The Illumination (10 page)

“Is it all right if I get my things?” she asked.

“Wait. Do you have somewhere to go?”

“In two months I do. August the twentieth. Until then I can just bum around on other people’s couches.”

“What’s August the twentieth?”

“First semester of college.”

“College? Your whole high school career was nothing but senior skip days.”

“Yeah, at the end it was, but by then what was the point? I already had my acceptance letters. My GPA was like 3.85. I figured I could miss the rest of the semester and still end up with B’s and C’s. I’m not stupid, you know, just self-abusive.” She glanced to the side as if addressing a court reporter. “Not like that,” she said, rolling her eyes. Then she noticed the discoloration on Jason’s finger. “Jesus, you really got yourself, didn’t you? Hold on.”

She left the room. A car coasted down the street with a sizzling noise. The crickets were offering their midnight chorus. Jason wondered if it had rained while he was asleep.

He noticed that Melissa had picked the journal up and replaced it on the coffee table. The binding was scuffed away at one corner, exposing the brown strata of the boards, and though she had tried to smooth the pages flat, there was still a kink to them. She returned with her backpack and took out a bottle of peroxide, a cotton ball, and a Band-Aid.

“You don’t want this thing to pus over, believe me.”

She held his finger up to the lamp and began disinfecting it. On the back of her leg he saw a fresh cut stretching all the way from her heel to the cove of her knee. It gleamed like a river of pristine water on a clear summer morning. “Why do you do that? Burn yourself. Cut yourself like that.”

Her lips gave an amused slant. “Tell me, Jason Williford—how do you feel right now?”

“Honestly? Miserable.”

She gave his finger a motherly kiss. “There. Is that better?”

“No. No, not really. Very sweet, though.”

“What about this?”

She took the wound between her lips and bit. A darting sensation engulfed his hand, flashing along his wrist in a series of tiny pulses. She bore down until her teeth pierced the skin. A deluge of light poured out of his finger, so bright that it shone through her cheek. He could see the delta of blood vessels reaching across her face. When she bore down once more, slowly increasing the pressure, the shape seemed to resolve itself into the outline of a fallen tree, and then the room filled with a hazy pink radiance, and he lost all awareness of it. A hard spasm gripped his radial flexor. His body tightened in a wondrous surge of pain.

He opened his eyes to find her cleaning his knuckle again, dabbing it one last time with peroxide, covering it with a Band-Aid. “There,” she said. “All better now.”

It was nearly one o’clock, far too late for him to send her away, so he told her she could stay the night. She went to her bed in the guest room, and he went to his own across the hall, where he could see his injury filtering through the covers like a night light.

The next morning he woke early. He still needed to develop the photos he had taken at the concert. He selected a few to submit to the
Gazette
and set out for the office. When he returned home, Melissa was sitting at the kitchen table, eating leftover pizza from a take-out container. He poured himself a glass of water, chose a slice of mushroom-pepperoni, and sat down beside her. It was at that moment, without so much as a word, that they came to their understanding: he would allow her to live with him until she left for college, and in exchange she would teach him how to manipulate his body, inflicting those small, perfect impairments that rid him of his entire history.

——

The lessons began easily enough, with a straight pin and the edge of one of his fingernails. Melissa showed him how to slide the point slowly into the quick, creating a thin tunnel of steel that separated the nail plate from the connective tissue. It was a minor trauma, and yet it hurt, it hurt, and the light blazed out of it in an acute silver line. Sitting at the table after he removed the pin, he felt nothing but relief, pure relief, as gratifying as any he had known since he was a boy, when he would suddenly, for no reason at all, run as far and as fast as he could until he was completely out of breath, sinking onto the grass and watching the trees twitch blissfully in the breeze. The blood welled onto his fingertip. His mind sailed along in a dreamlike vesper. In the days that followed, Melissa guided him into greater and more pleasurable forms of injury, assisting him through each procedure step-by-step. She plucked the hairs from his stomach with a pair of tweezers, patiently and deliberately, so that each one generated a ring-shaped lambent spot that spread open and disappeared like a raindrop striking a puddle. She removed his shoe and his sock, crossing his big toe over his second to bring on a foot cramp. She gave him a pocketknife and coaxed him into making a series of cuts on his body, beginning with the least sensitive areas and progressing to the most: first the elbow, then the shoulder, then the back of the hand, the chest, the inner curve of the thigh. She offered him instructions on his technique: “Next time you don’t want to go so deep. FYI, once you pass the first like
millimeter
, it doesn’t hurt any more, it just does more damage. In fact, it hurts less, because the shock mechanism kicks in. At least that’s been my experience. Now, if we’re talking about matches or cigarettes, that’s something else altogether. Burn pain and cut pain are two totally different things.” By the end of the week, he could lay down knife wounds as easily as if he were quartering an apple, but still he could not bring himself to apply
a cigarette to his skin. It was not the heat that frightened him but the ember. She taught him how to use a butane lighter instead, running the flame until the flint wheel was uncomfortably hot, then damping the gas and immediately pressing the metal to his flesh. In a single afternoon, he left half a dozen identical burn marks on his arms. They throbbed with light for a while before they fell cold. Afterward they looked like the badges of some strange new plague, their raised red welts like ridged tire tracks. The hair he had singed from his skin filled the house with a smell like sulfur and charcoal. When he opened the windows to let the rooms ventilate, he could hear a dog barking, an insect chirring, a door slamming, a car honking, a sprinkler ratcheting around in circles. The wooden clock typed four-thirty in the hallway. It was all so beautiful. The next step, Melissa said, was for him to re-address the injuries he had already formed. Most of his wounds from the car accident had healed completely, and those that hadn’t were cushioned behind too much fat and muscle for him to damage them any further. There was still his knee, which continued to give off little twinges from deep inside the joint—and would occasionally, before a storm, when the barometric pressure dropped, emit a lustrous ache that even Melissa agreed was impressive—but it, too, had largely mended, and he couldn’t count on it to bring him the kind of pain it used to. That left his more recent injuries. Melissa showed him the best way to reopen his cuts: tracing their seams with a knife, then lifting and peeling the skin away. It felt as if he were trying to unseal the flap of an envelope without tearing the paper. There was blood, of course, but never as much as he was afraid there would be, and on her own arm Melissa demonstrated how to stanch it using a styptic pencil. He tried the same remedy and found that it brought a short-lived sting to his skin that was nearly as brilliant as the wounds themselves. He knew so little about the ways his
body could be made to suffer, and yet already he had learned more than he ever thought possible. Never before had he endured so many varieties of injury—burns, punctures, bruises, lacerations. And always with the pain came a kind of ecstasy, the feeling that he had crested a hill and lifted free of his expectations. His future was behind him now. He no longer needed to struggle. Nothing could hurt him as much as he had already been hurt.

From three to five, starting in July and lasting until mid-September, the front wall of his house was turned directly toward the sun, and the light flowed in through the windows. The living room and the bedrooms became needlessly hot, even when he shut the blinds and ran the air-conditioner, and he took to spending those late afternoons with Melissa and her friends, sometimes at the bookstore or the movie theater, sometimes in one of the pavilions by the reservoir. In the old days, when he saw men such as himself—older guys who had attached themselves to a group of teenagers, paying for their meals, cracking the occasional dated joke—he thought exactly what everyone else did:
Look at that poor deluded sap trying to recapture his faded youth
. But he was not trying to recapture a thing. He was only trying to endure the heat for a while. If he could have recaptured his youth, his youth as it actually was, with the pattern of the next twenty years intact and waiting for him, would he have? Maybe so. But a whole new youth, with its own set of dreams and uncertainties, would only have exhausted him. People often talked about wishing they could return to the moment just before a tragedy and begin again, repairing the rupture in their lives, setting off down a different path, the right path, the path that should have been theirs all along, but then, as time passed, they healed and moved forward in ways that depended upon exactly that rupture, and it became harder and harder to justify abandoning what they had gained for the sake of what they had lost. Jason knew, though, he knew
without question, that if he could have returned to the day of the accident and prevented it
(don’t leave home, don’t leave home)
, he would have. He would have taken everything he had learned since then, every moment of the life he had created, and destroyed it. It was his gift to Patricia, his tribute—to create the kind of life he would be willing to burn to ashes.

Often it was nearly dark by the time he got home. He would find the answering machine winking up at him with its red eye. He had stopped returning the calls he received, but he continued to listen to his messages.

“Mr. Williford, this is Karen at Dr. Sutter’s office. We’re phoning to see why you’ve missed your last two appointments. Is anything wrong?”

His crutches were propped against the wardrobe in his bedroom, but he no longer bothered to use them. He would not be keeping any more of his appointments.

Beep
. “Hey, dude, where you been? The whole crew is getting together for the game this weekend. Tim reserved a skybox at the stadium. We wanted to see if you could come along. No need to chip in, it’ll be on us. Just give me a call.”

He had friends—of course he did—but he presumed that if he kept ignoring their entreaties, they would eventually forget about him. He would be free of their kindness, of their pity. He was tired of jokes that stopped short in his presence, gazes that remembered the way he used to be.

Beep
. “Jason. Paul here. We’re flying Trieschmann out on assignment to the West Bank, and we need a camera to accompany him. You’ve been shooting some good stuff for us lately, and I wanted to see if you would be up for the job. Should get you a lot of attention, if you can do it. They’re dropping like dominoes over there.”

The truth was that the entire Middle East might have vanished
in a single gleaming detonation, and he would not have noticed. Every morning he forced himself to leave the house and take a picture or two for the
Gazette
. That was all the scrutiny he could bear to give the world. No matter where he looked, he saw nothing but pain. An evangelist handing out pocket editions of the New Testament, a star-shaped kidney stone illuminating his urinary tract. An old woman whose arthritic fingers looked like brown twigs coated in ice. A horse trailer hauling a single young Appaloosa, its left eye glowing white as a Ping-Pong ball. In spite of everything, his instincts had not abandoned him.

He looked forward to the hours he spent with Melissa and her friends. With them he visited parts of the city that he had never seen before: the undersides of bridges, the pine chases behind housing developments. One afternoon, they were loitering in the playground of an elementary school when he saw Christman, from the paper, taking pictures of the bare flagpole. God only knew what he found interesting about the subject. There he was in the courtyard, though, firing off shot after shot, standing beneath the aluminum rod in a circle of compressed dirt.

He noticed Jason sitting on one of the climbing platforms and came over. “Williford,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I was just thinking of photographing that flagpole over there fourteen or fifteen times.”

It took Christman a second to realize Jason was kidding. He clutched his camera protectively to his chest, then gave a little
ah!
, as if to say that he had been in on the joke all along.

“But seriously, man, what’s with you and the kids? And Jesus, what happened to your—to
all
of you guys’ arms and legs? That’s not still from the car accident, is it?”

Someone said, “Leave Jesus out of it,” and the others struck up their usual chorus of one-liners.

“Define ‘accident.’ ”

“A bus is more like it.”

“What’s with you and the flagpole?”

“ ‘We’re not creating wounds. We’re uncovering the wounds that are already there.’ ”

“Shut up, Bryce.”

Jason waited for their voices to simmer down before he told Christman the truth.

Christman was skeptical. “
Knives
and
fire
. Right. Uh-huh. Seriously, man—”

“I am serious. Would you like to see for yourself?” Jason opened the largest blade on his pocketknife and ran it along the edge of his arm, watching the skin separate from his wrist to his elbow. It was the longest cut he had ever permitted himself to make. The noise that came out of him was barely human, a slow, strained creak that rose into its own sound like some ancient tree tightening in the cold.

Christman brought his camera to his eye. Jason let him take the picture. He could already imagine the caption: “Jason Williford, 35, practices bodily mutilation with several young friends outside Oak Grove Elementary School.
Gazette
Staff Photo/Glen Christman.” He listened to the shutter snap and felt the blood streaming out of him, and he didn’t care, he didn’t care. This was how he would waste the rest of his life, he thought, sitting in the heat of the sun and carving light into his flesh. When Christman made his excuses and left, he seemed to bob across the playground like a balloon. A car floated slowly down the street, and the kids’ bodies swam between the bars of the climbing tower. The color had been wicked out of the grass. A bird offered a glorious caw. Jason tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn’t support him.