Kevin Brockmeier - The Illumination

Tell him that …

Tell him I …

But he did not know how to finish the sentence.

He found himself wandering into the room where she used to exercise. There was still a CD in her stereo, he noticed, and, out of habit, he pressed play to see what she had been listening to. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing, I’m very scared for this world . He recognized the song right away, with the shrilling of the crickets, that plaintive voice arching out over the mandolin. Eviscerate your memory . Before the chorus took hold, he was overcome with a sense of dread and had to press the stop button. He shook his head involuntarily, like a dog throwing off crests of water. He sat down on the stationary bicycle. He had known the song for twenty years, longer than he had known Patricia, longer than he had known how to drive or write a check. Its meaning in his life ought to have been incorruptible. It was about his own mind when he was thirteen, the endless afternoons he spent lying on the carpet with his headphones on, the yard work he needed to finish and the girlfriends he wished he had, the innocent freedom and sadness of it all, but now somehow it had become blighted with the knowledge that Patricia had been listening to it the day of the accident, or the day before, or she had been preparing to listen to it the day after. Every note was a note she knew by heart, every word a word she used to sing, and she was gone now, and he had killed her, and he felt like a criminal presented with the evidence that would put him away. All these weeks, he had been telling himself it was only a matter of time before everything would return to normal. But it never would return to normal, would it?

He got back up and forwarded to the next song on the CD, but stopped it before the lyrics began, just as the guitar was interrupting the organ. He switched trays and played a few seconds of a classic R&B song, If you ever change your mind, / About leaving, leaving me behind , and then a few seconds of a pop tune the two of them had always loved, With you in that dress, my thoughts, I confess, / Verge on dirty , and then the opening lines of an old jazz standard, A tinkling piano in the next apartment, / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant . He saw how they had all been transformed into something much smaller and grayer. It seemed that every song he knew had been hollowed out, scraped clean of its associations, and refilled with memories of Patricia: the smell of her shampoo; the way she rested her hand on his lap; the sound of her gasping his name as the ice took the wheels of the car, then repeating it as they flipped over and spun toward the concrete pillar. It was all too unfair.

When the doorbell rang, he left his crutches lying on the floor and hobbled over to the foyer. It would be a UPS driver delivering a package, he presumed, or maybe a neighborhood activist canvassing the block with a petition, someone he could send away with a thank-you and a signature, but when he opened the door, the face that greeted him belonged to the girl from the bus shelter, the willowy one with the burn rings on her arms and legs, Melissa Wallumrod.

He said her name. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I bet you can figure it out if you really try.”

“Yes, well, about that, I didn’t know who you were myself until this morning. That was my editor’s initiative.”

“Your editor’s initiative got me kicked out of my house.” She was carrying a green canvas duffel bag that was padded out like a bolster. She swung it onto her feet. “My parents made me pack up and leave.”

“I see. How did you find me?”

She took the front section of the newspaper out of her back pocket and read from the caption beneath the picture. “Melissa Wallumrod dot dot dot bodily mutilation dot dot dot . Here we are: ‘ Gazette Staff Photo, Jason Williford.’ You’re in the phone book. After that, it was a piece of cake.” She looked him up and down—his head cocked, his arms tucked close to his sides, one knee slightly raised—and said, “So, Flamingo, are you going to let me in or what?” Then she shouldered past him, disrupting his balance. A thrill of pain flashed through his leg as his foot struck the floor. By the time he caught up with the girl, she had already dropped her duffel bag on the carpet and set herself on the arm of the couch, apprehensively, experimentally, like a cat seeking a high place from which to avoid being startled.

“Make yourself at home, why don’t you.”

“I intend to.”

And she meant it.

He asked her the obvious question. “What are you doing here?”

“I need a place to stay,” she confessed. Apparently, she had decided that his house would do. Nothing he said could dissuade her. Maybe if she apologized to her parents… he was certain they would… “Ha. Obviously you don’t know Tom and Doris.” Why didn’t she try one of her friends? “Um, hello? I guess you missed the paper this morning. I’m a bad influence—‘the girl who practices bodily mutilation near Allsopp Park.’ ” But why on earth should he allow her into his home? Didn’t she think that was asking too much? “Hmm, I don’t know, let’s see. Maybe because you’re the one who came prying into my life and stirred everything up. Can you honestly tell me you don’t bear some responsibility for that?” Well, then, what made her so sure she could trust him?

She scoffed. “Please. Look at you. You’re in even worse shape than I am.”

Finally, out of exhaustion, and because she had played on his highly reactive sense of culpability, he gave in. “One night.”

She smiled. “So where’s the guest room?”

He did not know what to do with a teenage girl, how to look after her or keep her entertained, so he left her alone to read her manga and listen to her iPod. Late that afternoon, he went to the playground at the end of the block to snap a few pictures. Afterward, he stopped at the mini-mart to buy something for dinner. When he got home, she was still there and had not stolen anything, so he made her a meal of spaghetti and meat sauce with a salad of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots, the kind that came in a transparent plastic pouch. It was the best he could do. That night, he sat down with her to watch TV, a game show she liked about a dozen couples who raced each other around the world to win a million dollars. It had begun to thunder and rain. The house felt close around them. She excused herself during a commercial, and when she came back, she had a new burn mark on her ankle, glowing like a heating coil. A sheen of clear tissue fluid wept from the center.

“You must love this shit,” she said, falling onto the couch beside him.

“Excuse me?”

“The Illumination.” She gestured at the TV screen, where one of the contestants had fallen off a camel, scraping a radiant stroke of red war paint across his forehead. Behind him the beast was chewing its tongue and swatting its tail. Its knees presented a constellation of distinct silver points. “For a photographer, this must be like Heaven.”

“Heaven? No, I wouldn’t say that.” He was thinking of all the times he and Patricia had sat on the couch sharing popcorn while they watched a movie, his hand hovering solicitously at the rim of the bowl as hers reached inside, then hers hovering there as his did. That was his Heaven, and it had come and it had gone. What this was, he didn’t know. Heaven-plus. Heaven-minus. “Why don’t we call it purgatory?”

She must have interpreted the remark as a joke, because she answered, “Very funny, Jason Williford,” and jabbed him in the gut. His scar began to send out circles, a slow wave of them, traveling across his chest and stomach as his wound throbbed with pain. Fascinated, she pressed her palm to the spot and watched the light radiate past her fingers.