The Illumination

Jason found a spot on the brick curb surrounding a pumpkin ash. He was close enough to the mosh pit that occasionally, when some poor kid was expelled from the scrum like a watermelon seed, he had to hold his crutches out for protection. He aimed his camera into the audience and began shooting. The motion of the crowd was too frenetic for him to select his images with any care, so instead he relied on instinct and chance, taking picture after picture as the dancers slammed into one another’s bodies. He found the crossed metal struts of the stage and tried to keep them centered in his lens. As the sun faded from the sky, the dancers and their thousand little traumas became more prominent. The bruised faces and wrenched elbows. The muscle strains. The split fingernails. The chipped smiles. The gashes they opened in one another’s calves and ankles with their steel-toed boots. He would end up with a time-lapse study of teenage recklessness, he imagined, the kids’ bodies slowly disappearing into the darkness until nothing was visible but a bright field of lesions, a Muybridge series of scratches and contusions. He stayed there snapping pictures until the band finished its set and someone in the audience shouted, “Break your guitars,” and the singer said, “Only rich assholes destroy their instruments,” and then the crowd came apart in a few last halfhearted scuffles.

Jason was looking forward to printing the photographs, spreading them out on his table and selecting a few to submit to the paper. For the first time since he had returned to work, he did not know what he would find. The mystery had roused his curiosity. When he got home, though, the front window was casting a quadrangle of light across the yard. Inside he found Melissa lounging in the living room with seven or eight of her friends. He recognized a few of them from the bus shelter—the boy who had bartered with him for cigarettes, the girl with the curved incision on her waist. His house had been occupied by strangers. The air had that strangely saturated quality peculiar to places that have suddenly fallen silent, as after a dirty joke or an argument, and the tension was strong enough to stifle any irritation he might have felt. He began telling the kids about the concert and the mosh pit, the floating star map of injuries. “I’m surprised you guys weren’t there.”

A boy lying on the floor said, “Not our kind of music, man.” He had folded one of Jason’s throw pillows across the middle and was using it to prop up his head.

“What is your kind of music?”

“We’re into show tunes.”

“Shut up, Bryce.”

The boy began singing “Memory.”

“Hey, I like that song.”

“Bryce, cut it out.”

“I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then.”

“Dude, nobody wants to hear you sing.”

Jason swung a few steps closer on his crutches. “So what were you all doing when I came in?”

That silence again—it was extraordinary. No one would meet his eye. A girl in a college T-shirt shielded her mouth behind her palm. Melissa scratched her neck, leaving a small area of coruscation that vanished like a firefly’s mating flash. He looked around for a knife, a matchbook, a pack of cigarettes. That was when he spotted Patricia’s journal, the one she had been carrying the day of the accident, the day she died, the day he did. It was jammed between two of the couch cushions. Had he neglected to return it to the exercise room? Or had they found it while he was gone? He pictured them prowling around the house looking for ways to amuse themselves. Hey, guys, you have to check this out. It’s some kind of long-ass love letter. He let his crutches topple away from him. Something happened as he sank to the floor. It was several seconds before he realized, and then only dimly, that he had scraped a layer of skin from his knuckle on the edge of the coffee table.

The journal was in his hands now. It smelled of nicotine and potato chips, and also, faintly, of the shea butter that Melissa or her friends or the woman who had taken it from the hospital must have used. Patricia’s own scent was gone, exhausted, just as it was gone from the bed, the towel rack, her favorite chair, as it would soon be gone from every corner of the house except a few well-hidden sanctuaries, some drawer or jewelry box he had never had occasion to open and that would steal the breath from him when he did.

“All of you need to leave.”

Though he felt frail, his voice had a surprising full-bloodedness to it. The kids stood up from the furniture almost as one. There was the sound of springs extending, of clothing brushing against itself. Someone tried to speak to him. “We didn’t mean anyth—”

“Leave! Right now!”

He waited for their steps to shuffle across the hardwood, then lifted his head. Melissa was standing between the living room and the front hall, her body sliced in two by the doorway.

“You, too. This isn’t your home. Out.”

She let her foot sway back and forth until the floor interrupted it with a squeak. “You know, for what it’s worth, no one was laughing at you. I thought the diary was beautiful, and so did they. That’s why I wanted to show it to them. I just thought you should know that. Have you ever seen the movie Ghost World?” she asked.

She was stalling for some reason, hoping perhaps that he would tell her he understood, that there was nothing to forgive. The corroded rubber of her shoe had left a gray mark on the white pine boards.

“Never mind. Okay. Anyway. I’m sorry. I’m not a decent person. No big surprise, right?”

She closed the door behind her as she left.

He sat down in one of the padded chairs by the bookcase. His knee flared a little as he straightened his leg, but the bone had almost healed, and the luster of the wound was too faint to distract him anymore. This life of his —he was no good at it. He had seen photographs of people whose tragedies had turned their faces to transparent glass, had even taken a few: survivors of house fires and hunting accidents whose grief was distinguished by a wide-open compassion that extended outward in every direction. Not so his own, which had a miserly inward- looking quality that embarrassed him. Sadness had made him smaller than he used to be, less caring. It was his joy that had been distinguished by compassion. I love listening to you pick out a song you don’t know on the piano. I love the way you’ll try to point out a star to me over and over again sometimes: “That one. Right there. Can’t you see it? Just follow my finger.” I love the lines that radiate from the corners of your eyes when you smile, and I’ll love them even more when they’re permanent, honey. I love how you roll your eyes but can’t help smiling whenever I call you “honey.”

The skin he had stripped from his knuckle was buckled against itself, a loose tag of flesh that hung from the middle of his index finger, thick enough that he could still make out its natural color. He bit it off and spat it into his hand. Then, because he did not know what to do with it, he set it on the coffee table. The new layer of tissue on his finger smarted as it touched the air. When he pressed it with his thumb, the light seemed to surge around it, a wobbling crown of silver tinsel. He sat there toying with it as the wooden clock made its keyboard noise. Was he increasing the sting or merely concentrating it? He couldn’t tell. But the flesh took on a crimson tone as he worked his nail into it, the light became a more fixed silver, and for a while the feeling absorbed all his attention. Then he heard a click that sounded like something settling behind the wall, and he turned to see the boy who never spoke to anyone, the scrawny, blue-eyed kid from down the block, staring into the house again. His eyeglasses were touched to the window, and Jason thought, The little spy, the dirty little voyeur, what right did he have, what right did any of them have, to treat his home like a TV show, tuning in whenever they felt like a bit of entertainment? He rose to his feet and hurled Patricia’s journal. It clanged off the window and landed facedown on the rug, its pages flexed into a sort of oxbow. The twigs of the bushes rustled outside, and when he looked again, the boy was gone.

Within seconds, his anger had turned to embarrassment. He had let his frustration get the better of him. Patricia would have been ashamed. He sat back down and put the knuckle of his index finger to his mouth, moistening the barked spot with his tongue. Some time later, he felt a hand on his shoulder and realized he had fallen asleep. His neck was stiff, and the light was making him squint, but he saw that Melissa was back, and no wonder, since as far as he could remember, he had not bothered to chain the door.

“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.”