Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  And apparently nobody, so far, had found that reflection peculiar, or troubling, or amusing. Nobody right now in Karlsruhe. He had to wonder why he was troubled by it. In a few days, he might mention it to Audrey. See what she comes back with. He didn’t yet want to look directly at it, himself. He knew from experience, the way to make a problem grow is simply to ignore it, exist alongside it, glance at it only sidelong from time to time, and avoid frightening it off. Maybe it would turn out to be nothing.

  He even had a plan: to bring it up saying he’d run across it somewhere online in an abstract of someone else’s article. Bringing it up as his own idea would make Audrey respond more guardedly, artificially, because of how she took care of him. He would even say he found the idea objectionable. That would be how to plant the idea. Audrey sooner or later would have a response. It was Audrey who, fifteen years ago, had set him off on a new idea by suggesting, innocently, that space implied time because “distance is always a matter of time, isn’t it?” Her view of physics was always as pure as a fresh-bloomed lily, and he always watched closely, after having set a new notion within that cup. He knew her well, and he knew if he brought this up as his own new idea, her response wouldn’t be honest or naive. He would bring it up during her glass of Guinness. So I ran across something preposterous on abstracts.com today.

  “It is now the moment,” Blythe whispered with her head bowed, “for a very deep red.”

  She was pondering the book of choices. Meanwhile she was shedding her jacket to reveal yet another wardrobe change of the evening. She must have stopped by home again. For a jailhouse visit, she’d outfitted herself in a tight knit shirt that was both turtlenecked and sleeveless, baring her shoulders while shackling her neck. But the same jeans as before.

  “Throw me the remote, would you?” Mark said, because in fact he did want the TV screen flickering, on mute.

  She tossed him the button-studded wand while she picked up the phone to order. What materialized on the screen was the hotel’s continuous video loop, of well-made, paired beds, colorful repasts on sparkling tables, a foxy couple in evening dress toasting each other, a smoking pair of hot tubs—which he killed the sound on—and switched away from—coming immediately upon (and this was perfect, so he left it playing) the lion, the scarecrow, and the tin woodsman galloping away into the distance, up the Yellow Brick Road, escorting their pretty, Earthling, ruby-slippered, messianic girl in Oz—the little, bristly dog mopping up the rear—all in a candy-colored landscape of tissue paper flowers and papier-mâché tree trunks and the famous yellow paving bricks, painted flat on the plywood surface of a ramp that had been nailed together by union stagehands in a studio soundstage, which, when it existed, stood probably not far from here. In Burbank or in Hollywood. The four pilgrims skipped away together with arms interlocked, the lion’s mechanized tail wiping back and forth. And when the camera lifted, it revealed the horizon where the road stretched, the city of Oz appearing there, its towers and turrets, promising to answer every desire.

  He told Blythe with a wave of the remote wand, “Look, the perfect metaphor.”

  She couldn’t pay attention because she was getting the room service people on the phone.

  Metaphor for L.A. and the whole entertainment culture. Metaphor for the Fantasy Vacations biz. And for the kids’ journey up the hill to touch the Hollywood Sign. Metaphor for all Bodie Lostig’s delusions, too, including his vision of a future rustic Shaker Heights impoverished and utopian, but most aptly a metaphor for the boy’s personal grandiosity. He, in his wheelchair, was the fuming fulminating fake wizard, handing out pronouncements. Blythe meanwhile was on the phone reaching accord with the wine people: “All right. Profound, yes, but limited. Not a wine that goes all over the place. Good. Thanks.” She put the phone away, and she turned to see the TV screen he had asked her to look at. She folded her arms.

  Then, having considered for an instant the metaphor on TV he’d pointed out, she turned to the wheeled cart, like a patient there, and she lifted the linen sheet, revealing carafes of water, apples and pears, cheese, a rude-woven basket filled with breads of different toughnesses and tendernesses. On ice under a glass dome was the small palette of fishy salves. The whole thing made her happy and solved all the world’s problems. Lifting her arms in that same chute of fanfare in which she’d surrounded the whole operatic debacle of her dying Rod, she cried, “I am so delighted we got into all this trouble, Mark.” And she took up a plate and started putting together their snacks.

  Mark, in an effort to enjoy what little remained of his rancor, went straight back, “So he’s some kind of antiabortion fundamentalist.”

  This remark needed no prelude. The topic of Bodie was always near at hand. And the Perdue family’s recent abortion was famous. Via well-intentioned gossip everybody on the tour pretty much knew why everybody else was there, and how everybody was doing.

  Blythe, loading plates, didn’t even glance up. “Him?” she said, puzzled. “No, no. He’s Mister Liberal Everything. He and his family, they’re totally Green Party, pro-choice, anti-nuclear, pro-whale … I think that’s something you got wrong, there.”

  Well, if so, then he’d misunderstood. The boy would have to be entirely rethought, and reimagined.

  But Mark didn’t care anymore. He didn’t need to understand Bodie Lostig anymore. Bodie Lostig had been effectively put away. Mark had stopped even looking directly at Bodie Lostig’s physical person, literally never again glanced, after a certain point in the evening, around the triumphal moment when $849 of his own cash, fresh from Blythe’s ATM, was paid to the city and county of Los Angeles. The weekend was over, more or less, and his daughter was smart and she would soon see through him, and she would drop him. And anyway, here came a neatly composed plate of victuals.

  Also, here came Blythe. She didn’t sit in the armchair. She took both plates and clambered up on the bed, kneeling before him, too close, licking something savory off her finger and thumb, saying, “So. Tell me. Now at last. Why is there no such thing as ‘location,’”—she shrugged one bare shoulder around at their present location, with mischief in her eye, as if there were some delicious double meaning here in the nonexistence of this particular location—“and no such thing as duration?”

  She was unmistakably inside the barrier they’d agreed on. She should be sitting across the room. He said, while picking among the bits on his plate, “Oh, there is time. There is space. When I said that, I was talking about absolute measurements.”

  All weekend he had conveyed that, in the presence of his own ideas, he was both embarrassed and bored. Now his tone, all the more, warned her away.

  In repentance—and yet somehow defiance, too—she kept her attention on her food, smiling. “We mere mortals think in relative terms, not absolutes.”

  There came a knock at the door and the muffled announcement “Room Service.” Blythe backed away fast and got to her feet. “That was mighty quick.” First she dug out of her purse a crumpled bill, and when she’d opened the door she told the short, uniformed, handsome, Aztec-looking man how alarmingly prompt he was. The ensuing unavoidable ceremony—presenting the label, unpacking stemware and decanter, pulling the cork with a strangling grip on the bottle, pouring a sample—took place in a total silence, a sore silence, incriminating to them both. This was a different Blythe now, in her leotard-like shirt. He remembered now, the first thing she did, entering the room, was find the thermostat and turn it way up, so a hot exhaust started coming from the wall unit. The place was already growing overwarm. Mark frankly knew nothing of this woman—people can be surprising—indeed with most people, pretty much anything is possible—and if he let his imagination range back over the past days, he might find himself unmaking all his conclusions and ideas about her. He had no basis for all his assumptions. He’d gotten young Bodie Lostig all wrong, too. All bets are always off, realistically. Now, here, between two people who had but near-zero insight into themselves, let alone into each other, certain dee
ds might ensue in a hotel room, which would have consequences. The main thing he’d wanted was that there be no consequences. That shirt was somewhat halter-designed, descending from the ring of fabric at her neck and baring shoulders that were freckled as well as balletic looking. After her sample of wine was poured, she tasted it, and then she took over the bottle herself, telling the man thanks, getting him out of the room. All the while on the television screen, the quartet of supplicants, each carrying his own unique defect, or complaint, had reached the great, tall gates of Oz. The Earth-girl—the one member of the expedition who was made of flesh (rather than silvery cardboard, or straw, or costume-department notions), poor human flesh, sexual flesh, tacky-to-the-touch, indeed Kansas flesh, from right back there in the barnyard—had knocked upon the great gates. And they’d all been admitted.

  Blythe had pursued the Aztec man to the door and crushed her bill into his palm, and when the door was firmly closed, she went over to the wine and turned her back, pharmacist-wise, at the table for pouring, then turned again, gloating, piloting two tall ruby wineglasses to the bed. On television—though they couldn’t be heard with the sound off—the stumpy little green people were waltzing the girl through a cosmetic process that looked like a “Complete Stylist’s Makeover.” The colors of Oz, increasingly in every rebroadcast over the years, are radioactive, disagreeable. Kansas was better. In Kansas around the muddy barnyard everyone looked sick and pale and discouraged, like an old Swedish art film. In the atmosphere incipient tornadoes laid a dark eschatological sentence on all things. It was the Depression or something, and people were trying to seem cheerful.

  Blythe, while keeping the big wineglasses from spilling, was on her knees wading up the mattress to him, reclaiming ground. She commented on Oz, waving her own heavy goblet toward the screen, “Metaphor for theoretical physics?”

  Mark found that startling. And pleasing. She was playing the role of “student” so pertly. With her usual perfect clairvoyance she’d leaped forward inside his personal peculiar little philosophical world.

  “How do you mean?” he said.

  She sipped. “The journey to Oz: people going onward asking the wrong question. Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, all of them. They’ve come asking the wrong questions.”

  “Which is … physics … ?”

  “As you say on the old YouTube Novas.” She sipped again while keeping her eyes on him. “People asking the wrong questions.”

  Her nearness. Her knee. It was making him panic while, inwardly, also thawing a certain syrup, syrup of disloyalty to his own life, the feeling that some stranger had replaced her, a stranger capable of flouting their agreement of prudence, and he came out and uttered a bizarre, half-baked thing, to at least stop the advance. “Funny: you want to stay loyal to ‘Rod,’ and I find I want to stay loyal to the little Noddy-thing idea out there. Wouldn’t that be weird.”

  This was his cartoonish mysticism, immediately regrettable when exposed to light, something not intended in any literal way, and it would be embarrassing now if he had to try to explain, how the imaginary omniscient floating fetus had been the only constant observer of the weekend’s folly. Blythe, with an absurdity thrust in her face, was making a confused effort actually to comprehend it, her gaze slowly coming apart. The remark was more of a slap than he’d meant.

  So—since it also did make some kind of arcane sense—it seemed necessary to try to develop a few logical connections, and lifting a hand, gripping the strands of an invisible web, he began, “Like, how all knowledge is all connected up.”

  Now this was occult.

  And could only get worse. “I mean, naturally, I’ll always know a lot more things than a fetus ever did. But they’ll be the same kinds of things. In a very general way.” Yes, he was now talking Bodie Lostig’s kind of philosophy, but he was entitled, unlike Bodie Lostig.

  She continued to look as if she might be willing to admit there was some glimmer of a meaning there. But of course couldn’t see how.

  He had succeeded in one thing. He had succeeded in stopping her. In actually humiliating her, mentioning their loyalties. She’d really sat back on her heels. He’d wrecked everything.

  “Of course it’s huge, it’s immense, the sheer amount of things I know because I happen to be ‘alive.’ I know who the president is. What color the sky is. How to walk. You know: left foot, right foot. What a hand is. The alphabet and the days of the week and so on.” And so on, and so on. Newtonian physics and the new physics, and the even newer. What the mother Audrey’s face looks like. What the weather is like on a given day.

  Poor Blythe, blocked and repulsed but still kneeling before him, stared at the two plates beside her on the bed. She folded her forearms, her wineglass in the crook of an elbow, and she said, “Mark?” She was exasperated. “May I just say? It’s been three months. Hasn’t it? How come your whole family seems joined in this agreement to keep moaning and groaning over the Nod decision?”

  “I’m so tired of that … name.”

  “You all made a logical decision.” She lifted herself off her denim haunches and, avoiding looking at him, steadying herself with a hand, she was beginning the process of crawling backward on her knees, because she’d been spurned, and she climbed off the bed and went to the dresser, to add more to her glass.

  Though she hadn’t depleted it much. It was still mostly full.

  As she poured she said, “An embryo has no consciousness. You’re a scientist, Mark. You’re the one who was telling me about survivor’s guilt.”

  Clearly tonight he had the job—and would continue to have it—the job of belittling the offer of love. Which would be a cruel, hard insult, because he loved her. The important thing was to keep pretending it wasn’t happening.

  “No, not guilt,” he blathered onward, “You don’t understand. No guilt. Just more like selfpity. Like we went online and looked at all the equipment we’d need. There’s this whole world online. He wouldn’t have been eligible for any of this, but you can get helmets so they can’t hurt themselves, and spoons with special handles and special exercise-gym equipment, chairs with things so they can’t fall out. Video programs for home schooling—or just, I guess, pacifying them—and timing systems that put in morphine. Special little tricycles. There’s a whole little world—of people devoted to these dead-end lives.” His voice had been going up higher, so he stopped, then started again lower, “Of course. I’m a scientist. I believe, and I know for a fact, that it was one step up from a cyst or a wart. It possibly had a kind of ‘awareness,’ unlike a wart. But no self-awareness.”

  So there, he’d made that distinction aloud. It was always only an inner idea, never tested in the air. And it survived the test. Cyst or wart.

  Of course, he’d always not cared, nor did anybody. That was the true and happy fact. Nobody did. People pretended to but really didn’t. Not caring was the indispensable condition that originally condensed everything out, like mass and energy in the big-bang moment. His not caring—and most of all his blamelessness, one’s everlasting indemnity—those were the more interesting, startling aspects of the experience. Try as one might, one can’t feel anything but gladness, relief, over an unremarkable little avoidance of life. And moreover, one ought not to. That was the extra thing: admitting you don’t care you don’t care. That was the strange, the additional step, decreeing a world where people don’t care that people don’t care. It’s fine to be fine.

  He summed up, “When you start implying—” he began. And then started a different way, “None of this has anything to do with guilt, or like, whether the little ‘ghost’ of a baby ‘forgives’ us.”

  Blythe, leaning there with her wineglass where she was driven away, must be getting tired of this topic this weekend. Especially now, with its obvious merely diversionary purpose.

  But she did approve of that last affirmation, about how irrelevant is the forgiveness thing. She smiled mistily, “The cut worm forgives the plow?”

  Th
at seemed unlike her. He really almost recoiled. It seemed so unkind. She explained. “Poem. William Blake. The ‘sad-but-true’ department.”

  He had to wonder for a minute whether being turned away had made her bitter and now she meant to hurt him—because of the way he’d sent her from the bed. That was unkind of him, sending her away. That was a bad moment there. He would replay it often in memory in the weeks and months to come, and maybe even the years to come: the way she’d climbed off the bed, after having knelt before him. She, too, might always hate the memory of that moment.

  But in speaking of worms and plow blades, her voice had been gentle. Her eyes had been humorous, warm, lit up. “We are in the sad-but-true department,” she chided.

  Sometimes, with Blythe, it was as if they both knew the same old tune and together they could enter up unrehearsed into it. They were conversing in a heavenly salon where nothing anymore mattered. And she was—she was—cold inside like him. Maybe there never had been any genuine risk of physical affection in this room—no matter how high she turn the thermostat to heat the air.

  In a surge of love for her in his despair he told her, “Oh, Blythe, you know, people are pretty much interchangeable.”

  That perplexed her. He’d said it wrong, it sounded like he was describing an insignificance to things, a sordid insignificance. He’d meant it to be a kind of apology, just for being married to somebody else. It was as close as he would come to a confession of love.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her eyes softened by something that made her smile a little. “You’ve got Audrey, and she’s not interchangeable.”