luminescence

For a short time Eleanor took a position with a family welfare organization in Cloverton. She had already considered and rejected the idea of becoming a nun; had volunteered for three months at a rape counseling group; had been eyeing, to be truthful, charitable services as ways in which to balance out the bad karma she'd racked up during her first few years away from home -- hoping that maybe, along the way, she'd remind God or Whomever that she was a good kid after all. Maybe it would change God's mind, and he'd speak up again, if only to say hello.

She was convinced that she was crazy.

On her first day she arrived at the agency as a woman in a thick tweed overcoat was scrabbling at the door. Locking it, it turned out. The woman turned and saw Eleanor approaching and said, "Yes?" Eleanor said that she was the new hire. The woman looked harried, but found the time to pause, perplexed. She asked, "New hire?"

"Technically," Eleanor explained, "the new receptionist. But I'm very interested in --"

"Sorry, sorry, don't have time," the woman said. "I've got to go retrieve a child."

The woman hurried past Eleanor, struggling to lift her bag up onto one very padded shoulder. Eleanor tried the door and found it immovable, and called after the woman, "Can you let me into the office?" She opened her hands apologetically. "I don't have a key."

The woman stopped beside a sun-scorched Aerostar that looked woefully shabby, particularly when you noticed the crisp white magnetic placard on the door that read, in bright blue and green, Cloverton Child and Family Protective Services. She squinted in Eleanor's direction, and her stiff shoulders slumped. "The power's out in there," she said. "Probably just a breaker, but I don't have time." She sighed, and looked down at her watch. "Look, you better just come with me, and I'll let you in when we get back. Okay?"

And this is how Eleanor found herself in the living room of a dimly-lit trailer that was situated so awkwardly on a dusty, dry lot that it looked as if it had been carelessly tossed there and forgotten about. Around it the land was dead for a good fifty yards in any direction, at which point the dirt gradually became overgrown with waist-high yellow grass. The interior of the mobile home was mostly devoid of furniture, except for a surprisingly large and expensive-looking flat-screen television, and speakers like small Roman columns that jutted up in every available corner of the room. A leather sofa was the only companion to the rig, and it was occupied now by a small boy playing a video game.

What struck Eleanor first was the emptiness of the trailer. Second was how unsaturated everything looked: the walls were dull and almost colorless in the faint light, which stabbed through closed venetian blinds in short, thin beams, illuminating trillions of dust motes that seemed to hang lethargically in place. The carpet was going thready around the edges, and was thin and uninspired. Not a single light was on; there was only the weak natural light through the blinds, and the flicker of the television. She thought that for such a costly machine, the color was certainly depressing; she watched as a bulky character with a sword leapt elegantly around a landscape of rocks and ruins, scarf fluttering from his neck.

The woman, who had introduced herself as Martha Gibbons as they drove "to location", was, for the moment, ignoring the little boy. She barged through the kitchen and disappeared through a hallway that was blocked-off by a sheet tacked to the ceiling, and a moment later reemerged, only to plow past Eleanor in the opposite direction, navigating down another hallway and into a series of small rooms along its side. Eleanor could hear an awful lot of thumping around back there, but Martha didn't reappear.

"Are you alright?" she called, and Martha's voice, sharp as a machete, came back: "Fine. If I don't say much, then I won't have to watch my mouth."

Eleanor said to the boy, who had barely looked up when they'd entered, "That's an interesting game there."

The boy didn't say anything.

She tried again. "I think I might like it if it were more colorful."

The boy sighed, and pressed a button on his controller, and the action on the screen froze. He turned and looked at her and said, calmly and efficiently, "I've adjusted the settings to achieve maximum visual effect for this particular game. The colors are weak because the game is moody. Okay?"

She didn't think to be startled by such a complete though from an eight-year-old until some time later; for the moment, she was too busy being startled by the bruise that bloomed on the side of the boy's face that had previously been turned away from her, and the seeping laceration at its middle. "The impact point," Martha would later explain. "A cowboy boot is what I was told." Eleanor thought that it was no wonder the room, and the game, were so lifeless; it seemed as if all of the color in the room -- maybe even the world -- had been sucked into an area spread across this little boy's temple and right eye.

She immediately thought to go to him and wrap him up in her arms and tell him that not everything in the world was shit, and even moved her foot, just a little, and that was shen she noticed movement from the corner of her eye, and glanced toward the hallway to see Martha standing there, shaking her head at Eleanor. "I know," Martha said. "But you really can't. I'm going to interview the boy, and then we're going to take him back with us. Why don't you wait outside, Ellen. Okay?"

Eleanor didn't correct her, and she looked helplessly at the boy, who was studying the big-screen again, fingers snapping and popping and flying, and then she turned and went outside, closing the paper-thin door behind her. She stumbled down the short makeshift steps to the dirt, and everything around her seemed rich and colorful, everything that had been so dismal just a few minutes ago. For the first time, color seemed completely subjective, and it didn't occur to her until much, much later to wonder what that meant for her, particularly when the memory she treasured most was a hurricane of nothing but color. For now, there wasn't time to think about it; for now she had to occupy her mind with other things while she waited for Martha to finish with the boy, and to drive her back to Cloverton and to the office, where she would no longer be stranded in the middle of nowhere, and where she would have an escape route after telling Martha Gibbons, who probably wasn't even the person to tell, that she couldn't do this job.