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

explorer. I made vast new areas of knowledge cultivable and known. I
descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures
with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations
lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering
rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized
language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied
the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I
memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the
populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of
presidents, tyrants and kings. I was learning what Mom had learned already: that
there are journeys we make alone every day that take us far away from one another.
    Every
morning I awoke in our cold house and padded softly into the kitchen, where I
prepared Pop Tarts, hot chocolate and perhaps a bowl of cold cereal. Then I
turned on all the stove’s gas jets to break the chill, and sat at the wooden
breakfast nook perusing last evening’s Herald (I disdained the Times for political
reasons). I might listen to some all-chat radio, fix a small pot of coffee and
return to my study, always attentive as I passed Mom’s silent room, where she
remained discreetly asleep or self-absorbed until mid-afternoon. Then I read
alone in my room until at least noon, spilling the strange energetic words into
my head. Geology, psychology, ancient history, applied linguistics, German,
modern philosophy, South American etymology, Central American politics,
Fourier, Rousseau, Marx–a vast boil and suck of words and languages. I
recall little of what I learned then; the ideas didn’t really stick. Rather
they seeped into my skin and belly. It was as if I were modifying the shape of
my hunger rather than appeasing it. The only knowledge that really mattered to
me then mattered because it was linked somewhere in my imagination with the
emerging shape of Dad. I remember quantum physics because I felt that Dad, like
the movement of planets, was not a fact so much as a quality of interpretation.
I remember European revolutionary governments of the eighteenth century because
their subversion of “Father” had never eliminated so much as merely redesigned
his very real and persistent presence. I remember Hegel because I always
imagined that the thisness which was Mom and I was always transforming itself
into the thatness which would be life with Dad. Dad was the thatness towards
which all our complicit motion yearned. In February he called for the first
time.
    Is
this Phillip? he asked. I had never before answered a phone to the sound of my
own name.
    “Who’s
this?”   I didn’t need to ask. There
was only one other person in the world who knew my name.
    This
is your dad, he said. This is your dad who misses you both very much.
    I
hung up. And he didn’t ring back.
    At
least not that same night.

 
    WHEN
I WENT to bed I tried to distinguish the different schemes of light that infiltrated
my room. There was the lunar and the electrical, the stellar and the reflected.
There was the light of ghosts and the light of living things. That night Pedro
spoke to me for the first time since he began dreaming of those hard lightless
objects which filled his somber toolbox.
    “I
forgive what you did to me, but I’ll never forgive what you did to your mom. I’ll
never forgive what you did to yourself.”
    “But
what about the light, Pedro?” I asked. “What sort of light do you see now? Does
the light make you feel warm, or safe, or sad?” But Pedro’s voice had grown
silent again. He had said what he wanted to say. It was as if, while he
dreamed, someone was keeping watch over him. Dreaming was a prison in which you
were never alone for one minute, in which you were responsible to a legion of
regulations, timetables and personnel. I couldn’t understand why Pedro said he
would never