The Illumination (3 page)

Sometimes she liked to imagine that the journal had a voice and that it was speaking directly to her—a gentle baritone that developed a bit of gravel when it used her name.

I love to wake up in the middle of the night and listen to you sleeping
(
Carol Ann
, she added):
the funny noises you make when you dream, the tiny pop of your lips separating
.

“You’re too sweet. Stop it.”

I love kissing your tattoos one by one—first the bracelet on your ankle, then the heart on your shoulder, then the Celtic knot on the small of your back
.

“That’s some imagination you have. There’s not a single tattoo on my body.”

The truth was that she could extract any line from the book, any line at all, and find more kindness in it than she had heard
from her husband in their four years of marriage. In the beginning, when they first started seeing each other, she had been just young and naïve enough to mistake his parched inhumanity for an elaborate comic routine. She still remembered the feeling of uneasy awareness shading into panic when she realized he meant every word he said, that
Nothing smells worse than an Asian who’s just discovered dairy
and
Fat is still fat, even if it’s only your wrists
were not examples of insurrectionary humor, as he saw it, but precise statements of fact. The day she arrived home from the hospital, she had mopped the blood from the kitchen floor and cleaned the tacky brown deposits that dotted the wall and table. She had even washed the carving knife that she somehow found the presence of mind to put in the dish drainer before she left. But she ignored his package, the one that had caused so much trouble, allowing it to sit there on the counter in its jacket of threaded tape. Maybe it was no more than a trick of the subconscious, but every time she saw it, she felt a sudden glinting sensation in her thumb. A week passed before she finally built up the nerve to finish opening it. This time she used a pair of scissors, wincing as each white thread burst apart like a tendon. Inside, beneath a mound of excelsior, she found that month’s alimony check. His idea of a joke.

She spent eight hours a day sifting through stories about the economy and the Illumination, the vaccine shortage in Africa and the latest defense postures in the Middle East, so much misery that it made her head ache, and the last thing she wanted to do when she got home was watch the news. Usually, after reading a page of the journal, she would make a simple meal of soup or pasta for herself, take it to the dining room, and flip through one of the catalogs that had arrived in the mail that afternoon. Sometimes, in the endless inventory of throw rugs, wool sweaters, and
fireplace cribs, she would momentarily forget everything that had ever happened to her, closing the last page and returning to her own life like a moviegoer stepping out of a darkened theater, dazed by the angle of the light.

She found it relatively easy to cook while she was wearing the glove, and to eat and type and drive, but not everything came so effortlessly. Shoes were a problem. Washing the dishes. Shaving beneath her right arm. She liked to knit every night before she went to bed, but knitting was impossible now, so instead she took to lying on the sofa watching rebroadcasts of various daytime talk shows—the one with the straight-talking Texan who walked offset holding hands with his wife, the one with the people who threw chairs at one another. Whenever the talk shows’ guests were blindsided by grief, a kind of nimbus would settle around them, a colorless shimmering cloud that seemed to be exhaled directly from their pores, fainter even than the light from a hangnail. Was she seeing their emotional pain, she wondered, or its physical counterpart, like the raw throat that followed a bout of crying, or the stomach cramps that accompanied a wave of anxiety, or the gripping sensation you felt in your chest when you realized the man you were married to despised you? Physical or emotional, it didn’t matter—the aura was unmistakable. Even on her old eighteen-inch Curtis Mathes, she could always tell when the people on the talk shows were really suffering and when they were merely playacting for the cameras.

She began to notice the same aura when she was out in public. She saw it on crossing guards, panhandlers, neighbors, coworkers. It was a simple matter of training herself not to dismiss the sight as a mirage. One day, a couple of weeks into the Illumination, she was on her lunch break when her joints began to ache and her skin felt cold to the touch and she knew she was
coming down with a fever. The bottle of Advil in her purse was empty, so she pulled up to a convenience store and ran inside for a packet of pain relievers. A man was blocking the pharmaceutical shelf. Even from behind, she could see that he was distraught about something. The air wavered over his body like the air around the edges of a flame. He took a bag of cough drops from a hook, then looked up at her and gave a weak smile. “Carol Ann Page,” he said, and tapped his thumb with his index finger.

In an instant she recognized him. “Dr. Alstadt.”

“How’s that thumb of yours?”

It was stinging, she realized, stinging and cold. A frigid glow had spread down through her glove, radiating past the bones of her wrist. “Not so good today. Are you all right? Did something just happen to you?”

He touched his brow, a nervous tic, smoothing down a cowlick that must have stood far back in the thicket of his hair when he was younger but projected from the bare curve of his forehead now like a minnow leaping out of a still pond. “And here I thought I was hiding it so well. A bad day at work, that’s all. But here—let me take a look at you.” He undid the glove from her hand, a gesture that seemed strangely intimate in the buzzing luminosity of the soda cabinet. A noise of concern escaped him. “Oh, Carol Ann. My. How long has it been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Do you see how the color changes here at the scar line? That’s a sign of severe vasoconstriction. Let me ask you, does it hurt—does it light up and sort of
tighten
when you expose it to the cold?”

“Yes. It does do that.”

“And when did you first notice the symptom?”

“ ‘The symptom’? I didn’t know it was a symptom. It’s been
sensitive to the cold ever since I came home from the hospital. Is that what you’re asking?”

“No, that’s to be expected. What I’m asking is when did you notice the
color
change?”

Just now, she supposed. Just this moment. When she cut her eyes across the floor, she saw a starfield of spinning dots, and she had lived in this world for so long, and she wanted so desperately for someone to be in love with her, and for a moment she had to lock her knees to prevent them from buckling.

“Dr. Alstadt, I’m not feeling so well.”

He took her by the elbow. “Are you good to drive? I think we need to get you to the hospital.” She waited to see if the dots would leave her head, and when they did, she straightened her back and nodded. “All right. Just to be on the safe side, I’m going to ask you to follow me, okay?” he insisted. “Let me check out first, and then we’ll go.”

He took the cough drops to the counter. While he was paying for them, she called the office and explained that she would be late returning to work that afternoon: “A medical emergency. I’m not sure really. Hopefully by three o’clock.” She hung up and put the phone in her purse, listened to the cashier clearing his lungs. Glancing at him, she saw two dim blossoms of what must have been cancer showing through his polyester shirt. Cancer or maybe emphysema.

A mid-afternoon gloom had settled over the city, making the trees darker than the sky. A light rain was falling. As she followed Dr. Alstadt to the hospital, she thought about all the times she had sat in the backseat of the car when she was small and her parents were young and they were driving her to church or to school, watching windblown fleets of raindrops chasing one another across the glass.

——

The hospital’s main doors opened onto an atrium with a gently sloping ceiling of metal trimmers and polished glass. She kept looking up at the rain on the roof and then down at its reflection on the floor, hundreds of semitransparent shadows that flowed across the tiles like snakes. A bird had built its nest into one of the ceiling’s upper struts, and she wondered what it did on days like this: Did it tuck its head beneath its wings or just stand there stolidly and wait for the weather to turn?

She followed Dr. Alstadt down a chain of hallways and through the emergency ward, where a nurse was sorting patients into admission groups, saying, “Green group, green group, yellow group, green.” In the last few weeks, it seemed, the hospital had established a system of treating patients based on the strength of the light emanating from their bodies. The Illumination had ushered in a new age of critical care. Doctors no longer had to rely on their patients to tell them how badly they were suffering. “Head light and heart light take priority, of course,” Dr. Alstadt told her, “along with any obvious major traumas. Then we take all the other lights and make a visual determination of their severity.”

The walls were tilting toward Carol Ann suddenly. She became aware that he had paused between sentences, and she made the noise she seemed to recall normal people making when they wanted to show an interest in something. The doctor steadied her with his hand. “Good Lord. You’re really not feeling well, are you? Let’s get you a bed.”

He showed her into an examination room.

“You rest here a minute, and I’ll go find the vascular specialist.”

The curtains ballooned outward as he left, then settled back against the window. She saw that the pain assessment chart, with its six faces transforming from glee to agony, had been taken down from the wall. It was no longer necessary, she supposed, now that the Illumination had taken hold. She felt a pulse of blood traveling through her thumb, too much of it for so small a space, and she closed her eyes and waited for the twinge to pass, and before long Dr. Alstadt had returned with a young Indian man he introduced as Dr. Kimberley, his neck starlit with a fresh shaving rash.

Dr. Kimberley said, “I understand your injury has been misbehaving on you, Miss Ann-Page. Let’s see what we can do about that. May I?” He removed her glove and took the base of her thumb between his fingers, pressing against the two indentations the splint’s metal stays had left there, compacted to a smooth pale sheen. He was like a carpenter using a wood clamp, and as he tightened his grip, she watched her thumb change colors, instantly reddening below the line of the cut and gradually pinkening above it.

Dr. Alstadt made a grimacing noise with the corners of his mouth. Dr. Kimberley shook his head. “You see,” he said. “This is what happens when you skip your follow-up appointments.”

“But I didn’t skip my follow-up appointments. I had a follow-up appointment last week. I have another follow-up appointment on Thursday.”

“Oh. Well. Then sometimes these things happen.”

The rest of it seemed to transpire very quickly. Once again she was given a shot in the crook of her elbow, and once again her skin began to tingle, and once again she had the sensation that all her life until just that moment she had been falling toward the ground and suddenly, instead, she was floating above it, and
the world looked so handsome, and the light so sweet and welcoming, and she cried as she lay there waiting for the orderlies to take her into the strange, blue, humming, capacious elevator. When she woke up and tried to wipe the grit from her eyes, she found that there was a boxing glove on her hand, and then her mind cleared and she realized that the boxing glove was a bandage, wrapped so tightly that it had fixed her fingers together into a sort of trowel. A machine beeped next to her left ear. A woman in dark green nursing scrubs came in to check on her. When Carol Ann asked her how the operation had gone—
where was her glove? could she go home now?
—the nurse looked at her chart and said, “Maybe we should wait for the doctor to explain things to you,” and then, “Calm down, now, Miss, calm down. There’s no need for us to raise our voices, is there?” and finally, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your thumb has been amputated at the knuckle.” It took almost a full minute for Carol Ann to understand that the schools of fish swimming in slow spasms across her vision meant that she was holding her breath. The nurse opened a water bottle, placed a pair of the blue pills on her tongue, and helped her swallow them. Then came the long hours of careless assent and easy reminiscence she had dreamed about while she was sitting behind her desk at work. Memory after memory leafed open in her mind like buds on a tree. The time she found her babysitter rubbing one of her mother’s bras against his cheek. The night she spilled her popcorn on the usher at the movie theater. The Matisse and Duchamp posters with which her college roommate had decorated their dorm room. The fountain outside the library where someone had arranged the coins to spell
Mike Rules!
Her recovery suite had a single bed this time, and she could run the lamp or change the position of her mattress without fear of disturbing anyone. She did not recall turning the
television on, but on it certainly was, and she watched two men in cheap suits debating how the Illumination had affected our duty toward animals, or “the lower creatures of the world,” as they kept calling them. One of the men’s ties was sending irritated little glimmers up his neck. An abscessed tooth was radiating from the other’s mouth. Every so often there was a film clip of a stack of poultry pens in the bed of a trailer, the wire cages giving off innumerable white flashes; or a jockey hieing a horse around a track, its knees and shoulders burning with the strain of the race; or a gang of children flinging gravel at a stray dog, beads of light opening on its body as it tried to twist out of the way.

Dr. Alstadt must have gone home already, because the girl who came to replace her bandages that night could not have been older than twenty-five, fresh out of medical school, her hair held back with a pair of tortoiseshell barrettes. At first Carol Ann was too apprehensive to look at what remained of her thumb, and she kept her eyes fixed on the ceiling until the girl was finished, but a few hours later, when the same doctor returned to change the dressing again, a nurse had fortified her with a second dose of the blue pills and she was able to investigate the amputation. It was not as gruesome as she had imagined it would be. She had a neat little half-thumb now, homely but not repulsive, the crease along the center sewn so tightly together that the stitching looked like one continuous black thread. The injury shone like a penlight where the tendons had been sliced apart, and she was aware of the pain, but she did not mind it nearly as much as she suspected she should. The doctor swabbed her thumb with a clear, sharp-smelling liquid that evaporated almost immediately, then cushioned and rewrapped it. She was saying something about the importance of keeping the area disinfected when Carol Ann drifted off to sleep.