Kevin Brockmeier - The Illumination

The next morning he woke early. He still needed to develop the photos he had taken at the concert. He selected a few to submit to the Gazette and set out for the office. When he returned home, Melissa was sitting at the kitchen table, eating leftover pizza from a take-out container. He poured himself a glass of water, chose a slice of mushroom-pepperoni, and sat down beside her. It was at that moment, without so much as a word, that they came to their understanding: he would allow her to live with him until she left for college, and in exchange she would teach him how to manipulate his body, inflicting those small, perfect impairments that rid him of his entire history.

The lessons began easily enough, with a straight pin and the edge of one of his fingernails. Melissa showed him how to slide the point slowly into the quick, creating a thin tunnel of steel that separated the nail plate from the connective tissue. It was a minor trauma, and yet it hurt, it hurt, and the light blazed out of it in an acute silver line. Sitting at the table after he removed the pin, he felt nothing but relief, pure relief, as gratifying as any he had known since he was a boy, when he would suddenly, for no reason at all, run as far and as fast as he could until he was completely out of breath, sinking onto the grass and watching the trees twitch blissfully in the breeze. The blood welled onto his fingertip. His mind sailed along in a dreamlike vesper. In the days that followed, Melissa guided him into greater and more pleasurable forms of injury, assisting him through each procedure step-by-step. She plucked the hairs from his stomach with a pair of tweezers, patiently and deliberately, so that each one generated a ring-shaped lambent spot that spread open and disappeared like a raindrop striking a puddle. She removed his shoe and his sock, crossing his big toe over his second to bring on a foot cramp. She gave him a pocketknife and coaxed him into making a series of cuts on his body, beginning with the least sensitive areas and progressing to the most: first the elbow, then the shoulder, then the back of the hand, the chest, the inner curve of the thigh. She offered him instructions on his technique: “Next time you don’t want to go so deep. FYI, once you pass the first like millimeter , it doesn’t hurt any more, it just does more damage. In fact, it hurts less, because the shock mechanism kicks in. At least that’s been my experience. Now, if we’re talking about matches or cigarettes, that’s something else altogether. Burn pain and cut pain are two totally different things.” By the end of the week, he could lay down knife wounds as easily as if he were quartering an apple, but still he could not bring himself to apply a cigarette to his skin. It was not the heat that frightened him but the ember. She taught him how to use a butane lighter instead, running the flame until the flint wheel was uncomfortably hot, then damping the gas and immediately pressing the metal to his flesh. In a single afternoon, he left half a dozen identical burn marks on his arms. They throbbed with light for a while before they fell cold. Afterward they looked like the badges of some strange new plague, their raised red welts like ridged tire tracks. The hair he had singed from his skin filled the house with a smell like sulfur and charcoal. When he opened the windows to let the rooms ventilate, he could hear a dog barking, an insect chirring, a door slamming, a car honking, a sprinkler ratcheting around in circles. The wooden clock typed four-thirty in the hallway. It was all so beautiful. The next step, Melissa said, was for him to re-address the injuries he had already formed. Most of his wounds from the car accident had healed completely, and those that hadn’t were cushioned behind too much fat and muscle for him to damage them any further. There was still his knee, which continued to give off little twinges from deep inside the joint—and would occasionally, before a storm, when the barometric pressure dropped, emit a lustrous ache that even Melissa agreed was impressive—but it, too, had largely mended, and he couldn’t count on it to bring him the kind of pain it used to. That left his more recent injuries. Melissa showed him the best way to reopen his cuts: tracing their seams with a knife, then lifting and peeling the skin away. It felt as if he were trying to unseal the flap of an envelope without tearing the paper. There was blood, of course, but never as much as he was afraid there would be, and on her own arm Melissa demonstrated how to stanch it using a styptic pencil. He tried the same remedy and found that it brought a short-lived sting to his skin that was nearly as brilliant as the wounds themselves. He knew so little about the ways his body could be made to suffer, and yet already he had learned more than he ever thought possible. Never before had he endured so many varieties of injury—burns, punctures, bruises, lacerations. And always with the pain came a kind of ecstasy, the feeling that he had crested a hill and lifted free of his expectations. His future was behind him now. He no longer needed to struggle. Nothing could hurt him as much as he had already been hurt.

From three to five, starting in July and lasting until mid-September, the front wall of his house was turned directly toward the sun, and the light flowed in through the windows. The living room and the bedrooms became needlessly hot, even when he shut the blinds and ran the air-conditioner, and he took to spending those late afternoons with Melissa and her friends, sometimes at the bookstore or the movie theater, sometimes in one of the pavilions by the reservoir. In the old days, when he saw men such as himself—older guys who had attached themselves to a group of teenagers, paying for their meals, cracking the occasional dated joke—he thought exactly what everyone else did: Look at that poor deluded sap trying to recapture his faded youth . But he was not trying to recapture a thing. He was only trying to endure the heat for a while. If he could have recaptured his youth, his youth as it actually was, with the pattern of the next twenty years intact and waiting for him, would he have? Maybe so. But a whole new youth, with its own set of dreams and uncertainties, would only have exhausted him. People often talked about wishing they could return to the moment just before a tragedy and begin again, repairing the rupture in their lives, setting off down a different path, the right path, the path that should have been theirs all along, but then, as time passed, they healed and moved forward in ways that depended upon exactly that rupture, and it became harder and harder to justify abandoning what they had gained for the sake of what they had lost. Jason knew, though, he knew without question, that if he could have returned to the day of the accident and prevented it (don’t leave home, don’t leave home) , he would have. He would have taken everything he had learned since then, every moment of the life he had created, and destroyed it. It was his gift to Patricia, his tribute—to create the kind of life he would be willing to burn to ashes.

Often it was nearly dark by the time he got home. He would find the answering machine winking up at him with its red eye. He had stopped returning the calls he received, but he continued to listen to his messages.

“Mr. Williford, this is Karen at Dr. Sutter’s office. We’re phoning to see why you’ve missed your last two appointments. Is anything wrong?”

His crutches were propped against the wardrobe in his bedroom, but he no longer bothered to use them. He would not be keeping any more of his appointments.

Beep . “Hey, dude, where you been? The whole crew is getting together for the game this weekend. Tim reserved a skybox at the stadium. We wanted to see if you could come along. No need to chip in, it’ll be on us. Just give me a call.”