The Illumination Read online

  “I’ll have someone look into that for you, sir.”

  “She’ll be worried about me. I need to let her know that I’m all right.”

  “For now, let’s just concentrate on taking care of that body of yours, okay?”

  It was like that every time he asked about her, as if his questions had slid through some invisible crack in the air and vanished into another world. Had they spoken to his wife yet? I’m sure the doctor will be in to talk to you soon. What was her condition? Are you feeling any discomfort, Mr. Williford? How are those painkillers working for you? Evidently a decision had been made that he was too fragile to know the truth. By the time his doctor finally sat down to explain what had happened to her, he was only waiting for someone to say the words out loud: “I’m sorry, Mr. Williford. We did everything we could, but your wife’s injuries were too extensive. She didn’t make it.”

  His twenty-three days in the hospital were spent watching his bones heal and his scars form, trying to forget who he was and what had happened to him. He couldn’t cough, or even breathe too deeply, without feeling that his ribs were about to split open. Hiccups were a terror. The one time he sneezed, his vision blurred and he nearly passed out. Whenever he shifted his weight, he saw two long serrations of light opening through the thin blue cotton of his exam gown, one across his sternum, another over his left hip. The ballpoint pen had left a small round mark on the white field of his stomach, and he discovered that the seat belt had printed his torso with a crisply bordered bruise, like a soldier’s bandolier, its ammunition sash glinting in the sunlight. Day by day he watched as it turned blue, then green, then spread over his skin in a grotesque yellow stain that gradually lost its shine and color. The radiance that had filtered from his mouth ceased to show as soon as his incisors were capped with porcelain. Suddenly, to his relief, he could pronounce his f’s and his v’s again.

  It was his kneecap that took the longest time to mend. For nearly two weeks it sent an excruciating silver spike through his leg every time he moved in his harness. Just when it seemed the pain was beginning to abate, his physical therapist decided that the day had come for him to try walking again. She lowered his leg onto the bed and measured him for crutches. “They might be somewhat uncomfortable for you at first,” she cautioned, “but won’t it feel good to leave here on your own two feet? Now hold your horses until I come back,” she said, and he lay there thinking about what it would be like to open his front door, to collect the mail and attempt to revive the plants. The name he had been struggling to ignore rose up inside him and pressed at his lips. Her name is Patricia. Patricia Williford. Patty. Only his long habit of silence and the abrasions lingering in his mouth kept him from repeating it out loud. Soon, the physical therapist returned with a pair of metal crutches. “Chromium,” she said, “with gel polymer tips, the best we have.” She insisted that he test them out. As he wobbled across the room, she carefully laid out her instructions, presenting them one by one like a waiter placing dishes on a table: “Nice and easy, that’s right. Balance yourself on your left leg, your left leg. If it hurts, that means you’re not letting the crutches do the work. You want to avoid placing any weight on that injured knee of yours.” He found that if he ignored her advice, if instead he leaned into the pain when it came, his leg would flood with a glow so strong he was unaware of anything else. For a few seconds, he seemed to be nothing more than the light of that shattered bone, white and expansive, pulsing within its own radiance, and his wife’s name faded entirely from his mind. The agony was nearly indistinguishable from bliss.

  Over the days that followed, his pain became increasingly familiar to him. It would come over him when he was reaching for the push-buttons on his bed or crossing the floor to the bathroom, when he was watching the sun bounce off the TV, watching the rain leave its cat’s paws on the window, a response he realized he had been waiting for all along, as if he and his wounds were simply having a conversation at bedtime, interrupted by long moments of insensibility. Oh, yes. Where were we? You were asking me a question, weren’t you? He did not court the sensation, but he did not shrink away from it, either. Whenever he felt it diminishing, a brief feeling of regret settled over him. The fact that he was healing meant that he would be returning to his real life soon. The doctor had reduced his dose of sedatives. The nurse had removed his catheter. His knee had set inside its cage of pins and wires, and though he was still required to wear a brace, he was no longer confined to his harness. On his crutches he felt like an ape swaying across the African veldt, using his long arms to knuckle over the grass.

  He was discharged from the hospital on one of those stern late-winter afternoons when a low blanket of rain clouds had turned the sky the color of a blackboard coated with chalk dust. He took a taxi home. As soon as he saw the walnut tree in his front yard slowing outside the window, he asked the driver to help him carry his small parcel of belongings inside. The house was dim and silent. Only a slight humming from the kitchen marked the stillness. He imagined himself pulling a chair across the floor and opening the refrigerator door, sitting in its tidy rectangle of light the way that pioneer families used to gather around a fireplace. It would be a source of comfort in the house, a place where nothing else mattered but his own momentary well-being. Instead, he paid the cabdriver and showed him back outside. He threw the junk mail in the trash and sorted his get-well-soon and sorry-for-your-loss cards into two separate stacks on his desk. He checked his e-mail, deleting the spam from his in-box. Finally he had just enough energy left to water the plants, rotate them, and pick their dead leaves loose before he took himself upstairs for a nap.

  Shortly after midnight, he reached out to press his hand against his wife’s back, feeling, as he always did, for the shallow rain-draw of her spinal crease. Then he remembered what had happened. He woke up thirsty and sweating in his blue jeans and went to the kitchen for a ginger ale. On the refrigerator he found the last Post-it note he had left her: I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall. Long ago he had read somewhere that the best way to keep a marriage healthy was to find one new thing you loved about your partner every day. The notion had lingered with him, and so each morning before work he had paused on his way to the car to write her a mash note. There were thousands of them altogether, one for each day of their marriage. I love the shape of your legs inside your brown leather skirt. I love how quietly you speak when you’re catching a cold. I love hearing you tell the cockatoo story to people who don’t know it yet. I love watching you step so carefully inside your footprints when it snows. I love the way you hunt for our names as the movie credits scroll by—“thirteen Jasons and not one Patricia.”

  Usually, by the time the sun came up, he already knew what he was going to write, but on the morning of the accident he had run short of ideas and finally, standing over the stove, had allowed himself to resort to the spaghetti remark. There was one particular note he had been saving for their anniversary, a note he was sure she would like—I love it when you wear my blue jeans, even if you do, too, drip chocolate sauce on them—and if he had known it was their last morning together, the last time she would pad across the linoleum in her thick winter socks, the last time she would open the refrigerator looking for cream for her coffee or jelly for her toast, he would have used it a few months early. At the very least he would have written something more intimate than I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall.

  This was what she did: when she wanted to test the spaghetti she was cooking, she would fling a strand against the wall, and if it stuck, she knew it was ready, and if it didn’t, she would try again a few seconds later. Sometimes, after the pot had finished boiling, she would throw an extra strand just for the pleasure of seeing it whip through the air and flatten so suddenly against the plaster. The next day he would find the pieces she had flung hanging over the stove, brittle and yellowed, clinging to the wall in precisely delineated loops and twists that left funny little abstract maps of themselves in the
paint when he chipped them loose.

  It was something he had always teased her about, that runelike series of curves and squiggles in the kitchen. The pasta motif, he had called it. And now, suddenly, the sight made his stomach clench. It took the best part of his life, the only part he had ever felt he understood, and consigned it to the past. Worse, it summoned up an image he had been trying to suppress ever since he woke with his injuries shining out of his skin.

  Patricia’s body as their car struck the bridge stanchion.

  Her long hair whipping against the window.

  Spaghetti patterns of blood on the dash.

  He had always known that their time together would one day be spent. That it might be spent so soon, though, was a possibility he had never allowed himself to imagine. He was a fool. He crumpled the note up and tossed it in the trash. Then he fished it out and smoothed it flat against the counter. He couldn’t bear to read it, but he couldn’t bear to throw it away, either. He would have to put it in a file somewhere and try his best to forget about it.

  That was when he remembered her journals—seven of them, each page filled from corner to corner with transcriptions of the notes he had left her. She kept them lined up on the glass and oak espresso table in the room where she exercised. Once or twice, hearing the springs of her equipment stop, he had peeked in to find her stretched out on her Nautilus or her rowing machine, paging through the journals as if they were old diaries she was investigating for traces of the thoughts that used to preoccupy her when she was young and brave, when she was unchanged. He attached the Post-it note to one of his crutches and carried himself across the house. Patricia’s exercise room had always been a sanctuary for her, the one place in the house where she could play her music, burn her candles, and sort through her baskets of yarn and crochet hooks in privacy. Now it felt overwhelmingly empty. When he flipped the light on, the objects that greeted his eye had an unusual tidiness to them, a strange and frightening aura of completeness, as if the treadmill and the storage hutch, the stereo and the upright speakers, had all suddenly become imprisoned inside their own outlines. The silhouette of a beetle whisked its legs inside the ceiling fixture. One of the pipes gave a tug beneath the house. In the quiet, the noise made him shiver.

  He went to press the Post-it note into Patricia’s most recent journal, but beneath the window, on the table where it should have been, there was an empty slot with a boundary of dust around it. Where could it be? He tried to recall—had he seen the book in her hands the day of the accident? Maybe so. But when he went to the front hall and opened the box the hospital had labeled with her name, he found only her clothes, her shoes, and her pocketbook, along with a small plastic bag holding her wrist-watch and jewelry.

  She had definitely taken the journal into the car with her. He was sure of it now. He remembered her clutching it to her hip as they left to meet their reservation at the restaurant. “What if I get bored and need something to read?” she had joked, whispering to him with her hand alongside her mouth, “I’ll let you in on a little secret—the guy I’m dining with today is a real snooze.” But if it wasn’t in the box, then where was it? Who would lose a dead woman’s handwritten journal? Who would steal it?

  Who, as it developed, but the woman who had shared her recovery room. The hospital spent a week or more attempting to track it down before discovering that she had taken it. Apparently, she had adopted it as some sort of charm or talisman, a sad, sick symbol of God-knew-what illness or unhappiness. She had actually been reading it—reading it!—as if it were her own cache of personal letters. She had spoken with Patricia, had watched her die, had believed he was dead, too—or at least so she said. But none of that excused her, none of it healed him, none of it made his life one bit easier or brought his wife back from the dead. When she finally placed the journal in his hands, apologizing for what she called “this misunderstanding,” he felt himself shaking with relief and exhaustion. Absurdly, he found that he was afraid of dropping the book. The idea came to him that it was Patricia herself he was holding, that she had fallen and twisted her ankle, maybe, and given him her hand, and he was bearing her up as she limped through the snow. Soon they would both be inside again. He would place a pillow beneath her foot and kiss her toes one by one, starting with the pinky, and they would drink half a bottle of red wine, then wipe the stains from each other’s lips with their thumbs, and she would make a happy little upsy-daisy noise as he carried her upstairs to bed.

  Instead, he brought the journal home, took it into the living room, and set it on his lap. His fingers flipped backward from the endpapers, watching as the pages filled with her handwriting. He had no need to leave the Post-it note inside, since she had already written it down. There it was in her own precise script, facing him one more time, the last sentence on a half-empty page, I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall, ending with that oddly turned period of hers, like a toppled v or a bird’s beak.

  One morning, some six weeks after the accident, his editor woke him from a sound sleep to ask if he knew when he would be returning to work. “I realize you’re going through a rough patch, Jason. Grieving—check. Convalescing—check. I get it, I’m with you, I understand. By all means, you should take as much time as you need. But I’m telling you, you’re missing out on some of the greatest shots of your life right now. Have you seen the stuff Dawes has been producing? Or Laskowski? Even Christman gave us a front-pager yesterday! Christman for Jesus’ sake! I’m telling you, this Illumination thing is really big. Don’t just sit there in that house of yours and turn to stone on us. I can’t believe that’s what she would want, Patricia.”

  He felt like the priest of some ancient blood religion, incensed to hear her name spoken out loud. “How do you know what she would want? Maybe this is exactly what she would want.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  From down the block came the mosquito-like drone of someone operating a lawn mower. Mysteriously, his anger evaporated. “I don’t, you’re right. Tell you what, Paul—I’ll try to have some images for you by the end of the week, okay?”

  “Sounds good. Whenever you’re ready. No pressure from me on this end. Take all the time you need.”

  Jason snapped the phone shut and went to the mirror, where he stripped off his pajamas and embarked on his customary preshower ritual, stretching his limbs and tensing his muscles to see how much light they gave off. His eye and his cheek had healed completely, as had his shoulder and his hip, his gums and incisors. One of his ribs still shone with a filmy incandescence, and a new abrasion on his elbow, tacky from scraping against the supermarket meat freezer, glittered like the mica in the sidewalk. Since his discharge from the hospital, he had been dining mainly on microwave dinners and cheap delivered pizza—salty, greasy foods that upset his digestion—and when he turned too forcefully to the side, he could see a pair of bright rectal fissures opening up behind him. Then there was the scar on his abdomen, a small red fold tattooed with a pucker of blue ink. The wound still wept with light occasionally, but only if he distended his belly. It was his knee that continued to worry him, maintaining a constant twilight glow that was run through by cruel white flares whenever he took it out of its brace, sank his weight onto it, or attempted to rotate it laterally. In short, he was still recuperating from the accident. The pain was not as bad as before, though, and he thought he could risk a walk through the neighborhood.

  After he had showered and eaten breakfast, he got his camera and set off on his crutches. He wanted to see what images the world would present to him, whether his eye had been altered by sorrow, whether he had any skill left, any talent, and that was how he came to meet the cutters.

  He had spent the morning framing the pictures he saw in his lens, capturing them one by one—although he hated that word, capture; hated its suggestion that with a camera you could seize any sight that presented itself to you, stuff it in a cage, and point to it as it jammed its nose through the bars. Better to say that he
preserved them, then. He preserved the sight of an old man sitting on a motionless merry-go-round, a long strand of angina shining through his shirt. The sight of a mother smacking the seat of her son’s pants, the burning corona of a bite mark on her arm. A street cop with a gleaming herpes infection on his lip. A rail-thin window-dresser, her sides lit up by shingles. The sight of a girl afflicted with acne, staring down at herself in a fountain, her face fluorescing up at her from the steel mirror of the water. He was pleased to discover that he had not lost his facility for composition, that the lines and curves of things still sought out their counterparts in the air, their colors laying their shapes out in polychromatic blocks. His camerawork had always been a product of habit and instinct, tilting toward craftsmanship rather than artistry, and maybe that had made him a second-rate photographer—he didn’t know—but there was one thing to be said for habit and instinct, for plain old humble craftsmanship, and that was that it wasn’t so easy to snuff out.

  He had shouldered his camera and was preparing to head back home when one last image presented itself to him: a pack of adolescents, seventeen or eighteen years old, smoking cigarettes beneath the bus shelter. Their arms and legs were patterned with dozens of freshly inflicted injuries. The glowing lines and tiny luminescent planets on their skin resembled the pits and notches carved into the bus bench. His gaze was drawn to their deliberate, almost sculptural quality. He found it hard to look away.

  Surreptitiously, he returned his camera to his eye, moving his head a few inches to the left to compose a shot. Before he could release the shutter, though, a boy with a chain of burn blisters reaching up his arm shouted, “Hey! Dude with the camera! C’mere!”

  Jason looped the strap around his neck and crossed the street, steadying himself on his crutches when he reached the shelter.