The History of Luminous Motion by Scott Bradfield Page A

house with his mother, a rather fragmented and conspicuous
woman named Ethel. Rodney was the perfect friend for me, really, and introduced
me to a world far more disorderly, I imagined, than my own. Rodney was
submissive without obedience, patient without serenity. He had a Stingray
bicycle, a rather brutal attitude toward his unfortunate mother (which, I
admit, caused me some uneasy admiration, as an aborigine might admire the
miracle of a cigarette lighter or a beeping digital watch) and a top-floor
bedroom filled with marvelous and dispensable things.
    “Why
don’t you take this shirt,” he might tell me. “These are some pants I grew out
of. You never change your clothes, guy. You never wash your hair.”
    Usually
I wasn’t listening. I was far too preoccupied with the room’s many bright
objects to feel at all self-conscious about my appearance. There were board games:
Stratego, Polyanna, Monopoly, The Game of Life, Battleship and Risk. We
constructed monstrous machines with red and white Lego blocks, Erector sets and
plastic, prepackaged model kits. Mostly, though, I was thoroughly taken with
Rodney’s chemistry set, a somewhat corroded metal cabinet box which, unfolded,
displayed tidy bottles of strange substances with unfamiliar smells, tastes and
textures in them. Some, like tannic acid, were labeled with urgent red crosses
and warned of deadly dangers that should be investigated only “in the company
of adults.” The set contained beakers and flasks and test tubes and even a
small chemical fire with metal clasps and braces. “This is life’s sudden
start,” I said, the first time I saw it. “This is chemistry.” I purchased a
loose-leaf notebook and began keeping track of the various mixtures I
contrived. Sulphuric acid and nitrous oxide and carbon, zinc and rubbing
alcohol and a few kernels of long-grain white rice. Then, under what I
considered “controlled laboratory conditions,” I exposed small animals to them.
Bugs, butterflies, lizards and frogs. Sometimes the small animals betrayed no
reactions at all. Sometimes, a few hours or a few days later, they died.
“Science isn’t reason, Rodney,” I told him. “Science is pure chance and sudden
luck. It’s magic, in a way. Chemistry is that unstable and perfectly
coordinated music of the fundamental that lives in our skin and our shoes. This
is where life achieved its sudden flash, and where time itself will someday
rediscover its own timeless regeneration.” I contributed tannic acid to the
beaker labeled POETIC TROPE #117, thiamine spirit and, from Rodney’s mother’s
kitchen cabinet, baking soda, and just a touch of oregano. A thin sudsy foam
gathered around the beaker’s rim. “We’ll seek secrets in the random,” I told
Rodney. “We’ll discover truth in chance’s sudden dances.”
    Rodney,
leaning against the table and gazing into the brownish fluid, displayed only
that marvelous and half-lidded unconcern for which I always envied him. He
wasn’t after anything, my friend Rodney. He sincerely didn’t care if he lived
forever or not.
    “What
about a booger?” Rodney asked. “What about if we put a booger in it?” Without
looking at me, he tapped the beaker’s rim with the nail of one of his clean,
well-manicured fingers, as if trying to startle into existence whatever soft
chemical reactions lay down there in the hidden world of chemistry.

 
    THE
HOMES RODNEY and I systematically violated that spring were wary places,
hollow, haunted and impercipient, like old lovers or dying trees. Because I was
smallest, I always entered first, through basement windows, up shaky trellises
into high bedrooms or, more usually, through the opaque slender windows of
bathrooms that had been left open to air out the muggy shower smells. Then I
would come around to the front door where Rodney would snap his gum at me with
his weary and affected nonchalance and help me peruse the belongings of these
soft and dimly dreaming houses.
    “What
a