Light without Violence

A Short(ish) Story

My wife steers with one hand and flips a pocket knife open with the other. It’s the same kind of knife you’d find on a boy scout—acne-red plastic and all beat up—a small thing that you wouldn’t expect to be so sharp.

“You know, they’re all dead,” she says, pointing the blade at the sky. “The stars.”

We pass a Now Leaving Sunny California sign, and the night stretches over the empty desert in front of us. 

“How did we get here?” I ask. My hospital gown doesn’t cover my legs, and the leather seat against my skin is warmer than a used gurney. “Was I discharged?” 

“But if we can still see their light, does it even matter?” she asks, folding her knife closed then back to open. “Are they really dead if we can still feel their warmth?”

In the vanity mirror, her lips move the same way they did months ago, back when we first learned about my diagnosis. Sitting across from the doctor in his office, she had told him that she knows better than anyone that people only create words like ‘rest tremors’ or ‘muscular atrophy’ to distance themselves from what’s really going on. While she pointed and drew invisible signs, talking with her hands and fingers, my own hands and fingers kept twitching into fists. And in that office, when she told the doctor, “My husband’s not going to end up like some kind of Stephen Hawking,” I dug my nails into my palm and held them steady while I said, “She’s right, I’m much better looking.” 

My arms and legs took the brunt of it. My face too. But back in the car, beneath the stars, I don’t have to squeeze my fists anymore to speak. My hands aren’t even shaking. Turning my head to check the back seat, something else I’m surprised I can do, I ask “Where are my clothes? If I was discharged, I’d have my clothes.” 

The open knife slips from my wife’s fingers. This thing that looks more like a toy than it does a weapon, it bounces off her leg and into her lap. She’s shaking worse than I ever had. 

“What’s going on?” I ask. 

She brings her hand to my leg, and even through my gown, her skin is cold. I try wrapping the thin fabric over her, I try holding her hand with my own, but her knuckles are so white I can’t tell where she stops and I begin. 

“Maybe it’s the same thing for people,” she says, keeping her eyes on the road. “How we carry them with us even after they’re dead.”

Overhead, something blinks between constellations. 

My wife digs her sharp, chewed apart fingernails into my leg as the thing above us chops louder and louder. But what I feel is not in my leg. What I feel are my own nails bending back, as if I’m the one squeezing. Before I can even consider why, the thing chopping overhead shines a spotlight down on top of us. Stains cover the back of my wife’s hand. All these dried, red and brown splotches. Way too much blood to have just come from a bad hangnail. It looked more like what had happened to her on our second date. 

***

Back before I got sick, in this same desert—far from any city or any light pollution—I was a boy scout all over again. But instead of my dad and his pocket knife, it was my wife and her telescope. My wife before she was my wife. Her telescope, this tiny thing with its feet suctioned cupped to the trunk of her car. The lens stretched no bigger than the length of a kid’s baseball bat, and I thought, this thing is way too small to actually work. What could it possibly show me that I couldn’t see with my own eyes?

“There are a half-dozen mirrors in that tube,” my wife told me as I leaned over the eye piece. “Specular reflectors,” is what she had said. “They flip everything left to right, then our eyes go on to turn it all upside down.”

She had said, “What we see isn’t always what we get.”

In the eyepiece, the moon. This cold white desert of ash exploding in detail. Centuries of craters and scars stretched across its surface. It was like looking at a car crash—like being able to zoom into the wreckage of someone’s life from a safe distance.

Over my shoulder, my wife says, “Can I ask you something?”

The suction cup feet of the telescope squeaked as I tried twisting its lens, moving it sideways, trying to follow the empty rivers and pock-marks across the surface. This burnt-out husk of rock that for some reason the Earth keeps around.

“I’m not trying to get sentimental or anything,” my wife said, her lips trembling next to my ear. “It’s just, I have to ask…what is it you see in me?”

The telescope was stuck. With my eye still pressed against the lens, I tugged harder and harder, until pop. One of the suction-cupped feet jumped free, and this extinguished campfire of a planet became just another gray blob. Off balance, the telescope swung its weight around like it’s Lou Gerhig up to bat. Heavier than you’d expect. Another pop, and the thing had cracked right into my wife’s face.

***

In this same desert, one broken nose, two dead arms and a pair of useless legs later, here we are again. We’re speeding away from sunny California with a buzzing helicopter right on top of us. I roll my head to look at my wife. The scar along the bridge of her nose. I look at her the way she tells me no one else ever has. The kind of look that forms constellations out of dots or weapons out of toys. 

I say, “I’m about to die, aren’t I?”

***

She would always tell me that the further away from Earth you get, the more beautiful it gets. “From the moon’s perspective,” she would say, “the world is a quiet oasis.” 

That’s what I saw in her. 

A place I’d never been to. One with a better view. 

Our first date had been my idea. Before I smashed her nose with a telescope, I had taken her to a place she’d never been to. The school’s gym. There, among a bunch of grunting, acne-scarred college athletes, was where I first taught her how to hold a knife. Sharp edge out. Reverse grip. 

“Remember,” I had said, pulling out my dad’s pocket knife. “It isn’t about winning the fight. It’s about getting away unharmed.” 

When I went to hold up her wrist, to show her how to best stand, she jumped. A deer caught in the brush. Weights slammed against the ground around us, and men howled like baby bears as I waited for her to come back to me. Palm up and open. An offering she eventually took.

“Now,” I said, wrapping her fingers around the knife for her. “If you plunge too deep, the knife will stick, and you’ll lose your only protection.” 

Being that close to her for the first time, she had smelled like a spring night. She smelled like those nights my dad took me camping—when he would cut up lemons and boil tea on the fire. The fire that would crackle and pop into the air where the smoke would carry each flash further up into the stars. Those were the nights my dad took his lemon soaked knife and taught me how to whittle away tree branches. How to make normal things dangerous. 

Now, that same knife was in my date’s hand.

In the gym, she swung her arm down at a diagonal, practicing what I had shown her, when she said, “Don’t worry. This is the deepest I’ve ever gone with anyone.”

***

Back in the car, my wife’s crunched nose and my four useless limbs later, my fingernails bend harder. My wife’s knuckles, bright white against my leg and shaking. She clings to me like a dead leaf to its branch—like the Earth to its moon.

“Can you keep talking?” I ask her.

She takes the car around a sharp turn. “It’s a miracle light even exists at all,” she says. “In order to get it, you need fusion. You need protons and electrons and hydrogens and heliums all smacking into each other. The more crashes, the more sparks.”

“Isn’t it weird?” she asks, “That there’s no light without violence.”

When we re-center, a piece of paper—some card—slides from the console and onto my lap. 

“And even with all that bashing going on, it’s a miracle any photon ever makes it out,” she says. “It could bounce off a deuterium atom at the wrong angle, get its wavelength shifted up a notch. One wrong move and it’s stuck forever.” 

This thing in my lap. A certificate. I strain to read it because even in the helicopter’s spotlight the car is too dark. The print is all blots and squiggles. 

“Statistically,” my wife explains, “with all those collisions, all that bashing over and over again, light…it shouldn’t even exist.” 

I squint my eyes as hard as I can at the paper in my lap until I can see what the words say.

Certificate of Death. 

Dated several hours ago.

“Look at it however you want,” my wifes says, “but there’s no such thing as miracles.”

Reds and blues flash. Behind us, sirens blare on, and it sounds like the worst night of my life.

***

“Be prepared.”

That’s what my dad had always told me on our spring camping trips. So the night I first met my wife, that night I left the school gym way too late, I had his red knife on me like I always did. In the pocket of my baggy shorts, it knocked against my thigh as I jogged through the poorly lit sidewalks that snaked around campus. Engines roared awake from far off on main street, and I jogged faster, hoping I hadn’t missed the last bus home. 

Me, always late, always beating myself up about it.

Even before that night, a different night. The worst night. Years earlier, as a new high-school graduate, I had been late for dinner. This dinner at some restaurant I knew my dad couldn’t afford but he reserved anyway. A celebration before I left town for college. But again, like always, I had lost track of time. Too busy working out at the rec center.

When I had realized my mistake, I didn’t even change before jumping in my car. The restaurant was on the other side of town, so to avoid traffic, I sped through poorly lit backroads and down hills like I was in the pinewood derby. The digital clock blinked on and off to remind me how late I was, when I saw the smoke up ahead. 

This smoke, it funneled through tree branches and up into the sky. Dense. Like a million campfires dense. So thick, I almost missed the flames licking away the car underneath. Wrapped around the base of a tree with no one else around.

I pulled over and got out of my car.

“Hello?” I asked, my lips shivering out the word. Then, louder. “Is anyone in there?”

The heat beat against my face the closer I got. The fire was too bright to see if the wrecked car was forwards, backwards, or upside down, let alone if there was anyone trapped. I inched into that giant campfire, face melting, eyes freezing each time they blinked. Until finally, all that detail—everything that had been hidden in plain sight—exploded into view. 

“Be prepared,” I wasn’t.

After the paramedics arrived, the firetrucks and the police, they all told me there was nothing I could have done. Even if I had gotten there earlier, they said, the seatbelt had fused the driver to his seat. The car in front of us, under a kaleidoscope of emergency lights, now a husk. Its paint had burnt away, whiter than the moon. And all that was left of the driver, all that was left of my father, was split between that wreck and some gurney. 

Someone covered in reflective tape came up to me. “We found this on him,” he said, holding out his hand. Palm up. My dad’s knife in near perfect condition. 

Look at that however you want. 

Years later, another night. A better night. That knife knocked against my leg as I ran through campus hoping to catch the bus. And that same knife would be the first thing I grabbed when I heard the scream. Without a second thought, I would turn right around and follow the cries for help back the way I came. Back into the dark. Miracle or not.

***

Flashing from red to blue and back again, this damned knife has somehow ended up in my wife’s lap. One dead dad, a broken nose, and my entire degenerated body later. In front of us, more sirens light up. Between them and the helicopter, the full wreckage of our lives is on display. 

My wife rolls the window down, and the inside of the car roars awake. 

“Light bends when the temperature rises,” she shouts over the wind, grabbing the death certificate from my lap. “It distorts when the pressure increases.” 

My own fingernails press and bend the same way hers do as she crumples the paper into a ball, tossing it out the window. The police in front of us aren’t slowing down.

“Why care about reality,” my wife screams, “when we can choose to see whatever we want?” 

Once the certificate is just a small gray blob in the rearview, she jerks the wheel.

We veer off-road and into the dirt. As our wheels tug and pull against the ground, the police cruisers glide right over it. My seatbelt locks up, and I lurch forward. Our car fishtails around, throwing the desert floor up into the air and spinning us back in the same direction we just came—into a stand still. Iridescent dust rains over us like we’re suspended in a nebula. 

My wife puts one hand in mine and the other on her knife. All I feel is cold. Cold like a shell. Like a dead body. 

As the cops approach us, a tightening circle of silhouettes, my wife looks right at me. She looks at me the way no one else ever had, taking me to that place she always did. I’m floating high over the clouds, up through the atmosphere and into space, when she yanks me back down. Destroys the illusion. 

She had plunged the blade into her socket.

***

I see stars.

One by one, they blink on and off as people shout all around me. The world is a shadow with no depth. I reach for my wife, but…I’m on the wrong side of the car. I’m the one behind the wheel. 

Tears spill out of me, running down my cheek and neck. My eye throbs, and I go to rub it but there’s a knife in my hand. The blade is stained, but not with dried browns or reds. This blood is fresh, and just around the edge, I can almost see my reflection.

It’s flipped left to right and upside down.

It’s my wife staring back at me. 

What we see isn’t always what we get. 

I drop the pocket knife. My husband’s pocket knife. As the police bang on the windows, his body stays lifeless in the passenger’s seat next to me. His body. Not mine. And no matter how hard I strain and blink, no matter how much my lens contracts around my pupil, he won’t move. I can’t bend the light anymore.

So much for miracles. 

***

That damn knife. Whenever we had to go to the hospital, it was one of the two things my husband always made sure he had. That weathered-red pocket knife, and something to read. 

As the illness progressed, as he spent more time in hospital gowns than regular clothes, I became the designated knife holder. “I hate to admit it,” he’d say, “But at this point, I think you can do more damage with that than I could.” 

And when he got so bad that he couldn’t even hold his own books anymore, he asked me to read to him. But what was heavy for him was even heavier for me. I couldn’t make it through a single chapter of any of his books without collapsing into tears, sobbing enough fluids that I should have probably gotten my own IV. 

So we settled on brochures. Brochures, TV guides, and after-care instructions. As long as he could hear my voice, he’d claim, that’s what mattered. But there’s only so much useless fluff to read in a hospital, so one day, after running out of pain charts and medication side-effects, I brought in my old textbook. The same textbook he saw me with on the first night we met. 

The best night of his life, he’d tell me.

That night on campus, I had left the library late. Too late. The buses all had to have been gone by now, so the walk to my apartment was a long dark voyage between planets.

What may be one small step for man, is a walking nightmare for women.

My textbook, a shield against my chest, as I moved through the grounds. Slowly. Breathing like I had to conserve every molecule. Trying to shrink myself. Turn invisible. But all of that, it didn’t even matter, because halfway through my walk, somewhere between the physics department and the gym, a hand grabbed my wrist. 

This gloved-black hand, it tugged me off the sidewalk and further into the dark, into an island of bushes. Thorns clawed at my shirt, because I had dropped my textbook shield. It lay behind me on the grass. There, at the edge of this black hole. An edge that once you pass you can’t go back to. 

My face smashed in the ground, I dug my nose into the dirt as if I could bury myself. Escape the situation. That gloved hand only pushed me deeper until I was breathing dead leaves and bird shit. Until the world became the darkest I’d ever seen it.

Then a scream. One that wasn’t mine. A loud grunt over my shoulder that crashed into the thick brush. The weight on top of me, gone. 

Someone else had jumped into the black hole with us, wrestling with my attacker. The glint of a small knife flashed through the air like a meteor, and I scrambled for my shield. My textbook. By then, the attacker had gotten my savior on his back. So I came up behind him, swinging my door stopper of a book into his face. 

Down he went.

The other man, my savior, looked at me wide-eyed. He looked at me, the book, the unconscious assailant, then back to me. 

“Well,” he said. “I guess I’ve been carrying around the wrong weapon.” 

***

Here in the desert, one dead husband later, and I’m all out of weapons. Yes, my fist is squeezed around his knife, my fingernails bending from the pressure, but I know it’s useless. 

Someone yanks the car door open, and cold air blows through my hair as I’m pulled out. The sky spins from top to bottom. All around. And once again, I’m pushed to the ground, my nose in the dirt. Once again, I try to disappear beneath the weight of the world, or at the very least, hope it will crush me.

***

“Stellar mass loss will cause a binary star system to merge.”

These are the words I read to my husband before he died, in the hospital, just before a nurse came in and started shutting off his machines. 

“Stellar mass loss will cause a binary star system to merge.” 

Half a lifetime ago, in that campus gym, just days after that stranger attacked me, is when it really started. It started when my husband held out his hand. After he had grabbed my wrist and I had recoiled, he held out his hand, showing me his red-weathered pocket knife. He had made sure the blade pointed up his wrist.

Towards him and away from me. 

Days earlier, this man had risked his life for me. But for whatever reason it was this gesture with his knife that actually got me—that brought me completely into his orbit. 

Sometimes the smallest things hit the hardest.

He pulled me in even further on our second date, after he cracked me in the face with my telescope. There in the middle of nowhere. No tissues. No nothing. He was prepared. 

“Lean forward,” he had said. “Pinch your nose.”

Looking at him crosseyed, through my forehead, he pulled off his shirt. My heart went bruh-drup bruh-drup, which pulsed out even more blood. He flipped his pocket knife open, yanked a corner of his sleeve tight, and cut out a strip. A regular boy scout. The moonlight cast sharp shadows across his chest, and when he leaned back towards me, I flipped my eyes away. 

“Easier than a whole shirt hanging from your nose,” he explained, rolling the small piece of fabric together and handing it to me. 

That was my husband, giving everyone the shirt off his back. 

But again, it ended up being the smaller gesture that caught my attention.

It was him driving my car with one hand and flipping his knife open and closed with the other while I breathed in the rust from my blood and the laundry detergent from his shirt. It was him with his bare chest saying, “You know, I’ve never told anyone this, but…” And then it was him getting completely naked. It was him getting completely naked, because he was sharing something with me he hadn’t shared with anyone else. His dad. Those camping trips. The car crash. His pocket knife.

Going deep.

Something even he couldn’t teach me how to do right.

Year after year, broken body part after broken body part, he’d strip himself down again and again for me. Until I could recite his own stories as if they were mine. Until one day, somewhere between the time I started carrying his pocket knife and the time he died, it reached critical mass. I lost where I ended and where he began.

“Stellar mass loss will cause a binary star system to merge.” 

Not even an hour after reading that line was when his doctor handed me the certificate. This heavy piece of paper that I held onto but didn’t read. While he scribbled things onto his clipboard, saying stuff like ‘immuno-compromised’ and ’sepsis,’ my husband lay in his hospital bed like a White Dwarf. The opposite of a black hole, a twin star that gave and gave and gave of himself until it turned him into a husk. 

And I wasn’t ready to let go.

With the doctor still talking, I walked away to grab my husband’s wheelchair. I rolled it over to his bed and tried to lift him up, but the doctor grabbed my wrist. He grabbed my wrist the same way that attacker did back in college. So I did what my husband taught me. I grabbed the pocket knife, sharp edge out, reverse grip, and slashed it across the doctor’s arm.

***

Somehow, the world still hasn’t crushed me. Back in the desert, someone hoists me onto a stretcher. My remaining eye shows me the mess I’ve made. All the sirens and the stars and, just within my periphery, along the very edge, my husband.

His body.

What was left of us, split between my car and this gurney.

Someone shines a small flashlight in my eye, “When’s your birthday?” he asks. “Do you know who you are?”

“Did you know,” I tell him, “that to the naked eye a binary star system looks just like any other star?” My lips trembled and my fingernails bend back because of the first I’m making with my hand. The pocket knife pressing into my palm.

The medic’s gloved hand grabs my wrist, and I pull back. 

“Hey,” he said. “It’s okay, we’re here to help. Can you tell me who you are?”

He keeps his hand there, outstretched and open. 

“And did you know,” I say, “That…that…” 

Behind him someone pulls my husband from the car and out of view.

No more weapons. No more shields.

I say, “I’m not entirely sure,” and let go of the knife.

He grabs it from me and helps lay me back so he can roll me towards the ambulance. Over us, the night sky. The same sky my husband and I looked out at with my telescope all those years ago. It’s there, right before I’m pushed into the ambulance, that one of the stars peeking around the edge of the moon blinks out. 

The End.