were extremely important, and the more exact the better. Rules kept the world from turning into a vicious trap. There were dangers everywhere, a thousand tripwires in the grass. People had to watch their step, even in the sunlight. When he was little, Chuck had rehearsed the rules tirelessly. The house was where he lived when it got dark. He also lived there on weekends, plus during snowy weather. He lived in the school for eight hours a day. He wasn’t allowed to sleep there, only in the house. The school had three separate times: class-, lunch-, and recess-. The house had five: chore-, play-, meal-, bath-, and bed-. Both the school and the house were two stories tall. Both had time-out corners, and both had magnolias around them. They were different from each other in one big way. The school had kids who shouted and knocked Chuck over. In the house there was only him and his parents.
To Chuck, the house resembled a stack of yellow rectangles. The rectangles were bricks, and they glistened after it rained. Though they looked delicious, he wasn’t supposed to taste them. That was another rule, but a hard one to remember. He was a crazy little retard, always licking the house. What was wrong with him that he was so stupid? How many times did he have to be told “no”? Those were the questions his pretend dad hissed at him. There were real dads, and then there were pretend dads. It was only pretend dads who called their kids retards. Chuck’s hair curled softly at the nape of his neck. No real dad would grab a handful and twist it. No real dad would laugh and say, “Indian torture ritual. Go ahead, run and tell your mom, you little twerp.” A real dad would never, ever do such a thing. It seemed obvious as soon as you thought about it.
It was easy for Chuck to recognize other people’s pain. When you hit people, or pushed them, something terrible happened. Their bodies changed underneath the skin, straining, tightening like ropes. Cats and dogs and horses reacted exactly the same way. It looked like something inside them was trying to escape. It looked like a ghost wanted out of their bones. The difference was real and physical, not in Chuck’s imagination. He had seen it happen at least a million times. Over the years, he had almost gotten used to it. People confused him usually, but not people who were hurting. So when the light came, he wasn’t surprised one bit. Suddenly, everywhere he looked, people began glowing from their wounds.
This time he wasn’t the only one who noticed it. His teacher saw it, his mom, even his pretend dad. He and his parents were watching TV when it started. There was a gymnastics competition happening on the sports channel. Girls in leotards were tucking and whirling like amazing machines. They hopped lightly, toe by toe, along a balance beam. They ran leaping onto a springboard and flipped over backwards. Then one of them broke her leg doing a cartwheel. She fell down, and a gasp spread through the audience. Her shinbone glittered like a mirror full of camera flashes. The couch springs creaked noisily as Chuck’s parents leaned forward. At that moment, he realized they could see it, too.
Later, he watched his mom bite one of her hangnails loose. Right away, her cuticle began to sparkle along the curve. (That was the white horseshoe around her fingernail: a cuticle.) His pretend dad nicked himself shaving, and the cut shimmered. And when Chuck pinched himself, a test, it worked perfectly. A cloud of light danced and quivered over his skin.
On Monday, his teacher, Mr. Kaczmarek, was late to school. Rushing inside, he accidentally banged his hand on the door. The whole class watched it flicker like a slow fire. Later, at recess, Mr. Kaczmarek divided them into Bombardment teams. Todd Rosenthal stalked Chuck with one of the red balls. He said, “Let’s see you dodge this, you dumb bastard.” The ball hit Chuck hard and square on the forehead. The other kids gathered around, watching the light spread open. Every single one of them reacted exactly the same way. They began running and hurling their dodgeballs at one another. When the recess bell rang, they all filed back inside. Everyone’s skin was printed with glowing white plates of light. It took almost the whole day for them to disappear. The last one winked out just before the buses arrived.
As usual, Chuck sat at his desk and never spoke. Technically, a “dumb” person was just someone who stayed quiet. Chuck
A week passed, and still nothing had returned to normal. The president appeared on the news to give a speech. He used words like
Chuck got bored and wandered outside while he was talking. A black sports car was tilted forward onto the street. The car’s front tire had gotten wedged inside a manhole. It was lodged underground, smoking and wailing as it spun. The driver was punching the window and screaming curse words. His nose was leaking blood, shining onto his upper lip. Some of Chuck’s neighbors stood on their lawns watching him. A man in gray sweatpants shouted, “Put it in reverse!” Someone else said, “Want me to go get my winch?” The car’s engine just kept howling like a wounded animal.
There were similar accidents, similar horrible scenes, all the time. Chuck saw stories about them on the TV at night. A bus might tip over speeding around a steep curve. The passengers would stumble from the wreck like gleaming torches. A chef might slice her hand open carving a turkey. The wound would cast a bright light over the counter. A model in high heels might fall on the runway. Her face would come up glittering from the wooden floor. Light kept pouring out of people whenever they hurt themselves.
At first, all the grown-ups were upset by these accidents. Car crashes and mistakes with kitchen knives were nothing new. The strange glow—that was what bothered them so much. Nobody knew what to call the thing that was happening. Soon, though, within days, people began talking about “the Illumination.” The name was everywhere suddenly, a kind of secret agreement. It made the changes in the world seem less frightening.
Chuck heard two strangers gossiping about it in the supermarket. They were old men with thick glasses and rubbery earlobes. He liked the way their teeth clacked in their mouths.
“That war injury of mine’s lit up like Independence Day.”
“You should’ve seen my Emmy with the arth-a-ritis this morning.”
“And look at my trick knee shining—the damnedest thing.”
“She can’t hardly make the coffee her hands clench so.”
“It’s this Illumination is what it is, don’t you know.”
One of them picked up a jar of peanut butter. “Five big ones!” he complained, and slammed it back down. Nobody but Chuck seemed to notice the way it glowed. Even objects felt pain if you struck or ignored them. Jars of peanut butter could be hurt just like people. Dirt bikes, toys, shopping carts, cereal boxes: they all could. Chuck knew—and had always known—that it was true.
Once, at age five, he had kicked his toy train. He remembered how it hit the wall and flipped over. The chimney, made of plastic, broke off with a crack. The train looked like a hand with a missing finger. It looked like an empty shack standing in brown dirt. Chuck sat down and tried his best to repair it. The face on the front stared up at him sadly. The very worst part was the way it kept smiling. Chuck could tell that it had not stopped trusting him. It still liked him and wanted to be his friend. He had to pat its head and say, “There, there.” His mom found him crying and jamming the pieces together. How could he explain the horrible thing he had done?
That was the day he began treating everything so gently. He never threw his toys or knocked them together anymore. He made sure that both his shoes were always tied. (The right one was a boy, the left a girl.) Once a week, he washed and dried his rock collection. He used all sixty-four crayons when it was coloring time. The trees he drew might be blue, black, or yellow. It didn’t matter, as long as every color was happy. Chuck had eight stuffed animals—mostly bears, plus one elephant. At night, he arranged them all carefully on his bedspread. He stroked the animals softly and smoothly on their backs. Then he slipped his body delicately into place beneath them. He wished them eight separate goodnights before closing his eyes.
Wherever he looked, he could see the light in things. Everything looked silver when you saw it in a mirror. Everything was helpless and needed to be saved from harm. There was the big plastic upside-down water jug at school. There was the stone birdbath in his next-door neighbor’s yard. There were metal coins and the chrome handlebars on motorcycles. Trees gleamed with sap, and rocks sparkled with hidden crystals. Some tennis balls glowed bright green in the ordinary sunlight. Lamps, clocks, and televisions all shone with an inner light. Was it impossible that what they shone from was pain?
Chuck’s duty, he believed, was to watch over it all. He was big, strong, noble—the Superman of lifeless objects. Objects did not understand how dangerous the world could be. They were simple, childlike, and they could not protect themselves. He hated to see them hurt, hated it beyond words. And that was why he had to steal the book.
