The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [37]
Later, he watched his mom bite one of her hangnails loose. Right away, her cuticle began to sparkle along the curve. (That was the white horseshoe around her fingernail: a cuticle.) His pretend dad nicked himself shaving, and the cut shimmered. And when Chuck pinched himself, a test, it worked perfectly. A cloud of light danced and quivered over his skin.
On Monday, his teacher, Mr. Kaczmarek, was late to school. Rushing inside, he accidentally banged his hand on the door. The whole class watched it flicker like a slow fire. Later, at recess, Mr. Kaczmarek divided them into Bombardment teams. Todd Rosenthal stalked Chuck with one of the red balls. He said, “Let’s see you dodge this, you dumb bastard.” The ball hit Chuck hard and square on the forehead. The other kids gathered around, watching the light spread open. Every single one of them reacted exactly the same way. They began running and hurling their dodgeballs at one another. When the recess bell rang, they all filed back inside. Everyone’s skin was printed with glowing white plates of light. It took almost the whole day for them to disappear. The last one winked out just before the buses arrived.
As usual, Chuck sat at his desk and never spoke. Technically, a “dumb” person was just someone who stayed quiet. Chuck was dumb, and everybody knew it, including Mr. Kaczmarek. But he gave Todd Rosenthal two checkmarks for saying “bastard.”
A week passed, and still nothing had returned to normal. The president appeared on the news to give a speech. He used words like no obvious harm and further study. An awful bright silver cavity kept flashing from his mouth.
Chuck got bored and wandered outside while he was talking. A black sports car was tilted forward onto the street. The car’s front tire had gotten wedged inside a manhole. It was lodged underground, smoking and wailing as it spun. The driver was punching the window and screaming curse words. His nose was leaking blood, shining onto his upper lip. Some of Chuck’s neighbors stood on their lawns watching him. A man in gray sweatpants shouted, “Put it in reverse!” Someone else said, “Want me to go get my winch?” The car’s engine just kept howling like a wounded animal.
There were similar accidents, similar horrible scenes, all the time. Chuck saw stories about them on the TV at night. A bus might tip over speeding around a steep curve. The passengers would stumble from the wreck like gleaming torches. A chef might slice her hand open carving a turkey. The wound would cast a bright light over the counter. A model in high heels might fall on the runway. Her face would come up glittering from the wooden floor. Light kept pouring out of people whenever they hurt themselves.
At first, all the grown-ups were upset by these accidents. Car crashes and mistakes with kitchen knives were nothing new. The strange glow—that was what bothered them so much. Nobody knew what to call the thing that was happening. Soon, though, within days, people began talking about “the Illumination.” The name was everywhere suddenly, a kind of secret agreement. It made the changes in the world seem less frightening.
Chuck heard two strangers gossiping about it in the supermarket. They were old men with thick glasses and rubbery earlobes. He liked the way their teeth clacked in their mouths.
“That war injury of mine’s lit up like Independence Day.”
“You should’ve seen my Emmy with the arth-a-ritis this morning.”
“And look at my trick knee shining—the damnedest thing.”
“She can’t hardly make the coffee her hands clench so.”
“It’s this Illumination is what it is, don’t you know.”
One of them picked up a jar of peanut butter. “Five big ones!” he complained,