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

forgive me. It had to be a code or a cipher of some kind. If he
told me the truth about his new life, he might get himself in trouble with the
people who gauged and monitored that life. I would have to ask him about it
later. For now, effortlessly, I could only sleep.

 
    8

 
    DAD
CALLED THE next morning around ten thirty.
    It’s
been five years, he said. You guys are a hard act to follow but not so hard to
trace. I may not always know where to find you, but I always know where you’ve
been. You’ve left a trail that you might call a mile wide. Hearing my detective
agency’s progress reports on your travels is more fun than watching television,
and there are some pretty good programs on television these days, or so I’ve
heard. I was worried when I learned you had the phone connected in your mom’s
name. The electricity and the gas.
    Dad
wasn’t a voice, not even on the phone. He surfaced as something vaster and more
comprehensible than speech. I tried to convince him he had the wrong number.
But Dad wasn’t buying.
    Your
mom’s had some tough breaks, Dad continued. (I couldn’t imagine what Dad looked
like, but I could envision his large body outside in some nondescript backyard
wielding a long green garden hose. He sprayed the grass and flowers, the
contented trees and saplings. Then he filled a large plastic bucket with soapy
water and went out front to wash the car.) Your mom is a very good woman who doesn’t
always do good things. She’s not what I’d call an appropriate role model for a
young boy. What I’m trying to say, Phillip, is that it may be time for you to
come home and live with your dad again. We can fix up your old room. We can
enroll you in school. Your mom’s welcome as well, Phillip. I still love your mom,
no matter what she’s done. And so far as I know, she’s done some pretty bad
things. There was that poor fellow, Bernie Somebody, in San Luis Obispo. And a
year or so earlier, that architect in Simi Valley.
    A
cold breeze was moving into my legs, my buttocks, my stomach. It reached into
my chest.
    “What
architect?” I asked. Other worlds were opening themselves to my inspection when
I was seven years old–not just the worlds in books. “What architect in
Simi Valley? Did he have a red beard?” I asked, not remembering so much as describing,
as if I were the one making the world real with my voice. “Did he have a deep
basso profundo singing voice? Did he drive a brand-new green BMW?”

 
    DAD
CALLED EVERY afternoon and told me things Mom had done. Felonies, assaults,
mild flurries of misdemeanors and traffic citations gone to warrant, suspected
manslaughters in Burlingame, San Jose, Whittier. Mom was becoming even more
glorious, transubstantial and unreal. She was moving further away from me and
into the realm of raw, undifferentiated nature. Mom was a bat, a wolf, a bear,
a tiger. Sometimes, as I grew to love her even more, I imagined her luring me
into the nests and secret networks of her convoluted self. Alone in my bed at
night, I heard myself talking like her, my mind working like hers. “The
irregularities of the world’s body correspond with the map of our own brains,
baby,” I said in my dark room, entangled by my dark and muddled blankets. Gently
my hands stroked my stomach, my thighs, the stray black hairs beginning to emerge
across my breathing chest. “We travel across the world and into the ways
representation works. Trees aren’t trees, roads aren’t roads, moms aren’t even
moms. The history of motion is that luminous progress men and women make in the
world alone.” Sometimes I couldn’t even remember which words were mine and
which words Mom’s. Whose voice was it, whose tongue and whose lips? Where did
my flesh of words end and Mom’s words of flesh begin? Was this Mom’s face and
stomach and beating heart, or was this mine? Was I becoming her, some mere
reproduction of Mom, or had she so totally and unselfishly invested herself
inside me that