The Illumination

back hallway to the parking lot, balancing her palm before her like a waiter carrying a bowl of soup, would know immediately how much her hand hurt. But then that was true of everyone now. Everyone, everyone, everyone, and all the time. The world had changed in the wake of the Illumination. No one could disguise his pain anymore. You could hardly step out in public without noticing the white blaze of someone’s impacted heel showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in a glory of leukemia.

At work, Carol Ann took to scouring the Internet for images of political and business leaders with the angry flush of renal disease, the barbed-wire knot of a blocked artery, or any of the hundreds of other telltale patterns of resplendence she had learned to recognize. She included these pictures in her news packets without comment. And if her hand flared with pain while she was delivering a hard copy to her boss, and if the silver light of a toothache shone from his mouth as he said thank you, the two of them might make a small motion of their heads in sympathy, but they would not say a word. It was important that the workplace remain professional. They all tried their best not to acknowledge one another’s suffering. Even when one of the receptionists came in with belt-strap bruises radiating through the front of her shirt, wincing each time she reached to open the filing cabinet, the rest of the staff avoided saying anything to her. It was almost noon that day before Carol Ann found the woman inspecting her stomach in the bathroom mirror and was forced to ask her if she was all right. She met Carol Ann’s eyes in the glass, shook her head in disbelief, and repeated the question: “Am I all right? Am I all right? Am I all right?” It was like a chant or a song, four hard beats, and for the rest of the day, as Carol Ann sat hunched over her computer, surveying the leaders of the world, in all their wounds and illnesses, the phrase kept replaying itself in her mind: Was she all right? Was she all right? Was she all right?

Nearly a month had passed since she sliced through the tip of her thumb. One evening she arrived home to discover another package from her ex-husband waiting by the front door. This time the seams were covered by only a few strips of masking tape. Even with her good hand cramped from typing, she was able to steady the box against the kitchen counter and open it. Immediately beneath the lid was the front section of the Financial Times, and beneath that was a magazine called How to Spend It, and beneath that were hundreds of red plastic drinking straws. She knew how his mind worked, knew that wasting her time was a favorite mean little game of his, and right away she guessed what he had done. She still had to sort through forty or fifty straws, though, blowing into each of them with a hard blast of air, before she found the one into which he had rolled her alimony check. It shot out with the quiet phut of a spitball, landing upright between the ribs of the dish drainer. His usual petty degeneracy. She could picture him leaning back in a chair somewhere, grinning triumphantly, bowing his hands out to crack his knuckles. I love the way your face falls whenever you see my handwriting on an envelope. I love how easy it is to aggravate you. I love waking up next to someone else in the morning. For a moment she allowed herself to contemplate leaving an angry voice-mail message for him—she could threaten to file suit against him for her medical expenses, or for malicious wrongdoing—but the truth was she had injured her thumb by her own carelessness, she and no one else, and anyway he had changed his phone number, and she did not know the new one.

That Friday, she had an appointment to get her stitches removed. They were the dissolving kind, designed to be absorbed into her body, but her physical therapist had noticed that the tissue around the threads was inflamed and suggested that she look into having them taken out by a professional. On the highway a car had wrapped itself around a bridge stanchion, spilling blue cubes of windshield glass over the carpool lane. Carol Ann merged into the long line of drivers slowing to gape at the light show, creeping past the police cars, the ambulance, and the curve of orange cones, until her exit opened up and she could punch the gas and speed free of the fold. The hospital revealed itself through the flowing green of the pine trees. She parked and went inside. Soon an orderly in brown scrubs came to escort her into an examination room. The doctor who had lectured her about missing her follow-up appointments, Dr. Miss-Ann-Page, Dr. Misanthrope—she could not remember his real name—arrived to inspect her amputation. In a tone of weary reproach, he told her, “Fortunately for you, the wound has already sealed itself,” and, “Some people have a negative reaction to the proteins in the suture. The result is a poor tissue response. That’s all I’m seeing here, not the world coming to an end,” and finally, as he braced her hand and picked at the knot with a pair of angled scissors, “Now I don’t want any flinching from you, Miss, understand? This won’t hurt a bit.” Surprisingly it didn’t. She watched the thread sinuate through her skin, flashing in and out of sight like a black snake moving through white sand. The first time a doctor ever took her blood, she was not yet three years old, and he had pacified her by telling her that her body was filled with red water, asking, “Did you know that? Would you like to see some?” She had sat there fascinated while he pricked her arm and his syringe filled with cherry Kool-Aid. She felt a similar fascination as she followed the surgical thread passing out of her thumb. Afterward, she was left with only a pale impression of stitches on her skin, barely glowing at all. A few lambent blood-vessel blotches traced the edges, and a checkmark of scar tissue rose above the knuckle. The whole procedure took less than ten minutes.

She was on her way out when Dr. Alstadt chased her down, placing a hand on her wrist. “So how did everything go with Dr. Kimberley?” he asked.

“Kimberley! That’s it. I think he was angry with me about something.”

“People always think that. He just has this manner. But your thumb is feeling better? You can get back to doing the things you love?”

“Like tying my shoes and brushing my teeth.”

“Exactly.”

She found herself adopting the pose of the woman she wished to be, someone coolly self-deprecating, confident, willing to puncture her own seriousness with a shrug and a wry remark. “My plan is to take it slow, start with one tooth and work my way up.”

“Good idea,” he said.

He smiled nervously, looking down at the chart in his hands. She could tell that he was mustering up the courage to continue.

“Is there something else, Doctor?”

“Actually, yes. We’ve transferred you over to primary care. Officially, you’re no longer on the A&E registry, which means I’m not your doctor anymore. So I was wondering …” He cleared his throat. “We’re not supposed to do this, but I was wondering if you would consider letting me take you out to dinner sometime.”

“Doctor! I don’t even know your first name!”

“It’s Tom. Thomas. Dr. Thomas Alstadt.”

“Dr. Thomas Alstadt.” She indicated the file he was holding. “Is that me you’ve got there?”

He nodded.

“Does it have my phone number in it?”

He nodded again.

She tapped the chart and shifted on her heel and did not glance back until she had left the building. She happened to spy him at the exact moment he stopped watching her. He was turning his face away as an orderly in mocha-colored scrubs approached him with an outstretched hand, and so he did not see the call-me gesture she threw him. But it didn’t matter—she was sure he had gotten the message.

Her legs carried her beneath the blue sky and the pine trees with that drifty roller-skating feeling she remembered from the sunlit summer Fridays of her childhood. She kept replaying the sound of his voice— It’s Tom, Thomas, Dr. Thomas Alstadt—and laughing to herself. Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

That it was too big for her to contain.

That it would ebb as quickly as it had risen.

And sure enough, late that night, she woke to find that she had not yet finished healing. Her hair was pasted to her forehead, and her hand shone with a sharp pain. She was afraid that it was starting all over again, all the hurt and debility. She could hear the high sustained note of a fever in her ears. Her life was a waste and a failure, and she had never loved another human being, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the planes of her skin and appear in some other place. The world was unreliable. The world could turn on a dime. It was a joy to be alive when it was a joy to be alive, and it was a terror to be alive when it wasn’t. What else had she ever learned?

It was several hours before the light subsided and she was able to fall back asleep. In the morning she drank