Man in the Dark (9 page)

You’re still young. You’re still the prettiest girl on the block. Someone else will come along, I’m sure of it.

Before Virginia can answer him, the doorbell rings. She stands up, muttering
Shit
under her breath as if she means it, as if she honestly resents the intrusion, but Brick knows that he’s cornered now, and any chance of escape is gone. Before leaving the kitchen, Virginia turns to him and says: I called while you were taking your bath. I told him to come between four and five, but I guess he couldn’t wait. I’m sorry, Owen. I wanted to have those hours with you and charm your pants off. I really did. I wanted to fuck your brains out. Just remember that when you go back.

Back? You mean I’m going back?

Lou will explain. That’s his job. I’m just a personnel officer, a little cog in a big machine.

Lou Frisk turns out to be a dour-looking man in his early fifties, somewhat on the short side, with narrow shoulders, wire-rimmed glasses, and the marred skin of someone who once suffered from acne. He’s dressed in a green V-neck sweater with a white shirt and plaid tie, and in his left hand he’s carrying a black satchel that resembles a doctor’s bag. The moment he enters the kitchen, he puts down the bag and says: You’ve been avoiding me, Corporal.

I’m not a corporal, Brick answers. You know that. I’ve never been a soldier in my life.

Not in your world, Frisk says, but in this world you’re a corporal in the Massachusetts Seventh, a member of the armed forces of the Independent States of America.

Putting his head in his hands, Brick groans softly as another element of the dream comes back to him: Worcester, Massachusetts. He looks up, watches Frisk settle into a chair across from him at the table, and says: I’m in Massachusetts, then. Is that what you’re telling me?

Wellington, Massachusetts, Frisk nods. Formerly known as Worcester.

Brick pounds his fist on the table, finally giving vent to the rage that has been building inside him. I don’t like this! he shouts. Someone’s inside my head. Not even my dreams belong to me. My whole life has been stolen. Then, turning to Frisk and looking him directly in the eye, he yells at the top of his voice: Who’s doing this to me?

Take it easy, Frisk says, patting Brick on the hand. You have every right to be confused. That’s why I’m here. I’m the one who explains it to you, who sets things straight. We don’t want you to suffer. If you’d come to me when you were supposed to, you never would have had that dream. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?

Not really, Brick says, in a more subdued voice.

Through the walls of the house, he catches the faint sound of the jeep’s engine being turned on, and then the distant squeal of shifting gears as Virginia drives away.

Virginia? he asks.

What about her?

She just left, didn’t she?

She has a lot of work to do, and our business doesn’t concern her.

She didn’t even say good-bye, Brick adds, reluctant to drop the matter. There is hurt in his voice, as if he can’t quite believe that she would ditch him in such an offhanded way.

Forget Virginia, Frisk says. We have more important things to talk about.

She said I was going back. Is that true?

Yes. But first I have to tell you why. Listen carefully, Brick, and then give me an honest answer. Putting his arms on the table, Frisk leans forward and says: Are we in the real world or not?

How should I know? Everything looks real. Everything sounds real. I’m sitting here in my own body, but at the same time I can’t be here, can I? I belong somewhere else.

You’re here, all right. And you belong somewhere else.

It can’t be both. It has to be one or the other.

Is the name Giordano Bruno familiar to you?

No. Never heard of him.

A sixteenth-century Italian philosopher. He argued that if God is infinite, and if the powers of God are infinite, then there must be an infinite number of worlds.

I suppose that makes sense. Assuming you believe in God.

He was burned at the stake for that idea. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong, does it?

Why ask me? I don’t know the first thing about any of this. How can I have an opinion about something I don’t understand?

Until you woke up in that hole the other day, your entire life had been spent in one world. But how could you be sure it was the only world?

Because . . . because it was the only world I ever knew.

But now you know another world. What does that suggest to you, Brick?

I don’t follow.

There’s no single reality, Corporal. There are many realities. There’s no single world. There are many worlds, and they all run parallel to one another, worlds and anti-worlds, worlds and shadow-worlds, and each world is dreamed or imagined or written by someone in another world. Each world is the creation of a mind.

You’re beginning to sound like Tobak. He said the war was in one man’s head, and if that man was eliminated, the war would stop. That’s about the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard.

Tobak might not be the brightest soldier in the army, but he was telling you the truth.

If you want me to believe a crazy thing like that, you’ll have to prove it to me first.

All right, Frisk says, slapping his palms on the table, what about this? Without another word, he reaches under his sweater with his right hand and pulls out a three-by-five photograph from his shirt pocket. This is the culprit, he says, sliding the photo across the table to Brick.

Brick does no more than glance at the picture. It’s a color snapshot of a man in his late sixties or early seventies sitting in a wheelchair in front of a white country house. A perfectly sympathetic-looking man, Brick notes, with spiky gray hair and a weathered face.

This doesn’t prove anything, he says, thrusting the photo back at Frisk. It’s just a man. Any man. For all I know, he could be your uncle.

His name is August Brill, Frisk begins, but Brick cuts him off before he can say anything else.

Not according to Tobak. He said his name was Blake.

Blank.

Whatever.

Tobak isn’t up on the latest intelligence reports. For a long time, Blank was our leading suspect, but then we crossed him off the list. Brill is the one. We’re sure of that now.

Then show me the story. Reach into that bag of yours and pull out his manuscript and point to a sentence where my name is mentioned.

That’s the problem. Brill doesn’t write anything down. He’s telling himself the story in his head.

How can you possibly know that?

A military secret. But we know, Corporal. Trust me.

Bullshit.

You want to go back, don’t you? Well, this is the only way. If you don’t accept the job, you’ll be stuck here forever.

All right. Just for the sake of argument, imagine I shoot this man . . . this Brill. Then what happens? If he created your world, then the moment he’s dead, you won’t exist anymore.

He didn’t invent this world. He only invented the war. And he invented you, Brick. Don’t you understand that? This is your story, not ours. The old man invented you in order to kill him.

So now it’s a suicide.

In a roundabout way, yes.

Once again, Brick puts his head in his hands and begins to moan. It’s all too much for him, and after struggling to hold his ground against Frisk’s demented assertions, he can feel his mind dissolving, whirling madly through a universe of disconnected thoughts and amorphous dreads. Only one thing is clear to him: he wants to go back. He wants to be with Flora again and return to his old life. In order to do that, he must accept a command to murder someone he has never met, a total stranger. He will have to accept, but once he gets to the other side, what is to prevent him from refusing to carry out the job?

Still looking down at the table, he forces the words out of his mouth: Tell me something about the man.

Ah, that’s better, Frisk says. Coming to our senses at last.

Don’t patronize me, Frisk. Just tell me what I need to know.

A retired book critic, seventy-two years old, living outside Brattleboro, Vermont, with his forty-seven-year-old daughter and twenty-three-year-old granddaughter. His wife died last year. The daughter’s husband left her five years ago. The granddaughter’s boyfriend was killed. It’s a house of grieving, wounded souls, and every night Brill lies awake in the dark, trying not to think about his past, making up stories about other worlds.

Why is he in a wheelchair?

A car accident. His left leg was shattered. They nearly had to amputate.

And if I agree to kill this man, you’ll send me back.

That’s the bargain. But don’t try to wriggle out of it, Brick. If you break your promise, we’ll come after you. Two bullets. One for you and one for Flora. Bang, bang. No more you. No more her.

But if you get rid of me, the war goes on.

Not necessarily. It’s still just a hypothesis at this point, but some of us think that getting rid of you would produce the same result as eliminating Brill. The story would end, and the war would be over. Don’t think we wouldn’t be willing to take the risk.

How do I get back?

In your sleep.

But I’ve already gone to sleep here. Twice. And both times I woke up in the same place.

That’s normal sleep. What I’m talking about is pharmacologically induced sleep. You’ll be given an injection. The effect is similar to anesthesia—when they put a person under before surgery. The black void of oblivion, a nothingness as deep and dark as death.

Sounds like fun, Brick says, so unnerved by what is facing him that he can’t help cracking a feeble joke.

Are you willing to give it a shot, Corporal?

Do I have a choice?

I feel a cough gathering in my chest, a faint rattle of phlegm buried deep in my bronchia, and before I can suppress it, the detonation comes blasting through my throat. Hack it up, propel the gunk northward, dislodge the slimy leftovers trapped in the tubes, but one try isn’t enough, nor two, nor three, and here I am in a full-blown spasm, my whole body convulsing from the onslaught. It’s my own fault. I stopped smoking fifteen years ago, but now that Katya is in the house with her ubiquitous American Spirits, I’ve begun to lapse into the old, dirty pleasures, cadging butts off her while we plunge through the entire corpus of world cinema, side by side on the sofa, blowing smoke in tandem, two locomotives chugging away from the loathsome, intolerable world, but without regret, I might add, without a second thought or single pang of remorse. It’s the companionship that counts, the conspiratorial bond, the fuckyou solidarity of the damned.

Thinking about the films again, I realize that I have another example to add to Katya’s list. I must remember to tell her first thing tomorrow morning—in the dining room over breakfast—since it’s bound to please her, and if I can manage to coax a smile out of that glum face of hers, I’ll consider it a worthy accomplishment.

The watch at the end of
Tokyo Story.
We saw the film a few days ago, the second time for both of us, but my first viewing goes decades back, the late sixties or early seventies, and other than remembering that I’d liked it, most of the story had vanished from my mind. Ozu, 1953, eight years after the Japanese defeat. A slow, stately film that tells the simplest of stories, but executed with such elegance and depth of feeling that I had tears in my eyes at the end. Some films are as good as books, as good as the best books (yes, Katya, I’ll grant you that), and this is one of them, no question about it, a work as subtle and moving as a Tolstoy novella.

An aging couple travels to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children: a struggling doctor with a wife and children of his own, a married hairdresser who runs a beauty salon, and a daughter-in-law who was married to another son killed in the war, a young widow who lives alone and works in an office. From the beginning, it’s clear that the son and daughter consider the presence of their old parents something of a burden, an inconvenience. They’re busy with their jobs, with their families, and they don’t have time to take proper care of them. Only the daughter-in-law goes out of her way to show them any kindness. Eventually, the parents leave Tokyo and return to the place where they live (never mentioned, I believe, or else I blinked and missed it), and some weeks after that, without warning, without any premonitory illness, the mother dies. The action of the film then shifts to the family house in that unnamed city or town. The grown-up children from Tokyo come for the funeral, along with the daughter-in-law, Norika or Noriko, I can’t remember, but let’s say Noriko and stick with that. Then a second son shows up from somewhere else, and finally there’s the youngest child of the group, who still lives at home, a woman in her early twenties who works as an elementary school teacher. One quickly understands that not only does she adore and admire Noriko, she prefers her to her own siblings. After the funeral, the family is sitting around a table eating lunch, and once again the son and daughter from Tokyo are busy, busy, busy, too wrapped up in their own preoccupations to offer their father much support. They begin looking at their watches and decide to return to Tokyo on the night express. The second brother decides to leave as well. There is nothing overtly cruel about their behavior—this should be emphasized; it’s in fact the essential point Ozu is making. They’re merely distracted, caught up in the business of their own lives, and other responsibilities are pulling them away. But the gentle Noriko stays on, not wanting to abandon her grieving father-inlaw (a walled-off, stone-faced grief, to be sure, but grief for all that), and on the last morning of her extended visit, she and the schoolteacher daughter have breakfast together.

The girl is still irritated by the hasty departure of her brothers and sister. She says they should have stayed longer and calls them selfish, but Noriko defends what they did (even if she would never do it herself), explaining that all children drift away from their parents in the end, that they have their own lives to look after. The girl insists that she’ll never be like that. What’s the point of a family if you act that way? she says. Noriko reiterates her previous comment, trying to comfort the girl by telling her that these things happen to children, that they can’t be helped. A long pause follows, and then the girl looks at her sister-in-law and says: Life is disappointing, isn’t it? Noriko looks back at the girl, and with a distant expression on her face, she answers: Yes, it is.