The Illumination

“I think you take my meaning.”

Morse shook his head.

And then it was, “Looks like our man here doesn’t know anything,” and, “That’s a shame really. A real shame,” and they seized him by the arms and marched him around the corner. The people on the sidewalk stood hard to one side or else shied away into the entries of shops and restaurants. At the dark end of the alley, beneath the fire escape, the one with the smile said, “All right. Lee Hartz. Name ring any bells for you yet?” and the one with the tire iron said, “I don’t think he understands the question,” and the one whose neck muscles stood out like wood vines said, “I guess we’ll have to find some other way to ask him.”

They came at him with their fists and their boots and their knives. The light left his body in a flood of silver. Perhaps this time it really was his soul.

He sank against a cellar window, shielding his face with his hands until it was over. He was not sure how long the three of them took, only that a moment came when someone belted him on the ear and one last kick made its mark on his hip. Then there was just the quiet of their breathing, their lungs laboring as if they had finished a race. The one with the necktie said, “Rest up now, buddy,” or maybe it was the one with the shaved head. He couldn’t tell their voices apart anymore. “We’ll be seeing you soon.”

Morse listened as the traffic absorbed the sound of their footsteps. Slowly, slowly, he uncovered his eyes. The alley was so narrow he had become invisible to most of the people on the street. He watched them passing in the distance as if through a sheet of water, the strange reeds of their bodies blurring this way and then the other. The one sliding a letter into the mailbox, his frayed leather satchel looped over his shoulder, was named Masaki. At the lab he and his team were working with silica fiber and an attosecond laser on an experiment in quantum optics. Their thesis—and the Hval equations had already borne this out—was that there was no such thing as photonic degradation, that light was effectively immortal, or at least as immortal as the universe itself. If he was right, their research would cement the principle as fact. Masaki imagined himself standing before a hushed auditorium. “Distinguished colleagues,” he would say, “members of the press,” and he would gesture toward the spotlight illuminating him on the dais. “This light you see, and the light of the candles on your tables”—it would be an awards banquet, he decided—“and even we ourselves, all of us here, our own images, are, in a word, imperishable. This is what my team’s experiments have demonstrated.” They were so close, so close. He could hardly wait to publish their results. A quarter was resting by the toe of his shoe, and he stooped over, collected it into his palm, and stood back up. A wave of passengers poured from the subway tunnel. Another wave surged across the asphalt. And all of them, the whole great press of men and women, children and teenagers, jostling and coughing and checking their text messages—they believed their lives were like falling silver coins, flashing for merely an instant before they returned to the darkness. They were wrong, but it was what they believed. Masaki’s heart was moved by their weakness and their splendor. He heard a commotion and glanced down the alley. Take that gentleman lying against the brick wall in a heap of wet clothing, crying out so gravely and unintelligibly. Yes, his moans were awful, and yes, his wounds burned out of him like a fire, but his pain would cease, and his body would heal, and the light would last forever.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, and to everyone at Pantheon and Knopf who has supported this book, including Tim O’Connell, Rita Madrigal, and Josefine Kals; to Alex Bowler and everyone at Jonathan Cape; to my agent, Jennifer Carlson, and her colleagues at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner; and to Heather Swan, for her early encouragement and her help with the title.

A Note About the Author

Kevin Brockmeier is the author of The View from the Seventh Layer, The Brief History of the Dead, The Truth About Celia, Things That Fall from the Sky, and two children’s novels. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and The Oxford American, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Granta Best of Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Also by Kevin Brockmeier

The View from the Seventh Layer

The Brief History of the Dead

The Truth About Celia

Things That Fall from the Sky

For Children

City of Names

Grooves: A Kind of Mystery

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Brockmeier

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Portions of this work were previously published in the following: “Ryan Shifrin” in Tin House, “Jason Williford” in Unnatural State, and an excerpt from “Nina Poggione” (as “A Fable for the Living”) in Electric Literature.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hugh Blumenfeld for permission to reprint an excerpt from “The Strong in Spirit,” words and music by Hugh Blumenfeld, copyright © 1983 by Hugh Blumenfeld. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Recordings: The CooP: Fast Folk Musical Magazine (SE 201, Feb. 1983); The Strong In Spirit (Grace Avenue Records 1987, Prime-CD 1994). Reprinted by permission of Hugh Blumenfeld.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brockmeier, Kevin.

The illumination / Kevin Brockmeier.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-37958-0

I. Title.

PS3602.R63145 2010 813?.6—dc22 2010020732

www.pantheonbooks.com

Jacket image © Illustration Works