Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  She intended no acrimony there. She was just ruminating, joining him in ruminations, upon the metaphysical mystery of separate identities. She only meant that Audrey Naale of Terra Linda—driver of a black Lexus, wearer of a red tool belt, former lawyer—didn’t have these particular freckled shoulders, or the Subaru with the sticky drink holder, or hair of a certain cedar-shaving consistency, or the Risdie education, the L.A. loft with Persian carpets and a cappuccino machine. She was a different fate. It was a comment on what a comedy this is, this business of having identities, being posted at a distance from each other, each taking up the general project of being or seeming happy.

  In fact he actually rather appreciated the cut-worm remark, and he went on (because he always did like to think this was fundamentally what they were talking about all weekend), “It’s a good thing there is death, no?” The plow that comes to sever all. Death the necessary plot device in the background, to make the story go. Or death as a kind of storage place: a theater’s offstage prop closet in the dark. The fetus’s stunted cerebral cortex, according to the doctors, had never had any possibility of higher abstraction or language abilities. He’d often wondered, even long before this, if all you’d ever had was incomprehension and discomfort, from your earliest consciousness, you could think it was normal. You might think it’s just how things are. And go on like that.

  Blythe, over her wineglass rim’s hoop, gave a sigh—which included a tired, formal chuckle, admitting that “death” is, yes, a sort of resource, deep and cold and dependable, irrigating all things, irrigating all the visible world. There’s no afterlife, but Mark continued to enjoy the poetic and fanciful notion that when he dies he’ll be “joining” the idea of Noddy, in some way. They’ll simply be together in the place where 2 + 2 = 4, that’s all. The place of spare parts, the prop closet. The place where shining geometry is. And integral calculus and number theory.

  Blythe was growing tired and dejected all the while—he could observe it while it was happening—because plainly the real point of all this was sinking in, that the purpose of all this talk was to replace the love she’d thought of starting. The shirt she’d chosen involved no brassiere at all, and, in the ingenious, supernatural weave of the Acebandage-colored stretch fabric from the magical tables of the womenswear side of the department store, her separate breasts were blinded and somehow pilloried, in a way that wounds a man, simultaneously maims and fantastically empowers him. But over this spectacle now her arms were folded. And her attention drifted to her large Celebrity tote bag.

  Which she wandered over to, with a resolve. It bore the Celebrity Vacations business logo: a blazing California sun wearing sunglasses. She said, “Here you go,” and she pulled out the glossy white folder, embossed with the same sun logo, whose pockets contained all the Xeroxes of the contracts, the weekend’s itinerary, brochures describing the other Fantasy Vacations programs, the disclaimers he’d signed in carbon copy, contact information, order forms to fill out requesting extra CDs and DVDs and souvenir Tshirts and caps and Celebrity warm-up suits, and places for the kids to enter their email addresses and create their own online passwords to join up with the “Fame Club” website and get discounts on online games and fabulous merchandise.

  She tossed it on the hotel dresser. “Your stuff,” she said.

  Passing it to him was a last little piece of business before getting on their flight tomorrow.

  She put her wineglass on the food cart, and she took up a pear. Picking at a defect on its skin, she said, going back to the kind of talk she thought he preferred, “So what name would you’ve rathered? For the little person in memory in history.”

  Mark didn’t answer, for suddenly he had sunk and decayed to a level where he couldn’t be scraped together again. The more he taught the standard equations to undergraduates—in those classrooms where chalk dust mist in the air and chalk dust grime-paste on his palms and in his pores bred the bacteria that gave him his winter coughs and colds—the more he redescribed the old relativistic space-time geometry, the more times he went through the derivation of Planck’s constant—the more fictitious became the integrals and sums, the standard Hamiltonians and de Broglies, the more irrelevant, and the more he sensed himself inside a thrumming organism where only a trustingness called ignorance got anybody by.

  It was everybody’s trusting ignorance, but also it was his case particularly. The antibiotics had worked, but there were still episodes, and always would be, when he couldn’t remember the commonest word; or in a journal article, an equation on the page would stand eternally mocking his understanding; or when the first half of a sentence, which he had no idea how to finish, extended like a pier, out into a misty lake. Only tenure kept him standing.

  Blythe shrugged. “I had an abortion. Long ago. College. But it wasn’t late-term.”

  Mark said, “Mm.” It was supposed to be a noise of empathy. He picked up his plate and set it on his lap and broke a piece of bread. His life had pretty much passed him by. He ought to be hungry, and was hungry, but also finishing his meal was like a kind of progress, or just impatience.

  On television the four seekers in Oz were still aiming to get to the halls of enlightenment. Dorothy was being drawn on a horse cart by a green horse through the streets of an Emerald City like an old Bavarian village. Probably Judy Garland had abortions, too, sleeping her way through Hollywood at some point in her career. Possibly—or even certainly? —such things happened back then.

  “Everybody’s had an abortion,” he said in commiseration. Also if it wasn’t late-term it would have been a whole different thing. Maybe it would have been better if they had viewed the remains. In the days before the operation, a nurse at a desk with a computer and a gliding mouse (a mouse that clicked and circled, while she filled out an onscreen form), had asked whether they would like to view the remains. Mark and Audrey were slightly horrified, but according to the nurse some people with late-terms insist on viewing the remains. The Perdues naturally did not need to, and they said so. And so a click went into the mouse under the nurse’s hand, which created the computer record, and the mouse went circling and clicking, and the question never came up again. It was a good thing in fact, because he didn’t want to see the remains and the sight could have done no good for anybody. He would have just pictured a kind of slippery chute somewhere. (If it were necessary to picture anything!)

  Blythe stopped watching TV—the little green horse, as it pulled the cart, was tossing its shampooed head—and she again topped off her glass, and she turned and came back to the bed, bringing her wineglass with her, and on her knees slid up toward the same place as before, while Mark kept watching the screen.

  She set her wineglass aside and focused on him. He kept his eyes on the TV. But she’d planted herself to make a sizeable notch in his lane of vision, kneeling, hands on hips, shoulders pressed back. He was aware, sidewise, of the lichen-green color in her gaze in hotel lamplight, and he knew that she must be seeing what everybody saw: a man who, objectively, wasn’t going to be pulling his weight anymore, and in the midst of this desert he’d entered, she saw herself as medicine. She lived in this particular desert here. It was her desert. Where he was a newcomer, she was a creature adapted to it, its austerities, its compromises, privations. And now here she was on the bed: she had made herself now a lower-class sort of woman for him, a second-best, low-self-esteem, out-of-town woman. It was unmistakable that the unbrassiered breasts were a gift, swaddled as they were in the stretch fabric that suspended each separately in sight, heavily, to deliver the old never-fail mental concussion, putting the crucial dab of Novocain upon a man’s brain—for Mark was a creature helplessly evolved to obey any whatsoever tides or gravitational yearnings; and already always, whenever he was around her, he was aware of the inevitable prickle of the deep roots’ clutch, a grip on his body furnished by evolution for purposes of reproduction but also, accidentally-on-purpose, an addictive pleasure, like that of a lab rat who will keep pressing the bar to
get the sweet pellet, and she of course must know he was constrained to that. The empty void she evoked in the world around herself was the drug, as well as the license, it was the beginning of mercy, it was the condition of his deliverance.

  He turned fatally to look in her eyes.

  And she said, “All right, I’ve got to go. So gimme an innocent little kiss, dear Mark. It’s two-something by now.”

  “Two-something. Why, the night’s only beginning.”

  She rolled her eyes. All this was the perfect melting road. Now they could simply be unwise, and forgetful, and allow face to drift closer to face, and he would start to accept that form of airless underwater delirium and would be unzipping those jeans and releasing the sight of her hip rising. It could happen any time he liked. The two breasts actually seemed to swell under his sight (if that were physiologically possible), and he murmured as he kept an eye on them, “And anyway the movie’s not over.” His plate was there, and he broke off a piece of bread, thinking it might be debonair—to chew on a little bit of bread, prolonging the flirtation cruelly.

  She said, “I have a feeling Lotta and Bodie will decide they want to do the video tomorrow. So in the morning I’ll be here at nine to pick you up. Okay? As planned? You’re not going to have much time to get some sleep in.”

  So he made his move. As bold as any handsome cinema actor, he fastened the starfish of his hand to her left breast and, suavely, gave it a couple of fond little pulses. But he certainly must have misunderstood the situation. Because she yipped his name and batted his hand away and sat up straighter, smiling crazily. Then she seized the same hand she had just knocked away. She held it down on her thigh in both her hands. “You are such a goof,” she sang. “It’s flattering, Mark. It is. It really is.” She was petting his hand, petting it hard, because it had misbehaved. The attack had gone off wrong. He’d seen right away by the light in her eye—by her thrilled horror—the little squeezes he’d given the breast were more like a double-honk on a rubber bulb. That’s what her unnecessary, hysterical, spastic response made of the situation.

  Still, it would be possible to recover somehow. He’d hung his head sharp to one side. As if a neck tendon had been clipped. And he looked down and, with a free hand, painted his torn bread crust in the salmon mousse, then taking a bite, he smiled up at her, trying to show shameless, unrepentant cunning.

  She seemed to take the smile as sorriness. She smiled back at him, shaking her head, “You really are a goof,” and she lifted his captive hand, squeezing it into a fist between her own, pressing it to a safe spot between her breasts.

  If it were possible, by a deep-enough sigh, to rewind time just twenty seconds, Mark drew exactly such a sigh now. It was a great sigh that might succeed in sucking back events while they still lingered in the air between them. But he inhaled a flake of breadcrust and he had to cough, right in her face, pushing back against the headboard to launch it out. It was a big high-velocity cough, and he was able to keep the entire mouthful from exploding all over her, but then he had to gasp, because a second cough was coming, and the intake of breath sucked something deep in his air passage. Bread. It was so well plugged in his throat, he couldn’t make a sound. He looked at her. Eyes alone could communicate. A vacuum-seal had shut him out from life. It had put him behind a pane. Right before his face was the air he needed: his eyes swam forward in the very oxygen. But seeing it alone wasn’t enough. This would be serious. The wad of bread was really well stuck.

  Blythe saw what was wrong right away, and she stood up from the bed. He could, in fact, make little sounds in his larynx, but they were a dead man’s sounds. And the effort pinched his esophagus tighter. He didn’t like this at all. This was the kind of thing you hear about. He climbed forward and crouched on all fours like a vomiting dog. But that posture did nothing to pop out the plug. The wad of bread was really not moving. There was nothing going in and nothing coming out, neither ebb nor flow of air. Meanwhile his brain seemed to be ballooning inside his skull. Blythe came over and started banging on his spine.

  That did nothing. It was just an annoyance. It just hurt. He crawled away from the rain of blows, trying to bank what little oxygen he had in his lungs. For some reason Blythe went into the bathroom. Obviously she was in an irrational state of not knowing how to act. Because she came right back out. He got to his feet on the floor. He had an idea he should run out into the corridor, and maybe get to the lobby. But that would accomplish nothing. Blythe was saying, “What should I do? What do you want me do to?” She picked up the phone, but he waved at her to put it down, because he was a married man in a hotel room with a young woman who was so well-dressed, at two-something in the morning, with wine. That’s where he was, whether dead or alive.

  They both, surely, knew about the Heimlich maneuver. He made embracing motions, nodding his head. She understood and she approached—daintily, as if he were soaking wet and she didn’t want to dampen her own clothes—and she started hugging him face-to-face. She didn’t know how to do it. You’re supposed to hug people from behind. But he had trouble prying her away. He himself was getting weak. He was trying to conserve energy. She understood and moved away.

  He turned around and backed into her. She locked her forearms over his ribcage, over the heart area, and began constricting as hard as she could. This wasn’t going to work. The pressure had the effect of locking down, all the more, the plug in his throat. That plug was the floor of his consciousness now. That plug represented the silent seafloor where he was planted and still waving. She kept on hugging, tighter, because it might work eventually.

  On the desk by the phone, two paper sleeves held the return flight tickets. He could see them right there, while she squeezed and hugged, see them with eyes that were still functioning. It was an image carried by optic nerves to a brain that wasn’t yet oxygen-deprived. He almost felt that if he ceased to exist, Lotta and Audrey would cease to exist, too! As if they were a pair of people he’d dreamed up in the process of dreaming himself up.

  Of course the truth was, they were real, actual people. Who would have to go on without him. Into the future. A remark came back to him: it was something he’d told Lotta tonight, when she was whining over how small was the chance of her having come to exist at all, There’s always going to be a you. It was only a throwaway remark, like a joke, but it had a joke’s grain-of-truth quality, too, accidentally, the way a bell, in chiming, does summon eternity. That “there’s ‘always’ going to be a ‘you’” would be as true for Lotta as it had been for him.

  This entire end-of-the-world business of “personal extinction” had always been only an abstraction, something that happened to other people, people who were only dreamed up as accessories in his own existence. When death isn’t a remote abstraction anymore, you see how the whole design would be unfair, if that’s how it works, and the arrangement itself ought to be frankly addressed, not only on the general principle of justice, but also in view of a more efficient design in nature. The purity of being right about this ought to be invincible. On the television screen (because his vision was starting to shrink and he was going back to being merely an inconsequential visitor again in this life) was the palace of the Wizard, its lustrous floors. The quartet of timid pilgrims, each clutching tightly his own personal defect, were entering upon the long corridor, to make their entreaties of the fraudulent Oz—only to learn in the end, of course, they’d got it wrong, because they were, yes, asking the wrong questions. What they were seeking had never existed, and wasn’t even desirable. What they needed was behind them somewhere, something very small, something they’d left back in the grass somewhere long ago. Old story. This movie was another of the million things a fetus would never know about. Would never suspect the existence of. Most things were like that: their existence unsuspected. All our lives, mere tangency suffices for touch. One ought not to be astonished, or pretend it’s a big surprise. The only great experiences were Audrey and Lotta. Whom however he’d, likewise, hardly known.
They had slipped through his “hands.” As does it all. And he had been remiss, too, in the matter of the goldfish. The thing had been on his mind. Because if that fish were, in fact, swimming right now in a glass of water beside a bathroom mirror, it wouldn’t be able to take comfort in thinking its reflection was a companion, swimming alongside. Every time it took a turn, its little friend would fail to follow. What schooling fish need is to stay parallel. Instead, with a mirror’s reverse symmetries, its only friend would keep peeling away. Peeling away forever. Which could drive a goldfish mad, in eternity.

  Then Mark was aware that he could breathe. His forehead was on the carpet and he could breathe. He was lying on the carpet. He was lucky. He worked steadily at breathing. And just let Blythe wait. Then he lifted his head. The wad of bread was out there in the room somewhere. He had fainted. Blythe had, in the meantime, come around to sit before him cross-legged on the floor, looking out of breath herself. She had figured out the Heimlich maneuver.

  SHE STAYED FOR only a little while. She made tea, of some pointless tasteless herbal type; the hotel provided an electric kettle on the bathroom counter with a basket of tea bags. During much of the time waiting for the kettle to heat, she stayed out of sight in the bathroom, watching it get hot.

  Mark didn’t want any tea, but because she was having a cup, he accepted a cup of his own and had a sip or two. It was good to have the heat spreading over his heart. She sat across the room in the armchair. “I squeezed the stomach. Instead of the chest. That’s the secret.”

  It was a remark that ended a long silence. It was as if everything they’d said in the last three days were lies, even though they’d sincerely believed it all, and it all must have been true at the time. It all was true. He’d turned the TV off, so they were more alone. “Interesting day tomorrow,” Blythe said. “The video things. The little awards ceremony, the goodbyes, the hugs in the parking lot.”