The reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound; there is something more important than this wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.
In the accident he had cracked his sternum and three of his ribs, dislocated his right shoulder, fractured his pelvis, and knocked identical wedge-shaped fragments out of his front teeth. The steering column had crushed his right knee. A ballpoint pen, flung loose from the coin tray, had perforated his stomach. The side-curtain airbag had bruised his left eye, and at first, after the swelling went down, he presumed that the light he saw leaking from his injuries was a result of the contact lens the doctor had prescribed, designed to keep the scab beneath his eyelid from scratching his cornea. Then someone told him about the Illumination, and he understood that the same thing was happening all over the world. Everywhere, everywhere, in bars, locker rooms, parks, and emergency wards, the wounded were burning with light.
He could see his own lesions shining through the bandages on his shoulder, the cotton compress on his abdomen, the pins and netting of his leg harness. He was aware of the pain, but ever since he woke from surgery, his senses had been buoyed up on a sea of narcotics, and as he lay there staring at the contours of his limbs, it seemed to him that he was watching a distant cloud bank flashing with lightning. Somewhere far away the rain was falling straight and hard. The sand was pockmarked with raindrops. It was all so lovely and mysterious. And yet for the nurses who came every few hours to change his dressing and adjust his drainage tubes he had only one question: “Can I see my wife? Will you check on her for me? Her name is Patricia. Patricia Williford. Patty.”
“I’ll have someone look into that for you, sir.”
“She’ll be worried about me. I need to let her know that I’m all right.”
“For now, let’s just concentrate on taking care of that body of yours, okay?”
It was like that every time he asked about her, as if his questions had slid through some invisible crack in the air and vanished into another world. Had they spoken to his wife yet? I’m sure the doctor will be in to talk to you soon. What was her condition? Are you feeling any discomfort, Mr. Williford? How are those painkillers working for you? Evidently a decision had been made that he was too fragile to know the truth. By the time his doctor finally sat down to explain what had happened to her, he was only waiting for someone to say the words out loud: “I’m sorry, Mr. Williford. We did everything we could, but your wife’s injuries were too extensive. She didn’t make it.”
His twenty-three days in the hospital were spent watching his bones heal and his scars form, trying to forget who he was and what had happened to him. He couldn’t cough, or even breathe too deeply, without feeling that his ribs were about to split open. Hiccups were a terror. The one time he sneezed, his vision blurred and he nearly passed out. Whenever he shifted his weight, he saw two long serrations of light opening through the thin blue cotton of his exam gown, one across his sternum, another over his left hip. The ballpoint pen had left a small round mark on the white field of his stomach, and he discovered that the seat belt had printed his torso with a crisply bordered bruise, like a soldier’s bandolier, its ammunition sash glinting in the sunlight. Day by day he watched as it turned blue, then green, then spread over his skin in a grotesque yellow stain that gradually lost its shine and color. The radiance that had filtered from his mouth ceased to show as soon as his incisors were capped with porcelain. Suddenly, to his relief, he could pronounce his f’s and his v’s again.
It was his kneecap that took the longest time to mend. For nearly two weeks it sent an excruciating silver spike through his leg every time he moved in his harness. Just when it seemed the pain was beginning to abate, his physical therapist decided that the day had come for him to try walking again. She lowered his leg onto the bed and measured him for crutches. “They might be somewhat uncomfortable for you at first,” she cautioned, “but won’t it feel good to leave here on your own two feet? Now hold your horses until I come back,” she said, and he lay there thinking about what it would be like to open his front door, to collect the mail and attempt to revive the plants. The name he had been struggling to ignore rose up inside him and pressed at his lips. Her name is Patricia. Patricia Williford. Patty. Only his long habit of silence and the abrasions lingering in his mouth kept him from repeating it out loud. Soon, the physical therapist returned with a pair of metal crutches. “Chromium,” she said, “with gel polymer tips, the best we have.” She insisted that he test them out. As he wobbled across the room, she carefully laid out her instructions, presenting them one by one like a waiter placing dishes on a table: “Nice and easy, that’s right. Balance yourself on your left leg, your left leg. If it hurts, that means you’re not letting the crutches do the work. You want to avoid placing any weight on that injured knee of yours.” He found that if he ignored her advice, if instead he leaned into the pain when it came, his leg would flood with a glow so strong he was unaware of anything else. For a few seconds, he seemed to be nothing more than the light of that shattered bone, white and expansive, pulsing within its own radiance, and his wife’s name faded entirely from his mind. The agony was nearly indistinguishable from bliss.
Over the days that followed, his pain became increasingly familiar to him. It would come over him when he was reaching for the push-buttons on his bed or crossing the floor to the bathroom, when he was watching the sun bounce off the TV, watching the rain leave its cat’s paws on the window, a response he realized he had been waiting for all along, as if he and his wounds were simply having a conversation at bedtime, interrupted by long moments of insensibility. Oh, yes. Where were we? You were asking me a question, weren’t you? He did not court the sensation, but he did not shrink away from it, either. Whenever he felt it diminishing, a brief feeling of regret settled over him. The fact that he was healing meant that he would be returning to his real life soon. The doctor had reduced his dose of sedatives. The nurse had removed his catheter. His knee had set inside its cage of pins and wires, and though he was still required to wear a brace, he was no longer confined to his harness. On his crutches he felt like an ape swaying across the African veldt, using his long arms to knuckle over the grass.
He was discharged from the hospital on one of those stern late-winter afternoons when a low blanket of rain clouds had turned the sky the color of a blackboard coated with chalk dust. He took a taxi home. As soon as he saw the walnut tree in his front yard slowing outside the window, he asked the driver to help him carry his small parcel of belongings inside. The house was dim and silent. Only a slight humming from the kitchen marked the stillness. He imagined himself pulling a chair across the floor and opening the refrigerator door, sitting in its tidy rectangle of light the way that pioneer families used to gather around a fireplace. It would be a source of comfort in the house, a place where nothing else mattered but his own momentary well-being. Instead, he paid the cabdriver and showed him back outside. He threw the junk mail in the trash and sorted his get-well-soon and sorry-for-your-loss cards into two separate stacks on his desk. He checked his e-mail, deleting the spam from his in-box. Finally he had just enough energy left to water the plants, rotate them, and pick their dead leaves loose before he took himself upstairs for a nap.
Shortly after midnight, he reached out to press his hand against his wife’s back, feeling, as he always did, for the shallow rain-draw of her spinal crease. Then he remembered what had happened. He woke up thirsty and sweating in his blue jeans and went to the kitchen for a ginger ale. On the refrigerator he found the last Post-it note he had left her: I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall. Long ago he had read somewhere that the best way to keep a marriage healthy was to find one new thing you loved about your partner every day. The notion had lingered with him, and so each morning before work he had paused on his way to the car to write her a mash note. There were thousands of them altogether, one for each day of their marriage. I love the shape of your legs inside your brown leather skirt. I love how quietly you speak when you’re catching a cold. I love hearing you tell the cockatoo story to people who don’t know it yet. I love watching you step so carefully inside your footprints when it snows. I love the way you hunt for our names as the movie credits scroll by—“thirteen Jasons and not one Patricia.”
Usually, by the time the sun came up, he already knew what he was going to write, but on the morning of the accident he had run short of ideas and finally, standing over the stove, had allowed himself to resort to the spaghetti remark. There was one particular note he had been saving for their anniversary, a note he was sure she would like—I love it when you wear my blue jeans, even if you do, too, drip chocolate sauce on them—and if he had known it was their last morning together, the last time she would pad across the linoleum in her thick winter socks, the last time she would open the refrigerator looking for cream for her coffee or jelly for her toast, he would have used it a few months early. At the very least he would have written something more intimate than I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall.
This was what she did: when she wanted to test the spaghetti she was cooking, she would fling a strand against the wall, and if it stuck, she knew it was ready, and if it didn’t, she would try again a few seconds later. Sometimes, after the pot had finished boiling, she would throw an extra strand just for the pleasure of seeing it whip through the air and flatten so suddenly against the plaster. The next day he would find the pieces she had flung hanging over the stove, brittle and yellowed, clinging to the wall in precisely delineated loops and twists that left funny little abstract maps of themselves in the paint when he chipped them loose.
It was something he had always teased her about, that runelike series of curves and squiggles in the kitchen. The pasta motif, he had called it. And now, suddenly, the sight made his stomach clench. It took the best part of his life, the only part he had ever felt he understood, and consigned it to the past. Worse, it summoned up an image he had been trying to suppress ever since he woke with his injuries shining out of his skin.
Patricia’s body as their car struck the bridge stanchion.
Her long hair whipping against the window.
Spaghetti patterns of blood on the dash.
He had always known that their time together would one day be spent. That it might be spent so soon, though, was a possibility he had never allowed himself to imagine. He was a fool. He crumpled the note up and tossed it in the trash. Then he fished it out and smoothed it flat against the counter. He couldn’t bear to read it, but he couldn’t bear to throw it away, either. He would have to put it in a file somewhere and try his best to forget about it.
That was when he remembered her journals—seven of them, each page filled from corner to corner with transcriptions of the notes he had left her. She kept them lined up on the glass and oak espresso table in the room where she exercised. Once or twice, hearing the springs of her equipment stop, he had peeked in to find her stretched out on her Nautilus or her rowing machine, paging through the journals as if they were old diaries she was investigating for traces of the thoughts that used to preoccupy her when she was young and brave, when she was unchanged. He attached the Post-it note to one of his crutches and carried himself across the house. Patricia’s exercise room had always been a sanctuary for her, the one place in the house where she could play her music, burn her candles, and sort through her baskets of yarn and crochet hooks in privacy. Now it felt overwhelmingly empty. When he flipped the light on, the objects that greeted his eye had an unusual tidiness to them, a strange and frightening aura of completeness, as if the treadmill and the storage hutch, the stereo and the upright speakers, had all suddenly become imprisoned inside their own outlines. The silhouette of a beetle whisked its legs inside the ceiling fixture. One of the pipes gave a tug beneath the house. In the quiet, the noise made him shiver.
He went to press the Post-it note into Patricia’s most recent journal, but beneath the window, on the table where it should have been, there was an empty slot with a boundary of dust around it. Where could it be? He tried to recall—had he seen the book in her hands the day of the accident? Maybe so. But when he went to the front hall and opened the box the hospital had labeled with her name, he found only her clothes, her shoes, and her pocketbook, along with a small plastic bag holding her wrist-watch and jewelry.
She had definitely taken the journal into the car with her. He was sure of it now. He remembered her clutching it to her hip as they left to meet their reservation at the restaurant. “What if I get bored and need something to read?” she had joked, whispering to him with her hand alongside her mouth, “I’ll let you in on a little secret—the guy I’m dining with today is a real snooze.” But if it wasn’t in the box, then where was it? Who would lose a dead woman’s handwritten journal? Who would steal it?
Who, as it developed, but the woman who had shared her recovery room. The hospital spent a week or more attempting to track it down before discovering that she had taken it. Apparently, she had adopted it as some sort of charm or talisman, a sad, sick symbol of God-knew-what illness or unhappiness. She had actually been reading it—reading it!—as if it were her own cache of personal letters. She had spoken with Patricia, had watched her die, had believed he was dead, too—or at least so she said. But none of that excused her, none of it healed him, none of it made his life one bit easier or brought his wife back from the dead. When she finally placed the journal in his hands, apologizing for what she called “this misunderstanding,” he felt himself shaking with relief and exhaustion. Absurdly, he found that he was afraid of dropping the book. The idea came to him that it was Patricia herself he was holding, that she had fallen and twisted her ankle, maybe, and given him her hand, and he was bearing her up as she limped through the snow. Soon they would both be inside again. He would place a pillow beneath her foot and kiss her toes one by one, starting with the pinky, and they would drink half a bottle of red wine, then wipe the stains from each other’s lips with their thumbs, and she would make a happy little upsy-daisy noise as he carried her upstairs to bed.
Instead, he brought the journal home, took it into the living room, and set it on his lap. His fingers flipped backward from the endpapers, watching as the pages filled with her handwriting. He had no need to leave the Post-it note inside, since she had already written it down. There it was in her own precise script, facing him one more time, the last sentence on a half-empty page, I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall, ending with that oddly turned period of hers, like a toppled v or a bird’s beak.
One morning, some six weeks after the accident, his editor woke him from a sound sleep to ask if he knew when he would be returning to work. “I realize you’re going through a rough patch, Jason. Grieving—check. Convalescing—check. I get it, I’m with you, I understand. By all means, you should take as much time as you need. But I’m telling you, you’re missing out on some of the greatest shots of your life right now. Have you seen the stuff Dawes has been producing? Or Laskowski? Even Christman gave us a front-pager yesterday! Christman for Jesus’ sake! I’m telling you, this Illumination thing is really big. Don’t just sit there in that house of yours and turn to stone on us. I can’t believe that’s what she would want, Patricia.”
He felt like the priest of some ancient blood religion, incensed to hear her name spoken out loud. “How do you know what she would want? Maybe this is exactly what she would want.”
“You don’t mean that.”
From down the block came the mosquito-like drone of someone operating a lawn mower. Mysteriously, his anger evaporated. “I don’t, you’re right. Tell you what, Paul—I’ll try to have some images for you by the end of the week, okay?”
“Sounds good. Whenever you’re ready. No pressure from me on this end. Take all the time you need.”
Jason snapped the phone shut and went to the mirror, where he stripped off his pajamas and embarked on his customary preshower ritual, stretching his limbs and tensing his muscles to see how much light they gave off. His eye and his cheek had healed completely, as had his shoulder and his hip, his gums and incisors. One of his ribs still shone with a filmy incandescence, and a new abrasion on his elbow, tacky from scraping against the supermarket meat freezer, glittered like the mica in the sidewalk. Since his discharge from the hospital, he had been dining mainly on microwave dinners and cheap delivered pizza—salty, greasy foods that upset his digestion—and when he turned too forcefully to the side, he could see a pair of bright rectal fissures opening up behind him. Then there was the scar on his abdomen, a small red fold tattooed with a pucker of blue ink. The wound still wept with light occasionally, but only if he distended his belly. It was his knee that continued to worry him, maintaining a constant twilight glow that was run through by cruel white flares whenever he took it out of its brace, sank his weight onto it, or attempted to rotate it laterally. In short, he was still recuperating from the accident. The pain was not as bad as before, though, and he thought he could risk a walk through the neighborhood.
After he had showered and eaten breakfast, he got his camera and set off on his crutches. He wanted to see what images the world would present to him, whether his eye had been altered by sorrow, whether he had any skill left, any talent, and that was how he came to meet the cutters.
He had spent the morning framing the pictures he saw in his lens, capturing them one by one—although he hated that word, capture; hated its suggestion that with a camera you could seize any sight that presented itself to you, stuff it in a cage, and point to it as it jammed its nose through the bars. Better to say that he preserved them, then. He preserved the sight of an old man sitting on a motionless merry-go-round, a long strand of angina shining through his shirt. The sight of a mother smacking the seat of her son’s pants, the burning corona of a bite mark on her arm. A street cop with a gleaming herpes infection on his lip. A rail-thin window-dresser, her sides lit up by shingles. The sight of a girl afflicted with acne, staring down at herself in a fountain, her face fluorescing up at her from the steel mirror of the water. He was pleased to discover that he had not lost his facility for composition, that the lines and curves of things still sought out their counterparts in the air, their colors laying their shapes out in polychromatic blocks. His camerawork had always been a product of habit and instinct, tilting toward craftsmanship rather than artistry, and maybe that had made him a second-rate photographer—he didn’t know—but there was one thing to be said for habit and instinct, for plain old humble craftsmanship, and that was that it wasn’t so easy to snuff out.
He had shouldered his camera and was preparing to head back home when one last image presented itself to him: a pack of adolescents, seventeen or eighteen years old, smoking cigarettes beneath the bus shelter. Their arms and legs were patterned with dozens of freshly inflicted injuries. The glowing lines and tiny luminescent planets on their skin resembled the pits and notches carved into the bus bench. His gaze was drawn to their deliberate, almost sculptural quality. He found it hard to look away.
Surreptitiously, he returned his camera to his eye, moving his head a few inches to the left to compose a shot. Before he could release the shutter, though, a boy with a chain of burn blisters reaching up his arm shouted, “Hey! Dude with the camera! C’mere!”
Jason looped the strap around his neck and crossed the street, steadying himself on his crutches when he reached the shelter.
“What’s your name, man?” the boy asked him.
“Jason Williford. I’m a photojournalist for the Gazette. You guys don’t mind if I snap a few pictures, do you?”
“Ten dollars.”
“What?”
“Ten dollars, and you can take our picture. Apiece.”
“I can’t offer you any money. I’m a journalist.”
“Ten dollars in cigarettes then. There’s a gas station over there on the corner. Call them a gift.”
He thought it over. There was a specific shot he kept envisioning, one that would allow the wounds engraved on their skin to flow across the borders of their bodies into the pocks and slashes on the bus bench, like hanging lights echoed in a polished tabletop.
“Two packs. Two packs for the lot of you. That’s the best I can do.”
“Deal,” the boy agreed. Jason was halfway to the corner when a girl perched on the backrest of the bench, her shoes beating out a two-four rhythm, called after him. “Salem Black Labels!”
As soon as he returned with the cigarettes, a boy in a red T-shirt tore the cellophane from one of the packs, knocked a cigarette loose, and replaced it upside-down. Then he tweezed a second one out with his small, knuckly fingers and lit it. “I heard these things are bad for you,” he said. “Did you know that quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your health?”
One of the other kids said, “Huh-I-did-not-know-that. Did you know that smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight?”
Hardly a beat had passed before someone added, “Did you know that quitting your health now greatly reduces serious risks to your smoking?” And then they were all working at it together, jockeying to extend the thread of the joke. They passed the cigarettes around with a plastic lighter. Jason took advantage of their inattention and began snapping pictures. There was a panel ad on the back of the bus shelter that kept disrupting the balance of the shots, announcing in bold black letters PERSONAL INJURY, MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE, BIG TRUCKS, and time after time he had to find a perspective that would obscure the words. Ordinarily he would have crouched or stood on his toes, maybe climbed over the bench for a better angle, but the brace on his leg had turned such maneuvers into elaborate feats of acrobatics.
In the end, though he wasn’t quite able to achieve the image he had envisioned, he found one that came close: the dazzling white stroke of the recent incision on a girl’s exposed waist beside a scythelike mark on the fiberglass bench, the one extending into the other in a perfect curve. Quickly, before the girl could move, he released the shutter.
The other girl, the lovely pale fashion-model-type sitting atop the bench, the one who had shouted for Salem Black Labels, gestured to him. “Hey, Jason Williford, photojournalist. I’ve got a picture for you. Are you ready?” She took three quick drags on her cigarette to make the emberhead glow, then, on the inside of her wrist where the blue vein beat, extinguished it. A powerful smell overtook the air, like the whiff of salt and char at a burger joint. The cigarette sizzled, and the smoke changed color, and a magnificent wave of light came bloating out of the burn. Through Jason’s camera, it resembled the great fanning loop of a solar flare. The aurora borealis was dancing over Greenland. Radios everywhere were filling with static. He couldn’t help himself: he took the shot.
Within seconds the light had subsided, throwing off a few last sparks as it fell to the surface of the girl’s wrist, where it continued to twitch and flutter. A smile was locked on her face. The bays of skin beneath her eyes were moist with tears. He took a shot of that, as well.
Enough, he decided. Laskowski and Christman be damned.
He capped the camera and returned it to his shoulder. “So all those cuts on your bodies—you guys did those to yourself?”
The kids exchanged a glance and broke up laughing.
That evening he was sorting through the pictures he had taken, selecting the ones to submit to his editor, when he realized something: during his long afternoon in the processing room, not once had he thought about Patricia. He had become lost in the familiar beaverish activity of enlarging, fixing, and scanning his photos, and his memories of her had vanished, along with his awareness of the pain in his leg. The little system of injuries that was his body and the one immense injury that was his life—he had forgotten about them both, and when he thought back on the contentment he had felt, a terrific surge of guilt passed through him. He had accepted that he would forget Patricia in his suffering sometimes, but to forget her in his pleasure? It seemed monstrous, inexcusable. He forced himself to picture her: the freckles on her back and shoulders, the soft, swelling veins that ran along her ankle, the dimple that appeared on her cheek whenever she tried not to smile, all of it swimming in the blood of the car accident.
He bore down on his knee until the joint spasmed with light. His breathing quickened, and his teeth ground together. He would not allow his pain to forsake him.
Two days later he had an appointment with his physical therapist. The routine was familiar by now. She gripped his shoulder as he executed a slow windmill with his arm—a simple matter of form, since his collarbone had already healed—then had him straighten his back and twist his torso around, inspecting his hip for signs of stiffness or discomfort. She examined his stomach as he performed a sit-up. The scar on his abdomen shone in the glare from the overhead lamp, and she had to switch it off to make sure the source was not internal. Finally she came to his leg, guiding him through a battery of stretches, lifts, and pivots that made his face break out in a hard sweat.
“I have to admit,” she said when they were finished, “I’m still concerned about your knee. We ought to have switched you over to the forearm crutches by now. You’re behind schedule. Have you been doing your leg extensions?”
He had discovered that when he removed his brace, bending his knee until the ligaments tightened, then jerking his leg rigid, the joint would pop with a violent paroxysm of light. The lacerating sensation would last for several minutes. He could not stop testing it.
“Not regularly, no.”
She jotted something down in his folder. Then, contemplatively, she asked, “Did anyone ever tell you you were dead when the paramedics brought you in?”
“No. Wait. I was?”
“You were. The doctors revived you on the operating table. It’s a miracle you’re alive today. You should have some respect for that miracle and take better care of yourself.” She clicked her pen shut with a flourish, as if punctuating the remark. “Okay. Lecture over. Like I said, I’m not ready to switch your crutches out just yet, but I think we can get rid of that brace you’ve been wearing. You have to promise me you won’t test your limits, though. If your knee flares up, you’ll lie back and rest awhile. Can you promise me that? Can you? Mr. Williford? Hello?”
So he had died, but what did that mean? Had his heart stopped beating? Had his brain shut down? Of the hours following the accident not one memory remained to him: no flash of images, no luminous white tunnel, only the sight of the bridge whirling smoothly, even elegantly, above him, like the long arm of a windmill, and then, some time later, the speckled yellow ceiling of the recovery room. His therapist wrote out a prescription for him. He left with an appointment to return in seven days. As his crutches conveyed him past the staircase and the admissions counter, past the bank of ferns twitching their fingertips in the air, it occurred to him that he had, quite literally, been resurrected. But resurrected into what? he wondered. His life had become unfamiliar to him, cold and disquieting. He felt as if time as he knew it had flickered to a close. The world had ended. The oceans had climbed their shores, the buildings had burst out of their windows, and all the old meanings had fallen away. It turned out that the world at the end of time was just like the world at the beginning: a single set of footsteps printing the grass, everything lit with its own newness, a brighter and much, much emptier place.
He was passing a newspaper box when the front section of the Gazette caught his eye. Positioned above the fold, filling a quarter-page, was his photo of the girl in the bus shelter. The light from her cigarette burn was not as crisp in the paper’s mineral ink as it had been in his own emulsions, but the wound’s display of pain, that curved lily blooming so magnificently into the air, was no less remarkable for that. The girl’s arm plunged across the frame in a lovely white slash. The cigarette seemed to pierce her wrist like a nail. Behind it one could just make out the blurred fabric of her blue jeans and, in the upper left-hand corner of the shot, the braided green vines of a small tattoo. The photo was a stand-alone, with no companion article. The caption read, “Melissa Wallumrod, 17, practices bodily mutilation with her friends Monday morning near Allsopp Park. Gazette Staff Photo/Jason Williford.”
He took out his phone and dialed his editor, who answered, “Jason! How does it feel to be back in the land of the living?”
“It feels fine. But—”
“Well, you earned it, my friend. That’s one first-class shot you took. What we need now is to get you out on assignment somewhere. The Middle East. South Central. Name your war zone. Someplace where you can really exercise your skills.”
“Paul, listen, I have a question for you. How did you trace the girl’s name?”
“Girl?”
“The one in the picture. The one with the cigarette.”
“Oh, that was easy,” he said. “What happened was I sent one of the interns over to the park and, well, okay, no luck there, but then I sent him to the high school during their lunch hour, that one over by the new Target, and bam!—someone recognized her tattoo. The intern found her out behind the building with her friends. Said she was cagey at first, wouldn’t give him her name, but that cigarette burn was there on her wrist, all tacky and glowing around the rim. We looked her up in the yearbook. She’s definitely the one.”
“Thanks, Paul. That’s all I needed to know. I’ll have another batch of pictures for you by Friday.”
Jason hung up and bought a copy of the newspaper, riffling through it to see if any more of his pictures had made it to press. On the back of the City Section, squeezed into a twenty-eighth of a page, was his image of the old man on the merry-go-round, his scalp mottled with liver spots, the cloth of his shirt fissured with arteriosclerosis. There was a Dawes photo on A-2, a Laskowski on A-8, and a second Dawes on B-1, plus the usual dozen or so from the Associated Press. Jason folded the paper and tucked it behind his crutch. A scrim of clouds drifted over the sun. There were days when everything seemed to have a beautiful underwater lucidity to it, the banks and the traffic lights, the billboards and parking meters, all of them tilting through their planes until something bent or contorted inside them and they shimmered back together. He watched a homeless man with small misshapen sores shining out of his beard sifting through a trash barrel. He watched a woman in a thin linen dress stepping out of a French salon, her freshly waxed pubis phosphorescing through her skirt. There was an ache inside people that seemed so wonderful sometimes. He wished he had brought his camera with him.
His brace and crutches had made it impossible for him to drive, and anyway his car was still in the impound lot awaiting destruction, the right side crimped around an invisible concrete pillar, so he hailed a taxi and rode back home. He paid the driver and climbed out onto the curb. From his front door, he collected a religious leaflet signed, “Sorry we missed you, will try again later. ‘For the Lord God will illumine them.’—Rev 22:5.” Inside, the silence of the house was broken only by the wooden table clock in the hallway, the one Patricia had picked up at last year’s summer arts festival, making its elaborate tap-TAP-t-t-tap-TAP noise as it clattered through its numbers. She had always said that it reminded her of the walnuts that came tumbling down their roof every October. To him, though, it sounded uncannily like fingers traveling over a computer keyboard, and for an instant, as he rounded the corner, he truly expected to see her sitting there at her desk in the next room, her eyes following the cursor as it flashed at the bottom of the screen. The sun would be falling in scraps against her back, a hundred fragments of light opening and closing through the shadows of the philodendron. The shampoo she had used that morning would be perfuming the air. He was sure of it.
He had such memory lapses several times a day, but they never lasted for long. Soon enough he would begin thinking about her half-finished diary of love notes, and the way he kept asking after her in the hospital, and the smooth expanse of sheets on her side of the bed, and he would have to wrench his knee to distract himself from where his thoughts had taken him.
He was walking through the living room when he spotted someone peering in the window—a small round head, cut off at its shoulders like the ornamental sphere on a newel post. It was the boy from down the block, the one with the pale blue eyes who never spoke to anyone. He was staring hard into the room, his hands cupped around his face like a diving mask. He was so absorbed in whatever he was looking at that Jason remained invisible to him until he drummed his fingers on the glass, a sound that startled the boy and sent him tripping out of the bushes and across the lawn, then curving down the street until he vanished into the darkness of his garage. What had captured his attention? Jason wondered. The couch and the coffee table, the armchair and the television—everything was in its place, none of it at all unusual. For a moment, he entertained the notion that the boy was some sort of tormented mystic, able to see the spirits of the dead. It was a floating little Hollywood fantasy in which Patricia had returned to the house as a ghost, and the boy could see the dead, but he could not hear them. Why couldn’t he hear them? Because the dead had no voices—maybe that was it. Or because his talents were too small. Or because he was only a kid and he had not yet grown into them. Whatever the reason, he had been watching Patricia’s lips as they formed the words she wished to say. There was something she needed to communicate before she faded into the next world, a message she wanted to leave for her husband.
Tell him that …
Tell him I …
But he did not know how to finish the sentence.
He found himself wandering into the room where she used to exercise. There was still a CD in her stereo, he noticed, and, out of habit, he pressed play to see what she had been listening to. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing, I’m very scared for this world. He recognized the song right away, with the shrilling of the crickets, that plaintive voice arching out over the mandolin. Eviscerate your memory. Before the chorus took hold, he was overcome with a sense of dread and had to press the stop button. He shook his head involuntarily, like a dog throwing off crests of water. He sat down on the stationary bicycle. He had known the song for twenty years, longer than he had known Patricia, longer than he had known how to drive or write a check. Its meaning in his life ought to have been incorruptible. It was about his own mind when he was thirteen, the endless afternoons he spent lying on the carpet with his headphones on, the yard work he needed to finish and the girlfriends he wished he had, the innocent freedom and sadness of it all, but now somehow it had become blighted with the knowledge that Patricia had been listening to it the day of the accident, or the day before, or she had been preparing to listen to it the day after. Every note was a note she knew by heart, every word a word she used to sing, and she was gone now, and he had killed her, and he felt like a criminal presented with the evidence that would put him away. All these weeks, he had been telling himself it was only a matter of time before everything would return to normal. But it never would return to normal, would it?
He got back up and forwarded to the next song on the CD, but stopped it before the lyrics began, just as the guitar was interrupting the organ. He switched trays and played a few seconds of a classic R&B song, If you ever change your mind, / About leaving, leaving me behind, and then a few seconds of a pop tune the two of them had always loved, With you in that dress, my thoughts, I confess, / Verge on dirty, and then the opening lines of an old jazz standard, A tinkling piano in the next apartment, / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant. He saw how they had all been transformed into something much smaller and grayer. It seemed that every song he knew had been hollowed out, scraped clean of its associations, and refilled with memories of Patricia: the smell of her shampoo; the way she rested her hand on his lap; the sound of her gasping his name as the ice took the wheels of the car, then repeating it as they flipped over and spun toward the concrete pillar. It was all too unfair.
When the doorbell rang, he left his crutches lying on the floor and hobbled over to the foyer. It would be a UPS driver delivering a package, he presumed, or maybe a neighborhood activist canvassing the block with a petition, someone he could send away with a thank-you and a signature, but when he opened the door, the face that greeted him belonged to the girl from the bus shelter, the willowy one with the burn rings on her arms and legs, Melissa Wallumrod.
He said her name. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I bet you can figure it out if you really try.”
“Yes, well, about that, I didn’t know who you were myself until this morning. That was my editor’s initiative.”
“Your editor’s initiative got me kicked out of my house.” She was carrying a green canvas duffel bag that was padded out like a bolster. She swung it onto her feet. “My parents made me pack up and leave.”
“I see. How did you find me?”
She took the front section of the newspaper out of her back pocket and read from the caption beneath the picture. “Melissa Wallumrod dot dot dot bodily mutilation dot dot dot. Here we are: ‘Gazette Staff Photo, Jason Williford.’ You’re in the phone book. After that, it was a piece of cake.” She looked him up and down—his head cocked, his arms tucked close to his sides, one knee slightly raised—and said, “So, Flamingo, are you going to let me in or what?” Then she shouldered past him, disrupting his balance. A thrill of pain flashed through his leg as his foot struck the floor. By the time he caught up with the girl, she had already dropped her duffel bag on the carpet and set herself on the arm of the couch, apprehensively, experimentally, like a cat seeking a high place from which to avoid being startled.
“Make yourself at home, why don’t you.”
“I intend to.”
And she meant it.
He asked her the obvious question. “What are you doing here?”
“I need a place to stay,” she confessed. Apparently, she had decided that his house would do. Nothing he said could dissuade her. Maybe if she apologized to her parents… he was certain they would… “Ha. Obviously you don’t know Tom and Doris.” Why didn’t she try one of her friends? “Um, hello? I guess you missed the paper this morning. I’m a bad influence—‘the girl who practices bodily mutilation near Allsopp Park.’ ” But why on earth should he allow her into his home? Didn’t she think that was asking too much? “Hmm, I don’t know, let’s see. Maybe because you’re the one who came prying into my life and stirred everything up. Can you honestly tell me you don’t bear some responsibility for that?” Well, then, what made her so sure she could trust him?
She scoffed. “Please. Look at you. You’re in even worse shape than I am.”
Finally, out of exhaustion, and because she had played on his highly reactive sense of culpability, he gave in. “One night.”
She smiled. “So where’s the guest room?”
He did not know what to do with a teenage girl, how to look after her or keep her entertained, so he left her alone to read her manga and listen to her iPod. Late that afternoon, he went to the playground at the end of the block to snap a few pictures. Afterward, he stopped at the mini-mart to buy something for dinner. When he got home, she was still there and had not stolen anything, so he made her a meal of spaghetti and meat sauce with a salad of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots, the kind that came in a transparent plastic pouch. It was the best he could do. That night, he sat down with her to watch TV, a game show she liked about a dozen couples who raced each other around the world to win a million dollars. It had begun to thunder and rain. The house felt close around them. She excused herself during a commercial, and when she came back, she had a new burn mark on her ankle, glowing like a heating coil. A sheen of clear tissue fluid wept from the center.
“You must love this shit,” she said, falling onto the couch beside him.
“Excuse me?”
“The Illumination.” She gestured at the TV screen, where one of the contestants had fallen off a camel, scraping a radiant stroke of red war paint across his forehead. Behind him the beast was chewing its tongue and swatting its tail. Its knees presented a constellation of distinct silver points. “For a photographer, this must be like Heaven.”
“Heaven? No, I wouldn’t say that.” He was thinking of all the times he and Patricia had sat on the couch sharing popcorn while they watched a movie, his hand hovering solicitously at the rim of the bowl as hers reached inside, then hers hovering there as his did. That was his Heaven, and it had come and it had gone. What this was, he didn’t know. Heaven-plus. Heaven-minus. “Why don’t we call it purgatory?”
She must have interpreted the remark as a joke, because she answered, “Very funny, Jason Williford,” and jabbed him in the gut. His scar began to send out circles, a slow wave of them, traveling across his chest and stomach as his wound throbbed with pain. Fascinated, she pressed her palm to the spot and watched the light radiate past her fingers.
That night, in his room, he lay awake listening to the girl across the hall drumming her nails against the headboard of her bed. He imagined her stepping through his door, her cuts and burns sketching faint traces in the air as she knelt beside him and stroked his brow, saying, “Very funny, Jason Williford. Very, very funny,” and for what reason? There was another body in the house, another voice, another set of hands enacting their own private ceremonies. He was not used to it. But then it was temporary, and he supposed he would not have to get used to it.
The next morning, around ten o’clock, when the girl woke, he asked her whether she was planning to go to school that day. She shook her head listlessly and padded off to the kitchen in her pajamas. When she came back with a soda, he asked her why not, and she popped the can open, sipped at the overflow, and answered, “Senior Skip Day.” That seemed plausible enough, but the next day she said the same thing, and then it was the weekend, and still she had not gone to school, and still she was sleeping in the guest room.
Each afternoon she went out for a few hours with her handbag and her iPod, but she always returned before he chained the door for the night. On Monday, she said to him, “I hope you don’t mind, but I borrowed the key from that hook in your office. I thought it would be simpler if I made myself a copy.” On Tuesday, she said, “You know, most of the time you walk around here like your best friend just died, and then it’s like this wind blows over you and you’re perfectly happy all of a sudden. Why are you that way?” On Wednesday, she said, “So what kind of a person was she? Did she have any hobbies? You know, like tennis or something?” On Thursday, she said, “What the fuck happened to the paint on your kitchen wall?” And on Friday, she said, “Why didn’t you two have any children?”
“We were talking about it. She wasn’t ready yet.”
“Jesus.” She accented the word in the Irish way: Jay-sus. “I’m sorry.”
“Why be sorry?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just mean that it might be easier if you had some little half-version of her running around.”
But would it have been? In the year leading up to the accident, he had hinted as often as he thought he could get away with it that he was ready to have a child, but Patricia had always just smiled foggily at the suggestion, saying, “You’ll be a good father,” or, “Snips and snails and puppy dog tails,” some amiably circumspect remark which made it clear that she felt no urgency about the matter and that if there was a clock ticking, it was not hers. He had wanted a child so persistently back then, so powerfully, or at least he had believed he did. When Patricia ran the bathroom faucet in the morning to wash her face, in his ears the sound disguised itself as the babbling of an infant, and late at night, when the wind chimes touched pendants on the back porch, the bells were like a dream of tinkling mobile music. Now, though, it was obvious to him that what he had really wanted was a family, not a child. He was grateful—relieved—that there was no “little half-version of her running around,” no face that looked more like its mother’s every day, no vessel for all his grief and contrition. There were more than enough children in the world already. He saw them every day in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants and the playground at the end of the block, laughing and shouting at one another, so careless and daring. They played slapping games that left luminous blotches on the backs of one another’s hands. They climbed fences and tackled one another, fell off bicycles and rolled down hills, until their bodies were resplendent with bruises. They held races on busy sidewalks, dashing past grown men and women lit all over with injuries of their own. Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.
One night, Jason took his camera to the pedestrian mall, where a local hardcore band was performing on the summer stage. It was a softly glowing June evening, with a ghostly moon hanging in the treetops. The sky was the kind of barely shadowed pink he had noticed before in the linings of seashells. Fifty or sixty teenagers were huddled together on the plaza, leaping at one another and hurling their shoulders around as the band went charging through its songs, two or three minutes at a stretch.
Jason found a spot on the brick curb surrounding a pumpkin ash. He was close enough to the mosh pit that occasionally, when some poor kid was expelled from the scrum like a watermelon seed, he had to hold his crutches out for protection. He aimed his camera into the audience and began shooting. The motion of the crowd was too frenetic for him to select his images with any care, so instead he relied on instinct and chance, taking picture after picture as the dancers slammed into one another’s bodies. He found the crossed metal struts of the stage and tried to keep them centered in his lens. As the sun faded from the sky, the dancers and their thousand little traumas became more prominent. The bruised faces and wrenched elbows. The muscle strains. The split fingernails. The chipped smiles. The gashes they opened in one another’s calves and ankles with their steel-toed boots. He would end up with a time-lapse study of teenage recklessness, he imagined, the kids’ bodies slowly disappearing into the darkness until nothing was visible but a bright field of lesions, a Muybridge series of scratches and contusions. He stayed there snapping pictures until the band finished its set and someone in the audience shouted, “Break your guitars,” and the singer said, “Only rich assholes destroy their instruments,” and then the crowd came apart in a few last halfhearted scuffles.
Jason was looking forward to printing the photographs, spreading them out on his table and selecting a few to submit to the paper. For the first time since he had returned to work, he did not know what he would find. The mystery had roused his curiosity. When he got home, though, the front window was casting a quadrangle of light across the yard. Inside he found Melissa lounging in the living room with seven or eight of her friends. He recognized a few of them from the bus shelter—the boy who had bartered with him for cigarettes, the girl with the curved incision on her waist. His house had been occupied by strangers. The air had that strangely saturated quality peculiar to places that have suddenly fallen silent, as after a dirty joke or an argument, and the tension was strong enough to stifle any irritation he might have felt. He began telling the kids about the concert and the mosh pit, the floating star map of injuries. “I’m surprised you guys weren’t there.”
A boy lying on the floor said, “Not our kind of music, man.” He had folded one of Jason’s throw pillows across the middle and was using it to prop up his head.
“What is your kind of music?”
“We’re into show tunes.”
“Shut up, Bryce.”
The boy began singing “Memory.”
“Hey, I like that song.”
“Bryce, cut it out.”
“I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then.”
“Dude, nobody wants to hear you sing.”
Jason swung a few steps closer on his crutches. “So what were you all doing when I came in?”
That silence again—it was extraordinary. No one would meet his eye. A girl in a college T-shirt shielded her mouth behind her palm. Melissa scratched her neck, leaving a small area of coruscation that vanished like a firefly’s mating flash. He looked around for a knife, a matchbook, a pack of cigarettes. That was when he spotted Patricia’s journal, the one she had been carrying the day of the accident, the day she died, the day he did. It was jammed between two of the couch cushions. Had he neglected to return it to the exercise room? Or had they found it while he was gone? He pictured them prowling around the house looking for ways to amuse themselves. Hey, guys, you have to check this out. It’s some kind of long-ass love letter. He let his crutches topple away from him. Something happened as he sank to the floor. It was several seconds before he realized, and then only dimly, that he had scraped a layer of skin from his knuckle on the edge of the coffee table.
The journal was in his hands now. It smelled of nicotine and potato chips, and also, faintly, of the shea butter that Melissa or her friends or the woman who had taken it from the hospital must have used. Patricia’s own scent was gone, exhausted, just as it was gone from the bed, the towel rack, her favorite chair, as it would soon be gone from every corner of the house except a few well-hidden sanctuaries, some drawer or jewelry box he had never had occasion to open and that would steal the breath from him when he did.
“All of you need to leave.”
Though he felt frail, his voice had a surprising full-bloodedness to it. The kids stood up from the furniture almost as one. There was the sound of springs extending, of clothing brushing against itself. Someone tried to speak to him. “We didn’t mean anyth—”
“Leave! Right now!”
He waited for their steps to shuffle across the hardwood, then lifted his head. Melissa was standing between the living room and the front hall, her body sliced in two by the doorway.
“You, too. This isn’t your home. Out.”
She let her foot sway back and forth until the floor interrupted it with a squeak. “You know, for what it’s worth, no one was laughing at you. I thought the diary was beautiful, and so did they. That’s why I wanted to show it to them. I just thought you should know that. Have you ever seen the movie Ghost World?” she asked.
She was stalling for some reason, hoping perhaps that he would tell her he understood, that there was nothing to forgive. The corroded rubber of her shoe had left a gray mark on the white pine boards.
“Never mind. Okay. Anyway. I’m sorry. I’m not a decent person. No big surprise, right?”
She closed the door behind her as she left.
He sat down in one of the padded chairs by the bookcase. His knee flared a little as he straightened his leg, but the bone had almost healed, and the luster of the wound was too faint to distract him anymore. This life of his—he was no good at it. He had seen photographs of people whose tragedies had turned their faces to transparent glass, had even taken a few: survivors of house fires and hunting accidents whose grief was distinguished by a wide-open compassion that extended outward in every direction. Not so his own, which had a miserly inward-looking quality that embarrassed him. Sadness had made him smaller than he used to be, less caring. It was his joy that had been distinguished by compassion. I love listening to you pick out a song you don’t know on the piano. I love the way you’ll try to point out a star to me over and over again sometimes: “That one. Right there. Can’t you see it? Just follow my finger.” I love the lines that radiate from the corners of your eyes when you smile, and I’ll love them even more when they’re permanent, honey. I love how you roll your eyes but can’t help smiling whenever I call you “honey.”
The skin he had stripped from his knuckle was buckled against itself, a loose tag of flesh that hung from the middle of his index finger, thick enough that he could still make out its natural color. He bit it off and spat it into his hand. Then, because he did not know what to do with it, he set it on the coffee table. The new layer of tissue on his finger smarted as it touched the air. When he pressed it with his thumb, the light seemed to surge around it, a wobbling crown of silver tinsel. He sat there toying with it as the wooden clock made its keyboard noise. Was he increasing the sting or merely concentrating it? He couldn’t tell. But the flesh took on a crimson tone as he worked his nail into it, the light became a more fixed silver, and for a while the feeling absorbed all his attention. Then he heard a click that sounded like something settling behind the wall, and he turned to see the boy who never spoke to anyone, the scrawny, blue-eyed kid from down the block, staring into the house again. His eyeglasses were touched to the window, and Jason thought, The little spy, the dirty little voyeur, what right did he have, what right did any of them have, to treat his home like a TV show, tuning in whenever they felt like a bit of entertainment? He rose to his feet and hurled Patricia’s journal. It clanged off the window and landed facedown on the rug, its pages flexed into a sort of oxbow. The twigs of the bushes rustled outside, and when he looked again, the boy was gone.
Within seconds, his anger had turned to embarrassment. He had let his frustration get the better of him. Patricia would have been ashamed. He sat back down and put the knuckle of his index finger to his mouth, moistening the barked spot with his tongue. Some time later, he felt a hand on his shoulder and realized he had fallen asleep. His neck was stiff, and the light was making him squint, but he saw that Melissa was back, and no wonder, since as far as he could remember, he had not bothered to chain the door.
“Is it all right if I get my things?” she asked.
“Wait. Do you have somewhere to go?”
“In two months I do. August the twentieth. Until then I can just bum around on other people’s couches.”
“What’s August the twentieth?”
“First semester of college.”
“College? Your whole high school career was nothing but senior skip days.”
“Yeah, at the end it was, but by then what was the point? I already had my acceptance letters. My GPA was like 3.85. I figured I could miss the rest of the semester and still end up with B’s and C’s. I’m not stupid, you know, just self-abusive.” She glanced to the side as if addressing a court reporter. “Not like that,” she said, rolling her eyes. Then she noticed the discoloration on Jason’s finger. “Jesus, you really got yourself, didn’t you? Hold on.”
She left the room. A car coasted down the street with a sizzling noise. The crickets were offering their midnight chorus. Jason wondered if it had rained while he was asleep.
He noticed that Melissa had picked the journal up and replaced it on the coffee table. The binding was scuffed away at one corner, exposing the brown strata of the boards, and though she had tried to smooth the pages flat, there was still a kink to them. She returned with her backpack and took out a bottle of peroxide, a cotton ball, and a Band-Aid.
“You don’t want this thing to pus over, believe me.”
She held his finger up to the lamp and began disinfecting it. On the back of her leg he saw a fresh cut stretching all the way from her heel to the cove of her knee. It gleamed like a river of pristine water on a clear summer morning. “Why do you do that? Burn yourself. Cut yourself like that.”
Her lips gave an amused slant. “Tell me, Jason Williford—how do you feel right now?”
“Honestly? Miserable.”
She gave his finger a motherly kiss. “There. Is that better?”
“No. No, not really. Very sweet, though.”
“What about this?”
She took the wound between her lips and bit. A darting sensation engulfed his hand, flashing along his wrist in a series of tiny pulses. She bore down until her teeth pierced the skin. A deluge of light poured out of his finger, so bright that it shone through her cheek. He could see the delta of blood vessels reaching across her face. When she bore down once more, slowly increasing the pressure, the shape seemed to resolve itself into the outline of a fallen tree, and then the room filled with a hazy pink radiance, and he lost all awareness of it. A hard spasm gripped his radial flexor. His body tightened in a wondrous surge of pain.
He opened his eyes to find her cleaning his knuckle again, dabbing it one last time with peroxide, covering it with a Band-Aid. “There,” she said. “All better now.”
It was nearly one o’clock, far too late for him to send her away, so he told her she could stay the night. She went to her bed in the guest room, and he went to his own across the hall, where he could see his injury filtering through the covers like a night light.
The next morning he woke early. He still needed to develop the photos he had taken at the concert. He selected a few to submit to the Gazette and set out for the office. When he returned home, Melissa was sitting at the kitchen table, eating leftover pizza from a take-out container. He poured himself a glass of water, chose a slice of mushroom-pepperoni, and sat down beside her. It was at that moment, without so much as a word, that they came to their understanding: he would allow her to live with him until she left for college, and in exchange she would teach him how to manipulate his body, inflicting those small, perfect impairments that rid him of his entire history.
The lessons began easily enough, with a straight pin and the edge of one of his fingernails. Melissa showed him how to slide the point slowly into the quick, creating a thin tunnel of steel that separated the nail plate from the connective tissue. It was a minor trauma, and yet it hurt, it hurt, and the light blazed out of it in an acute silver line. Sitting at the table after he removed the pin, he felt nothing but relief, pure relief, as gratifying as any he had known since he was a boy, when he would suddenly, for no reason at all, run as far and as fast as he could until he was completely out of breath, sinking onto the grass and watching the trees twitch blissfully in the breeze. The blood welled onto his fingertip. His mind sailed along in a dreamlike vesper. In the days that followed, Melissa guided him into greater and more pleasurable forms of injury, assisting him through each procedure step-by-step. She plucked the hairs from his stomach with a pair of tweezers, patiently and deliberately, so that each one generated a ring-shaped lambent spot that spread open and disappeared like a raindrop striking a puddle. She removed his shoe and his sock, crossing his big toe over his second to bring on a foot cramp. She gave him a pocketknife and coaxed him into making a series of cuts on his body, beginning with the least sensitive areas and progressing to the most: first the elbow, then the shoulder, then the back of the hand, the chest, the inner curve of the thigh. She offered him instructions on his technique: “Next time you don’t want to go so deep. FYI, once you pass the first like millimeter, it doesn’t hurt any more, it just does more damage. In fact, it hurts less, because the shock mechanism kicks in. At least that’s been my experience. Now, if we’re talking about matches or cigarettes, that’s something else altogether. Burn pain and cut pain are two totally different things.” By the end of the week, he could lay down knife wounds as easily as if he were quartering an apple, but still he could not bring himself to apply a cigarette to his skin. It was not the heat that frightened him but the ember. She taught him how to use a butane lighter instead, running the flame until the flint wheel was uncomfortably hot, then damping the gas and immediately pressing the metal to his flesh. In a single afternoon, he left half a dozen identical burn marks on his arms. They throbbed with light for a while before they fell cold. Afterward they looked like the badges of some strange new plague, their raised red welts like ridged tire tracks. The hair he had singed from his skin filled the house with a smell like sulfur and charcoal. When he opened the windows to let the rooms ventilate, he could hear a dog barking, an insect chirring, a door slamming, a car honking, a sprinkler ratcheting around in circles. The wooden clock typed four-thirty in the hallway. It was all so beautiful. The next step, Melissa said, was for him to re-address the injuries he had already formed. Most of his wounds from the car accident had healed completely, and those that hadn’t were cushioned behind too much fat and muscle for him to damage them any further. There was still his knee, which continued to give off little twinges from deep inside the joint—and would occasionally, before a storm, when the barometric pressure dropped, emit a lustrous ache that even Melissa agreed was impressive—but it, too, had largely mended, and he couldn’t count on it to bring him the kind of pain it used to. That left his more recent injuries. Melissa showed him the best way to reopen his cuts: tracing their seams with a knife, then lifting and peeling the skin away. It felt as if he were trying to unseal the flap of an envelope without tearing the paper. There was blood, of course, but never as much as he was afraid there would be, and on her own arm Melissa demonstrated how to stanch it using a styptic pencil. He tried the same remedy and found that it brought a short-lived sting to his skin that was nearly as brilliant as the wounds themselves. He knew so little about the ways his body could be made to suffer, and yet already he had learned more than he ever thought possible. Never before had he endured so many varieties of injury—burns, punctures, bruises, lacerations. And always with the pain came a kind of ecstasy, the feeling that he had crested a hill and lifted free of his expectations. His future was behind him now. He no longer needed to struggle. Nothing could hurt him as much as he had already been hurt.
From three to five, starting in July and lasting until mid-September, the front wall of his house was turned directly toward the sun, and the light flowed in through the windows. The living room and the bedrooms became needlessly hot, even when he shut the blinds and ran the air-conditioner, and he took to spending those late afternoons with Melissa and her friends, sometimes at the bookstore or the movie theater, sometimes in one of the pavilions by the reservoir. In the old days, when he saw men such as himself—older guys who had attached themselves to a group of teenagers, paying for their meals, cracking the occasional dated joke—he thought exactly what everyone else did: Look at that poor deluded sap trying to recapture his faded youth. But he was not trying to recapture a thing. He was only trying to endure the heat for a while. If he could have recaptured his youth, his youth as it actually was, with the pattern of the next twenty years intact and waiting for him, would he have? Maybe so. But a whole new youth, with its own set of dreams and uncertainties, would only have exhausted him. People often talked about wishing they could return to the moment just before a tragedy and begin again, repairing the rupture in their lives, setting off down a different path, the right path, the path that should have been theirs all along, but then, as time passed, they healed and moved forward in ways that depended upon exactly that rupture, and it became harder and harder to justify abandoning what they had gained for the sake of what they had lost. Jason knew, though, he knew without question, that if he could have returned to the day of the accident and prevented it (don’t leave home, don’t leave home), he would have. He would have taken everything he had learned since then, every moment of the life he had created, and destroyed it. It was his gift to Patricia, his tribute—to create the kind of life he would be willing to burn to ashes.
Often it was nearly dark by the time he got home. He would find the answering machine winking up at him with its red eye. He had stopped returning the calls he received, but he continued to listen to his messages.
“Mr. Williford, this is Karen at Dr. Sutter’s office. We’re phoning to see why you’ve missed your last two appointments. Is anything wrong?”
His crutches were propped against the wardrobe in his bedroom, but he no longer bothered to use them. He would not be keeping any more of his appointments.
Beep. “Hey, dude, where you been? The whole crew is getting together for the game this weekend. Tim reserved a skybox at the stadium. We wanted to see if you could come along. No need to chip in, it’ll be on us. Just give me a call.”
He had friends—of course he did—but he presumed that if he kept ignoring their entreaties, they would eventually forget about him. He would be free of their kindness, of their pity. He was tired of jokes that stopped short in his presence, gazes that remembered the way he used to be.
Beep. “Jason. Paul here. We’re flying Trieschmann out on assignment to the West Bank, and we need a camera to accompany him. You’ve been shooting some good stuff for us lately, and I wanted to see if you would be up for the job. Should get you a lot of attention, if you can do it. They’re dropping like dominoes over there.”
The truth was that the entire Middle East might have vanished in a single gleaming detonation, and he would not have noticed. Every morning he forced himself to leave the house and take a picture or two for the Gazette. That was all the scrutiny he could bear to give the world. No matter where he looked, he saw nothing but pain. An evangelist handing out pocket editions of the New Testament, a star-shaped kidney stone illuminating his urinary tract. An old woman whose arthritic fingers looked like brown twigs coated in ice. A horse trailer hauling a single young Appaloosa, its left eye glowing white as a Ping-Pong ball. In spite of everything, his instincts had not abandoned him.
He looked forward to the hours he spent with Melissa and her friends. With them he visited parts of the city that he had never seen before: the undersides of bridges, the pine chases behind housing developments. One afternoon, they were loitering in the playground of an elementary school when he saw Christman, from the paper, taking pictures of the bare flagpole. God only knew what he found interesting about the subject. There he was in the courtyard, though, firing off shot after shot, standing beneath the aluminum rod in a circle of compressed dirt.
He noticed Jason sitting on one of the climbing platforms and came over. “Williford,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I was just thinking of photographing that flagpole over there fourteen or fifteen times.”
It took Christman a second to realize Jason was kidding. He clutched his camera protectively to his chest, then gave a little ah!, as if to say that he had been in on the joke all along.
“But seriously, man, what’s with you and the kids? And Jesus, what happened to your—to all of you guys’ arms and legs? That’s not still from the car accident, is it?”
Someone said, “Leave Jesus out of it,” and the others struck up their usual chorus of one-liners.
“Define ‘accident.’ ”
“A bus is more like it.”
“What’s with you and the flagpole?”
“ ‘We’re not creating wounds. We’re uncovering the wounds that are already there.’ ”
“Shut up, Bryce.”
Jason waited for their voices to simmer down before he told Christman the truth.
Christman was skeptical. “Knives and fire. Right. Uh-huh. Seriously, man—”
“I am serious. Would you like to see for yourself?” Jason opened the largest blade on his pocketknife and ran it along the edge of his arm, watching the skin separate from his wrist to his elbow. It was the longest cut he had ever permitted himself to make. The noise that came out of him was barely human, a slow, strained creak that rose into its own sound like some ancient tree tightening in the cold.
Christman brought his camera to his eye. Jason let him take the picture. He could already imagine the caption: “Jason Williford, 35, practices bodily mutilation with several young friends outside Oak Grove Elementary School. Gazette Staff Photo/Glen Christman.” He listened to the shutter snap and felt the blood streaming out of him, and he didn’t care, he didn’t care. This was how he would waste the rest of his life, he thought, sitting in the heat of the sun and carving light into his flesh. When Christman made his excuses and left, he seemed to bob across the playground like a balloon. A car floated slowly down the street, and the kids’ bodies swam between the bars of the climbing tower. The color had been wicked out of the grass. A bird offered a glorious caw. Jason tried to stand up, but his legs wouldn’t support him.
A voice he recognized said, “You guys, I forgot to bring my stuff. I better take him somewhere and get him fixed up.” Then the girl who was staying with him, the beautiful one who liked to cut herself—Melissa: that was her name—put her arms around him and lifted him to his feet. Together they set off across the schoolyard.
At the end of the street, she stopped at a convenience store and bought him a bottle of water. “Here, drink this,” she said. His head cleared once he did. He felt a little better. They arrived home to find the front door hanging open. Had he forgotten to lock it? Had she? He didn’t think so.
At first, he was sure they had been robbed, but after Melissa had cleaned and bandaged the cut on his arm, the two of them walked through the house taking inventory. Nothing appeared to be missing, or at least nothing important, though the wind had scattered a pile of receipts across the foyer, and the wooden clock had fallen from the table in the front hall. When he bent over to retrieve it, a mahogany cog came rattling out of the case and rolled across the boards, dead-ending against the wall. He put the clock to his ear. It was no longer ticking, so he set it down on the floor again, nudging the corner with his toe.
“It’s okay,” he heard Melissa saying, and he wondered why he could feel her voice against his neck, and then she was brushing his cheek with the back of her hand and they were kissing. He had a body, and so did she, and they sank into each other, their wounds irrigated with an exquisite light. As she parted his lips with her fingers, he experienced a gradual sliding and turning sensation. He felt as if he were in a plane banking out over the ocean. His life was passing below him like the distant creases of the waves. The white triangles of a hundred sails dotted the water. He could not remember where he was going.