Absolute Brightness

by James Lecesne

  Father Jimbo was already up the front steps and unlocking the heavy front doors. He stood in the vestibule with one arm holding open the door. I could see into the darkness, but darkness was all I saw.

  “Come on,” he said, jerking his head toward the building. “I want to show you something.”

  “I really ought to get home. My mom’ll be calling the police after me.” But even as I said it, I was moving up the steps toward him.

  “It will only take a minute.”

  Once we were inside, with the door shut behind us, I could feel rather than see the spaciousness of the church in front of me. A tiny lit candle flickered in the distance, but it was so small and so far off that it hardly illuminated the place; it was just a point of light. I could hear the two of us breathing, but once Father Jimbo spoke, I could also hear how big the place was. The sound of his voice carried to the far wall and then bounced back at us.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “This is what I want to show you.”

  “What?”

  “This.”

  “It’s dark. I don’t see anything.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Exactly. But what is darkness?”

  “Huh?”

  He was beginning to freak me out with this business about the darkness, his questions, his breathing. I could smell his aftershave and hear the chafing of his neck against his clerical collar as he turned to look at me in the dark. We were too close, and everything suddenly felt wrong—and scary.

  “Can we say what darkness is?”

  Just as I was about to turn and run, Father Jimbo flipped a switch on the wall beside him, and the chandelier lights at the back of the church went on. Instantly I could see the church, and though it seemed unfamiliar to me in this eerie half-light, it was without a doubt the place I had always come to on Christmas and Easter and on those Sundays when Mom insisted that we get dressed, go to Mass, and pray for God-knows-what.

  “Darkness is where light is not,” Father Jimbo said, answering his own question. “Darkness is the absence of light, Phoebe. The more light there is, the less dark. It works the same with good and evil. Think about it. The more good there is, the less evil.”

  “So what’re you saying…,” I asked him without exactly looking at him. “Are you saying I have to talk to Uncle Mike myself?”

  * * *

  On my way home, I thought about Father Jimbo’s demonstration of light and dark, good and evil. I kept replaying the scene over and over in my mind, trying to figure out if it had been fair of him to lure me into the dark and use the church as a backdrop for his party trick. I wondered if he had perfected this stunt back in Africa. I pictured him as a young man traveling from village to village, astonishing whole tribes of natives. Perhaps he went around with a generator packed in the back of an open van. Maybe he had a string of lights and a big switch, so that even in a village beyond the reach of an electrical hookup, he could do his thing and mystify the crowd. The more light there is, the less dark! It works the same with good and evil! Think about it. I even imagined a scenario where Father Jimbo had tried his trick in a church somewhere in the United States back when he was a novitiate. I could easily picture the kind of panic it would have caused among the parishioners and the many complaints lodged with the bishop, until finally Father Jimbo was summoned to headquarters and given a stern warning not to try it again.

  But how could he keep himself from indulging in such a dramatic demonstration of a question that is fundamental to our understanding of human nature, a question that has, as he put it, troubled some of the greatest thinkers and theologians throughout human history? With evil still rampant in the world and showing no signs of lessening its influence, wouldn’t he feel that it was his moral responsibility to flip the switch again and again, as many times as necessary, whenever he saw the opportunity, every time someone came to him with a question? So what’ll I do?

  In my case, I was able to answer my own question. I walked over to Electra’s house and knocked on the back door. Mrs. Wheeler peeked through the yellow frilled curtains, the ones that I myself had once helped to hang about a million years ago. She opened the door and grabbed me by my shoulders.

  “Where you been, girl? I could just about whup you for not coming ’round our house. Told Electra, told that child to get herself over your house and drag your ass back here if she had to, but … What you do with your hair, girl? That’s a color? Get in here this minute and let me see you in the light.”

  twenty-one

  AFTER A YEAR of not being friends, there I was, once again, sitting at Electra’s kitchen table on a Friday night waiting for her to come down the stairs so she could join me and we could get into some trouble. Just like always, I could hear her mother arguing with her, telling her what to do. But this time I was the task at hand.

  “She came all the way over here to see you. Least you can do is go downstairs.”

  “And do what?”

  “Say hi. Be civil. Talk to the girl. Work it out.”

  “And what if I don’t want to?”

  “Then, girl, you’re a bigger fool than folks take you for. Now get.”

  Electra appeared in the kitchen looking not that happy to see me. Her dreads were tied up in a purple scarf, and just the ends were sticking out of the top like a wrapped-up bunch of flowers. She was wearing a worn-out pink T-shirt, and her jeans were the ones that we’d stolen from the Gap almost two years ago. The moment I saw her, I realized how much I liked her, and I had to admit to myself that despite all my halfhearted efforts, no one had come close to replacing her as my best friend. I shrugged and said, “It’s been like a bad year or something. For both of us. I don’t even know what either of us did that was so wrong. But I’m telling you, it’s not right for us to not be friends. I came to say I’m sorry. Forgive me?”

  Electra shifted her weight to one hip and tilted her head way to one side. She just looked at me as if she were weighing her options or assessing my outfit. Finally, she offered me the flesh of her small round arm and said: “Lick it, bitch.”

  We laughed so loud, it sent Mrs. Wheeler running down the stairs and into the kitchen. When she saw us with our arms around each other, she just shook her head and glanced upward as if some explanation could be found written in the ceiling plaster. She pretended that she had been scared out of her wits by our yelping, but really I think she knew what was up and just wanted to see us happy together again.

  I gave Electra a quick rundown of the situation, describing Uncle Mike’s behavior and his insistence on the death penalty as a form of justice. She gasped with horror at all the right moments and reacted as a best friend should, responding to every prompt with exaggerated facial gestures and knowing nods. She understood what I was trying to say before I’d even finished saying it. Finally, she grabbed me by the hand and led me up the stairs into her bedroom. I sat on the edge of her bed as she plopped herself into a knockoff Aeron chair and began clicking away on her keyboard.

  “And you’re getting a computer,” she informed me, without taking her eyes away from the screen. “It’s ridiculous, you livin’ in the dark ages. I love reading books as much as you do, but you know, even Jane Austen’s got a website now.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “No. For real. You’re getting one. ’Cause if we’re going to be friends again you gotta get connected. I’ll teach you.”

  Within minutes she had located a website devoted to the subject of capital punishment. She scooted over so that I could squeeze in beside her on the chair, and together we read what appeared on the screen. She scrolled and clicked like a master. I was amazed at her dexterity, her know-how. Obviously she’d been keeping herself busy during the past year.

  “Here it is,” she said.

  We were shocked to learn that before the end of the month, seven human beings would be put to death somewhere in the United States either by electrocution or lethal injection. Electra read aloud the names of the condemned, along with the intende
d dates of their deaths and also the states where the executions were to take place.

  “Stephen Hopper—March second—Texas.

  George Mobley—March seventh—Ohio.

  William Ray Smith—March eighth—Ohio.

  Henry Wallace Jr.—March tenth—North Carolina.

  William Dillard Doyle—March twelfth—Indiana.

  Jimmy Ray Pollard—March fifteenth—Texas.

  Julio Melendez—March sixteenth—Oklahoma.”

  Because neither of us could think of anything else to say, we found ourselves observing a moment of silence.

  “And look,” Electra said when the moment had passed. She clicked ahead to the following month. “More names in April. Same thing.”

  “Whoa,” was all I could offer.

  “Yeah. And no one notices,” she remarked as she took her hand off the mouse and reached across to push the hair out of my eyes. “No one does the math. It just goes on.”

  “And tell me again,” I said, feeling more dense than usual. “How does this help my case with Uncle Mike?”

  Electra threw herself onto her bed and looked over at me like I was lame for not seeing things as clearly as she did.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Nothing. It’s just that up until this thing with Travis, you didn’t care a hoot ’bout capital punishment. Now all of a sudden you’re an activist? How’d that happen, you think?”

  “I know Travis,” I offered, though I could tell from Electra’s all-knowing expression that I’d answered exactly as she expected me to. “But it’s not like I don’t care about all those other guys. I do. I just don’t know them. Not personally.”

  “Ex-aaaactly!” she said as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat up so she could look me straight in the eye. “You got to get your uncle to know Travis. Somehow you got to make Travis a real, living, breathing person to him. More real than even Leonard was. Then your uncle can’t possibly consider offing him.”

  “Right. And how am I supposed to do that?”

  She let out a startled hoot and fell back onto the bed. After she kicked one leg up into the air and touched her socked toes to the canopy top, she said, “Girl, don’t look to me for the answer. You’re the one who kissed the boy.”

  * * *

  A week later, Mom decided that it was time for Uncle Mike to move out of the living room. He’d been with us since the start of the trial, and Mom was sick of coming downstairs every morning to find him hanging off the couch, half dressed and snoring like a pirate. Her solution was to give my room to Uncle Mike and move me to the rollaway bed in Deirdre’s room. This was not a happy situation for anyone for the following reasons:

  1. My bed was too small for a big guy like Uncle Mike.

  2. Deirdre wasn’t thrilled with the idea of having a roommate at this point in her life.

  3. Neither was I. And

  4. Just hearing the word “rollaway” gave me a serious pain in my neck.

  “Why can’t he move downstairs into the boxed set?” I asked Mom.

  She pursed her lips and shook her head as though I’d just spit on someone’s grave.

  So picture me a week before Uncle Mike was to address the court, unable to sleep a wink. I’d written a long and impassioned letter to Travis, imploring him to apologize to Uncle Mike and explaining to him that his best chance for staying alive was to appeal to my uncle for mercy. I then slipped the letter to Father Jimbo in a sealed envelope. He smiled at me when he took it and promised that he would hand deliver it to Travis himself before the sentencing trial started. Because Father Jimbo was a man of God, I assumed that he’d told the truth and then followed through with his promise. But a day had passed and still there had been no word from Travis, no apology, no letter. I kept imagining the humiliation my family was soon to face when Uncle Mike stood up in court and demanded an eye for an eye. My worst-case scenario involved him playing an original song in the courtroom, a song that he’d been hammering out on his guitar in private during the week, a song that he would dedicate to the memory of Leonard. After a few hours of deliberation, the jury would return to their seats and deliver a unanimous decision, one that would involve Travis Lembeck’s execution.

  I must have finally drifted off at some point, because I was jolted out of a deep sleep by the sound of heavy footsteps in the hallway right outside the bedroom, followed by a pounding on my mother’s door and a plea for help. I looked over at Deirdre’s Hello Kitty alarm clock and watched the numbers flip to 5:17 a.m. I got up from the rollaway and pressed an ear to the door. By this time, my mother was telling Uncle Mike to calm down and shut up and what the hell was he trying to do, wake the dead? Uncle Mike was knocking some part of himself against the wall and whimpering like a wounded bear. I heard a loud plunk on the carpet. It was a wonder to me that Deirdre continued to sleep throughout the noise, which was taking place just yards from her head.

  “Get off the floor, Mike! For God’s sakes, get up!” my mother said in a frantic whisper. “You can’t just park yourself here. It’s five o’clock in the morning. Get up!”

  Somehow she convinced him to go downstairs, and they settled in the kitchen. I was stationed just outside the kitchen door, which is how I heard every word.

  According to Uncle Mike’s account, he awoke (in my bed) to find Leonard in a ghostly form standing in the middle of the room and looking very confused. Neither of them spoke. They both just held each other’s glance for a full minute, each of them considering what to do next.

  “Wait. What’re you doing here?” Leonard is supposed to have said. “What have you done with her? Why isn’t Phoebe in her bed?”

  “He said these things?” Mom asked Uncle Mike. “He spoke words?”

  “Well,” Uncle Mike replied with the kind of hesitation you usually get from a kid when he’s caught in a lie. “Not exactly. More like I could feel him saying those words.”

  “Go on.”

  Uncle Mike said he just lay there staring until Leonard made the first move, a move that involved dissolving into thin air. He was gone. Uncle Mike stumbled out of the room and made his way down the hall to find my mother.

  Uncle Mike was convinced that Leonard had come with one purpose—to find me. He believed that Leonard had a message to deliver, and he wanted my mother to wake me up and find out what it could be. He said we all needed to know before it was too late, before we did something that couldn’t be undone.

  By the time I made it back into my rollaway, the room was just beginning to lighten. Deirdre rolled over in her bed and squinted at me.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I told her. “Uncle Mike saw a ghost.”

  “Whoa,” she murmured as she scratched her head. She then threw back the covers on her bed and scooted her body over against the wall, making room for me. “Come on. You might as well get in.”

  I did and pulled the covers over me. I could feel the warmth from where her body had just been, and I could feel the heat radiating from where her body actually was. I felt I might get some sleep after all.

  “Is it late or is it early?” she asked me.

  “Both,” I replied.

  We were in for a very long day.

  Later, when I came downstairs dressed and ready for breakfast, I made buttered raisin toast, drank my orange juice, and asked Uncle Mike if he’d be moving out of my bedroom anytime soon. He stared at me.

  “Huh?”

  “Or maybe you could move downstairs to Leonard’s room,” I suggested.

  He shook his head no.

  Nothing more was said for the rest of the week, but I felt that I had found a possible solution to my problems—not only the problem of where I would be sleeping (Uncle Mike moved back onto the couch the next night) but also to the problem of Travis Lembeck. But it wasn’t until we were dressed and sitting next to each other in the backseat of Mom’s car and waiting for Mom and Deirdre to join us that Uncle Mike was able to address the issue.<
br />
  “I don’t do much public speaking,” he said. “Standing up in front of people and all. Never been my thing.”

  I nodded and pretended to be arranging stuff inside my purse. The fact that he was nervous wasn’t exactly news. The signs were there. He had spent most of the morning locked in the bathroom mumbling to his reflection in the mirror. Also his cologne was stronger than usual, and he had two cuts on his face from shaving. This was the morning that the sentencing phase of the trial was scheduled to begin—the phase in which Travis’s fate would be decided.

  “Was he wet?” I finally asked, without looking up from my purse.

  “What?”

  “Last time Leonard came to see me, he was dripping wet. From the lake, I guess. He looked good, though. Happy. Did he look happy?”

  Uncle Mike stopped breathing, his mouth hung open.

  “You seen him, too?” he managed to croak.

  “All the time. He’s getting to be a total pest. Just like in life.”

  We continued to sit there in silence until my mother and Deirdre slipped into the front seat and we drove away. Once we were on the Turnpike headed toward Trenton, Deirdre, our self-designated driver, launched into a rather lengthy dissertation about the origin of the French twist, a topic that no one other than Deirdre herself cared to discuss. Uncle Mike kept looking out the window, and though he held the pages of his prepared speech furled up in his fist, he never even gave it the once-over.