The History of Luminous Motion
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
___________
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 transmitters,
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 filed 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?”
“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?