The Illumination

inspected the books on his blanket as if they were meeting his eyes. Sometimes they would reach for one with a tiny bated coo of recognition, and he would think they were going to buy it, but no, they had already read it, and they only wanted to know if he had liked it as much as they did. They cherished certain books and disdained others with a zeal that seemed totally genuine yet totally arbitrary. Frequently they wore too much clothing. They rarely haggled. The one feature they seemed to share in common was a tightness at the nape of the neck, as if someone had fixed a stiff metal lozenge where their spine emerged from their shoulders. Though Morse himself was not a Reader, he had been studying them for years, alert for that compressed diamond of tension and the light it cast over their collars.

Sometimes, on the gray-soaked days of February and March, when the sun seemed to dissolve into the clouds like an antacid tablet, he would peer down the street and see nothing but a gleaming field of injuries, as if the traumas and diseases from which people suffered had become so powerful, so hardy, that they no longer needed their bodies to survive. From the doors of shops and art galleries came strange floating candles of heart pain and arthritis. Stray muscle cramps spilled across the sidewalk like sparks scattering from a bonfire. Neural diseases fluttered in the air like leaves falling through a shaft of light. A great fanning network of leukemia rose out of a taxi and drifted incandescently into an office building, and he watched as it vanished into the bricks, a shining angel of cancer. On sunny days, like today, the light was still visible, but Morse had to look more closely to make it out. It was people—they were the problem. Their bodies got in the way. A team of Mormon missionaries walked by in their shirts and ties. It was only after examining them carefully that he noticed that the heavy one, the one with the lumbering gait, had a crescent of athlete’s foot glowing from the heel of his shoe. The Chinese family who operated New Fun Ree wheeled their baby into the restaurant, her colic the same silvery white as her jumper. A young couple emerged from the subway, stroking each other’s hands. They turned toward the street, and their outlines blurred like plucked wires. The one with the poison ivy rash was named Adam. Just that morning he had stepped into the shower and found an awful prickling Nike swoosh of blisters crimsoning his calf. “I’ll be damned,” he said, poking his head past the curtain. “Hey, honey? Did you take me hiking or something this weekend and forget to tell me about it?” In the mirror, Helen had cocked an eyebrow, spitting her toothpaste out. “I don’t think so. Did you go away and miss me when I wasn’t looking?” She was always doing this—amazing him by drawing up some half-forgotten endearment of his, a flirty little line she had greeted with a muffled thank you months before, and offering it back to him like a petit four on a tray. She did love him. She did. He steered her past the street bum with his milk crate and his blanket. Goddamn poison ivy. Goddamn nature. If he grazed his calf with his shoe while he was walking—accidentally, let’s say—would that count as scratching? Do it, Adam. Go ahead. No one will mind. “Don’t you dare, mister,” the one in the turtleneck, Helen, warned him. “If that stuff spreads, it will be your own fault.” She took a sip of the coffee she had bought from the subway vendor, the Exotic Autumn blend. You’ll love it, he had said. Best of the season, he had said. But it had an ultrasweet botanical taste she couldn’t stand, like the dried cloves her mother always punched into the hams she prepared at Easter. Yuck. Why bother? She tossed the cup in a trash can. An alley cat leaped out from behind the pizza boxes and newspapers and sprang between her legs, bawling at her with its teeth bared, a shrill iamb of hatred. She backed away. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had no place in the world. There was no pity, no consolation. Everything she did ignited these wild billows of spite and resentment. She couldn’t even throw a cup of coffee away without causing trouble for herself. She used to be so at home in her life, so happy, and now there was Adam, only Adam, and he was too lovestruck to see her properly. How could she explain that the woman whose sweat he liked to lick off his fingers, the woman he wanted to marry, wasn’t Helen at all but the ruins of Helen, the shipwreck of Helen?

Morse lost his grasp on them as they crossed the street. Ever since he was a child he had experienced these occasional episodes of deep understanding. Now and then, unpredictably, things would shiver as if from the cold, and he would know what someone nearby was thinking and feeling. It was happening more often all the time. One day, he was afraid, his life would be nothing but other people’s minds. Across the street, for instance, were a pair of glaziers unloading a sheet glass window from a truck flashing its hazards. The one supporting the lower end was named Ezra. A scrim of clouds breezed across the sky, filtering the sunlight, and there in the glass suddenly, as he tilted the pane, he saw his reflection, his dreadlocks spilling out of their elastic band like snakes from a can of novelty peanut brittle. Behind him the world was a claylike city color, the gray and brown of weathered sidewalks and high-rises stitched with fire escapes. It was so strange, so strange. He was backing up when the heel of his boot struck the curb. His reflection lurched away from him. He barely managed to steady the glass in time. Have a nice trip, Ezra. See you next fall. To his partner he said, “Take it a little slower there, why don’t you, yeah?” Every word was like a blade in his sore throat. The pain showed through his Adam’s apple, a dazzling string of broken beads. He hated himself when he got this way, hated his voice, hated his body. It was the city that did it to him. The crowds, the noise, the pollution. Two years, and he still wasn’t used to it. There were days when he could not close his eyes without seeing his Moms and Pops, his four younger sisters, his old bedroom, the luminescent stars on his ceiling, the above-ground pool in his backyard, the beautiful green and yellow of the trees sashaying in the breeze along the coast. He wished he could hear them rustling the way they did on those sunlit summer afternoons when he and his friends stood shaking them for nuts. I don’t like this place. I don’t want to be here.

And then he was gone.

Morse heard a train grinding metal, that unmistakable city sound, and from out of the subway came an enormous spreading tide of pedestrians. Bike messengers pedaled along the curb and swerved across the median, their wheels tilting back and forth. Cars followed one another into empty parking spaces like bowling balls tocking into a ball corral. A bus stopped at the corner to discharge its passengers. In scarcely a second they broke apart, disappearing down side streets and alleys, into clothing stores, restaurants, and apartment buildings. To all of those who crossed in front of his blanket Morse repeated his sales pitch.

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

Their skin was raw from the wind, their eyes glowing with fatigue or fever, allergies or conjunctivitis, and almost always they passed him by. Occasionally, though, one would stop and look at his merchandise.

“What does that mean, one for two?”

“One of my books, two of yours. Or cash money.”

“What if I don’t have any books with me?”

“Then cash money.”

“How about for the Basilakos? The hardcover there? What would that set me back?”

“Price inside the cover.”

It happened the same way every day, eight to ten hours of work for a few dollars in sales. No one ever came to him with books to trade, except for a handful of his regulars. The one with the clip-cloppy high heels and the endless collection of alternate history novels. The one who shopped for his bedridden grandmother, picking out the kind of mysteries that had the name of the author embossed across half the cover. The one who sorted through Morse’s entire stock every Monday and Thursday, deftly and selectively, as if culling the almonds from a jar of mixed nuts. And the smaller one, the talker, who had left Morse staggering across the hospital parking lot the day the Illumination began, his body whitewashed with lacerations.

“How goes it, MP?” That was what he called him, MP—short, he said, for Morse Putnam, Missing Person, Mister Popularity. “Keeping busy?”

“Yeah, yeah, keeping busy.”

“Selling a few books?”

“Selling a few.”

“And how are you feeling today? Feeling good?”

“Mm-hmm. Feeling good.”

This was their ritual, although sometimes it was “Are you feeling groovy today?” and Morse would say, “Feeling groovy,” or “Are you feeling lucky today?” and Morse would say, “Feeling lucky,” which made the one with the gold watch and the vein in his forehead chuckle and tell him, “You’re okay, my friend. Nothing wrong with the old Morse-man, is there? Anyway, two of yours for one of mine, right? That’s the bargain?”

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

“Yeah, I know, I know. I’m just twisting your balls a little. Here you go,” and he would hand Morse a pair of hardcovers he had just purchased from Barnes & Noble, the printing sheen still on the jackets. Sometimes, if the smaller one was in the middle of a job, he would leave immediately, but often he would stay and chat with