Man in the Dark (12 page)

Brick knows that Flora is right. He could never kill an innocent stranger, not even if his own life depended on it—which it probably does. He lets out a long, shuddering breath, then runs his hand through Flora’s hair and says: So what am I supposed to do?

Nothing.

What do you mean,
nothing
?

We start living again. You do your job, I do mine. We eat and sleep and pay the bills. We wash the dishes and vacuum the floor. We make a baby together. You put me in the bath and shampoo my hair. I rub your back. You learn new tricks. We visit your parents and listen to your mother complain about her health. We go on, baby, and live our little life. That’s what I’m talking about. Nothing.

A month goes by. In the first week after Brick’s return, Flora misses her period, and a home pregnancy test brings them the news that if all goes well, they will become parents by the following January. They celebrate the positive test result by going out to a fashionable Manhattan restaurant that is far beyond their means, consume an entire bottle of French champagne before placing their orders, and then gorge themselves on a gargantuan porterhouse for two, which Flora claims is almost as good as the meat in Argentina. The next day, on his second visit to the dentist, a cap is put on Brick’s left incisor, and he resumes his career as the Great Zavello. Bolting around the city in his battered yellow Mazda, he dons his cape and performs at elementary school assemblies, retirement homes, community centers, and private parties, pulling doves and rabbits out of his top hat, making silk scarves disappear, snatching eggs out of thin air, and transforming dull newspapers into colorful bouquets of pansies, tulips, and roses. Flora, who left her catering job two years earlier and is now working as a receptionist at a doctor’s office on Park Avenue, asks her boss for a twenty-dollar raise and is turned down. She explodes in a tantrum of injured pride and storms out of the building, but when she talks it over with Brick that evening, he persuades her to return the next morning and apologize to Dr. Sontag, which she does, and because the doctor doesn’t want to lose such a competent, hardworking employee, he rewards her with a ten-dollar increase in salary, which is all she was hoping for in the first place. Money is nevertheless an issue, and with a child now on the way, Brick and Flora wonder if they will be able to feed that third mouth with what they are earning now. On a grim Sunday afternoon toward the end of the month, they even discuss the possibility of Brick going to work for his cousin Ralph, who owns a high-powered real estate agency in Park Slope. Magic would have to become a part-time occupation, little more than a hobby to be pursued on his days off, and Brick is reluctant to take such a drastic step, vowing to land some higher-paying jobs that will give them the breathing room they need. Meanwhile, he has not forgotten his visit to the other America. Wellington is still burning inside him, and not a day goes by when he doesn’t think of Tobak, Molly Wald, Duke Rothstein, Frisk, and, most disturbingly of all, Virginia Blaine. He can’t help himself. Flora has been so much more tender with him since his return, metamorphosing herself into the loving companion he always longed for, and while there is no question that he loves her back, Virginia is always there, lurking in a corner of his mind, gently putting the bandage on his face and telling him how much she wanted to charm his pants off. By way of compensation, perhaps, he begins reading Brill’s old reviews on the Internet—always in secret, of course, since he doesn’t want Flora to know that he’s still thinking about the man he was instructed to kill—and every time he comes across an article about a book that sounds interesting, he checks it out of the library. He used to spend his evenings watching television with Flora on a sofa in the living room. Now he lies on the bed and reads books. So far, his most important discoveries have been Chekhov, Calvino, and Camus.

In this way Brick and Flora swim along in their conjugal nothing, the little life she lured him back to with the good sense of a woman who doesn’t believe in other worlds, who knows there is only this world and that numbing routines and brief squabbles and financial worries are an essential part of it, that in spite of the aches and boredoms and disappointments, living in this world is the closest we will ever come to seeing paradise. After the horrific hours he spent in Wellington, Brick too wants only this, the jumbled grind of New York, the naked body of his little Floratina, his work as the Great Zavello, his unborn child growing invisibly as the days pass, and yet deep inside himself he knows that he has been contaminated by his visit to the other world and that sooner or later everything will come to an end. He contemplates driving up to Vermont and talking to Brill. Would it be possible to convince the old man to stop thinking about his story? He tries to imagine the conversation, tries to summon the words he would use to present his argument, but all he ever sees is Brill laughing at him, the incredulous laughter of a man who would take him for an imbecile, a mental defective, and promptly throw him out of the house. So Brick does nothing, and precisely one month after his return from Wellington, on the evening of May twenty-first, as he sits in the living room with Flora, demonstrating a new card trick to his laughing wife, someone knocks on the door. Without having to think about it, Brick already knows what has happened. He tells Flora not to open the door, to run into the bedroom and go down the fire escape as fast as she can, but willful, independent Flora, unaware of the fix they’re in, scoffs at his panicked instructions and does exactly what he tells her not to do. Bounding off the sofa before he can grab her arm, she dances to the door with a mocking pirouette and yanks it open. Two men are standing on the threshold, Lou Frisk and Duke Rothstein, and since each one is holding a revolver in his hand and pointing it at Flora, Brick doesn’t move from his spot on the sofa. Theoretically, he can still try to escape, but the moment he stood up, the mother of his child would be dead.

Who the fuck are you? Flora says, in a shrill, angry voice.

Sit down next to your husband, Frisk replies, waving his gun in the direction of the sofa. We have some business to discuss with him.

Turning to Brick with an anguished look on her face, Flora says: What’s going on, baby?

Come here, Brick answers, patting the sofa with his right hand. Those guns aren’t toys, and you have to do what they say.

For once, Flora doesn’t resist, and as the two men enter the apartment and shut the door, she walks over to the sofa and sits down beside her husband.

These are my friends, Brick says to her. Duke Rothstein and Lou Frisk. Remember when I told you about them? Well, here they are.

Jesus holy Christ, Flora mutters, by now sick to death with fear.

Frisk and Rothstein settle into two chairs opposite the sofa. The cards that were used to demonstrate the trick are strewn across the surface of the coffee table in front of them. Taking hold of one of the cards and turning it over, Frisk says: I’m glad you remember us, Owen. We were beginning to have our doubts.

Don’t worry, Brick says. I never forget a face.

How’s the tooth? Rothstein asks, breaking into what looks like a cross between a grimace and a smile.

Much better, thank you, Brick says. I went to the dentist, and he put a cap on it.

I’m sorry I hit you so hard. But orders are orders, and I had to do my job. Scare tactics. I guess they didn’t work too well, did they?

Have you ever had a gun pointed at you? Frisk asks.

Believe it or not, Brick says, this is the first time.

You seem to be handling it pretty well.

I’ve played it out in my head so often, I feel as if it’s already happened.

Which means you’ve been expecting us.

Of course I’ve been expecting you. The only surprise is that you didn’t show up sooner.

We figured we’d give you a month. It’s a tough assignment, and it seemed only fair to give you a little time to work yourself up to it. But the month is over now, and we still haven’t seen any results. Do you want to explain yourself?

I can’t do it. That’s all. I just can’t do it.

While you’ve been twiddling your thumbs in Jackson Heights, the war has gone from bad to worse. The Federals launched a spring offensive, and nearly every town on the East Coast has been under attack. Operation Unity, they call it. A million and a half more dead while you sit here wrestling with your conscience. The Twin Cities were invaded three weeks ago, and half of Minnesota is under Federal control again. Huge parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Nebraska have been turned into prison camps. Shall I go on?

No, no, I get the picture.

You have to do it, Brick.

I’m sorry. I just can’t.

You remember the consequences, don’t you?

Isn’t that why you’re here?

Not yet. We’re giving you a deadline. One week from today. If Brill isn’t taken care of by midnight on the twenty-eighth, Duke and I will be back, and next time our guns will be loaded. Do you hear me, Corporal? One week from today, or else you and your wife die for nothing.

I don’t know what time it is. The hands on the alarm clock aren’t illuminated, and I’m not about to switch on the lamp again and subject myself to the blinding rays of the bulb. I keep intending to ask Miriam to buy me one of those glow-in-the-dark jobs, but every time I wake up in the morning, I forget. The light erases the thought, and I don’t remember it again until I’m back in bed, lying awake as I am now, staring up at the invisible ceiling in my invisible room. I can’t be certain, but I would guess it’s somewhere between one-thirty and two o’clock. Inching along, inching along . . .

The Web site was Miriam’s idea. If I had known what she was up to, I would have told her not to waste her time, but she kept it a secret from me (in collusion with her mother, who had saved nearly every scrap of writing I’d ever published), and when she came to New York for my seventieth-birthday dinner, she took me into my study, turned on my laptop, and showed me what she had done. The articles were hardly worth the trouble, but the thought of my daughter spending untold hours typing up all those ancient pieces of mine—
for posterity,
as she put it—more or less undid me, and I didn’t know what to say. My usual impulse is to deflect emotional scenes with a dry quip or wiseacre remark, but that night I simply put my arms around Miriam and said nothing. Sonia cried, of course. She always cried when she was happy, but on that occasion her tears were especially poignant and terrible to me, since her cancer had been detected only three days earlier and the prognosis was cloudy, touch-and-go at best. No one said a word about it, but all three of us knew that she might not be around for my next birthday. As it turned out, a year was too much to hope for.

I shouldn’t be doing this. I promised myself not to fall into the trap of Sonia-thoughts and Sonia-memories, not to let myself go. I can’t afford to break down now and sink into a despond of grief and self-recrimination. I might start howling and wake the girls upstairs—or else spend the next several hours thinking of ever more artful and devious ways to kill myself. That task has been reserved for Brick, the protagonist of tonight’s story. Perhaps that explains why he and Flora turn on her computer and look at Miriam’s Web site. It seems important that my hero should get to know me a bit, to learn what kind of man he’s up against, and now that he’s dipped into some of the books I’ve recommended, we’ve finally begun to establish a bond. It’s turning into a rather complicated jig, I suppose, but the fact is that the Brill character wasn’t in my original plan. The mind that created the war was going to belong to someone else, another invented character, as unreal as Brick and Flora and Tobak and all the rest, but the longer I went on, the more I understood how badly I was fooling myself. The story is about a man who must kill the person who created him, and why pretend that I am not that person? By putting myself into the story, the story becomes real. Or else I become unreal, yet one more figment of my own imagination. Either way, the effect is more satisfying, more in harmony with my mood—which is dark, my little ones, as dark as the obsidian night that surrounds me.

I’m blathering on, letting my thoughts fly helter-skelter to keep Sonia at bay, but in spite of my efforts, she’s still there, the ever-present absent one, who spent so many nights in this bed with me, now lying in a grave in the Cimetière Montparnasse, my French wife of eighteen years, and then nine years apart, and then twenty-one more years together, thirty-nine years in all, forty-one counting the two years before our wedding, more than half my life, much more than half, and nothing left now but boxes of photographs and seven scratchy LPs, the recordings she made in the sixties and seventies, Schubert, Mozart, Bach, and the chance to listen to her voice again, that small but beautiful voice, so drenched in feeling, so much the essence of who she was. Photographs . . . and music . . . and Miriam. She left me our child, too, that mustn’t be overlooked, the child who is no longer a child, and how strange to think that I’d be lost without her now, no doubt drunk every night, if not dead or on life support in some hospital. When she asked me to move in with her after the accident, I politely turned her down, explaining that she had enough burdens already without adding me to the list. She took hold of my hand and said: No, Dad, you don’t get it. I need you. I’m so damned lonely in that house, I don’t know how much longer I can take it. I need someone to talk to. I need someone to look at, to be there at dinner, to hold me every once in a while and tell me that I’m not an awful person.

Awful person
must have come from Richard, an epithet that shot out of his mouth during an ugly row at the end of their marriage. People say the worst things in the flush of anger, and it pains me that Miriam allowed those words to stick to her like some ultimate judgment of her character, a condemnation of who and what she is. There are depths of goodness in that girl, the same kind of self-punishing goodness that Noriko embodies in the film, and because of that, almost inevitably, even if Richard was the one who jumped ship, she continues to fault herself for what happened. I don’t know if I’ve been of much help to her, but at least she isn’t alone anymore. We were settling into a fairly comfortable routine before Titus was killed, and I just want you to remember this, Miriam: when Katya was in trouble, she didn’t go to her father, she went to you.