The Bigger Light (33 page)

He loosened his tie, and about half of the buttons on his waistcoat. His pocket watch glimmered against the light from the dashboard. He was doing fifty miles an hour. And it was now ten o’clock at night. He wondered what he had done so long in the city, why he had taken all those wrong turns before he got onto the highway, this highway that seemed to have been waiting for him for such a long time of suspended happiness and freedom. What had he done in the city all afternoon, all those other afternoons that it had taken him such a long time to reach this point …

Floes and floes of angel’s hair, ice cream castles in the air …
In the apartment, Bernice is dozing off on the couch in the living room. The glasses are set for the party. So are the plates and the napkins. The food has been cooked and the candles have
burned themselves down and out. The last one explodes silently into smoke, and as if Dots is the only one to hear this gasp of life, or of death, she opens her eyes, shakes her head like someone caught sleeping in the wrong place, and she asks Bernice the time.

“Two.”

“So late?”

“Well, it looks as if nobody ain’t coming.” She gets up and takes her plate, which she had used hours ago, when she became hungry from waiting, back into the kitchen. She comes back, like a woman disoriented, and takes Dots’s plate too.

“Only me and you, girl.”

“And Lew didn’t as much as call.”

The cat is sleeping. Bernice goes to the same window through which she had looked hours before, and around in the darkness outside and still surrounding she can see very little life. All the windows except a few have gone to bed. The night becomes old now, and the light in front of the subway entrance, or exit, is no longer burning. One after another, the remaining lights in an apartment across from her go out.

“What you say the time is?”

“The time, Dots?”

“Yeah. What it is?”

“The night old, Dots. Late.”

“Yeah. It will soon be light, though.”

Precisely, as she said this, Boysie reached the United States border. The Immigration officer nods to him, and waves him on. Ahead of him is more highway, and more music and more black coffee when he stops and where he stops. He can feel the bigness of the space around him, for he knows he has left one kind of space for another one.

AUSTIN CHESTERFIELD CLARKE
was born in Barbados and came to Canada in 1955 to study at Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He has enjoyed a varied and distinguished career as a broadcaster, civil rights leader, professor, and diplomat, representing Barbados as its Cultural Attaché in Washington DC. His many honours include Lifetime Achievement Awards for Writing from both the Toronto Arts Council and Chawkers–Frontier College, an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from Brock University, the 1998 Pride of Barbados Distinguished Service Award and, most recently, the Order of Canada. He is, formerly, writer-in-residence at the University of Guelph, and the 1998 inaugural winner of The Rogers Communications Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize. Author of eight novels and five collections of short fiction, Austin Clarke is widely studied in Canadian universities. He lives in Toronto.