Rodney’s hand took my arm firmly. Just as firmly, I shook it away.
“Be careful, there. Hold on, you want me to get some towels or something? Phillip? Are you listening to me or what?”
I wanted to be good. Feverishly, as I worked, I knew I wanted to be good and to enter the kingdom of Heaven. “I used to pray,” I said out loud, to nobody in particular. “When I was little, I used to pray every night.”
“What’s that?” Pouring more whiskey into his soda can, Rodney dripped some onto Dad’s white shirt sleeve. Then, after a moment, “Are you sure you don’t want me to hold something?”
Again I shrugged him away. “I used to pray on my hands and knees, and imagined a Heaven filled with white lacy clouds. Many pleasant men and women came out to greet me as I entered through these tall, alabaster white gates. There was a young girl there about my own age. I thought she was really beautiful, and we became close friends. One night she let me kiss her, and another night I saved her from the hordes of Satan’s evil minions. I imagined all this while I prayed to be good and pure. I wanted to remain a child like that forever.”
“I never prayed to be good,” Rodney said, reflectively sipping. “I only prayed for three things in my entire life. Money. Women. And power. And when you get right down to it, I’m not in such a hurry about the women and the money. Power’s the main thing, Phillip. Power’s the only thing worth really praying for.”
“I wanted to do good deeds. I wanted to help cripples and old women who nobody loved. I wanted to save puppies from the pound, and teach broken birds to fly again.”
“What are you doing with that–”
“I wanted there to be absolutely no pain and suffering in the entire world. Sometimes I wonder why I wanted that. I can’t understand the dreams I dreamed then. What did they matter? What did pain and suffering have to do with me? They had nothing to do with me. They were things, they were different from me. I’m not really in the world at all, Rodney, am I? I’m really not, am I?” I was hot with dizziness and my own blood. With the back of my hand I wiped the sweat gathering on my forehead. I needed to lie down for a minute. I needed a glass of ice-cold water. But I couldn’t relax just yet. I wasn’t finished. And then I heard the sudden crack of Mom’s overpainted door opening down the hall. It all seemed perfectly natural–the world right now, events and circumstances. Then Mom’s slow, balancing footsteps, her large stomach preceding her into the mouth of the living room. Rodney nudged me sharply with his elbow.
“Hello, Mrs. Davis,” Rodney said.
I was about to attach a pair of snub-nosed pliers. I cupped them in my hand like a guilty, smoldering cigarette and turned. Mom was standing there, watching us, her face glowing, wearing the big blue robe I had bought her for Mother’s Day.
Mom was looking at Dad’s face as if it were the face of a child in a photograph. Her eyes steadfastly refused to look at any of the things I had begun doing to him.
“When you’re finished in here, baby, I want you to leave,” Mom said. The fingertips of one hand were poised upon her stomach, as if gauging delicate reactions down there, secret chords and melodies. Morses of plasma, protein and bone. “I don’t want you around the baby. You can take the car, and your father’s money. But go far away, and I’ll say I don’t know what happened. I was asleep in my room. I woke up in the morning and found him. I hadn’t heard a thing all night. I’ll still love you, Phillip, but I don’t want you around anymore. I’ve tried hard to understand, but I’m afraid I just can’t understand anymore.”
It was cold static moonlight. Outside, in the distance, I heard the helicopter beating past again. Somewhere in the night a police car sounded, and then its brief momentary eruption of inhuman voices. “Not in the alley, over”; “Roger, Sam-six.” I was thinking, Just fine. You go where you want to go, Mom, and I’ll go where I want to go. I was staring her straight in the eye. I was ashamed of nothing. She, on the other hand, wasn’t looking at me. She couldn’t look at me because she knew it too. She knew that this was my night, the night of my stark ascension. Dad wasn’t going anywhere without me. Mom was the one who would be left behind. Everything was going to turn out exactly the way I wanted it to turn out and there was nothing Mom, or Dad, or anybody else could do about it. I was going to have my way, simply because I finally understood in which direction my way led.
“I lost you in San Luis,” Mom said. She was watching the can of 7UP in Rodney’s hand. “You’ll never change, Phillip. You are the way you are and that’s that. I didn’t say anything at the time but I knew, and you knew I knew. Whatever your father knew isn’t any of my business. Your father simply shouldn’t have gotten involved. He knew better. He knew me. He couldn’t have been that naive about you. I don’t know what he expected when he came here, but we never invited him, we never made him any promises. Now, if you and your friend don’t mind, I’m going back to bed. I’m going to sleep for about a hundred years. When you leave, remember to lock up. Don’t leave any lights on. You won’t be able to write me because I won’t let you know where I’ve gone.”
Mom turned, paused with one hand on the wall, the other on her stomach. Then, cautiously, she conducted my unborn sibling down the hall to her warm and silent bed.
There wasn’t any time for reflection. I attached the snub-nosed pliers. Nobody was going to tell me what to do anymore. Nobody could send me away or leave me. Not even Mom. Not even Dad.
“Jesus,” Rodney said. His hands were trembling, his voice faint, his eyes intent on my work now with either concealed admiration or blank distrust. “Your family’s too much, guy.”
“I always wanted to be good,” I said as I feverishly worked, feeling vast geologic plates and fissures expanding in the deep earth under my feet. “I always wanted to go to Heaven. Now I don’t care. I’ll go anywhere. It’s quite a relief, you know. It’s like having all your appointments canceled and knowing you can spend the whole day in bed with a good book.”
“You’re really something, Phillip,” Rodney said. “You really are.”
“In order to free the self, one must abandon all preconceptions about what the self is.” As I worked, the words arose in me without my volition. They were like the hard intricate tools I wielded, they were like the dense yielding body of Dad. Associative, crystalline, buzzing, hard. Next to these words, the world seemed to reliquefy itself, dissolving in the blood of some archetypal Christ. “Make no mistake about it–the self exists, Rodney, and this is it. This is the self. This is the self here.” I showed Rodney something on the end of one stubby screwdriver. “Blood, tissue, bone, cartilage, marrow, mass, gravity, liquid, sound, light. It moves or it doesn’t move. It lives or it doesn’t live. This is the history of luminous motion, Rodney. This is the flux and convection of sudden light. We’re all the same but we’re all not the same too. What you know is not what I know. What you prefer is not what I prefer. There’s just this–and this–and this–” Dad’s body gave a sudden, galvanic kick– “or this,” I said, enraged by the still pulsing life in him, “or this or this or this or this. This here, or this here. This is all we are, this warm and fragile envelope, this thin impacted tissue. It’s not that we exist but that we know we exist that makes our lives so miserable. And this–this is nothing. And this, and this, and this. This is all nothing too.”
“And this,” Pedro echoes. “And this, and this, and this.”
“This is the progress men and women make alone in the world of light,” I chanted, the words filling me with heat and rage. “This is all we are, Rodney. This is all we’ll ever be…” They were my words but they were somebody else’s words too. Mom couldn’t leave me. Only I could leave Mom. I was dizzy with fierce excitement. The blood coursed and raced in my head. I was moving too, through these humming veins, down these moist undulating corridors. I was moving into the world of Dad’s body, a place even Dad had never been before. I would show them. I was going to show all of them. Mom and Dad, Rodney and Beatrice, Ethel and the world. The whole world, the whol
e vast and intricate world. And Pedro. Pedro, of course… I was going to show all of them. “This is it, Rodney. This is the light. This is Dad’s light–but now it’s mine. Now it’s my light. Now it’s Mom’s light too…”
Rodney said, “Hey, Phillip. What’s that noise?”
“This is the history of motion, Rodney. The history of motion. Look–the history of motion. The history, the history of motion…” I could feel it now. I knew it was coming. I could feel the pulse in my bones and skin. It raced in my blood. It raced in Dad’s blood too. Something spurted into my eye and I wiped it away with the back of my wrist.
“Hey, Phillip. Something’s wrong, man. Phillip. Hey–get it together, guy. I think somebody’s outside–”
It was mine and it was Dad’s and someday it would be the baby’s too. Me and Mom and the baby and Dad. And the light, the light–
and then suddenly there was just the awful thundering noise of it, descending outside in the ruined and brilliant white sky. Finally I saw it. The light, the hard bright white light flashing through the cracked venetian blinds into our living room, beating and flashing, fast and sudden and secure, roaring and louder like massive engines driving and obliterating everything, even the night. It was all life, it was all living. This was my life. I was doing it now. I was living my own life now–
“Jesus Christ!” Rodney shouted, grabbing my hands, pulling at me. “Phillip–we gotta get out of here!”
But nobody pushed me, nobody made me do anything I didn’t want to do. Not tonight and not ever again.
“Rodney!” I shouted. I was disentangling my hands from Dad’s clinging warmth. I even tried to lift Dad in my arms to show him. I wanted Dad to see too. I wanted everyone to see. “Look there! At the window!”
It burned through the window blinds. It was life. It was white. It was coming for me, for me.
“Rodney! Look!”
I was shouting over the noise of the beating helicopter rotors. Everything was so simple now. All the hard eternal light of it was burning in our blood and our bones and our brains…
“Rodney!” I called. I turned around the room, alone in the whirling hallway. The back door to the garage door stood wide open.
The light thundered through everything, beating back drapes and curtains. The entire house was rattling and trembling, the light swirling and turning. Pedro, darkness, Pedro, darkness. And then just the darkness. And then just the light. And Dad’s life hot on my hands and my clothes and my face, and the hard beating light outside like a summons, celestial and vast, like Jesus or God, Buddha or Muhammad. Like Dad’s voice. Like Mom’s love. Like light and motion, motion and light–
“Rodney!” I cried. “Come back! This is it! It’s over! They’re here!
“ROGER, TEN-FOUR” the shortwave outside blared, its cessation as suddenly loud as the world around it. Massive car doors opened and slammed, footsteps sounded heavy and fast on the front stairs. I heard a flowerpot crash into the cold alleyway. “Open up!” they shouted. “Open up in there!” And then that loud peremptory knock at my front door and, as I turned, the door exploding open with a crash of dark large-bodied men in dark blue uniforms. Their badges and flashlights gleamed, their weapons flashed, but I wasn’t afraid, because I wasn’t going anywhere I didn’t want to go. They were mine–I wasn’t theirs. My arms were even outstretched to embrace them, my hands and face stained with the sacred blood. Totem, totem, totem… and the light streaming through me like the rain and the wind and the sky. We would all taste the Eucharist, we would all ingest the flesh and suffer strange transubstantiations. We would all find God, we would all live forever. I knew she would tell them. I knew all along she’d never leave me or send me away. My mom loved me. They were here. I was saved. It was the police.
THE HARD SONG
____________
26
WHILE undergoing three weeks of isolated observation at Valley Youth Correctional Facilities I was allowed some books, a pen and notepad, and a few choice hours each afternoon of strictly regulated media privileges. I was also granted, almost as an official afterthought, what seemed to me at the time like virtually acres of soft, casual introspection. They tell me I slept nearly two full days and nights upon my arrival, awaking only to take slow bites at the facility’s tepid, customized meals. I don’t, however, remember those first two days at all. I only remember waking one bright spring morning to the harsh sun flashing outside my window, the glass of which was inlaid with a fine protective wire mesh. The thin bed and walls of my room seemed drab by comparison. I heard a few singing birds, eccentric, anxious and shrill. I was confronted by a long mirror in which I sat on my bed, observing myself with a sort of cool diffidence, as if I were warden to my own reflection. I assumed that invisible behind the mirror sat my more official audience. My reflected face was lined and bruised from excessive sleep, and I poured a glass of water from the blue plastic pitcher beside me on the weak, clumsy bureau. My room was like the rooms of the motels in which I had been raised, at once transient and profane, fleeting and ill-designed. After months of strange vacation I was finally home again. And no matter how much fun you have on vacation, it’s always good being home again.
“Do you know what you did?” Officer Henrietta asked me soon after my arrival. My afternoon sessions with Officer Henrietta, a trained and certified psychotherapist, were the only ritual of my day beyond mere self-maintenance. Officer Henrietta was a bluff, affable man, but one who wanted it known he wasn’t about to take any nonsense, especially not from a child.
“I don’t remember,” I confessed. “But I’m sure that, whatever it was, it was wrong. Or else I wouldn’t be here, would I, Officer Henrietta?”
“What you did was very, very wrong,” Officer Henrietta said. “What you did endangered the lives of people you loved. What you did frightened a lot of people. It frightened you, so you can’t even remember what happened. Do you believe you’re capable of that? Do you believe you’re capable of doing things so horrible you can frighten yourself that much?”
The office in which we met six days each week was cluttered with papers, Styrofoam coffee cups and crumpled Hershey’s wrappers. I always felt comfortable in that office, and actually looked forward to the rather easy, meaningless conversations Officer Henrietta was kind enough to conduct with me. Officer Henrietta’s distinct, often provocative questions never startled me or made me feel ill at ease. Instead, they implied what my obvious responses simply had to be, responses I did not utter so much as activate, like functions in a computer. Graphs, data, production, profit, loss. Anger, love, resentment, sadness, pain. The world of the self and the world of machines. During these days and nights of slow, unhurried reflection, I began to realize that those were the two worlds I always seemed to be getting confused. The world of the self and the world of machines.
“I believe the human mind is capable of anything,” I told Officer Henrietta. “The mind is its own place, just like Milton’s heaven. It sounds like something Blake would have said, doesn’t it? I’m talking William Blake, now. Do you know who William Blake is, Officer Henrietta?” Officer Henrietta’s black felt pen sat poised at the edge of the paper, but his unresponsive brown eyes were trained upon me with a remote, unfocused expression, as if they were staring into something both vital and abstract, like the weather. “And as for me,” I said, “I believe I’m capable of anything I’m capable of doing. I can be anybody I want to be, because only I have the power to decide. Not the world, not this institution, not you and your framed documents. Only me and my conceptions of me. My mom taught me that. I can grow up to be a doctor, an astronaut, or even the president of the United States. I can be a bird, a rock, a cloud. I can be anything I want to be, Officer Henrietta. And I’m afraid there’s not really anything you can do to stop me.”
Every once in a while Officer Henrietta emitted long, mystical sighs, vague punctuations which indicated vaster and cooler worlds than ours filled with sunny, padded white clouds and sparkling blu
e beaches. He leisurely chain-smoked Marlboros or Winstons and drank vile, bitter coffee dimly discolored by Cremora. He showed me ink blotches and asked me what they meant (though I suspect he may have known already). I described for Officer Henrietta bats, abattoirs, leering faces and dark twisted passages filled with incessant and secret motion. He asked me abstract questions. If you drew a picture of yourself on a piece of paper, what color paper would you choose? If a strange man came up to you on the street and asked you to love him, what would you say? If you were on a sinking ship, who would you save first–the women or the children? These were all fine questions, and I answered them the best I could. I told him I would choose a sheet of beige paper, because that was the color of my mom’s car. I told him I would tell the strange man to love himself, and let me get on with my own life. I told him in the event of a shipwreck I wouldn’t try to save anybody, I would let the whole world drown. We would all return to the deep earth together, drifting down through the intricate seaweed and glistening blue water, women and children all together at last, journeying into a safer and warmer world than the one of broken ships.
One day Officer Henrietta began showing me photographs of a beautiful woman with white, smiling teeth. He showed me photographs of a man tied up on a nice sofa in the living room of a nice house. Strange things had been done to his body, from which the clothing had been torn in places, like the paper windows in a Christmas Advent calendar. The pictures seemed slightly familiar to me in a dozy, unimperative way. I thought vaguely I might like to meet these people. But then I also thought it wouldn’t matter to me that much if I never met them at all.
“Is there anyone you’d like to see?” Officer Henrietta asked, laying the photos facedown on his desk, shuffling and stacking them meaninglessly like a deck of cards. “Can you think of anybody offhand? A relative, maybe. Somebody you especially love.”
The History of Luminous Motion Page 17