We Are the Light(19)
The boy slept the whole way.
I was surprised to hear him speak when we were pulling into my driveway. “Maybe this is crazy,” he said, “but would it be possible to make a feature-length movie for my senior project?”
When I shifted into park, turned off the car, and looked over at him, he returned my gaze with a palpable vulnerability. I understood that it had taken a lot of courage for him to voice what psyche was asking of him and so I said, “I think that’s a fantastic idea!” Then before I truly understood what I was saying, I added, “And maybe—for the presentation part—we can even screen it in the Majestic Theater.”
He stared back at me, trying to blink away his concern, until I finally realized what I had just suggested.
We sat there in the car staring at each other, neither of us willing to say what we were both thinking, which was that some sort of higher force was dropping bread crumbs and that maybe this moment was the first crumb we had actually picked up, right before agreeing to follow the trail.
I was just about to voice the thought when Eli opened the passenger-side door, got out, and then strode across the back lawn and directly into his tent, zippering the flap shut behind him.
When Jill came home later that evening with hamburgers from The Cup, I told her to let Eli be but refused to tell her what we had been up to during the day, saying it was “man stuff,” to which she replied, “Are the two of you going to start living in a cave and hunting with spears as well?” but in a friendly, jokey manner, which made me laugh and say, “Maybe.”
Isaiah dropped by later that night. After I filled him in on day one of Eli’s senior project, Isaiah said he wanted to pray with me. We put our hands on each other’s shoulders and bowed our heads so that our hairlines touched and closed our eyes. Then—in a booming voice—he said, “Dear Heavenly Father, please bless whatever crazy venture my friend Lucas has begun, and please be with Eli as he starts to heal and work his way through his pain and, ultimately, find the path that You have already mapped out for him. Amen.”
I echoed his “Amen” and then Isaiah hugged me hard, patting me on the back and saying, “It’s really good to see you working with young people again.”
When I locked my bedroom door that night, winged Darcy was waiting for me, so I asked her if she soars with the birds of Raptor Mountain now that she has the ability to fly, but she only engulfed me in her wings and held me tightly in a way that let me know she was proud of me. The last thing I remember hearing before I lost consciousness was her saying, “The boy is the way forward,” like she had many times before. And I felt the truth of that statement vibrating harmoniously through every bone in my body.
The next morning, I was able to add four angel feathers to my collection, pulling them by the quills from the comforter, and each one felt like a confirmation of everything I had learned to believe in since we last spoke.
I think you once said Jung would call it a “compensation,” but I might be remembering that incorrectly. It’s been a long time since you and I have talked Jungian philosophy.
I’ll write again soon, but for now, I must sign off.
Your most loyal analysand,
Lucas
7.
Dear Karl,
Did you know that you can buy real feathers on the internet?
This was a surprise to me, although it probably shouldn’t have been. Eli and I decided on natural pheasant feathers, because they create an almost tiger-striped appearance when you line them up uniformly. It’s almost on-the-nose ironic, because Eli wants to make a monster film, where he plays the misunderstood but ultimately humane monster, à la Frankenstein’s. Except—instead of an abnormal brain—our monster will have a healthy brain and won’t kill any little girls or any people at all. (Eli could rattle off many other comps in addition to Frankenstein, but monster movies are not exactly my forte, to say the least.) Eli and I debated for a long time about what the monster should look like, taking into consideration our limited budget and the fact that we have no special effects team or makeup artists. (Eli is bringing a little over four hundred dollars to the project, which we initially thought would be mostly funded with the life insurance money Jill was able to secure after Darcy’s pretend funeral.)
Eli kept saying things like, “How can we—given our limited budget and time restraints—convey a feeling of otherness that will simultaneously repel and intrigue a general audience?”
It turns out he’s even more passionate about classic monster films than I had previously realized, but in an intellectual way. He sees them as metaphors, of course. Like I mentioned earlier, he and his brother, Jacob, used to binge classic monster movies every weekend, before Jacob “went south,” as Eli puts it. They at one point had quite the DVD collection, but their mother inexplicably sold it at a pawn shop a few months before the tragedy, saying she needed the money to buy food and pay the mortgage, even though she apparently has a pretty good job working in the city as some sort of director or manager for a popular TV news program, which I’m sure you would recognize if I were to say its name, but I won’t because I don’t want to politicize these letters. You always said that politics was the road to splitting and binary thinking, which I learned firsthand when Sandra Coyle shamed me out of The Survivors’ Group.
Don’t worry, I have been conscious of Eli’s unconscious fantasy: me taking up the role of big brother—playing Jacob, if you will. To combat that, I have kept the role of the father or initiator firmly at the forefront of my mind and have resisted the impulse to backslide into some sort of puer Peter Pan boy adventure. I’m all business here. I’ve put aside all of my own needs to be fully one hundred percent in service of bringing out Eli’s potential—helping him to individuate, as Jung says.