Read Online The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier - Free Book Online Page A

of an old man sitting on a motionless merry-go-round, a long strand of angina shining through his shirt. 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 shingles. 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 craftsmanship 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 craftsmanship, 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.
    Surreptitiously, he returned his camera to his eye, moving his head a few inches to the left to compose a shot. Before he couldrelease 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
. 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-shirt 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. Didyou know that smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight?”
    Hardly a beat had passed 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 passed 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