do next. My dad said we should do a new version of the book but my grandpa said it was �
��bullshit.” My dad said that my grandpa was being a “stubborn old man,” and my grandpa didn’t say anything. My dad said that if my grandpa “really cared about us” he’d do it, but my grandpa just turned on the A’s pregame show.

  I’m sure my dad will figure it out, but for now, everyone hates my grandpa, for burning down our kitchen and driving our family into the ground and not caring about us at all.

  Except me, I don’t know how I feel.

  More later,

  Arthur Louis Pullman the Third

  8.

  I FELT THE whole world before I saw it that morning.

  First, light from the open window, stinging my eyelids, welcoming them to existence again. I kept my eyes closed, not ready for the world and all its brightness.

  Then, pain, icy hot, directly behind my forehead. My face was burning, and after raising a shaky hand to feel its temperature, I left it resting above my nose, too exhausted to move. There was nothing in my body at all.

  I was a thousand miles from home and my father had no idea where I was.

  I was sleeping on the cold, hard bed of a hostel, occupied by a secret society that worshipped a man that I most vividly remembered for forgetting his sandwiches and drinking whiskey. But I was unintentionally engaged in my own form of worship, stringing together bread crumbs he had left behind in an attempt to understand him.

  And I did understand him, at least better than I had before, at least enough to clarify what I really didn’t know about him: What was he reliving, and why? Why had he stopped doing it in the first place? Where was he going and why did he end up in Ohio? Why did no one in my family know anything about it? Why was this all a secret?

  Behind my eyelids, I saw him in Room 17D, gathering whatever he carried and preparing to make his way back out into the uninviting world. His view of the future from 17D must have been a bleak one, and I wondered what had compelled him forward, why he hadn’t just decided that this spot, this bed, was as good as any to lie down in and die.

  But that answer was the easiest of all. It was written into the poem from last night, and every poem. There was something there for him, a “great purpose,” a “greater love,” an “angel,” a “paradise,” a “you” that he was chasing, and it kept pulling him forward, train after train and city after city. I wondered how much of his life had been spent in search of it, whatever it was. Whoever she was.

  And then I remembered why I was waking up, and why I would continue forward. Because for the first time, when I thought about searching for something, it wasn’t Kaitlin’s face that popped into my head. It was Mara’s.

  I could see her even before opening my eyes, perfect and delicate and small, lying next to me, sharing the same pillow, facing me, not turned away as Kaitlin always had been. The future from Room 17D didn’t look bleak with her in it. For me, I knew what that meant—it meant that I was ready. It meant there was a reason for waking up. So I did, and I opened my eyes.

  But Mara was gone.

  9.

  MARA WASN’T IN the bathroom, so I checked the hallway, the common area, the entryway. They were all deserted.

  I rapped on the door to Room 16, the dormitory, several times. It took what had to have been a hundred knocks before someone answered, the door still latched. Through the narrow opening, I recognized half of Lucas’s face.

  He yawned, wiping sleep from his eyes.

  “Hey, is, uh, is Mara in there?”

  He shook his head, expressionless. “Naw, man, no one’s here,” he mumbled, and went to slam the door.

  “Wait!”

  He held it open.

  “She’s Indian, short, she’s got a little—”

  “Yeah, I know who Mara is, dude. She’s not in here.”

  He moved to close the door and again, I pushed back against the latch. The recoil force knocked me backward. “No!” I shouted. “I, uh, I serve a Great Purpose! I know the whole, the whole thing.”

  “Dude, I get it.” He lazily shook his head. “But everybody left this morning, on the train.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Yeah,” he said, wiping his face again. “We kinda have this policy—‘if he wanted you to know, he would’ve taken you with’.”

  I didn’t respond. I trembled, my knees threatening to give. Lucas must have sensed my panic, because he slid off the latch, and opened the door.

  He wasn’t lying. There were three male bodies sleeping on the bunk beds, one that I recognized from the night before, and the rest of the room was empty but for the cigarette butts, Solo cups, and remaining bottles of liquor. No Laura, no Jack, no Great Purpose, no Mara.

  Lucas shrugged again. “See, all gone.” He slammed the door shut.

  I felt empty as I dragged myself across the deserted common room, weighing possibilities. Maybe she’d gone to our original room, number 6, so she could have a full bed to herself. Maybe she’d gone to get us breakfast, or coffee, and would be back any minute. Either way, there was no way she would have given up, not with so many clues left to solve. She wouldn’t abandon the clues that we already had. Those had to mean something to—

  A bead of sweat formed on my forehead and I started moving faster toward 17D. I don’t know that you fully appreciate what you have here, I could hear her saying. There are people who will pay a lot of money for this. I was at a near run when I burst into our room. The tiniest, most silent part of my brain expected her to be sitting on the bed, waiting, with a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich and a half smile on her face. The whole rest of me knew she wouldn’t be.

  The rest of me was right. The room was empty and colder than it had been the night before. I sprang toward my backpack, ripped it open, and found my clothes, my toothbrush . . . and nothing else. All four of my grandfather’s clues were gone.

  My brain fought to think of scenarios that didn’t involve Mara stealing from me, didn’t require her to be the person I didn’t want her to be. I tried to give her every excuse. She went to make photocopies. She hid them so no one else could steal them from me.

  But the more I invented, the more ridiculous they all became. The only one that made sense was the obvious one: I had been lied to, led on, and cheated. She had used me, preyed on my social discomfort, and made me feel like a god so her job would be easier. Thinking about how willingly I’d let her in and followed her, how eagerly I’d drugged myself and given her a getaway, how happily she’d been giggling with Jack the night before, made me want to drive my car off a bridge and into a lake. I had been played, plain and simple, right from the first minute, and now I had nothing.

  I wondered if Great Purpose was even real.

  I wondered if the Sharpie on the wall had been written there that morning.

  I wondered if her name was actually Mara.

  I know what it’s like to not feel anything. The light from the lamp spread and began to burn the real world around it.

  I let myself be consumed by it. My hands, arms, and legs began to tingle as they lost feeling.

  Mara’s face swam in and out of the nothingness; her head was on the pillow and the pillow needed to suffer; her body leaned against the shelf and I needed it gone; the lamp and its light were a threat to my survival and I was stronger than they were. My body took over, limbs swinging blindly, grabbing, pulling, ripping, throwing, screaming, grunting, begging for everything to go away but it didn’t. I submitted, my nerves waking up on their own.

  I left the room with my backpack, speed-walking out the door with my head down, and the light followed. I was sure the man at the front desk glared at me, but I didn’t stop to apologize, I didn’t stop to look, I couldn’t see him anyway.

  A rush of cold air bit my face; miserable, hopeless, stinging, perfect cold; it wasn’t my face, it was my body’s. It dragged me street by miserable street, stirring into the sting of the wind and the rush of the traffic, into the street and into the cars around me.

  “Arthur, you’re okay, buddy, but you’ve gotta slow down.” Mason jogge
d to keep up, so I sped up to get past him. “Just take one deep breath.”

  Mason always did this, tried to lie to me when things went wrong. I’d come home fuming, furious about Kaitlin and all the ways she tried to make me jealous, and Mason would remind me that frustration was part of the process of learning to love someone. Then he’d asked me a hundred questions—what she’d said, how she’d said it, and what I thought she wanted—to mine for information. Of course he didn’t want me to feel better, he just wanted to know what I knew. Just like Mara.

  I opened my mouth, let the air chill my lungs until my chest was burning, then slammed my left fist against it as many times as I could. I stretched my left hand underneath the cast and it burned like the day I’d broken it, perfect, melting, all familiar, the physical, unnatural crunch of bone against bone channeling all the hurt into one emotionless spot, voices in my ears, screaming—

  “It doesn’t have to be like this.” Mason was trying to make his voice sound calm but I could tell that he was panicking, I could always tell when I was making him panic. “We can beat this, we’ve done this before.”

  I found myself on another row of abandoned buildings, shops that had closed and boarded up their windows, shops that decided it wasn’t even worth it to keep on trying—and I saw birds flying across glass one hundred yards in front of me.

  “Just slow down and tell me about it.” Mason tried to grab my shoulder but I shrugged him off. “Talk to me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “What’s going on, why you’re walking this fast, why you keep hitting yourself like that, all of it. You can tell me about whatever.” Mason wasn’t letting me get him out of my sightline. “Tell me about what just happened, what you guys are fighting about. I swear it will feel better, it always does.”

  I stopped to pant, my breath materializing in front of me, and stared at him.

  “What, do you think I’m gonna talk to her about it?” His face didn’t flinch. “You can trust me, Arthur.”

  I began to move forward, quickly, again, away from him; as I passed an interstate, a Camaro sped by in the HOV lane, begging me to smash the windows, yank the driver out by his shirt, throw him against the sidewalk, and go speeding off into the mountains of Colorado, get up over a hill, somewhere where I couldn’t see anything behind me. and fly recklessly into and out of the world ahead of me.