The Illumination (29 page)

It happened the same way every time. Why could he never remember?

——

On Friday afternoons, when the weather was clear, he liked to go book hunting. He would push his shopping cart from one block to the next, rattling over every seam in the sidewalk, every steel vent, until he had returned to the subway entrance. To walk the whole circuit of thrift stores and libraries took him two hours and forty-five minutes. His cart’s left front wheel had become detached, and when he forgot to apply his weight to the handle, the empty holding bracket scraped the pavement and left a streak of orange rust. He was always nervous some police officer would cite him for vandalism and arrest him, so he shuffled along with his head down, glancing up only when he saw a light so bright he was sure someone must be dying, though invariably it was only the sun rebounding off a windshield or a manhole cover. Or almost invariably. One day, shortly after the Illumination, when Morse had just returned to his books, he was offering his usual pitch to the pedestrians when a few yards away, beneath the lamppost in front of the subway entrance, the one plugging quarters into the parking meter put his hand to his head and collapsed. The one walking her dachshund rushed to his side to perform CPR, and the one in the business suit phoned 911, but already the rules were second nature to Morse: light equaled pain, and as the glow from the man’s body sharpened to a million pinpoints that bleached together and then faded to a shadow, he knew that death had taken him, in his polished shoes and Burberry coat, away.

By now everyone along Morse’s route knew him so well that his question—“Any books for me today?”—was merely a formality.

“Well, someone donated a few Harlequins I can give you,” they said.

Or, “I left a couple for you back by the restrooms.”

Or, “Sorry, brother. Try us again next week.”

Or, “Here you go. They’re in pretty ratty shape, but you’re more than welcome to ’em.”

Welcome to ’em
, he thought.
Well come two um. Welc’m to’m
.

One mid-April evening, he had just completed his itinerary when he passed a pile of furniture resting at the base of someone’s stoop, the remnants, he guessed, of an estate sale or an eviction. The lamps, chairs, mirrors, and such had already been picked over, but he found a stack of old books sitting in a cardboard box and loaded them into his cart. When he reached the subway entrance, he fanned them out next to the rest of his merchandise. At the bottom of the stack was a flat wooden coffer that hardly resembled a book at all, but he included it anyway, using it to shore down the corner of the blanket.

A school bus backfired, striping the air with a plume of black exhaust. The sidewalks were bustling with people. The one taking the tiniest, most judicious steps as she walked out of New Fun Ree winced at the blast. She felt as if she were crossing a high wire hundreds of feet above the ground. Her name was Zoe, and for her it had been a long life of falling ill whenever the seasons changed, regarding her body as it slowly broke down and defeated her. Its agonies and odors. Its sad animal deterioration. They always followed the same pattern, her sicknesses: first the raw burred patch of a sore throat spread slowly across the roof of her mouth, and then she felt a tack in her left ear when she swallowed, and then her neck grew stiff, and her eyes burned, and finally her joints ached and her nose ran and every inch of her incandesced inside the bright aura of a fever. But that wasn’t right, was it? The pain was old, as old as she was, but the light was new. It was easy to forget it had not always been there. It was so soft, so intimate, like the colors in a Giroux print. Or that was
how she saw it, at least. Some of her colleagues in the Art Department described it rather differently: like the marshy blotches of a Jaeger painting; like the sun-streaked elliptica of an Ozu film. She would not have been surprised if every person in the world observed her own distinct version of the phenomenon, eight billion unique, privileged variations. Another car honked. She tried to keep going. How would she ever cross the street to her apartment? Feed a cold, starve a fever, they said, but she really needed to get something solid in her stomach.

Because the sky was bright and the air was warm, Morse worked later than usual that night. The traffic was fitful, moving forward in clots and gaps, and the moon was already rising over the buildings when three boys dashed across the street, cheating the signal. They leaped onto the curb a few steps in front of a pickup truck and headed toward New Fun Ree, the colors of their clothes shuddering around them. The one whose shoelaces were whipping at the pavement was named Wallace. He had three pizzas from Pie R. Squared in his hands: a cheese, a pepperoni, and for Camarie, the vegetarian, a black olive and pineapple, which was pretty damn disgusting, if you asked him. He was thinking about the campaign he was running—how if the group followed the Eastern path, they would encounter the last of the elder folk, and if they followed the Western path, they would find the seal of Raxhura, but if they strayed toward the Smoke Mountains, the fire genasai would consume them in flames—when he spotted it, a pale wooden box the size of a laptop computer, sitting at the margin of that old book guy’s blanket. Holy shit, was that what he thought it was? He said, “Hey, hold up, guys,” and Ben P. and Conrad turned around. Wallace handed the pizzas over to them, then bent down to give the wooden box a closer look. His palms were sweating something ridiculous. His heart
was racing like he didn’t know what kind of crazy engine. Everything was exactly right: the scorched brown lettering, the blurred illustration of the Phoenix, the “Arise, Oh Generations of the Dead” slogan with the famous “Generations of the Dad” misprint. No doubt about it—what they had here was a first-edition Cities in Dust manual. And not only that, but the brads on the corners of the box were still in place, which meant that odds were the set was intact, with both the Twelve Nations supplement and the original Gazetteer. Unbe-fucking-mazing. Buy it, Wallace. Buy it. Borrow the money. Do whatever it takes.

“How much is that book right there?” he asked, keeping his voice nonchalant.

“One for two or cash money.”

“Mm-hmm. What exactly does that mean?”

And after Morse had explained it to him, the one with the loose shoelaces said, “Dude, my mom’s got a whole wallful of books at home. Come with us. You can take your pick.” So Morse followed the boys to an apartment building on the 1400 block, then onto an antique elevator with an operator’s stool in the corner. The walls were so narrow the four of them were barely able to fit inside. He had to leave his shopping cart in the lobby. The one with the crickety voice led them into the front room of his apartment, which, just as he had promised, contained seven full-length rows of recessed shelving, jammed with several thousand books.

Morse took his time looking over the selection. In the next room, gathered around a coffee table strewn with dice, papers, and metal figurines, was a cluster of seven young teenagers. The one with the green silk fillet braided into her hair, the only girl in the bunch, was sitting on a futon with her knees folded to her chest, clutching a throw pillow like a mother protecting her baby.
Camarie was her name, and no matter what she tried, she kept falling in love. With Wallace and that ribbed blue sweater of his—its smoky sort of pencil-shavings smell. With Mr. McKim, her math teacher, and the dry-erase marker bruises on his knuckles. With the
News at Nine
anchor—the weekend guy—and the way he pressed his lips together and made a little
mm
sound, as if he were scratching a hard-to-reach itch, whenever he had to report something tragic. With Ben P. and that lock of hair he couldn’t keep out of his eyes. With Ben F. and his strong brown tennis-player’s arms. With Wallace again and how he laughed louder than anyone else at his own jokes. With Nathan and the hundred different ways he had of saying “dude.” With Conrad and how he bit the loose threads from the cuffs of his shirt, bringing his perfect white teeth together like nail clippers. With her brother’s friend Hal and his beard that looked as soft as Jesus’. With Wallace one more time and that night she rolled a ninety-nine for agility and he said, “Kick-ass,” and then winked at her. Boys!

Morse had already chosen the first of his books, a thick volume of Impressionist paintings he knew would sell right away, when the phone on the table rang. Without thinking, he picked it up. The one who lived there flung his hands about as if flailing at a mosquito. “Shit, man. That’s gonna be my mom. Why did you answer? Give me the phone. No, quick, find out who it is, and say, ‘How can I help you?’ ”

The words plunged at Morse like bats, filling the room with their clacks and their squeaks, and he barely had time to fight his way through them before he spoke. “Who am I, and how can I help you?”

“I’m sorry?” the voice in his ear said.

The one folding the slice of pepperoni pizza said, “Tell her, ‘This is the wrong number,’ dude.”

The red-haired one dove in with, “Dude, say good-bye. Hang up.”

Morse repeated the phrases as best he could, then returned the phone to its cradle.

A second later, it rang again. This time the one who lived there answered: “Hey, Mom. Yeah, just me and the campaigners are taking a break.” The blandishing tones of his voice became more bruised, more salted. “You must have dialed the wrong number or something. Okay, listen, don’t freak out. There’s this guy we met and—”

Morse scoured the shelves for the second of his two books.
Impressionist Masterpieces in Full Color
was the kind of oversize hardcover whose thick, coated paper was cool to the touch and gave off a smart perfume of expensive ink. The binding was so heavy he had to support the book on his hip. He wanted his other choice to be smaller, lighter. He was sure he would know it when he saw it. Dimly, as he scanned the bookcase closest to the front door, he heard the noise of an argument, or half an argument, the raised voice of the one letting the dice clitter in his hand, but it was of no significance to him.

The one whose retainer was drawing a silver line across his teeth groaned. “All right, man. Hurry it on up. You can have that one and one other, but that’s it.”

On impulse Morse selected a worn volume with a frayed silk bookmark dangling over its spine from the corner of the top shelf.

“Fine. Fantastic. You have your two books. Now go. Go. You have to go now.”

Morse heard the one on the phone saying, “Okay, okay, we’re done. He’s leaving. Problem solved,” as he placed the wooden box with the brown lettering on the sideboard and took his exit. In the hallway he made the call button glow beneath his index
finger. In the elevator he sat like a king on the stool’s satin cushion. From the lobby he retrieved his silver chariot. And then he was gone, back outside, among the night smells and the speeding cars and the bars with their gray windows and the diners with their bright ones.

Because it was late and the alley behind New Fun Ree was unilluminated, Morse wasn’t able to page through the second book until the next day. It turned out to be a diary, handwritten in blue ink, each page lined from top to bottom with thousands of small slanting letters.

I love how dark your hair gets after you wash it. I love waiting for you in the airport at the bottom of the escalator. I love the way you run your hands under the hot water a hundred times a day when it gets cold outside. I love how you “dot all your
t’
s and cross all your
i
’s.” I love my birthday present—thank you so much. I love hearing you rise to someone’s defense, and twice in one night, too: Woody Allen
and
Neville Chamberlain. I love watching you upend a whole bottle of water after you’ve exercised: that little bobber working in your throat, and the gasp you make after you finish swallowing, and the way you slam the bottle back down on the counter. I love how cute you are when we’re watching basketball together and you pretend to care who’s winning. I love your idea for a hard rock supergroup made up of the members of Europe, Asia, and America—Pangaea. I love your cleansing rituals (but I love your dirtying rituals even more). I love your morning breath
.

That was all it was, line after line of love notes, none of them longer than a sentence. They appeared to be from the father of the one with the loose shoelaces and the crickety voice, addressed to his mother.

I love the e-mails you send me in the middle of the day
.

I love trying to coax you to pick out a restaurant
.

I love the way you groan whenever adult human beings start talking about comic books
.

The cover was scuffed, the pages were buckled with moisture, and Morse was uncommonly disappointed. No one would ever buy such a thing. He presumed the one who had allowed him to take it would come looking for it within a day or two. He decided to save it for him.

The next week, when the smaller one, the talker, came by to swap his books and slide Morse a few extra dollars, he made a show of considering his choices. “No, not the Lawrence,” he said. “And not the Ramirez. And definitely not the Railey. A man’s got to have
some
scruples. How about that one?” and he reached for the diary of miniature love letters.

Morse surprised himself with the force of his objection. “No! Not that one.”

“MP!” The smaller one shook his head. “I’m ashamed of you. A businessman never gets attached to his own merchandise. That’s the first rule of success: sure, fine, love the product, whatever—but love the
sale
more. I thought I taught you that.”

“Sure, fine, whatever.” Morse slipped the book into his coat. “Not that one.”

The smaller one’s hand cuffed Morse’s shoulder. “Hey, I’m just screwing with you. Hell, give me the Railey. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

That afternoon, when it began to sprinkle, Morse rolled a sheet of Visqueen over his books. The diary seemed to broadcast its message straight through the plastic,
I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you
, pulsing like a beacon. All around him people were braking their cars or ducking into buildings, zipping their jackets or opening their umbrellas. He fixed his mind on the pretty one standing under the awning of the jewelry store and
thought,
I love your green dress and your loneliness and your matching green shoes
. He turned to the one who was limping into the subway station and thought,
I love how you have a foot cramp and you keep saying “Stop it, stop it, stop it” to yourself
. He watched the one carrying the grape cluster of plastic bags and thought,
I love it that you’re walking down the sidewalk and now you’ve turned the corner and I can’t see you anymore because you’re gone
. He had expected it to be effortless, expected his love to ease right out of him, as gently and clearly as notes from a piano, but soon enough he realized it was impossible. It couldn’t be done, or at least he couldn’t do it. He did not love anyone, he only understood them, and who in this world would choose understanding over love?