The Illumination

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.

A voice he recognized said, “You guys, I forgot to bring my stuff. I better take him somewhere and get him fixed up.” Then the girl who was staying with him, the beautiful one who liked to cut herself—Melissa: that was her name—put her arms around him and lifted him to his feet. Together they set off across the schoolyard.

At the end of the street, she stopped at a convenience store and bought him a bottle of water. “Here, drink this,” she said. His head cleared once he did. He felt a little better. They arrived home to find the front door hanging open. Had he forgotten to lock it? Had she? He didn’t think so.

At first, he was sure they had been robbed, but after Melissa had cleaned and bandaged the cut on his arm, the two of them walked through the house taking inventory. Nothing appeared to be missing, or at least nothing important, though the wind had scattered a pile of receipts across the foyer, and the wooden clock had fallen from the table in the front hall. When he bent over to retrieve it, a mahogany cog came rattling out of the case and rolled across the boards, dead-ending against the wall. He put the clock to his ear. It was no longer ticking, so he set it down on the floor again, nudging the corner with his toe.

“It’s okay,” he heard Melissa saying, and he wondered why he could feel her voice against his neck, and then she was brushing his cheek with the back of her hand and they were kissing. He had a body, and so did she, and they sank into each other, their wounds irrigated with an exquisite light. As she parted his lips with her fingers, he experienced a gradual sliding and turning sensation. He felt as if he were in a plane banking out over the ocean. His life was passing below him like the distant creases of the waves. The white triangles of a hundred sails dotted the water. He could not remember where he was going.

Chuck Carter

The world was beginning to flower into wounds.

—J. G. Ballard

Chuck Carter lived in dozens of different places every day. Sometimes he lived in a house with dark green carpets. Sometimes he lived in a school that smelled like milk. He lived in a run-down car with his parents sometimes. They drove it everywhere, his mom and his pretend dad. The door was spotted with giant pumpkins of orange rust. The seat belt slanted across his chest like a sash. Chuck’s whole body vibrated with the engine, even his bones. He liked to watch the power lines swooping past outside. They rose and fell in a beautiful, slow, hypnotizing way. It looked like they were taking turns bouncing on trampolines.

One time, Chuck rode in an elevator with glass walls. This was the single best place he had ever lived. He remembered sailing into the enormous blue sky like Superman. Below him, all the people had turned into moving dots. He felt tall and brave and powerful, nothing like himself. The ride lasted three minutes, and then it was over. He still dreamed about it once or twice a week. It was the best and happiest of all his dreams. His other favorite place to live was under the clotheslines. There were two of them, twins, stretching across his backyard. He liked to live between them while the sheets dried. It felt like camping out in an airy white tent. Sometimes he wished he could stay there and never leave.

Mostly, though, Chuck lived either at home or at school. It took him a while to learn the exact rules. Rules