Kevin Brockmeier - The Illumination

The paramedics who arrived not ten minutes later kept calling Judy “the crit.” “We’re on scene with the crit,” they said into their radios. “The crit is not responding to verbal stimuli. The crit’s pupils are fixed, pulse slow and even.” They picked her up, harnessed her to a stretcher, and told Ryan he should follow them to Mercy General. No, he could not ride in the back of the ambulance. They were sorry. Regulations. So he grabbed his keys from the dresser and ran outside and started the car. The ambulance seemed to float through the streets like a toy, a die-cast racer propelled along a plastic track. Gradually he fell behind, watching the blue lights lend their flicker to more and more distant buildings, until, abruptly and inexplicably, at the corner of Burlington and Court, the driver began obeying the traffic laws. By the time the hospital came into view, Ryan was no more than half a minute behind them, but when he pulled into the emergency room’s entrance bay, the paramedics were already sitting on the ambulance’s back fender as if they had been there all night. One was scuffing the pavement with his shoe, the other upending a thermos into his mouth. When Ryan got out of his car, they met his eyes and shook their heads at him. And so the first part was over, and he could begin teaching himself not to remember.

It was a year later that the light began.

Ryan was scorekeeping for a youth basketball game at the church the night it started, operating the board from a table at mid-court. In the last seconds of the fourth quarter, one of Fellowship’s boys attempted to dunk the ball and dashed his hand against the rim, a blow so violent that the backboard clanged on its springs. The noise continued to reverberate even after the final buzzer sounded. Beneath the basket the boy was hunched over. Inquisitively, as if the pain had simply made him curious, he bent his wrist, and from inside, where the tendons fanned apart, it began to shine, a hard surge of light that turned his glasses into vacant white disks. He winced and said, “Aw, Christ.”

At first Ryan assumed the glare from one of the lamps in the parking lot must be sliding through the stained-glass window, casting a peculiar incandescence over the boy, one that just happened to be concentrated on his injury, but the brightness followed him as he staggered across the floor to the sidelines, crumpling like an animal onto the bench. A few of the other players, Ryan noticed, had glowing white bruises on their arms and legs. The visiting team’s coach wore a circle of light around his left knee, the bad one, the knee with the wraparound brace. Ryan thought something must be wrong with his vision. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, opening them to see dozens of other people, in the bleachers and on the court, blinking and rubbing their own. What was going on?

Driving home he passed a traffic accident on the highway. A car had flipped over onto its roof, and in the front two bodies were hanging from their safety belts, glowing like pillars of fire. The light was no illusion. Ryan stopped his MP3 player and dialed through the broadcast band. The first few channels were following their programming guidelines, airing music or commercials, sermons or station ID stingers, but eventually he found a community radio show that occupied the thin sliver of airspace between an oldies station and the local public radio affiliate. “And I’m sorry,” the host was saying, “but, you know, this is some weird business we’ve got going on here at the Reggae Hour. For those of you who’ve just tuned in, Tony, my engineer, has this toothache on it looks like—what?—his right incisor. Right incisor, Tony? His right incisor. And it’s shining like a lightbulb, a bite-size effing lightbulb. A Christmas light! I do not lie to you, ladies and gentlemen. I do not lie.”

So Ryan was not crazy.

At home, he immediately turned on the television and sat watching the news until he fell asleep, and then again when he woke up. He could hardly do anything else.

The Illumination: who had coined the term, which pundit or editorial writer, no one knew, but soon enough—within hours, it seemed—that was what people were calling it. The same thing was happening all over the world. In hospitals and prison yards, nursing homes and battered women’s shelters, wherever the sick and the injured were found, a light could be seen flowing from their bodies. Their wounds were filled with it, brimming. The cable news channels showed clip after clip to illustrate the phenomenon. There was the footage, endlessly rebroadcast, of the New York City mugging victim saying, “It hurts right here, and right here, and right here,” touching the three radiant marks on her neck, shoulder, and breastbone. There was the free-for-all at the hockey match, one lightning flash after another bursting from the cluster of sticks and uniforms. There was the fraternity party at which the pledges had taken turns punching through sheets of glass, leaving their hands sliced open with glittering, perfectly shaped gashes. And those were just the images Ryan could not shake, the ones that haunted him when he closed his eyes in the shower to wash the shampoo from his hair. Over and over again he watched soldiers burning out of their injuries, footballers flickering through their pads and jerseys. He watched children with sacklike bellies basking in a glow of hunger. Occasionally, the light seemed to arrive from a distinct direction, like the sun slanting through a gap in a curtain, but often it simply infused whatever aches or traumas afflicted people. At such times, it had the appearance of a strange luminescent paint layered directly over their skin. They might have been angels in an El Greco painting.

That was the beginning. For a few months, church attendance spiked. Some of the seats at Fellowship Bible were taken by visitors, some by the Christmas-and-Easter set. It didn’t matter—each new face showed the guilt, fright, or confusion of someone confronted by a game whose rules had suddenly changed. After a while, though, when it became clear that the world was not ending, or not ending soon, and everyone began to accept that pain now came coupled together with light, the congregation diminished. Each Sunday, fewer and fewer people were required to sit in the folding chairs the ushers had arranged behind the pews, until finally the chairs were taken up and put away, wheeled into the closet on their long metal platforms. Again the church directory was crowded with photos of people who turned up only once or twice a year.

Ryan wished he could permit himself to be one of them, but it was impossible. There was someone who was watching him, who needed him there in her stead, someone who whispered an almost imperceptible thank you each time he walked through the door, her voice no louder than a breath, scarcely strong enough to make a candle flicker. It was for her sake that he was still distributing the leaflets. He devoted a few hours a day to the job, circulating from one neighborhood to the next so that he walked down every block on his route at least once a month. The church paid him for it—not much but enough, or enough for now. Enough along with the insurance settlement. Enough along with his investments and the money he had saved during his brokerage days. “For the Lord God will illumine them,” the new leaflets read, from the final chapter of Revelation, singular, The Revelation of St. John the Divine , and he marched from house to house with a sheaf of them in his leather satchel. When no one was home, he would take a leaflet from the sorry-we-missed-you stack, scroll it shut, and tuck it into the doorjamb, next to the campaign flyers and the pizza offers. When someone answered, he would smile as if he understood why he was smiling and ask the question he always asked: “Tell me, have you heard the Good News?” He abided by business hours, which meant that there were always more sorry-we-missed-you houses than have-you-heard-the-Good-News? houses. In the summer it was mainly schoolkids he saw, in the winter retirees and homemakers. And there were the invalids, too, of course, a surprising number of cripples and terminal cases, as if on every block two or three houses had been seized in the jaws of some great machine and reduced to stone and timber. The old men with prostate conditions. The diabetes patients with ulcerated feet. The arthritis sufferers with swollen joints. All of them were illuminated with the telltale signs of their own infirmity. “Sorry about your heart,” Ryan wanted to say, or, “Sorry about your legs,” but he was still getting used to the etiquette of the situation. Was it discourteous to admit that you could see a person’s sickness playing out on the surface of his body? What if it was a form of sickness that had always previously been hidden?