The Illumination

birdsong. All over the city people had taken to the streets to enjoy the first breath of spring. Morse watched the one with the bad case of acne—his neck, cheeks, and forehead a glimmering and resplendent red—pop a wheelie on his racing bike. The one whose bare legs were goose-pimpling in the breeze crossed the street. The one holding the paper bag and the soda bottle hummed along to his own private music. He stopped short as he was passing Morse’s blanket. “Tell me, is that Tevis you’ve got there, the original Gold Medal paperback?”

Morse opened the book he had indicated and displayed the copyright page.

“It is, isn’t it? I’ll be damned. How much?”

“One for two or cash money.”

“One for two what?”

“Books.”

A car pulled up to the curb, its parking lock clicking and chirping.

“I don’t have any books with me. Hmm. Hey, look, this is going to sound ridiculous, but what about a bowl of chili?” He extended his paper bag. “Can I trade you a bowl of chili instead? It’s good. Good chili is worth two books easy, right?”

“No chili. One for two or cash money.”

“Yeah, but I just spent my last five dollars. How’s this, look—a bowl of chili, a bottle of 7Up, unopened, and”—his hand fished a few coins from his pocket—“a quarter, a dime, and one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight… twelve pennies?”

And because Morse was thirsty, he nodded.

The one with the soda bottle gave a firecracker-like clap. “It was a pleasure doing business with you,” he said once the exchange was made, and strutted away.

Morse decided to eat his lunch in his alcove. He picked up his milk crate, parceled his blanket around his books, and lifted the bundle into his shopping cart. In the alley behind New Fun Ree, on the blind side of a dumpster, he found the smaller one crouching like an injured dog. His eye had long since healed over, but a hundred other injuries illuminated his body. The fingers of his right hand, wrapped in a T-shirt, yielded a flat and powerful light. His bruised ribs and galled right cheek printed the air with their sigils. His face shone from beneath the skin, slung over his skull like a scarf over a lamp. He said, “I think I’m in some trouble here, MP,” and once again Morse watched as the film of the world came loose on its spindle. His name was Lee, Lee Hartz, and oh Jesus, oh Jesus, how was he going to protect himself? Vannatta would find him and finish what the others had started. He would rip him open, flay him apart, proceeding digit by digit, layer by layer, until there was so much blood that whoever found him would have to shield his eyes from the light. The currency of punishment—that was what Vannatta called it. As in, “We’re going to give our friends on Ninth Street an important lesson in the currency of punishment.” A blow for every hundred, he meant. A broken bone for every thousand. A human life for every million. Lee had seen it happen to countless thieves and swindlers, watched their fragile bodies spraying outward from themselves like the glass from a hurled bottle, shattered and gleaming on the pavement. Where could he hide? Where? Vannatta knew the city down to its pores, its nerve endings, its last filthy alley and its last wind-etched bridge bearing. He could find Lee wherever he went. He could snap his fingers and kill a man. He never rested, never slept. Oh my sweet Lord above.

Lee used his good hand, his left one, to grip Morse’s arm. “I need someplace to hide. I need to flat fucking vanish. Can you hide me, buddy? Can you do that?”

“Someplace to hide.” And it came to Morse like a crack of thunder. “I can do that.”

He led the smaller one out of the alley and around the corner, then past a modest streetside park where the benches were peppered with men and women whiling away their lunch hours. The one with the ulcer flaring from her lip was named Nina. The foul thing shone like a penlight, with much too bright a brightness, though she wasn’t talking, wasn’t chewing, wasn’t even moving. Why? she wanted to know. What was wrong with her? For nearly five years, five years, it had been one ulcer after another, a plague of shining sunken wounds. She was hungry, but she could not eat. She was lonely, but she could not speak. And she no longer believed it would stop. Oh, there had been a lover once, and he kept e-mailing to ask her when he could visit, and maybe someday she would say yes to him, maybe someday she would say now, but every time she dared, she felt that briary sensation on her lips and tongue, and she knew that it would soon be getting worse. She had never found love, or if she had, she had rejected it, and she was nearly certain she would die young—or at least younger than she otherwise would have—because no one had ever come along and saved her. She leaned back, distending her arms behind the bench. Overhead a pair of gray squirrels were sparring around the trunk of a beech tree. She watched as they dashed in and out of sight, their tense little brushes flickering a half step behind them. If only she could have been one of them, she thought—could have been anyone, or anything, else for a while, a bird, a kite, a cloud. What sense did it make that such a thing wasn’t possible? It would take so little. Who had created this world, anyway? All her life she had avoided bar fights, contact sports, political protests—anywhere there was the slightest chance she might get hurt. She had been so careful, so excruciatingly careful. Not once had she ever been punched in the mouth, and yet that was how she felt now, all the time: as if she had just been punched in the mouth. But it’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything.

The train platform was only a few blocks away. Morse guided the smaller one through the turnstile and onto the northbound express. On the other side of the river, in the gas station by the used car lot, he borrowed forty dollars to buy a carton of cigarettes and packed them into the smaller one’s jacket. The smaller one’s stomach shone and guttered through his shirt, its lancinations casting their light over Morse’s hands. As he closed his zipper, he felt like a doctor stitching an incision. The two of them shuffled past the pumps and the repair bays, the pawn shop and the nail salon, the warehouse with the giant American flag painted on its side. Then it was through the chain-link fence, under the freeway, up the bluff, and into the trees. The last thing the smaller one said as Morse banked him away in an empty tent was “What we did to you that day—I had no clue, man, you gotta believe me.”

It was nine days later, and Morse had stopped hearing footfalls in the alley at night, stopped feeling the wind on his neck, stopped, in short, expecting trouble to find him, when it did. He was sitting on his milk crate by New Fun Ree, reading one of the diary’s late pages by the light of the sun, the pigeons strutting past his blanket like mindless little kings.

I love feeling your hands reach behind me to adjust my collar when I’m wearing a shirt and tie. I love the way, when we haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ll run to me with one of your patented spring- loaded hugs, your arms outstretched and then BAM! I love the hard time you have with fractions. I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love the beautiful pink cushions of your lips. I love hearing you sing old R&B songs when you don’t know I’m listening, love your bright little meadowlark of a voice. I love it when we finish having sex, and we don’t have anything to do, and I can just lie there twitching inside you for a while. I love the way you’ll put a few spoonfuls of palak paneer on your plate, eat it, then put another few spoonfuls on your plate, eat it, and so on. I would love to have a baby with you.

He had just turned the page when the book was plucked from his hand, taken almost delicately, as if someone were twisting a blueberry from a vine. He looked up, and there they were, the one with the shaved head and the one with the paring knife and the big red beefy one with the metal hoops in his ear. He recognized them right away, though he had not seen them since the day they put him in the hospital.

The big one, who had loosened his necktie and rolled up his shirtsleeves, fanned through the pages of the diary. “What’s this we got here?”

Morse tried to ask him a question. “Doing some? Some some?”

“I’m gonna do me some reading.”

“Doing some reading?”

“That’s just what I said now, isn’t it?”

He handed the book to the one whose missing tooth, a bicuspid, gave a jack-o’-lantern quality to his face, and the one with the missing tooth cocked his wrist and flung it into the street. The cover jackknifed over on itself with a ruinous crack before a truck sent it skidding into the gutter. Several of the pages fluttered loose. Morse watched them follow one another across the asphalt, spilling words the way a car wreck spills oil.

“Now, I understand you’ve been seen with a friend of ours. Man by the name of Lee Hartz. What we want to know is where he’s hiding out these days.”

“Hiding out?”