The Illumination (21 page)

I love driving to the bluff and drinking cheap red wine out of paper cups with you
.

I love how beautifully you sing when you think no one is listening
.

I love it when the computer freezes up or we get stuck in a traffic jam and you lean back and pull out your old “Ahhh! This is the life!” routine
.

When had he lost it, he wondered, where had he left it behind?

“Now, some of you may not know this,” the pastor was saying, “but Brother Shifrin has been working for the church in one capacity or another for more than forty years. Kids, that’s longer than some of your parents have been alive. You may not believe it”—he patted his chest—“but that’s longer than old Pastor Wallace himself has been alive.”

Ryan was sitting at the outside corner of the left front pew, directly beneath the giant black box speaker on its crossed metal stilts. The altar was lined with Easter lilies. He couldn’t wait to start high school next fall, and his hip was aching with a soft lucidity, and his hands were stained with liver spots and petechial hemorrhages, but that did not keep him from catching the Frisbee his scoutmaster was throwing through the crisp November air, nor from knocking on a hundred doors each afternoon with his satchel and his leaflets, though he confessed he found it hard these days to tie his shoelaces and operate his telephone, and he had been away from home now for such a long time.

It seemed to him that he had grown old not in the usual way, day by day, but in a series of sudden jerks. His sister died, and ten years fell on his shoulders. The flames burst from the building in
Ouagadougou, and down came another twenty. The street tiles cracked, the stadium collapsed, the shanties were flattened, and the years fell over him like rain.

Why had he never married or fathered children?

He wanted a Heaven of starting over, a Heaven of trying again.

The pastor was speaking gently into the microphone. “And when you listen to the testimonials I’ve received, I am sure you will say to yourself, as I have, Truly, this is a man whose work has been blessed by the Lord. For what better life can we imagine than a life of Christian service, a life of waiting upon the Creator and His beloved children? Before I read the first of these letters to you, though, I’d like to ask that you all please rise and join me in a song that exemplifies the spirit with which Brother Shifrin has dedicated himself to the church, number two hundred fifteen in our hymnal, ‘Teach Me Lord to Wait.’ ”

As the organ resounded and the benches creaked, Ryan thought of his sister: how she had loved to sing, and how young she had been when she relinquished her life, and how assiduously he had taken it up and lived it.

What do you think, Judy? What do you make of that? Did I keep it warm enough for you?

Now the worshippers were on their feet, performing a hymn he knew by heart, their voices flowing just alongside the melody, as if tracing the banks of a stream. And if a bomb were to land on them as they sang so humbly and sincerely, the splendor of their bodies would bathe the town in silver. And if every bomb flew from its arsenal, every body displayed its pain, the globe would catch fire in a Hiroshima of light. And maybe, from somewhere far away, God would notice it and return, and the cinders would receive Him like a hillside washed in the sun.

She was in Seattle, at the bookstore across from the university, with the high windows and the wooden chairs and the microphone that lent a floating electric quality to her voice, and
The Age of Girls and Boys
kept creaking as she flexed its spine, and her mouth was shedding a raw white light that sharpened to a knifepoint every time her lips came together, and she could see that she had wrested the audience’s attention, their genuine attention, though whether they were listening to her or watching the light show was anyone’s guess, and there in the second row, sitting with his tousled hair and his loose-necked posture, was the man who had approached her the night before, at the event in Bellingham, to sign a galley proof of
Off-Campus Apartments
, her sad sunken ship of a first novel. She could hear him reacting to the story she was reading, making half-voiced subliminal noises of agreement or fascination, chuckling when she mentioned the widow’s inexplicable accent, and nodding vigorously,
gymnastically
, as if choosing sides in a debate, at “the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together.” Was he experiencing his feelings or merely demonstrating them? She couldn’t decide. Afterward, he made sure to claim the last spot in line, mothing away to investigate the new releases, when a woman with a tote
bag fell into place behind him, then drifting back over to the procession. She had already autographed twenty or thirty books by the time he reached her.

He took a copy of
Girls and Boys
from the stack and said, “Hi there again. I was at that thing you did last night. Remember? The guy who said you were his favorite writer?”

She tried her best to smile without using her mouth—to
express
a smile—but even that was difficult. The ulcer on her lower lip was stinging, stinging terribly. She felt as if someone had taken the flesh, right there where her incisors met, and run it through a sewing machine:
zt-zt-zt-zt-zt
.

Before she could steel herself to answer, he hurried on: “Anyway, what I neglected to tell you yesterday is that I absolutely love this collection. Love. It. Especially ‘Small Bitter Seeds.’ That one’s my favorite. I read it in the
Pushcart
, and afterward I ordered all your books.
Everything.
”

To talk meant to suffer, as it had for much of the last four years, and she had become practiced at finding the most efficient path through a conversation. Usually she could touch all the major landmarks so glancingly and yet so deftly that the average person failed to notice she was even taking a shortcut. “Thank you. I knew you looked familiar. That was actually the title story until my editor told me no one would buy a book called
Small Bitter Seeds
. Now how would you like me to sign this?”

“Oh, this one’s for my father. Write, ‘To Jon Catau.’ That’s
J-o-
no
h-n
, and then Ka-too:
C-a-t-a-u.
”

After she finished the inscription and shut the book, she found him staring over her shoulder. The windows crowning the poetry shelves were filtering the light so that the trees outside, the lampposts, the buildings, all seemed to swim in blue Easter egg dye, but that wasn’t what had caught his attention. He was examining
his reflection in the glass, and specifically the incandescent bruise on his arm. Gaze too long at your wounds, she had discovered, and your eyes would fill with phantom colors, like a sunbather drowsing on a beach towel.

One of the booksellers was repeating her name. “Ms. Poggione? Excuse me. Ms. Poggione?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“We were hoping you would sign some stock before you leave. And also we have this guest album with a page for all our authors. Would you mind writing something in it for us? Nothing fancy—just a few words will do.”

He slid the books across the table one by one, like a line cook prepping burgers, marking each title page with the jacket flap so that all she had to do was take a copy from his hand, cross through her name, and replace it with her signature. In the guest album she wrote, “Thanks for hosting me on this, the final leg of the great spring
Age of Girls and Boys
tour.” She added a doodle of a girl boosting a boy over her head like a circus strongman. The man with the bruise on his arm had withdrawn to the sanctuary of the employee recommendations shelf, but when she began gathering up her purse and jacket, he came loping back over to the table. With a sudden sweeping feeling of magnification she intuited that he was going to ask her to dinner, and in fact he did, forcing himself to meet her eye, then saying something that began, “I hope you don’t mind,” and ended, “a great little seafood place, the best in Seattle.” He was certainly sweet enough—a sweet, brave kid, and starstruck, by
her
, of all people—but the truth was that it hurt too much to talk, and she just wanted to return to her room and lie in bed with a mouthful of hydrogen peroxide foaming up over her gums.

“That’s very nice, but I’m afraid I’m not feeling well.”

“Oh. All right. I understand completely.” Meekly he asked, “So at least can I give you a ride back to your hotel?” Maybe it was the way his voice seemed to slip through the center of itself and form a knot, so like Wallace’s when he thought he had embarrassed himself, but she realized all at once that she could not disappoint him again. She resigned herself to another ten minutes of conversation and nodded fine, okay.

“Great! I’m parked out back.”

He led her down the staircase and across the ground floor, past circular racks stuffed with purple and gold sweatshirts, shelves stuffed with pennants and soda cozies, and out into the evening, which was not blue at all but a soft, waning pink. The floorboards of his car were littered with textbooks and old CD cases, the carpets gritty with road salt. As he drove her across the bay, he spun an excitable little monologue, telling her about the inlet they were passing, where his friends Coop and Mia kept their catamaran, and the neighborhood off to the right, where his favorite coffee shop was located, and not far away, near the arboretum, was the unpainted furniture store where he had worked after high school for eighteen months, while he “decompressed,” he said, “and figured the whole thing out,” and there up ahead you could see the car wash with the elephant sign, a smiling neon behemoth hosing itself down with its trunk, which was his very favorite car wash—easily, no contest.

It took an effort of will to interrupt him. “You live in a wide world of favorites, don’t you?”

“That’s what Coop says. I guess I do.”

“So how did you hurt your arm?”

He searched the sagging cloth of the ceiling for an answer. “You know, I honestly can’t remember. Bumped into a doorway. Got punched.”

He slid into the turning lane at a red light and leveled his gaze at her. “But
that,
” he said, and he tugged his lip down to display the tissue, a healthy rose color, unlit by trauma or disease, “must hurt like all hell.”

Impulsively she grazed the ragged fringe of her sore with her tongue. It flashed the way a shard of glass does when it’s struck by the sun. “Mm-hmm. Like all hell.”

“Yeah, I can totally tell. You know, I really respect you. My football coach—don’t worry, I’m not one of those football guys. I quit when I was in eighth grade. But what my coach used to say is that you’ve got to play through the pain. And that’s what
you
do. It must be hard to get up in front of an audience and talk when your mouth is like it is.”

And that was her situation exactly. There were entire weeks when she did everything she could to avoid speaking to other people: letting her voice mail take her phone calls, using the self-service lane at the grocery store, waiting for the UPS truck to drive away before she collected her packages. The problem began shortly after the Illumination, when she punctured her soft palate with a tortilla chip. With fascination and disgust, she watched over the next few days as the mark sank into her skin and filled with a luminous fluid. It took nearly two weeks for it to heal, by which time she had generated another by jabbing her gums while brushing her teeth. After that the wounds came in clusters, appearing whenever she bit the inside of her mouth or ate something too salty or spicy, but just as often for no reason whatsoever, or at least none she could determine. At first she thought the problem was only temporary, but four years had passed since then, and she had not gotten any better. Four years of withdrawing from her friends, her son, her parents, of declining to go on dates because she couldn’t bear to pretend she was all right. Four
years of pinprick-size cavities on her lips and her gums, her cheeks and the roof of her mouth, on the tender border of her tongue, tiny inflamed holes that expanded slowly and clotted at their edges, then whitened, distended, and lost all form. Some of the sores grew as large as nickels, flooding her face with light even when her lips were clamped shut. No sooner did one vanish than another would appear. Often, when things were at their worst—when she came into morning thinking she might have healed while she slept and gave the spot where one of her ulcers had been an experimental tap and felt so ill with pain that her hands tightened and the wells beneath her eyes grew damp—she would find herself repeating,
Why me, why do I have to be sick all the time, what possible purpose could it serve? And why
this
sickness, why
this
pain, why not some other? Take my eyes so that I cannot see. Take my legs so that I cannot run. Anything, anything, but my mouth so that I cannot speak, my mouth so that I cannot eat, my mouth so that I cannot kiss, my mouth so that I cannot smile. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Or at least make me better tomorrow than I am today, make me better next week than I’ve been this one
. This was the voice in her head, a veritable Niagara of words, pouring over one another in their own immense cloud of turbulence and spindrift, but trailing alongside it was her other voice, her speaking voice, the one her ulcers had forced her to adopt, which employed as little motion as possible, so that she wound up rejecting even the shortest words in favor of easier ones, saying
mm-hmm
for
yes
and
mm-mmm
for
no
, and obliged her to take great care with every sentence she uttered so that avoiding her lesions would not distort her pronunciation. She was afraid that the voice she used in public would change the voice she used in the privacy of her thoughts, that fluid, unfearing voice with which she had once written her books. Presuming,
of course, that it had not already. Your mind was not free of your body. That was the lesson.