The Illumination_ A Novel Part 2

That was when he remembered her journals-seven of them, each page filled from corner to corner with transcriptions of the notes he had left her. She kept them lined up on the gla.s.s and oak espresso table in the room where she exercised. Once or twice, hearing the springs of her equipment stop, he had peeked in to find her stretched out on her Nautilus or her rowing machine, paging through the journals as if they were old diaries she was investigating for traces of the thoughts that used to preoccupy her when she was young and brave, when she was unchanged. He attached the Post-it note to one of his crutches and carried himself across the house. Patricia's exercise room had always been a sanctuary for her, the one place in the house where she could play her music, burn her candles, and sort through her baskets of yarn and crochet hooks in privacy. Now it felt overwhelmingly empty. When he flipped the light on, the objects that greeted his eye had an unusual tidiness to them, a strange and frightening aura of completeness, as if the treadmill and the storage hutch, the stereo and the upright speakers, had all suddenly become imprisoned inside their own outlines. The silhouette of a beetle whisked its legs inside the ceiling fixture. One of the pipes gave a tug beneath the house. In the quiet, the noise made him s.h.i.+ver.

He went to press the Post-it note into Patricia's most recent journal, but beneath the window, on the table where it should have been, there was an empty slot with a boundary of dust around it. Where could it be? He tried to recall-had he seen the book in her hands the day of the accident? Maybe so. But when he went to the front hall and opened the box the hospital had labeled with her name, he found only her clothes, her shoes, and her pocketbook, along with a small plastic bag holding her wrist-watch and jewelry.

She had definitely taken the journal into the car with her. He was sure of it now. He remembered her clutching it to her hip as they left to meet their reservation at the restaurant. "What if I get bored and need something to read?" she had joked, whispering to him with her hand alongside her mouth, "I'll let you in on a little secret-the guy I'm dining with today is a real snooze." But if it wasn't in the box, then where was it? Who would lose a dead woman's handwritten journal? Who would steal it?

Who, as it developed, but the woman who had shared her recovery room. The hospital spent a week or more attempting to track it down before discovering that she had taken it. Apparently, she had adopted it as some sort of charm or talisman, a sad, sick symbol of G.o.d-knew-what illness or unhappiness. She had actually been reading it-reading it!-as if it were her own cache of personal letters. She had spoken with Patricia, had watched her die, had believed he was dead, too-or at least so she said. But none of that excused her, none of it healed him, none of it made his life one bit easier or brought his wife back from the dead. When she finally placed the journal in his hands, apologizing for what she called "this misunderstanding," he felt himself shaking with relief and exhaustion. Absurdly, he found that he was afraid of dropping the book. The idea came to him that it was Patricia herself he was holding, that she had fallen and twisted her ankle, maybe, and given him her hand, and he was bearing her up as she limped through the snow. Soon they would both be inside again. He would place a pillow beneath her foot and kiss her toes one by one, starting with the pinky, and they would drink half a bottle of red wine, then wipe the stains from each other's lips with their thumbs, and she would make a happy little upsy-daisy noise as he carried her upstairs to bed.

Instead, he brought the journal home, took it into the living room, and set it on his lap. His fingers flipped backward from the endpapers, watching as the pages filled with her handwriting. He had no need to leave the Post-it note inside, since she had already written it down. There it was in her own precise script, facing him one more time, the last sentence on a half-empty page, I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall, ending with that oddly turned period of hers, like a toppled v v or a bird's beak. or a bird's beak.

One morning, some six weeks after the accident, his editor woke him from a sound sleep to ask if he knew when he would be returning to work. "I realize you're going through a rough patch, Jason. Grieving-check. Convalescing-check. I get it, I'm with you, I understand. By all means, you should take as much time as you need. But I'm telling you, you're missing out on some of the greatest shots of your life right now. Have you seen the stuff Dawes has been producing? Or Laskowski? Even Christman gave us a front-pager yesterday! Christman for Jesus' sake! I'm telling you, this Illumination thing is really big. Don't just sit there in that house of yours and turn to stone on us. I can't believe that's what she would want, Patricia."

He felt like the priest of some ancient blood religion, incensed to hear her name spoken out loud. "How do you you know what she would want? Maybe this is know what she would want? Maybe this is exactly exactly what she would want." what she would want."

"You don't mean that."

From down the block came the mosquito-like drone of someone operating a lawn mower. Mysteriously, his anger evaporated. "I don't, you're right. Tell you what, Paul-I'll try to have some images for you by the end of the week, okay?"

"Sounds good. Whenever you're ready. No pressure from me on this end. Take all the time you need."

Jason snapped the phone shut and went to the mirror, where he stripped off his pajamas and embarked on his customary preshower ritual, stretching his limbs and tensing his muscles to see how much light they gave off. His eye and his cheek had healed completely, as had his shoulder and his hip, his gums and incisors. One of his ribs still shone with a filmy incandescence, and a new abrasion on his elbow, tacky from sc.r.a.ping against the supermarket meat freezer, glittered like the mica in the sidewalk. Since his discharge from the hospital, he had been dining mainly on microwave dinners and cheap delivered pizza-salty, greasy foods that upset his digestion-and when he turned too forcefully to the side, he could see a pair of bright rectal fissures opening up behind him. Then there was the scar on his abdomen, a small red fold tattooed with a pucker of blue ink. The wound still wept with light occasionally, but only if he distended his belly. It was his knee that continued to worry him, maintaining a constant twilight glow that was run through by cruel white flares whenever he took it out of its brace, sank his weight onto it, or attempted to rotate it laterally. In short, he was still recuperating from the accident. The pain was not as bad as before, though, and he thought he could risk a walk through the neighborhood.

After he had showered and eaten breakfast, he got his camera and set off on his crutches. He wanted to see what images the world would present to him, whether his eye had been altered by sorrow, whether he had any skill left, any talent, and that was how he came to meet the cutters.

He had spent the morning framing the pictures he saw in his lens, capturing them one by one-although he hated that word, capture; capture; hated its suggestion that with a camera you could seize any sight that presented itself to you, stuff it in a cage, and point to it as it jammed its nose through the bars. Better to say that he preserved them, then. He preserved the sight of an old man sitting on a motionless merry-go-round, a long strand of angina s.h.i.+ning through his s.h.i.+rt. The sight of a mother smacking the seat of her son's pants, the burning corona of a bite mark on her arm. A street cop with a gleaming herpes infection on his lip. A rail-thin window-dresser, her sides lit up by s.h.i.+ngles. The sight of a girl afflicted with acne, staring down at herself in a fountain, her face fluorescing up at her from the steel mirror of the water. He was pleased to discover that he had not lost his facility for composition, that the lines and curves of things still sought out their counterparts in the air, their colors laying their shapes out in polychromatic blocks. His camerawork had always been a product of habit and instinct, tilting toward craftsmans.h.i.+p rather than artistry, and maybe that had made him a second-rate photographer-he didn't know-but there was one thing to be said for habit and instinct, for plain old humble craftsmans.h.i.+p, and that was that it wasn't so easy to snuff out. hated its suggestion that with a camera you could seize any sight that presented itself to you, stuff it in a cage, and point to it as it jammed its nose through the bars. Better to say that he preserved them, then. He preserved the sight of an old man sitting on a motionless merry-go-round, a long strand of angina s.h.i.+ning through his s.h.i.+rt. The sight of a mother smacking the seat of her son's pants, the burning corona of a bite mark on her arm. A street cop with a gleaming herpes infection on his lip. A rail-thin window-dresser, her sides lit up by s.h.i.+ngles. The sight of a girl afflicted with acne, staring down at herself in a fountain, her face fluorescing up at her from the steel mirror of the water. He was pleased to discover that he had not lost his facility for composition, that the lines and curves of things still sought out their counterparts in the air, their colors laying their shapes out in polychromatic blocks. His camerawork had always been a product of habit and instinct, tilting toward craftsmans.h.i.+p rather than artistry, and maybe that had made him a second-rate photographer-he didn't know-but there was one thing to be said for habit and instinct, for plain old humble craftsmans.h.i.+p, and that was that it wasn't so easy to snuff out.

He had shouldered his camera and was preparing to head back home when one last image presented itself to him: a pack of adolescents, seventeen or eighteen years old, smoking cigarettes beneath the bus shelter. Their arms and legs were patterned with dozens of freshly inflicted injuries. The glowing lines and tiny luminescent planets on their skin resembled the pits and notches carved into the bus bench. His gaze was drawn to their deliberate, almost sculptural quality. He found it hard to look away.

Surrept.i.tiously, he returned his camera to his eye, moving his head a few inches to the left to compose a shot. Before he could release the shutter, though, a boy with a chain of burn blisters reaching up his arm shouted, "Hey! Dude with the camera! C'mere!"

Jason looped the strap around his neck and crossed the street, steadying himself on his crutches when he reached the shelter.

"What's your name, man?" the boy asked him.

"Jason Williford. I'm a photojournalist for the Gazette Gazette. You guys don't mind if I snap a few pictures, do you?"

"Ten dollars."

"What?"

"Ten dollars, and you can take our picture. Apiece."

"I can't offer you any money. I'm a journalist."

"Ten dollars in cigarettes then. There's a gas station over there on the corner. Call them a gift."

He thought it over. There was a specific shot he kept envisioning, one that would allow the wounds engraved on their skin to flow across the borders of their bodies into the pocks and slashes on the bus bench, like hanging lights echoed in a polished tabletop.

"Two packs. Two packs for the lot of you. That's the best I can do."

"Deal," the boy agreed. Jason was halfway to the corner when a girl perched on the backrest of the bench, her shoes beating out a two-four rhythm, called after him. "Salem Black Labels!"

As soon as he returned with the cigarettes, a boy in a red T-s.h.i.+rt tore the cellophane from one of the packs, knocked a cigarette loose, and replaced it upside-down. Then he tweezed a second one out with his small, knuckly fingers and lit it. "I heard these things are bad for you," he said. "Did you know that quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to your health?"

One of the other kids said, "Huh-I-did-not-know-that. Did you know that smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight?"

Hardly a beat had pa.s.sed before someone added, "Did you know that quitting your health now greatly reduces serious risks to your smoking?" And then they were all working at it together, jockeying to extend the thread of the joke. They pa.s.sed the cigarettes around with a plastic lighter. Jason took advantage of their inattention and began snapping pictures. There was a panel ad on the back of the bus shelter that kept disrupting the balance of the shots, announcing in bold black letters PERSONAL INJURY, MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE, BIG TRUCKS PERSONAL INJURY, MEDICAL NEGLIGENCE, BIG TRUCKS, and time after time he had to find a perspective that would obscure the words. Ordinarily he would have crouched or stood on his toes, maybe climbed over the bench for a better angle, but the brace on his leg had turned such maneuvers into elaborate feats of acrobatics.

In the end, though he wasn't quite able to achieve the image he had envisioned, he found one that came close: the dazzling white stroke of the recent incision on a girl's exposed waist beside a scythelike mark on the fibergla.s.s bench, the one extending into the other in a perfect curve. Quickly, before the girl could move, he released the shutter.

The other girl, the lovely pale fas.h.i.+on-model-type sitting atop the bench, the one who had shouted for Salem Black Labels, gestured to him. "Hey, Jason Williford, photojournalist. I've got a picture for you. Are you ready?" She took three quick drags on her cigarette to make the emberhead glow, then, on the inside of her wrist where the blue vein beat, extinguished it. A powerful smell overtook the air, like the whiff of salt and char at a burger joint. The cigarette sizzled, and the smoke changed color, and a magnificent wave of light came bloating out of the burn. Through Jason's camera, it resembled the great fanning loop of a solar flare. The aurora borealis was dancing over Greenland. Radios everywhere were filling with static. He couldn't help himself: he took the shot.

Within seconds the light had subsided, throwing off a few last sparks as it fell to the surface of the girl's wrist, where it continued to twitch and flutter. A smile was locked on her face. The bays of skin beneath her eyes were moist with tears. He took a shot of that, as well.

Enough, he decided. Laskowski and Christman be d.a.m.ned.

He capped the camera and returned it to his shoulder. "So all those cuts on your bodies-you guys did those to yourself?"

The kids exchanged a glance and broke up laughing.

That evening he was sorting through the pictures he had taken, selecting the ones to submit to his editor, when he realized something: during his long afternoon in the processing room, not once had he thought about Patricia. He had become lost in the familiar beaverish activity of enlarging, fixing, and scanning his photos, and his memories of her had vanished, along with his awareness of the pain in his leg. The little system of injuries that was his body and the one immense injury that was his life-he had forgotten about them both, and when he thought back on the contentment he had felt, a terrific surge of guilt pa.s.sed through him. He had accepted that he would forget Patricia in his suffering sometimes, but to forget her in his pleasure? It seemed monstrous, inexcusable. He forced himself to picture her: the freckles on her back and shoulders, the soft, swelling veins that ran along her ankle, the dimple that appeared on her cheek whenever she tried not to smile, all of it swimming in the blood of the car accident.

He bore down on his knee until the joint spasmed with light. His breathing quickened, and his teeth ground together. He would not allow his pain to forsake him.

Two days later he had an appointment with his physical therapist. The routine was familiar by now. She gripped his shoulder as he executed a slow windmill with his arm-a simple matter of form, since his collarbone had already healed-then had him straighten his back and twist his torso around, inspecting his hip for signs of stiffness or discomfort. She examined his stomach as he performed a sit-up. The scar on his abdomen shone in the glare from the overhead lamp, and she had to switch it off to make sure the source was not internal. Finally she came to his leg, guiding him through a battery of stretches, lifts, and pivots that made his face break out in a hard sweat.

"I have to admit," she said when they were finished, "I'm still concerned about your knee. We ought to have switched you over to the forearm crutches by now. You're behind schedule. Have you been doing your leg extensions?"

He had discovered that when he removed his brace, bending his knee until the ligaments tightened, then jerking his leg rigid, the joint would pop with a violent paroxysm of light. The lacerating sensation would last for several minutes. He could not stop testing it.

"Not regularly, no."

She jotted something down in his folder. Then, contemplatively, she asked, "Did anyone ever tell you you were dead when the paramedics brought you in?"

"No. Wait. I was?"

"You were. The doctors revived you on the operating table. It's a miracle you're alive today. You should have some respect for that miracle and take better care of yourself." She clicked her pen shut with a flourish, as if punctuating the remark. "Okay. Lecture over. Like I said, I'm not ready to switch your crutches out just yet, but I think we can get rid of that brace you've been wearing. You have to promise me you won't test your limits, though. If your knee flares up, you'll lie back and rest awhile. Can you promise me that? Can you? Mr. Williford? h.e.l.lo?"

So he had died, but what did that mean? Had his heart stopped beating? Had his brain shut down? Of the hours following the accident not one memory remained to him: no flash of images, no luminous white tunnel, only the sight of the bridge whirling smoothly, even elegantly, above him, like the long arm of a windmill, and then, some time later, the speckled yellow ceiling of the recovery room. His therapist wrote out a prescription for him. He left with an appointment to return in seven days. As his crutches conveyed him past the staircase and the admissions counter, past the bank of ferns twitching their fingertips in the air, it occurred to him that he had, quite literally, been resurrected. But resurrected into what? he wondered. His life had become unfamiliar to him, cold and disquieting. He felt as if time as he knew it had flickered to a close. The world had ended. The oceans had climbed their sh.o.r.es, the buildings had burst out of their windows, and all the old meanings had fallen away. It turned out that the world at the end of time was just like the world at the beginning: a single set of footsteps printing the gra.s.s, everything lit with its own newness, a brighter and much, much emptier place.

He was pa.s.sing a newspaper box when the front section of the Gazette Gazette caught his eye. Positioned above the fold, filling a quarter-page, was his photo of the girl in the bus shelter. The light from her cigarette burn was not as crisp in the paper's mineral ink as it had been in his own emulsions, but the wound's display of pain, that curved lily blooming so magnificently into the air, was no less remarkable for that. The girl's arm plunged across the frame in a lovely white slash. The cigarette seemed to pierce her wrist like a nail. Behind it one could just make out the blurred fabric of her blue jeans and, in the upper left-hand corner of the shot, the braided green vines of a small tattoo. The photo was a stand-alone, with no companion article. The caption read, "Melissa Wallumrod, 17, practices bodily mutilation with her friends Monday morning near Allsopp Park. caught his eye. Positioned above the fold, filling a quarter-page, was his photo of the girl in the bus shelter. The light from her cigarette burn was not as crisp in the paper's mineral ink as it had been in his own emulsions, but the wound's display of pain, that curved lily blooming so magnificently into the air, was no less remarkable for that. The girl's arm plunged across the frame in a lovely white slash. The cigarette seemed to pierce her wrist like a nail. Behind it one could just make out the blurred fabric of her blue jeans and, in the upper left-hand corner of the shot, the braided green vines of a small tattoo. The photo was a stand-alone, with no companion article. The caption read, "Melissa Wallumrod, 17, practices bodily mutilation with her friends Monday morning near Allsopp Park. Gazette Gazette Staff Photo/Jason Williford." Staff Photo/Jason Williford."

He took out his phone and dialed his editor, who answered, "Jason! How does it feel to be back in the land of the living?"

"It feels fine. But-"

"Well, you earned it, my friend. That's one first-cla.s.s shot you took. What we need now is to get you out on a.s.signment somewhere. The Middle East. South Central. Name your war zone. Someplace where you can really exercise your skills."

"Paul, listen, I have a question for you. How did you trace the girl's name?"

"Girl?"

"The one in the picture. The one with the cigarette."

"Oh, that was easy," he said. "What happened was I sent one of the interns over to the park and, well, okay, no luck there, but then I sent him to the high school during their lunch hour, that one over by the new Target, and bam!-someone recognized her tattoo. The intern found her out behind the building with her friends. Said she was cagey at first, wouldn't give him her name, but that cigarette burn was there on her wrist, all tacky and glowing around the rim. We looked her up in the yearbook. She's definitely the one."

"Thanks, Paul. That's all I needed to know. I'll have another batch of pictures for you by Friday."

Jason hung up and bought a copy of the newspaper, riffling through it to see if any more of his pictures had made it to press. On the back of the City Section, squeezed into a twenty-eighth of a page, was his image of the old man on the merry-go-round, his scalp mottled with liver spots, the cloth of his s.h.i.+rt fissured with arteriosclerosis. There was a Dawes photo on A-2, a Laskowski on A-8, and a second Dawes on B-1, plus the usual dozen or so from the a.s.sociated Press. Jason folded the paper and tucked it behind his crutch. A scrim of clouds drifted over the sun. There were days when everything seemed to have a beautiful underwater lucidity to it, the banks and the traffic lights, the billboards and parking meters, all of them tilting through their planes until something bent or contorted inside them and they s.h.i.+mmered back together. He watched a homeless man with small misshapen sores s.h.i.+ning out of his beard sifting through a trash barrel. He watched a woman in a thin linen dress stepping out of a French salon, her freshly waxed pubis phosph.o.r.escing through her skirt. There was an ache inside people that seemed so wonderful sometimes. He wished he had brought his camera with him.

His brace and crutches had made it impossible for him to drive, and anyway his car was still in the impound lot awaiting destruction, the right side crimped around an invisible concrete pillar, so he hailed a taxi and rode back home. He paid the driver and climbed out onto the curb. From his front door, he collected a religious leaflet signed, "Sorry we missed you, will try again later. 'For the Lord G.o.d will illumine them.'-Rev 22:5." Inside, the silence of the house was broken only by the wooden table clock in the hallway, the one Patricia had picked up at last year's summer arts festival, making its elaborate tap-TAP-t-t-tap-TAP tap-TAP-t-t-tap-TAP noise as it clattered through its numbers. She had always said that it reminded her of the walnuts that came tumbling down their roof every October. To him, though, it sounded uncannily like fingers traveling over a computer keyboard, and for an instant, as he rounded the corner, he truly expected to see her sitting there at her desk in the next room, her eyes following the cursor as it flashed at the bottom of the screen. The sun would be falling in sc.r.a.ps against her back, a hundred fragments of light opening and closing through the shadows of the philodendron. The shampoo she had used that morning would be perfuming the air. He was sure of it. noise as it clattered through its numbers. She had always said that it reminded her of the walnuts that came tumbling down their roof every October. To him, though, it sounded uncannily like fingers traveling over a computer keyboard, and for an instant, as he rounded the corner, he truly expected to see her sitting there at her desk in the next room, her eyes following the cursor as it flashed at the bottom of the screen. The sun would be falling in sc.r.a.ps against her back, a hundred fragments of light opening and closing through the shadows of the philodendron. The shampoo she had used that morning would be perfuming the air. He was sure of it.

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 gla.s.s, 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 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 Eviscerate your memory. Before the chorus took hold, he was overcome with a sense of dread and had to press the stop b.u.t.ton. 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 had killed her, and he felt like a criminal presented with the evidence that would put him away. All these weeks, he had been telling himself it was only a matter of time before everything would return to normal. But it never would return to normal, would it?

He got back up and forwarded to the next song on the CD, but stopped it before the lyrics began, just as the guitar was interrupting the organ. He switched trays and played a few seconds of a cla.s.sic R&B song, If you ever change your mind, / About leaving, leaving me behind If you ever change your mind, / About leaving, leaving me behind, and then a few seconds of a pop tune the two of them had always loved, With you in that dress, my thoughts, I confess, / Verge on dirty With you in that dress, my thoughts, I confess, / Verge on dirty, and then the opening lines of an old jazz standard, A tinkling piano in the next apartment, / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant A tinkling piano in the next apartment, / Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant. He saw how they had all been transformed into something much smaller and grayer. It seemed that every song he knew had been hollowed out, sc.r.a.ped clean of its a.s.sociations, and refilled with memories of Patricia: the smell of her shampoo; the way she rested her hand on his lap; the sound of her gasping his name as the ice took the wheels of the car, then repeating it as they flipped over and spun toward the concrete pillar. It was all too unfair.

When the doorbell rang, he left his crutches lying on the floor and hobbled over to the foyer. It would be a UPS driver delivering a package, he presumed, or maybe a neighborhood activist canva.s.sing the block with a pet.i.tion, someone he could send away with a thank-you and a signature, but when he opened the door, the face that greeted him belonged to the girl from the bus shelter, the willowy one with the burn rings on her arms and legs, Melissa Wallumrod.

He said her name. "What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I bet you can figure it out if you really try."

"Yes, well, about that, I didn't know who you were myself until this morning. That was my editor's initiative."

"Your editor's initiative got me kicked out of my house." She was carrying a green canvas duffel bag that was padded out like a bolster. She swung it onto her feet. "My parents made me pack up and leave."

"I see. How did you find me?"

She took the front section of the newspaper out of her back pocket and read from the caption beneath the picture. "Melissa Wallumrod dot dot dot dot dot dot bodily mutilation bodily mutilation dot dot dot dot dot dot. Here we are: 'Gazette Staff Photo, Jason Williford.' You're in the phone book. After that, it was a piece of cake." She looked him up and down-his head c.o.c.ked, his arms tucked close to his sides, one knee slightly raised-and said, "So, Flamingo, are you going to let me in or what?" Then she shouldered past him, disrupting his balance. A thrill of pain flashed through his leg as his foot struck the floor. By the time he caught up with the girl, she had already dropped her duffel bag on the carpet and set herself on the arm of the couch, apprehensively, experimentally, like a cat seeking a high place from which to avoid being startled. Staff Photo, Jason Williford.' You're in the phone book. After that, it was a piece of cake." She looked him up and down-his head c.o.c.ked, his arms tucked close to his sides, one knee slightly raised-and said, "So, Flamingo, are you going to let me in or what?" Then she shouldered past him, disrupting his balance. A thrill of pain flashed through his leg as his foot struck the floor. By the time he caught up with the girl, she had already dropped her duffel bag on the carpet and set herself on the arm of the couch, apprehensively, experimentally, like a cat seeking a high place from which to avoid being startled.

"Make yourself at home, why don't you."

"I intend to."

And she meant it.

He asked her the obvious question. "What are you doing here?"

"I need a place to stay," she confessed. Apparently, she had decided that his house would do. Nothing he said could dissuade her. Maybe if she apologized to her parents...he was certain they would..."Ha. Obviously you don't know Tom and Doris." Why didn't she try one of her friends? "Um, h.e.l.lo? I guess you missed the paper this morning. I'm a bad influence-'the girl who practices bodily mutilation near Allsopp Park.'" But why on earth should he allow her into his home? Didn't she think that was asking too much? "Hmm, I don't know, let's see. Maybe because you're the one who came prying into my life and stirred everything up. Can you honestly tell me you don't bear some responsibility for that?" Well, then, what made her so sure she could trust him?

She scoffed. "Please. Look at you. You're in even worse shape than I am."

Finally, out of exhaustion, and because she had played on his highly reactive sense of culpability, he gave in. "One night."

She smiled. "So where's the guest room?"

He did not know what to do with a teenage girl, how to look after her or keep her entertained, so he left her alone to read her manga and listen to her iPod. Late that afternoon, he went to the playground at the end of the block to snap a few pictures. Afterward, he stopped at the mini-mart to buy something for dinner. When he got home, she was still there and had not stolen anything, so he made her a meal of spaghetti and meat sauce with a salad of iceberg lettuce and shredded carrots, the kind that came in a transparent plastic pouch. It was the best he could do. That night, he sat down with her to watch TV, a game show she liked about a dozen couples who raced each other around the world to win a million dollars. It had begun to thunder and rain. The house felt close around them. She excused herself during a commercial, and when she came back, she had a new burn mark on her ankle, glowing like a heating coil. A sheen of clear tissue fluid wept from the center.

"You must love this s.h.i.+t," she said, falling onto the couch beside him.

"Excuse me?"

"The Illumination." She gestured at the TV screen, where one of the contestants had fallen off a camel, sc.r.a.ping a radiant stroke of red war paint across his forehead. Behind him the beast was chewing its tongue and swatting its tail. Its knees presented a constellation of distinct silver points. "For a photographer, this must be like Heaven."

"Heaven? No, I wouldn't say that." He was thinking of all the times he and Patricia had sat on the couch sharing popcorn while they watched a movie, his hand hovering solicitously at the rim of the bowl as hers reached inside, then hers hovering there as his did. That was his Heaven, and it had come and it had gone. What this was, he didn't know. Heaven-plus. Heaven-minus. "Why don't we call it purgatory?"

She must have interpreted the remark as a joke, because she answered, "Very funny, Jason Williford," and jabbed him in the gut. His scar began to send out circles, a slow wave of them, traveling across his chest and stomach as his wound throbbed with pain. Fascinated, she pressed her palm to the spot and watched the light radiate past her fingers.

That night, in his room, he lay awake listening to the girl across the hall drumming her nails against the headboard of her bed. He imagined her stepping through his door, her cuts and burns sketching faint traces in the air as she knelt beside him and stroked his brow, saying, "Very funny, Jason Williford. Very, very funny," and for what reason? There was another body in the house, another voice, another set of hands enacting their own private ceremonies. He was not used to it. But then it was temporary, and he supposed he would not have to get used to it.

The next morning, around ten o'clock, when the girl woke, he asked her whether she was planning to go to school that day. She shook her head listlessly and padded off to the kitchen in her pajamas. When she came back with a soda, he asked her why not, and she popped the can open, sipped at the overflow, and answered, "Senior Skip Day." That seemed plausible enough, but the next day she said the same thing, and then it was the weekend, and still she had not gone to school, and still she was sleeping in the guest room.

Each afternoon she went out for a few hours with her handbag and her iPod, but she always returned before he chained the door for the night. On Monday, she said to him, "I hope you don't mind, but I borrowed the key from that hook in your office. I thought it would be simpler if I made myself a copy." On Tuesday, she said, "You know, most of the time you walk around here like your best friend just died, and then it's like this wind blows over you and you're perfectly happy all of a sudden. Why are you that way?" On Wednesday, she said, "So what kind of a person was she? Did she have any hobbies? You know, like tennis or something?" On Thursday, she said, "What the f.u.c.k happened to the paint on your kitchen wall?" And on Friday, she said, "Why didn't you two have any children?"

"We were talking about it. She wasn't ready yet."

"Jesus." She accented the word in the Irish way: Jay Jay-sus. "I'm sorry."

"Why be sorry?"

"I don't know. I guess I just mean that it might be easier if you had some little half-version of her running around."

But would it have been? In the year leading up to the accident, he had hinted as often as he thought he could get away with it that he was ready to have a child, but Patricia had always just smiled foggily at the suggestion, saying, "You'll be a good father," or, "Snips and snails and puppy dog tails," some amiably circ.u.mspect remark which made it clear that she felt no urgency about the matter and that if there was a clock ticking, it was not hers. He had wanted a child so persistently back then, so powerfully, or at least he had believed he did. When Patricia ran the bathroom faucet in the morning to wash her face, in his ears the sound disguised itself as the babbling of an infant, and late at night, when the wind chimes touched pendants on the back porch, the bells were like a dream of tinkling mobile music. Now, though, it was obvious to him that what he had really wanted was a family, not a child. He was grateful-relieved-that there was no "little half-version of her running around," no face that looked more like its mother's every day, no vessel for all his grief and contrition. There were more than enough children in the world already. He saw them every day in grocery stores and fast-food restaurants and the playground at the end of the block, laughing and shouting at one another, so careless and daring. They played slapping games that left luminous blotches on the backs of one another's hands. They climbed fences and tackled one another, fell off bicycles and rolled down hills, until their bodies were resplendent with bruises. They held races on busy sidewalks, das.h.i.+ng past grown men and women lit all over with injuries of their own. Everyone had his own portion of pain to carry. At first, when you were young, you imposed it on yourself. Then, when you were older, the world stepped in to impose it for you. You might be given a few years of rest between the pain you caused yourself and the pain the world made you suffer, but only a few, and only if you were lucky.

One night, Jason took his camera to the pedestrian mall, where a local hardcore band was performing on the summer stage. It was a softly glowing June evening, with a ghostly moon hanging in the treetops. The sky was the kind of barely shadowed pink he had noticed before in the linings of seash.e.l.ls. Fifty or sixty teenagers were huddled together on the plaza, leaping at one another and hurling their shoulders around as the band went charging through its songs, two or three minutes at a stretch.

Jason found a spot on the brick curb surrounding a pumpkin ash. He was close enough to the mosh pit that occasionally, when some poor kid was expelled from the scrum like a watermelon seed, he had to hold his crutches out for protection. He aimed his camera into the audience and began shooting. The motion of the crowd was too frenetic for him to select his images with any care, so instead he relied on instinct and chance, taking picture after picture as the dancers slammed into one another's bodies. He found the crossed metal struts of the stage and tried to keep them centered in his lens. As the sun faded from the sky, the dancers and their thousand little traumas became more prominent. The bruised faces and wrenched elbows. The muscle strains. The split fingernails. The chipped smiles. The gashes they opened in one another's calves and ankles with their steel-toed boots. He would end up with a time-lapse study of teenage recklessness, he imagined, the kids' bodies slowly disappearing into the darkness until nothing was visible but a bright field of lesions, a Muybridge series of scratches and contusions. He stayed there snapping pictures until the band finished its set and someone in the audience shouted, "Break your guitars," and the singer said, "Only rich a.s.sholes destroy their instruments," and then the crowd came apart in a few last halfhearted scuffles.

Jason was looking forward to printing the photographs, spreading them out on his table and selecting a few to submit to the paper. For the first time since he had returned to work, he did not know what he would find. The mystery had roused his curiosity. When he got home, though, the front window was casting a quadrangle of light across the yard. Inside he found Melissa lounging in the living room with seven or eight of her friends. He recognized a few of them from the bus shelter-the boy who had bartered with him for cigarettes, the girl with the curved incision on her waist. His house had been occupied by strangers. The air had that strangely saturated quality peculiar to places that have suddenly fallen silent, as after a dirty joke or an argument, and the tension was strong enough to stifle any irritation he might have felt. He began telling the kids about the concert and the mosh pit, the floating star map of injuries. "I'm surprised you guys weren't there."

A boy lying on the floor said, "Not our kind of music, man." He had folded one of Jason's throw pillows across the middle and was using it to prop up his head.

"What is your kind of music?"

"We're into show tunes."

"Shut up, Bryce."