The History of Luminous Motion Read online

  “Sometimes,” I said, on shaky ground now. I didn’t know what Mom expected from me. “Sometimes, you know, well. We don’t go anywhere. We just sort of sit around, you know.”

  “Do they have nice yards and gardens?”

  “Some of them, I guess.”

  “Do they have nice rooms filled with nice toys?”

  “Sure, some of them.”

  Mom smiled brightly, but without looking at me. She was crushing out her Marlboro and gazing off into the bright rooms and gardens of my imaginary friends.

  “It’s better for you this way,” she said. “You deserve a normal upbringing, some firm and certifiable life. It’s the only time life is certifiable, baby. When you’re a child. When you grow up it doesn’t make any sense, whatever way you look at it. Would you like to bring one of your new friends home for dinner some night?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do you like your new home? Do you like Pedro?”

  I thought for a moment. I felt a hot, blazing fire swelling up in my heart, my face, my vision. My throat constricted. I felt suddenly dizzy and blurred. Hoarsely, I answered, “He’s a nice man, I guess.”

  “You’re right, baby,” Mom said. “He is a very nice man.”

  One unforgivable day Mom even took me to Penny’s for what she referred to as my “school clothes,” and for one wild catastrophic moment pulled me to a halt beside the racks of Cub Scout uniforms and supplies. Compasses and safety knives and handkerchief rings and merit badges and handbooks and tents. Finally she bought me white wool socks, cotton underwear and a map of the solar system, which she posted on the wall of my room in order to provide what she called a “vigorous bit of brain food,” just as proud moms everywhere hang glittering mobiles above the cribs of their dully gazing babies. I always kept expecting things would get better. Instead they just got worse and worse.

  THERE WAS TALK of a birthday party in November, and throughout that entire summer I paced and worried in a monstrous imminence of cakes, candles, other children in foil hats, door prizes and gifts with bright wrapping and scissor-scored, frilly ribbons. We would play party games at this “birthday party.” Mom would award little prizes, and be careful no child was overlooked. I would close my eyes and make wishes. I would greet all my beribboned friends at the front door with an ingratiating smile on my face. Ultimately, while Pedro cheerily drank his beers and reacquired his customary flushed expression, I would be ceremoniously required to open presents. New shirts, model planes, transistor radios, “young adult” books, record albums, perhaps even my own portable record or cassette player. Board games, desk lamps, magazine subscriptions, boats and T-shirts and socks. Things and more things, accumulating in my lap, pulling the weight down from my abdomen, pulling both Mom and me closer to the hard ground, deeper into the intractable earth. Nothing but weight and gravity and mass, immovable mass. And that look of motionlessness in Mom’s once beautiful eyes. “For your next birthday, we’ll have a party in the park,” she would tell me, just as I thought the ordeal was over, still wiping the slightly hysterical tears from my eyes. “You can invite even more friends. You’ll receive even more presents.”

  At this I would awake with a start in my sweaty bed, entangled by my twisted blankets, surrounded by the concrete moonlight, enveloped by the whirling dust. The solar map confronted me like a graceless benediction, filled with cartoon colors and impossibly tidy convergences. Moons and planets and suns, imprisoned by gravity and centrifuge and chemical weight. Perihelion and apogee. Jupiter and Mars. I would gladly have disappeared into any of them. I would have boiled on Mercury, exploded with my own freezing breath on Pluto. I felt all the movement coming to a stop inside me, like the gestating atmospheres of nascent planets. Someday Jupiter would be like that, a ball of impacted dirt, senseless rigid cities, malign children assembled around some ominous birthday cake with their noisemakers and party hats. I was growing more solid and permanent every day. Perhaps people would start calling me by a nickname. Buster, or Chipper, or Mac. I could easily imagine Pedro calling me Mac. I could see the word as it was thickly articulated by his fleshy lips, as if he were extruding a soft rubber ball on the tip of his plump pink tongue. How you doing, Mac? How about we go to a ball game, Mac?

  I couldn’t return to sleep. I tossed and turned. Before I suffered a real birthday party I would kill myself; I vowed they would all repent their relentless cruelties, and with a certain relish I imagined my obituary and funeral. The day would be rainy and dark as they lowered my forlorn, tiny casket into the deep, sculpted earth. Mom would cry and cry, but there would be nobody to hold her like I could hold her. Mom would know then. She would know the horror and loneliness she had subjected me to. Pedro would stand firmly beside her, but there was nothing he could do to stop her crying. Convulsing, weeping, begging me to come back. Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Planet X. As I diminished in Mom’s universe, she could only stand helplessly by and watch me go. If I couldn’t live in Mom’s universe, then I would teach her. I would find a universe of my own. Those were nights when I actually and sincerely hated my mom. I may never forgive myself for it, but I really hated her then.

  ON RARE OCCASIONS their bedroom door was locked at night, but usually they left it wide open, encouraging, I guess, some idyllic familial confidence and integrity. On nights I couldn’t sleep I might go in there and look at them embraced by their bleached and complicit white sheets. Mom always slept on her right side, near the verge of their king-sized Stayrest mattress. Pedro grunted and snuffled in his sleep like a pig. His belly looked even bigger when he lay on his back, his mouth open, his splotchy face expressionlessly stupid. When I looked at Pedro sleeping I felt something vegetable and hard growing inside me. It whispered with tangled roots and burrs and weaving, fibrous fingers. It moved only at night. It was trying to tell me something about myself nobody had ever told me before. It reached through everything. It was almost here.

  3

  IT WAS JUST a phase she was going through, I convinced myself. Like menstruation or bad luck. Whenever Mom became maudlin or self-involved, I would lay my head in her lap, wrap my arms around her and listen patiently, without offering a word of reproach. “You deserve a better life than I ever gave you,” Mom might whisper, holding an icy drink beside my ear, gazing aimlessly at her reflection in the warped vanity mirror. “You deserve a home, baby. You deserve people you can count on, a place you can come to.” I wouldn’t say anything at these times. To say anything would only validate Mom’s delusory self-recriminations. I was always certain we would start moving again at any moment. Mom was just resting; Mom was recharging her batteries. Soon, without fanfare, Mom would be Mom again.

  So there I was, immured within Pedro’s musty sanctum, my own fault, really. I had never read the signs correctly; I had not anticipated every swerve and convolution of our ragged map. Whenever Mom doubted herself, I should have engaged her doubt in conversation. I should have allowed that doubt to become real, and thus something we could change and modify like any real thing. I should have reminded her of her own words. “Assurance is that evasion by means of which cultures exist. The world we seek to grab hold of often grabs hold of us.” But I didn’t. I believed ultimately that the world was filled with firm and self-evident truths, like those in the Declaration of Independence, and like all people of true vision, Mom and I would always share those truths, we would always know where those truths were located. Thus confidently I had allowed my mom to drift away and grow lost in endless dialogues with her own reflection, believing as I did that the world’s firmness would always lead her back to me. So now I deserved it, wasting my days in that insipid school, drifting aimlessly among the rusting climb-schemes of the playground, engaged by my own subjective and watery dejection. I was beginning to feel not only despondent but unreal. The world was growing filled with sharp things, things that banged and brushed against me, things that crowded and pressed me. I, meanwhile, was growing more and more immaterial and abstract.
r />   “Phillip,” my teacher would ask, “would you like to be the next one to read out loud?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you want to learn how to hold a hacksaw?” Pedro’s hand held my shoulder with genuine concern, a concern that threatened to make my shoulder in some way his. “Do you want to learn how to solder metal?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you want to help me with dinner?” Mom asked. “Or do you want to go outside and play with your friends?”

  They were embroiling me in these unanswered and impossible questions, questions without answers, only compromises.

  “Is there anything you’d like at the store?”

  “Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?”

  “Can you tell us the capital of Delaware? South Dakota? Spain?”

  “Who’s your favorite movie star? What’s your favorite book or television program?”

  Blizzards of questions. Questions that infested the air like battering moths, knocking against things, dying alone in blistering glass lampshades among blazing heat and their own aborted larvae.

  Perhaps they couldn’t control me, but they could limit my ability to control myself. Perhaps my teachers couldn’t transform me into some gibbering Audio Visual Monitor, content with my colored paper and chalky paste. Perhaps Pedro couldn’t indoctrinate me with metric drills, high-speed power lathes and hammers. Perhaps Mom, seeking to evade her own tragic and naive compromise with the world of Pedro, could envelop me in draperies and new cotton underwear and the radiant warmth of my own portable TV. My secret internal motion, however, couldn’t be so easily disavowed. At least that was the mythology I tried to weave around myself like a protective blanket or a deliberate dream. They would have to disavow my breath first, my heart, the quality of my voice and brain. Some nights Mom would lie in bed with me to help me sleep, and I would remain stiffly and brazenly awake in her cool arms. While she spoke, I pretended not to listen. While I dreamed, she pretended not to know.

  “If it makes you feel any better, baby, I’m not doing any of this for you. I wouldn’t condescend like that. And while it’s hard to explain what I’m trying to find here, I do believe I’ve found it. Pedro is a very kind, unimaginative man who never bothers me when I don’t want to be bothered. He promises me security, baby, and the deepest sort of privacy too.” As she stroked my damp brow I felt the entire universe contract around me. Mom’s lies were involved in some vaster scheme of lying. There were vaster deceptions being practiced in the universe than in Mom’s passionless bed with Pedro. “But if you ever want to talk about anything, you know you can tell me, baby. It may not change things, but it might make you feel better. Just talking about things helps sometimes. And then other times it doesn’t help at all.”

  But of course I couldn’t say anything. That would only betray me to the mindless airy abstractions of Mom’s lustrous deception. I could display only my thin affected drowsiness, pretending as if I too were warm and secure in Pedro’s ambivalent home. I guess that’s what I hated Mom for most, my own timid and recalcitrant dissimulation. I felt like some burglar or criminal forced to flee the world rather than rush, as Mom and I once had, fiercely into its expanding and elliptical heart. The only freedom they allowed me was to dissemble and resist, to disguise that brisk and fundamental pulse of myself from this false world’s pulselessness.

  They couldn’t get inside me, but they could so alter and confuse my world that I might actually forget how to get back inside myself. It was like Wittgenstein’s allegory of the matchboxes. Even though I knew and preserved that special and untransgressed secret of myself from the world’s systematic fiddling, ensconced in its immutable privacy the secret itself ceased to breathe and turn. It became an artifact, like something buried in the stale air and glass cases of some shoddy museum, one filled with estranged and obdurate guards in blue suits and official-looking hats that didn’t quite fit. I wasn’t Mom’s baby anymore. I wasn’t the rider of Mom’s ceaseless motion. I was just another kid in school. I was just a child awaiting his “formative years,” coddled with warm blankets and bland, nutritious meals. I was just a matchbox. I was just a thin matchbox in which some broken object could be heard rattling. It might be a penny. It might be a plastic green soldier. It might be fragments of a splintery pencil, or a pebble, or a rusty nail, or some dead insect. Or it might be just nothing. It might be nothing worth having at all.

  MY DIET, EDUCATION and serenity were strictly regulated and monitored from now on. I was to attend good movies, read good books, eat good food, defecate and sleep at prescribed hours. I received a haircut at the barber’s every two weeks. I received inoculations for polio, tetanus, smallpox, diptheria. I suffered a visit to the dentist, where a cruel hygienist scraped the hard crusty plaque from my teeth with sharp steel instruments. “You’re very lucky not to have any cavities,” she told me, and I could only think, There, I told you. I never needed you to begin with, as I spat blood into the white bowl’s blue, cascading water. I received stacks and stacks of new clothes, though my drawers were already filled with freshly pressed and laundered shirts and slacks. My old friendly Levi’s and sweatshirts vanished while my closet blossomed with toys in boxes, colorful books and sports equipment, flashing electronic games and educational video cassettes. “You know, I was thinking,” Pedro said one day, refolding his paper and placing it in his lap, pulling off his sparkling bifocals with a flourish. He gazed blankly at the ornamental knickknack shelf he had installed earlier that evening. “You know what Phillip needs? Phillip needs a dog. A nice little puppy he can raise and take care of. It will teach him about responsibility. It will be his good friend whenever he feels dejected and alone. If he keeps it well brushed and groomed, he can let it sleep at the foot of his bed. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it earlier,” Pedro said cryptically. “A dog.”

  And then, wordlessly suffering on the carpet with my schoolbooks, raptly gazing at he heatlessly flickering television, I could only listen as Mom concurred with an earnestness which made me sick to my stomach. I felt deep intestinal kicks and grinding. Heat lifted into my heart, my chest. The blood rushed to my head and I felt dizzy and slightly nauseous, as if I were ascending into the high air on some sudden spaceship. We will go to the pound on Tuesday, Mom said. No, Wednesday, because Tuesday I work. We’ll get a license. And Pedro, honey, you can build a doghouse in the yard. We’ll make a little mattress inside with old rags and things. When it’s potty trained, we’ll even talk about letting it sleep at the foot of Philip’s bed. We can buy books about training dogs, dog grooming and health care, dog dogness and doggish dogs. Bland little puppies which you hold in your arms like presents. They all have big floppy ears and big soulful eyes. They always love you, no matter what. No matter how you feel about yourself, dogs think you’re the greatest. No matter how harsh and insincere the world is, dogs aren’t. Dogs love you even when you kick them, even when you don’t feed them. Dogs love you even when your hands clench their throat. Dogs love love love you even when they can’t breath, even when their tiny soulful eyes grow more bloodshot and confused, even when they give that final, galvanic little kick and their breath stops. When they grow rigid. When their eyes turn glassy and reflective. When you bury them in the garden with a tiny wooden cross and pray for God to forgive them all their sins.

  4

  WITH ALL MY polluted and forlorn heart I prayed Mom would shamelessly murder me just like that, the same way I would surely murder any conceivable puppy with which they might attempt to burden and restrain me. Kill me and let it be over with, I prayed each night in my feverish bed. Kill me with your own hands so I know it’s you. Like the puppy, I will still love you; I will never stop loving you. Like the puppy I will trust you always and forever, right up to the very end.

  I felt weaker every day, more listless, distracted and pale. Mom, though, never seemed to notice. Vulnerable and more diffident, smaller and smaller, I was drifting further and further away from her li
ke some eccentric planet. “Culture has a perfectly sensible purpose,” Mom said, seated on the verge of my bed with her cool hand in my lap, abstractly gazing out the window at the red apocalyptic sunset, distantly contemplating the intricacies of her own subversion. “It’s not out to get us. It’s not like we have anything to fear from culture but ourselves.” Sometimes, as I stared at her, her voice grew dimmer and more diffuse. I was beginning to realize that Mom had not succumbed to the world’s lies, but rather to the sudden swerve and convolution of her own extraordinary mind. “Culture’s just a scheme of rules and regulations we’ve all quite happily agreed to. It’s not like all the clichés, baby. Like we submit. Like we’re oppressed or imprisoned or enchained. Culture’s got our best interests at heart. Culture’s just the walls of a house. It’s that house I always told you we lived in, only I didn’t realize that house was culture before.” Mom was wearing a slightly ragged and pulpy white nightgown that had belonged to Pedro’s deceased wife, Marjoree. Mom was gaining weight; her beautiful face had grown pale and flaccid. The palms of her hands felt cold and dry. “Freedom is a place inside your mind,” she said. And now we were in different galaxies, Mom and I, spinning among remote civilizations and suns. “Culture’s just a set of rules that makes life comfortable. That gives us time to enjoy the freedom we can only live inside ourselves.”

  Mom said I was suffering growing pains. Pedro was the one who began bringing home the doctors. My temperature was taken, my blood and pulse. My malaise was misdiagnosed as influenza, trauma, shock, diabetes and even leukemia. I never bothered to get out of bed anymore. Letters were written to and from my school; a tutor occasionally arrived and sat beside my bed, as cold and indifferent as Mom with his mundane assignments and state-approved texts. I spent all day watching TV. The morning news. A few hours of game shows in which the world’s insipid and luxury-starved eagerly competed for new washing machines, trash compactors and automobiles. Perhaps a soap opera or two and then, finally, the talk shows. Mike Douglas was my favorite, but there were days when Merv Griffin was my favorite too. I liked the talk shows because they featured a revolving panel of guests who had just flown in from limited engagements in Tahoe, Reno and New York. They all had many stories to tell, most of them amusing and comfortably inconsequential. They knew that language was a sort of padding or excess. It was uttered with practiced enthusiasm. You could talk and talk and talk on TV and never have to say anything. I lay in my bed and never said anything either.