The Radiant City Read Free Page A

the upturned arms of the goddesses Simplicity, Temperance, Charity and Goodness, that gives Matthew hope. The sunlight sparkling on the water is like laughter, transmuted at this distance from sound to shards of prismatic encouragement.
     
    Matthew has seen a great deal of light in his travels around the world, and he has come to the conclusion that it has different properties in different places: the harsh glare of a frozen icefield, the sweet veil in a bamboo thicket, the distortion of distance and depth that follows a thunderstorm when the sun’s rays stab under the skin of cloud cover, the threatening gloom of a darkening prison cell. Light takes on the characteristics of the objects in its path, and this, he has come to believe, is what humans do as well. Light can blind as well as reveal. It can save someone who wanders too close to an unseen edge, but it can just as easily betray a person cowering in a hidden place. He has concluded that contrary to what religious imagery would try to persuade the populace, light is neutral, and indifferent.
     
    The wounds in his body have closed over and physically, Matthew is as good as he is going to get. The mind is another matter. Diagnoses have been assigned. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Nervous Exhaustion. Still, the practical problem exists regardless of mental fragility: if you want to eat, you must have money. In a flurry of demented activity back in the United States the month before, he sold everything he owned. It put some money in the bank, but depressingly little. If he wants more, he must write the book. It is a simple equation, the execution of which has thus far evaded him.
     
    And so, begin now. Start again. But first, scan the bookshelf above the desk to see if there is any inspiration to be had there or, failing that, any excuse to procrastinate. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee, which is Matthew’s bible. But not today. Some short stories by Grace Paley. A book by M.F.K. Fisher, a gift from someone now forgotten. The Collected Stories of John Cheever, some science fiction. Asimov, Frank Herbert, Heinlein, Ray Bradbury. Nope. Sorry, pal. Nothing for you this morning . Pick up a pen and face the page. It must be longhand, for he has long since learned the terrible temptation of the delete button. Breathe. Start where? Beirut? El Salvador? He writes about Beirut, andSid Cameron, the Belgian photographer who wore a brown and yellow paisley vest he never washed. About the day Sid took him to the Palestinian refugee camp at Sabra, after the Lebanese Phalangists had slaughtered thousands. About the endless swelling bodies, the wandering, weeping women, the rubble, the mutilations. About how Sid had thoughtfully turned his head away as Matthew vomited and then offered him a half-bottle of warm Coke with which to wash out his mouth. “You’ll get used to it,” said Sid, who had survived his initiation in Vietnam and told stories about what napalm and bouncing-betty landmines could do.
     
    Sabra was such a dusty place, and hot. Like Hebron. Don’t go there. Back away. Next stop, El Salvador. Still hot, but wet, damp enough to flush the dust out of memory’s mouth. The pen moves. . .
     
     
     
    El Salvador. Carl showed me the ropes. He drove slowly, thoughtfully, on his daily rounds, taking photos of all the new corpses that appear like weird night-blooming succulents, fresh each morning. Fresh too were the strange blisters that blossom on my skin, spreading like a pale parasitic vine across my hands, my arms, and my chest. The rash grew with the rising sun and receded each night only to begin again. The blisters didn’t bother me much during the day, when they were nothing more than a soft burning, but at night, as they germinated under my skin, they itched like something crawling beneath the flesh.
     
    Carl laughed at me as the blisters spread across my face, making me look like a pimply adolescent. “You should have seen the stuff that’d grow