The Effects Of Light Part 12

"I don't like surprises," she said, aware that she sounded like a brat. But that didn't stop her from saying it.

"Okay," he said. Then: "But come on. Are you kidding me? We're on a date. It's not like I took you skydiving or something."

"But the point is, you didn't ask me. You didn't take the time to know whether this-specifically this-was something I'd enjoy."

"Exactly. And that's what being with someone is about. Stretching. Learning by trial and error." He lowered his voice as the waiter delivered their appetizers. Then he said, "I don't get it, Myla. We have these great conversations, and then, just when I think we're having a good time, you shut down. Like you're not allowed to have fun."

She ate her salad in silence, feeling her anger and hurt mounting as she speared baby spinach onto her fork. Finally she glanced up, her eyes nearly spilling with tears. "That wasn't just any old 'great conversation,' Samuel."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"This morning? My father's book?"

"I didn't mean it like that. I just-" He paused, trading his smile for a look of sincerity, seriousness. "Are you regretting sharing David's book with me? That we talked about it?"

She felt the heat entering her cheeks. She was caught in her own mean emotion. She hesitated.

"Come on." Frustration was creeping into Samuel's voice. "Be honest with me."

"Yeah," she admitted, looking down. "I don't like that I just handed it over to you. I mean, where is this actually going, anyway? And then I think, well, you're being so nice, and I wonder why I have to be so cynical all the time." She folded and refolded her napkin. "What kind of person am I that I can't just relax and enjoy-"

"Whoa." Samuel had propped both elbows on the table and was leaning forward. "Myla, look at me."

She lifted her head.

"You're a perfectly normal person. That's what kind of person you are. That ma.n.u.script is precious to you. If anything, I worry about it being too precious. He seems to have pulled you in so fully. But I'm happy that reading it makes you happy. I want you to trust that you can tell me about it. I understand how much it matters to you."

Myla felt herself flooding with relief as the waiter, a gray-haired man wearing a starched white ap.r.o.n, caught the change in mood at the table and refilled their winegla.s.ses. She took a bite of bread and felt a bit more like herself again.

"I don't know," she said. "Reading this book, as dense and difficult as it is, is exactly like being a child again. Being held inside one of my father's huge stories." She paused. "It becomes everything that matters. In fact, I was thinking about the way David makes me, made me, question everything. Right now, in the section I'm reading . . ." Her voice trailed off.

"Still the first section, right?"

"Samuel, we don't have to talk about my father's book just because I'm obsessed with it. This is a date, after all."

"Yeah," he said, brandishing a bread stick, "and we're overly educated intellectuals. What else do we do? What do you think I liked so much about Kate Scott? Your looks? I don't think so." He pointed the bread stick at her. "Hit it."

Myla gathered herself. "Well . . . David was suggesting that linear time-you know, this idea of past, present, future time flowing in one irreversible direction-piggybacked its way into society's mind on the back of the straight line. The straight line is something we can see; time is something we can't. But the idea of time going from start to finish, birth to death, works a lot like the idea of a straight line moving from left to right."

"So we're talking the typical time line here. The kind I made in fifth grade for my report on the Trojan War: first this happened, then this, then this."

"Exactly. David says we've learned to think about time that way-and then, and then, and then-because it's so simple, so satisfying. We can link certain events to other events, thereby making time more manageable. What an easy way to digest history. Except David says that for most people, time isn't really experienced like that at all. Instead, it seems to move in cycles, like seasons. Things pa.s.s and then come again."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, tell me, does time feel like a straight line you just follow through your whole life? I mean, does your life feel like some clear trajectory from past to future?"

Samuel closed his eyes and wrinkled up his mouth as he thought. "I guess not," he said after a moment. "It's just this big jumble of times. And then I look up and everything's changed."

"Exactly." She smiled. "But empirical Truth, Reason, Logic-all the stuff that started in the Renaissance and then became the way all Western culture thinks-relies on linear time as the only kind that's really valid. David doesn't say it isn't valid; he just claims it wasn't and isn't real in the way we've come to believe in it. We don't naturally experience time as a line; we learn how to live as if it's a line."

"How so?"

"Think of painting. How the artist takes a two-dimensional canvas and creates three-dimensional s.p.a.ce. He does it through tricks, through illusion. We all know that the room in a painting isn't a real room, even though it looks like we can enter it. That's because painters have learned how to create the illusion of empty s.p.a.ce. We can't see emptiness itself, but we can see objects placed in emptiness. Just look around," she said. Emptiness surrounded their table, and yet it was not visible in itself. Myla nodded and continued.

"In a painting, all these things around us-that table, the wine bottle, the maitre d's podium-would be measured out on lines radiating from a fixed point, the viewpoint outside the painting. Because everything is so neatly done, so accurate, it's possible to measure the exact distance between our wine bottle and that table over there to find out how far apart they are. This is where linear time comes in. As a practical tool. The shortest distance between two points, two objects, is a straight line, right? Well, it takes time to walk along that line. Time is the tool we need to make that measurement. The expanse of s.p.a.ce, and all the things in it, make this specific kind of time necessary. The farther apart the objects, the longer it takes to move between them. If you want to reproduce the look of material reality, you need to know about this kind of time."

She sat back. "And David goes on to say that the things that appear along the time line begin to be seen as related in specific ways. Cause and effect enters the rational world. Something happens at point C, and its effect appears at point K. We now accept cause and effect as a given, but it's really one more abstraction . . ." She shook her head. Trying to re-create David's argument exhausted her. She was suddenly self-conscious.

"What?" asked Samuel.

"Nothing," she said. A column of silence surrounded them as Myla tried to find her footing again. Her father's mind was like a pulse inside her that she wanted to release into the room, into the world. But she felt the world resisting her excitement. Even Samuel, as sympathetic as he was, couldn't help her reach the limits of her father's mind.

Then Samuel spoke, his gaze never leaving her. The warmth in his voice surprised her. "Hearing you talk about your dad's book reminds me of when my dad and I built a boat together one summer. I was eleven or twelve. He knew everything. It was amazing to spend every afternoon in the garage with him, using his tools, following his lead. And then we got to sail it together." He smiled. "I think that must be how it feels for you to read David's book."

"Yeah," she said. "I guess it is. It sweeps me up."

"So how can I sweep you up?" he asked as the waiter set down their main dishes.

"What?" The question surprised her.

"I want to light you up like that. You're glowing." Samuel's eyes were straight on her. "You're lit from inside."

Myla felt herself flush with color. She didn't know what to say next.

But Samuel did. "To dates," he said, lifting his winegla.s.s. "To making you glow." And then they ate.

RUTH AND I SIT AT HER BIG BLACK table; she's wearing white gloves and is turning pictures from one end of the table over onto the other. The pictures are big. They're black and white. They make me look both real and fake at the same time. The reason is this: to have the picture taken, I have to have been there. But the picture seems fake, because that can't be how I really look. And I don't even mean how my face looks or my body or the way my hands hang. It's more like this: how can you look at a picture and know what's inside me? And because it's my face, because I was actually there, I remember that particular day, and my face is like a book I can read. But I don't know what other people see.

Ruth ends the picture turning and says, "There they are."

"Wow." There's a lot of them. I haven't seen them all together like this, thick in a stack, making willowing sounds when she turns them. I haven't ever seen how much paper I take up.

"Here's a question, Pru. If you could use these pictures to tell a story, what would it be?"

It's a hard question. I guess the story would be me, but I can tell she wants more, wants to know what the story would be that I'd tell about myself. And what is that story? I don't know it yet. So I tell her, "It's about the changes in me. You've been taking pictures of me since I was three. And now I'm ten. And someday I'll be a teenager and then a grown-up with babies. That's the story. Like the first pictures of me are almost when I'm still a baby, when I haven't done anything exciting yet, or brave, when I don't even know you that well, when I don't even have a favorite kind of food. And then later, now, you can see those ways I'm more myself, more grown. And the cool thing is you'll take just as many pictures this year and next year, and every time, the pictures will be one more piece of the puzzle."

Ruth knows the rest. She says, "They're great pictures, Prudence. But not because of me. They're you, all you." And then we look at them again, this time the other way, backward, starting with me now and flipping back to the new, the little, the beginning.

MYLA EXTRACTED HERSELF FROM Samuel's arms and pulled a sweatshirt over her head. It was dawn, and the blue morning slimmed itself under the window shade. She was thirsty. She'd go down quickly for a gla.s.s of water, then come back up to read the next installment of David's ma.n.u.script.

When she first walked into the kitchen, she didn't notice Jane sitting at the table. But Jane turned around at Myla's footsteps, and then Myla saw the look on her face. "I didn't expect you to be awake," said Jane.

"What's wrong?" Myla pulled out a chair and sat, putting her hand on Jane's arm.

"I don't know what to say."

"What is it? Tell me."

Jane took Myla's hand and put a small notebook into it. The notebook was curved and bent, as if it had been carried in a pants pocket. "I've been trying to convince myself this isn't what it looks like."

Myla opened the notebook and saw her name at the top of the first page, followed by a description of her outfit on the day Samuel had first arrived on the front porch. She turned the page to find a family tree, her family tree, with direct lines from Sarah and David to her and Pru, and dotted lines connecting her family to Jane and Steve's. As she flipped through the dozen pages with writing on them, she caught words: David's Book (they call it The Book); Jane a mother figure?; Logistics of Myla's Disappearance. Myla kept turning, her hands buzzing from rage. And then she recognized her own words, something she'd said to Samuel the first night he'd stayed in this house: "I learned a long time ago that no one can be responsible for anyone else's beliefs. You believe what you believe. You know what you know. The best any of us can do is to examine our own prejudices, our own a.s.sumptions, and correct ourselves when we're wrong."

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" she asked. "Jane? Where-"

"When you guys were out last night, I was doing a load of darks and had some extra room. So I grabbed a pair of jeans off your chair. And when I was cleaning out the pockets, I found this."

"Samuel."

"Yes." Jane rubbed Myla's arm. "But let's not jump to conclusions. Who knows what-"

"He's taking notes on me. I don't need to draw any other conclusions than that." Myla felt herself rising, moving through the kitchen, climbing the stairs, bursting into her bedroom, where Samuel lay sleeping. He'd actually had the gall to tell her to trust him. She towered over him, amazed at how her body was leading her mind. The sheer force of her anger woke him.

"What the f.u.c.k is this?" she said, waving the notebook over his head.

Samuel woke up quickly. "What?" he said. "What is that?"

"Doesn't it ring a bell?"

He put his hand up, and halfway toward the notebook, his hand faltered. "Wait a minute," he said. "Where did you get that?"

"Where do you think I got it?"

"That's private," he said. "That's none of your business."

"Excuse me for thinking that it is my business, since every single f.u.c.king page has my name on it."

"I can explain it," he said. "If that's what you need. An explanation."

"Don't explain it. I want you out."

Samuel sat up in bed. "Myla, be reasonable-"

"You told me I could trust you and I did." Myla's voice was under control, and she spoke slowly. "What was that bulls.h.i.t last night about making me glow? Are you kidding me? I can't believe I fell for it." She tossed the notebook on the bed. She turned around and strode to the door. "Get out of my sight. I mean it. I want you out by the time I get back."

She got in her car and she drove.

MYLA STARTS TO CHANGE. IT'S like her face changes every time she looks at me. Sometimes I'll see something in her that's untrue or too different, and I can bring her back into something familiar all by myself. But sometimes I don't recognize her at all. She's wrong to pull away that way. Because it makes me notice her more, notice her difference, notice her pulling.

Then one day we're downstairs after school. She's sitting on the counter with a c.o.ke she bought with her own money, and I'm making cereal. She says, "If I show you something, can you keep it a secret?"

"Sure," I say, and she pulls a folded-up piece of paper out of her pocket. "They don't think you're old enough to see this stuff, but I think that's bulls.h.i.t," she says, and then I'm glad she's my sister, even though I don't know what I'm about to see. When she hands it to me, I realize I'm expecting an article about Ruth's photographs, and it's true, that's what it is. But when I try to read it, it's not half as exciting as I expect it to be. In fact, it's kind of boring. Talking about what kind of film Ruth uses, and what time of day she shoots, and how long she's been taking pictures. It's from a photography magazine. Myla points me to a couple of places she thinks are important.

There's one part in particular that criticizes Ruth in a way I've never thought of before. It says that Ruth calls her pictures important because they explore innocence. The person writing the article says that would be just fine, as long as there were only innocent people looking at the photographs. But, it says, "Ms. Handel's photographs showcase innocence for a fallen adult world, one in which she surely knows such innocence is long gone. Hence, she relinquishes any personal responsibility for her nubile subjects, exhibiting their innocent nakedness for all-innocent and corrupt alike-to see."

I've never thought of myself as innocent at all. Just me. That's it. That's all I can understand about those long and complicated sentences, all I know is true. I try to say this to Myla, because I think she's handed me this article to talk about the ideas in it. I say, "It sounds like this guy just had his own opinions before he even saw the pictures. Like he didn't really look at them."

Myla shrugs.

"You know what I mean?" I ask her.

She shrugs again. "Can I have it back?" she asks, and I fold the article back up so she can put it in her pocket. She seems upset at me, or like she wants to leave, and I don't know why she showed it to me in the first place. She drinks her c.o.ke while she's looking at me. "Our family's just plain weird," she says.

That makes me kind of mad. "How do you mean, weird?" I've already poured the milk on the cereal. I need a spoon so I can eat it before it gets all sludged, but Myla's legs trap the drawer that holds the utensils. I can tell by her face that now's not the time to nudge her knees aside. So I watch the cereal as it slowly fizzles.

"Like. Okay. Naked pictures all over the place-"

"They aren't all over the place, Myla."

"-and I don't know. All these people who aren't related to us but we owe them stuff."

"I don't know what you mean," I say. Now I want to jerk the drawer out hard and hurt the backs of her legs. Then I realize there are spoons in the dish rack. I grab one of those and jam it into the bowl.

Myla sighs. She says, "Ruth expects us to be in the pictures. Jane expects us to babysit Emma. I'm the one who has to show you the articles written about us in national publications. David's never home."

"David's home as much as any other dad."

"David makes us call him David."

"That was you. You called him David from the beginning, and it stuck. Don't blame me."

"Jesus, Pru, I'm not blaming anyone. I'm trying to have a conversation here. You're ten. You're not too much of a child that you can't talk to me about this s.h.i.t."

"You're a child too, Myla."

"I'm fifteen."

"Whatever." I roll my eyes back at her.

"Listen." She hops down from the counter and stays where her feet drop. "I just don't think any of it's as important as I used to. I mean, I have a lot of other things going on now, and maybe if I don't agree all the way with articles like this one, I can see they might have a point."

"You're wrong," I tell her. "We're not innocent, and we're not the opposite of it. We're just us. Happy in our family. Happy in Ruth's pictures. Happy with Jane and Emma."

"Maybe."

"So are you just going to, like, not hang out with us anymore?"

Myla rolls her eyes at me and I want to hit her. "You don't get it." Then the thing that makes me really mad comes next. "I guess I shouldn't expect you to. You're still a little girl. You still need them for everything."

I haven't finished eating, but I slam my bowl into the sink and don't let her say one word. I have to get away from her. So I go to my room. A while later I hear the front door closing and know she's gone. That's how we begin to stop talking.

chapter fifteen.