Pitch Dark Read online

  We had drinks and dinner early, because you had to get home, after your tiring day, in time to be picked up for your morning flight. And we talked, as we do, of the news, and our errands, and maybe something comic in them. Then, since I couldn’t stay with you, or you with me, on account of the driver in the morning, you took me home, and I gave you a chicken liver for your dog and a pill for the night, and you gave me some letters to mail. After which, I’m afraid, I cried again. You seemed bewildered by that. I said, You know, the thing is you build your life a bit. And you said, The thing is it’s built. After midnight, and this is very unusual for us, you called and said you loved me, and I said whatever I said, also Catch a lot of fish on your island, and that I would see you when you got back.

  I only don’t know if I will see you when you get back. That is all that is wrong, or some of what’s wrong. That I shouldn’t be here when you get back, that I ought not to have been here many times before, that I know and knew that with anything I have of instinct or of wisdom. The Germans say no one can jump over his own shadow, and I used to rationalize, no, not rationalize, think, that I couldn’t ask you to jump outside your way. But what I’m afraid I’ve done is lost, lost you something, lost me something, lost us, by what I did not insist, a possibility. Because there is no reason in the world why, in eight years, we have never had, and we will never have, a week. And because I am not one of your daughters, nor one of your assistants, nor your wife, nor a dependent friend or colleague, nor a litigant clamoring for your attention, nor a politician who seeks your advice. Or even, as I once said, in the dark, with a smile, a secretary or a blonde in a chorus line with whom you are having an affair. You said you wouldn’t be having an affair with either of the last two, but the truth is, we would probably be better off if you were. If I were that secretary or that blonde, though as you say your life is built, you would have to find room, make some kind of room. The weeks on the north island in summer, the other island in winter, the hunting and walking weekends, even the occasional junket to the Riviera or to London. Somehow not with me, not with me. Not Christmas, of course, or birthdays, which I know don’t really matter. I just don’t know quite how I let it happen. Perhaps I had no choice, or perhaps you never loved me quite enough, and I didn’t want to know.

  So here we are. Or rather, there you are and here I am. And maybe the thing is simply not to think about it, and grow old, older still, like this. What we have now, it is true, is that you come to see me almost every day, and you bolt your morning tea, or your evening Scotch, and when I said the phrase that occurred to me, for the first time, to characterize the way you sometimes leave as Making good your escape, you did laugh. And you often spend the nights. But I may as well confess that, though I love you and seeing you changes the character of my mood and day, I sometimes dread, I don’t know how else to put it, sometimes dread a kind of visit that you make to me. I long for you to be here, miss you when you are gone, but sometimes to wonder whether I can amuse you, or whether you will be bored, tired, called away for bridge, or work, or tennis, or because one of your daughters has had a whim, well, sometimes I dread what will follow such a visit, and so I’ve come to dread a bit the visit, too. And while that may be true of any couple, any marriage, we have reversed it somehow. In the scheme of things, the mistress has something of the island; some of the strain, routine, and sense of long, cold winter belongs with the wife.

  When you are away, there are these traces: a few notes left on my front door, saying you’ll be late or asking where I am; a French pocket knife with a single all-purpose blade; two Liberty scarves bought with leftover currency at foreign airports; and, of course, the passage of the years, and the location of my house. You’ve moved the whole arsenal of the Other Woman, somehow, into your own house, and at my place, when you come, there’s only me. I wonder if you know at all what is happening in my heart, what a word. I suppose you don’t. You’ve so many females, wife, sisters, daughters, cousins, dog, in your life that you’ve probably confused me with them all. I guess I like to think that you love me more than you know, though I suppose the grounds are pretty slim for saying that. Well, a child’s thing. But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life. Also, look at it this way, just what is it that I, that we are going to have, to look forward to, to look back on, after all. I mean, here I am, for the first time and yet again, alone at last on Orcas Island. What are you going to do? What you’ve always done, I guess. But what am I going to do, what shall I do, now?

  “I’ll get over it.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yes. And you’ll find somebody else.” Your face froze. You said, “I won’t.” I said, “You will. The thing is, I won’t mind so much. Because I won’t know.”

  Look here, you know. I loved you.

  Well, the question occurs, so many times, clearing desks, doing income tax, looking for letters, documents, some are missing, one doesn’t know for sure which are lost, doesn’t dare even to look too carefully, time and time again, there is this, Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?

  II. PITCH DARK

  QUANTA, Amy said, on the train, in that blizzard, in answer to my question, Quanta.

  Not here, Diana said, to her lasting regret, to her own daughter, who approached her, crying, in front of all those people. Not here.

  Just ax for José, the young man said, on the ride out to Newark Airport. You need a ambulance, or a driver for any reason, you call the same number. Just ax for José. Also, when the People Express terminal loomed nearby, just beyond the small maze of side streets and overpasses: You can see it from here; but just try to get to it.

  Quanta. Not here. Just ax for José.

  You are very busy. I am very busy. We at this rest home, this switchboard, this courthouse, this race track, this theater, this nightclub, this classroom, this office, this lighthouse, this studio, are all extremely busy. So there is this pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say, but to justify its claim upon our time.

  So the sentences leap, do they? on stage, do all the business for which they have been so long in training, then go, panting and gagging, offstage until they are called again from the wings. Is that what you mean?

  MINDFUL, no, but mindful, as they say at the start of every paragraph of every mindless, interminable, often simultaneously bland and vicious UN resolution, Mindful of these pressures, I ask you all the same to trust me, stay with me here a moment, I’m alone.

  “Now these,” she said, “are from Isfahan. And these are from Chichicastenango.” She was old. She had been, for more than thirty years, beginning at the time and with the help of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the dragon of the passport office. Now she was retired, showing me her house. “When were you in Chichicastenango?” I asked, holding my little notebook. “I don’t recall the year,” she said.

  To begin with, I almost went instead to Graham Island.

  I broke the law, perhaps I ought to confess this at the start, I fell afoul of the law at last, in an unlikely place, on the road to Dublin from a town called Cihrbradàn. I left at three in the night, unseen, I hoped, unheard. I was saved, further down the road, by a teamster to whom I lied, though he did not ask me much, and who may have lied to me as well. A lorry driver, they would have called him there, but his truck was immense; he drove, as he told me, all night two nights a week. When I asked, he said he was a union man, so he would have been a teamster here. I left the country and the jurisdiction by plane and traveling under a pseudonym, or a name that was anyway false. I am a fugitive from the jurisdiction now. But then, in extenuation, there were so many things. In extenuation, there are always so many things. The surgery. My state of mind. The shady business at the airline ticket office. Look here, you know, look here. I am trying to leave. All the little steps and phases and maneuvers, stratagems, of trying to leave him now, without breaking my own heart, or maybe his, or scaring myself to death, or bounding back.
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  This is the age of crime.

  Was there something I did, you think, or might have done, I ask you that, some thing I did not do, and might have done, that would have kept you with me yet a while?

  This is the age of crime. I’m sure we all grant that. It’s the age, of course, of other things as well. Of the great chance, for instance, and the loss of faith, of the bureaucrat, and of technology. But from the highest public matters to the smallest private acts, the mugger, the embezzler, the burglar, the perjurer, tax chiseler, killer, gang enforcer, the plumber, party chairman, salesman, curator, car or TV repairman, officials of the union, officials of the corporation, the archbishop, the numbers runner, the delinquent, the police; from the alley to the statehouse, behind the darkened window or the desk; this is the age of crime. And recently, I think the truth is this, over a period of days and nights some weeks ago, I became part of it. How else account for the fact that I found myself, at three a.m. on a dark November night, haring in a rented car through the Irish countryside, under a sickle moon? At times it rained. Sometimes the sky was black and clear, with the moon and stars precise and perfect overhead. It was cold. The car’s radiator did not work. And there I was, speeding along the road, I hoped, toward Dublin, from a place called Cihrbradàn. I had no clear plan, but I thought I had at most ten hours to be gone.

  Beside the road, invisible, the fields, the long stone walls. On the road, few cars, three perhaps an hour, all of them coming toward me. Nobody following, then, no one in pursuit. And yet, as I passed through the small, dark, widely separated towns, I wondered whether my headlights and engine were noticed, whether a policeman, perhaps, or some sleepy but eager informer, had picked up the receiver, and called the next town. Phones ringing, then from town to town, not even for me necessarily. What lawful errand, after all, could send a cheap, small rented car out on a Southern Irish road, at this speed, in this weather, at this hour? Except that, with any luck, it no longer gave much sign of being a rented car. That afternoon, in broad daylight, I had peeled its rental sticker off. In fact, though I did not know at what precise moment I had crossed over into crime, that removal must have marked a turning point. On the one hand, they, they could say that it proved guilt or at least criminal intent. I, on the other hand, I could make what I had begun to think of as the argument of What kind of fool do you take me for. I mean, do you take me for such a fool as to remove a rental sticker in broad daylight when what I have in mind is a furtive escape. The argument, I knew, hardly ever worked, in politics, or criminal law, or private life—and yet, in my case there was no criminal record, and so little evidence. It made no sense for me to be doing what I seemed to be doing, in view of what little I had done. I might prevail. Sleet came down. It was pitch dark. Rarely, every twenty or thirty miles, there was a light, a single lighted window, in a house. With, behind it, a poet, a wakeful mother, a worker on the night shift, a terrorist, with a clock, and caps, and fuse? What I had felt for days was fear. Alternating with a sort of double suspicion: that the fear was groundless. Now, as the sky became clear again, I felt what every vandal must feel as he races through the night: dawning exhilaration. Out there, Orion, darkness, the incredible unseen beauty of the Irish countryside. If not real joy, at least a waning trepidation. Then, within an hour, I had reason to think I had missed my turnoff at Castlebar.

  I stopped. I pulled over on the left. Driving on the left had been so much of the problem until then. I got out and, in the dark, under the headlights, I looked at a map of Ireland. There was no sign, no mention whatever, of a tiny intersection I had just passed. The words on the roadside marker, R.9 Lockarnagh, did not appear on the map at all. But I concluded, from the time passed and the mileage, that I had, in fact, missed the turnoff. So I turned, and raced back in the direction I had been coming from. A car, now, coming toward me, lowered his headlights and went by. But I could not make out his license plates, or even the color or contours of his car. I had to assume he could not make mine out, either. He had arrived too late to see me stop and turn around. If he had been following me, then, he was going the wrong way. Miles passed, more miles. The road no longer looked familiar. What were the odds, I thought, what were the odds that my mother’s daughter, the descendant of my ancestors, should be lost like this, late one night in Ireland, fearing what was after all the law, under this sickle moon? Well, I’d been with Yemenite servants and the wives of nuclear physicists in a bomb shelter in Rehovoth, with Ibo tribesmen at a military installation in a nameless town. As much as this is the age of crime, after all, this is the century of dislocation. Not just for journalists or refugees; for everyone. I was by no means the first in my family to have reason to fear the law of a nation, or to seek furtively to escape from its jurisdiction and its police. But it was cold. I was alone, and it was dark. I thought I was lost, and then I looked at my gas gauge. A quarter of a tank. I would have to look out for gas stations, not that I recalled having passed any that were open. On the highway to Dublin, surely, there would be one. If I could find the highway. Headlights appeared in my rearview mirror, distant at first, and then closer. I pulled over to the left, off the road again, got out and flagged down what turned out to be an enormous truck. I’m sorry, I said, I seem to be lost. Could you tell me how I get on N.5 to Dublin. He hesitated. A shifty, wily look of suspicion, which I thought I’d seen innumerable times since I arrived in this strange country, passed over his face. Then he said, I’m going to Dublin. You can follow me. He drove off, and I followed. What was that look of suspicion, I wondered, could he have taken this nightrider who flagged him down for a terrorist? Why not. Who else would be out, at this hour, flagging people down? Then I wondered what load he was transporting in that immense truck. Come to think of it, I had seen no other trucks on the road that night since Cihrbradàn, certainly none of that size and weight. Could he be carrying gelignite, at this hour? Was he, perhaps, a terrorist, and did that look of suspicion cross his face because he feared for a moment that I was the police? Strange odds, those, too, for my ancestors.

  But there we were, he and I, haring single file through the Southern Irish countryside. I was no longer alone. A new fear, a sort of paranoia, crossed my mind: had he hesitated because he planned to mislead me, was he heading, not toward Dublin at all but straight back to that place named, come to think of it, like some hybrid out of Freud and Kafka, Castlebar? Miles and miles. No signs that I could see. Irish road signs, in any case, are grey-black on grey-white, and in print so small that they are virtually illegible to any driver on the road. From time to time, I kept looking at my gas gauge. Then, I sped past him, drove, slowed, stopped, switched on my hazard lights and stood in the road to flag him down again. Patience, no look at all of What is it this time? on his face. I said I was running out of gas. I secretly hoped he had some, but I did not mention it. Is there likely to be a gas station pretty soon? I asked. Not till nine-thirty in the morning, he said. How much gas did you have when you started out? Three-quarters full, I said. Well, then you ought to be all right, he said. Of course, like so many things that were said to me in Ireland, this seemed to make no sense. I mean, surely it depended, not on how much gas I had when I set out, but on how much would be required for the distance that remained, or at least how much I had where I was starting from.

  Maybe what we have here is Mayerling for one. Maybe Mayerling always was for one.

  There we stood, though, this tall broad man and I, in the sleet, on the road, in the beam of his enormous headlights. I asked how much farther it was to Dublin. He said, About a hundred twenty miles. Are there no all-night gas stations in Ireland? I asked. He said no. Well, then I guess I won’t make it, I said. My flight from Dublin leaves at ten. A pause. We stand, not looking at each other. The sleet has abated. His headlights are muted now, and diffused by mist. Do you suppose, I ask, speaking as slowly as the thought evolves, that I could drive till I run out of fuel, and then ride the rest of the way with you? He reflects. He looks toward his truck. He seems l
ess surprised by the question than I am. That would be all right, he says. I ask, Where shall I leave my car, at some closed gas station, or just any place where it runs down. Oh, he says, locked, I think, on the street at Ballyhairness. I find it difficult to understand what he says, not just because he speaks softly and I am unfamiliar with his accent, but because, as I now notice, he has a stammer. In any event, I have grown by now to love him. I wonder whether he is going to leave me after all. But as we drive, miles and miles, at speed, the sky is sometimes black, with that clear moon and stars, sometimes mauve, sometimes filled with rain; though my gas gauge has gone well beyond the red and rests firmly now on empty; though I have no clear plan, and I’m in my way alone again; in due course, a sign appears. What it says is Ballyhaunis 10. And though I have a moment of free-fall panic, what if he doesn’t stop? on the whole I trust him now, and what I think is, Well met, teamster.

  The truth was, there was something in the ice cube.

  The turning point at the paper was the introduction of the byline.

  Here’s who I knew in those days: everyone.

  Everyone?

  Well, not everyone in the world, of course. But a surprising number and variety, considering the lonely soul I was when I was young, and the sort of recluse I have since become.

  “It’s really too much. I can’t tell you who they’ll seat next to you,” Claire said, after dinner, at the guarded island villa. “Wives, Canadians. They sit you next to anyone.” Also, “The daughter married an octoroon. A baboon. I don’t know.”