Radiance: A Novel Read online

  Mark added, “If, as you say, this Rod was personally, psychologically, built so that there was no way out for him.”

  I.e., maybe Rod was a man who’d had only lovelessness, as his sole resource, his ace card. Deep at the bottom of his personal bag of tricks, his survival kit, was lovelessness. Such was the general impression he was getting. So fine: let substance addiction take a man like that. He was never entirely all there to begin with. Euthanasia was always his exit, from the get-go. The girl had done her duty, poor thing.

  A change of subject visibly crossed her mind as she smiled with a fondness, “Sorry about Billie. Tonight.”

  Before they’d left the Studio Lot, Billie Ahrsatz, in her tersest tones, had warned Mark that his daughter was officially off the tour now. Fantasy Vacations was not legally responsible for her. All their agreements were null and void. She would be excluded from all further Celebrity Vacation activities and no portion of the Perdues’ money would be refunded. The same would go for Bodie and the Lostigs.

  “Billie’s all right,” Mark said. “She’s just doing her job. And who knows: when the kids come back to the hotel safe and sound …”

  “She just legally has to warn you. As soon as they show up, they’ll be back on the program.”

  A lull grew in the compartment again, and the topic of Rod’s death saturated right back. Maybe Mark was interested in making mischief of some sort. He asked of Rod’s entire problem, “But really why?” and for emphasis he reached out and pressed—or tapped—her knee. Touch was allowed in this last hour, because their chastity had been so perfect—and because they were sitting out front where the kids might come by any minute and see them, so they were safe that way—and because this conversation about the AIDS-ridden, bearded Veronica Lodge was so, almost, ghoulish it refrigerated any threat of eroticism, in the space of these two bucket seats, with intervening gearshift.

  Blythe phrased his question, “Why was Rod so fucked-up?”

  She would have to think about that, looking out into the source of coppery light all around the front entrance of the hotel. Dozens and dozens of little lightbulbs, row upon row. She mused, “He had a wonderful family. I love his family. And we’re still,” her two scissoring fingers tapped together.

  She thought for a while. Then, still looking at the hotel entrance, she said, “Poor doorman. He’s in there. He’s in there with his white gloves, waiting to see if we’re going to need help with our luggage or whatever. Wasn’t it sharp of the night clerk? To call about Bodie when he left? I don’t see the security camera. ’Cause I suppose this is where they got a shot of little old Bodie wheeling his way up the road.”

  Then she turned to Mark’s question, “It’s just how Rod was. I guess being so completely a ‘user,’ or ‘exploiter’ … is essentially a form of being scared to death. It ended up as like a vampire thing: By being unable to love, he got to be absolutely the most lovable guy in the world. Everybody knew Rod. Really. He was everybody’s favorite person. He had some kind of magic. He really did light up rooms. You know,” she finished, tiredly, in the light of her own failure as a human being, “charisma.”

  Mark blurted out in a sudden whine, while lifting his arms, with an outreach as if to embrace her, though still lying back against the car door, “I have the sense, oh my love …” That was a forbidden word, but he had no choice, there was no other word, nothing else would convey what he meant to give her permanently, during this little window of time where eternity could be glimpsed. “I have the sense that you are coming out of a long, long, long misunderstanding.” There was almost tearfulness in his voice, but not the real thing, only the comical simulation of it. “The sense that you just totally wasted your time.”

  That was supposed to be consoling. This pretty woman, ten years younger than himself, looked at him, for some while, with an evident open-mindedness, making a game effort of revising her life backward. Trying to see it all as a waste of time, and merely “a long misunderstanding.”

  Misunderstanding of herself, and of Rod. Misunderstanding of love. Misunderstanding what people mean when they speak. A short unhappy life was the medical expression, back home, that had condemned the sketchy intrauterine diagram to an early nonexistence: so the thing had been well warned off. Mark was lucky, and it was lucky. As for Mark, he himself was “alive,” and right now he was grateful just for the sight of Blythe Cress, the djinn of desire before his eyes, she was a candle, her embraceable shoulders unembraced. All he meant was for her to despise her old boyfriend. To feel licensed to go ahead and despise him. Of course he, Mark, was more like the cold-blooded “vampire” at this moment and felt a secret consanguinity with such a one as Rod, whom he shouldn’t judge harshly. In this car, he was the one with pessimism running in his veins, unsuspected by her, all weekend watching her like an old Peeping Tom, during a little four-day trip in Los Angeles, behind his mask.

  She, with her shamed hang of the head, at last on consideration looked slightly thankful to have heard such a verdict on her life: that ten years had been wasted on a misunderstanding, and what a short, unhappy life she’d had.

  Blinking her eyes at the emerging end of the “tunnel” he’d described, she said, “Well, I’m tired,” and she smiled.

  EVEN “FANTASY WEEKENDS” have to end. At the front desk there were no messages for him, according to the two kids behind the counter wearing hotel badges. Hotel employees would have no insight into him, naturally; he was just a moving silhouette; they wouldn’t see he had cut off an apparently genuine love in his world—nor have any idea he had just conducted such a long, strange conversation, a conversation oddly cruel, oddly shallow on important subjects. Nor care, nor notice him at all. Behind their tall counter, a really good-looking girl and a really good-looking boy in their best clothes for work, they’d been obviously flirting, while they loafed and goofed off together during the long, dull hours they had to kill on their shift in an empty lobby with nothing but soft piped-in music all night and the half acre of purple carpet stretching untracked before them. When he inquired, the girl poked a few buttons on her computer and said there had been no calls to his room. He knew there wouldn’t be. He continued to believe Lotta would come back soon. Everything was going to be fine. His particular job was not to worry. That is, not to think. Just now in the car, Blythe had tilted her head and smiled and said I’m tired, and when she uttered those words, with that smile, it meant he was released into his marriage again. Tomorrow was scheduled to be a busy, event-filled final day for all the young Celebrities. It also meant she didn’t necessarily accede to his brutal, oversimple explanation of her time with Rod.

  He stood inside the big elevator and let the heavy bronze doors close over his face, and when the floor started swelling fast underfoot, his condemned elevator-stomach (as the illuminated number began climbing heavenward) made him—as he always did in elevators—tally up the ways he hadn’t measured up in life. In Karlsruhe, where he wasn’t present this weekend, the main interest would be whether the new European collider would strike up a Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was the particle responsible, at the beginning of time, for the birth of the illusion of “mass.” He was guilty of actually not caring about that, at forty-two. Or rather, he could see it as merely the product of the software designers programming the detection system. They were programming it to find what they thought would be there. So programmers find the thing they’re looking for. And don’t find anything they aren’t looking for. Then, as the elevator kept soaring, he couldn’t help but notice a goldfish lying behind him on the carpet in the back corner.

  To all appearances it was an actual goldfish, rather than a fake or a toy. And it looked alive, it wasn’t dead, it was mostly inert, but every few seconds its gills pulsed. He was positive. He watched it for a while. It lay still. Then, sure enough, its gills gaped again. The dorsal fin flexed.

  This was the work of children who were probably guests in the hotel. Or it involved the pranks of older kids. Certainly the fi
sh was not a passenger that was going to get off at its own floor, though that was the feeling, an odd fancy he sensed at his back, as he turned away from its corner and faced the heavy bronze doors, his own ghost reflected there, and the rising mausoleum slowed down and sounded its subdued clang, and the doors opened on what must be his floor—all the floors looked alike—(however, he could tell he was definitely not experiencing lymebrain, its disorienting periphery-sizzle; he knew exactly where his room was)—so he left the goldfish to its own fate and turned left down the corridor, toward his room, rather than, say, somehow scooping and flicking the little, cold, flippy thing onto his palm and carrying it, carrying it on an open palm down the corridor, to get it into a glass of water. Which is maybe what he ought to have done. Instead he went along as usual, his fingers counting the ibuprofen pellets deep in both pockets.

  Those were confusing, hard months, the months before the courses of antibiotics, when he seemed like a hypochondriac and kept getting different diagnoses, the months when the shooting pains and fatigues and finger-electricity and mental lapses and vengeful headaches all entered his life, all as an extremely educative new force. He’d been trying to keep it a secret at work but one day couldn’t hide a certain fact, that either he’d never understood gauge-symmetry models, or else he’d lost his grasp of the subject. It happened during a graduate student’s oral exams: in his mind there was only an empty place, a lesion, where the knowledge ought to have been. At least these days the antibiotics had worked, and the time of the terrible symptoms was over, and he had tenure. But still, from that point on, he would always be taking the back stairway in getting to and from his office. And (accidental boon) they would keep him off any real committees.

  At his hotel room door, the magnetic-strip card came to hand. With its plastic corner he tapped his own upper lip, then lower lip, then his left cheek and his right cheek. And he tapped the wood above the doorknob, below the doorknob, and to its left and its right. Then he inserted it. He didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. He might even have trouble falling asleep. Because he would go on worrying about Lotta. Yes, they both had taxi money and cell phones. Yes, Bodie might be only a harmless poseur. Yes, Lotta was smart. Still, a day will not be finished until Lotta is home safe. That’s how it will be, until she moves into a college dorm. Or, sooner, switches to a school in her cousins’ place in Connecticut.

  Also, he had a longing for Blythe and that, too, would keep him awake. He felt like an eighteen-year-old. Blythe hadn’t stayed in the car: she’d gotten out and escorted him to the front door, where there was more talk, just meaningless talk. The doorman wasn’t around anymore. Mark did say one thing, in parting. He said that there must be no letters or phone calls between them, nor emails either, that they must never have any contact again.

  But the effective point was, a communications blackout would put her in his thoughts perpetually and eternally.

  She said, “I know.”

  So there was nothing to say after that, and like teenagers they stood separated but staring into each other’s eyes, just drinking each other in, it seemed to go on for minutes, and did in fact go on for some time, while possibly the hotel’s front security cam was watching them. If they were being reproduced on a security screen, they would look very odd: two grown-ups standing, facing each other, upon a threshold, not talking, just staring, in their different heights, she with her heels together, her hands hanging at arm’s length clasped before her, with that skeptical flickering light in her eye. His own overfamiliar dowsing rod had been somewhat fattened by that conversation, somewhat lastingly, and indeed, he was still walking around with a nudge of that. It would subside with distraction. As always in hotel rooms, when he came in, he whacked the power button, in passing the TV, and he headed for the minifridge—those being the two cornucopias, rather specious and rather disappointing cornucopias, that furnish the semierotic life of the hotel “guest.” On the television, a soothing voice materialized, narrating a kind of slide show, describing a hotel website where the menu of guest amenities might be perused. It’s always a too-shallow menu. There is no end, in this life, there’s only frustration, only desire. The answer to the question Why would he want to insult all Blythe Cress’s values? was obvious: damaging her was a form of vengeance, babyish vengeance, for his not being able to sleep with her. Such is the damage people inflict. He couldn’t call her and try to fix it. He wasn’t the type. Every moment a fossil. In the minifridge he found a kind of cheese spread in a plastic capsule. And crackers. And a bottle of fizzy water. Some bland-looking disks of salami, fanned out inside heavy shrink-wrap. So he sat at the desk and set out the elements of his meal on the desk blotter beside the paper sleeve containing the returntrip airplane tickets, first cracking the seal on the cap of the carbonated water. The label on the bottle displayed an illustration of a tiny mound of colorful fruit, small as a molehill, spilling forward in sunny abundance, including cherries, and a pineapple, and citrus fruit. The bottle’s released fume was fragrant as furniture polish. But any real taste turns out to be more in the fumes, rather than in the water itself. The label listed no ingredients, only “Natural Flavors.” Among esters it would contain a few parts per million of industrial flavorings, amyl formate, dimethyl octanol, probably some form of butyrate, isoamyl acetate, ethyl propionate.

  THE ISSUE OF the goldfish, at last, rose up as inescapable just when he had lain down in bed and turned off the light and pulled up the blankets and made himself comfortable. It either needed to be kept alive in a water glass or be killed—by stepping on it on the bathroom floor or by flushing it down the toilet into septic hell. He really, still, wasn’t sure which of those solutions he would go for even as he threw off the blankets—and with annoyance—with a pointlessness foredestined—he went out into the corridor. The likeliest thing was that, by now, it had either died or been rescued. At least fifteen minutes had passed since he’d seen it breathing, but who knows, maybe a goldfish can survive a long time.

  No one would be around in the hallways at this time of night. And there was nothing indecent about his flannel pajamas, a newish, notraggedy set that Audrey bought him for a birthday present, as a joke, because they were printed all over in little illustrations of atoms—the old Bohr model, with electrons buzzing in ovals like horseflies, nothing like the actual Pauli quantum wave shapes, their fierce beauty. Out in the corridor he carried his cell phone with him in hand, in case Lotta might call while he was out of the room. But also, admittedly, a Lyme disease recoverer wants to carry a cell phone with him in a hotel corridor, just in case the Great Mental Incompetence should overcome him in the maze of identical doors and he should need to call the front desk for help. That happened once. It happened at a Chicago conference, but nobody in the Berkeley delegation found out about it and there were no echoes of it.

  He pushed the elevator button and stood on the carpet. The possibility was always there, that his not caring about the Higgs boson—or about new gauge-symmetry ideas either—was another Lyme symptom, but an emotional kind of late-stage symptom to go along with Lyme incompetence. It would be Lyme indifference. In any case, an indifference was a relief. And when the elevator did arrive, it was empty. No goldfish in that corner. No goldfish in any corner. So it was either dead or it had been rescued. The lobby clerks might have rescued it. If it was now swimming in a glass on the rim of a bathroom sink, seeing its own golden reflection in a mirror, it could think its reflection was another little fish—that is how their little fishy brains work, organisms programmed to group together in great, flashing shoals and live amidst each other’s mirrored behavior—so it might believe it was seeing a friend in the glass swimming alongside and might swim onward in that knowledge.

  In any case, he didn’t worry about Blythe, in consigning her again to the life she’d devised for herself. Downstairs, at the moment of farewell in the doorway, she began explaining one last thing: Anyhow, Mr. Magoo was a cartoon, reverting to an earlier topic of the weekend, as she felt comp
elled to tie up every last loose end, and compelled, too, to seal him off in his own preserving anecdote. He’s supposed to be nearsighted. He toddles along and he, like, drives straight off a bridge but gets caught by a ferryboat. Or he falls in a manhole but thinks he’s in a movie theater. So he’s perfectly happy. The hotel doorman had vanished, and Mark wondered if the security camera, on closed-circuit screens, was reproducing her lips as they moved. He’s always congratulating himself. Very self-congratulatory. He goes toddling along chuckling about the “nice breeze” while an anvil is dropping right next to him.

  The phone rang in his hand, where he stood in the hotel corridor. It was Lotta’s wrongtone. Lucky thing he’d brought it.

  “Hi, Dad. Are you back at the hotel?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Everything’s fine,” she said, but he could tell everything wasn’t fine. “Can you come and get us? Is Blythe already gone home with the car?”

  “Where are you?”

  “We’re by the Hollywood Sign. But we’re hard to get to. I’ll have to guide you here by phone.”

  “What exactly is the problem?”

  “Bodie’s wheelchair fell. He’s fine. Everything is fine. He just fell down in this little place, and now he’s having a little trouble getting out. It’s one of those thingies like in deserts. He just needs a rope. Do you have a rope? Of course you don’t. You would have to get Blythe to bring a rope.”