Into That Darkness (6 page)

Right. Alright.

The engineer hefted the chisel and the mallet and he drew one fist back and splayed the other palm angular and fierce against the girder and he swung down hard. A flurry of sparks bloomed up into the dust and the old man suddenly felt light-headed, sick with dread. There was a great steel ringing in that hole and the sound shivered through his bones and teeth and the sparks arced incandescent and burning.

Nothing happened.

The engineer looked across, his eyebrows raised. Son of a
bitch
, he grinned.

The old man let out his breath.

And then the engineer swung and struck, swung and struck. After a time the old man took over and his blistered fingers felt thick and bruised and bloodied in his gloves as he hammered away. At each blow the bones in his arms shuddering. The heat swam in his eyes and he paused and wiped his forehead against his sleeve and glanced up at the engineer above him hauling struts in a clanking armload down through the spirals of blown dust and the old man's eyes ran.

Then they were through.

The old man at the engineer's elbow, the engineer grunting and the chisel clinking hollowly then punching past and in and through. The girder gave way. The engineer smashed an armhole, a leg hole, a hole the width of a child. A great fetid whoosh of air walloped past them and out up the tunnel and the old man coughed in the black reek and the headlamps were bending weirdly off the bricks and broken furniture beyond and the shapes wavered in the glare and then the light steadied and the old man squinted to see what lay within.

It might have been the back of a café counter once. He was calling in the roiling dust for the boy and he saw the mother's corpse on its stomach with its legs upraised and braced as if to bear the weight of the destruction. Her braided hair in tangles down her back. Her face turned from him. He saw she lay naked to the waist, her left elbow bent downward, the hand pinned somewhere underneath. The fold of the elbow was marbled with blood. He did not see the boy.

Son? he called in. Mason?

He called again and then the engineer beside him called also and their headlamps sliced along the haunted cavern walls and met and crossed and slid back.

Jesus, the engineer murmured. Jesus fucken christ.

Slowly, from the hidden side of the woman's body, a grey face lifted. Austere and terrible in the grey dust. The old man and the engineer both fell silent. Their headlamps glinted in the boy's eyeglasses and flattened and shone back and then the boy was blinking and regarding them from the deep well of his fear.

Come on, son, the old man was saying. That's right. This way.

He was tiny. He came out bent double at the waist and he climbed free and as he took the old man's arm his entire body began to tremble. He was wearing a red sweater coated in the white dust and his thick eyeglasses hung askew on his nose but he did not seem to be hurt at all. He was filthy and coughing and his face was streaked with tears. A small black boy with dark eyes. The old man knew him at once and the woman dead within.

I can't wake her up, the boy was saying in a small voice. She won't wake up. I think she's sick. Can you help her? Please?

The old man said nothing but held him very hard as if to crush the fear from him and the boy in that eerie white light burrowed his face into his shirt and then the old man was murmuring, Alright, it's going to be alright. Over and over, in a kind of incantation. As if it might really be so.

I wouldn't know where to begin. You get old. But it's the magnificence
you don't expect. You're prepared for how the past pulls up short, for
what burns off in the long heat of a life. We get ugly and soft like molten
iron. I don't suppose any of us are spared. Well. I guess Callie was spared.

A woman at a gallery show once asked me about happiness. I gave
her a peculiar look at that. I told her anyone who makes happiness the
point, won't ever know it. Maybe that's not what she was asking. I don't
know if you're born with joy inside you, or if it's a kind of choice you keep
making as your life goes on. I really don't. I suppose joy and happiness
aren't the same thing. I do believe I might have been more than I became.
Callie used to say disappointment was what you held in your hands
whenever you made a fist and then opened it. Then she'd make a fist and
punch me on the shoulder. I don't know that I ever understood that. A lot
of the things she said I didn't understand. I guess that's the thing about a
life. No one makes you into anything except that you go along with it.

I met Callie at my first gallery show in Toronto. It was a small basement
gallery. She was the tallest woman in a crowded room and she
wore heels just to be sure. Her black hair in a bob over her ears. I don't
think I took my eyes off her. When she smiled I thought of the sea. I don't
know the connection myself. She held out her cigarette for a light and
I asked her opinion of the paintings. She told me art and illustration
weren't the same thing. It amazes me, how young we were. She touched
my arm and told me I needed to learn to paint with my eyes closed, to
learn how the paintings looked to my fingers. Her palm left a print of
plaster dust on my sleeve.

Those early works were street studies. The city streets at dawn, at
dusk. The light in those paintings was about a kind of searching, I guess.
I didn't know exactly what for. I don't believe I ever found it. It took me
a long time to see the light itself was the mystery. Callie used to say light
was God to Giotto, and because of that light was God for the next six
hundred years. Shadows came to stand in for knowledge, earthly understanding,
for what makes us most human. I don't believe there's any
contradiction in that. If you go into a dark room, your eyes adjust. They
adjust and find what light there is. We're built to accommodate the
darkness.

Listen to me. Thirty-six years on and my head's still trying to understand
what my hands have always known.

His wife did not die in autumn and yet autumn was when he'd dream of her.

He came up out of that tunnel into the grey light coiling his safety line in the webbing of one thumb and slapping it forward and his legs stiffening in the late air, hamstrings cramped, back aching. And this was the dream: his wife shyly drawing her hand across the shiny knee of his trousers. A digger in the rubble held out a bottle of water and he took it from her. And this was the dream also: the steel-dark of his wife's black hair against his skin. The cold ropy weight of it after she had bathed, through the open door the clawfoot washtub gleaming. Something was in him and he did not understand it. It was not quite grief. He thought it was what happened to grief after a long time in a person. He thought:
The boy will know it too.

He shook his head, pulled off his gloves in disgust.
You are
going to pieces old man
, he thought.
There will be nothing left of you
in an hour.
Only when he opened his eyes did he realize he had spoken aloud. He looked at the digger looking at him there.

You're alright, she said. Sure you're alright.

I'm not alright, he said.

His hands were sore and his arms streaked where the sweat had run. He leaned up against a slab and passed a hand across his eyes and then loosened the cloth at his throat. He felt nothing. They had brought the boy up out of that rubble and the woman lay dead below and he felt disgusted thinking of his part in it all.

After a moment he bared his teeth in a carious grin and drank the water then lowered the bottle with his chin sunk to his chest then raised it and drank again. He rubbed his eyes, looked up. The sun shivered orange and watery and huge under the low western sky like some terrible omen in the late blue light.

Where did they take him? he asked at last. His voice was hoarse.

The digger looked up. Who?

The boy. The boy they just brought out.

She nodded at the street below.

The old man studied the digger. She was a short woman with wide shoulders and big strong-looking hands and she wore stiff trousers that crinkled when she shifted her weight. He supposed they had been soaked and dried during the day. He did not know what they would have been soaked in. Gasoline perhaps. She looked very tired.

After a moment she said, It'll take them a while to cut her out.

Yes. Where will he go?

I don't know.

They won't make him see her body.

Somebody has to.

It's his mother. They won't let him see her like that.

She said nothing to that.

That boy needs to get to a hospital, he said.

Now she brushed a strand of hair from her face, looked at the old man. Her eyes were deep-set, dark. The hospitals are wrecked, she said. Nothing's left. He's got to go to a station.

A station? Where are they?

I don't know. The big one's at the Vic General.

You mean at the hospital?

She nodded.

He stared at her a moment then shook his head and looked off up the street then stared at her again. Well, he said slowly. That's where he'll need to go then.

There'll be trucks along soon.

When?

Soon.

When did the last truck come by?

She blew out her cheeks.

Have any trucks come by?

What's the matter with you?

What?

You got something you want to say just say it.

I don't.

Good.

She folded her arms grimly across her chest as if something had been settled and after a minute he got to his feet. He screwed back the cap of the water bottle and set it at his feet. He did not thank her for the water.

He scrambled achingly down the slope, hands fumbling with his gear. His wrists were black with grime and blood and he worked his fingers thickly. He did not see the engineer nor did he see the slender girl with the bruise at her forehead and both might have been apparitions of that horror for all that he would ever learn of their fates.

He could see a group gathered farther up the ridge and he knew there would be digging there but he did not go to them. He was sick, worn down, somehow ashamed. He had no intention of looking for the boy and yet when he reached the street he made his slow way over to where the digger had gestured. He saw a small group of survivors huddled together in the lee of an upturned Saab but he did not see the boy and he was surprised by how this made him feel.

He finally found the boy crouched alone against a mailbox with his knees pressed to his chest. His strange squinting eyes. Someone had scrubbed his face clean and draped a blanket across his shoulders and the old man stood over him peering down from his great height. He saw again the window of that café, a dark hand pressed to the glass. The boy's eyeglasses were bent at the nosepiece and he pushed them farther along his nose in order to see.

Mason?

The boy peered up at him.

My name is Arthur. Do you remember me, son?

The boy did not reply but only looked up at him with his burned stare and there seemed nothing at all in him that the old man could speak to. He gestured to the bent eyeglasses. Wondering what it was about this boy.

I can fix those for you, if you'd like. Do you want me to fix them?

The boy slid his eyeglasses under the ruff of blanket.

Well. Okay. His voice was gruff. He glanced off down the street and then back at the boy. Is someone taking care of you, son? he asked. When the boy said nothing he did not know what to say and after a moment he said: I've got to go home now. I'll come back in the morning if you'd like. To check on you. Would you like that?

The boy squinted up at him.

What is it? I can't take you with me. He grimaced suddenly, hearing himself say it. He had not intended to say such a thing. You don't want to come with me, do you? he asked.

No, the boy whispered.

He waited but the boy said nothing more and the old man reached down and very gently, very awkwardly patted his shoulder. The boy did not stir. After a moment he straightened and turned and began to make his way up the street. The buildings felt blown-out, emptied, shells of what they had been the morning before. The red sun was nearly down and the shadows were lengthening.

At the corner where the old pub still stood he stooped to tie his shoe and then paused with one hand on his knee and he crouched breathing like that for what seemed a long time. He was angry with himself for frightening the boy. He glanced at the sky, glanced back the way he had come. The dark streets strewn with rubble and stalled cars. Then he breathed in sharply. Someone was crouching in the shadow of the bank across the way, watching him.

He looked at the huddled figure and said nothing and then looked at the figure again.

Mason? he called. What are you doing? Come here son.

He got to his feet and stood very still in the road but the boy did not approach. He watched the boy holding his eyeglasses to his face, studying him with dark eyes.

Mason? he called again, more gently. You don't want to walk with me?

The boy said nothing. Mute and fierce with that blanket clutched at his shoulders.

At last he shrugged and turned and went on. As he began to walk the boy began again also. When he would slip too far ahead the boy hurried to catch him up, then hung back until he had moved on.

In this manner they went. The boy following. Or being led. It did not matter which.

They went.

Sometimes I'll hear her speaking in the next room, or calling up at
me from downstairs. I don't know. I thought for a time it was grief. It
wasn't. It was just my outliving her.

My grandfather used to say time has a way of worrying in. I guess he
meant everything is in a state of decay. Painting isn't any different, it's
like music in that. Its element, too, is time. You move through a painting
quickly, or slowly. The eye takes in nothing at a glance. There was an
expression I struggled to capture for years. It wasn't a large canvas. I
dreamed it one night fifteen years ago and became obsessed with painting
it. It was of a young woman sitting in a silver car in a parking
lot, her face just lifted towards the windshield. And on her face was an
expression of just-flourishing sadness, a kind of serenity. I saw it with
terrible clarity. I've never forgotten it. I never could get it right. Always
it was complicated by regret, by apology, by blame. A face is a fluid thing,
it's like the surface of the sea. It's never still. Even in sleep. I don't know,
when you add the play of light across it it becomes near impossible to
hold. Even photographs fail in that. I have a half-dozen photographs of
Callie but none of them are her. I know it's strange to say it.