Absolute Brightness (25 page)

As I made my way through the darkened neighborhood, everything looked unfamiliar to me. Without people or pets or the familiar brightness of day, without the many small distractions of my neighborhood that I had come to think of as my right-of-way, every house up and down the street seemed suddenly insubstantial and empty. Even my own house appeared flat and dark, without substance, a stranger to the daylight version of itself.

Only the damp of the dew on the late-night lawns and on my toes as I made my way across the lawns felt real and true. And the only stories I could believe in were the ones shimmering in the black above me in the form of stars. Eventually I arrived at the Turnpike overpass. That too seemed real. The highway beneath me was busy with rattling sixteen-wheelers, buses filled with Atlantic City gamblers, and solitary, all-night, NoDoz drivers. I paused, grabbed hold of the chain-link fence, and felt the pulse of good and evil blazing through the night, on its way to somewhere.

If you are an average person, most of the stones will go wide of their mark.

It was already very late, so I continued to walk. I had, after all, come out with a purpose in mind. I had miles to go.

I made my way around to the back of Travis's house and into his derelict yard. It wasn't much of anywhere really, just a scrap of scrubby earth with thin patches of wild grass jutting up here and there. There were a few rusted and disabled bicycles leaning up against a wrecked wooden fence. I stood in the tall grass near the house and looked up at what I hoped was Travis's bedroom window. I held a smooth pebble in my hand and repeated Claude M. Bristol's mantra to myself:
Try it and you'll prove that it can be done.

Since Travis had been acting as remote and unresponsive as a fence post for almost a week, I considered him a perfect target for my experiment. I threw the pebble and missed. Clearly I didn't believe. Not enough. After seven failed attempts, I realized that I believed in the wrong thing. I hadn't been focused on hitting the window, as I should have; I was concentrating too hard on my belief that Travis and I were meant for each other.

On the eighth try I heard the sharp crack of the stone splitting glass. A light went on inside the room, and Travis's silhouette was at the window. He popped out the screen and stuck his head into the dark.

“Down here,” I said, waving my arms like a crazy person.

“What the hell're you doing?” he yelled back at me. “You broke the window!”

Obviously, he wasn't that happy to see me.

“Forget it,” I said, dropping my arms to my side and walking quickly toward the front of the house. I heard him shout
“wait!”
but I was already gone.

When I was out by the sidewalk, he came bounding out of his house in his bare feet. He was struggling to get his T-shirt over his head.

“Wait up,” he said.

Now stop and tell yourself that you can hit the objective.

I stopped, but that was as far as my belief could take me. I could go no further. I didn't turn around, and since I had nothing to say, I just stood there waiting for the next thing to happen.

“You scared the shit out of me,” he said to my back. “What're you doing here? What time is it?”

When I didn't respond, he touched my shoulder very gently as though he were touching the top of a just-baked cake to see if it was fully done.

“Phoebe?” he whispered.

I swung around and glared at him as hard as I could manage. His face looked crumpled like a pillow, soft and creased with sleep. And judging from his startled expression, he was clueless as to why I thought it was a good idea to show up at his house in the middle of the night. This could easily have been a dream he was having where people do and say extraordinary things for no apparent reason.

“This was a bad idea,” I said, stating the obvious. “It's just that … I thought after what happened last week … I thought there was something between us, something going on. I was wrong. Obviously.”

Don't say it's impossible. Try it and you'll prove that it can be done—if you will only believe it.

A police car happened to be cruising down the street; it slowed and came to a dead stop beside us.

“Everything all right here?” asked the cop. He looked like a younger, slimmer version of Chuck, another cop doing his duty, riding around the neighborhood, discouraging people from being bad.

“Fine,” I replied, trying to relax so I didn't look like a victim.

His sidekick was a lady cop with blondish hair that had been slicked back and pulled into a ponytail. She leaned over so we could see her, and more important so that she could get a good look at Travis. I smiled brightly at her and said, “Hello there.”

“Okay, then,” the first cop said, and the car moved along.

Travis and I stood there without saying anything for the longest time. Finally he said, “You weren't wrong. I mean about coming here.”

 

seventeen

TRAVIS AND I
hung out on his front steps for about an hour while he smoked one cigarette after another. His toes gripped the edge of the step like a bird on a perch, and I couldn't help noticing how surprisingly elegant his feet looked. My own feet have never been anything to write home about, although my toenails were especially good that night due to the fact that I had had them professionally polished for Leonard's funeral.

“So?” Travis asked me, after a lot of chitchat about nothing in particular. “What's goin' on with you?”

I responded by burying my head between my knees. For the next four or five minutes I managed to spot the concrete with my dripped tears. It was a ridiculous outburst of emotion, totally unexpected. Travis placed his hand gently on the nape of my neck and held it there as if he were trying to steady an appliance that had gone out of control. Between my sobs and the apologies for my sobbing, I forgot all about my toenails, I forgot about Travis's feet, I forgot Claude M. Bristol. I forgot just about everything, except for one thing.

“Leonard,” I said, choking back a sob. “What was the deal with him? He was so deeply weird. And he wasn't even with us that long. Why do I even care? And what am I doing with my life? I've lived here ten thousand times longer than Leonard did. I know everyone. My grandmother had a big funeral. Well, a memorial service or whatever. Everybody came. People from her childhood came. But how many people will come to
my
funeral? Electra? We used to be best friends, but now she just seems like a character out of a stupid book I read a long time ago.”

Travis just squinted and looked at a spill of streetlight that was falling on the grass.

“Oh, sure,” I said, wiping the drip from my nose with the back of my hand. “My stupid family would be there, but only because they
have
to. Old Mrs. Kurtz will show up. For the macaroons. But then they'll go on just like before. I won't be missed. Not really. Nothing will change.”

“I'd come,” Travis said quietly.

“Yeah, but you didn't come yesterday. Where
were
you?”

“I was away.”

“Right. Away. Whatever.”

He tossed the last of his cigarette onto a scabby patch of dirt and dead grass. Then he took hold of my hand. With one big yank, he lifted me onto my feet. The screen door screamed for oil when it was opened, and before I knew what was happening, we were inside his darkened house.

The air was still, cool, and it smelled of metal mixed with the fetid odor of the old carpet and the sour smell of beer.

“I shouldn't be here.”

“Shh,” he told me. “My dad's away. It's just us.”

I let him lead me up a steep staircase. Each footstep echoed throughout the house as we went up and up. As we reached the bedroom at the top of the stairs, Travis switched on an overhead light, but then he thought better of it and we were plunged back into darkness that was as stunning as it was sudden. My heart began pounding against my rib cage; it pounded so violently, I was afraid that it might actually break loose, make a getaway, and be lost to me forever. Travis still had hold of my hand, but I placed my other hand over my heart in an effort to calm myself and contain the panic.
Was I having a stroke?
I wondered.
Was I dying?

As soon my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the outline of a mattress lying flat on the floor, flush against the far wall.

“Lie down now,” he told me.

I was grateful just to let my legs buckle under me, since they were headed in that direction anyway. The lumpy mattress took the weight of me without a sound. Travis removed my flip-flops, and each one fell to the floor with a thump. Then I felt his weight beside me. He moved in close, and I could smell the sharp tang of tobacco on his breath mingling with the all-day smell of his body. I could feel the heat of his skin as he pressed up against me, but mostly I was feeling something else, something like desire rising in me, rising, and then, as D. H. Lawrence had described it, I began to feel the rippling brilliance with flapping feathers deep down inside me.
This could be it
, I thought.
It could happen. Get ready
.

Suddenly I remembered Bethany and the stupid certificate that I had signed in the auditorium back when school was still in session. Of course, at the time no one had taken the thing seriously; it was just one of those things you did because you had to. Peer pressure and all. But the fact that I was thinking about it while lying beside a boy who was working his hand into my pants proved that it was more than just a meaningless piece of paper. Somehow by signing my name, I had agreed to install a little Bethany inside my brain, and now her singsong voice was chiming in my ear, “
Just 'cause no one catches you doing something wrong, well, that doesn't mean you won't suffer consequences.
” But
was
it wrong? Or was it exactly what I'd wanted from Travis ever since I first saw him at the mall and kissed him in the parking lot? I needed a minute to breathe and figure it out, but—

“Don't you want to?” Travis whispered into my hair. He was on top of me now. I could feel his ribs pressing against mine, his hipbone digging into my pelvis, pressing up against my thigh; he was moving with a jerky rhythm that wanted my attention, burrowing down as though I was lost ground that he was desperately trying to claim for himself.

And even though I'd never done it before, I knew enough to know that all his heaving and pushing was not what I, personally, was after. Clearly he wasn't so good at this. He was trying too hard.

“Wait,” I murmured, though admittedly I wasn't as forceful as Bethany had instructed us to be if it ever came to this. I said it again, this time louder, and I added a thrust of my forearm for emphasis. My elbow knocked him in the jaw. He leaned back and looked me in the eye.

“What?”

“Nothing, I just think—”

He didn't wait for me to finish. Instead, he sprang up from the bed and let out a wild hiss of a sigh that quickly turned into a mournful cry. For a second I thought he might jump out the bedroom window, but he stopped short, pressed his hands against the sill, and stuck his torso out into the night.

“Look,” he said, as though he were talking to someone floating right outside his bedroom window. “You might as well know instead of hearing it from someone else. I'm gonna enlist.”

“Enlist? What? Like in the army?”

“Yeah. Maybe even the marines.”

What was he saying? And why was he saying it? Why now? This is very sudden
, I thought. Was he trying to get me to pity him, to admire his manhood, to just lie back and let him have his way because this was his last chance to score as a civilian before they shipped him out? I couldn't tell. All I could think of were his feet, his lovely feet, so elegant and almost ladylike gripping the stoop on a hot summer night. What would become of those feet? Where would they take him? Iraq? Like Larry Wheeler, would he come back without one of them? It could happen. He might lose them both. He might not come back at all.

“The world's so messed up,” Travis said as he pulled himself back into the room. “Someone's got to fight the Axis of Evil and all. Might as well be me. And what's happening here? Same old shit.”

He lit a cigarette and then heedlessly tossed the match out into the backyard. He could've started a major fire in the weeds down below. We could've been blown to pieces by some kind of explosion from a gas leak or something. I waited, but nothing happened, just the distant whir of cicadas and the deep hum of someone's central air. Same old shit.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. “I mean is that really what you want to do with your life?”

“It's not my whole life. Four years. I come out and what's the worst thing that could happen? I get a party at the VFW like that loser, Larry Wheeler, and everyone treats me like a hero. Not so bad.”

“You could get killed.”

He shrugged one shoulder and blew a slow, steady stream of cigarette smoke out the window.

“Maybe you should talk to Larry,” I said as I propped myself up on my elbows. “He could tell you what it's really like and all.”

“I know what it's like.”

He leaned over so that he could reach a key on his computer and give it a tap. The screen came to life and illuminated the room with an eerie blueness that seemed equal parts light and shadow.

“See this? It's called
Full Spectrum Warrior
. But it's way harder than trying to make a fat plumber rescue Princess Toadstool.”

“Y'mean like with
Super Mario Brothers
?” I said.

I wanted him to know that I wasn't a total technopeasant. I understood his reference to one of the vintage video games made by Atari, back when video games were still fringe and designed mainly for kids and not for killing. I'd never been an expert, but I had spent some time playing these games on Electra's home computer, and though I found them entertaining and even challenging at first, they didn't take hold in me the way they had in, say, Electra's brother or in Travis. I was more the
Jane Eyre
type. I read books.