Kevin Brockmeier - The Illumination

It was a different rain, nearly eight months later, and Morse was watching the water create beads on his poncho, when the smaller one brought him two new books. The first was called Mister Parsons , the second Mansfield Park , and he said, “Two MPs for my main MP. Don’t let them get wet now. I think you’ll like these.”

“One for two or—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, one for two or cash money. Give me that hardback number right there. The big red fella. It’ll match my sofa.”

Morse weaseled the book out from under the Visqueen and handed it to the smaller one, and the smaller one slipped it into his coat, gave a little cha-cha with his tongue, and pretended to fire his finger at Morse. Then he walked away whistling. Morse would never understand people who exulted in bad weather.

It was barely noon, but it seemed as if the sun had already gone down. The sky was a solid brick of gray, so dark that Morse lost sight of the smaller one long before he made his turn onto Tenth Street. The rain that dotted his poncho formed tiny solid-looking drops that merged by threes and fours into trembling half-domes, then broke free of their shapes and streamed away. The effect was mesmerizing, soporific. It was an effort for him to look anywhere else, though eventually he did. On the corner, beneath the black canopy of a newsstand, he saw an abscessed tooth blazing like a newborn star. The stacked blocks of a degenerative disk disorder came leaning out of a taxi. Behind the window of the drugstore were a pair of inflamed sinuses, by the counter a shimmering configuration of herpes blisters, on the bench a lambent haze of pneumonia. And across the street Morse saw a great branching delta of septicemia slide through the rear doors of an ambulance and disappear in a glory of light.

The subway shrieked and released its passengers. Up they trudged from under the street, hunching and shivering. The one shaking the water from his hands was named Charles Dennison, the Attuned and the Obedient, Beloved of the Lord and His Angels, and issuing its proclamations in his mind was the Divine Vibratory Expression named Hahaiah. Hahaiah had given Charles a single holy task: to provide fresh experiences to Eternity. The responsibility was profound. Fish the magazine out of that trash can. Whack the sports car with it. See the license plate: DADSTOY. Yes, that one. No, not the window, the door! Hit the DOOR! Now bite your hand, there where the palm thickens at the base of the thumb . Charles set his mouth to his palm. HARDER . His teeth drew light from his skin. Good . In Eternity everything had already taken place—that was the problem. Nothing happened there that was not happening again. Only here, in the Physical and Contingent World, could one generate fresh experiences for the Lord and His Elect, which was why it was incumbent upon Charles to do exactly what Hahaiah bade him. Stop that woman, the one in the fur jacket . Charles took the woman by the sleeve. Say, “Truly, my lady, it is a Marvelous and a Blessed Day. ” “Truly, my lady, it is a Blessed and a Marvelous and Day.” A MARVELOUS and a BLESSED . “A Marvelous and a Blessed.” The woman wrenched herself away from Charles and continued through the door of the hotel. He saw her standing in the lobby with a look of vexation and disordered pride, trying to tease the oil from her jacket with her fingers while the doorman folded her umbrella. This was what the world was: the one and only place where things could still happen for the first time.

It was late afternoon before the rain finally drove Morse to his alcove and he had the chance to give the books the smaller one had traded him a shake. From Mister Parsons fell a thousand dollars in hundreds. Another thousand fluttered from the pages of Mansfield Park . The bills were authentic, newly printed, with that sweet, antiseptic smell that reminded him of window spray.

Never before had the smaller one given him so much cash money. Not for the first time Morse wondered where it all came from.

He was having one of his indoor moods, so he took his cart to the lockers at the bus station, then checked into a hotel, the old Beaux Arts building across from the modern art museum. He put his clothing in a drawstring bag to be laundered, showered until the water no longer ran gray, then settled down in a bathrobe and slippers to ply his way through the TV stations. He had brought only a single book with him, the diary of I love you ’s with the torn binding and the foxed pages, which the one with the loose shoelaces had never retrieved. Every now and then, when Morse had nothing better to do, he liked to open it and read a few lines at random. I love your avocado and Swiss sandwiches. I love the way your neck arches like a cat’s whenever you hear a car slowing down on the street outside our window. I love the story of the Sticky Bandit—aka Mr. Splat. I love your fascination with crop circles, but as landscape art, not UFO indentations or messages from the Circlemakers of the Beyond. I love swipping your triggle gitch . He was fascinated yet vexed by the book. Between each sentence, it seemed, there was a gap, a chasm, a whitening away of meaning. He did not understand how something so sweet, so earnest and candid, could also be so wayward and enigmatic. He kept expecting to return to the book and discover that it had pondered all his questions while he was gone and then fortified itself with the answers.

For two nights, Morse stayed in his hotel room eating grilled steak and cheese agnolotti, seared scallops and grilled duck breast, and drinking sparkling water and tempranillo and white burgundy. The cake he ordered was too rich, and the raspberry sorbet gave him an ice cream headache, the kind that smoldered across his temples for thirty seconds and then flared out, but he barely noticed it. It felt good to eat and drink, to stand at the window looking out over the city, to sleep in a soft bed, to wake without quite realizing he had. It felt good to be alive. Wounded but alive. Shining but alive.

By the time he returned to his milk crate and his six squares of sidewalk, the weather had turned cold and serene, ice-still. Everyone was puffy with extra clothing—coats, jerseys, sweat suits, long johns, wool socks, and ribbed hats. He could see the cars breathing from their tailpipes like looming metal monsters. A station wagon rabbited forward to beat the light, then braked to a stop behind a delivery van. The family inside leaned into the momentum. Their bodies seemed to quiver, their minds seemed to dance, and Morse waited for them to reveal themselves to him. The one sitting Indian-style in the cargo area was named Evie. The chump seat —that was what Tom and Amy called it. Or sometimes the chimp seat . Which meant that Evie was the chump. Or sometimes the chimp. But she didn’t care. She liked riding back there with the groceries and the jumper cables. It was like camping out in her own private fort, a fort that was also a spaceship, a spaceship that was also a go-cart, a go-cart that bumped down the track at sixty miles an hour while she pretended to steer with her hands and also sometimes even her feet. “Are you okay back there in the caboose, Evie-girl?” her mom called out, and Evie said, “I’m fine,” and most of the time her mom asked, “Whatcha doing?” next, but fortunately she didn’t this time, because what Evie was doing was peeling the scab from her knee. It was nearly the size of a silver dollar, or maybe a piece of gum after it’s been flattened on the driveway, and just like the gum it was crisp on the top side but gummy on the bottom, and just like the silver dollar it sparkled in the light. It hurt a little as she lifted it free, trailing a few strings of something wet and sticky. Total and complete grossness.