Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Read online

  Instead, I had the jeweler wife of a copywriter friend make a three-inch-long (i.e., life-sized) hummingbird out of semiprecious gemstones, gold wire, and lacquered cellophane. I lowered it into Memory’s cubicle on a thread. A hand-lettered card accompanied my gift.

  The card said, “Happy Birthday, Memory. There are at least thirteen lies I can tell you about ruby-throats. This is the first one: ‘I am a hummingbird.’ The remaining lies will follow in turn.”

  I signed it—almost sincerely—“Love, Peter.”

  Memory, true to her name, remembered our less than auspicious meeting. She caught the nod to Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” She agreed to go out with me.

  We began carefully. No pushing. Movies, not art films. Ball games, not museums. Del Taco’s, not Nikolai’s Roof. And when our inevitable shoptalk began to give way to heart-to-hearts, I cooled down and backed off.

  Five good days, full of subsurface sexual tension. It was the first time in my life I enjoyed seeing Dale Murphy fan in four out of five at-bats. Or Sly Stallone do anything at all.

  On our sixth day, I decided to tell her Falsehood Number Two. After work, Memory and I drove to an old-fashioned tearoom in Madison, Georgia, three counties away. We ordered spinach salad, scalloped potatoes, and lemon chicken. Later, our white-jacketed waiter came out and set a desert plate in front of Memory.

  “Your fortune cookie, ma’am.”

  Memory eyed it suspiciously. Then she cracked the cookie open, removed the fortune slip, perused it.

  As I already knew, it said: “The blood spot on the gorget of the male is an outward sign of its passion.”

  My tie was crimson silk. I waggled it at Memory—a lascivious Oliver Hardy impersonation.

  “Two down.” Memory smiled, then added: “Female ruby-throats don’t have red gorgets, Peter.”

  “According to Mr. Audubon, no, they don’t.”

  Memory read the tiny scroll again. “So does this”—holding the fortune aloft—“imply that the females lack passion?”

  I took the scroll from her and used a ballpoint to write on its unprinted side. “Here. A corollary to Lie Number Two.” I passed the slip back to Memory.

  She read its message: “The female suppresses her blood spot from an inborn sense of propriety.”

  Another smile. “You wish,” she said, and I didn’t know whether she meant that females actually did lack passion or that my attempt to unsuppress hers was a transparent botch.

  Hopefully, I returned her smile.

  Memory didn’t lack passion. Even though the following day was a workday, she agreed to an interlude. At a bed-and-breakfast in a remodeled antebellum house, we spent most of that night playing out the feverish impulses of our blood.

  In the morning, we made separate long-distance calls to KG&K to tell our bosses that we were sick and wouldn’t be in.

  “This is something I don’t do,” she said.

  Jaybird-naked next to her, I had to laugh.

  “Lie about being sick,” she said sharply. “We can’t do this again, Peter.”

  My stomach lurched as if I did have a virus. “Memory—!”

  “During the week, I mean. It’s unprofessional.”

  We argued, but Memory was adamant. Although I felt sure that later, under the lash of desire, she would change her mind, she never did. In fact, Memory went back to work that very afternoon, claiming that her attack of flu had been a feeble one. I, however, stayed out the entire day, angry and resentful. She had sabotaged the perfect pleasure jaunt.

  The next weekend, I took Memory to my friend Jeremy Taggart’s hunting and fishing cabin in the mountains of Pickens County. This was no rustic, ramshackle hideaway, but a well-appointed bachelor’s lair featuring a music-and-video center, a wet bar, and a series of erotic lithographs at those spots on the walls where most Good Old Boys would have hung deer heads, shotguns, or purloined electric beer signs.

  Memory thought the lithographs vulgar. Fortunately, the cabin had something that she liked: the hummingbird feeder hanging from a shingled eave of Jeremy’s toolshed. A picture window in the loft bedroom permitted us to lounge limb in limb on Saturday afternoon watching the fleet, metallic hummers (most, white-throated females) pop into sight at the feeder’s phony scarlet blossoms, hover there siphoning the sugar water that Memory boiled for them, and flit off into … maybe another dimension. They were feisty birds. One territorial female, feinting and attacking, repeatedly chased away all the others seeking to drink from the feeder.

  “The little bitch,” Memory said.

  Then that green-jacketed harridan vanished too, and for a long moment the air was birdless—spookily so. I used this interlude to tell her my third premeditated lie:

  “‘Hummingbirds do not fly; they matter-transmit.’”

  Memory considered this. Then she kissed me on the temple and pointed at a spot between the bed and the picture window.

  “You’re right,” she said. “There’s one … now!”

  I blinked. So emphatic was Memory’s suggestion, I thought a male ruby-throat had materialized in our bed loft. The sound of its whirring wings, the ebony syringe of its beak, and the pulsing fire of its gorget burned into my retinas as if a flashbulb had exploded. Then the mirage was gone, and all I could hear, as I clutched Memory’s warm, supple body, was laughter. The laughter of a sorceress.

  “Another,” she demanded.

  We wrestled. Memory kept laughing and, through this laughter, daring me to manufacture a fourth fantastic lie.

  “‘Sex for hummingbirds is an exquisite agony,’” I finally said, spitting out my epigram. “‘To imagine it, stick your finger into the blur of an electric beater.’”

  She liked that. “Very good, Peter. Nine to go.”

  Yet more laughter, followed by a spontaneous binge of inventive sex—none of it, its exquisiteness aside, the least agonizing.

  The next present I gave Memory was a circular aquarium containing a dozen flamboyantly colored tropical fish, several muck-eating snails, and an underwater forest of seaweed and sinuous ferns. I installed the aquarium in her apartment on a Friday afternoon while Memory was still at the office. When she arrived home, she found the glowing tank, the beautiful angel wings and clownfish, and, in a near-invisible Lucite cube suspended at the aquarium’s heart, one iridescent hummingbird.

  “Peter!” she said, approaching the radiant tank.

  The hummingbird wasn’t real. It was the same one I’d lowered to her desk as spectacular proof of my interest. Distorted by the fish-peopled water, though, it looked real. I kissed her on the forehead and slipped out the door, allowing her to find and read for herself the lie on the accompanying card:

  “Eventually, a hummingbird in a tank of oxygenated sugar water will sip its way to freedom.”

  A major Atlanta soft-drink firm employing Kyser, Godwin & Kale decided to create, name, and test-market an energy-boosting drink in direct competition with Gatorade. Logan Metasavage gave this account to me and told me to have my entire campaign worked out in brilliant detail yesterday. I got to it.

  I named this drink—some sort of citrus-flavored, sugar-laden, cherry-colored, additive-doped swill—NRG-Assist, and I designed a bottle resembling a hummingbird feeder, a label on which a pair of cartoon ruby-throats are prominent, and a series of animated TV ads featuring the energetic hummers as product spokescreatures. The makers of NRG-Assist were delighted; they gave us a handsome bonus for executing the campaign so quickly. Thus did I vindicate—that week, at least—my reputation as a company hot-shot.

  On Sunday, Memory and I attended a free symphonic concert on the grass in Chastain Park. Between sets, a light plane buzzed the crowd, trailing an advertising banner. This banner bore the burden of my sixth falsehood, a public falsehood for which the company and I were generously reimbursed:

  “Hummingbirds prefer NRG-Assist.”

  As an additional reward, KG&K gave me a twelve-day vacation in Palm Springs, Florida
. Memory couldn’t go, but I stayed in touch with her via postcard and Southern Bell.

  In the seventh week of our itemhood, Memory had a pregnancy scare. It was only a scare, but it fell between us like a sword; and the lie I handed her on a postcard purchased during my getaway to Florida—a card showing a red-gilled lizard on a palm tree—did nothing to ease her mind, even though I’d meant it lightly:

  “The first hummingbirds were the get of an oversexed chameleon and a bewildered dragonfly.”

  What eased her mind was the arrival, nearly two weeks late, of her period. That tardy event calmed some of my midnight anxieties too. Some. Not all.

  Two nights after Memory told me that everything was copacetic, I had a psychedelic nightmare. A plague of hummingbirds swept up from South America and hurtled into Atlanta in a whirring cloud of invisible wings and chittering, batlike squeaks—a cloud so dense, begemmed, and mobile that the sun was eclipsed; traffic disappeared behind a series of shifting emerald scrims; and hummingbird guano began to fall like wet caulking on sidewalks, gutter guards, window ledges, awnings, rooftops.

  This vile bombardment went on and on. If you stuck your head outdoors, the backwind from a myriad ever-beating wings would knock you down. Rays of sunlight struggling to penetrate the metallic cloud sparked blinding flashes off it. Those Atlantans who weren’t cowering in parked cars, or in the revolving doors of department stores, or in streetside bus shelters, lay on the pavement with their hands over their heads, like actors in old Civil Defense films about the Soviet nuclear threat.

  I woke up sweating. Is a plague of hummingbirds what I would have sired on my Oriental dragonfly if Memory had really been pregnant? Out of my lover’s womb, a noisy litter of ruby-throats?

  A tape recorder lay on the end table next to my bed. I kept it there in case midnight inspiration seized me during my efforts to devise a full-bore ad campaign for one of our clients. I picked it up, found its built-in microphone, and spoke my lie:

  “One plague in Egypt was of hummingbirds: Pharaoh’s people died with emerald plumage in their mouths.”

  An evening later, when I played this back for Memory, she said, “There aren’t any hummingbirds in the Old World, Peter. And there never have been.”

  “Don’t be so literal-minded,” I said.

  Memory wanted me to meet her daddy. I needed to see that she had strong ties here in Atlanta. So, in her VW beetle, we drove to her father’s clapboard house in Decatur.

  Mr. Yang, wearing a pair of smoky sunglasses, sat in a lawn chair illegally watering his drought-stricken grass. The hose lay in a narrow trench next to the driveway, eeled up into some weedy vegetation at his sneakered feet, and, thereby hidden, spilled its liquid bounty into all the nether reaches of the yard, which the hose had flooded to a condition of squishy marsh.

  “Howdy,” the old man said, tilting his head like a dog.

  He had on a Day-Glo orange jumpsuit and a paint-freckled Braves cap. At seventy-plus, he looked only about five years older than I did. Memory had told me that the bullet wounds responsible for his retirement included a blasted-away calf muscle, a shattered elbow, a mangled hand. But only when he stood to greet us did I notice his injuries.

  “Daddy, there’s a water shortage. You could be fined.”

  “Only if they catch me.” Limping, he herded us up the walk to his air-conditioned house.

  In the tiny living room, Mr. Yang felt his way into a low-slung easy chair. Next to this chair lay the corpse of an aged, silvery, lion-maned chow, the handiwork of a taxidermist.

  “That’s Chiang Kai-shek,” Memory explained. “Daddy’s last and longest-surviving seeing-eye dog.”

  She said that her father had been a masseur in Taipei, Taiwan (blind persons have a monopoly on the massage profession in that island nation), and that he had founded a thriving, wholly upright massage parlor in Atlanta soon after coming to Georgia in the early 1950s. As Memory spoke, her father absentmindedly scratched the dead animal’s muzzle.

  A shiver helixed my spine: I wasn’t much comforted to hear that Mr. Yang had had Chiang Kai-shek stuffed because the faithful chow had given its life for him in the same brutal robbery attempt that had forced his retirement.

  While Memory was in the kitchen, Mr. Yang informed me that his daughter loved me. Moreover, I was the first man for whom she had felt such tenderness since her divorce.

  “Memory tells me you lie to her, Peter.”

  I was too stunned to reply.

  “Lies about hummingbirds,” he specified, smiling. “As a way of wooing her.”

  “I guess that’s so,” I said, only a little relieved.

  “It can be hard, coming up with clever lies.” Mr. Yang tilted his blind head. “Would you like to borrow one?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay. Here you go, then. It’s a direct steal from Stevens, but it’s a ‘lie’ you must keep in mind if Memory is really in love with you.”

  I waited, my hands clammy and my irritation building.

  Mr. Yang stared through his silver lenses at me: “‘A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a hummingbird are one.’”

  A coldness unrelated to the air conditioning bludgeoned me, for this “lie,” echoing some lines in Stevens’s blackbird poem, embodied a subtle threat. Mr. Yang wished me to understand that my intentions toward Memory had better be honorable.

  “Lie Number Nine, Peter,” Mr. Yang said. “Feel free to tell it to Memory when you leave here this evening.”

  “I will,” I said. “That’s exactly what I’ll tell her. Thanks, Mr. Yang. Thanks a lot.”

  “I don’t think her ex-husband—the womanizing no-account doing time in Macon—ever saw the truth in that lie.”

  “He didn’t?”

  “No, he didn’t. He was a runaround. When the feds arrested him on a drug charge, I told Memory to speak the truth about his activities. She did, too. In court.”

  “Good. Good for her. Really great.”

  “You’re tense, young man. I can tell from your voice. Let me give you a massage.”

  This offer frightened me. The simple thought of the old man’s touch set goose bumps sprouting. “But your hand …”

  “With one hand, I’m better than most sighted people who have a healthy pair. If I didn’t tire so fast, I’d still be working.”

  For some reason, I submitted. In a back bedroom, I lay naked on an aluminum table. The old man kneaded the flesh at my nape, my shoulder blades, the small of my back, and my upper buttocks as if he wanted to sculpt them into completely other shapes—hummocks of loamy soil, maybe, or the body parts of a bipedal alien being. My muscles stayed as taut as clock springs.

  “Try to loosen up,” the old man said.

  “I can’t.” My face lay on a stiff folded towel.

  “Maybe it’s because you’ve been mixing Memory and desire.” He chuckled, not kindly. “Do you suppose?”

  “Mmmmf.” I had no memory. I had no desire.

  “I can feel it in my fingers. There’s something cruel in you, Peter. Something bleak and unforthcoming.”

  He told me my birthdate. He gave me the names of the last four women I had romanced “seriously.” He alluded to my parents’ divorce and told me where my father was buried. He informed me that I had never been a baseball fan and that I had no more interest in poetry than I had in hummingbirds. Never fear, though—he wouldn’t tell. Memory was a big girl and could find out these unremarkable secrets for herself—probably by a method akin to the tactile one that he was presently employing. Indeed, she might know my secrets already.

  I wanted to flee, but the old man’s single good hand held me to the table. Neither his massaging technique nor his menacing patter seemed likely to freshen or relax me.

  Twenty minutes into this delicate sadism, he said, “Do you know why I named my daughter Memory?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Memory is a form of knowledge.” Mr. Yang leaned the heel of his hand onto my spine. “What o
ne remembers, one knows. Memory—Mnemosyne, the Greeks called her—was the feminine source of all human creativity. I hoped our daughter would please her mother and me just as happy memories do. Also, I trusted that memory—our daughter’s, I mean—would serve her as a shield and an ever-present solace. Do you see?”

  “I don’t know. Yes, sir. I think so.”

  “What one remembers—really remembers—one stores. I named Memory years before the personal computer; but, in terms of memory storage, Memory’s my computer. My memory is lousy, Peter. Some days, I scarcely know my own name. But if I want to hear about my late wife, Memory calls up her recollections and gives them to me in forms well suited to my sightlessness—stories, songs, poems. Do you follow, young man?”

  “Yes, sir.” But I didn’t. I just didn’t want to give Mr. Yang an excuse to shatter a vertebra.

  “I may forget, Peter, but Memory won’t. And when she tells me what she knows, I always remind her … not to forget it.”

  Eventually, he released me. Eventually, the three of us—the old man slumped in his chair with a plastic plate on his lap and the silver-furred Chiang Kai-shek beside him—ate what Memory had so painstakingly prepared for us.

  I don’t recall what that was, nor do I wish to.

  Later, standing in the lobby of the Fox Theater on Peachtree, I told Memory her father’s lie: “‘A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a hummingbird are one.’”

  “Nice,” Memory said. “But I hope it isn’t a lie.”

  “It’s not my lie, Memory.”

  “I tell Daddy everything, Peter.”

  “You tell him everything,” I said numbly. Suddenly, I had an unsettling suspicion.

  “In that robbery your dad got shot up in …”

  “What about it?”

  “Were the holdup men caught?”

  “Chiang Kai-shek tore one of them up. That gave Daddy time to shoot the other. In fact, he crippled the second creep even worse than those cowardly bastards did for him.”

  “Not bad for an old geezer shooting blind,” I admitted, without enthusiasm.