The History of Luminous Motion Read Online Free PDF Page A

green
faceless plastic army men, a variety of baseball mitts and a solid, unscratched
hardball, seamed and dense. I could feel the foundations of our ranch-style
open-plan house beginning to creak and kneel–I and my room full of things
poised to abrupt through the floor, through the earth’s crust and mantle,
rejoining that infinite and unseen history of strange misshapen creatures with
rattling carapaces and stunned, minuscule brains. I was becoming pure weight
now, hard matter. I couldn’t move; some nights I couldn’t breathe. “You stay in
bed all your life if you want to,” Mom said, after a bespectacled psychiatrist
suggested I go away for a few months. He was a member of the advisory board to
a “special” ranch where children like me conventionally responded well to
treatment. This hypothetical summer camp was filled with ponies and swimming
pools and campfires; young boys and girls of my own age slept in tents, sang
campfire songs and traveled down whitewater rivers on rafts. But Mom wouldn’t
let them take me; Mom told them I would be all right. That was my mom. Even
while she was destroying me, she would take care that nobody else destroyed me.
“There’s nothing wrong with a few months of uninterrupted reflection,” she told
me that night. “As long as we’re happy. As long as we’re all happy in our house
together, there’s no reason why we should be in any rush to go anywhere.”

 
 
 
    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