The History of Luminous Motion (2 page)

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.

“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 like 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.

Where
Mom had once lived her life in the world she now lived her world in the mind.
It was a secret world filled with dark speculation and sober intricacy. Vast
and comprehensive theories were worked out down there, enthralled by senseless
reason. Complicated chiaroscuros of reflection like magnificent Venetian
tapestries. Extensive logarithms of interpretation like sculpted white clouds.
Mom’s secret self sat there in its immaculate kingdom, merely dreaming of other
kingdoms like mine. “We’ve started your college fund,” Mom said, enthroned on
the edge of my bed, her cool hand petting my sweaty brow. “Pretty soon we’ll
start looking into a few of the better prep schools. When Pedro retires we’ll
look for a larger house. You can travel in the summer. You will always have a
home to come to, always a little money in the bank. Then you’ll be free to be
anybody you want to be. You can go to medical school. You can be a rock star. You
can be a stage actor or a vice-president. You can shoot drugs or hire hookers. You
can become homosexual or a hired assassin. It’s your life, baby, and you live
it anyway you choose. I’ll always love you, no matter what. Just always
remember–you need to play the game if you want to break the rules, and
even if you play by all the rules, deep in your brain you’ll always be playing
your own game. You are immaculate. You endure for numberless centuries. You
persevere in a world of pure gravity and sound. You are like light, baby. You
are like a sea of air. You are history, and make all of history something
else.”

I
could hardly sleep at all anymore, tossing and twisting among my feverish
sheets, hearing Mom’s steady breath in the bedroom adjoining mine, Pedro’s antiphonal
and staggered snores. When I did sleep I dreamed I was awake. I dreamed Mom was
sitting in my bed. I dreamed Pedro was building and hammering in the backyard. I
dreamed the teachers and other schoolchildren were telling me I had done a very
good job. I was easy to get along with, they all liked me a lot better now that
I tried, now that I made some effort to be fun to be with. A spectral puppy
licked my face. The ghosts of my delirious life assembled around me in the
dark, compensatory, half-lit world of my dreams.

Pedro
built me a sturdy lap tray so I could eat my meals sitting up in bed. He built
me a bookshelf and a large wooden toy chest, and filled them with board games,
jigsaw puzzles, woodburning and constructor and Lego sets, sacks of green
faceless plastic army men, a variety of baseball mitts and a solid, unscratched
hardball, seamed and dense. I could feel the foundations of our ranch-style
open-plan house beginning to creak and kneel–I and my room full of things
poised to abrupt through the floor, through the earth’s crust and mantle,
rejoining that infinite and unseen history of strange misshapen creatures with
rattling carapaces and stunned, minuscule brains. I was becoming pure weight
now, hard matter. I couldn’t move; some nights I couldn’t breathe. “You stay in
bed all your life if you want to,” Mom said, after a bespectacled psychiatrist
suggested I go away for a few months. He was a member of the advisory board to
a “special” ranch where children like me conventionally responded well to
treatment. This hypothetical summer camp was filled with ponies and swimming
pools and campfires; young boys and girls of my own age slept in tents, sang
campfire songs and traveled down whitewater rivers on rafts. But Mom wouldn’t
let them take me; Mom told them I would be all right. That was my mom. Even
while she was destroying me, she would take care that nobody else destroyed me.
“There’s nothing wrong with a few months of uninterrupted reflection,” she told
me that night. “As long as we’re happy. As long as we’re all happy in our house
together, there’s no reason why we should be in any rush to go anywhere.”