The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [87]
The sun had fallen behind the audience. In the deepening shade of the room, it was easy to see their wounds and contagions: the wrenched backs and sciatic hips, the legs cramped with heat lightning, a glittering pathology of sprains, rashes, and carcinomas. Nina sat at the table by the lectern and signed the books she was handed—a half-dozen Girls and Boys and twice that many Twin Souls, plus a mint-edition copy of her ancient small-press poetry chapbook, Why the House Loves the Fire, preserved in an acetate sleeve for the store’s first-editions case.
She had spent too much time talking and had worn the seal off her ulcer. She could feel it shining through her lips. You’ve been stung by a bee or a wasp before, haven’t you? she answered. You know how at first it’s only a faint irritation, and you can almost disregard it, but then the venom spreads and suddenly, in the smallest division of a second, the injury blossoms open and becomes alarmingly, almost hyperphysically, bright? Well, it was like that blossoming-open moment, continually renewing itself, for days and days. Yes, she answered, she had seen a doctor about it. The problem was that nobody knew what caused them. Rumors, she answered. Rumors and folk remedies. Flaxseed oil. L-lysine. Hydrogen peroxide. Warm saltwater. For a while she had tried burning them closed with a sulfuric acid compound that left a cap of white crust over the top, but every time she used it her mouth filled with the sickening taste of aluminum foil, and often the sores would keep expanding underneath the cauterant and absorb it anyway. All the time, she answered. Because words on paper didn’t hurt. No, she answered. No. They had made a ruin of everything she cared about. She didn’t want adulation anymore. She didn’t want love. She only wanted to carve a small path of painlessness and blunted feeling through her life until she came out the other side.
Back at the hotel, before she phoned Wallace, she stood at the mirror practicing her diction. “Hello. Hello. Make me better. Make me better. This is your mother. Mother. Mother.” She would wait for him to ask her how she was doing, and “I’m better,” she would say. Which was true, or very nearly. She would be better soon. She was sure of it. The trick was to speak deliberately enough to rid her consonants of that lunging electric quality that gave her condition away, but not so deliberately that it sounded unnatural or calculated. Even the slightest measure of strain in her voice, and Wallace would pick up on it. He was like a hero in a classic detective novel: Father Brown, Hercule Poirot. She worried sometimes that she had passed her syndrome along to him, that one day in his mid-thirties he would wake to discover that his immune system had broken apart inside him like a crossette, bursting open in an eruption of pus and cankers, and everything he loved had become difficult. She hoped the thought would never occur to him. She didn’t want him to dread growing up.
She called her home number. Someone answered on the first ring, speaking with the heavy gravel of a smoker or a barroom blues singer. She thought she heard him ask, “Who am I, and how can I help you?” but in the initial air pocket of the connection, she might have been mistaken.
“I’m sorry?”
There was a whispered flurry of dudes, and then the man said, “This is the wrong number. Say good-bye. Hang up,” and the line went silent.
She stared at the phone. After a few seconds, the LCD became dim from inactivity, and her face peered back at her with the blank puzzlement of a prisoner in a cage. She pressed redial. Her home number marched across the screen, appearing digit by digit beneath the phone icon transmitting its telepathy waves.
This time Wallace answered. “Hello?”
“Wallace. What is going on?”
“Hey, Mom. Nothing. Just me and the campaigners are taking a break. What’s up?”
“Who was that man