The History of Luminous Motion (12 page)

The
black atoms swarmed and rushed around me. They were my private atmosphere. They
would take me back into the darkness with them very soon. “Fine,” I said. “I
don’t really care what you think, anyhow.”

“Let
me put it to you this way, Phillip.
You
don’t matter. Neither does your dad. We’re all nothing but heat, motion,
gravity, sound, history, light–that’s all that matters, Phillip. Just
force and stress, time and matter. Start thinking about those things. Get
outside your feeble, crowded little brain for once in your life and try looking
at the big picture, will you? You guys all like to think you’re such hotshots,
you’re in such control of everything. Well, you’re not. You’re nothing but a
bunch of dicks, that’s all you are. Us women, on the other hand, we’re what you
call heterogeneous. That means we’re everywhere, everybody at once. We’re both good
and bad, right and wrong. We’re the great resolvers of conflict, Phillip. We’re
like octopuses–because we’ll swallow
anything
.
Even men. Even battling and forlorn men like you and your dad. You guys try so
hard to be subjects, characters, things, you forget us women are the whole
story. We embrace you all. What you really want to destroy is women, that story
of yourself you can’t control. Women are what you really hate, Phillip, not
that poor dumb jerk of a dad you’ve got. I’ve been reading a lot lately,
Phillip, since we broke up. French feminists, existential Marxists. I’m
teaching myself French so I can read Sartre’s
Critique of Dialectical Reason
–much of which has been
improperly translated, from what I understand. You should learn to speak French
too, Phillip. Then we could talk French to each other over the phone.”

“I’m
sorry I called,” I said. I could hear something clacking wetly in Beatrice’s
always lugubrious mouth. I could even hear its faint reverberation against
Beatrice’s crooked teeth. Hard candy, I thought. Perhaps a Tootsie Pop.

“Do
you miss me?” Beatrice asked after a while. “Have you missed me since I haven’t
been around?”

There
was more to the universe than light, gravity, mass, history, motion and sound.
That’s where she was wrong. I was in the universe too. Me and Pedro.

“Sometimes,
I guess,” I said. “I guess sometimes I miss you a little bit.”

PEDRO
AND I agreed on one thing–we would have to move quickly. Dad had begun
talking about returning Mom and me to our true home.

“As
you know,” Dad said to me one night over dinner, I haven’t wanted to rush
things up to now. I didn’t see any hurry. But now I don’t see any need to waste
any more time around here, either.” Dad indicated the thin dismal living room,
made even more sad and depleted by the bright new furniture and drapes Dad had
installed since his arrival. “I don’t think I’m just speaking for myself here,
but let’s face it. It’s pretty depressing, wouldn’t you say? It seems to be
getting on everybody’s nerves.”

“It’s
just a house,” Mom said. “It was just the first thing I could find when I
needed one.”

Mom
was seated across the table from Dad. She was wearing a broad-waisted cotton
summer dress. She gazed emptily at the curtained window behind Dad as she
chewed her Chinese noodles. Mom had only lately, at Dad’s polite insistence,
begun taking meals with us.

“Our
real home’s still waiting for us,” Dad said. “There’ll be a nursery for the
baby. There’ll be a room for a live-in nurse to help your mom. And you, sport. You.”

Dad
offered me the rest of the cashew chicken, which I perfunctorily declined. I
had suddenly lost my appetite.

Dad
forked the remainder onto his own plate. “You’ll be going back to school. You’ll
have a nice room, and a proper library to study in. You know I bought the
Britannica School Edition for you since you left? I put it up in your room
already, along with a few other things. A word processor, your own video
machine, some classic movies on cassette. I think you should start filling in
some of the gaps in your education–I’m talking popular culture, here. The
entertainment industry. That’s the business I’ve always expected might attract
you someday. Film, television. Cable’s opening up a lot of new ideas in
marketing. The production end, that’s what you’d be good at. Technical equipment,
where the real money is.” Dad poured himself the rest of the lapsang souchong. He
gazed into the tepid brown water, as if he were reading the arrangement of leaves
at the bottom of his cup. I wondered if they said anything interesting. “I
think it’s time we got on with our lives,” he concluded. “I think it’s high
time we all stopped messing around.”

20

“HI,
ETHEL. HOW you doing?”

“Phillip.
Phillip. Oh, isn’t this nice. Isn’t this nice to see you.
Phillip
.”

Ethel’s
voice sounded and recoiled at the same time, stepping her lightly backward into
her immaculate living room. Even as she called my name she seemed to evade me. I
stood on the sunny porch and she in the shadowy doorway. The contrast made her
appear at once firm and unfocused, as if every particle of her was being
diffused by some foggy outdoor film screen. She resembled an apparition, like
one of my recent dreams of Ethel.

“Is
Rodney home?” I said. “Do you think I could see him?”

As
she was letting me into the hall Rodney’s voice abrupted warily from the top of
the stairs. “Who is it?
 
Ethel? Is
it someone for me or what?”

“I
think it’s good you’ve come over to make up,” Ethel whispered. Quickly she
began handing me whatever was available on the dining room table. A plate of
crescent-sliced, crustless sandwiches. A bag of Cheetos. A couple of cold Buds.
“It doesn’t matter who starts an argument, does it?” she said, winking. “It
just matters who’s man enough to make up. If you’re friends with somebody, then
sometimes you’ve got to swallow a little of your pride, don’t you, Phillip? It’s
good to have you back, dear. I think he’s missed you. I think maybe we’ve both
missed you.”

I
really wasn’t up for Ethel right now. Every gesture she made suggested she and
I shared some secret agreement that either excluded or diminished Rodney. I
wanted to tell her that she didn’t matter. That the friendship Rodney and I
shared not only superseded her, but was actually none of her business.

I
carried all the stuff up to Rodney’s room, balancing it against my stomach. I
knocked lightly with my knee.

“Conviction’s
all we lack,” I said. “That determination not simply to be ourselves, but to be
anybody
. We should carry our
conviction like a hammer. It doesn’t matter what we build. It only matters that
we
act
. It only matters
that
we build.” I was soaring now. I was
thipping across the lane dividers in Mom’s luminous car again. I saw Buellton.
I saw Fresno. I saw Salinas. I felt Mom’s voice rising in me strong and intrepid
for the first time in months. I would never die. Mom would never leave me. “We’re
like armies of men, political nations, the corporate arrangements of cells,
tissues and bodies. We’re not children, Rodney. We’re the world. We’re greater
than the world, because we can make it into anything we want it to be–no matter
who tells us otherwise. We’re all that matters, Rodney. All that matters are
our strategic situations, and the tactical stuff we use in order to get where
we want to go, in order to take what we want. Where we are, what we get, how we
get it–
that’s
all that really
matters. We act together, Rodney, just like always. You and I. It’s not like we
have any choice. It doesn’t matter if you like it, or if I like it, or even if
we like each other. It just
is
,
Rodney. You and I just
are
. We’re
stuck with each other. We’re friends for life.”

Rodney
had hardly touched his tidy fragment of sandwich. He examined it distantly now
where it rested on his jiggling knee like a trained hamster.

“I
liked that damn dog, Phillip. You knew that. It wasn’t like you had any right. It
wasn’t like it was your dog or anything.”

I
could hardly recognize Rodney. A blue pentangle had been tattooed around the
frame of his left eye. His hair had been shaved back to reveal a high, shiny
forehead; it was tonsured and dyed a streaky, phosphorescent green. His room
was filled with books on voodoo, black arts and magic. A cone of sandalwood
incense burned on a tiny brass devotional table decorated with the bodies of
naked, writhing women with serpentine hair and pointed breasts. From his left
pierced ear dangled a silver earring intricately carved with the skull of a
leering baboon. The floors and furniture were littered with various lurid
paperbacks with bright red colors depicting flames, apocalypse, demons and
witches and complicated demonic symbols. The books bore titles such as
Hell Town U.S.A.
,
Cry the Children
,
The Book of
Satanic Myth and Lore
,
UFO Sightings
Unveiled
and
Sydney Omar’s Guide to
Astrology: Taurus
. “I’m glad you finally developed an interest in reading,”
I said after a while. “It always helps to find a subject that interests you.”

“I
GUESS I’VE just been bored,” Rodney admitted later, while I was searching
through his closet and rearranging the piles of moldering laundry I found
there. “Bored bored bored. Jesus Rice Krispies I’ve been
fucking
bored. Getting up, eating Ethel’s lousy goddamn breakfasts,
going to school. And the teacher’s droning on about this and that and the other
thing. I try to tell the teacher, you know. I don’t give a fuck about geometry
or English. Like I’m probably going to drive a truck or something when I get
out of school. Join the army or something simple. I’m sure in the
army
they’re all going to be wondering
what an acute angle is. I’m sure I’ll make lots of friends driving my truck
because I can diagram some lousy goddamn sentence. And then after school I’m
free, right? What’s that mean? I go down to the bowling alley or the shopping
mall with my friends. We scope the girls, smoke a little doobidge, maybe a tab
of acid every now and then. But that’s not really living, is it? I mean, if
that’s living, then excuse me right now. I’ll go out and put a bullet in the
old brain pan. But if that’s
not
all
there is, right, well, maybe there’s something I could do a little less
radical, like, you know. I don’t mind my life or anything–I’m perfectly
willing to give it a try. So what the hell, I figured. I’m sick of school,
drugs, this goddamn oppressive house of Ethel’s and all. Maybe it’s time I experimented
a little more with my life, took a few chances. So that’s when I decided to
become a warlock. To master the satanic arts of black magic. Devil worshiping,
for you laymen. I want to master what they call the black arts.”

I
moved aside cardboard boxes filled with Marvel and DC Comics, dismembered
football and hockey uniforms, baseballs and baseball gloves. Then, behind some
crumpled
Playboy
magazines, I found
it.

“It’s
all relative,” Rodney said. “Black magic’s no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than white
magic. It’s not like one’s ‘good’ and the other’s ‘evil.’ It all just depends on
what side you’re rooting for. In other words, it’s all relative. Black magic
can go places white magic can’t, that’s all. Satan’s not any more evil or good
than God, he’s just trying to move in on God’s territory, like General Motors
or Chanel. Everyone faces competition–that’s what makes the strong
stronger. That’s why civilization gets better and better instead of falling
apart. I say use what you’ve got in this world, because nobody else is going to
give you anything
they’ve
got. Use
what you’ve got, or else the other fucker’s going to use what
he’s
got on
you
, and I’m not kidding. I think you hear me, Phillip. I think you
know where I’m coming from.”

A
Judas Priest album was playing full blast on Rodney’s stereo. I couldn’t make
out the lyrics very clearly. It seemed as if they were screaming,
Retribution, retribution, retribution,
retribution…

“Could
you turn that down?” I asked, unlatching the slightly oxidized steel clamps and
unfolding the chemistry set atop Rodney’s rolltop desk. I pushed some of
Rodney’s soiled paperback books out of my way. Aleister Crowley’s
The Book of Law
. John Knox’s
Satan’s
Women: A Guide to the Pentagram
. A couple of James Herbert and
Stephen King novels. L. Ron Hubbard’s
Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health
.

“I’ve
even managed to explain this all to Ethel so even
she
understands where I’m coming from,” Rodney said. “And Ethel, as
we all know, is a stupid cunt.”

“Now,”
I said, “how about a little more light?”

21

I
COULDN’T JUST go and kill Dad, say with a gun or a knife or a bomb. He couldn’t
be obliterated, like propositions or houses. He was far too vast and remote to
be assailed by small hands and arms such as mine. No, if I wanted Dad out of
the way, then I had to deploy Dad’s strength against himself. I could not conquer,
Dad could only succumb. I could not be the agent of Dad’s death, only its
engineer.

While
I tapped a few intricate crystals of sodium into a beaker, I suggested Rodney
turn on his cassette player.

I
would have to insinuate the diffuse, inorganic world of chemistry into Dad’s body
while Dad wasn’t looking. Rodney put on the Grateful Dead, and I began
furiously assembling compounds with which, over succeeding days and weeks, I
began dosing Dad’s coffee, cookies, roasts and steaks. Dad always said he and I
should go more places together, so I proposed we go everywhere, everywhere at
once. We were going to journey into the real scheme of life, Dad and I, into
life’s basic molecular stuff. The assemblies of atoms and molecules, that
systematic world of electrons that orbited and contextualized mere physics. Appearances,
behaviors, properties, symbols and formulae, enumeration and analysis, polymers,
fuels, oxides and energy. I was returning Dad to that world where he truly
belonged, that fundamental world of basic particles that breathed underneath our
realer world of mere events. Meanwhile, in Rodney’s room, the stereo played:

Many rivers to cross,

      
And
I can’t seem to find

      
My
way over …

Soon
Dad was suffering colonic spasms, flatulence, rashes, dizziness, occasional
vomiting, boils, sore throats, hemorrhoids, blurred vision and acne. “I don’t
know, sport,” Dad said, one hand resting covertly on his stomach. Mom was still
patiently chewing her prawn salad. “I don’t know if I feel like dessert or
not.” I had been experimenting with sodium compounds that night. Sodium sulphate
in Dad’s mushroom soup. Sodium thiosulphate in Dad’s tandoori shrimp.

“Don’t
worry about it, Dad,” I said. “I’ll do the washing up. You get yourself some
rest.”

Mom,
impressively large now, sat resolutely at her place, eating everything in
sight. Once the salad and entrée had vanished, Mom commenced tearing into the
sourdough French bread and margarine.

“I
think something’s bothering your father,” Mom said, after Dad went into the
living room to lie down. Mom was crunching French bread in her mouth, scraping
crumbs from the corners of her mouth with one long fingernail. She was staring
off into her private country where our baby was lifting itself onto its hind
legs and uttering its first hesitant vocables. “Your father hasn’t been
sleeping well,” Mom said. “Sometimes he wakes the baby. Sometimes he’s so
restless I can’t sleep, I can’t even relax.” Mom made soothing motions against
her stomach. “I may begin asking him to sleep on the living room sofa.” Mom was
wiping the doughy center of the bread at her plate until the plate was white
and dry like a bone. Then she put the soft, moistened bread into her mouth, a
patient, animal expression on her face, complacent but alert.

“I
guess you can say I started taking a serious interest in Satan about six months
ago,” Rodney said, while I heated random substances in a beaker over a thinly
glowing can of Sterno. “But that doesn’t mean Satan hadn’t been important in my
thoughts long before, or that I wasn’t in some important way already under his
influence even when I was very small, even before I was old enough to talk or
read. I think I always knew about Satan, but it was only unconscious knowledge,
if you know what I mean. There’s lots of knowledge that’s important in this
world, and you don’t necessarily have to be able to explain it for it to be
valuable to you personally. I’ve learned a lot of really strange things about
myself and the universe around me, Phillip, especially since I’ve been
contemplating the powers of darkness and all. In fact, I’ve even traveled back
to visit my prenatal existence with the benefit of this really interesting
book.” Rodney showed me L. Ron Hubbard’s
Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health
. “Because of this interesting journey
into my past, I’ve learned that the very first face I ever knew was Satan’s
face. I saw him while I was growing in Ethel’s womb. I know it’s kind of a
disgusting thought just thinking Ethel
has
a womb and all, but there you have it. Satan singled me out even when I was
just a batch of simmering molecules. I guess that’s why I’ve always been a
rather
unpleasant
sort of person.
It’s not like I ever
wanted
to be
such a pain in the ass–I just couldn’t help myself. It was sort of like
my destiny, in a way. What’s really great about this scientology stuff I’ve
been reading–this idea that we have all these infinite previous
existences and all–is that it doesn’t
matter
.
I mean, it doesn’t really matter who I am
now
,
that I may be a devil worshiper or even worse. Because I might have been a
bunch of really
nice
people in my
previous incarnations. Priests and ministers, even. Kings and queens, paupers
and dogs. I might have been Sir Francis Drake in a former life. I might even
have been Willie Mays.”

“Willie
Mays isn’t dead,” I said.

“Yet,”
Rodney reminded me.

As
I tapped chemicals into beakers, flasks and test tubes, as I scraped pungent
growths from the surfaces of petri dishes and damp Wonderbread, Rodney often
chattered animatedly like this, filling his room with strange notions and
imaginings. There was something fecund about Rodney now, vigorous and
irrepressible. Rodney lived and thought and ate and dreamed. He was a different
Rodney from the one I had known before, and I must admit that now I liked him
better. He seemed more involved in life. He didn’t just wait for things to
happen.

One
afternoon when I arrived at his room Rodney had erected the collapsible card
table and covered it with a somber damask tablecloth. At the center of the
tablecloth a white candle burned auspiciously on a white plate. A few of
Rodney’s books–
Demonology and the
Occult
and
Making the Spirit World
Work for YOU
–lay haphazardly about on the floor. Three chairs were
situated around the table, and Beatrice sat in one of them.

“Hello,
Phillip.”

I
turned to Rodney. “What’s she doing here?” I asked.

“The
spirit world is a very feminine place,” Rodney said, motioning me to sit down. “It’s
filled with all sorts of feminine forces or something. We need her to help us
reach into the feminine half of the void. Now, does anybody want a Coke before
I turn off the lights?”

Beatrice
did. Then the room went dark and we joined hands around the table.

“All
right,” Rodney said. “I guess we can get started.” He shifted in his seat a few
times. A large poster of Aerosmith gazed down meaningfully from Rodney’s wall. The
luminous dial of Rodney’s private phone seemed to hum faintly, and Rodney
cleared his throat. “So I guess, you know, we’re all gathered here to talk to
the spirit world. So we should sit real quiet for a moment and just listen.”

The
luminous dial hummed, the large poster gazed. I could still smell the odor of
marijuana and cigarettes which Beatrice and Rodney must have shared before my
arrival.

“So,”
Rodney said, clearing his throat and fidgeting impatiently in his rattling
folding chair, “this is sort of the part where we have to get in touch with the
cosmic vibrations and all. We’re very spiritual people here, waiting to meet
some interesting people out there in the spirit world. I mean, if anybody out
there’s listening, we’re looking for a guide, some sort of friendly spirit
who’s still tied to the material world in some way, but basically who’s dead
already.”

“I
heard a throat lozenge clicking about in Beatrice’s mouth. Her hand gave mine a
slight, conciliatory squeeze, but she wasn’t looking at me.

“So
we’ll just wait here,” Rodney said after a few moments. “We won’t say a word or
disturb any of you. We just want to sort of know what you’re all thinking, and
if any of our former loved ones are out there, and if there’s anything we can
do for you down here on earth. That sort of thing. You know, like maybe we’ll
scratch your back, you’ll scratch ours. Then if later like maybe
we
need anything from
you
, you know. Well, I think you get the
picture. Now, I don’t want to be hassling you and everything, so I’m going to
shut up for a while, and just get in tune with your vibrations. OK? So none of
us are going to say anything for a while. I really mean it this time.”

I
don’t know how long we sat there, but it seemed like hours. Eventually the
noisy lozenge dissolved in Beatrice’s mouth–like one of her erotic
promises, I thought–and when I peeked covertly out of the corner of my
eyes I saw she had fallen asleep. She sat slumped forward slightly in her
chair, her tiny pink tongue extruding from her too-thin lips, like the tongue
of some sleeping terrier. I wondered if Beatrice dreamed of her long abandonment
of me, and if she dreamed it without remorse. Rodney, on the other hand, sat
unreflectively alert in his chair, his wrists braced against the flimsy table. His
face didn’t flinch, nor his expression waver. I had never seen Rodney so firmly
involved in anything before. As my half-open eyes peered into the dark corner
of Rodney’s room, I thought I saw something begin to cohere. It was red, and
hot, and tiny, like a tiny glowing red eye, a canny wolfish eye. There was a
thin ribbon of steam rising from it. Then I detected the odor of sandalwood,
and recognized the cone of burning incense in a delicate brass tray on Rodney’s
bureau. I wondered then if it mattered, whether a vision had to make itself
real in order to achieve spiritual validity, or whether the world’s mundane
objects could be significant too, like St. Augustine’s rotting fruit.

To
prevent my mind from drifting, I tried to concentrate on the spirit world and
the slow, bitter ghosts of the dead and unborn I expected to find there. My
active mind, however, kept returning to Beatrice’s damp, muggy palm I held so
carefully in my left hand. This warmth had once comforted and consoled me, like
light. There was a special spiritual electricity here which I had once
considered private and inexpressible, but which I now considered diffuse,
conglomerate and altogether human, like Southern California Edison or the
Department of Water and Power. This warmth could sleep and live without me,
without even thinking of me. It could be my warmth, but then someday it could be
somebody else’s warmth too. Somebody else’s hand might hold it, somebody else might
kiss it with their lips. It could go away from me and live in its own house. Warmth
was a spiritual force too, I realized then. Ghosts often exist even in the bodies
of people we love.

Rodney
began to hum. A low, Gregorian, extensive sort of hum that expanded in the room
like warm air or rumors. Until now I had been squinting, but as my eyes began
to relax I closed them. The darkness under my eyelids was slightly
phosphorescent. With my eyes closed and my mind alert, the world made more
sense. Warmth, light, motion, mass, gravity, weight, space and sound. These
were all around me, but sometimes I could not see or sense them because the
world got in my way, sometimes even the thickness and delirium of my own body. Rodney
hummed, and Beatrice’s soft hand nestled in mine like some submarine creature,
convoluted and brainless, a mass of uncomprehending nerve and muscle. I could
travel away through worlds of weight and sound, but only with this sleeping
hand to guide me back again. The world of sensation was very dim, and Rodney’s
humming voice trembled everywhere like loose wallpaper. Dark shapes turned
around me, and I descended through notched cavernous chambers of impacted
weight and mass. Sound resided everywhere, but mass resided only in strategic
places, waiting for its opportunity to influence human events. Light always
resided somewhere other than where it was. I traveled without body or form. I
was just an envelope of heat and sensation, diffused by the radiant warmth of
other hands and bodies. You couldn’t make out faces or landscapes down here. You
could only detect the irreducible heart of things, things like light, and
motion, and weight, and mass, and sound.

“Hey!”

Someone
shook my shoulder. I opened my eyes.

“Hey,
did you feel anything? I think I started to feel something.”

All
the lights were on. Rodney stood over me, a freshly lit cigarette smoldering in
his hand. He had removed his T-shirt to reveal the green tattoo of a dragon uncurling
around his pale navel. Rodney’s chest was smooth, muscled and hairless.

“Didn’t
you feel something there at the end? Not a voice, exactly. It was like we were
slipping, like we were getting through somewhere.”

Beatrice
sat on the edge of Rodney’s bed, her legs primly crossed and unfamiliar. I
reached for one of Rodney’s cigarette’s from the card table. “I can’t really
say yet.”

“You’ll
see,” Rodney said. “We’ll do it tomorrow. We’ll keep doing it until we get it
right.” Rodney went and sat on the bed next to Beatrice. He put one arm around
her. “How you doing, baby?”