Man in the Dark (3 page)

Corporal, the man says, shaking Brick’s hand with a firm, enthusiastic grip. I’m Serge Tobak, your sergeant. Better known as Sarge Serge.

Brick looks down at the man, who is a good six inches shorter than he is, and repeats the name in a low voice: Sarge Serge.

I know, Tobak says. Very funny. But the name stuck, and there’s nothing I can do about it. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em, right?

What am I doing here? Brick asks, trying to suppress the anguish in his voice.

Get a grip on yourself, boy. You’re fighting a war. What did you think this was? A trip to Fun World?

What war? Does that mean we’re in Iraq?

Iraq? Who cares about Iraq?

America’s fighting a war in Iraq. Everyone knows that.

Fuck Iraq. This is America, and America is fighting America.

What are you talking about?

Civil war, Brick. Don’t you know anything? This is the fourth year. But now that you’ve turned up, it’s going to end soon. You’re the guy who’s going to make it happen.

How do you know my name?

You’re in my platoon, dumbbell.

And what about the hole? What was I doing down there?

Normal procedure. All new recruits come to us like that.

But I didn’t sign up. I didn’t enlist.

Of course not. No one does. But that’s the way it is. One minute you’re living your life, and the next minute you’re in the war.

Brick is so confounded by Tobak’s statements, he doesn’t know what to say.

It’s like this, the sergeant rattles on. You’re the chump they’ve picked for the big job. Don’t ask me why, but the general staff thinks you’re the best man for the assignment. Maybe because no one knows you, or maybe because you have this . . . this what? . . . this bland look about you, and no one would suspect you’re an assassin.

Assassin?

That’s it, assassin. But I like to use the word
liberator.
Or
maker of the peace.
Whatever you want to call it, without you the war will never end.

Brick would like to run away on the spot, but because he’s unarmed, he can’t think of anything else to do but play along. And who am I supposed to kill? he asks.

It’s not
who
so much as
what,
the sergeant replies enigmatically. We’re not even sure of his name. It could be Blake. It could be Black. It could be Bloch. But we have an address, and if he hasn’t slipped away by now, you shouldn’t have any trouble. We’ll set you up with a contact in the city, you’ll go undercover, and in a few days it should all be over.

And why does this man deserve to die?

Because he owns the war. He invented it, and everything that happens or is about to happen is in his head. Eliminate that head, and the war stops. It’s that simple.

Simple? You make him sound like God.

Not God, Corporal, just a man. He sits in a room all day writing it down, and whatever he writes comes true. The intelligence reports say he’s racked with guilt, but he can’t stop himself. If the bastard had the guts to blow his brains out, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

You’re saying it’s a story, that a man is writing a story, and we’re all part of it.

Something like that.

And after he’s killed, then what? The war ends, but what about us?

Everything goes back to normal.

Or maybe we just disappear.

Maybe. But that’s the risk we have to take. Do or die, son. More than thirteen million dead already. If things go on like this much longer, half the population will be gone before you know it.

Brick has no intention of killing anyone, and the longer he listens to Tobak, the more certain he becomes that the man is a raving lunatic. For the time being, however, he has no choice but to pretend to understand, to act as if he’s eager to carry out the assignment.

Sarge Serge walks over to the jeep, fetches a bulging plastic bag from the back, and hands it to Brick. Your new duds, he says, and right there in the open he instructs the magician to strip off his army uniform and put on the civilian clothes contained in the bag: a pair of black jeans, a blue oxford shirt, a red V-neck sweater, a belt, a brown leather jacket, and black leather shoes. Then he hands him a green nylon backpack filled with more clothes, shaving equipment, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a hairbrush, a .38-caliber revolver, and a box of bullets. Finally, Brick is given an envelope with twenty fifty-dollar bills in it and a slip of paper with the name and address of his contact.

Lou Frisk, the sergeant says. A good man. Go to him as soon as you get to the city, and he’ll tell you everything you need to know.

What city are we talking about? Brick asks. I have no idea where I am.

Wellington, Tobak says, swiveling to his right and pointing into the heavy morning fog. Twelve miles due north. Just stay on this road, and you’ll be there by the middle of the afternoon.

I’m supposed to walk?

Sorry. I’d give you a lift, but I have to go in the other direction. My men are waiting for me.

And what about breakfast? Twelve miles on an empty stomach . . .

Sorry about that, too. I was supposed to bring you an egg sandwich and a thermos of coffee, but I forgot.

Before leaving to join his men, Sarge Serge pulls the rope up from the hole, yanks the metal stake out of the ground, and tosses them into the back of the jeep. Then he climbs in behind the steering wheel and starts the engine. Giving Brick a farewell salute, he says: Hang in there, soldier. You don’t look like much of a killer to me, but what do I know? I’m never right about anything.

Without another word, Tobak presses his foot on the accelerator, and just like that he is gone, disappearing into the fog within a matter of seconds. Brick doesn’t budge. He is both cold and hungry, both destabilized and frightened, and for more than a minute he just stands there in the middle of the road, wondering what to do next. Eventually, he starts to shiver in the frosty air. That decides it for him. He has to get his limbs moving, to warm himself up, and so, without the faintest notion of what lies ahead of him, he turns around, thrusts his hands into his pockets, and begins walking toward the city.

A door has just opened upstairs, and I can hear the sound of footsteps traveling down the hall. Miriam or Katya, I can’t tell which. The bathroom door opens and shuts; faintly, very faintly, I detect the familiar music of pee hitting water, but whoever has done the peeing is thoughtful enough not to flush the toilet and risk waking the household, even if two-thirds of its members are already awake. Then the bathroom door opens, and once again the quiet tread down the hall and the closing of a bedroom door. If I had to choose, I would say it was Katya. Poor, suffering Katya, as resistant to sleep as her immobilized grandfather. I would love to be able to walk up the stairs, go into her room, and talk to her for a while. Tell some of my bad jokes, maybe, or else just run my hand over her head until her eyes closed and she fell asleep. But I can’t climb the stairs in a wheelchair, can I? And if I used my crutch, I would probably fall in the dark. Damn this idiot leg. The only solution is to sprout a pair of wings, giant wings of the softest white down. Then I’d be up there in a flash.

For the past couple of months, Katya and I have spent our days watching movies together. Side by side on the living room sofa, staring at the television set, knocking off two, three, even four films in a row, then breaking for dinner with Miriam, and once dinner has been eaten, returning to the sofa for another film or two before going to bed. I should be working on my manuscript, the memoir I promised to write for Miriam after I retired three years ago, the story of my life, the family history, a chronicle of a vanished world, but the truth is I’d rather be on the sofa with Katya, holding her hand, letting her rest her head on my shoulder, feeling my mind grow numb from the endless parade of images dancing across the screen. For over a year I went at it every day, building up a hefty pile of pages, about half the story I’d guess, perhaps a little more, but now I seem to have lost the stomach for it. Maybe it started when Sonia died, I don’t know, the end of married life, the loneliness of it all, the fucking loneliness after I lost her, and then I cracked up that rented car, destroying my leg, nearly killing myself in the process, maybe that added to it as well: the indifference, the feeling that after seventy-two years on this earth, who gives a damn if I write about myself or not? It was never anything that interested me, not even when I was young, and I certainly never had any ambition to write a book. I liked to read them, that was all, to read books and then write about them afterward, but I was always a sprinter, never a long-distance man, a greyhound working on deadline for forty years, an expert at cranking out the seven-hundred-word piece, the fifteen-hundred-word piece, the twice-weekly column, the occasional magazine assignment, how many thousands of them did I vomit forth? Decades of ephemera, mounds of burned-up and recycled newsprint, and unlike most of my colleagues, I never had the slightest inclination to collect the good ones, assuming there were any, and republish them in books that no sane person would bother to read. Let my half-finished manuscript go on gathering dust for now. Miriam is hard at it, coming to the end of her biography of Rose Hawthorne, squeezing in her hours at night, on the weekends, on the days when she doesn’t have to drive to Hampton to teach her courses, and for the time being maybe one writer in the house is enough.

Where was I? Owen Brick . . . Owen Brick walking down the road to the city. The cold air, the confusion, a second civil war in America. A prelude to something, but before I figure out what to do with my befuddled magician, I need a few moments to reflect on Katya and the films, since I still can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. When she started ordering the DVDs through the Internet, I took it as a sign of progress, a small step in the right direction. If nothing else, it showed me that she was willing to let herself be distracted, to think about something other than her dead Titus. She’s a film student, after all, training to become an editor, and when the DVDs started pouring into the house, I wondered if she wasn’t thinking about going back to school or, if not school, then furthering her education on her own. After a while, though, I began to see this obsessive movie watching as a form of self-medication, a homeopathic drug to anesthetize herself against the need to think about her future. Escaping into a film is not like escaping into a book. Books force you to give something back to them, to exercise your intelligence and imagination, whereas you can watch a film—and even enjoy it—in a state of mindless passivity. That said, I don’t mean to suggest that Katya has turned herself into a stone. She smiles and sometimes even emits a small laugh during the funny scenes in comedies, and her tear ducts have frequently been active during the touching scenes in dramas. It has more to do with her posture, I think, the way she slumps back on the sofa with her feet stretched out on the coffee table, unmoving for hours on end, refusing to stir herself even to pick up the phone, showing little or no signs of life except when I’m touching or holding her. It’s probably my fault. I’ve encouraged her to lead this flattened-out existence, and maybe I should put a stop to it—although I doubt she’d listen to me if I tried.

On the other hand, some days are better than others. Each time we finish a movie, we talk about it for a little while before Katya puts on the next one. I usually want to discuss the story and the quality of the acting, but her remarks tend to focus on the technical aspects of the film: the camera setups, the editing, the lighting, the sound, and so on. Just tonight, however, after we watched three consecutive foreign films—
Grand Illusion
,
The Bicycle Thief,
and
The World of Apu
—Katya delivered some sharp and incisive comments, sketching out a theory of film-making that impressed me with its originality and acumen.

Inanimate objects, she said.

What about them? I asked.

Inanimate objects as a means of expressing human emotions. That’s the language of film. Only good directors understand how to do it, but Renoir, De Sica, and Ray are three of the best, aren’t they?

No doubt.

Think about the opening scenes of
The Bicycle Thief.
The hero is given a job, but he won’t be able to take it unless he gets his bicycle out of hock. He goes home feeling sorry for himself. And there’s his wife outside their building, lugging two heavy buckets of water. All their poverty, all the struggles of this woman and her family are contained in those buckets. The husband is so wrapped up in his own troubles, he doesn’t bother to help her until they’re halfway to the door. And even then, he only takes one of the buckets, leaving her to carry the other. Everything we need to know about their marriage is given to us in those few seconds. Then they climb the stairs to their apartment, and the wife comes up with the idea to pawn their bed linens so they can redeem the bicycle. Remember how violently she kicks the bucket in the kitchen, remember how violently she opens the bureau drawer. Inanimate objects, human emotions. Then we’re at the pawnshop, which isn’t a shop, really, but a huge place, a kind of warehouse for unwanted goods. The wife sells the sheets, and after that we see one of the workers carry their little bundle to the shelves where pawned items are stored. At first, the shelves don’t seem very high, but then the camera pulls back, and as the man starts climbing up, we see that they go on and on and on, all the way to the ceiling, and every shelf and cubby is crammed full of bundles identical to the one the man is now putting away, and all of a sudden it looks as if every family in Rome has sold their bed linens, that the entire city is in the same miserable state as the hero and his wife. In one shot, Grandpa. In one shot we’re given a picture of a whole society living at the edge of disaster.

Not bad, Katya. The wheels are turning . . .

It just hit me tonight. But I think I’m on to something, since I saw examples in all three films. Remember the dishes in
Grand Illusion
?