The History of Luminous Motion Read online

  THE HISTORY OF LUMINOUS MOTION

  Scott Bradfield

  Revised with a new afterword by the author

  London: Red Rabbit Books

  Copyright ⓒ Scott Bradfield 1989

  First revised edition with afterword ⓒ Scott Bradfield 2013

  Red Rabbit Books, London

  Books by Scott Bradfield:

  Fiction:

  The History of Luminous Motion (1989)

  Dream of the Wolf: Stories (1990)

  What’s Wrong with America (1994)

  Animal Planet (1995)

  Greetings From Earth:

  New and Collected Stories (1996)

  Good Girl Wants it Bad (2004)

  Hot Animal Love:

  Tales of Modern Romance (2005)

  The People Who Watched Her Pass By (2010)

  Criticism:

  Dreaming Revolution (1993)

  Confessions of an Unrepentant

  Short Story Writer (2012)

  For Felicia

  This is the long lulled pause

  Before history happens

  Tom Paulin

  Motion

  Light

  Sound and Gravity

  Mass

  Chemistry

  Life

  The Hard Song

  MOTION

  ___________

  1

  MOM was a world all her own, filled with secret thoughts and motions nobody else could see. With Mom I easily forgot Dad, who became little more than a premonition, a strange weighted tendency rather than a man, as if this was Mom’s final retribution, making Dad the future. Mom was always now. Mom was the movement that never ceased. Mom lived in the world with me and nobody else, and every few days or so it seemed she was driving me to more strange new places in our untuned and ominously clattering beige Rambler. It wasn’t just motion, either. Mom possessed a certain geographical weight and mass; her motion was itself a place, a voice, a state of repose. No matter where we went we seemed to be where we had been before. We were more than a family, Mom and I. We were a quality of landscape. We were the map’s name rather than some encoded or strategic position on it. We were like an MX missile, always moving but always already exactly where we were supposed to be. There were many times when I thought of Mom and me as a sort of weapon.

  “Do you love your mother?” one of Mom’s men asked me. We were sitting at Sambo’s and I was drinking hot chocolate. Mom had gone to the ladies’ room to freshen up.

  It seemed to me a spurious question. There was something sedentary and covert about it, like the bad foundation of some prospective home. I had, as always, one of my school texts open in my lap. It was entitled Our Biological Wonderland: 5th Edition, and I was contemplating the glossary to Chapter Three. I liked the word “Chemotropism: Movement or growth of an organism, esp. a plant, in response to chemical stimuli.” Chemotropic, I thought. Chemotropismal.

  “Your mother is a very nice person,” the man continued. He didn’t like the silence sitting between us at the table. I myself didn’t mind. He smoked an endless succession of Marlboros, which he crushed out in his coffee saucer rather than the Sambo’s glass ashtray resting conveniently beside his elbow. Nervously he was always glancing over his shoulder to see if Mom was back yet. I didn’t tell him Mom could spend ages in the ladies’ room; the ladies’ room was one of Mom’s special places. No matter where we were or where we were traveling, Mom found a uniform and patient atmosphere in the ladies’ rooms where she went to make herself beautiful. Sometimes, when I accompanied her there like a privileged and confidential adviser, we would sit in front of the mirror for hours while she tried on different lipsticks and eye shadows, mascaras and blushes. Mom found silence in the ladies’ room, and in the beauty of her own face. It was like the silence that sat at the tables between me and Mom’s men, only by Mom and me it was more appreciated, and thus more profound.

  “I love my mom,” I said, holding the book open in my lap. Mom’s man wasn’t looking at me, though. He seemed to be thinking about something. It was as if the silence had actually moved into him too, something he had inherited from the still circulating memory of Mom’s skin and Mom’s scent. I looked into my book again, and we sat together drinking our coffee and hot chocolate, awaiting that elimination of our secret privacy which Mom carried around with her like a brilliant torch, or a large packet of money. Sometimes I felt as if I were a million years old that summer, and that Mom and I would continue traveling like that forever and ever, always together and never apart. I remember it as the summer of my millionth year, and I suspect I will always remember that summer very well.

  THOSE WERE NIGHTS when we moved quickly, the nights when Mom found her men. Usually I would lie in the backseat of our car and read my faded textbooks, acquired from the moldering dime bargain boxes of surfeited and dusty used-book stores. I would read by means of the diffuse light of streetlamps, or the fluid and Dopplering light of passing automobiles. Sometimes I had to pause in the middle of paragraphs and sentences in order to await this sentient light. In those days I thought light was layered and textured like leaves in a tree. It moved and ruffled through the car. It felt gentle and imminent like snow. Eventually I would fall asleep, the light moving across and around me on some dark anonymous street, and I would hear the car door open and slam and Mom starting the ignition, and then we would be moving again, moving together into the light of cities and stars, Mom pulling her coat over me and whispering, “We’ll have our own house someday, baby. Our own bedrooms, kitchen and TV, our own walls and ceilings and doors. We’ll have a brand-new station wagon with a nice soft mattress in back so you can lie down and take a nap any time you want. We’ll have a big yard and garden. We might even have a second house. In the mountains somewhere.”

  In the mornings I would awake in different cities, underneath different stars. Only they were the same cities, too, in a way. They were still the same stars.

  MOM KEPT THE credit cards in a plastic card file in the glove compartment, even the very old cards that we never used anymore. The file box also contained a few jeweled rings and gold bands that we sold at central city pawnshops, and a few random business cards with phone numbers and street maps urgently scrawled on their backs. These were the maps of Mom’s men, and sometimes I preferred looking at them rather than at my own textbooks. These were the names of things, people and places that possessed color, suspense and uniformity, like a globe of the world with textured mountain ranges on it. Lompoc, Burlingame, Half Moon Bay. Buellton, Stockton, Sacramento, Davis, San Luis Obispo. Real Estate, Plumbing, Fire Theft Auto, 24 Hour Bail, Good Used Cars, Cala Foods and Daybrite Cleaners. Mom’s men were accumulations of words, like nails in a piece of wood. When I closed the plastic file again the lid’s plastic clamp clacked hollowly.

  “That’s Mom’s Domesday Book you’ve got there,” Mom said. “Her Dead Sea Scrolls, her tabula fabula. That’s Mom’s articulate past, borrowed and bought and certainly very blue. If they ever catch up with your old mom, you take that file box and toss it in the river–that is, if you can find a river. Head for the hills, and I’ll get back to you in five to ten, though I’m afraid that’s a rough estimate. I’ve stopped keeping track of the felonies. That’s a compensation that comes with age–not wisdom. You’re allowed to stop keeping track of the felonies.” Mom was wearing bright red lipstick, tight faded Levi’s and a yellow blouse. She drank from a can of Budweiser braced between her knees. I didn’t think Mom was old at all. I thought she was exceptionally young and beautiful.

  Outside our dusty car windows lay the flat beating red plains of the San Fernando Valley. Dull gray metal water towers, red-and-white-striped radio transmitter
s, cows. “Emily Dickinson said she could find the entire universe in her backyard,” Mom said. “This, you see, is our backyard.” Mom gestured at the orange groves and dilapidated, sunstruck fresh-fruit stands and fast-food restaurants aisling us along Highway 101. The freeway asphalt was cracked and pale, littered with refuse and the ruptured shells of overheated retread tires. Then Mom would light her cigarette with the dashboard lighter. I liked the way the lighter heated there silently for a while like some percolating threat and then, with a broken clinking sound, came suddenly unsprung. Mom’s waiting hand would catch it–otherwise it would project itself onto the vinyl seat and add more charred streaks to the ones it had already made. There was even a telltale oval smudge against the inside thigh of Mom’s faded Levi’s. “It’s along here somewhere. We’ll have a McDonaldburger and then I know this bar where maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe we’ll both get lucky.” And of course we always did.

  2

  BECAUSE I ALWAYS identified Mom according to her customary and implicit movement, whenever that movement ceased or diminished it seemed to me as if Mom’s meaning had lapsed too. It was her wordlessness I recognized first, that pulse and breath of her steady and unflagging voice. It was a soundlessness filled with noise, a meaninglessness filled with words. It was like that intensification of language where language is itself obliterated, as if someone had typed a thousand sentences across the same line of gleaming white bond until nothing remained but a black mottled streak of carbon.

  “This is Pedro,” she told me that long ceremonious day in San Luis Obispo. We had been spending the week at a TraveLodge on Los Osos Boulevard, thanks to the uncomprehending beneficence of Randall T. Philburn, a ranch supplies salesman Mom had met in a King City Bingo Parlor the week before. Randall had carried Diner’s Club and American Express. He had shown me a trick with two pieces of string. The next time I saw him I was supposed to have memorized the names and chronologies of all our presidents.

  “And this, Pedro, this is the only important man in my life,” Mom said. “My unillustrious and laconic son, Phillip.”

  So that was how it began. She told me his name was Pedro, as if all her men had names. Pedro. As if a man’s name was something to be uttered and not a bit of embossed plastic to be stored in a grimy beige plastic file box in our Rambler’s rattly glove compartment. Pedro. As if I were supposed to remember. As if a man’s name was something you said with your mouth so that another’s ears might hear.

  It was no simpler than that, that first staggering cessation of Mom’s body and voice. Barely an utterance and more than a name. Pedro. And it wasn’t even his name, really.

  “HOW YOU DOING, sport?” Pedro asked, teaching me a firm handshake. His real name was Bernie Robertson, and Bernie possessed a round florid face (particularly after his second or third Budweiser), a hardware store in Shell Beach, a slight paunch, and a two-bedroom house in the Lakewood District of San Luis Obispo, where I was permitted the dubious privacy of my own room. It was only a week after our first, formal introduction that Bernie helped us transfer our few things from the TraveLodge into his home where Pedro’s real, unvoiced name was everywhere. It was on the mail and on the automobile registration and on the towels and on the hearth rug, it was on the mortgage and the deed. It was even burned into a crosscut oak placard that hung from Pedro’s front porch: THE ROBERTSONS. It was a name that, unless we were very careful, might soon attach itself to both Mom and me.

  “My house is your house,” Pedro liked to say, sitting on the sofa with his arm around Mom, his can of Bud balanced on his right knee. Pedro’s house contained stuffed Victorian love seats, knickknack shelves, porcelain statues of Restoration ladies and gentlemen engaged in rondels and courtly kisses, untried issues of Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post, lace doilies and even antimacassars. Mom lay with Pedro on one sofa, her head in his lap, his arm across her breast. I sat alone on the love seat with my textbook. It was entitled Science and Our World Around Us, and contained a color photograph of E. coli. Most human beings and animals contained this bacterium in their intestines, the photo caption said, and though generally benign, it could cause infant diarrhea and food poisoning. Mom and Pedro seemed very happy and warm in front of the fire. The television was on, generating its soft noise. One slice of dry pizza remained in the oily cardboard container beside the blazing brick fireplace where Heidi, Pedro’s smug and disaffected gray cat, paused occasionally in its rounds to lick at it. Sometimes I just read the dictionary. Auto-da-fé, autodidact, autoecious, autogamy, autoimmune. Words in a dictionary have a rhythm to them, a dry easy meaning I can assemble in my head like songs, or caress like pieces of sculpted wood. Autoecious, I thought. Autogamy. Autoimmune.

  “Is there anything you’d like to watch, Phillip?” Mom might ask. “Pedro and I just watched a program we wanted to watch.”

  I disregarded Mom’s offer, drifting in the currents of words and pictures issuing from the privacy of my books. The television remained tuned to whatever mundane channel Pedro and Mom had selected. With the conclusion of that sad summer, I was casually enrolled in school.

  Needless to say, my first experience of public education was at once harrowing and nondescript. There was something nightmarish about the actual absence of terror in that place, which always struck me as a sort of systematic exercise in vaguely hollow and uneventful routine. There were other boys and girls there of my own age who I was encouraged to get to know. When I didn’t speak at the daily Show and Tell, my reticence was attributed to shyness and not intimate revulsion. Stories and fairy tales were read aloud to us, and we read to ourselves tedious true-life stories from the flimsy plastic pamphlets of the SRA Reading Program. (I was assigned to the intermediate level Red, due to my deliberate stumbling over consonantal clusters and mixed vowels. I was determined none of these strangers would ever know me.) We were there for seven or eight hours each day. Games, talk, asinine books, endless recesses, stupid unsatisfiable pets in cages lined with urine and sawdust, colored paper and paste and scissors which we were to hold in to our bodies when we passed them back to the Art Supplies Monitor. (Every one of us was designated by some such atrocious insignum, like cabinet officials in some tawdry, self-important South American nation. I, for example, was Chalk Board Clearance Supervisor.) It was interminable day after day of vacuous and unremitting childhood, unrelieved by any useful information whatsoever. The world had closed itself around me, and threatened to teach me only what it wanted me to know.

  “YOUR MOM’S A real special person, one first-class lovely lady,” Pedro liked to assure me. Every afternoon we were usually alone together for an hour or so after school, since Mom had taken a part-time job at the Lucky Food Store, boxing groceries. “You’re a very fortunate young man to have a mother who loves you so much.” He never looked at me when he spoke, but was busily popping the tops off beer cans, fiddling with the TV’s horizontal and vertical controls, or building something useful in the backyard. He didn’t speak so much as erupt with aphorisms. “Everybody needs to settle down someday,” he might say, or, “Sometimes a woman needs somebody who can take care of her. Even mothers needs a little love and support sometimes.” Then he would clamp something to the steel vise, or shave the spine of some unvarnished plywood door. On sunny days we hauled his tools and machinery out to the splintering pine workbench in the yard, and in those dull equivocal months of Mom’s immobility the days seemed relentlessly sunny. I would stand and watch from a distance–not for self-protection, but simply because I didn’t want to get too involved. Pedro loved to build things out there: a trellis, picnic table and chairs, cement patio, brick fireplace. If there were world enough and time I’m sure Pedro would have built airport runways out there, enormous ivory mausoleums, pyramids and skyscrapers and spaceships and planets. With the hacksaw which he always replaced so carefully in the oiled and immaculate toolbox. With the pliers. With the sharp steel file. With the ball peen hammer. With all those solid and patently useful tools he kept file
d in the large glimmering steel toolbox and stored underneath the same bed in which he and Mom slept together each night. It seemed the appropriate place to keep them, I thought. They massed underneath there like weather; you could feel the pressure of them in other rooms and houses. With these tools Pedro had built things in Mom’s mind too, working late at night while she slept. There was a literal or figurative truth in that image for me, and, during those horribly persistent days of domesticity, I didn’t care which was more correct. The literal or the figurative.

  MOM BEGAN DOING strange things after we moved into Pedro’s. She whistled sometimes, or sewed curtains. She darned socks. She even embroidered. I remember sitting beside her on the sofa and watching her hands fumble with the lacy cloth and a sharp, gleaming needle. That needle was the only part of the process that made sense to me. The needle was abrupt and binding. It carried with it its own sharp logic. Then one day the new curtains were hung in the living room and Mom put her hands on her hips and smiled. I suppose I was expected to smile too, but I didn’t smile. I looked at the thin curtains, though. They seemed to me perfect for Pedro’s thin house.

  “Are you happy?” she would ask during our private talks late at night, for Pedro always went to bed and awoke early.

  “I guess.”

  “Are you making friends at school?”

  “I guess.”

  “Do they ever invite you to their houses? Do they have nice families who make you feel welcome?”