The History of Luminous Motion (4 page)

7

THEN
ONE DAY I awoke puffy and unbathed in the backseat of our car and Mom told me.
The hot sunlight was filling the cracked vinyl upholstery, the warped,
discolored dashboard and dirty windows. Mom was leaning inside and pushing my
shoulder. “I’ve done it,” Mom said. “I’ve rented us a house.” So finally, after
years without memory, Mom initiated time again. We had our own house now, and
nobody lived in it but us.

“I’ve
learned some important things in the last few months or so,” Mom told me that
night. “About myself, you, our world, the future. And about the sort of
unrealistic expectations people can develop about one another. Everything’s
going to be different this time,” she promised. “I’ve learned to be realistic
about things. I’ve learned there are things we simply can’t expect from one
another.”

Every
few minutes she took her glass into the kitchen and hacked at a bag of ice we
had purchased from the local liquor store. The bag rested in the rusty and
chipped Formica sink, thawing and reshaping itself. Then Mom returned to the
living room with her icy glass and poured more Seagram’s and 7UP.

“I
don’t care, Mom,” I said, compelled by my own confessions too. “I just want you
to know that I’m not mad at Pedro anymore. I have been very selfish and
confused lately, and I don’t mind if Pedro comes to live with us again. I can’t
keep you to myself. It isn’t fair. My love for you can’t be a selfish love if
it’s to be honest and true. I have to let you live your own life because that’s
what I love about you. That life you live apart from me. I’m learning a lot
about myself as an individual, Mom. And if Pedro comes to live with us again, I
promise to be nice to him.
 
I won’t
do anything I shouldn’t do.”

Mom
sipped her drink in the cold room, the candles flickering around us, impaling
the mouths of Mountain Dew and Coke bottles streaked with ruddy wax. Mom just
looked away. It was as if she didn’t hear me. It was as if she were listening
to Pedro dream, the man whose name she taught me to say and then taught herself
to never say again. I wondered if in Pedro’s dreams there were visions of Pedro
dreaming, like the way angled mirrors reflect one another infinitely in department-store
dressing rooms. In Pedro’s dreams there was Mom, me, and a dark gathering shape
under the floors of our new house. The dark shape said, “The family environment
is a very important place for growing children. A stable family unit
environment determines whether a child will grow up feeling assured and
self-confident, or undisciplined, slothful and insecure.” Whenever we heard
that voice coming, Pedro and I knew Dad would be with us again soon.

“Sometimes
it’s hard to tell the difference between your conception of the world and the
world’s conception of you,” Mom said, swirling ice in her glass. We slept on
the shag carpet on rolled-up blankets and quilts lifted the previous evening from
a Best Western in Van Nuys. “It’s very easy to fool yourself. The harder you think
about things, the more confused you get.” She was lying on her back and gazing
at our white, water-stained ceiling. Her hands rested quietly on her breathing
stomach. “When I was a little girl I would sit on the living room couch for
hours sometimes, trying to figure out the simplest things. I couldn’t move. My
mind grew fuzzy and dim. I felt as if my skull was inflating with chemical
pressure. It grew dark outside. My mother returned home from work and fixed me
dinner, but I wouldn’t eat. I just sat there alone until I could feel this black
cloud slowly engulfing me. Inside the black cloud, I couldn’t think about
anything. I couldn’t remember what I had been trying to figure out. Sometimes I
couldn’t remember my own name, or the address where I lived. I couldn’t be sure
if my mother was really my mother at all.” Stealthily, the gas heater gave a
tiny kick in the kitchen. Outside, the city was filled with bright, airy noise,
whispering against the walls of our house like something corporeal, filled with
hissing and irreducible life.

“Go
to sleep, Mom,” I said, and placed my hand on both of hers. “Get some rest and
we’ll discuss it in the morning.”

“Lately,
I’ve started feeling like that again,” Mom said. “I see this cloud of blackness
coming up around me. I forget things. I can’t even tell if I’m dreaming or
not.”

Outside
in the bright night, the full moon gazed over everything, gravid with
implications.

“Your
father took me away from all that,” Mom said distantly, “and that’s why I’ll always
be very grateful to him. I’ll always be very grateful to your father, Phillip. But
that doesn’t mean I want him back.”

MOM
ALWAYS SAID we would buy furniture someday, but we never did. Instead we
purchased a Hitachi color television, VHS recorder and remote control with one
of our remaining credit cards on which time, like the vital current of some
living creature, was gradually running out. We purchased a pair of springless
Sta-Easy mattresses from a ridiculously exorbitant Salvation Army thrift store
and placed one in each of our musty, divided bedrooms. We purchased an
audiocassette recorder and various new tapes from Tower Records in Van Nuys,
and a small unvarnished pine desk with a built-in bookshelf for my room, on
which I assembled my various stained and pulpy textbooks, a new notepad, pink
rubber eraser, plastic ruler, pencil sharpener and pencil case. These were my
tools now, and like Pedro I kept them all in their proper place. There was
something submarine about them, even anxious. Mom had recently determined that
I would be a writer.

“Take
words and make them useful,” she told me. “Drain them of all the crappy
meanings they
used
to mean, and make
them mean something useful instead.” I assigned myself to my room for exactly
two hours every morning, where I studied my books and wrote my clean words.
With my elbows propped against my grainy desk, I plunged into books and
histories and explicable mysteries like some hungry and federally-sponsored
wilderness explorer. I made vast new areas of knowledge cultivable and known. I
descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures
with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations
lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering
rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized
language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied
the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I
memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the
populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of
presidents, tyrants and kings. I was learning what Mom had learned already: that
there are journeys we make alone every day that take us far away from one another.

Every
morning I awoke in our cold house and padded softly into the kitchen, where I
prepared Pop Tarts, hot chocolate and perhaps a bowl of cold cereal. Then I
turned on all the stove’s gas jets to break the chill, and sat at the wooden
breakfast nook perusing last evening’s
Herald
(I disdained the
Times
for political
reasons). I might listen to some all-chat radio, fix a small pot of coffee and
return to my study, always attentive as I passed Mom’s silent room, where she
remained discreetly asleep or self-absorbed until mid-afternoon. Then I read
alone in my room until at least noon, spilling the strange energetic words into
my head. Geology, psychology, ancient history, applied linguistics, German,
modern philosophy, South American etymology, Central American politics,
Fourier, Rousseau, Marx–a vast boil and suck of words and languages. I
recall little of what I learned then; the ideas didn’t really stick. Rather
they seeped into my skin and belly. It was as if I were modifying the shape of
my hunger rather than appeasing it. The only knowledge that really mattered to
me then mattered because it was linked somewhere in my imagination with the
emerging shape of Dad. I remember quantum physics because I felt that Dad, like
the movement of planets, was not a fact so much as a quality of interpretation.
I remember European revolutionary governments of the eighteenth century because
their subversion of “Father” had never eliminated so much as merely redesigned
his very real and persistent presence. I remember Hegel because I always
imagined that the thisness which was Mom and I was always transforming itself
into the thatness which would be life with Dad. Dad was the thatness towards
which all our complicit motion yearned. In February he called for the first
time.

Is
this Phillip? he asked. I had never before answered a phone to the sound of my
own name.

“Who’s
this?”
 
I didn’t need to ask. There
was only one other person in the world who knew my name.

This
is your dad, he said. This is your dad who misses you both very much.

I
hung up. And he didn’t ring back.

At
least not that same night.

WHEN
I WENT to bed I tried to distinguish the different schemes of light that infiltrated
my room. There was the lunar and the electrical, the stellar and the reflected.
There was the light of ghosts and the light of living things. That night Pedro
spoke to me for the first time since he began dreaming of those hard lightless
objects which filled his somber toolbox.

“I
forgive what you did to me, but I’ll never forgive what you did to your mom. I’ll
never forgive what you did to yourself.”

“But
what about the light, Pedro?” I asked. “What sort of light do you see now? Does
the light make you feel warm, or safe, or sad?” But Pedro’s voice had grown
silent again. He had said what he wanted to say. It was as if, while he
dreamed, someone was keeping watch over him. Dreaming was a prison in which you
were never alone for one minute, in which you were responsible to a legion of
regulations, timetables and personnel. I couldn’t understand why Pedro said he
would never forgive me. It had to be a code or a cipher of some kind. If he
told me the truth about his new life, he might get himself in trouble with the
people who gauged and monitored that life. I would have to ask him about it
later. For now, effortlessly, I could only sleep.

8

DAD
CALLED THE next morning around ten thirty.

It’s
been five years, he said. You guys are a hard act to follow but not so hard to
trace. I may not always know where to find you, but I always know where you’ve
been. You’ve left a trail that you might call a mile wide. Hearing my detective
agency’s progress reports on your travels is more fun than watching television,
and there are some pretty good programs on television these days, or so I’ve
heard. I was worried when I learned you had the phone connected in your mom’s
name. The electricity and the gas.

Dad
wasn’t a voice, not even on the phone. He surfaced as something vaster and more
comprehensible than speech. I tried to convince him he had the wrong number.
But Dad wasn’t buying.

Your
mom’s had some tough breaks, Dad continued. (I couldn’t imagine what Dad looked
like, but I could envision his large body outside in some nondescript backyard
wielding a long green garden hose. He sprayed the grass and flowers, the
contented trees and saplings. Then he filled a large plastic bucket with soapy
water and went out front to wash the car.) Your mom is a very good woman who doesn’t
always do good things. She’s not what I’d call an appropriate role model for a
young boy. What I’m trying to say, Phillip, is that it may be time for you to
come home and live with your dad again. We can fix up your old room. We can
enroll you in school. Your mom’s welcome as well, Phillip. I still love your mom,
no matter what she’s done. And so far as I know, she’s done some pretty bad
things. There was that poor fellow, Bernie Somebody, in San Luis Obispo. And a
year or so earlier, that architect in Simi Valley.

A
cold breeze was moving into my legs, my buttocks, my stomach. It reached into
my chest.

“What
architect?” I asked. Other worlds were opening themselves to my inspection when
I was seven years old–not just the worlds in books. “What architect in
Simi Valley? Did he have a red beard?” I asked, not remembering so much as describing,
as if I were the one making the world real with my voice. “Did he have a deep
basso profundo singing voice? Did he drive a brand-new green BMW?”

DAD
CALLED EVERY afternoon and told me things Mom had done. Felonies, assaults,
mild flurries of misdemeanors and traffic citations gone to warrant, suspected
manslaughters in Burlingame, San Jose, Whittier. Mom was becoming even more
glorious, transubstantial and unreal. She was moving further away from me and
into the realm of raw, undifferentiated nature. Mom was a bat, a wolf, a bear,
a tiger. Sometimes, as I grew to love her even more, I imagined her luring me
into the nests and secret networks of her convoluted self. Alone in my bed at
night, I heard myself talking like her, my mind working like hers. “The
irregularities of the world’s body correspond with the map of our own brains,
baby,” I said in my dark room, entangled by my dark and muddled blankets. Gently
my hands stroked my stomach, my thighs, the stray black hairs beginning to emerge
across my breathing chest. “We travel across the world and into the ways
representation works. Trees aren’t trees, roads aren’t roads, moms aren’t even
moms. The history of motion is that luminous progress men and women make in the
world alone.” Sometimes I couldn’t even remember which words were mine and
which words Mom’s. Whose voice was it, whose tongue and whose lips? Where did
my flesh of words end and Mom’s words of flesh begin? Was this Mom’s face and
stomach and beating heart, or was this mine? Was I becoming her, some mere
reproduction of Mom, or had she so totally and unselfishly invested herself
inside me that she no longer really existed at all? I tried to tell myself that
I was still me and that Mom was still my mom, but never with conviction. I am
myself, I whispered again and again in the dark. I live my own life.
 
I imagine my own worlds. That’s what I
kept telling myself.

“Mom’s
been arrested for soliciting,” I told Pedro one night. “That means Mom slept
with men and they paid her. She didn’t just take money from men, she engaged in
business relations. That means they took something from her too.” Pedro was
dreamily envisioning a new redwood knickknack shelf with Y joints and notched
shelves. He was twiddling his thumbs in his lap like a little boy. “Mom has
been committing crimes I didn’t even know about. She has stolen real cash and
valuable cars. She even sold drugs once. She put two men in a hospital and at
least one man in
 
a morgue. Mom has
been committing these secret acts without my help, because she’s got a terrible
temper and can’t help herself. What’s more, Pedro, Mom can be cured. Her
condition is something that can be altered by the proper medication, regulated
by trained doctors and commercial, cost-effective therapy. Mom has a very bad
temper, Dad says. Mom has a very bad temper and I’ve never seen it.” I was
feeling hot and flushed. Something gave in my stomach, like a loose floorboard.
I started to cry. “Mom’s someone I don’t know at all, Pedro. That’s why I’m
growing up so wild. That’s why I’m doing things I really shouldn’t do. Perhaps
that’s why I even did those things to you, Pedro. But I can’t remember. I can’t
even remember what I did to you anymore.” I tried to stop, but I couldn’t stop crying.
The atmosphere of my small room turned moist and clinging. I felt as if I were
crying inside the womb of some hibernal animal.

“If
you’re gonna play hardball, you’re gonna get hurt,” Pedro said wisely, drifting
away into the mist. “We’re all grown-ups in this game, kiddo. We’ve all got to
live the lives we’ve got to live.”

Pedro’s
easy aphorisms disguised a real truth. There were still some very important
things Pedro wasn’t telling.