The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield Read Free Book Online

there were visions of Pedro
dreaming, like the way angled mirrors reflect one another infinitely in department-store
dressing rooms. In Pedro’s dreams there was Mom, me, and a dark gathering shape
under the floors of our new house. The dark shape said, “The family environment
is a very important place for growing children. A stable family unit
environment determines whether a child will grow up feeling assured and
self-confident, or undisciplined, slothful and insecure.” Whenever we heard
that voice coming, Pedro and I knew Dad would be with us again soon.
    “Sometimes
it’s hard to tell the difference between your conception of the world and the
world’s conception of you,” Mom said, swirling ice in her glass. We slept on
the shag carpet on rolled-up blankets and quilts lifted the previous evening from
a Best Western in Van Nuys. “It’s very easy to fool yourself. The harder you think
about things, the more confused you get.” She was lying on her back and gazing
at our white, water-stained ceiling. Her hands rested quietly on her breathing
stomach. “When I was a little girl I would sit on the living room couch for
hours sometimes, trying to figure out the simplest things. I couldn’t move. My
mind grew fuzzy and dim. I felt as if my skull was inflating with chemical
pressure. It grew dark outside. My mother returned home from work and fixed me
dinner, but I wouldn’t eat. I just sat there alone until I could feel this black
cloud slowly engulfing me. Inside the black cloud, I couldn’t think about
anything. I couldn’t remember what I had been trying to figure out. Sometimes I
couldn’t remember my own name, or the address where I lived. I couldn’t be sure
if my mother was really my mother at all.” Stealthily, the gas heater gave a
tiny kick in the kitchen. Outside, the city was filled with bright, airy noise,
whispering against the walls of our house like something corporeal, filled with
hissing and irreducible life.
    “Go
to sleep, Mom,” I said, and placed my hand on both of hers. “Get some rest and
we’ll discuss it in the morning.”
    “Lately,
I’ve started feeling like that again,” Mom said. “I see this cloud of blackness
coming up around me. I forget things. I can’t even tell if I’m dreaming or
not.”
    Outside
in the bright night, the full moon gazed over everything, gravid with
implications.
    “Your
father took me away from all that,” Mom said distantly, “and that’s why I’ll always
be very grateful to him. I’ll always be very grateful to your father, Phillip. But
that doesn’t mean I want him back.”

 
    MOM
ALWAYS SAID we would buy furniture someday, but we never did. Instead we
purchased a Hitachi color television, VHS recorder and remote control with one
of our remaining credit cards on which time, like the vital current of some
living creature, was gradually running out. We purchased a pair of springless
Sta-Easy mattresses from a ridiculously exorbitant Salvation Army thrift store
and placed one in each of our musty, divided bedrooms. We purchased an
audiocassette recorder and various new tapes from Tower Records in Van Nuys,
and a small unvarnished pine desk with a built-in bookshelf for my room, on
which I assembled my various stained and pulpy textbooks, a new notepad, pink
rubber eraser, plastic ruler, pencil sharpener and pencil case. These were my
tools now, and like Pedro I kept them all in their proper place. There was
something submarine about them, even anxious. Mom had recently determined that
I would be a writer.
    “Take
words and make them useful,” she told me. “Drain them of all the crappy
meanings they used to mean, and make
them mean something useful instead.” I assigned myself to my room for exactly
two hours every morning, where I studied my books and wrote my clean words.
With my elbows propped against my grainy desk, I plunged into books and
histories and explicable mysteries like some hungry and federally-sponsored
wilderness