The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [89]
The truth was that the thread connecting her to the world was as thin as could be. A sunrise here or there, the feel of suede against her skin, the aroma of strong coffee in the morning, and a few moments of forgetful well-being—that was it, that was all she had, and she knew that it could snap at any moment. She had always believed that one day someone would come along and love her and she would understand how to live. Maybe the idea was juvenile, but she had carried it with her all her life, like an ember smoldering in a pouch of green leaves. It was only the past awful year that had forced her to give it up. And now here it was again, the hope that she had finally found him, the man who would wrench her into the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together.
One afternoon, as she was standing at the kitchen counter eating a turkey-and-diced-olive sandwich, she realized that she had made up her mind. She swept the bread crumbs into her palm and brushed them gently, caressingly, into the sink, as if she were stroking a cat. Then she went outside and knelt at the edge of the crevice. Her neighbor was grilling a steak in his backyard. A forsythia bush rustled in the wind.
There she was, and then there she wasn’t, and two large, pale ants were exploring the impression her knees had left in the grass.
It was the last the world would see of her, or at least the last the sun would, the last the sky.
I am here to tell you what happened next.
In Phoenix the streets ran flat and straight, and the jacaranda blossoms made strange ghosts in the slipstreams of the cars, and even at seven, after the sun had set, when the hotel’s valet motioned one of the taxis over for her, the city was clothed with a lustrous violet sky that seemed to have the full force of the day shining inside it, and her driver asked her why she was in town, and, “No kidding. Have you ever read those Stainless Steel Rat books?” and, “Tempe Square, d’ya say?” and she kept flattening her tongue against the sleek patch where her sore had been, reassuring herself that it scarcely hurt anymore, though her tongue itself was already perforated where she had rasped it against her teeth, and it felt as if she were balancing a seed, a small bitter seed, on the tip, and she knew it would be only a day or two before the tiny pock spilled out of itself and ulcerated, but for tonight at least she was better, she was better, and the bookstore smelled of bread and coffee from the bakery next door, and there was something about the way the microphone dislocated her speech, taking her Annie Lennox contralto and the slightly too-long hiss she gave her s’s and making them gigantic, directionless, that she was still unpracticed enough to find amusing, as if she were nothing but a voice, a big spectral voice, and she could lose herself in it, forgetting all the people who sat before her with their tics and abscesses, their blisters and swollen glands, the intestinal disorders that floated in their abdomens like foxfire, the conjunctivitis infections that made their eyes gleam and shimmer, gathered in their chairs between the podium and the horror shelves, and when she reached the end of the story, someone raised his hand and asked, “What’s wrong with your people?” and then, “Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I liked that. I really did. But you write these stories about characters who have great sectors of what one would ordinarily regard as the common human experience entirely unavailable to them. I mean, they don’t seem to realize it, but they do. I’m just trying to understand why,” and the only answer she could think to give was that she had spent the last four years doing exactly the same, trying to understand why, and then there arrived the usual questions about her favorite books and her writing schedule and her teaching philosophy and her cover designs, and after she was finished responding to them, when