The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [26]
He had such memory lapses several times a day, but they never lasted for long. Soon enough he would begin thinking about her half-finished diary of love notes, and the way he kept asking after her in the hospital, and the smooth expanse of sheets on her side of the bed, and he would have to wrench his knee to distract himself from where his thoughts had taken him.
He was walking through the living room when he spotted someone peering in the window—a small round head, cut off at its shoulders like the ornamental sphere on a newel post. It was the boy from down the block, the one with the pale blue eyes who never spoke to anyone. He was staring hard into the room, his hands cupped around his face like a diving mask. He was so absorbed in whatever he was looking at that Jason remained invisible to him until he drummed his fingers on the glass, a sound that startled the boy and sent him tripping out of the bushes and across the lawn, then curving down the street until he vanished into the darkness of his garage. What had captured his attention? Jason wondered. The couch and the coffee table, the armchair and the television—everything was in its place, none of it at all unusual. For a moment, he entertained the notion that the boy was some sort of tormented mystic, able to see the spirits of the dead. It was a floating little Hollywood fantasy in which Patricia had returned to the house as a ghost, and the boy could see the dead, but he could not hear them. Why couldn’t he hear them? Because the dead had no voices—maybe that was it. Or because his talents were too small. Or because he was only a kid and he had not yet grown into them. Whatever the reason, he had been watching Patricia’s lips as they formed the words she wished to say. There was something she needed to communicate before she faded into the next world, a message she wanted to leave for her husband.
Tell him that …
Tell him I …
But he did not know how to finish the sentence.
He found himself wandering into the room where she used to exercise. There was still a CD in her stereo, he noticed, and, out of habit, he pressed play to see what she had been listening to. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even sing, I’m very scared for this world. He recognized the song right away, with the shrilling of the crickets, that plaintive voice arching out over the mandolin. Eviscerate your memory. Before the chorus took hold, he was overcome with a sense of dread and had to press the stop button. He shook his head involuntarily, like a dog throwing off crests of water. He sat down on the stationary bicycle. He had known the song for twenty years, longer than he had known Patricia, longer than he had known how to drive or write a check. Its meaning in his life ought to have been incorruptible. It was about his own mind when he was thirteen, the endless afternoons he spent lying on the carpet with his headphones on, the yard work he needed to finish and the girlfriends he wished he had, the innocent freedom and sadness of it all, but now somehow it had become blighted with the knowledge that Patricia had been listening to it the day of the accident, or the day before, or she had been preparing to listen to it the day after. Every note was a note she knew by heart, every word a word she used to sing, and she was gone now, and he