The Illumination

a dumpster and a plat of cardboard. He helped him totter to the sidewalk, supporting him as he limped on his busted kneecap, which thrilled with light every time his foot struck the ground. By the time they reached the curb, the glare was unremitting. The smaller one looked up and down the street and complained, “Those dumb assholes took the car, can you believe it?” He hailed a taxi. At the hospital, he removed a horseshoe of hundreds from his jacket, thumbed off five, six, seven bills, and reached across the seat with them. “Good luck, man,” he said. “No hard feelings, I hope.” He tucked the money into his pocket, then opened the door and urged him outside.

He stumbled into the entrance bay, where several tired-looking doctors sat watching people arrive, pointing, nodding, shaking their heads, as if at a street performance they were too exhausted to appreciate. No one seemed to know what was going on. The halides were altering the whites and yellows of everyone’s clothing, lending them a flat blue baseball-park color, but the strained tendons and broken bones of the incoming patients were still plainly visible, even to him. There was the one in the tank top, the young mother, two big shimmering battery bruises on her back. The one with the star cluster of hives on his face. The elderly one with a dog bite showing through her stockings, as round and dazzling as a crown tipped with diamonds. But in all that shining parade of injuries, none was so spectacular as his own. As the taxi sped away, the doctors saw him stumbling along the handicap ramp and sprang up from their benches, calling for a stretcher. A radio was playing at the front desk. He heard a newscaster intoning, “From all over the world this evening we are receiving similar reports—of the ailing and the wounded, shedding light from their bodies,” which meant it wasn’t just them, it wasn’t just here, it was everyone and it was everywhere.

Quickly he was wheeled down the hallway. In the waiting area, he saw a man he knew from the camps, the one with the old photo of himself heat-pressed onto his T-shirt, a young peroxide-blond lifeguard with a girlfriend on his arm and a stripe of zinc on his nose. And there at the water fountain was another, the one with the braided gray beard and the Scottish terrier. And later he would hear that a third, the one who sold hairbrushes from the sidewalk in front of Fantastic China, had been hospitalized and died that same night with six broken ribs and a cerebral hemorrhage.

Two of the doctors lifted him onto a bed, and the room flooded with technicians and orderlies, anesthesiologists and nurses. The one whose eyes were two different colors asked him his name. If ever there was a question whose answer he had rehearsed, it was this, but he must have been in more pain than he realized, because his tongue let him down again. “More. More Put. More.” He felt something brushing his fingers and looked down to find himself holding a notepad and pen. His left hand, his dominant one, the hand that was torn at the webbing, kept filling with a silver mercury he eventually recognized as his blood, so he used his right, spelling his name out one slow letter at a time: Morse Putnam Strawbridge.

“Well, Mr. Strawbridge, hang in there, and we’ll get you put back together.”

He watched as his clothes were shorn from his body, felt a pinch on his arm, and much later, when he woke up, a pair of women were standing over him, the high clouds of their faces hovering against the blue ceiling. The one with the hint of a headache glowing on her brow said, “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Putnam. Are you ready for your morning exercises? We’re going to start with the heel slides today. Last night we made it to ten. We’re going to shoot for fifteen this time, okay?”

He tried to swallow, and everything shuddered slightly. The one with the headache was Diane, and the one gazing out the window, watching the buckeye pluck at the wind with its leaves, was Cici. Cici, who believed she was so much better than Diane, so much prettier, so much more sophisticated. Cici, who earned twice the pay for half the work, the lazy sponge. Diane lifted Morse’s blanket aside, exposing the fearsome light show of his joints and muscles. Her temples were pounding. She didn’t want to touch him. There was dirt and then there was dirt, she thought, God’s good soil and the grime that sank into a person’s flesh and never went away, no matter how thoroughly you scrubbed his filthy body. Heaven forbid her Billy end up like that one day. It’s your job, Diane. You don’t have to like it. Just brazen up and do it. One hand on the ankle, and the other on the hip. That’s the way.

He left the hospital with seven scars decorating his body. To his fingers they felt like segments of fishing wire, taut little lines threaded just below his skin, except for the cut the doctors had made to his peritoneum, which had swollen with infection while he was in recovery and now rose rippling from his stomach like a fat red hairless caterpillar. He was still in pain, still recuperating. An aurora flickered through his gut every time he stretched or coughed, sneezed or bent over. Someone had stolen his shopping cart and blanket from the alley, dumping his books into the alcove behind New Fun Ree, and he sorted through them, throwing out the ones that were rat- gnawed or waterlogged, glued shut by grease or mildew. He bought another blanket from Goodwill, stole another shopping cart from Costco, and four years after the Illumination, that day when something struck a switch in his injuries, he was still sitting cross-legged by the subway entrance, selling books to pedestrians.

“One for two or cash money. One for two or cash money.”

He was only nine years old the summer he learned that he could speak more easily when he had practiced what he was going to say. His parents had enrolled him in a workshop at the children’s theater. His teachers tried to lure him into their acting-is-believing games, but he was terrified, and nothing worked, until the hairy one, whose clothes gave off the musky smell of tennis balls in a freshly opened canister, took a gamble and cast him as Owl in The House at Pooh Corner. Morse studied the script until he had his part memorized, and taking the stage on the last day of camp, he discovered he could deliver his lines with grace and authority, as if he truly were perched on his floor that had once been a wall, telling a story to Pooh and Piglet on the blusterous morning his tree blew down. He spent the next few years believing he would become a movie or TV star when he grew up. Then one of his high school teachers explained that in proper Stanislavskian acting you should live in the moment, as if you were pioneering your words the second you spoke them, and that was it, it was all over, whatever eloquence he had imagined he possessed went bursting into the sky like dandelion snow. He could live in the moment or he could speak in it. He could not do both.

“One for two or cash money. One for two or cash money.”

That was his first method—memorization. His second was replication—sorting through the expressions he heard, weighing this piece and that, until he found the right words to mimic a real conversation. He was like a cashier returning a handful of change. In his imagination, each time he spoke, a drawer slid open and a silver bell ka-chinged.

How are you doing today? “How are you?” I’m fine, and yourself? “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

Or: Our records indicate that your full name is Morse Putnam Strawbridge—is that correct? “Correct. Morse Putnam Strawbridge.”

Or: Hello, and welcome to KFC. Would you like to try our new two-piece white-meat value meal? “New two-piece white-meat value meal.”

Though the technique could be surprisingly effective, he used it sparingly, since people tended to become angry when they realized what he was doing. Usually he relied on the dozen or so stock phrases he had already learned by heart.

“One for two or cash money.”

“What have you got here, books?”

“Books. One for two or cash money.”

“Let’s see. I think I’ll take the Poggione. How much is it?”

“Price inside the cover. Cash money.”

“Here you go then.”

Here you go then, he would think. You go here then. Then here you go. And he would accept two or three dollars from their hands, scrunching the bills together and stuffing them in his pocket. Then it was, “God bless you, brother,” or, “God bless you, sister,” and on to the next prospect. The one with the army surplus backpack and the wire-rimmed glasses. The young one, the schoolkid, rehearsing a mustache on his upper lip. The one with the in-town shoes and the out-of-town boyfriend, hoping to impress him with her daring and generosity by buying a book from the scruffy guy with the dirt browning his face. Never the one shifting her child protectively to her outside arm. Never the one discussing the stock market on his cell phone. The Readers and the Good Samaritans—that was who he wanted. He could identify the Good Samaritans from half a block away, zeroing in on him in a fury of benevolence, their fingers sharp and rigid, but the Readers were harder to spot. They could be young or old, sickly or robust, attractive or disagreeable. They