The Remote Island by Bryan Christian NBC discovers Facebook, what happened on Gossip Girl and Terminator and our obsession with Mario Lopez continues apace.
It might help to see her as she saw herself: the plain daughter of plain people; a young girl who wandered; an inventor of games. She had different colored eyes, one blue, one green.
When school started, the other children called her "dog eyes."
The girl was not plain. She was also not alone, because light loved her. Guarded and isolated her. Made her alluring and lethal. It was inevitable she'd possess secrets.
The girl eventually became the woman. Light loved her more than anything. Her skin was expensive paper. Her chest and the bridge of her nose were dotted with freckles. Her hair was a black river that flashed purple.
She lived in a spare white studio apartment and drove a used Volvo station wagon the color of rust. She smoked menthols; flakes of tobacco transferred from her fingertips to her cheeks where they would sit brilliantly. She was a photographer.
Light never felt as important as it did on her. When night settled it would loathe to leave her. Light liked it best when she cleaned — with the dust suspended in the air it could see where it touched her.
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Einstein teaches that the closer you come to the speed of light the more time there is.
When things were good between them people stared in wonder. Light spilled into rooms before her just to see her enter.
They carried on conversations through her camera, constructed arguments on silver gelatin paper. Light was always the subject, the way it wrapped around a piece of driftwood or balanced on the smallest flower. It showed her where to focus. It's unclear how it guided her. She'd spool through rolls of film. It seemed perfectly reasonable. The photos won awards.
It was intoxicating for both of them. As is the case in such situations, things outside the relationship ceased to matter. The woman was too busy for friends. Because of the woman light ignored various flowers and birds and people. Who can say what happened to them? They were never seen again.
When the phone company installed a fiber-optic system, light started calling at night:
"Hi," light said.
"Hello," the woman said.
"Hi," light said again, unsure.
"Do I know you?"
"Sure," light said. "It's two in the morning and you stumble into the bathroom. You strike a match. You apply the flame to a candle and you see the shadow of the smoke, but not the smoke, against the beige walls."
The woman hung up.
Finding the woman still in bed when it arrived in the morning, light was diffuse, uncertain whether it loved her most at rest or in motion. Light could not do enough for her. It was a wild thing in its efforts to please her. It thought, I make the heat that pushes the wind that forces the waves. It thought, The woman makes me.
There was no limit to the way light knew the woman. It knew her in the sudden flash of headlights and by the glow of alarm clocks. It knew enough to touch her neck thinking: I am heat. I am heat.
Light found her from distant clouds and from the pale skin on the insides of her arms. Light saw those
Light called her on the longest night of the year.
things that weren't the woman only as angles to approach her. She was always the sum of light's geometry.
Light helped her when the woman went shopping. Makeup and clothes. There was no end to the colors light loved to see her in. When it was time to ring up her purchases light made the scanners undercharge her.
Once, when the woman left a bulb on in her closet, light watched her all night (a corrugated light from between the shutters). Light that fell into the woman's hair might not come out for hours.
When the woman went into her darkroom, only a small part of light could reach her there. It felt assaulted. Meanwhile, immense light raced around finding all the things it would show her. Light like a storm.
When it couldn't take it anymore, it called her.
The woman answered the phone, "Hello?"
"It's me," light said.
"Who?" the woman asked.
"The mirror at ballet class."
"Wait," the woman said. "Tommy Marks? Is this Tommy Marks?"
"Wait," light said. "Remember your white leotards?"
The woman listened for the person behind the voice. She heard no breathing. She hung up.
The woman called the phone company and had them change her number.
Light was nothing but possibilities. Light knew the brown hillsides in Mexico where the butterflies wintered. Knew where all the celebrities dined. Light had forgotten more than anything else could ever know. Light had loved the dinosaurs, but light was right now, and, right now and always, light loved the woman.
Light suffered towards winter, resenting the woman for choosing the geography. Felt spurned. It disparagingly bathed the African summer with a wan coldness. The animals there did many adorable things, looking at the sky as if to say, "Why us?" but light ignored them.
Light called her on the longest night of the year.
"Remember, I found you in the high grass behind your grandparent's, rooting around like a field mouse. I made you blink."
"Stop," the woman said.
"I can't," light said. But light tried to respect her request and let her sleep in the next morning. Passed the time chasing seagulls. Pure torture.
Then there were strings of white lights left on all night above the woman's bed and light was beside itself. The room took on the soft glow of a fairy tale. Light swirled about her until a bulb burned out with a flash. The woman woke. She watched light slip out of the room. The next day she pulled the lights down like a vine and threw them away.
Light was forced to creep around her.
"I gave you everything," light said, calling one night in a dark mood. "The sheen of plastic toys. The wonder of paint. Your father like a soldier when you saw him watching you march to receive your diploma."
"I don't know what you're talking about," the woman said.
"There is what you can see which is good and those invisible things which aren't."
"I'm asking, please," the woman said. "Stop calling."
The next day the woman went out and purchased curtains. Opaque green velvet. The register rang up seven thousand dollars. The cashier had to compute the sale on paper. Light lingered in the woman's apartment while she installed them. There were stars and streetlights behind the curtains, but they couldn't reach the woman. Light pooled at the foot of the bed and felt slight, all the while pouring into the expanding universe.
In the morning, light burned everywhere, except in the woman's room. At the grocery store, an old man said, "Did you see the sunrise? I thought the world was coming to its conclusion." The woman was jealous. Light swelled, and a row of fluorescent tubes exploded like flashbulbs.
The woman used the phone to tell a person that she was "impossibly lonely."
"Well," said the other person, "we all feel that way sometimes."
The woman said, "I think I'm approaching my threshold. I had to tell someone. It feels like no one can reach me. I'm in some place that's absolutely empty; I'm just a voice calling from deep outer-space."
"I don't think it's like that," said the other person, a man. He was sitting in a small cubicle.
"Thanks," the woman said, hanging up, light carrying her deeper into space.
The curtains stayed drawn. Light was forced to creep around her. And, that spring, no one could explain it — the light was different. Flowers couldn't agree where to point.
"You should come out," light said, "where everyone can see you."
"It makes me sick to think that someone is watching."
"They'll always be watching."
"I want to disappear," the woman said, turning away from her window.
"I need you."
"The police are here, they're tracing your number."
"No," light said. "I remember." Light told the woman about her baby-sitter, a girl from the neighborhood who took Polaroids of her in the bathtub — her body whiter than soap. And the uncle who insisted she ride his leg like a pony,
I know the locations of everything you've touched, thought light.
breaking her hymen when she was eleven (the underwear buried in a hole she dug with a doll's feet). Both dying soon after. The baby-sitter walked through a sliding glass door. The uncle killed in a car accident, that same leg tangled like a root under the dashboard.
That she first masturbated one day in the summer. How light was suspended in pollen, hot on her swimsuit.
Then the woman stopped answering the phone and even light couldn't reach her. It waited once, for three days, trapped in her refrigerator.
I know the locations of everything you've touched, thought light. My favorite. My prism.
The woman would only leave her apartment in the evenings. The freckles that light loved were the color of oatmeal now. She was so pale that light could almost pass through her. Inside her apartment the woman had long stopped cleaning and dust had painted her camera case a vaguer shade of black.
There were billions of stars continually burning. Lightning announced dusk across the dirt mountains of Utah. And light felt so morose that it was almost extinguished.
The woman picked up her phone; she had to call someone.
"It's me," light said, before she could dial.
"You know," the woman said, "when I'm driving, I think every pair of headlights is you."
"Yes," light said. "You understand me."
"I'm going someplace where you won't find me," the woman said.
"I'll never leave you," light said. "That's a promise."
The woman hung up the phone and sat in the darkness.
Light washed her ankles when the woman took the stairs to the garage (this on a day in September when light filled the air and the water). Light was her halo when she got into the car. She rolled the windows down and then turned the ignition. The spark reached the fuel and made the car run. Six arms of light reached for her through the square windows of the garage door. The last thing she saw: the orange glow of the radio's station indicator.
Later, police and flashlights. The cool white fluorescents of the morgue.
The coroners — a husband and wife team — made their measurements and observations. Throughout the procedure they took turns holding the woman's hand. They sewed her torso with soft wire and gingerly bagged her for the funeral home.
The funeral director dressed her in a lavender suit; it was a dense wool felt and, though she usually wore it alone, they layered it over a blouse. She refused to do more than apply the palest pink lipstick.
There was a short ceremony where dim people in gray clothes introduced themselves as admirers.
As the lid of the black lacquered box closed, light felt abandoned.
Light remembered: her feet pigeon-toed, hips sheathed in a lemon silk slip, elbows tight to her ribs, fingers balancing the camera, her eyes searching. She captured him.
Baby, light was saying, I'm all over you.
The casket was planted. The hole refilled with soil. Sod was rolled into place, trimmed and tamped. Light directed the glowworms to assemble.n°
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Justin Tussing is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first novel, The Best People in the World, will be published by HarperCollins in February. An excerpt from that book appeared in the New Yorker's 2005 Debut Fiction Issue.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
