Radiance: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

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  Copyright Page

  DEATH—NOT SOME SPOOKY or religious or abstract idea of it but just the practical everyday ingredient in nature—is everywhere close, everywhere a comfortable, cool medium to thrive in, right against the skin as it is. At an age that struck him as premature (forty-two), a certain nondescript, unremarkable ordinary person (named Mark Perdue, an academic physicist who happened to be visiting Los Angeles) was having this surprisingly serene, commonplace realization, that when death does come—if not right this minute, then someday—it will turn out to feel rather like the solution at the end of an old math problem; it won’t necessarily be a wrenching experience, or even an unhappy experience. At the point of finally giving up oneself (one’s most cherished so-called self), it will come perfectly naturally for a man to—like water droplets appearing out of nothing—resolve again into the elements.

  He opened his palm in air combing atmosphere. Death abides always there in constant contact, right at one’s fingertips, in the form of the Periodic Table of Elements’ basic, cool powders and metals and crystals and colorless odors, while the sensation of “life” is merely the rarest, briefest tingle, throughout all the galaxies’ endless tonnage. Great, cold womb. Mineral of all germination. Death is oxygen, it’s not only cobalt and zinc, it’s also nitrogen and carbon. Death is the clear sky of an ordinary day, nitrogen blue at wavelength 475 nm in the visible spectrum. Brilliant death, structural death, life is death: “consciousness” can’t even string together the pebbles and dusts of this universal ore, not really. At every motion of “consciousness,” mortality intervenes, eternity intervenes, in every moment, too quick for the eye, in a billion consecutive brainflashes, like a deck-of-cards shuffle, so time and consciousness may seem to travel continuously and fluidly. As if there were no blackouts flickering between. As if there were no new personalities incarnated between. As if there were always a consistent “self,” or “soul,” freestanding as a Doric column.

  These were the panoply of commonplace old facts that whirled in the face of “Mark Perdue,” physics professor visiting from out of town, while he pressed his elbows in farewell upon the wooden armrests of his auditorium seat in L.A. At this moment, his overriding practical interest was in distinguishing between a heart attack’s genuine symptoms and its imaginary symptoms—because there might be an unavoidable short bit of pain or embarrassment on the way out. It is common knowledge that a sharp little discomfort precisely in the area of the heart isn’t necessarily a coronary. Real coronaries involve more widespread signs. All he had was the chest pressure. He had no arm pain, no shortness of breath, no cold sweat. And forty-two is too young, too young for anything but the imaginary sort of heart attack, envisioned in such detail that the idea can get a grip. And ever since his one big bout with Lyme disease, he has been borne up, regularly, by a bouncy fizz of bizarre nervous twinges and zaps and clanging sensations that, if alarming, or sometimes truly stupefying, amount to nothing.

  Nevertheless, the pure idea of a heart attack does, suddenly, lift a man upon a pinnacle. Because death, one thing to be said for it is that it’s a sure thing. It’s foolproof. And given the circumstances, here in L.A., an efficient little heart attack (a basically thrifty little heart attack if it succeeds) could make sense: Los Angeles is a fatiguing, jarring place, during a hectic weekend for a visitor to be deprived of his accustomed daily routine, far from his usual comforts, far from the assigned parking place in the faculty lot in Berkeley, far from his regular pastry while he hides out at Cafe Med off-campus and afterward his own office’s tarnished sticky doorknob, far from the pervasive campus air of eucalyptus, the smell of blackboard-eraser talcum in the corridors: all are familiar daily medicines preventing heart attacks, all habits to keep a man on paths in life veering from any heart attacks.

  Instead, now, here was Mark Perdue physically, bodily, in faraway Los Angeles sitting in row 7, seat GG, in a very loud concert hall—his daughter had at last mounted the stage, and she’d cued the band with a wink and gone straight into her song—which ought to have been a moment of accomplishment, and lapse, and relief. But that was when he started to think the fixed feeling in his ribs could be the onset, the sensation of an anvil, taking shape inside his chest. And he thought back to the beginning of the weekend, boarding the plane, when he’d felt this exact same discomfort in the heart and might have foreseen this. In a way, he did foresee it.

  He and his daughter, among the SFO–LAX commuters Friday morning, had been shuffling along dragging their carry-ons inside the drafty, dirty telescope that connects terminal and airplane, when he’d felt in his chest the first sigh, the first dilation, the immortal sadness, and he did foresee this whole thing (if only in the misty way one foresees all futures, all possibilities, all consequences and ramifications, omnisciently, the consciousness always editing, among the collapsing wave functions), but he set it aside. He set it aside just as one sets aside an infinite number of possible futures. There were plenty of people lined up behind him to board the plane. And it’s true: he’s too young for a heart attack. And who wants to make a fuss and disturb the queue, once you’ve slipped through with your boarding pass and your carry-on so big it might be flunked by the stewardess at the hatch door? And moreover, getting out of line—and going back to sit down—might well attract the actual, the full-blown, the non-imaginary heart attack.

  Staying in line turned out to be the right thing. He’d made it to this minute without ruining the trip. His daughter was onstage, singing like a pro, standing up there in the furnace of light, making it look easy; she wouldn’t have her debut wrecked by a father’s medical complaint. She wouldn’t have to find out till later. She would come offstage and only then have the little commotion in row 7 explained to her. The JumboTron projected her immense image behind her, along with her name, CARLOTTA PERDUE, sizzling and zooming onscreen. The air of the auditorium had somehow gone smoky, and laser-beam quills bristled from everywhere, seeming to originate in wildly swiveling projectors hidden in secret sockets all over the place. Different strobes kept photographing the multitudes’ profiles and shadows. Onstage the band (the bullying, prodding horn section; the guitarists fronting their walls of amps; the mandarin drummer with his drum set staked out around him like a small village) was driving an avalanche behind his sixteen-year-old Lotta in her thrift shop red dress; she was so confident she never once checked behind herself; she kept them all at her back; she dipped her knees, like a surfer, and she poured her whole head backward, to see the note overhead at high noon, and she held the microphone up. It was the easiest song in her repertoire, “… He’s got the little bitty baby—in his hands. He’s got the little bitty baby—” She would sail through mistake-free. He’d heard her rehearse it a thousand times at home. And this weekend he’d seen the pro musicians nail it effortlessly. They would carry her past any glitches. But still a mistake onstage, even if only a perceived mistake, would cause a lot of grief, and she’d have to be talked down out of it. The fatherly necessity of keeping an eye on the rest of the performance: it’s one of the reasons for a man’s staying virtually, effectively, alive.

  If this were a heart attack, at least he’d be going out of the world symmetrical, as always, heels together, knee
s together, elbows clamped to ribs, fingers tapping the armrests, four times each—north south west east—north south west east—forming that old prerational crux that absolves personal space. A heart attack felt statuesque. A heart attack didn’t feel unjust, either. Society is naturally a competitive place, and at this point, at Berkeley, they had reduced him to a 2:3 schedule, including some undergraduate sections. People would say in his brief time Mark Perdue had made a great contribution to the field. They would also say I wonder who gets his office. For seventeen years he’d had the last door on the corridor, the double portion of windows, the old madrones outside, the remoteness from corridor hubbub. It was where he landed when he first came over and was considered to be a big hire. And realistically now, his death warrant in that place had been sealed on the day when he was standing by the faculty mailboxes and he overheard young Chaterjee say to young Nan Park, We’ve got to keep Perdue out of Karlsruhe this year. He’s dead weight. He’s an embarrassment . That such a thing was now sayable! It was almost a year ago, and its significance kept growing clearer and more logical, because in a big world-class physics department, any elderliness is quickly and efficiently punished; the pithing jab can be delivered right there easily, the faculty-mailbox room for an arena, delivered accidentally by a pair of newcomers like Chaterjee and Park. People had doubtless noticed and discussed his lapses into (Audrey’s expression) “lymebrain”; like the lecture when, in front of a hundred students, he couldn’t remember the atomic numbers of basic isotopes; and the department meeting where he temporarily forgot what the inverse-square law is, when somebody referred to it: everyone in the room could see, and the room got quiet; and the time he couldn’t find his same-old usual parking place and was still wandering the campus as dusk came on, and Dorothy had to leave her desk and come out and lead him to it.

  There was, too, the daily indulgence in Cafe Med’s pastry, to be paid for at last. The pastries in the Med had a waxen sugar drizzle on top, which, over the years, will surely cement the arteries groping the heart’s lower hemisphere, trying to provide oxygen to those muscles, those never-tired heart muscles, even during sleep, always knitting a fresh pulse. Called now by his own personal heart attack, he’d be able to join the fetus Noddy, in the glass fishbowl he imagined as a fetus’s afterlife. Before they knew to abort it, he and Audrey made the mistake of giving it a cute temporary name of its own, and now three months later, the name kept lingering, the name alone, still out there, pecking and pecking at the outer cellophane-membrane of life, the little intergalactic shining cloud, the amniotic bag. Which, right now, estranged by his own chest pain, Mark was seeing through. What he saw, through the sac wall, was Lotta. She was onstage in the blaze of celebrity, holding a microphone, casually whipping the loose cord to unkink it. She at sixteen was so healthily seeking an independent life outside their three-bedroom condo that his influence as a “dad” would soon reach a natural tapering-off point, or had already reached it without his noticing. She’d be living in Connecticut in a few months. If she could figure out a way. Which she would. Being Lotta.

  To be snuffed out, furthermore, by one economical little heart attack far from home would feel like justice because it would be punishment for a kind of infidelity this weekend. This weekend, he and their escort, Blythe, had fallen into a certain quiet understanding.

  It was an understanding that could even arouse in the word escort its more unsavory meaning, something worth staying alive for, unsavory and actually reprehensible, for a man ten years older than Blythe, a man by comparison wise and cold. Over the days here, and the evenings, Blythe’s green eyes had started to pull him down in, in the fathoms of their green, a green he’d underestimated at first. He might have felt some sort of a warning at the very outset in his own flinch of selfpreservative aversion when he first saw her, in the L.A. airport holding up a MISS CARLOTTA PERDUE sign and wearing a kind of parody of chauffeur’s livery, a man’s blazer, too big for her, Charlie Chaplin–like, with the sleeves turned up.

  Blythe, now, she would suffer if he were to keel over and die right here in the dark in the middle of the concert she’d so smoothly arranged. She would feel guilty. She would. She was a woman who took responsibility for all things, for everything everywhere, from Los Angeles’s air pollution to an airline’s baggage delay, or the lack of napkins at the fast-food place. She made it all her fault. If he now slumped over forward in an auditorium seat, it would be just one more thing. At this moment, she was standing at the side of the performance, watching from the shadows at a level below the stage—he could see her down there in the stage-manager’s station—with her clipboard at her hip, her headphones’ mic on its stem hovering at her lips, the Yankees ball cap on her head so she could keep a lid on her own beauty and not upstage the Celebrities.

  His daughter, meanwhile, paced the parapet. That bright stage was the crucible of the future, and she was doing fine in it. She surely would find a way to escape home and get into a Connecticut school, and probably by next year she would be communicating with home only by emails and cell phone photos. In the airport on Friday, when he and Lotta, holding their boarding passes, were shuffling along in the queue through the old, dingy time machine tube toward the plane hatch, he’d been watching her shoulders in front of him, and they were unhappy shoulders, soft looking lately, rounded over in low expectations, and he was thinking how he’d never appreciated the strange life of woman until he’d been a father of a daughter. All his life he had “cherished” women, or even in some way idolized them or just “wanted” them they’d always seemed such alien creatures, differently evolved as slippery dolphins. And that form of devotion would always, no doubt perpetually, be available, to be drawn flashing from its scabbard but he hadn’t known what a girl’s graces were until Lotta, nor felt how over years his world was gradually changing shape so that females’ natural secret regnant ascendancy became more impossible to ignore, not until Lotta, not until he’d started watching a girl take shape from earliest infancy, the fineness of discernment, as well as a soreness, which amounted to a discriminating kind of electromagnetic force, all superpowers in comparison with boys’—and how hard that all was for them, the amazing unremitting meanness of their competition, their fundamental sad practicality, then the encroaching ineluctable weird song and dance of their inferior competence.

  Lotta was smart, and she knew perfectly well that the so-called Celebrity Vacation weekend in Los Angeles was devised to cheer her up because everybody was depressed about Noddy. The pinpoint hole left by that tiny subtraction was turning out to be a solid monument: one of those monuments that, as it recedes in history, doesn’t shrink, but swells, and gains a bulk and a gravitation in getting farther away. Lotta knew she was the family weather vane; it was her assigned job. And as a daughter she showed all diligence in undertaking that burden, the duty of being happy. Or at least seeming happy. Sad to see. The first onset of the lifelong loneliness. Which we all do vanish into. Even the trusting little girl with the shining eyes, even she will vanish into it, the universal business of being, or seeming, “happy.” In the airplane line, standing behind her, he gave her carry-on a nudge with his toe and said, “Wanna trade? They’ll reject this one of mine. It’s too big.”

  She knew he was just razzing and flirting, and she didn’t respond.

  “They give beautiful girls a break. They’re hard on sneaky old guys.”

  She sighed. She had detected the obtuse fatherly strategy to flatter.

  “Ah, don’t scoff. Don’t scoff at the whole inevitable beauty problem,” he said, while a kind of hand inside his chest was just slipping its first gentle but businesslike grip over his heart, the same hand that’s holding the whole world, and the little-bitty-baby, and you-and-me-brother. “If you got beauty, you have to go along. And play along. It’s still a sexist world out there, darling. Your generation might get things fair and square, but, still, you’ll find everything is always gendered and sexual and sexist and sexy.” He stopped there, havi
ng shocked himself, too, because it was true, the Freudian fact so large that he, for one, would never stand back and size it up.

  She scorned to respond or even turn around. Instead she dove to unzip her carry-on and got out her little music player along with its skein of white wires for earphones. He had humiliated his teenager by talking audibly in the boarding queue, and in repentance he promised himself he would think before speaking, and censor all comments except the necessary ones, from now on, throughout the weekend. Just to be in public proximity to a father is shaming. Lotta sometimes, in horror of his banality and gaucheness—or just anticipating it—held herself perfectly motionless, matching her background, the most delicate prey in the world. Her announced dread, this weekend, was that she wouldn’t be talented enough to go on a “Fantasy Celebrity Vacation.”

  As she foresaw the advertised Three Days and Two Nights—recording session, video production, publicity party, stylist consultations, vocal coaching, limo cruise of Hollywood, gala music awards ceremony—she supposed that all the other children would have some special pizzazz and, furthermore, some kind of genuine, actual gift, along with the cunning and the social skills to display their gift to advantage. And Mark knew she might be exactly right. She might be entering in with a bunch of little egotist monsters. Who, however, would be very adroit little egotist monsters, succeeding well at the game. It was L.A. The whole thing could be an environment crueler than those high school corridors. But the brochure literature had been emphatic, in particular about the staff’s care for everyone equally, in the nurturance of self-esteem irrespective of any natural inequities in perceived talent, as the Fantasy Vacations rep said in their first phone call. And she added, Self-esteem for young people is Fantasy Vacations’ stock-in-trade. We’re very mindful of making the whole experience “Not About Winning-or-Losing.”