Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

Michael spoke aloud, warmly. The only response was a growl from Napoleon, couchant before the door. He pushed his chair back, slumped down in it, and moodily contemplated the single sheet of paper before him.

It was raining in the city again. He could hear rain pounding on the windowpane and see the dirty trickles that slid down the glass inside, where the caulking had dried and flaked and never been replaced.

Rain. Like all words, this one had its accumulated hoard of images. Sweet spring rain, freshening the earth and washing the grubby face of the world…The trickles on his window were jet-black. There was enough dirt on the window, but God only knew what color the rain had been to begin with.

The desk lamp flickered ominously, and Michael cursed again. He had forgotten to buy light bulbs. There wasn’t one in the apartment. He had already taken the bulb out of the kitchen.

It might not be the bulb, of course. It might be the damned fuses in the damned antiquated building, or some other failure of the outmoded and overloaded electrical system.

From the dark kitchen came a pervasive stench of scorched food. In his mental anguish over the typewriter he had forgotten about the pan of stew till it turned to a charred mass. One more pan in the trash can… He stubbed his toe groping through the dark kitchen. The broken coffee cup was not one of the ones from the dime store, it was a tender memento of something or other Sandra had given him. Sandra? Joan? Hell.

The paper, the sole product of an afternoon of creative effort, brought no comfort. It was filled from top to bottom with a series of disconnected phrases that weren’t even passable prose.

I hate his bloody guts.

He saved my life.

A desperately unhappy man.

A brilliant scholar.

Sexiest man she ever met.

All-around competence.

Wonderful guy, a real chip off the old block.

Keen, incisive business brain.

Almost too sensitive.

After Budge, one of the greatest backhands I’ve ever seen.

Brilliant…brilliant…brilliant…

And, at the very bottom of the page, dug deep into the paper by the pressure of his fingers on the keys:

He always knew about it. The dark on the other side.

Damn the words, and damn the doped-up infantile little hippie who had produced them, Michael thought. But this verbal incantation didn’t bring relief. He saw his words too clearly for the empty things they were. They didn’t describe Kwame, and they didn’t cancel the impact of the words Kwame had used. He makes bigger magic than I do, Michael thought sourly. Heap strong magic…The words haunted him; last night he had dreamed of shadows and waked in a cold sweat, tangled in bedclothes as if he had spent eight hours battling an invisible attacker.

Still. Dismiss Kwame as a talented junkie, and what did you have left? A series of epigrams, and damned dull ones at that. He was heartily sick of that word “brilliant.”

Yet as the inconclusive interviews had proceeded, one concept began to take shape. One thing about Randolph that was significant, and hard to explain. Incompleteness.

Yet you couldn’t say he didn’t finish what he began. He finished his book. As a writer, Michael knew the importance of that; for every completed book there are a thousand beginnings. He had finished teaching his course and he had apparently taught it well, even brilliantly-damn that word! He had not abandoned tennis or swimming until he had mastered both skills, and his retirement from politics had followed a series of almost uncontested victories.

He mastered a skill, and then he stopped. Was it because he found all of them too easy? No challenge? Or was it because, under the façade of competence, he was somehow unsure of his ability? That wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded. The severest critic was internal. If a man couldn’t satisfy that, paeans of praise from the outer world couldn’t convince him of his worth. He had to keep on trying, fighting, accomplishing, and never succeeding, because the inner critic was insatiable. So-eventually, suicide, alcoholism, drugs. It had happened before.

But not, Michael thought, to Gordon Randolph. His life had not followed that pattern. If he had quit competing, it was not in the spirit of defeat. He had not retreated into any of the standard forms of suicide. He seemed-yes, damn it, he was-a happy man, except for one thing, the one thing in which he had not succeeded. The one thing for which he cared most desperately. And none of the pat phrases on that sheet of paper gave any clue to his successes, or to his one great failure.

Michael reached for another sheet of paper and inserted it into the typewriter. At the top of the page he wrote:

His wife tried to kill him.

Was that why he couldn’t make any sense out of the man who was Gordon Randolph? Because, like so many of the others who had known her, he was becoming obsessed by Randolph ’s wife?

In her way, Linda was an even greater enigma than Gordon. Not because the coalescing picture was incoherent. A beautiful human being-they all agreed on the content of that, if not in the exact words, including Randolph himself. He had groped for words and so had Buchsbaum, but poor old Kwame had caught it. Then what had turned her from a saint into a devil, from a beautiful human being into an alcoholic, a haunted psychotic?

If I were writing a novel, Michael thought, they would have a common cause-Gordon’s incompleteness, his wife’s madness. But life is rarely so tidy or so simple. Or, if it is, the connections are too complex for us to see.

The light bulb flickered again. Napoleon muttered. The rain poured down harder. Michael got up and went into the kitchen. He stubbed his toe-the same toe.

A moving streak shot past him, into the sink and out through the slit in the window, its passage marked by a crash of breaking crockery, which was Michael’s last saucer. Nursing his throbbing toe, Michael restrained his curses and listened. He knew what Napoleon’s abrupt departure heralded. After a moment it came. A knock on the door; simple and ordinary. There was no reason why the sound should have made an anticipatory shiver run down his spine.

Linda watched the rain ripple against the window of the bus. The downpour was so heavy, it didn’t look like rain, but rather like a solid wall of water against the window of a submarine. The warm, stuffy bus was a self-contained, miniature universe; and the dark on the other side of the window might have been the vacuum of outer space. A few scattered lights, blurred by the rain, were as remote as distant suns.

The bus was not crowded. Not many people would come into the city in such weather and at such an hour, too late for the theaters or for dinner. The seat next to hers was occupied by a young sailor. He had come straight to it, like an arrow into a target. When he tried to strike up a conversation, she looked at him-just once. He hadn’t tried again. He hadn’t changed seats, though; maybe he didn’t want to seem rude.

Linda didn’t care whether he moved or not. She was aware of his presence only as a physical bulk; nothing else about him could penetrate the shell of her basic need. Even her physical discomfort was barely felt. Her shoes were still soaking wet and muddy. She had squelched through the ooze of Andrea’s unpaved lane, hoping against hope, even though she knew she would have seen lights from the road if anyone had been at home. She had even pounded on the door, hearing nothing except the yowl of Andrea’s pride of cats. Linda knew she could get into the house without any trouble; but with Andrea gone, there was no safety there. It was the first place they would look. Only a senseless desperation had taken her to Andrea in the first place. She wasn’t running to anything or anybody; she was running away.