Man in het duister Read online

  Like a snow image of an unbending but old, old man, he stood for a moment gazing at me. My mother sobbed as she walked beside him to the carriage. We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since.

  I switch off, and once again I’m in the dark, engulfed by the endless, soothing dark. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the sounds of a truck driving down an empty country road. I listen to the air rushing in and out of my nostrils. According to the clock on the bedside table, which I checked before turning off the lamp, the time is twenty past twelve. Hours and hours until daybreak, the bulk of the night still in front of me. . . . Hawthorne didn’t care. If the South wanted to secede from the country, he said, let them go and good riddance. The weird world, the battered world, the weird world rolling on as wars flame all around us: the chopped-off arms in Africa, the chopped-off heads in Iraq, and in my own head this other war, an imaginary war on home ground, America cracking apart, the noble experiment finally dead. My thoughts drift back to Wellington, and suddenly I can see Owen Brick again, sitting in one of the booths at the Pulaski Diner, watching Molly Wald wipe down the tables and counter as six o’clock approaches. Then they’re outdoors, walking together in silence as she leads him toward her place, the sidewalks clogged with exhausted-looking men and women shuffling home from work, soldiers with rifles standing guard at the main intersections, a pinkish sky gloaming overhead. Brick has lost all confidence in Molly. Realizing that she can’t be trusted, that no one can be trusted, he ducked into the men’s room at the diner about twenty minutes before they left and transferred the envelope of fifty-dollar bills from the backpack to the right front pocket of his jeans. A smaller chance of being robbed that way, he felt, and when he goes to bed that night, he has every intention of keeping his pants on. In the men’s room, he finally took the trouble to examine the money and was encouraged to see the face of Ulysses S. Grant engraved on the front of each bill. That proved to him that this America, this other America, which hasn’t lived through September 11 or the war in Iraq, nevertheless has strong historical links to the America he knows. The question is: at what point did the two stories begin to diverge?

  Molly, Brick says, breaking the silence ten minutes into their walk, do you mind if I ask you something?

  It depends on what it is, she answers.

  Have you ever heard of the Second World War?

  The waitress lets out a short, ill-tempered grunt. What do you think I am? she says. A retard? Of course I’ve heard of it.

  And what about Vietnam?

  My grandfather was one of the first soldiers they shipped out.

  If I said the New York Yankees, what would you say?

  Come on, everybody knows that.

  What would you say? Brick repeats.

  With an exasperated sigh, Molly turns to him and announces in a sardonic voice: The New York Yankees? They’re those girls who dance at Radio City Music Hall.

  Very good. And the Rockettes are a baseball team, right?

  Exactly.

  Okay. One last question, and then I’ll stop.

  You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that?

  Sorry. I know you think I’m stupid, but it isn’t my fault.

  No, I guess not. You just happened to be born that way.

  Who’s the president?

  President? What are you talking about? We don’t have a president.

  No? Then who’s in charge of the government?

  The prime minister, birdbrain. Jesus Christ, what planet do you come from?

  I see. The independent states have a prime minister. But what about the Federals? Do they still have a president?

  Of course.

  What’s his name?

  Bush.

  George W.?

  That’s right. George W. Bush.

  Sticking to his word, Brick refrains from asking any more questions, and once again the two of them walk through the streets in silence. A couple of minutes later, Molly points to a four-story wood-frame building on a low-rent residential block lined with similar four-story wooden buildings, all of them in need of a paint job. 628 Cumberland Avenue. Here we are, she says, extracting a key from her purse and unlocking the front door, and then Brick follows her up two flights of wobbly stairs to the apartment she occupies with her unnamed boyfriend. It’s a small but tidy flat, consisting of one bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower but no tub. Looking around the place, Brick is struck by the fact that there’s no television or radio either. When he remarks on this to Molly, she tells him that all the transmission towers in the state were blown up in the first weeks of the war, and the government doesn’t have enough money to rebuild them.

  Maybe after the war is over, Brick says.

  Yeah, maybe, Molly answers, sitting down on the living room sofa and lighting up a cigarette. But the thing is, nobody seems to care anymore. It was hard at first—my God, no TV!—but then you kind of get used to it, and after another year or two, you begin to like it. The stillness, I mean. No more voices shouting at you twenty-four hours a day. It’s an old-fashioned sort of life now, I guess, the way things must have been a hundred years ago. You want news, you read the paper. You want to see a movie, you go to the theater. No more couch potatoes. I know a lot of people have died, and I know things are really tough out there, but maybe it’s all been worth it. Maybe. Just maybe. If the war doesn’t end soon, everything will turn to shit.

  Brick is at a loss to explain it, but he realizes that Molly is no longer talking to him as if he were a dunce. How to account for this unexpected shift in tone? The fact that her job is done for the day and she’s sitting comfortably in her apartment puffing on a cigarette? The fact that she’s begun to feel sorry for him? Or, conversely, the fact that he’s made her two hundred dollars richer and she’s decided to stop poking fun at him? In any case, Brick thinks, a girl of many moods, perhaps not as crass as she seems to be, but not so terribly bright either. There are a hundred more questions he would like to ask her, but he decides not to push his luck.

  Stubbing out her cigarette, Molly stands up and tells Brick that she’s meeting her boyfriend for dinner across town in less than an hour. She walks over to a closet between the bedroom and the kitchen, pulls out two sheets, two blankets, and a pillow, then carries them into the living room and plops them down on the sofa.

  There you are, she says. Bedding for your bed, which isn’t a real bed. I hope it’s not too lumpy.

  I’m so tired, Brick answers, I could sleep on a pile of rocks.

  If you get hungry, there’s some stuff to eat in the kitchen. A can of soup, a loaf of bread, some sliced turkey. You can make yourself a sandwich.

  How much?

  What do you mean?

  How much will it cost me?

  Cut it out. I’m not going to charge you for a little food. You’ve already paid me enough.

  And what about breakfast tomorrow morning?

  Fine by me. We don’t have a lot, though. Just coffee and toast.

  Without waiting for Brick to answer, Molly rushes off to the bedroom to change her clothes. The door slams shut, and Brick begins making the bed that isn’t a bed. When he’s finished, he walks around the room looking for newspapers and magazines, hoping to find something that will tell him about the war, something that will give him a clue about where he is, some scrap of information that will help him understand a little more about the bewildering country he’s landed in. But there are no magazines or newspapers in the living room—only a small bookcase crammed with paperback mysteries and thrillers, which he has no desire to read.

  He returns to the sofa, sits down, leans his head against the upholstered backrest, and promptly dozes off.

  When he opens his eyes thirty minutes later, the bedroom door is ajar, and Molly is gone.

  He searches the bedroom for newspapers and magazines—with no success.

  Then he walks into the kitchen to heat up a can of vegetable soup and fix himself a turkey sandwich. He notes that the brands are familiar to him: Progresso, Boar’s Head, Arnold’s. Washing the dishes after eating this prosaic fare, he looks at the white telephone attached to the wall and wonders what would happen if he tried to call Flora.

  He takes the receiver off the hook, dials the number of his apartment in Jackson Heights, and quickly learns the answer. The number is out of service.

  He dries the dishes and puts them back in the cupboard. Then, after turning off the kitchen light, he walks into the living room and thinks about Flora, his dark-haired Argentinian bedmate, his little spitfire, his wife of the past three years. What she must be going through, he says to himself.

  He turns off the lights in the living room. He undoes the laces of his shoes. He crawls under the covers. He falls asleep.

  Some hours later, he is woken by the sound of a key entering the lock of the apartment door. Keeping his eyes shut, Brick listens to the scraping of footsteps, the low-pitched rumble of a male voice, the sharper, more metallic voice of his female companion, no doubt Molly, yes, indeed Molly, who addresses the man as Duke, and then a light goes on, which registers as a crimson glare undulating on the surface of his eyelids. They both sound a bit drunk, and as the light goes off and they clomp into the bedroom—where another light immediately goes on—Brick gathers that they’re quarreling about something. Before the door shuts, he catches the words don’t like it, two hundred, risky, harmless, and understands that he is the subject of the argument and that Duke is none too happy about his presence in the house.

  Managing to fall asleep again after the ruckus in the bedroom dies down (sounds of copulation: a grunting Duke, a yelping Molly, squeaking mattress and springs), Brick then floats off into a complex dream about Flora. At first, he’s talking to her on the telephone. It isn’t Flora’s voice, however, with its thick, rolling r’s and singsong lilt, but the voice of Virginia Blaine, and Virginia/Flora is begging him to fly—not walk, but fly—to a certain corner in Buffalo, New York, where she’ll be standing naked under a transparent raincoat, holding a red umbrella in one hand and a white tulip in the other. Brick begins to weep, telling her that he doesn’t know how to fly, at which point Virginia/Flora shouts angrily into the phone that she never wants to see him again and hangs up. Stunned by her vehemence, Brick shakes his head and mutters to himself: But I’m not in Buffalo today, I’m in Worcester, Massachusetts. Then he’s walking down a street in Jackson Heights, dressed in his Great Zavello costume with the long black cape, looking for his apartment building. But the building is gone, and in its place there is a one-story wooden cottage with a sign above the door that reads: ALL-AMERICAN DENTAL CLINIC. He walks in, and there’s Flora, the real Flora, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform. I’m so glad you could come, Mr. Brick, she says, apparently not recognizing him, and then she’s leading him into an office and gesturing for him to sit down in a dental chair. It’s such a shame, she says, picking up a pair of large, gleaming pliers, it’s such a shame, but it looks like we’re going to have to pull out all your teeth. All of them? Brick asks, suddenly terrified. Yes, Flora answers, all of them. But don’t worry. After we’re done, the doctor will give you a new face.

  The dream stops there. Someone is shaking Brick’s shoulder and barking words at him in a loud voice, and as the groggy dreamer at last opens his eyes, he sees a large man with broad shoulders and muscular arms towering above him. One of those bodybuilder types, Brick thinks, Duke the boyfriend, the guy with the bad temper, dressed in a tight-fitting black T-shirt and blue boxer shorts, telling him to get the fuck out of the apartment.

  I paid good money—Brick begins.

  For one night, Duke shouts. The night’s up now, and out you go.

  Just a minute, just a minute, Brick says, raising his right hand as a sign of his peaceful intentions. Molly promised me breakfast. Coffee and toast. Just let me have some coffee, and then I’ll be on my way.

  No coffee. No toast. No nothing.

  What if I paid you for it? A little extra, I mean.

  Don’t you understand English?

  And with those words, Duke bends down, grabs hold of Brick’s sweater, and yanks him to his feet. Now that he’s standing, Brick has a clear view of the bedroom door, and the moment he catches sight of it, out comes Molly, securing the sash of her bathrobe and then running her hands through her hair.

  Stop it, she says to Duke. You don’t have to play rough.

  Pipe down, he answers. You made this mess, and now I’m cleaning it up.

  Molly shrugs, then looks at Brick with a small, apologetic smile. Sorry, she says. I guess you’d better be going now.

  Slipping his feet into his shoes without bothering to tie the laces, then retrieving his leather jacket from the foot of the sofa and putting it on, Brick says to her: I don’t get it. I give you all that money, and now you throw me out. It doesn’t make sense.

  Rather than answer him, Molly looks down at the floor and shrugs again. That apathetic gesture carries all the force of a defection, a betrayal. With no ally to stand up for him, Brick decides to leave without further protest. He bends down and picks up the green backpack from the floor, but no sooner does he turn to go than Duke snatches it out of his hands.

  What’s this? he asks.

  My stuff, Brick says. Obviously.

  Your stuff? Duke replies. I don’t think so, funny man.

  What are you talking about?

  It’s mine now.

  Yours? You can’t do that. Everything I own is in there.

  Then try and get it back.

  Brick understands that Duke is itching for a fight—and that the bag is merely a pretext. He also knows that if he tangles with Molly’s boyfriend, there is every chance he will be ripped apart. Or so his mind tells him the instant he hears Duke issue his challenge, but Brick is no longer thinking with his mind, for the outrage surging through him has overwhelmed all reason, and if he allows this bully to get his way without offering some form of resistance, he will lose whatever respect he still has for himself. So Brick takes his stand, unexpectedly wrenching the bag out of Duke’s grasp, and immediately after that the drubbing begins, an assault so one-sided and short-lived that the big man floors Brick with just three blows: a left to the gut, a right to the face, and a knee to the balls. Pain floods into every corner of the magician’s body, and as he rolls around on the tattered rug gasping for breath, one hand clutching his stomach and the other clamped over his scrotum, he sees blood dripping from the wound that has opened on his cheek, and then, lying in the gathering puddle of red, a fragment of a tooth—the lower half of one of his left incisors. He is only dimly aware of Molly’s screams, which sound as if they are coming from ten blocks away. A moment after that, he is aware of nothing.

  When he picks up the thread of his own story, Brick finds himself on his feet, maneuvering his body down the stairs as he clings to the banister with both hands, slowly descending to the ground floor, a single step at a time. The backpack is gone, which means that the gun and the bullets are also gone, not to speak of everything else that was in the bag, but as Brick pauses to reach into the right front pocket of his jeans, the trace of a smile flits across his bruised mouth—the bitter smile of the not quite vanquished. The money is still there. No longer the thousand that Tobak gave him the previous morning, but five hundred and sixty-five dollars is better than nothing, he thinks, more than enough to get him a room somewhere and a bite to eat. That’s as far as his thoughts can take him now. To hide, to wash the blood off his face, to fill his stomach if and when his appetite returns.

  However modest these plans might be, they are thwarted the moment he leaves the building and steps onto the sidewalk. Directly in front of him, standing with her arms folded and her back resting against the door of a military jeep, Virginia Blaine is eyeing Brick with a disgusted look on her face.

  No monkey business, she says. You promised me.

  Virginia, Brick replies, doing his best to play dumb, what are you doing here?

  Ignoring his remark, the former queen of Miss Blunt’s geometry class shakes her head and snaps back: We were supposed to meet at five-thirty yesterday afternoon. You stood me up.

  Something happened, and I had to leave at the last minute.

  You mean I happened, and you ran away.

  Unable to think of an answer, Brick says nothing.

  You don’t look so good, Owen, Virginia continues.

  No, I don’t suppose I do. I just got the shit kicked out of me.

  You should watch the company you keep. That Rothstein’s a tough fellow.

  Who’s Rothstein?

  Duke. Molly’s boyfriend.

  You know him?

  He works with us. He’s one of our best men.

  He’s an animal. A sadistic creep.

  It was all an act, Owen. To teach you a lesson.

  Oh? Brick snorts, indignation rising within him. And what lesson is that? The son of a bitch knocked out one of my teeth.

  Just be glad it wasn’t all of them.

  Very nice, Brick mumbles, with a sarcastic edge to his voice, and then, all of a sudden, the final chapter of the dream comes rushing back to him: the All-American Dental Clinic, Flora and the pliers, the new face. Well, Brick thinks, as he touches the wound on his cheek, I got my new face, didn’t I? Thanks to Rothstein’s fist.

  You can’t win, Virginia says. Everywhere you go, someone is watching you. You’ll never get away from us.