The History of Luminous Motion (5 page)

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9

ODDLY
enough, it was during
this period of Mom’s increasingly alcoholic estrangement that I began to
experience anything like that “normal childhood” one usually encounters only in
books. I grew inured, if not accustomed, to the patent bliss of domesticity. I
developed a system of routine chores and scheduled ambitions, marking each day
on the calendar as I doled out payments to our landlord and utility franchises,
milkman and insurance broker. I took two paper routes. I studied every morning
and, every evening, fixed both Mom and myself a perfectly edible meal. Two or
three afternoons each week I would go out to what I referred to as my “job” in
order to earn money with which to “put bread on the table.”

As
a paperboy, I was kept informed when my clients went on vacations, and so, on
routine afternoons, I broke into carefully preselected homes and took jewelry,
portable televisions, cordless phones and microwaves, along with the more
alluring household appliances, and transported them downtown on the bus, where
I sold them at one of the various pawnshops frequented by gaunt men in loose
socks who stood about exposing swollen veins in their necks and foreheads, or
glowered at me from behind massy and varnished oak countertops as they
inspected my merchandise and contemplated ludicrous sums.

“Ten
dollars,” they said, eyeing me suspiciously, not concerned with where I got it
so much as how little I would take. “It isn’t worth my trouble. It isn’t worth
my time.”

“Make
it fifteen,” I replied, chewing my impassive bubble gum. “Maybe it’s worth a
little of your trouble. Maybe it’s worth a little of your precious time.”

I
even acquired during these days a friend. Rodney was twelve years old, and
lived in the corner house with his mother, a rather fragmented and conspicuous
woman named Ethel. Rodney was the perfect friend for me, really, and introduced
me to a world far more disorderly, I imagined, than my own. Rodney was
submissive without obedience, patient without serenity. He had a Stingray
bicycle, a rather brutal attitude toward his unfortunate mother (which, I
admit, caused me some uneasy admiration, as an aborigine might admire the
miracle of a cigarette lighter or a beeping digital watch) and a top-floor
bedroom filled with marvelous and dispensable things.

“Why
don’t you take this shirt,” he might tell me. “These are some pants I grew out
of. You never change your clothes, guy. You never wash your hair.”

Usually
I wasn’t listening. I was far too preoccupied with the room’s many bright
objects to feel at all self-conscious about my appearance. There were board games:
Stratego, Polyanna, Monopoly, The Game of Life, Battleship and Risk. We
constructed monstrous machines with red and white Lego blocks, Erector sets and
plastic, prepackaged model kits. Mostly, though, I was thoroughly taken with
Rodney’s chemistry set, a somewhat corroded metal cabinet box which, unfolded,
displayed tidy bottles of strange substances with unfamiliar smells, tastes and
textures in them. Some, like tannic acid, were labeled with urgent red crosses
and warned of deadly dangers that should be investigated only “in the company
of adults.” The set contained beakers and flasks and test tubes and even a
small chemical fire with metal clasps and braces. “This is life’s sudden
start,” I said, the first time I saw it. “This is chemistry.” I purchased a
loose-leaf notebook and began keeping track of the various mixtures I
contrived. Sulphuric acid and nitrous oxide and carbon, zinc and rubbing
alcohol and a few kernels of long-grain white rice. Then, under what I
considered “controlled laboratory conditions,” I exposed small animals to them.
Bugs, butterflies, lizards and frogs. Sometimes the small animals betrayed no
reactions at all. Sometimes, a few hours or a few days later, they died.
“Science isn’t reason, Rodney,” I told him. “Science is pure chance and sudden
luck. It’s magic, in a way. Chemistry is that unstable and perfectly
coordinated music of the fundamental that lives in our skin and our shoes. This
is where life achieved its sudden flash, and where time itself will someday
rediscover its own timeless regeneration.” I contributed tannic acid to the
beaker labeled POETIC TROPE #117, thiamine spirit and, from Rodney’s mother’s
kitchen cabinet, baking soda, and just a touch of oregano. A thin sudsy foam
gathered around the beaker’s rim. “We’ll seek secrets in the random,” I told
Rodney. “We’ll discover truth in chance’s sudden dances.”

Rodney,
leaning against the table and gazing into the brownish fluid, displayed only
that marvelous and half-lidded unconcern for which I always envied him. He
wasn’t after anything, my friend Rodney. He sincerely didn’t care if he lived
forever or not.

“What
about a booger?” Rodney asked. “What about if we put a booger in it?” Without
looking at me, he tapped the beaker’s rim with the nail of one of his clean,
well-manicured fingers, as if trying to startle into existence whatever soft
chemical reactions lay down there in the hidden world of chemistry.

THE
HOMES RODNEY and I systematically violated that spring were wary places,
hollow, haunted and impercipient, like old lovers or dying trees. Because I was
smallest, I always entered first, through basement windows, up shaky trellises
into high bedrooms or, more usually, through the opaque slender windows of
bathrooms that had been left open to air out the muggy shower smells. Then I
would come around to the front door where Rodney would snap his gum at me with
his weary and affected nonchalance and help me peruse the belongings of these
soft and dimly dreaming houses.

“What
a bunch of crap,” Rodney said. “What are we going to do with all this crap?”

Rodney
was an idealist who refused to be corrupted by mere matter. If I was a sort of
exemplary enlightenment scientist, Rodney was a romantic poet, airy and
uncompromised. “Crap crap crap crap crap,” Rodney said as I loaded pearls and
sparkling brooches into my green plastic Hefty bag, watches and piggy banks,
digital clocks and compact discs. “They’ll never even notice it’s gone. They’re
probably at the shopping plaza right now, buying more crap.” He shook his head
wearily, and poured himself a stiff bourbon from the liquor cabinet. If he
found a pack of cigarettes on a bedroom bureau or kitchen counter he would
chain-smoke casually, filling those transgressed homes with the roiling, misty
odor of Marlboros and Kools. I had great hopes for Rodney in those days. I
believed then, as I believe now, he was destined for far greater achievements
than myself.

“Good
riddance,” he always said, slamming shut the garage or front door as we walked
off down the suburban streets with our loot. We wore the purported innocence of
childhood wrapped around us like menacing cloaks and fog in some old movie. Only
Rodney and I knew what we hid inside those cloaks. Only Rodney and I knew the
secrets of the movies we lived inside, the movies other people only watched on
TV.

THESE
WERE THE days of my exile, a time of dense silence, strange houses and broken
basement windows. They contained locks that could be uncranked with tire irons,
or cats that purred and rubbed themselves against you. Sometimes the dogs barked,
but if you approached them in a certain way they would bow submissively and
allow you to scratch their foreheads. Sometimes we fed the pets while we
gathered up the belongings of their masters, and they curled up purring and
dreaming on the living room carpets where we would activate the TV for them,
for Rodney and I also felt more at home with the sound of the television around
us. Game shows filled with jeering buzzers and brand-new cars. Morning chat
shows that interviewed interchangeable circus clowns and school board supervisors.
Inexhaustible diurnal melodramas in which beautiful men and women lived and
loved and hated and died. Then there was only the resinous darkness moving into
the houses when we left them. Sometimes we transported our new stuff home in
stray shopping carts; sometimes, brazenly, we parked these indemnified carts
outside a McDonald’s or Burger King while we paused inside for a well-deserved
cup of coffee, a sweet roll or fries. I always knew in those days that this was
not the world I really belonged to; it was not my mom’s world, which both Mom
and I had lost, but a world of other moms and dads I would never comprehend. A
stony vast plateau without any landmarks or colors on it. A pale cloudless sky
in which nothing moved, nothing sounded. You could walk and walk for miles in
this world without ever seeing anybody, except of course at night when you were
asleep and dreaming about the dense silence, strange houses and broken basement
windows. Locks uncranked with tire irons, purring cats and submissive,
basement-anxious dogs. Exile was a dream of a return to something you couldn’t
remember. It took you back to a place you’d never been.

“I
think we should burn the dump,” Rodney said sometimes, languorously reviewing a
TV Guide
on the living room sofa
while I did all the hard work, disengaging the VHS from the Panasonic, stuffing
my coats full with quarters from a tin cookie jar in the kitchen. “I think we
should see if shit burns.” Rodney never seemed the invader of these broken homes,
but rather their more legitimate occupant, as if his invisible royal blood
admitted him to secret kinships and demesnes. Sometimes I felt awkward, looting
the silver and jewelry before Rodney’s calm and disaffected gaze. It was as if
Rodney was allowing my trespass and at any moment, if I made one wrong move or
discourteous gesture, my license would be summarily revoked. His expression
always seemed remotely curious whenever he looked at me, or at the items in my
hands, as if he retained some unflagging interest even though many thousands of
years ago he had given up on the possibility of ever being surprised again. “There’s
a good movie on Channel Four we can watch at my house,” he said. “It’s got
Ginger Rogers in it. I think Ginger Rogers is a great piece of ass, don’t you?”

All
these houses seemed like one house, just as all the silence of my strained
exile seemed like one continent, one forlorn place without a name. I could hear
my mom in these houses, I could see her dazed looks as she sat drinking alone
in her room, waiting while Dad gathered somewhere in the world like moisture,
like thick clouds, like heavy black currents. My sense of exile was my
inheritance from Mom; it might somehow, without my even understanding why,
constitute my one real gift to Dad, to whom I still owed the ominous debt of
conception. I was off in the world alone now. I was investigating strange
rooms, basements and gardens. I was trundling off with my pillowcases and Hefty
bags filled with merchandise like some diabolical and inverted Santa Claus. All
of the houses were part of one house. All of the houses in the world were part
of that one house by which Mom and I were divided as well as embraced. “Growing
up” began to signify one thing only to my feverish imagination. Mom and I could
live in worlds without each other in them.

I
NEVER UNDERSTOOD Rodney, but I was always awestruck by the incomprehensible life
he lived with his mother. Ethel had a generous pension from the Marine Corps
subsequent to her husband’s death at Tet, gray hair, and bad circulation in her
legs. Usually she sat all day and embroidered in a big stuffed chair, her feet
propped by cushions and a macramé footstool; when she walked she walked with
the aid of an aluminum cane. Whenever we came through the front door with our
stuff she would put down her knitting and watch while we stored it all in the
hall closet alongside the departed Mr. Johansen’s crisply dry-cleaned military
uniform, unused golf clubs, and loose photographs in a chipped Macy’s gift box
(I was forever examining the contents of other people’s closets). After we were
finished, Ethel offered us food and refreshments. “There’s tuna salad, Roddy. In
case you and your friend are hungry. There are some Snickers bars in the
freezer, just the way you like them. Only have some tuna salad first. Have some
good canned soup–there’s mushroom and cream of tomato. Then, if you and
your little friend want, I could fix us all a Manhattan.”

Rodney
said, “Mmmm.” He went into the kitchen and banged cupboard doors. I stood
noncommittally in the hall, watching Ethel in her chair. Ethel was reading one
of her old “collector’s” editions of
The
Amazing Spider Man
, and the plastic envelope lay across her knees like some
official procedure. “There’s Sara Lee pound cake, and even a couple of Twinkies
hidden away. And of course I could fix you both that Manhattan. Would you like
a Manhattan, Phillip?” She started to lay her comic on the coffee table and
reach for her cane.

“Do
me a favor, Ethel,” Rodney said. He had suddenly appeared beside me, one foot
on the stairs. He held a pair of tuna salad sandwiches on a white plate, and a
large bag of Nacho Cheese Flavored Doritos under one arm. “Just sit down, read
your comics, and shut the fuck up.”

I
couldn’t look at Ethel. I couldn’t look at Rodney. I felt a deep painful
turning in my body. My face was filling up with heat. I was walking through a
stunned silence, my feet on the stairs, Rodney already at the top. I was
trembling. Everything was a blur. I could hardly see where I was going.

“Don’t
tell me to shut up,” Ethel said, quite simply and emphatically at first. It was
as if she were telling us where the mayonnaise was. “Don’t tell your mother to
shut up. Rodney. Rodney, come back here.”

Breathing
a long sigh, Rodney gestured me into his room. He handed me the plate of
sandwiches. Then he shut his bedroom door firmly and locked the flimsy knob.