The Illumination (13 page)

That day on the playground was like every other day. After Todd said “Chuckie boy,” he said, “Count on it.” He said, “I’ll wring that scrawny neck like a chicken’s.” He said, “When you least expect it, there I’ll be.” Then he slapped Chuck, softly, like a gangster, and left.

For the rest of the day, Chuck’s elbow felt tight. He kept stretching his arm, hoping the joint would pop. The skin rippled slightly where Todd Rosenthal had grabbed him. It was nearly impossible for him to scratch his back.

That afternoon it rained and then gave way to sunlight. The parking lot reflected the sky from a thousand puddles. The basketball hoops dripped onto the pavement like shining halos. At three-thirty, Chuck’s mom picked him up in the car. She took the fast way home, speeding along the highway. The road was drenched with sheets of blue and white. At fifty miles per hour, the seats began to shake. Chuck’s teeth chattered in his mouth like a wind-up toy. His mom honked and shouted “Moron!” at the other drivers. Her voice shivered as she sang along with the radio. They stopped for gas, then groceries, then finished the drive. The rain had washed the dust out of the gutters. The bricks of Chuck’s house were dyed dark with water. They were stacked together like crispy double vanilla sugar wafers. He had not been caught licking them in several months. That was back in February, before the Illumination began. His pretend dad had
come storming across the yard, furious. He had promised to whip Chuck, hard, unless he stopped. He couldn’t keep sticking crap like that in his mouth. Seriously, was he that messed up in the goddamned head? He needed to grow the hell up and quit it. Chuck knew the rule by heart: no tasting the bricks. But sometimes, rule or no rule, he still wanted to. It was one more problem he could not figure out.

Chuck left his mom alone to unpack the grocery bags. He dropped his backpack on the floor of his bedroom. A bullfrog mirror hung on the back of his door. Chuck saw himself staring out from inside its shining mouth. The finger-shaped bruises on his elbow were purple and silver. There were five of them—one, two, three, four, five. Five times two was ten, so everything still fit together. He sat at his desk and took out his notebook. The stories he had heard about fifth grade were true. He had lots of homework—too much, in his opinion. Nearly every day he had some new assignment to complete. One night he might have to draw a plant cell. The next he might have to answer questions about Ethiopia. Or color and label the four chambers of the heart. Or fill out the tiny squares of the multiplication table. Or write a paragraph about Benjamin Franklin flying a kite. Today it was time to study for his vocabulary quiz. He would have to spell the words, then define them.
Evaporate, illiteracy, physician, membrane, diminutive, fragile, majestic, chandelier, sabotage, approximately
. They were longer than most of the words he knew. He practiced using them in a sentence to memorize them.

As soon as the sun rises, the water will evaporate
.

I was sick, so I went to see the physician
.

There is nothing good about illiteracy, so learn to read
.

Fridays and Saturdays were like a diminutive summer or Christmas. For approximately two days, Chuck could do whatever
he wanted. His parents usually let him stay up late with them. They sat side by side in the fragile TV light. They slurped beer and whispered and flirted with each other. They let their fingers walk quietly up each other’s legs. Meanwhile, Chuck colored pictures, ate honey-roasted peanuts, and drank soda. A membrane of Cherry Coke trembled above the glass’s rim.

One Friday, he decided he would draw a majestic rainbow. An actor was on TV accepting a lifetime achievement award. His lungs shone with cancer through his tuxedo like chandeliers. Chuck looked down and tried to concentrate on his drawing. One by one, he used all sixty-four of his crayons. He was getting ready to shade in the last section. He took his favorite color, cornflower blue, from the box. But his pretend dad snatched the sheet of paper away. He waved it in the air like an American flag. He said, “Bedtime for Bonzo!” and made a chimpanzee noise.

There was that feeling of miniature needles in Chuck’s eyes. He hated crying so easily, but he couldn’t help it. His rainbow was only one curve short of being finished. His pretend dad had ruined the drawing with his sabotage. Now, like always, he was angry at Chuck for crying. Underneath his breath, he said, “For the love of God.”

Chuck tried to stop sniffling, but it did no good. His bears and his elephant were waiting on their bench. They were frightened and lonely and wondering where he was. He ran to his bedroom in his socks and pajamas. After he shut the door, he heard his parents whispering. His pretend dad said, “What’s the use in me trying? I could be Mr. Perfect, and it still wouldn’t matter.”

He said, “Face it, we’ve raised one Grade A brat.”

He said, “You try to make a single monkey joke—”

Chuck’s mom sighed and cleared her throat to interrupt him. “If you really attempted to figure him out, you could. It’s not like you have to be Sherlock-frigging-Holmes. You want to know how
to put him to bed? There are three different ways to do it,” she said. Chuck pictured her extending her fingers as she listed them. “ ‘Chuck Carter, Chuck Carter, it’s time to sleep till morning.’ ‘Your stuffed animals are waiting for you to say goodnight.’ And then, if he absolutely won’t listen, there’s another one. ‘I want your head on that pillow in five minutes.’ ”

His pretend dad smacked the table and asked, “But why?”

“I can’t explain why, honey—I just know it works.”

“You’re saying he’ll cry whenever he doesn’t get his way.”

“I’m saying what harm does it do to humor him?”

“The world will eat him alive when he grows up.”

“That doesn’t mean that we should eat him alive, too.”

Chuck put himself to bed and listened to them argue. He lay there for a long time before falling asleep. He dreamed he was riding the glass elevator into space. The Earth disappeared beneath the clouds and a billion stars. He was either Superman or Batman or the Green Lantern.

The diary Chuck took still shone like a wounded animal. Sometimes he liked to sleep with it under his pillow. The light was sad and bright and comforting to him. In the morning, he would wake up inside its glow. Some of the book’s pages were bent into a wave. Chuck tried everything he could imagine to press them flat. He took his shoes off and stood on the cover. He put it beneath the leg of his dresser overnight. He piled all his other books on top of it. He even ran it under the heat of an iron. He thought he felt the curve loosening beneath the weight. Then his nose prickled with the smell of something burning. A fishing line of black smoke lifted into the air. An orange spark crawled over the paper like a ladybug. When he blew, it turned into a dozen smaller sparks. They smoked and vanished, leaving brown pinholes
in the page. Chuck was worried that he had only made things worse. The book was still kinked, even after all his work. He had stepped on it, scorched it, weighted it down. What if it believed he was angry—was
punishing
it? He picked it up and hugged it to his chest. He thought,
I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it
. The light was as bright as it had ever been.

It was a cool, cloudless day in October: jacket weather. The sheets drying in the backyard were rippling and swaying. Some cardinals were chasing each other through the magnolia’s branches. Shortly after lunch, Chuck took the diary outside with him. The sheets were like a narrow room without a ceiling. He lay there thinking and teasing the grass into threads. He could see a gray squirrel twitching its bushy tail. He could see airplanes drawing white chalk-lines in the sky.

He kept remembering something about his kindergarten teacher, Ms. Derryberry. Ms. Derryberry had kept an unusual toy on her desk. It was a row of metal balls on V-shaped threads. The balls worked like a grandfather clock or a teeter-totter. She would let the first one swing into the others. The ball at the end of the row would jump. When it fell back, the first ball would jump again. Then the last ball would jump, then the first again. Those two balls, the first and last, took turns swinging. Each would land back where it started with a clack. The five or six in the middle stayed perfectly still. After a while, the toy would run out of energy. The noise would stop, and everyone would return to work.

Like Chuck, Ms. Derryberry had believed in having many rules. There were rules about talking and playing and sitting down. There were rules about gum-chewing and lining up for recess. There was even a rule about going to the bathroom. It was rule number seven on the list: Restroom Privileges.

ONE BOY, ONE GIRL, YOU MUST TAKE THE HALL PASS!!

She gave gold stars to everyone who followed the rules. Twenty gold stars were enough to earn you a reward. The reward might be a piece of hard cinnamon candy. It might be the chance to lead the recess line. Sometimes Ms. Derryberry let you hand out the art supplies. And sometimes she invited you to sit at her desk. You got to climb like a king into her chair. She let you play with the little swinging silver balls. It didn’t matter how hard you slung the first one. Soon they slowed down and began tapping against one another. They quickly found their rhythm, going
clack clack clack clack
. They were like circus acrobats doing graceful tricks in midair. They rocked and tilted, side to side, back and forth. Each collision was a little quieter than the one before. (That was the word for things knocking together: a collision.) Finally a ball would fall so softly that it stopped. All of them would sway slightly on their V-shaped threads. And you would get up and return to your seat.

Just thinking about the desk toy could calm Chuck down. The clacking sound, those seesawing silver globes—they were wonderful. It was true then, and it was still true now.

On hard days, he would remember watching the toy operate. He imagined another toy just like it inside his head. His heart seemed to thump along with the clacking noise. He had the peculiar feeling of being suspended by strings. It gave him a soothing sort of rocking chair sensation.

The sheets billowed in the wind, and Chuck sat up. He had no idea how long he had been outside. He opened the diary to a page in the middle. The man across the street loved his wife’s morning ritual. He loved the way she saved the comics for last. He loved how the smoke followed her around a fire. The walls of the
room suddenly began to fall away. Chuck’s mom was taking the sheets down from their clothespins. “Well, hello there, Buster,” she said when she spotted him. “Don’t forget we’re getting that hair of yours cut today.” Chuck leaped up and ran back inside with the diary.

That afternoon, his pretend dad stayed home cleaning the garage. It was just Chuck and his mom in the car. Chuck sat in the front seat, behind the rustiest door. Metal flakes drizzled to the ground when he slammed it. His whole life, he had loved riding in the car. He loved how the tires floated sideways on wet roads. He loved the soft fabric that sagged from the ceiling. He used to laugh whenever his parents honked the horn. It sounded like that
Sesame Street
monster bopping its nose. That was years and years ago, when Chuck was little. Back then, he sat in an egglike cushioned plastic seat. His mom would buckle him in and shut the door. It would open, like magic, in a completely different place. The grocery store, the park, the church—he never knew. He would’ve stayed there all the time if he could.

At the barbershop, Chuck sat between two big silver mirrors. One was in front of him, the other behind him. The mirrors kept reflecting each other across the open floor. Their frames became smaller and smaller, shrinking into the distance. He could see thousands of Chucks inside the long tunnel. Every time he moved sideways, so did all the others. He nodded so that the barber could trim his neck. The other Chucks nodded, too, at exactly the same time. He shook the hair from his gown—so did they. He stretched his arms out like wings—so did they. The barber told Chuck, “No more squirming around, young man. You don’t want me lopping off one of your ears.”

Chuck pictured his ear hitting the floor like heavy fruit.

The barber paused and said, “Whoa there, no crying now.” He gave Chuck a reassuring little pat on the shoulder. “You have my word, your ears are safe with me.”

Slowly and carefully, he clipped the hair behind Chuck’s ears. His scissoring hand glowed white from every joint and muscle. Chuck stopped sniffling as he watched it open and close. It was like looking at an X-ray of a hand. Behind him a skeleton was sawing and fluttering its fingers. It was making chopping gestures—a strange dance of bones. And then, before Chuck knew it, his haircut was finished.

The barber cleaned his neck, dusting it with baby powder. He unsnapped Chuck’s gown, and hair sprinkled to the floor. Chuck’s chair sank onto its pole with a hissing noise. He got up and followed his mom to the counter. Not until then did he catch sight of Todd Rosenthal. The other barber was shaving his hair down to bristles. He was saying words like
head lice
and
nasty buggers
. He lectured Todd’s parents: his mom and his real dad. “Really it’s gotta be your best option with these things.” He mowed a stripe in Todd’s hair with the clippers. “You can comb or you can cut is about it. I had one guy tried to drown them with gasoline. Now that works, but you’d better not light any matches. You’ll have yourself a bonfire is what you’ll have yourself. No, when the lice get this bad, it’s shaving time.”

A thousand Todd Rosenthals glared at Chuck from the mirror. “Say one word and you’re dead,” they mouthed to him.

On Monday, at school, Todd came in wearing a hat. Ms. Mount told him he would have to remove it. He handed her a note, and she read it silently. She nodded
okay, he had permission to wear his hat
. Todd kicked Chuck’s chair as he walked to his desk. Then he sat by the window, which rippled with rain. A car slid past,
and the water separated its headlights. The red dots of its brakes shone from the glass. Then they vanished, and the rain was just rain again. Todd gripped his cap by the edges, tugging it down. Chuck noticed how snugly it fit, but didn’t say anything.