The Illumination (22 page)

“Well, this is it, Ms. Poggione,” the boy said, and she realized they had reached the hotel.

“Thanks. What’s your name now?”

“John Catau.”

“I thought that was your father’s name.”

“It is. I’m a junior, or unofficially I am. My dad is Jon Catau:
J-o-
no
h-n
. I’m John Catau:
J-o-
with an
h-n.
”

“Well, John-with-an-
h
, you can call me Nina.”

“Nina.” He took her wrist, rubbing his thumb along the pulse point as if he were calming an injured animal, and she understood what she should have all along: that he was hitting on her. His touch was warmer and more muscular than she had supposed it would be. “Are you sure I can’t buy you a drink?” he said.

She risked stretching her mouth to smile at him. “Some other time.” And she opened the door and went into the hotel.

Upstairs, standing at her bathroom mirror, she drew her lower lip cautiously away from her teeth. The flesh sent out a spike of pain, shimmering as she exposed it to the open air. She had ruptured some fragile seal over the sore, and blood came brimming from the threadlike crack, spilling into the pocket of her gums. Though the edges of the canker had softened, she knew from experience that it would get worse before it got better.

She sat on the ledge of the tub and made her ritual evening phone call. Wallace didn’t answer, so she left him a message. Each time her lips came together or her teeth bit into a letter, she had that terrible sewing-needle sensation. She tried to conceal her discomfort, but the effort gave her voice an oddly convulsive sedative quality, as if her limbs were twitching while she slept:
“Hey, honey. I know you ha
v
e
p
lay rehearsal tonight,
b
ut I’
m
wi
p
ed out, and I’
m
going to slee
p
, so I’
m
calling early. Your
m
o
mm
a lo
v
es you. I ho
p
e you had a
p
er
f
ect day. Don’t
b
urn the house down. Re
memb
er, the Stegalls are right next door i
f
you can’t reach
m
e and there’s an e
m
ergency.”

She hung up. For the thousandth time, she reflected that she should write a story that used no
b
’s
, f
’s
, m
’s,
p
’s, or
v
’s, one she could deliver without aggravating her mouth. “A Story to Combat the Pain,” she would call it.

But what if it wasn’t her lips that were ulcerated?

She would have to write a second story to avoid her hard palate, one without any
c
’s,
d
’s,
g
’s,
h
’s—oh so many letters.

And a third that would let the tip of her tongue lie still, a story that was all vowels and labials, unspooling with a long underwater sound.

So then: “
Three
Stories to Combat the Pain.”

She washed her face and brushed her teeth, all but the bottom incisors, then changed into her pajamas and slipped into bed. Four more days of readings, she thought. Four more airplanes to four more cities. She wondered how Wallace was doing without her. Had he remembered to lock the door? Was he eating the food she had Tupperwared? He was the kind of boy who would nibble at a hot dog, offering half of it to a stray animal, and consider himself fed for the day—but he was fourteen, and old enough now, they had decided, to stay home alone while she was on tour.

Fourteen! In another year, unless she recovered as mysteriously as she had fallen ill, she would have been this strange sick creature for fully one-third of his life.

She yawned, and her mouth flickered at the boundary of her vision, as if a distant ship were sending out signals in Morse code.

——

Once there was a country where no one addressed the dead except in writing. Whenever people felt the urge to speak to someone they had outlived, they would take a pen and set their thoughts down on paper:
You should have seen the sun coloring the puddles this morning
, or
Things were so much easier when you were alive, so much happier
, or
I wanted to tell you I got all A’s on my report card, plus a C in algebra
. Then they would place the message atop the others they had written, in a basket or a folder, until the summer arrived and they could be delivered.

In this country it rained for most of the year. The landscape was lush with the kinds of trees and ivies that flourish in wet weather, their leaves the closest green to black. The creeks and pools swam with armies of tiny brown frogs. Usually, though, in the first or second week of June, the clouds would thin from the air little by little, in hundreds of parallel threads, as if someone were sweeping the sky clean with a broom, and the drought would set in. This did not happen every summer, but most. Between the glassy river to the west of the country and the fold of hills to the east, the grass withered and vanished, the puddles dried up, and the earth separated into countless oddly shaped plates. Deep rifts formed in the dirt. It was through these rifts that people slipped the letters they had written. The dead were buried underground, and tradition held that they were waiting there to collect each sheet of paper, from the most heartfelt expression of grief to the most trivial piece of gossip:

You won’t believe it, but Ellie is finally leaving that boyfriend of hers
.

What I want to know is whether you think I should take the teaching job
.

The crazy thing is, when the phone rang last night, I was absolutely sure it was you
.

Do you remember that time you dropped your earring in the pond and it surprised that fish?

I just don’t know what I’m doing these days
.

So it was that people surrendered the notes they had saved with a feeling of relief and accomplishment, letting them fall through the cracks one by one, then returned home, satisfied that they had been received.

This was the way it had always been, for who knows how long, with the dead turning their hands to the surface of the earth, and no orphans praying out loud to their parents, and no widows chitchatting with the ghosts of their husbands, and all the wish-it-weres and might-have-beens of the living oriented around a simple stack of paper and a cupful of pens. Then something very strange happened.

In Portland the bookstore was a labyrinth of aisles and staircases, with shelves that stretched to the rafters and let out the sugary smell of old paper, columns that shone with textured gold paint, and the floor was a worn industrial concrete that resembled a pond abounding with gray-green silt, and as she walked through the stacks she could see the vague form of her reflection passing underneath her, vanishing and reemerging in the grit and gloss of the stone, and on the store’s top level, where she gave her reading, the art books stood directly behind the audience in a long panorama of faces, so that Ms. Erin Colvin from Hillsdale and Mr. Jim Fristoe from the Pearl District seemed to sit alongside Andy Warhol and Mona Lisa and one of Modigliani’s radiant, blank-eyed women, and when it came time for Nina to take questions
and someone asked her how she developed her titles, she gave her usual answer, comparing the title to a target toward which she shot the arrow of a story and confessing that she had never been able to write so much as the first sentence until she had taken careful aim. In the case of the story she had just presented, she said, a fairy tale of sorts, she had tried “A Fable Beginning with a Glimpse of Blue Sky,” “A Fable Ending in a Thunderclap and a Rain Shower,” and “A Fable Occurring Between Two Thunderstorms” before she hit upon “A Fable from the Living to the Dead,” after which followed a dozen variations on that one idea—“A Fable
to
the Dead,” “A Fable
for
the Dead,” “A Fable
for
the Living
from
the Dead,” “A Fable
from
the Dead
to
the Living”—until at last she settled upon “A Fable for the Living.”

A Fable.

A fable.

A
f
a
b
le.

Her ulcer had begun pussing out, which meant that it was healing, but meant, too, that if she kept her lips closed for even half a second, the discharge would glue them together and pulling them apart would transfix her jaw with light. It was shameful, her pain, appalling. She hated to exhibit it, hated the attention it brought her. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop trying to justify or understand it. Most of the people who gathered to collect her signature were too young and fit to display more than a few minor sports injuries and shaving rashes, along with the occasional gleaming cincture of a hangover headache, but there were others in line, too, the sick and the insulted,
her
people. The teenage girl confined to a wheelchair by cancer or arthritis, hip dysplasia or osteonecrosis, her pelvis a shining cameo of bones. The old man whose heart was failing,
pulsing the way a star pulses. The woman nursing a glowing thyroid, surreptitiously pressing a hand to her neck. The doctor in her hospital scrubs, who seemed so healthy as she stood facing Nina but turned to hobble away with her spine iridescing through her shirt like a string of frightful pearls. Nina looked at them, and something softened inside her. She wondered if her face showed what she was thinking:
Yes. That’s it. I understand. You don’t have to tell me
.

Capping off the procession was a college student who wanted Nina to “sign this note” certifying that he had “gone to this reading.” As soon as she scratched her name on the page, he whisked it away from her, zipping it into his backpack as if it were some wild creature trying to buck its way out of his grasp.

Now it was only Nina and one of the booksellers. She fell silent as she autographed the remaining stock, fifteen copies of her new collection and twice that many of her most recent novel,
Twin Souls
, a sort of parable in the guise of a love story, about a world in which there were two of everybody and it was forbidden to interact with your other self—the first book of hers that had sold well enough, miracle of miracles, to earn out its advance. Her signature slowly changed beneath her fingers, rearranging itself,
purifying
itself, plunge by plunge and bend by bend until it was no longer a set of letters at all but a curious abstract design. It was like the pattern she had once watched a moth draw with its wings in the condensation on her bathroom mirror. She remembered switching off the lights and opening the window so that it would fly away and then, when it did, calling Wallace in to see the strange hieroglyph of sweeps and flickers it had left behind.

“I bet it was trying to communicate with you,” he mused. “Maybe it was my dad, reincarnated as a moth, and the only way he knew how to get in touch with us was to write something with
his wings.” He looked more carefully at the mark. “Except he’s illiterate.”

Wallace, her wonderful, brilliant Wallace, was the product of a fling she had allowed herself one night when she was drunk and twenty-two with a man whose name and face had abandoned her the moment he put on his clothing. Nearly five years passed before she found his business card behind her dresser and in a flash remembered who he was—his fingernails with their clean white crescents, a banker’s nails, and the way he bathed her thighs with kisses, stopping just short of her pubic mound as though he had encountered a brick wall. How, she wondered, would she ever work up the courage to tell the man what their one sodden hour of sex had engendered? The question, as it turned out, was academic, since a Web search informed her that not long after Wallace was born his father had been killed in a speedboat accident, “age 28, survived by his wife and childhood sweetheart, Tammy.” Wallace knew little more than that his father had died a long time ago and the two of them had never married.

When the last book was signed and the “Thank you so much, Ms. Poggione” came, Nina said good-bye with a handshake and collected her possessions. It wasn’t until she was on her way to the staircase that she noticed him standing at the first-editions shelf, John-with-an-
h
Catau, running his fingers over the covers as if he were fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by the various Gail Godwins and Curtis Sittenfelds in their clear plastic sleeves.

She stopped short. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Why, of all the places to run into each other,” he joked. Clearly he had been rehearsing what to say, but he made it only midway through the sentence before his voice tightened in a plexus of timidity and self-doubt, the same slipknot effect she had noticed the day before. “I’m sorry,” he continued. “Is this too
much? This is too much, isn’t it? It’s not a long drive from Seattle to Portland. Two and a half hours. It was just that you said ‘some other time,’ so I thought maybe … well … 
tonight.
”

For some reason she could not work up any anger toward him, or even any distrust. He was so obviously harmless—and not harmless in the thin-veneer way of countless serial killer movies, but truly harmless. He wore the fixed expression of a child caught filling the saltshaker with sugar. If only she weren’t so exhausted.

“I’m sick.” She said it once for herself and a second time for him. “I’m sick, John. And your attention is flattering, and if things were different, I would be happy to get a drink with you somewhere, but every minute I’m not holed away in my hotel room,
alone
, is hard for me. Do you understand?”

He grinned. “You remembered my name.”

“Bye, John.”

“Look, how about some coffee? There’s a coffee shop right downstairs. And then you can go back to your hotel and get some sleep and maybe tomorrow you’ll feel better than you do today.”

Make me better tomorrow than I am today. Make me better next week than I’ve been this one
.

She was the type of person who never read her horoscope, never saved the slips from her fortune cookies, and yet there were times when she was all too willing to be guided by coincidence and intimation, those fleeting signals that flagged the air like torches and suggested the universe had lit a trail for her. Which was why, she supposed, she agreed to have a cup of coffee—one cup—with him. She ordered a small vanilla latte, iced, so that she could conduct it to the corner of her lip with a straw. Did she want something to eat? A scone?