The History of Luminous Motion (10 page)

17

I
BEGAN TAKING less care of myself.
 
I
rarely showered or brushed my teeth, and soon grew inured to my own sweet,
soury smell. My teeth and gums felt coated with a thin, gritty film. I kept many
of the Jack Daniel’s bottles originally pilfered for Mom in my own room now,
and dark, amiable boys at the neighborhood bowling alley sold me marijuana,
hashish and belladonna. I spent a lot of time alone in my room, listening to
Pink Floyd on my headphones. Dylan, Van Morrison, Strauss and Rossini, Handel
and Bach. Stoned, I felt diffuse and more real. I ate packaged sandwiches,
cookies and mints. I watched late-night television. I was growing more solid
and real alone in my room while the rich saccharine smoke reshaped itself in
the air. Men, monsters, sailboats, planets, forests and rivers. Nobody needed
me, and I didn’t need anybody else. When I inhaled again from the joint I felt
the harsh air filling my abdomen. My blood grew heavy, tranquil and slow, my
eyes bloodshot and watery. Sometimes I touched my face, just to see if I was
grinning or not. My face felt tight and strained. Every so often I caught
myself squinting.

The
Jack Daniel’s and 7UP always tasted sweet and strong. I could taste it and then,
after rolling it on my tongue, swallow and inhale it at the same time. I could
feel it going down my throat and esophagus. I could feel it trickling through
the twitchy pyloric valve into the stomach’s muscled mouth. The icy drink still
felt cool and fresh going down. Alcohol was pure, like snow. It felt and tasted
like snow, or so I imagined, since snow was one of the many things I had never
experienced. Sometimes I imagined flaky white snow falling inside my stomach. Sometimes
I just lay flat on my back on my bed and tilted the icy glass to my lips, leaning
it against my doubled chin. Cigarettes tasted better and harsher when you were
stoned. I grew filled with a sense of intense well-being. I was no longer a
child, but rather a very wise old man. I had made billions on the stock market,
and endowed many large museums and worthwhile institutions. Younger men like
Dad were envious of my boats, luxury resorts, gambling casinos, tame striped
tigers and insatiable women. My women were of every conceivable nationality and
shape. Some of them had enormous breasts, which I fondled one at a time. I made
love day in and day out with an impossible assortment of attentive and
beautiful women. When I imagined these impossible orgies I placed my hand
between my legs. Sometimes it felt hard, but it also felt remote and slightly
detached, like a heavy steel pipe or a dictionary. I might start laughing
without any reason. I would reach for my Jack Daniel’s or my Bud. As I laughed,
tears rolled down my face.

“Phillip.
Are you all right in there?” Dad’s voice roamed outside in the corridor,
testing doorknobs and latches, brushing the loose leaves of wallpaper.

“Fine!”
I said, and started laughing again.

“What’s
that smell, Phillip? What’re you smoking in there?”

The
doorknob rattled flimsily. I heard the tiny lock brace and clack.

“Phillip?
Why’s your door locked?”

“I’m
in bed. I’m trying to go to sleep.”

Dad’s
voice waited. Dad’s voice was a thing, immobile and immense. Dad’s voice lived
in the corridor and made lots of money. Sometimes I imagined myself searching
through the corridor and uncovering the vast sums of cash Dad’s voice had
hidden out there. I invested it in Alcoa. My dividends would be nearly eleven
percent.

“I
don’t want you smoking in bed, Phillip. Now put out whatever sort of cigarette
you’re smoking and go to sleep. I don’t want to have to come in there.”

“I
don’t want you to have to come in here either, Dad,” I said, and started
laughing again. The tears soaked my T-shirt. “I’m putting it out. It’s just a cigarette,
and I’m putting it out.” I was laughing at the impressive mahogany bureau Dad
had bought for my room. I had pulled the bureau up and braced it against the
flimsy aluminum doorknob. The bureau was exactly like Dad’s voice. It was as if
the bureau held my door in place on one side, and Dad’s voice held it in place
on the other.

Dad’s
voice stayed where it was. It seemed to be trying to confirm something. It was
hard and resolute.

“I
love you,” Dad said. “And your mother loves you too. She said kiss you good
night.”

And
then I heard the familiar footsteps, and the door of the master bedroom brushing
against the shag carpet. I heard the deep breathing house. I heard the distant
ticking thermostat. I heard the beetles in the yard, and the electricity hissing
in the streets. I heard the stars and the moon. I took another hit off my
joint. The tiny pinprick ember flared, seeds popped. A fragment of paper
ignited and flashed and its ember drifted up into the air and vanished.

Within
minutes, Mom had begun screaming again.

I
NEVER WANTED to be loved when I was eight years old. I wanted to be crushed by
soft massive arms. I wanted to be lifted into some towering embrace. I wanted
to be hugged so tight I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to be hugged until my eyes
watered and my heart popped. I was often awake all night, pacing through the
halls and yard of my house, pausing sometimes at the door of my parents’
bedroom. After the screaming stopped you couldn’t hear anything. My parents’
bedroom was perfectly quiet at these times, hollow and soft, as if it had been
drained of atmosphere, like some unmanned spacecraft sent aimlessly into outer
space.

“Sometimes
I’m not even thinking,” I tried to explain to Beatrice one day. “Sometimes I
just pace, as if momentum alone compels me. It’s like I’m not going anywhere. Just
into the living room, the kitchen, down the stairs to the basement, through the
icy stone garage, remembering how Mom looks at me sometimes. Her face is ruddy
and flushed. She has this insipid smile on her face. Whatever’s growing inside
her has become wary and suspicious, as if it knows I’m outside waiting. Perhaps
it has simply grown stunned by Mom’s screaming. ‘Everything’s going to be
okay,” I try to comfort it. ‘Once you’re outside, you’ll have your own crib. We’ll
put you in my room where it’s quiet. You’ll eat well. You’ll see the sun. You’ll
reach out your flabby hands and grab my face. You’ll wear tiny clothes. We’ll
hang a bright, intricate mobile over your crib, and it will glitter, so you can
watch it at night when everybody else is asleep. You’ll stare at the bright
mobile and contemplate ideas like motion, light, repetition, difference. These
are the best ideas you’ll ever have.’”

“Why
don’t you try taking a Valium?” Beatrice was sitting with me on the garage
stairs. The front garage door was hanging wide open. Outside the hot sun
flashed across everything: white pavements, white stucco houses, gleaming white
windows. Beatrice was twisting the ends of her shirt around one index finger. “If
your mom hasn’t got any, I can get some from my old man. My old man loves
Valium.”

“I
want things to be different for her,” I said. I was staring at the bright
sunlight and the wide empty streets beyond my garage door. Inside here the
light seemed to radiate from the beamed walls and ceiling, the waxed tarpaper floor
sheets, the cold Rambler. “I want her to be happy. She’s a lot smarter than I
was at that age. She knows what’s out here because I’ve been telling her. When
she’s born, she’ll find out I’ve been lying about how much fun it is and she’ll
hate me.”

“Why
do you think it’ll be a girl?”

“Because
I know.”

“It’ll
be a boy, Phillip. Your mom will have a million sons.”

“I
want everything to be figured out before she gets here. I want everything to be
perfect.”

“We
all like to think we grow up,” Beatrice said. “History’s the one dream we dream
together.”

“I
don’t want to grow up.”

“You
already have.”

“I
want to grow down. I want to bury myself in the hard earth. I want to root myself
there like a dead tree. I want to entangle myself in the earth’s heart so
nobody can ever pull me out.”

“You’ll
buy a condo in the Valley. You’ll meet a beautiful woman who drives a silver
RX-7. You’ll get married. You’ll buy a house. You’ll have babies.”

“No,”
I said firmly.

“You’ll
take up gardening, skiing, stamp collecting. Your dad will take you on in the
firm. You’ll have color televisions in every room of your house, and video
recorders which function by remote control. You’ll have second thoughts. You’ll
wonder what you’re missing. Your wife will develop an unfocused expression. Her
expression will be exploring other continents, even while she’s sitting right
next to you. She’ll sleep with other men. You won’t even mind it that much. Sometimes
she’ll look very sad. You’ll teach your children to be independent, and shower
them with presents. You’ll tell your children you want them to have all the
things you never had.”

“You
don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know me at all.”

“You’ll
buy a sports car to make yourself feel young again.”

“There’s
things I’ve never told.”

“We
all never tell things, and it’s always the same things. They aren’t secrets,
Phillip. They’re conditions.
 
As
much as we may hate to admit it, we all live the same worlds inside.”

I
awoke every morning with a terrific hangover, parched and aching. Usually I
smoked a little grass and took some Tylenol, just to get me started. I watched
daytime television in my room. There were game shows that lasted forever. They
took up infinite space with their glittering prizes. Each prize bore a
cardboard placard inscribed with its retail value. Usually this value was
hyperinflated, but always impressive. Sometimes, unconsciously, I tried to add
these sums together in my head: $679, $2,807, $99, $3,499. Often the prize was
a brand-new car or a world cruise. I imagined myself winning these prizes and
taking these cruises. The cruise ships were filled with other boys and girls my
own age. There were sundecks and swimming pools, shuffleboard tableaux and
billiard tables. We played Ping-Pong and pinball. The girls all wore bikinis. Even
though they were only eight or nine years old, they all had large breasts. I
drank Jack Daniel’s and Wild Turkey, Stolichnaya and Kamchatka, Southern
Comfort and Jim Beam, Gallo and tawny port, Coors and Bud.

“Rodney,”
I said. I was leaning into my bedroom closet, as far away from Mom and Dad’s
room as I could get with my telephone receiver. “I need to talk to you. I can’t
figure this out alone. I need to see you.”

“I’m
kinda busy.”

“Just
for a half hour. Maybe I could come over.”

“I
said I’m busy.”

“But,
Rodney–” I was prepared to protest, to cry and shout and hammer and beg.
Then I heard Dad’s footsteps. They paused outside my door. Then his hand, very
faintly, rapped.

“Are
you asleep in there? Phillip?”

“I
gotta go, Rodney,” I said. And then I hung up.

18

“PHILLIP?”

“What?”

“Are
you in there?”

“Of
course I’m in here.”

“Don’t
talk back to me, son. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”

“I’m
all right.”

“Do
you want anything?”

“I
don’t want anything.”

“Did
you fix yourself some dinner?”

“I
fixed my dinner.”

Dad
went silent for a moment. His voice seemed to be gauging things like mass,
humidity and weight. “Your mom and I were worried about you.”

I
refused to dignify his duplicity with a response, and wondered about life on
other planets. Perhaps it was only microscopic and stupid. Perhaps it wasn’t
even self-conscious.

“You’re
spending a lot of time alone in there, Phillip. What do you do in there all
day?”

I
poured more Jim Beam into my ceramic mug. The ceramic mug said SON and was part
of a family set Dad had purchased at the mall a weekend before. “I read,” I
said. I reached under my bed for my Marlboro carton. “I’m trying to get some
reading done.”

“All
right, son.” Dad stood quietly out there for a moment, like some primitive
landmark, or guards outside a condemned prisoner’s cell. “I’ll leave you
alone.”

Dad’s
footsteps beat loudly in the hall. I heard dishes clattering in the kitchen. The
television started up in the living room. It was as if my house were inhabited
by disembodied sound. Then, after a while, Dad’s footsteps returned down the
hall. Very softly this time. Then his pocket screwdriver began investigating
the lock of my bedroom door. Tick tick. The doorknob rattled slightly. Tick.
Tick tick. A flashlight skittered underneath the door a few times.

The
locking mechanism on my side of the door was fastened with heavy black
electrician’s tape. My bureau was braced against it. On the bureau in a small
brown bag was the new bolt lock I had purchased at Walgreen’s just that
morning. I would install it later that night, after Dad was firmly asleep.

THE
BOOKS ON my shelves stared down at me like statues or awards, mementos of some
former life. They seemed cold to me now. Books were just the raw matter of
education. They were stuff, like coal or minerals. They could be accumulated,
quantified and known. I was no longer concerned with the known, but with the
process of knowing itself: pure motion, which did not render things known or
visible. It did not transport you to any fixed location on a map. It was into
the very function of the self that I journeyed now, and like Mom I could only
journey there alone. Misery enveloped me with soft black robes. They were warm
and clinging. They held me in place so I wouldn’t get lost. Misery was my map,
my boundary. It held me in place in this world of constant motion.

Whenever
Mom started screaming again, I knew that inside she felt warm and safe like me.
Sometimes I could hear other voices in there, hidden in that moist miserable
world of my private suffering, the voices of other people Mom and I might have
been.

“I’m
not a monster,” Dad said in my hallway after the lock stopped rattling. “It’s
not like I don’t have any feelings too, son. I know I’m the outsider. I know
it’s going to be hard for you to get used to having me around. I’m not trying
to rush things. When I first arrived and everything seemed to be going so well,
I knew this would happen eventually. You had to make a lot of heavy psychological
adjustments. I just want you to understand I’m doing the best I can, under the
circumstances. I’m trying to do what’s best for everyone. So I’m not saying you
should feel any different. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go right on hating me,
if that’s how you feel. I would never violate your privacy like that. I’m just
saying try to respect my position as well. Things aren’t any easier for me than
they are for you or your mother.” Times like this I thought Dad was a lot like
Jerry Lewis on the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy. Like
Jerry, Dad was prepared to go to the most grotesque and inhuman lengths simply
to prove his own humanity.

FOR
THE FIRST time in my life I was utterly alone. I examined the desultory,
overinflated images of naked women in men’s magazines. I bought a harmonica
that I liked to hold in my hand and imagine myself playing. Sometimes I danced
alone in my room, listening to Bruce Springsteen or Joe Cocker on my Sony
Walkman. I preferred Jim Beam, but I cultivated a taste for gin as well. I
drank and danced until I grew dizzy and surfeited with a thick, swollen
stomach, and collapsed on my unsheeted mattress, beating my feet in the air, watching
the room swirl around. When it started swirling I knew I might throw up at any
moment. That’s what the plastic-lined trash bin was for. I lay very still and
tried to make the room stop moving. It required an act of intense
concentration. It was as if this swirling room was itself a mockery of
movement, pulling up through my stomach while the alcohol moved through my
blood, lifted into my brain and skull and sinuses and teeth. I wanted more to
drink and tried to sit up. I knocked over bottles and ashtrays. The gray ashes
spilled across my clothes and sheets. There were beer cans everywhere.
Everything reeked of gin and cigarettes. The floor of my room looked like the
high school parking lot. The world seemed to be growing darker and more
desperate. “I don’t know where I’m trying to go, Mom,” I whispered, as if she
could hear me. “Maybe I’m already there and don’t know it.”

Whenever
I was this drunk I couldn’t sleep, though that didn’t stop me from dreaming. The
alcohol seemed to drive my blood and adrenalin as if I were a car, and I
experienced strange visions of my progress through the world of light. I
proceeded through dense green bushes and foliage. Insects chittered and flashed
in the air, glancing off my face, biting my arms and neck. I was wearing a
large khaki explorer’s hat. Native drums beat in the air, and the tortured cries
of captive white slave women. I was moving towards a secret road. The road was
white and powdery, like the beach of some pristine sea. It extended in two
directions. It might take me anywhere. It might take me nowhere at all. The
roaring of an airplane filled the blue sky, the beating of helicopters. Everything
was blowing around me, even the road’s white dust. The plane was descending to
take me away, but I didn’t want to go.

I
would sit up in bed and reach for my cigarettes, sometimes pulling the glass
ashtray or half-empty bottle of Beefeater’s onto the floor. I grew obsessed
with the idea that dreams were trying to communicate something very real to me,
perhaps even the secret advice and admonitions of Mom herself. Dreams were
life’s base or undergrowth. They were the rich earth from which real life
blossomed. The white road, native drums, women crying. The arrival of planes
and helicopters, and then the sudden disavowal of everything, the whirling dust
and drums and sky. In the world, perhaps, my progress had been halted
indefinitely. But I could still move in my dreams, and in my own desperate
recollections of them. I was learning what Mom had been trying to teach me all
along. When I could no longer live in the world, I could live the world alone in
my heart.

“It’s
time you started thinking about somebody other than yourself,” Pedro said. “You’re
not the only person in this world who’s lost somebody he loved.” Pedro’s face
was out of focus. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of the things Pedro had
seen or I had seen that made his face so indefinite like that. “Just think
about your dad for a minute. Just think about me, even. Try thinking for one
minute about how
I
must feel.” Pedro
was drifting away. We were all drifting away.

“There’s
only one thing I’ve learned in my entire life, Pedro,” I told him, though Pedro
didn’t exist as a body anymore. Pedro existed in the country of my imagination
like deep buried formations of rock and basalt. Vast geothermal plates shifted
and moved down there. The heat was unremitting. “And I’ll tell you, Pedro. I’ll
tell you what that one thing is.” I had spilled Jim Beam down the front of my
shirt. I took another long drink from my glass. “I don’t care who lost what. I
don’t care who’s gone without love. I don’t care about money, or people, or
countries, or politics. I only care about me now, Pedro, because now I’m like
Mom. Because now I’m not thinking about
anybody
except myself.”

LIKE
MOM I journeyed now into my own artificial country–a country much like
California, I thought. This country had fields and trees. It was divided into
counties, towns and cities. Several languages had developed over the centuries
that, like the landscape, were broken, discontinuous and unreal. There were,
however, no other people to be found anywhere. No other people dreamed of other
countries like mine. Nothing moved here at all, in fact. Not even the wind, or
the intricately sculpted and often sentient clouds.

If
I were to meet that other woman here, that special person in my life without a
name, she could not speak to me. She might not even recognize me. In this
privileged country my imagination had translated everything, even sensations
and appearances, into solid matter, things, atmosphere, nature, earth. That
other woman might try to read to me from books I remembered from childhood. Big
red and green books with pictures of bears, zebras and pelicans in them. That
other woman might try to speak to me, feed me, smell me, touch me, but she couldn’t
do anything about it. She had lost all pretensions to form and become only a
force, a dream of falling. She could only run through her accustomed
routine–combing and petting my hair, stroking my warm stomach, clipping
my toenails–while I drank my gin and tonics and contemplated the walls of
my country. My country had developed fissures and cracks, exposed plaster and
wiring. The doorknobs didn’t always correctly articulate with their locks. The
windows were often painted shut, their curtains torn and dingy. Dishes were
chipped, and glasses were filled with spongy cobwebs. None of the silverware
matched. If you stood on a chair and gazed into the highest cabinets of my
country you could just see, in its furthest, dingiest corner, something tiny
that didn’t move. It was gray and shapeless. It possessed no smell or texture. If
you looked at it too long, it wasn’t even there at all.

I
NO LONGER wanted to live forever. I only wanted to burn intensely in the sun
and extinguish, seedless and unforlorn like some unpopped pinecone. I began
taking foolhardy walks at night into the worst parts of town, where strange
dark men and women stood in doorways which were often plastered over with
promotions for rock concerts and record albums. If I possessed no home, then
logically my only home lay everywhere. The streets were filled with refuse. Garbage
cans were overturned, and the wild dogs did not approach you. The dogs always
looked at you over their shoulder as they paced anxiously away. They seemed to
be calling you. Perhaps they were just hoping you would call out to them. They
suffered terrible skin rashes and limped, like many of the strange men and
women who stood loitering in doorways, or pushed large shopping carts about. These
parts of the city were like some postnuclear landscape. These broken people had
survived the extinction of an entire civilization. There was something
admirable about them, about their rashes and strange growths and misshapen
features. They drank very cheap wine out of paper bags. Sometimes I stood and
watched, and they offered me some. I always refused. It was not because I was
afraid of contamination. It was because I was afraid I might contaminate them.

“How
you doing, Johnny? How you doing, baby?” The sexless old woman had a faint gray
beard and a pale face. “You coming home tonight? I’ll fix your bed. You come
home tonight and I’ll fix your bed.” Her fingernails were dirty and untrimmed. She
held in her hands a gruesomely stained and tattered paperback copy of
The Hite Report on Female Sexuality
.

“Johnny’s
dead,” I told her. “Johnny died last night in the hospital of tuberculosis. He
asked why you weren’t there. He asked why you weren’t even there to say
good-bye.”

Sometimes
I walked all night through unmapped and remote parts of the city that might
have been only dreams. I remember long dark alleys filled with yowling cats. I
remember men dressed as women, and women dressed as men. I remember bodies
asleep or dead, and when I touched them with my foot they didn’t stir or
respond in any way. Every few blocks or so I might find a well-lit liquor store
open where I could purchase cigarettes from an indifferent clerk who watched
X-rated movies on his videotape machine. I remember horrible-looking men who called
out to me when I passed. Sometimes they might follow me. Their bodies seemed to
have collapsed inside their matted gray clothes. Sometimes they emitted
terrible, half-human sounds, and I would run away. I don’t remember what was
real and what wasn’t during those long restless walks I took far away from my
home. I only remember moving deeper into the buried countries of my
imagination, where one found one’s way purely by instinct. I could never be sure
where I might arrive next. By now, of course, I had said good-bye to California
altogether.

“IT’S
NOT A plot or anything, Phillip,” Beatrice told me. “You’re not history. You’re
not what things happen to. You’re just a little kid, Phillip, who’s got a
number of severe personal problems right now. I’ve never suggested this sort of
thing before, but maybe you should see a counselor. Perhaps you should seek
professional help.”