The History of Luminous Motion (3 page)

5

I
KNEW WHERE they kept the Seconal. On the top shelf of the master bedroom’s
medicine cabinet in an amber child-proof bottle. You had to depress and crank
the lid with the heel of your hand. Then you held it there, a sweet unconscious
turning in oval gelatin capsules. Sometimes I might take one, letting the
capsule dissolve on my tongue, tasting the grainy barbiturate seeping through,
bitter and full of life. Then I would replace the pills in their container and
step quietly back through Mom and Pedro’s room. Mom lay on her side, facing me,
her eyes glassy and volitionless, watching me without deliberation, permitting
me my secret life. I saw myself reflected in her eyes, and the moonlight where
we converged. “I’m going to do it, Mom,” I whispered. “I don’t want to make you
unhappy but I think about it every night.”

Mom
didn’t say anything. Perhaps, absently, her right hand might gently stroke her
left shoulder. Her dark eyes might follow me to the door.

“I
know you’ll let me,” I said. “I just want you to know. I don’t want to hurt
you, but I can’t stand to let myself be hurt any more, either. If it was
between you and me, Mom, you’d make the same decision. You’d always choose to
hurt me rather than hurt yourself.” And then I crept silently back to my room,
tracking a spoor of glowing red ash across the carpet of Pedro’s dreadful
house, dreaming my inviolate dreams of motion again. In my dreams I was moving,
with or without Mom, across lawns and galaxies, streets and stars, suburbs and
unraveling solar winds. The Seconal was my ticket out and I was going to use
it.

MOM
WAS WORKING late that night due to a last-minute change in her schedule.

“Hey,
sport.” Pedro was watching a Dodgers and Giants game on TV and drinking his
customary Budweiser. “Out of bed tonight, I see. Good game here, if you want to
watch it.”

Mike
Marshall had just fouled a hard sinking fastball off his right foot.

“Now
Marshall’s walking away from the plate and boy has
that
gotta hurt,” Vin Scully said.

“Used
to play a little pro ball myself.” Pedro was digging into his ear with the little
finger of his right hand. After he finished he shook his head slightly, as if
he heard something rattle. “Some double-A in the Texas League. That was back in
sixty-two.”

It
was funny, because suddenly I didn’t even hate Pedro anymore. In fact, as I sat
and talked with him that night–or sat and allowed him to talk to
me–the world of menace I once associated with Pedro’s name began to
withdraw a little. Grow lighter and more gaseous, its molecules quicker and
more excitable. Pedro. I was suddenly convinced of the fact that Pedro
was
a very nice man, and that conviction
filled me with an impossible sadness.

“That’s
where I got my nickname, see.” Pedro’s eyes dimly apprehended Marshall on
first, Guerrero on second. Atlee Hammaker was pitching for the Giants. I really
liked that name. Atlee Hammaker. “I never said a lot when I was a kid, and
everybody thought, because I had really black hair then, that I was Mexican. I
really did look Mexican. I looked about as Mexican as you could expect a
Mexican to look.” Pedro ran one hand through his gray and thinning hair. Hammaker
struck out Bill Russell on four pitches. “Damn,” Pedro muttered. “Damn it,
Billyboy.”

“Sometimes
you just have to get up every day and make the effort,” Pedro consoled me
later. The game had gone into extra innings, tied 2-2, and Pedro had turned the
volume down with the remote control. He was on his sixth or seventh Budweiser,
and I was preparing to fetch him another from the fridge. “I mean, it’s not
like I ever had these big
ambitions
,
you know, to run a
hardware
store, for
chrissake. I mean, opening a hardware store wasn’t something that, you know,
woke me up excited every morning. Like I’d wake up thinking,
Hey
, I own a
hardware
store!
Hey
, I’m
on my way to work in my very own
hardware
store! Hell, no. It wasn’t like that at all, kiddo. I mean, running a hardware
store was just a lot of hard work every day, believe you me. There were plenty
of days when I just wanted to lie in bed too. No lie. I would have loved to
just lie in bed and watch TV and listen to ball games on the radio. But back
then, you see, I couldn’t afford to hire any help, and if
I
had stayed in bed all day, just who do you think would have paid
my mortgage so I
could
lie in bed all
day? Nelson Rockefeller? Think again, kiddo. Howard Hughes–my good old
buddy Howard? Well, I doubt it. I can’t say for sure, but somehow I doubt my
old buddy Howard
Hughes
would’ve come
round to help pay off
my
mortgage.”

He
opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. Pedro ate
most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy
Wonderbread. “This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo–and I’m telling
you this as a friend. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself
childhood
crap just doesn’t
work–doesn’t work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your
mom wants you to have this
idyllic
childhood and all. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up ‘idyllic’ in
the dictionary and I wouldn’t hold my breath. I wouldn’t lie in bed all day
waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

I
know, I wanted to tell him. You’re right. Love often requires sacrifices which
simply aren’t worth it.

“So
maybe you’ve had a few hard knocks. So maybe you’ve lived a fly-by-night existence.
That’s just the breaks, kiddo,” Pedro said, and for once I listened. For once I
wanted us to hear each other. “That’s just life. And believe you me, we sure
live it a damn sight better than we do lying in bed all day feeling sorry for
ourselves. That’s the truth, kiddo, and…”
 
He gave a tremendous yawn. “Jesus.” He blinked his eyes. His crumpled
Budweiser cans lay toppled around him on the table, sofa and floor like crude
chess pieces. “Boy.
 
I guess I’m
really bushed.” Pedro pushed himself to his feet, slouched, pot-bellied and
creased by the rough sofa cushions. “You take care of yourself, kiddo,” Pedro
told me, and shuffled in his wrinkled suede slippers toward the master bedroom.
“I think I’m going to hit the hay.” And then I heard him groaning into the
squeaky bed, drifting into his slow aimless dreams of the soft red barbiturate
haze that filled him like warm air fills a balloon. Meanwhile the ruptured
gelatin Seconal capsules lay scattered on a sheet of Kleenex on the desk in my
room.

I
finished my diet soda and went in to see how he was doing. He looked warm and
peaceful, his face flushed and puffy, his vital bodily organs sailing along gently
and intrepidly and slow. All the long steel kitchen knives were unsharpened and
dully glimmering in the kitchen cabinets. There was no heavy cord or rope
anywhere to be found, and though I suspected there might be some in the
basement, it was dark down there, cold and damp, and I wasn’t wearing shoes. Then,
like weather, I felt it, just the heavy simplicity of it, a faint steel resonance
underneath Pedro’s bed. For a while I stood and appreciated that strange,
almost tactile presence. It was very solid. It was useful and perfectly
designed. It had been there all along. And clearly it would do the job.

After
a while I pulled Pedro’s toolbox from under the bed where it waited for me like
history. I lifted it to the foot of the mattress. The toolbox contained
hammers, screwdrivers, ratchets, Allen wrenches, hacksaws and spare, gleaming new
replacement hacksaw blades. I knew that Pedro wanted a world as secure as the
things he constructed in the backyard, a world with perfectly articulated joints
and level, sanded surfaces. I knew that Pedro deserved a world like the worlds
he built out there, like the worlds he built inside himself and Mom. “Death is
the hard song, Pedro,” I told him. “We only sing it once, and none of us ever
sings it exactly right.”

Even
as I inaugurated my secret ceremonies of redemption that night, I knew
something vaster and more important than myself was responsible for all my
actions. Me, Mom, Pedro, and Mom’s vast world were all just fragments of a
process that would soon consume us all. I didn’t want to give into that
process, you see. I wanted to leave something behind, like the pyramids of
Egypt, or the heads on Mount Rushmore. I wanted to build something formidable
and good for all of us, but especially for Pedro. All that long night as I
feverishly worked, what I wanted more than anything was to build something for
Pedro that would last forever.

__________

6

I
thought when Mom saw
what I had done to Pedro she might stop loving me, but from that night forward
she may have started loving me even more. When she emerged expressionlessly
from the master bedroom I was sitting on the living room sofa, gently stroking
my wet clean hair with a brown towel, still stippled and muggy after my long
mournful bath. She didn’t pause or speak to me. She just began packing our few
belongings into pillowcases, and after a while I dressed and helped her carry
everything out to the garage where our old Rambler had sat gathering dust these
many months, sluggish and thick with its unstirred oils and rusty water. It
started up on Mom’s first try. Then she held down the accelerator for a while
and we sat there sleepily in the dark garage, staring out at the brighter and
more opaque darkness beyond the roar of our Rambler’s V-8. We were lifting off.
In a moment, we would be hurtling through space. Mom released the emergency
brake and the V-8 subsided to a rough, hesitant idle. Then we glided down the
long cement driveway while Pedro lay asleep in his calm and remorseless home,
dreaming his dreams of barbiturates, beer and the soft biting blades of tools
and things. God, I was filled with light that night. I was filled with Mom’s voice
and the very light of her. We were moving again. We would never die. We would
travel together forever in the world of inexplicit light, Mom and I.

“The
history of motion is that luminous progress men and women make in the world
alone,” Mom said. “We’re moving into sudden history now, baby. That life men
lead and women disavow, the sure and certain sense that nothing is wrong, that
life does not beat or pause, that the universe expands relentlessly. You can
feel the source of all the world’s light in your beating heart, in the map of
your blood, in the vast range and pace of your brain. That’s the light, baby.
You don’t need any other. Just that light beating forever inside of you.” We
were turning onto the freeway, which was filled with other, hurtling
headlights, enormous menacing trucks and buses. “We are like astronauts, we are
like wheeling planes and spaceships. We are like swaying birds with soft
stroking wings like oars. We beat against the heavy air, and carry our silent
and regenerate light with us wherever we go.”

It
was nice Mom telling me that the light was mine too. But I knew the light was
Mom’s and nobody else’s. For months I had seen nothing but my own interior
darkness, and now, against the glare of Mom’s resumed motion, I could sense the
entire world again as something far outside the reach of myself. No, all the
light we gathered was Mom’s light, Mom’s progress into places I could only dream
about. I was just a passenger, and like all passengers, unconcerned with
landscape and plot, enveloped only by the simple movement, the cumulate graph
of those coherent points along which we ate, slept, went to the bathroom, and
awaited movement again. We could live together forever and ever, again and
again, life after life. Mom didn’t have to lie anymore. She didn’t have to run
or hide, she didn’t have to journey further away from me in order to remain
with me as she did, deeper into her dreams of me and further away from my
untrained arms. I didn’t know it then, but I was soon to learn that I couldn’t
follow Mom everywhere.

THESE
DAYS I was intent on immortality, because I knew Mom’s only hope of redemption
lay in some expansion and unfolding of time that would swallow Mom and all her
imaginings into one formless shape and sound, not a place or location so much
as a dispersion of force. “Low-cholesterol diets, Mom,” I told her, browsing
through a college nursing text entitled
Health
and Our World: 32nd Edition
. “Then there’s the DNA, those complex looping
signals beeping in our blood and lymph. Death’s a program, Mom. Like eating,
sleeping, sex and hate. Our bodies generate death like fluids, waste, carbon dioxide,
anticoagulants, marrow. DNA’s the beeping clock, unraveling time in our bodies
like smoke from your cigarettes. It’s the tiniest force; it responds with
information, not blood; it circulates raw and genetically contrived data, not
life exactly. The heart–we’ll leave that to the regular scientists. There’s
some oils in fish that cleanse the body of fatty tissue and keep the rich blood
pumping. But down into the DNA is where I’ll go, Mom. When I grow up I’ll have
a laboratory. I’ll invent lots of stupid consumer junk so I make lots of money.
Then I’ll sink everything I’ve got into the DNA. I’ll climb down into its
bristling helical nets like a spelunker. I’ll dig out every secret, and they’ll
be our secrets, Mom, and we’ll live forever. We’ll buy a house overlooking the
beach, and I’ll keep my laboratory in the basement. And we’ll live together
without anyone bothering us for thousands and thousands of years.”

Most
of the time Mom just drove without looking at me, wearing her tortoiseshell
sunglasses and a floppy straw hat. She was listening, deep in her brain, but
watching other roads now besides the 101. “This is King City,” she might say.
“I think we’ve been to King City.” Mom’s face was very pale without makeup, but
very beautiful as well. “Let’s try it anyway,” and pulled onto the next
off-ramp. Soon we were winding down into a Burger King, a Wendy’s, a Motel 6, a
King’s Bowl Bar and Grill. I always insisted on a salad bar in these days of
Mom’s disaffection. I urged her to eat plenty of raw vegetables and fresh fish.
We would pull into the parking lot and she would turn to me. “It’s got to be
better than San Luis, doesn’t it? It’s got to be better than that hellhole.” Then
she gave the fleshy thigh of my arm a squeeze and smiled. Only she wasn’t
looking at me in a way. She was looking at me, but she wasn’t looking at me at
the same time.

RATHER
THAN DISAPPEARING into neon bars with her strange, unmanicured men, Mom took
longer and longer looks at herself in the vanity mirrors of our motel rooms,
drinking her Seagram’s and 7UP, her Scotch and Tab, her vodka and Sprite. She
wore her laciest lingerie and just sat there alone. Perhaps she would paint her
face with very bright makeup, or contrast her pale cheeks with soft blushes and
eye shadows, leaning forward, one elbow braced against a dimpled knee, one
brilliantly manicured hand splayed gently against the top of the dresser, her
other hand producing various vials and Maybelline from her handbag, which
bristled with crumpled Kleenex, tattered road maps, plastic cutlery, and the
various salt, ketchup, and NutraSweet packets she had lifted from fast-food
restaurants. Her breasts were fully outlined against the sheer fabric of her
lingerie; her long, slightly pudgy thighs (of which she was curiously ashamed,
and over which she generally wore pants or thick cotton “middie” skirts); her
legs glistening with dark nylons. Sometimes, as she watched herself applying
makeup, she might take a few long slow breaths. I could feel her breath in the
air; I could taste its warmth against my skin and face. Sometimes her nipples grew
more prominent and stiff. She removed her left hand from the table and placed
it against the inside of her left thigh. Lying on my side of the bed I watched
her, and my body filled with strange, smoky sensations. She wasn’t looking at
me. But I was looking at her.

I
began to feel a little out of breath, resting the open textbook against my
thin, almost concave chest.
 
Mom
was a bird, a cloud, a car. Mom was something that breathed like me, that felt
warm like me, that could move her legs like me. She wasn’t looking at me, but I
was looking at her. Her face emblazoned with cosmetics, her body firm and distant
and unbelievably warm. I was becoming her only man. No other men ever came
around. I was watching Mom and, after a while, in the corner of my eye, Mom
began watching me, her hand which held the lip gloss hovering against the edge
of the dresser, her cool gaze directed at me now, as if she saw me and she
didn’t see me, and I felt my entire body burning and pulsing with the light,
the light, all the night’s darkness which was now turning into light, and all
the sleepiness pulling at my face and filling my eyes with heat and softness
and a sort of blurred and amorous detachment, and then I was falling asleep,
and my body gave a sudden little kick. And as I slept I dreamed of Pedro. I dreamed
of Pedro dreaming of me. Because Pedro and I understood one another perfectly
now. We both loved Mom. And now we were all that remained of the strange and
delusory world of Mom’s men.

MANY
OF OUR surviving Visa and MasterCard cards were beginning to reach and
overreach their expiration dates, and Mom and I grew stingier with our fund of
invisible credit. We pulled “runners” at restaurants, coffee shops and motels. While
Mom flirted in the office with mechanics and gasoline attendants, I jimmied
open cash boxes on the service island with a screwdriver and pulled out the
large bills from under the steel change tray. We lifted food from grocery
stores and clothes from clothing stores. We took magazines, beer and cigarettes
from 7-Elevens, Stop ‘N’ Shops, Liquor Barns and Walgreen’s drugstores. One afternoon
at the Van Nuys Motel 6 I was returning to our room after playing one of my
slow games with a sharp stick and a dead, forlorn blackbird, and found Mom
carrying the color portable television from our motel room downstairs to the
car. We sold it that night to a pair of diminutive, portly Mexicans– very
pleasant and smiling men, as I recall–for twenty-five dollars in the parking
lot of Serra Bowl in Encino. “Value’s generated by the world, not by
consciousness,” Mom said that night as we drove south to La Jolla. “The trick
is to take the world and its values and generate better worlds inside. You’ve
got a choice, baby, and it’s the only choice you’ve got. Either remake the
world, or allow the world to remake you. Did that sign say 101? Look for my glasses–there,
on the dash. And keep an eye out for Highway 101.”

WE
WERE DRIVING, always driving, and always it was night. Outside our hurtling car
the darkness simmered with radio waves and the swirling, hot Santa Anas. Everything
converged out there, even the heartbeats of other stars and galaxies. Pulsars,
quasars, fissioning novas and supernovas, the radar of airplanes and control
towers, the diminishing cries of crepuscular birds. I couldn’t look into that
eternal night–and the oceans of static engulfing our AM radio every few
miles or so–without thinking the question. The question surfaced like
some underwater creature. It was learning to oxygenate. It was crawling from
the sea’s burning muck.

“Whatever
happened to Dad?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself. The question was like force,
blood pressure, chemistry, light. “Where is Dad now? Is he alive? At night like
this, when the night is just like this, does Dad ever think about us? Is Dad a
person in the world, Mom? Or does he just lie in his bed and dream? And if so,
Mom, are we his dream, or is he ours?”

But
Mom had already grown quiet, as if the question were not mine at all, but
rather part of some thin formless lapse within the continuity of Mom’s
diminishing world. She never said anything for hours at a time. She was going
very far away.

I
merely traveled. But Mom journeyed.