Illumination
Copyright 2015 by Roman Theodore Brandt
Table of Contents
Illumination
About the Author
Dedication
Illumination
College took me a long way from home. I met burnouts in back alleys and found god in vacant bedrooms, clawing at furniture to stand up with vomit in my stomach. I learned new ways to pronounce familiar words so that when I went home for the first time, I had an accent. Everyone said so. Even my little brother. Then we all just sat around the table staring at each other until my mom said: "So you're doing well then?"
"Yeah, I guess."
She laughed and shoved a forkful of broccoli in her mouth. "That's good, honey. That's great."
"He's finally doing something with himself," my dad said from his spot, and then he chuckled.
"Yeah, I guess I am."
And that was it. My brother got up to go to so-and-so's house. Who knows? I was a wreck my first time back. I went back to my dorm room and tried to imagine being an adult. Paying bills, getting married, killing myself on an assembly line like my dad.
"You need to get a useful degree, Mark." My dad's voice on the pay phone in the building lobby.
"Dad, I don't want a useful degree. I like what I'm doing. I like my major."
His side of the line crackled and he said, "Well, that's fine, but what about after school? When school's over, what about that?"
"I like my major."
Silence, then he sighed. "Well, it's your life to ruin." And he laughed. "Your mother says hello." And he says to her: "Linda, why don't you tell him that yourself?"
And the other phone in the house picked up. "Honey," my mom's voice said over the sound of the dryer running. "I hear computers are the future. Why don't you do something with computers?"
"I'm not your spokesman," Dad said to her over the phone, and laughed at the feedback between the receivers. "Linda, don't stand so close with the cordless."
"I just think you could do better, honey," Mom said to me, her voice echoing back and forth across the phone line.
So I had my parents' vote of confidence within a month of leaving.
Sometimes, I found myself at parties, sitting on dining room tables like Buddha, legs folded under and calm as Technicolor. Parties were a trip. I'd never been to one before the night I met Cody. I drank too much and sat up with him on strangers' couches talking about Renee Descartes. I thought, therefore I was. We had that in common at first, Cody and I. Well, until he remembered David Hume. Then, he could prove nothing. I realized the next day that we were in the same Philosophy class, but not the same movement.
Cody was like finding a puzzle piece you didn't realize you were missing until right then. Cody fit and made the picture whole. He moved into my dorm room when my roommate flunked out or hung himself or something. We ate pizza in the morning and walked around in our underwear together. We spent our days as blinking vampires, squinting into the sun and trying to relearn English from the night before. We stole sandwiches from food service and scratched strangers' phone numbers into the backs of toilet stalls. Every night we condensed and shrank into the confines of our dorm room and sat on our beds, talking existentialism and alcohol.
"What are you afraid of?" I asked him from the bottom bunk one night.
After a minute, he said, "Dying, I guess."
"What else?"
"Car accidents."
"Yeah, you and me both."
I looked over at the window at our view of the gas station across the street.
"Car accidents don't exist, though," he said, and he laughed.
"Tell that to those sad sacks on the freeway last week."
He was quiet for a while, and then he said, "What about you?"
"Huh?"
"What are you afraid of?" He asked.
I sighed and looked over at my backpack, full of homework I ought to do. I took a swig of the pepto at the foot of my bed, because my stomach was killing me. "My brain," I said finally.
He laughed. "I like your brain."
I guess that made one of us. My brain and I agreed to disagree on bedtime, meal contents and musical taste, and eventually even on more important topics like Cody. I didn't know what Cody and I were. I didn't know what to call it. I called it a lot of things in my mind, but nothing ever made it out of my mouth because nothing made sense.
"What is this?" he asked me once over iced coffee.
And I just shrugged. "What?"
"This. What is this? What are we? What am I to you?"
I just smiled at him and shrugged. "Let's have babies, I don't know."
"I want more than that," he said.
"Listen, why does it have to be anything?"
"I don't know," he said. "I just want to know. I like to know these things."
I stirred my coffee with the straw and said, "Why's everything have to be complicated?"
"Because the world is complicated." He took a sip of his coffee.
"The world needs to calm down." I told him.
He laughed and we never talked about it again until the night before my birthday. He was coming home with me in the morning, and I guess I was going to tell Mom about him. I just didn't know what to tell her. Cody knew what I should tell her, and I guess I did too. I didn't even know how to tell myself.
"Mom always makes a big deal out of my birthday." That was the best I could say about the whole thing, and my stomach was full of lead thinking about it.
"What do you think she'll say?"
"About what?"
Cody looked over at me from his chair. There was this awful silence, and I knew I should just say it. I needed to just get it over with.
"Don't you ever get tired?" He asked quietly. He was serious now, and it made me squirm.
"It's not a big deal," I told him. "I don't know why it has to be a big deal."
"You're not going to tell her."
"No. I might. I don't know."
He shrugged and got up out of the chair, stretching. "It doesn't matter. Let's go."
So we went to a friend's house for my birthday. I don't remember much about that night. I remember jumping on a trampoline and dancing by the bonfire, and Cody's eyes shining in the glow of the nightlight in some dark bathroom. I remember him laughing in my ear. I threw up and took a shower with my clothes on and that's when it gets really foggy.
I guess at some point, Cody helped me get back to our room. I think I'd be dead without that kid.
*
Sometimes I dream that I'm in a dark room, and it's like nothing's there in the dark at all. There's no sky, no stars, no grass or carpet or anything else. I think, therefore I am. I think, therefore I am, damn it. I'm in a void, and all my words are silent.
The world is silence, and nothing makes sense. My blood is 90 proof. I could bottle it and sell it if there were still liquor stores or grocery stores or even a gas station shining in the dark, flickering lights buzzing cold and florescent over a parked car. And then I'm there, I'm there, and it's so bright it hurts. The cooler's got shelves and shelves of 90 proof boy blood, and there's a car at the end of the row of gas pumps with the horn blaring, echoing into the night. The trunk is crumpled up into the back, and the front bumper is buried in the pole by the pump.
Go look, I tell myself. I dream in the present tense, because I live in the past. I don't ever look in the car, though, because I already know what's going on.
*
Cody was a bad driver. He was all over the road because his parents didn't let him drive until he was eighteen, and only because he was going to college. I didn't have a car, and this was my first trip home that I didn't have to take the bus.
I guess it was about noon
that Cody and I looked at each other through our sunglasses and laughed.
"You look like shit," he said.
"You look shittier."
He laughed again and ran a hand over his buzzed hair and said, "You want to get some food?"
"Don't say food."
"Alright."
We sat in silence and watched the cows and horses and sad farmhouses passing on either side for a while, and then Cody said, "I think you've got a drinking problem."
I didn't know what to say at first. I felt kind of cold, and my stomach was tight. "Yeah, maybe," I said finally. "I think we both do."
He shrugged, and I watched the landscape turning into my hometown.
"I guess we're here already," I said.
He squinted behind his sunglasses, looking around at the dead storefronts crowding around the car like live-in coffins. "It's only an hour from campus," he said after a minute.
And I said, "I was hoping it was longer this time."
It just made Cody laugh.
"I had the dream again," I told him.
He sighed and said nothing for a while, and then he said, "Yeah, so did I."
"I need to get more pepto later," I told him.
"You've been drinking that a lot."
"Yeah," I said, and I looked down at my hands, thinking about my stomach. "I do it for the attention," I told him.
A few more minutes brought us to the pocked parking lot of the roller rink my mom had decided to use for my birthday. Mom met us at the door.
"Let me look at your eyes," she said, and she snatched my sunglasses right off of my face. She sighed and pressed her lips together so hard they turned white. "Well, I guess we'll ride home together, yeah?"
"Cody can drive me. He drove me here."
Her eyes darted to Cody. "Cody? Oh, yeah. Cody." She faked a smile and held out her hand but he didn't know what to do with it, so she dropped it. "Are you a hugger?" She asked.
"No one hugs anymore, Mom."
She smiled at me. "That's a shame," she said quietly. "Alright, boys. Come on in and we'll do presents." And she went back inside, leaving us outside.
Cody laughed and started for the door, holding it open for me. "Presents, boys," he said.
So we went inside and tried to have a good time. Mom and Dad got me a gift card and my brother graced me with his presence and figured that was good enough. Cody and I sat in a booth because neither of us felt like skating.
"This is fun," said Cody, and it made me laugh. His eyes were red, and he blinked at me.
"We look awful," I told him, and he leaned over against the wall beside him.
"Speak for yourself," he said.
I looked out at the rink, at my mom and dad and my little brother skating and I wondered if they ever thought of dying. So many people die these days it's disgusting.
"Is this real?" I asked Cody.
"Is what real?"
My head was pounding. The room was all lights and colors and strobes, the speakers blaring music so loud we were screaming over it. It was so loud our drinks were rippling.
"It's loud," I said to him, and he rolled his eyes.
"The world is loud," he said, looking away.
"My head hurts." I closed my eyes and the music sounded like a horn blaring, a single car alone at a gas station, honking and honking.
"Don't do that," Cody said, and my eyes snapped open.
"Sorry."
"Don't think about it," he said, and then we just sat there, breathing.
I don't know when I first saw it, but I realized what I was looking at when Cody came back from the bathroom.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked him.
"What?"
So I shut up, but under his skin, his veins were glowing blue.
I looked over at my Mom. She waved at me, and her veins were florescent green roadmaps under her skin. I decided not to say anything about it. I see things sometimes.
"You see it?" Cody asked.
"Yeah, do you?"
"Nope," he said quietly. "Are you going to tell her?"
"About what?"
He clenched his jaw, tense and angry. "Let's forget it then," he said. "I don't want to live like this, Mark."
"Like what?"
He just shook his head and looked out at the rink. "Are we gonna skate or what?"
"I don't know how."
He laughed, because it was funny.
Mom pulled me aside later and smiled at me, sipping her drink. "Hey, so Cody, huh?" She yelled over the music and winked at me, glowing green in the dark.
"Mom, speak English."
She frowned and put her drink down onto the bar counter. "Listen, I know everything, okay? I'm everywhere, like god."
I laughed, and she smiled. "Mom, stop."
"There's nothing you want to tell me? Something about Cody, maybe?"
My stomach started gurgling. "I don't know."
She smiled again, but it was a sad smile. "I had the dream last night," she said.
"I don’t want to talk about that," I told her.
"You know I worry about you at college," she said.
I shrugged and started mapping escape routes with my eyes. The emergency exit was the fastest and loudest way out, but I just stood there.
Mom sighed, picking up her drink. She finished it off and put it back. Then, she looked at me and said, "I wish you could talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Okay, alright," she said, and she looked over at the rink. Dad and my brother waved at us, orange and yellow glowing veins, and she waved back, but I just stood there.
"I think orange is a good color for your father," she said.
"What does it mean?"
She looked at me. "What does what mean?"
"Orange."
"Oh, I don't know. You never know until it's over." She turned and walked away toward the benches to put her skates on, glowing green under her clothes. I looked down at my arms, and my veins were radioactive pink in the dark of the roller rink, glowing in the shadows the strobes left behind, pulsing pink to the blaring music.
Don't mind me. My life is surreal. I think, therefore I am crazy.
I had a professor last semester who wrote my name in pink on the whiteboard at the front of the room. "What does pink mean?" he asked the class.
I wish I could remember the answer.
Things went as well as could be expected, I guess. Mom skated into a table and decided she was done for a while and came rolling up to where my brother had just sat down across from us.
"Move over, Sweetie," she said, collapsing onto the seat. My little brother hates these things. He was bored in five minutes, but Mom had him cornered in our booth after Dad went off to work.
"It's a shame your dad has to work," Mom said to me, but she said it to no one.
"It's nice to finally meet you," Cody told her, and she smiled over at him, looking tired. Tired of smiling, tired of compliments, tired of living.
"Likewise," she said. "I'm glad Mark has a friend at college."
"It's not a big deal," I told her.
"I'm just saying," she said.
"My head hurts."
"Eat some pizza, Mark. It's good."
So I took a bite of pizza and my stomach immediately hated it. "I can't eat any more," I told her, and she sighed.
"He drinks," she told Cody, like Cody wasn't there last night helping me. Then, she said, "You might keep an eye on him."
So that was it. I was thirteen again. My stomach started gurgling. "Mom, I need to tell you something."
I felt Cody's eyes on me, but I couldn't look at him. "I have to tell you something really big."
And then I was stumbling out of the booth and down the hallway to the restroom, ready to paint the walls with everything I'd ever eaten.
I ran into the stall door and it was locked, and I hit my head. I might have thrown up. I don't remember.
*
It's dark again. It's cold
and there are stars now, rotating far away, all of them dying and being reborn and vaporizing planets. Red giants and white dwarfs shining in the dark. I can almost touch them. Then they're gone.
Don't look, don't look, but it's too late. There's a gas station alone in the dark, buzzing bright, flickering in the night. No attendant behind the counter, no gas in the tanks under the lot. No world beyond the lot.
"I think, therefore I am," I tell myself, and my voice echoes across the lot to where the car sits. My voice is the car horn, the alarm blaring. "I think, I think, I think."
The car is blue. The light is white. The alarm goes on forever, and it's so loud I have to cover my ears. I've got my hands over my ears and I'm screaming and screaming, and then there's nothing, only darkness. Darkness again, darkness forever. Then there's a light.
I think, therefore I am. I am Renee Descartes, and I like pizza. I am illuminated. I can philosophize with the best of them.
I love you, Cody. I love your blue blood and your blue heart and your blue aorta. I love your eyes, with your veins glowing blue, spinning toward me in the dark.
"Aren't you tired?"
"Of what?"
"Hiding."
I look up into the mirror, and I'm in the restroom again with my eyebrow bleeding and my eye red. I'm bleeding from my face, and I look like hell.
"Hiding what?"
And then the world goes black, because there's nothing to hide.
*
There was a needle, and I hate needles. I remember saying "Stop, stop," and crying when it went in, and then I was attached to a saline bag on a pole. I was a simple machine, pulleys and levers and memories. My eyes were overflowing, and I just kept crying.
Cody was there, and Mom was there talking about coordination and bad judgment. I closed my eyes and when I opened them my face hurt.
"Don't sit up," Mom was saying, and someone was pulling my face off, I swear. "They're putting in stitches."
Cody was watching in horror.
"You like to watch," I said to him.
"It's the drugs talking," Mom said.
"You are drugs," I told her.
"I most certainly am not," she said.
Then they took me to another room and I don't remember the rest. I didn't have any dreams this time. It was just darkness, just a few seconds in a void. I couldn't tell you how long I was actually out.
I woke up on my parents' couch and my face was throbbing. "Cody," I said, and my voice was thick like syrup. My mouth was full of saliva, and it was all over my pillow. "Cody help."