The History of Luminous Motion (19 page)

“I
will, Officer Henrietta,” I said, gazing for the last time around his blithe,
cluttered office. I would miss it here, where the games were always clearly
games, and never really mattered that much. “And I will keep in touch. I
promise you. I really will.”

28

BEATRICE
WAS RIGHT, of course. I was going to grow up.

I
moved to the big house in Bel Air with the man and woman from the hospital and
was enrolled in a private school. I was given my own room, color television and
VCR, and three times a week I was visited by a battery of psychologists and
dieticians who examined me with clinical smiles. I grew accustomed to the
spaces and geometries that lay around my large house, and for the first few
months I was occasionally allowed to explore these spaces, by foot or by bike. I
was never alone, however, for wherever I went covert men and women followed me
in slow, very obvious automobiles. Sometimes I even saw these men and women
parked beside the schoolyard where I would sit during lunchtime recesses and
watch my addled, utterly inefficient classmates run their races and enact their
imaginary dramas of pirates, cowboys and tycoons. The covert men and women never
bothered or oppressed me. I knew they were only there to protect me. Eventually
they stopped coming around and I felt a certain calm emptiness surround me; I
even missed those covert men and women in a way. It was as if I had lost the
only authentic family I had ever known.

This
was my home and this was my family where I did not live so much as circulate
among things, events and strangers like a sort of atmosphere. Here was the man
in the chair by the fire. Here was the woman in the bed near the TV. Here was
the baby in the room filled with bright plastic toys. The baby was very
remarkable and everybody always said so. It never cried or raised a fuss, and
whenever you spoke to it, it seemed to know exactly what you were saying. “My
name is Phillip,” I would say some nights after everybody else had fallen
asleep, standing alone over the baby’s dark crib. “I live in the next room. Your
parents support me and see to my education. When you grow up, you will be very
happy. You will exercise and eat right, and be involved in all sorts of extramural
sports at your school. You will fill this room of yours with many sports
trophies and citations of scholastic excellence. You will eventually become
involved with a pretty girl from your high school, and you will often bring her
by the house. I will always live here, too, but I won’t bother you. I will
always be in the next room. I will always be a moment away, in case you need
anything, or an emergency arises. But otherwise, I think, it would be best if
we didn’t see each other too much. I’m not trying to be antisocial. I’m just
considering all the complicated logistics involved in people living together
over a long period of time.” The small, intelligent baby would look up at me as
I talked. Its dark, attentive eyes concentrated on my moving lips. This was a
baby the man and woman of my house would eventually be very proud of. They
would never feel nervous about a child like this. They would always know where
it was, and generally what it was thinking. They could engage in casual
conversations with it, without worrying so much about what they said, or what
it might say back.

I
HAD A future now, as firm and incontrovertible as my house and my family. I
would complete grammar school, junior high, high school. Perhaps I would attend
USC or UCLA, and earn my degree in law, medicine or journalism. I would marry a
lovely, patient woman who would bear me no more than three lovely children. I
would acquire a job, my own big house, and two cars in a two-car garage. A
Pontiac and a Volvo. My wife and I would send the kids to summer camp every
year, to give us a little time to be together. On Christmas, we would take
everybody to the house of the man and woman who had raised me in Bel Air. We
would drink and sing Christmas carols. Every other year or so either I or my
wife would have an affair with someone, usually someone I worked with or my
wife met at one of the various regional political and charity functions she
often attended. We would consider calling everything off. The house, the
marriage, the formal avowals. But then we would start to grow more anxious and
uncertain the further and further we grew apart from one another. We would
begin to feel ourselves verging on vast unlabeled places that seemed to open up
out of the earth under our feet. We would come to tearful and sudden
reconciliations, reconciliations that grew quickly more formal and sensible as
succeeding weeks passed. Our children would grow up. Just like me, they would
raise families of their own.

I
HAVE NEVER been truly unhappy since settling down to a more normal childhood,
but perhaps, at times, I do feel a little restless. On these nights, when my
parents are asleep, I take out the little red sports car the man recently
purchased, an MG convertible with a hard, racy little engine and quick catlike
traction. I drive it out along the coast highway, or across Sunset into
Hollywood, where the tacky streets are empty and somehow magical late at night
after all the hookers and junkies have gone home, like the stage of an abandoned
movie set. Some nights I drive south to Orange County on Highway 5, or even as far
as San Clemente. The air is always pleasant at night that far south, clear and
warm. There are still a few rolling hills and green pastures that have not been
converted to barnaclelike condominiums, shopping plazas, hotels or bowling
alleys. It is always nice just to drive and relax and not feel in a hurry to be
going anywhere. It’s nice just to drive aimlessly around for a while with my
own abstract thoughts and dim, fading memories of a life that has always seemed
to me rather formless and abstract to begin with.

Some
nights, though, I drive to the San Fernando Valley and the house where Mom and
I once lived together. The front yard has been reseeded, and a number of pine
and fig saplings have been planted around the front yard, where they have
already grown into substantial trees. The basement window-latch can still be
slipped open with a flat screwdriver and, inside, the garage has recently been
swabbed out with solvent. Cleansed of its familiar smells, even the familiar
angles and architecture of that garage seem strange and unfamiliar to me now. A
large Ford Galaxy automobile stands in the middle of everything like an animal
presence, rusted and spackled with Bondo, serene and almost majestic. A cat
with luminous green eyes observes me from the perfect darkness between a
matching washer and dryer. I go up the back stairs. The stairs have been
carpeted with individual strips of green shag; the strips have been fastened
down with bright red and yellow thumbtacks. I unlock the back door with a
paperclip. Then I’m standing in the redecorated kitchen. Everything gleams in
the darkness, aided by moonlight that falls through the cafe-style curtains. Nothing
looks familiar here either, and I move into the living room.

We
learn the rules when we get older, and that’s what helps us get by. We’re not
uncertain anymore. We’re not startled by the slightest sounds. As I step into
the living room the only thing I find familiar here are the floorboards, which
do not creak when I don’t want them to. I feel like a spider on its home web,
exerting texture, balance and pressure, gliding across the surface of spaces
and silver fabric. Small children never know. They don’t know why people do
things, or even what they’re going to do next. Small children invent their own
reasons for things and things that happen. Children are reasonable too, just
like adults. It’s just that children don’t know the acceptable rules of reason
yet. Children can get lost. They need someone strong to lead them. Otherwise,
they can be easily led astray by the convolutions of their own minds. Childhood
is not a glorious thing. Childhood does not comfort or instruct. Childhood
isolates people. Sometimes, children make mistakes that they regret later on in
their lives.

This
living room was not filled with fine furniture, but it was clean and functional
and what is often referred to as homey. Flowers in vases, framed photographs on
shelves, a crushed velvet family portrait of the Kennedys, dull paisley
wallpaper, a large waiting television console, the whirling dust and fading,
sun-bleached curtains. Only this linked me with the past, this whirling dust. This
was the vast sound into which Mom had vanished. I thought I heard something and
I turned. A tiny rectangle of light escaped from underneath one of the bedroom
doors.

“The
history of motion,” I whispered. “The history of motion. Light, sound, heat,
gravity, mass, life. Motion, the history of motion,” I whispered, over and over
again, but I couldn’t remember, the fundamental weight of the words didn’t
work. “The history, the history of light. Light and history, history and motion,
motion and history…” The words were like the dust. They whirled without the
frame of sentences or that dark ritual meaning which would call her forth
again, out of the shadows of this lost house. The words would make the house
ours again. The words would bring Mom back to earth. “The history of motion.
The history of motion, Mom…” My family was very far away and inaccessible to me
now. But I didn’t want to be with them. I wanted to be here. I wanted to stay
here forever. I couldn’t stop crying, but I didn’t have to stop crying either.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t that I didn’t know my life had turned
out for the best. But I was growing up now, so I could cry all I wanted to,
even while my hands filled with the tears, even while I felt the icy wet turning
in my stomach and my heart. “The history, the history of motion.” And then, as
if by magic, the door in the hallway opened. A mist of pale yellow light poured
out.

The
child rubbed its eyes with its fists and looked at me.

“
¿Quien es?
” she asked. She was a dark
formless shape, looking for the bathroom. I must have looked enormous to her.

She
pulled her tiny fists away from her dark eyes, peering at me, incredibly tiny and
perfect like a tiny robot. “
¿Eres tu mi
padre? ¿Eres tu?
”

This
was it. I was about to find what I could not find in my own big house with all
the strong, independent and well-designed furniture I possessed there. If only I
could remember, I could stay. I wouldn’t have to go back. Everything would be
better again, it would all make perfect sense: the history, the history of
motion, something about light, and living one’s life in a world where everything
is always moving, and the way time takes you away from people, even people you
love… But I couldn’t remember how it went. I couldn’t remember the tone or the
light of it, the chords or the melody… The words wouldn’t come and I couldn’t
make them.

We
stood looking at one another in the dark hallway. She was not that much smaller
than me. In some ways, however, she was very much smaller.

“
Mi madre esta en la cama. La cama de mi
madre es azul
.”

There
was no way back unless I could remember. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t remember. I
couldn’t remember.

“Carmelita?”
a woman’s voice said. “Carmelita?
¿Qué
pasa, pobrecita?
What are you doing?” The woman’s voice was growing larger
and more indistinct.

I
continued to cry, without any reason. I wasn’t even sad. I didn’t feel lost or
lonely or forlorn. I just stood there in the heavy darkness and saw the light
click on in the open doorway down the hall. I heard slippers being pulled onto
feet, then the feet on the floor. In a moment, the child’s mother would appear
at the bedroom door.

Afterword
to the Revised Edition, April 2013

The History of Luminous Motion
was written during one of the happiest periods of my life, which may not be
apparent during some of the book’s darkest passages. I have never been a quick
learner, and it took me a long time to learn how to write the sort of fiction
that gave me pleasure; but after publishing a few stories in the late seventies
and early eighties (each of which I found incredibly difficult, and
time-consuming, to complete), during the mid-eighties I made a series of
clumsy, poorly thought-out and fortunate decisions: I moved to London, a
completely messy and disorganized city where I could walk endlessly and burn
off all the wasted energies that often prevented me from focusing on the scenes
and stories I was trying to create; I began making a precarious living writing
reviews and book-reports for London publishers, newspapers and literary
journals; and I discovered a series of fairly inexpensive and unstable
accommodations which were just large enough for me to establish space for some
books, a breadbox-sized black and white television, and my first
word-processor–a large, bulky, British-built Amstrad with a blinking
lime-green cursor and text which, to this day, I can still see buzzing away in
my corneas whenever I close my eyes for a few seconds, sort of like those weird
interstellar communications Philip K. Dick claimed he was receiving before he
died.

By
1987, I was writing every day, with joy and conviction; I was always broke; and
I managed to produce a series of good short stories, and the first chapter of
History
, over a period of about sixteen
months–about the same amount of time that it had taken me to complete
just one of my previous stories, such as “The Dream of the Wolf,” or “The
Flash!
Kid”. The first draft of
History
was begun in the sublet-bedroom
of Colin Greenland’s house in Chadwell Heath, and completed in a dire Camden
bedsit where, at one point, the kitchen was filled over with redbrick rubble
from the explosive impact of London’s first (and only) recorded hurricane in
October 1987. Revised over the next six months,
History
was, like all of my books, difficult to find a publisher
for; but I was represented by my one genuinely indefatigible literary agent, Anne
McDermid, who kept at it. And once it was published in New York–with some
heavyweight support from Sonny Mehta of Knopf in 1989–it received many
good reviews, and a respectable number of truly negative reviews, but didn’t
sell as well as the publishers (or I) had hoped. After a couple of paperback editions,
it went out of print. Occasionally, I receive a note from someone who claims to
have fond memories of the book, but otherwise, it feels to me like a largely
forgotten–or unremembered–novel. I often wish otherwise.

History
creeps up on all of us, and retyping the Knopf edition into my now far more
congenial (and often far too distracting) Apple desktop, I can’t help noticing
how dated this book has become over the decades–despite the fact that it
was set in a sort of “timeless” suburban world and anchored to as few concrete
historical references as possible. I haven’t made many corrections,
stylistically or otherwise. I can’t say I find my first novel as good as I had
hoped to find it–but at the end of the day, it still gives me pleasure,
which is all I ask of anything I write, or read.

It
gives me almost as much pleasure to believe that now, after twenty years,
readers other than myself can read it.