The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [31]
“Never mind. Okay. Anyway. I’m sorry. I’m not a decent person. No big surprise, right?”
She closed the door behind her as she left.
He sat down in one of the padded chairs by the bookcase. His knee flared a little as he straightened his leg, but the bone had almost healed, and the luster of the wound was too faint to distract him anymore. This life of his—he was no good at it. He had seen photographs of people whose tragedies had turned their faces to transparent glass, had even taken a few: survivors of house fires and hunting accidents whose grief was distinguished by a wide-open compassion that extended outward in every direction. Not so his own, which had a miserly inward-looking quality that embarrassed him. Sadness had made him smaller than he used to be, less caring. It was his joy that had been distinguished by compassion. I love listening to you pick out a song you don’t know on the piano. I love the way you’ll try to point out a star to me over and over again sometimes: “That one. Right there. Can’t you see it? Just follow my finger.” I love the lines that radiate from the corners of your eyes when you smile, and I’ll love them even more when they’re permanent, honey. I love how you roll your eyes but can’t help smiling whenever I call you “honey.”
The skin he had stripped from his knuckle was buckled against itself, a loose tag of flesh that hung from the middle of his index finger, thick enough that he could still make out its natural color. He bit it off and spat it into his hand. Then, because he did not know what to do with it, he set it on the coffee table. The new layer of tissue on his finger smarted as it touched the air. When he pressed it with his thumb, the light seemed to surge around it, a wobbling crown of silver tinsel. He sat there toying with it as the wooden clock made its keyboard noise. Was he increasing the sting or merely concentrating it? He couldn’t tell. But the flesh took on a crimson tone as he worked his nail into it, the light became a more fixed silver, and for a while the feeling absorbed all his attention. Then he heard a click that sounded like something settling behind the wall, and he turned to see the boy who never spoke to anyone, the scrawny, blue-eyed kid from down the block, staring into the house again. His eyeglasses were touched to the window, and Jason thought, The little spy, the dirty little voyeur, what right did he have, what right did any of them have, to treat his home like a TV show, tuning in whenever they felt like a bit of entertainment? He rose to his feet and hurled Patricia’s journal. It clanged off the window and landed facedown on the rug, its pages flexed into a sort of oxbow. The twigs of the bushes rustled outside, and when he looked again, the boy was gone.
Within seconds, his anger had turned to embarrassment. He had let his frustration get the better of him. Patricia would have been ashamed. He sat back down and put the knuckle of his index finger to his mouth, moistening the barked spot with his tongue. Some time later, he felt a hand on his shoulder and realized he had fallen asleep. His neck was stiff, and the light was making him squint, but he saw that Melissa was back, and no wonder, since as far as he could remember, he had not bothered to chain the door.
“Is it all right if I get my things?” she asked.
“Wait. Do you have somewhere to go?”
“In two months I do. August the twentieth. Until then I can just bum around on other people’s couches.”
“What’s August the twentieth?”
“First semester of college.”
“College? Your whole high school career was nothing but senior skip days.”
“Yeah, at the end it was, but by then what was the point? I already had my acceptance letters. My GPA was like 3.85. I figured I could miss the rest of the semester and still end up with B’s and C’s. I’m not stupid, you know, just self-abusive.” She glanced to the side as if addressing a court reporter. “Not like that,” she said, rolling her eyes. Then she noticed the discoloration on Jason’s finger. “Jesus, you really got yourself, didn