The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online

could not last.
    That it was too big for her to contain.
    That it would ebb as quickly as it had risen.
    And sure enough, late that night, she woke to find that she had not yet finished healing. Her hair was pasted to her forehead, and her hand shone with a sharp pain. She was afraid that it was starting all over again, all the hurt and debility. She could hear the high sustained note of a fever in her ears. Her life was a waste and a failure, and she had never loved another human being, and she wanted nothing more than to escape the planes of her skin and appear in some other place. The world was unreliable. Theworld could turn on a dime. It was a joy to be alive when it was a joy to be alive, and it was a terror to be alive when it wasn’t. What else had she ever learned?
    It was several hours before the light subsided and she was able to fall back asleep. In the morning she drank an extra cup of coffee to clear her head. She did the dishes and watched a few hours of television, and at noon Dr. Alstadt—Thomas—called her to ask if she would be free for dinner that night. She had no other plans, and she started to give him her address, but he interrupted with, “Actually, I already have it. Your chart, remember. I hope that isn’t creepy.”
    “I never want to hear from you again. So six-thirty, did we say?”
    “Six-thirty.”
    That day, grocery shopping, her eye was caught by one of the newsweeklies in the checkout lane. The headline read, “History Is an Angel,” and beneath that, in smaller print, “Bringing Light to the Past.” She decided to buy it. When she got home, she sat down to read the cover story, a long essay about the pictorial history of the twentieth century and how it might have differed had the Illumination commenced a hundred years earlier. It was illustrated with a four-page foldout of famous photos, digitally altered to show new varieties of light emanating from them. A Spanish soldier reeling from a bullet strike, his head ringed in a silver corona. A man in a naval uniform crying as he played the accordion, a bright cloud of grief surrounding his face and fingers. The motorcade in Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963: the president leaning into the eruption of light at his temple. A group of civil rights marchers hunching against the blast from a fire hose, the tightly contained spray of pain from their bodies matching the tightly contained spray of the water. A young girl withnapalm burns running naked in a dazzling aurora. A famine victim staring out of the radiance of her hunger. A dozen men in fire helmets floating like lanterns in a field of smoke. There was a terrible beauty to the images, and Carol Ann found it hard to look away from them. Her job had made her a student of popular imagery. The pictures would be reprinted in all the papers and on all the current affairs sites, she was sure of it, broadcast again and again on all the cable news networks. She began to feel uncomfortable with herself. Maybe she was just another driver who couldn’t stop gawking at a car crash. But then, in this case, wasn’t the car crash hers—or not hers alone, but hers in part, hers along with everybody else’s: the great shared car crash of modern history?
    Her thumb was still aching a little, but by that evening the glow was weak enough that she could cover it with a Band-Aid and ignore it. Dr. Alstadt arrived promptly at six-thirty. He was wearing a green silk tie, a blue oxford shirt, and bull-nosed brown shoes with a rolling pinprick pattern on top. With a comb and water, he had attempted to flatten the lock of hair on his forehead, and though he had not quite succeeded, she found the effort endearing.
    She made a gesture that encompassed his entire outfit. “Spiffy.”
    He wrinkled his lips. “Thank you very much. So are you ready to go? I’ve made reservations for us at Jacques and Suzanne’s.”
    “Just give me five more minutes.”
    She showed him into the living room and left to brush