The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [100]
By now everyone along Morse’s route knew him so well that his question—“Any books for me today?”—was merely a formality.
“Well, someone donated a few Harlequins I can give you,” they said.
Or, “I left a couple for you back by the restrooms.”
Or, “Sorry, brother. Try us again next week.”
Or, “Here you go. They’re in pretty ratty shape, but you’re more than welcome to ’em.”
Welcome to ’em, he thought. Well come two um. Welc’m to’m.
One mid-April evening, he had just completed his itinerary when he passed a pile of furniture resting at the base of someone’s stoop, the remnants, he guessed, of an estate sale or an eviction. The lamps, chairs, mirrors, and such had already been picked over, but he found a stack of old books sitting in a cardboard box and loaded them into his cart. When he reached the subway entrance, he fanned them out next to the rest of his merchandise. At the bottom of the stack was a flat wooden coffer that hardly resembled a book at all, but he included it anyway, using it to shore down the corner of the blanket.
A school bus backfired, striping the air with a plume of black exhaust. The sidewalks were bustling with people. The one taking the tiniest, most judicious steps as she walked out of New Fun Ree winced at the blast. She felt as if she were crossing a high wire hundreds of feet above the ground. Her name was Zoe, and for her it had been a long life of falling ill whenever the seasons changed, regarding her body as it slowly broke down and defeated her. Its agonies and odors. Its sad animal deterioration. They always followed the same pattern, her sicknesses: first the raw burred patch of a sore throat spread slowly across the roof of her mouth, and then she felt a tack in her left ear when she swallowed, and then her neck grew stiff, and her eyes burned, and finally her joints ached and her nose ran and every inch of her incandesced inside the bright aura of a fever. But that wasn’t right, was it? The pain was old, as old as she was, but the light was new. It was easy to forget it had not always been there. It was so soft, so intimate, like the colors in a Giroux print. Or that was how she saw it, at least. Some of her colleagues in the Art Department described it rather differently: like the marshy blotches of a Jaeger painting; like the sun-streaked elliptica of an Ozu film. She would not have been surprised if every person in the world observed her own distinct version of the phenomenon, eight billion unique, privileged variations. Another car honked. She tried to keep going. How would she ever cross the street to her apartment? Feed a cold, starve a fever, they said, but she really needed to get something solid in her stomach.
Because the sky was bright and the air was warm, Morse worked later than usual that night. The traffic was fitful, moving forward in clots and gaps, and the moon was already rising over the buildings when three boys dashed across the street, cheating the signal. They leaped onto the curb a few steps in front of a pickup truck and headed toward New Fun Ree, the colors of their clothes shuddering around them. The one whose shoelaces were whipping at the pavement was named Wallace. He had three pizzas from Pie R. Squared in his hands: a cheese, a pepperoni, and for Camarie, the vegetarian, a black olive and pineapple, which was pretty damn disgusting, if you asked him. He was thinking about the campaign he was running—how if the group followed the Eastern path, they would encounter the last of the elder folk, and if they followed the Western path, they would find the seal of Raxhura, but if they strayed toward the Smoke Mountains, the fire genasai would consume them in flames—when he spotted it, a pale wooden box the size of a laptop computer, sitting at the margin of that old book guy’s blanket. Holy shit, was that what