The History of Luminous Motion (18 page)

On
a Friday morning before lunch I was permitted two visitors. Beatrice and Ethel,
both immaculately buffed and manicured, lipsticked and glossed, sat on cracked
vinyl chairs in a small Visitor’s Lounge which included a wobbly, unvarnished
pasteboard coffee table, some magazines and an additional cracked chair for me.
Ethel wore a gauzy hat and was potent with cheap perfume. Beatrice wore a dress
that appeared slightly cheap and shiny, like polyester or cheap lacquer. Her
hair was washed, her lipstick excessively bright. As I sat down in the empty
chair, we all regarded one another uneasily, like strangers brought formally
together by some parent-teacher committee or charity bazaar. Ethel cleared her
throat and I examined my pale hands in my lap. Beatrice could not remain silent
very long. She shifted nervously in her seat, adjusting and readjusting the hem
of her awkward skirt.

“I
don’t owe you any apologies, Phillip,” she said. “Don’t think I came here to
apologize.”

I
wanted to tell her about my anger, how it had departed suddenly, become a force
of mere matter. I, meanwhile, was growing more ethereal and abstract. I thought
she might like be better now, this “new” Phillip.

“That’s
OK, Beatrice,” I said. “I didn’t expect you to.”

“Then
you expected right.” Beatrice’s blue eyes flashed at me. “What I did I did for
your own good. I don’t give a damn about your father. You could have drawn and
quartered that SOB for all I care–”

“
Betty
,” Ethel cautioned her abruptly.

“–and
I really
mean
that,” Beatrice
continued, cautioning Ethel right back. “What I
do
care about is you and Rodney. I was damned if I was going to
watch you both throw your lives away over your stupid father. He wasn’t worth
it, Phillip. You’re trying to kill the only person in the world you love
because the world won’t love you back. You’re a patent narcissist, that’s what
you
are. You gaze at the world and
expect the world to gaze dreamily at you. You’ve got to grow up, Phillip.
You’ve got to learn to relax. You’ve got to start showing some concern for
people in the world who weren’t born with all the advantages you’ve had. Think
of the children in Soweto and Afghanistan. Think of the political prisoners
throughout Latin America and Eastern Europe. The world’s not reflective,
Phillip. It’s dynamic and blind and stupid and correctable and utterly forlorn,
just like you. Just like me and just like Rodney and just like Ethel
here–” Ethel blushed slightly, as if she were flattered to hear her name
mentioned in any context at all. “It’s a world with real problems, that causes
real pain, that promises real pleasure and abundance. I haven’t been able to
sleep all week. I knew you knew, even without me telling. I just hope you know
too that it’s not because I don’t love you. I love you and Rodney very much. You’re
my family, and if I had to, I’d call the cops again today, right this very
minute, if I thought you and Rodney were about to do something you’d both
regret later. You can bet on it. If you tried to pull the same crap all over
again, I’d have the cops all over you in a second. I’d see to it they were all
over you like a cheap suit.”

Meanwhile
Ethel snuffled behind a dingy Kleenex. Her eyes had grown moist, and her
mascara was starting to run in places.

“Where’s
Rodney?” I asked. It wasn’t as if I were addressing her with my question, but
rather trying to push her out of my way. “When am I supposed to see him,
anyway?”

The
Kleenex in Ethel’s hand began violently shaking. Obviously flustered, Ethel
looked from Beatrice to me, and then at Beatrice again. Her face was very pale.

“They
caught him climbing over the back fence into a neighbor’s yard,” Beatrice said.
“He’s in a holding cell here, just like yours. But early next week he’ll be
transferred to a separate facility. They don’t want you and Rodney seeing each
other again for quite a while, Phillip.”

“It’s
my fault,” Ethel said. Finally she was looking at me. Her damp hand touched
mine. “I shouldn’t have let him near you. I know you don’t understand what you
do to people, Phillip. But you were a terrible influence on Rodney. I should
have paid more attention, Phillip. I should have gotten to know you better.”

“When
you get out, Phillip, I want you to call me.” Beatrice leaned forward earnestly
in her chair. It was the customary intensity of her expression now that made
her stiff dress seem more and more like a disguise. “I want you to call me and
tell me where you are. I left word with your parents, but they’re not
responding. When you get out, Phillip, I want to see you. Call me, promise?
Call me first thing.”

I
promised I would. I went to the door and asked the guard to take me back to my
room. But already I knew I would never call her. We were all moving off into
separate worlds and galaxies now. We were all journeying off to find the only
redemption any of us could afford. I didn’t owe Beatrice anything and she
didn’t owe me. And I certainly never wanted to be betrayed by Beatrice ever
again.

A
FEW NIGHTS later, while I was lying on my bed trying to design my own mantra,
Rodney came and tapped at my door.

“Phillip,”
he whispered. “Hey, Phillip. It’s me.”

My
room was dark, and a mantra to me was just a faultily remembered notion. A
mantra was a puzzle that drew your mind into the deeper, more complicated
puzzle of the world itself. Or so I understood it. You are hanging from a rope
in a dark pit. At the bottom of the pit a lion roars at you. At the top, a
mouse gnaws silently at your rope. This is the universe you’ve landed in. Even
salvation doesn’t last very long.

“Hey,
Phillip. I’ve just got a minute. Are you up?”

I
climbed out of bed and went to the door. I could sense the pressure of Rodney’s
fingertips on the outer side of my hard steel doorknob. In my dark room with
the door bolted from the outside, I thought of Dad.

“Rodney,
I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to you.”

“Look,
I only got a minute. I gave the guard twenty bucks from the cash Ethel smuggled
in for me. Here, something else.”

I
felt Rodney’s body brush lightly against the outer surface of my door. Then I
heard something strike the air vent over my head. Rodney’s feet landed softly
on the outer hall. Then I heard Rodney jump again, and a pack of Winstons popped
through the air vent and ricocheted off the dark, wide-screen mirror.

“You
get them?”

“I
think so.”

“Just
one thing, Phillip–and listen to me real carefully now. Tell these fuckers
anything they want to hear. You got me? Anything. Be anybody they want you to
be, and get the fuck out of here. This place is full of crap, man. Have you
gotten a look at that Officer Henrietta, Boy’s Best Friend? I never met anybody
filled with more crap in my entire life. So do what they say, right? Say
whatever they want to hear.”

“Rodney,
I have to ask you something–”

“Hold
on a second–” Rodney whispered. Then his voice grew dim, harder and
echoing as he leaned away from the door. “What?” he asked, in a louder voice.
“Just one minute.”

“Did
we hurt anybody, Rodney?”I asked quickly, afraid my question might go
unanswered. “I’m beginning to suspect we may have done something we shouldn’t
have–”

“
Fuck
, lady!” Rodney told the echoing
hallway. “I told you
one minute
!”

Then,
as if the institution itself was hurrying to divide Rodney from my vital
inquiry, I heard the dark weighted body of a guard sweep down the hall and
Rodney’s elbows knocking loudly against my hollow door.

“
Fuck
you, lady. You fucking
cunt
, I
said
I’m coming. Watch it there, will you?
Shit!
”

“Rodney,
keep in touch,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. His voice was steadily
diminishing down the long corridor, as if someone were slowly turning down the
volume on a radio.

“Tell
the fuckers anything, Phillip! You hear me? Tell them whatever the fuck they
want to hear and get yourself out of this dump.
Hey
, lady. That’s my
arm
you’ve got there. Know what you just did, lady? You just
screwed
yourself out of twenty fucking bucks–that’s what you
just did. You blew it, lady, because I’m going to
eat
it, you hear me. I’m going to
eat
your twenty fucking dollars before I’ll let you see a piece of
it.”

“I’ll
do my best,” I whispered secretly, as if Rodney and I were conferring in one of
the unoccupied, transgressed homes of our childhood. “I’ll tell them
anything–as soon as I figure out what it is they want to hear.”

I
would call Rodney’s house months later after my release, but his number was
long disconnected by then. My letters were returned by the post office, no
forwarding address available. I didn’t blame Ethel, really. I was not the only
man in her life.

Then,
just before it disappeared forever from my world, Rodney’s voice said, “Hey,
lady. I thought you were supposed to be letting me out to take a piss.”

27

THE
FOLLOWING THURSDAY I was escorted to the Youth Facility’s remotest, somberest
corridor for what Officer Henrietta called an “informal prelim.” Escorted by a
young woman in a patently unattractive and bulky blue uniform, I saw for the
first time the general design of the institution, filled with its atmosphere of
harsh fluorescent light, bracketed by white ungleaming tile floors and
lacquered beige walls. In one corridor I heard the monotonous, aggressive
clocking of a Ping-Pong ball, and in another a sports program on TV. We passed
a cafeteria where young Chicano men wore white aprons and black hairnets. They
had tattoos on their muscular arms and lean, mustached faces, and swabbed down the
floors with tall wet mops. They rested the mops against their shoulders and
looked at me as I passed. I felt very uneasy looking back. They scratched under
their arms and continued watching me go by. Then they scratched roughly between
their legs.

In
the distant, official temperature of the Deposition Room (or so the plastic
sign said on its door) I was seated in a stiff chair at a table with three men
who wore modest navy-blue suits with modestly patterned ties. They were
introduced as a judge, a prosecuting attorney, and a Youth Offense Adviser,
who, I assumed, was sort of like my lawyer. When they spoke, however, I could
never distinguish who was saying what, or from what official position.

“There’s
no prior record then.”

“None.”

“If
the parents aren’t making charges, why are we holding him?”

“We
found illegal substances on his friend. Everybody thought it might be a good
idea to keep him under observation for a while.”

“Who’s
everybody?”

“Joe,
Harry, Delacruz. Me.”

“That’s
not everybody, is it?”

“I
guess not.”

“How
old is he?”

“Eight
years old.”

I
sat forward in my chair. “Almost eight and a half,” I said, but they didn’t
seem to hear.

“What
does the psychological profile say?”

One
man opened a manila folder and read to us. “Severe amnesiac reaction to stress
and poor body management. Perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic, with delusions of
grandeur and competitive reality disorder.” The man closed the file. “The
doctor thinks the kid could grow out of it.”

One
of the men tapped his pencil against the flimsy Formica table.

“If
we keep him, where are we going to keep him?”

“Here,
I guess.”

“What
about a foster home?”

“I
don’t think this case is exactly cut out for your usual foster home.”

“What
do the parents think?”

“The
father wants to take him to his home in Bel Air. He’s pretty well off. He says
he’ll bring in hired help. He promises to keep a close eye on the kid for the
next few years or so. He’s going to hire private tutors and keep him out of
school. He’s going to bring in clinical psychologists. One doctor he’s hired
already wants to try some things on the kid with insulin. I say we give the kid
back to his parents.”

The
men grew silent for a while. I sat quietly in my chair, trying not to look at
any of them.

“What
do you think, Phillip?” the most self-confident of the men asked me after a
while. He crossed his hands on the thick manila folder. His hands formed a wedge
that was aimed at my heart. “You’ve heard us discussing your future. Have you
any ideas about where you’d like to spend the next few years of your life?”

I
looked at the man. His dark hair was cut short in a bland, official style. He
wore thick plastic-framed glasses.

“I
guess I don’t really,” I said. “I guess I’ll be happy to do whatever you
gentlemen think best.”

THE
WARM REALITY of my small, institutional room was growing dimmer and more fluid
each day while I lay on my bed, contemplating my freshly designed mantras and
the world’s annihilation and rebirth in the form of pure, rarefied and
immaculate spirit. I was no longer concerned with what crimes I had committed,
nor what penalties I might suffer for them. Life itself is a penalty of sorts,
and the whole world its own infallible crime. We were all in it, we all lived
it. Perhaps we weren’t responsible for this awful mess, but if we weren’t
responsible, then I thought it pretty safe to assume that responsibility in
itself didn’t really mean anything. Like Mom, we did not die or cease to exist
so much as awaken to a more enduring and unfathomable life. Once we awoke, this
world wouldn’t matter anymore. We wouldn’t even know where we were. We wouldn’t
remember who we had been, or care too much about what we were to become. Being
would only matter then, and nothing else. Now that I was saved, now that Mom
had sacrificed herself in exchange for my firm redemption, I believed salvation
was possible for the world too. I believed anyone could find ultimate
happiness, just like my mom had, just like I was finding it now.

“Tall,”
Officer Henrietta told me.

“Short,”
I said quickly. I liked this game because when I played it I could feel myself
starting to disappear, leaving behind nothing but my automatic words. I could
briefly glimpse the world into which Mom had vanished. If you played the game
long enough, you completely forgot you were playing any game at all.

“Big.”

“Little.”

“Dog.”

“Cold.”

“Friend.”

“Suffering.”

“Hurt.”

“House.”

“Desire.”

“Warmth.”

“Father.”

“Blood.”

Officer
Henrietta put down his stack of file cards and made a succinct notation on the
plywood clipboard. He took his cigarette from the ashtray and looked at me.

“Mother,”
he said. He took a long drag from his cigarette. He did not exhale right away. He
squinted a little, as if he were trying to peer inside me.

I
looked at Officer Henrietta. I deeply desired one of his menthol cigarettes,
but I had recently decided to give up nicotine, as well as all earthly
substances that left me indebted to mere matter.

“The
history of motion,” I said after a while.

Officer
Henrietta exhaled the smoke slowly. A fine, gritty mist expanded in the flat
spaces between us and then evaporated. “What’s that?” he asked. He was talking
more slowly now. We had begun playing a different sort of game entirely.

I
held my folded hands braced between my legs. This room was very cold all of a
sudden. I suspected someone in some deep, secluded and inviolate security nexus
had activated the formidable air-conditioning.

Officer
Henrietta and I continued to gaze at one another for almost a full minute.

“Nothing,”
I said. I watched Officer Henrietta crush out his Kool in the glass Denny’s
ashtray. “Can I please go back to my room now?”

Officer
Henrietta sighed. At times like this I felt very sorry for Officer Henrietta.

ONE
MORNING I was escorted not to Officer Henrietta’s office but rather to a wide
asphalt parking lot where a gray, nondescript car awaited me. Without further
ceremony or discussion I was transported to the busy corridors of a Valley
hospital, through avenues of pale sunlight and fading adobe shopfronts and
streets filled with cars and potholes and roaring buses. From outside the
hospital appeared very dark and ominous, like some corporate office building
with dark cement walls and reflecting glass windows.
 
I was taken into a cool lobby and then into an elevator’s
tinkling Muzak. Women and nurses smiled at me, then frowned at the stern
obdurate guard beside me who gripped my pale hand. I was taken to a private
room where a beautiful woman lay exhausted in a bed, and a man and another
woman stood at the window beside the bed. When I entered the room, everybody
looked at me.

“I’ll
be right outside,” the guard said. She was a woman. She went outside and closed
the door.

“How
are you, Phillip?” the man said. The man wore a large bandage across the right
side of his face, and there were a few visible lines of stitches across the
bridge of his nose and down one side of his neck. A second woman with
sun-blonde hair stood beside him, her arms folded, and glared menacingly at me.
This was her room, she seemed to be telling me. These were her friends, this
was her family. I wasn’t wanted here. At any moment, she could ask me to leave.

The
man stepped forward, and I heard other bandages brushing dryly underneath his
clothes. He stepped with a slight limp. He held his body stiffly. He took my
hand and sat down with me on a pair of chairs beside the bed. “Your mother’s still
asleep,” the man said. “She’s all right, though. Don’t be frightened. At three
thirty this morning your mother gave birth to a nine-and-a-half-pound baby boy.
Isn’t that exciting, sport? I wish you could have been there. It’s such a
miracle, watching a baby being born.”

The
man sat there staring at me, but I just looked at the sleeping woman in the
bed. She was very beautiful, for those who like women with dark hair and fair
skin. Her hair was a mess, though. And without any makeup she probably looked a
lot older than she really was.

“This
is my sister,” the man said, indicating the severe woman beside the window. “This
is your Aunt Sally from Phoenix.”

Aunt
Sally hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She was packing a cigarette against the
ledge of the window, just sitting there and looking at me. Her cigarette went
tap tap tap. A sign over the sleeping woman’s bed said NO SMOKING PLEASE. If
Aunt Sally doesn’t like the way I look, maybe
she’s
the one who should leave, I thought.

Aunt
Sally showed the man her cigarette. “I’m going outside for one of these,” she
said. It was as if she had read my mind.

The
man nodded at her and she left.

“I’ll
be right outside,” Aunt Sally added, and closed the door behind her.

The
man and I sat together for a while and watched the sleeping woman. The man held
my hand in his, and I didn’t mind. I knew he was trying to tell me something. He
was waiting for the right moment. He thought he might be able to detect that
right moment in the pulse of my hand.

“We’re
all going home together, sport. It’s a great house. It’s in the best part of
Bel Air. I’m sorry you’ve had to spend so much time in that awful place, but I didn’t
really have any choice. I’ve had a couple of good lawyers on it, and you should
be able to come home with your mother and me tomorrow. I know things have been
very confusing for you, sport. No hard feelings, I promise. But if we’re going
to sort things out, we’re going to have to sort them out together, if you know
what I mean. We’re going to have to work through things together in our own
house, just between us three–us
four
now, I should say–and not give up until we get it right. You follow me,
sport? Are you with me on this?”

I
didn’t answer. I was already growing bored with looking at the sleeping woman,
so instead I gazed out the window at the white, cottony sunlight suffusing the
San Fernando Valley. There was no color out there today, I thought. It was one
of the Valley’s white days.

“Would
you like to go with me and see the baby?” the man asked. “We could do that
right now, if you want. Before they take you back.”

I
didn’t like this man very much. I knew that right away. I didn’t really dislike
him that much, either, though. I tried to be as tactful as possible.

“Let’s
not rush things, OK?” I said. Out in the distance, an oblique dark shape began
to emerge from the white sky. After another moment, I recognized it. It was the
Goodyear blimp.

TWO
DAYS LATER Officer Henrietta shook my hand and gave me a little lecture about
growing into manhood and all the responsibilities a young man faces. Growing up
is never easy, and young men face difficult problems every day, problems like
sex and drugs and peer pressure. It was important to remember, Officer
Henrietta explained, that a young man must learn to find truth within himself
and his family, and that if a young man only knew that the people around him
really did love him, he’d also know that no matter how hard the problems or how
difficult the choices, he would still find his way safely through any
unpleasantness the world might have to offer. “Even when you’re an adult,”
Officer Henrietta said, “it doesn’t get any easier. You keep thinking it’s
going to get easier, but it doesn’t. I think you just get used to the pressure
after a while. I think you just become a better judge of your own character.”

In
the long pause that followed, I said, “I’m sure you’re probably right, Officer
Henrietta. And I’ll keep your good advice firmly in mind. I really will.”

“Good
boy, Phillip. Now go along and pack your things. And if you ever have any
problems, or if you ever have any questions and you don’t know who to turn to,
you can always call me. OK? Now get going. And keep in touch.”