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can
feel the source of all the world’s light in your beating heart, in the map of
your blood, in the vast range and pace of your brain. That’s the light, baby.
You don’t need any other. Just that light beating forever inside of you.” We
were turning onto the freeway, which was filled with other, hurtling
headlights, enormous menacing trucks and buses. “We are like astronauts, we are
like wheeling planes and spaceships. We are like swaying birds with soft
stroking wings like oars. We beat against the heavy air, and carry our silent
and regenerate light with us wherever we go.”
    It
was nice Mom telling me that the light was mine too. But I knew the light was
Mom’s and nobody else’s. For months I had seen nothing but my own interior
darkness, and now, against the glare of Mom’s resumed motion, I could sense the
entire world again as something far outside the reach of myself. No, all the
light we gathered was Mom’s light, Mom’s progress into places I could only dream
about. I was just a passenger, and like all passengers, unconcerned with
landscape and plot, enveloped only by the simple movement, the cumulate graph
of those coherent points along which we ate, slept, went to the bathroom, and
awaited movement again. We could live together forever and ever, again and
again, life after life. Mom didn’t have to lie anymore. She didn’t have to run
or hide, she didn’t have to journey further away from me in order to remain
with me as she did, deeper into her dreams of me and further away from my
untrained arms. I didn’t know it then, but I was soon to learn that I couldn’t
follow Mom everywhere.

 
    THESE
DAYS I was intent on immortality, because I knew Mom’s only hope of redemption
lay in some expansion and unfolding of time that would swallow Mom and all her
imaginings into one formless shape and sound, not a place or location so much
as a dispersion of force. “Low-cholesterol diets, Mom,” I told her, browsing
through a college nursing text entitled Health
and Our World: 32nd Edition . “Then there’s the DNA, those complex looping
signals beeping in our blood and lymph. Death’s a program, Mom. Like eating,
sleeping, sex and hate. Our bodies generate death like fluids, waste, carbon dioxide,
anticoagulants, marrow. DNA’s the beeping clock, unraveling time in our bodies
like smoke from your cigarettes. It’s the tiniest force; it responds with
information, not blood; it circulates raw and genetically contrived data, not
life exactly. The heart–we’ll leave that to the regular scientists. There’s
some oils in fish that cleanse the body of fatty tissue and keep the rich blood
pumping. But down into the DNA is where I’ll go, Mom. When I grow up I’ll have
a laboratory. I’ll invent lots of stupid consumer junk so I make lots of money.
Then I’ll sink everything I’ve got into the DNA. I’ll climb down into its
bristling helical nets like a spelunker. I’ll dig out every secret, and they’ll
be our secrets, Mom, and we’ll live forever. We’ll buy a house overlooking the
beach, and I’ll keep my laboratory in the basement. And we’ll live together
without anyone bothering us for thousands and thousands of years.”
    Most
of the time Mom just drove without looking at me, wearing her tortoiseshell
sunglasses and a floppy straw hat. She was listening, deep in her brain, but
watching other roads now besides the 101. “This is King City,” she might say.
“I think we’ve been to King City.” Mom’s face was very pale without makeup, but
very beautiful as well. “Let’s try it anyway,” and pulled onto the next
off-ramp. Soon we were winding down into a Burger King, a Wendy’s, a Motel 6, a
King’s Bowl Bar and Grill. I always insisted on a salad bar in these days of
Mom’s disaffection. I urged her to eat plenty of raw vegetables and fresh fish.
We would pull into the parking lot and she would turn to me. “It’s got to be
better than San Luis, doesn’t it? It’s