Where Night Stops

by Douglas Light

  The top line shot off toward infinity in both directions, but the bottom line stretched only one way. Half of infinity. “The top line.”

  The old woman packed her pipe with fresh tobacco. “What you believe you want,” she said, “isn’t what you truly want.” She stood, lit a match, and tendered the tobacco. The pipe bowl flamed, the smoke swirling thickly. She hobbled off in a cloud, saying, “Clean up. Go home.”

  The Brighton train station. The odor of industrial grease mixed with fresh-baked rolls. The PA muttered an announcement for trains soon departing. Heels clattered on the hard floor, racing from one track to another.

  Seeing me, the ticket girl broke open in laughter.

  My hangover flared. “What is so fucking funny?”

  The girl bit off her glee, seeing I wasn’t in the mood. “Sorry,” she said. A zit beaconed on her forehead like a third eye. “Just having fun, it being your birthday and all.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  She made a noise of embarrassment. “Really?”

  I said nothing, gazed at her toxically.

  She pulled a compact from her purse and held it up to me.

  I eyed the small, oval mirror. Across my cheeks, my forehead, my nose, was written Birthday Boy in black marker.

  Chapter 27

  Abidjan is in Côte d’Ivoire, Africa. I found this out after Higgles texted me to fly there for the job.

  After two days waiting for instructions, Higgles finally contacted me. Things had fouled, he texted. My contact died in route, had a heart attack on the plane as it crossed the Atlantic. He was found with three different passports and over $17,000 cash, a chunk that was to be mine. Hold tight, Higgles wrote. I know a guy. Might be able to salvage the job.

  I texted him that I still expected to get paid. “And some plus-plus.”

  Côte d’Ivoire, a country of coup-spoiled dreams. The heat was incredible.

  My hotel room looked like a large shower, the entire place tiled in glossy brown. The AC barked out foul, tepid air that tasted of bus exhaust, so I spent my days sitting in the shade out front of the Paris Amerika, a makeshift café decorated with Beverly Hills 90210 posters. Brenda, Brandon, Kelly, and Dylan. All had a film of grit covering their faces. I stuck with Lipton tea.

  Abidjan had nice areas. This wasn’t one. Trash and rubbish piled up on the road out front of the café. As I sweated out my essential salts and waited for instructions, men roamed past with chained hyenas and rifles. Gang protection. The women hauled loads on their heads that would buckle me.

  Foreign money is like Monopoly money, its value mysterious and shifting. My first day at the Paris Amerika, I over-tipped, kicked out twenty thousand CFA francs—around forty American dollars—for my cup of tea. I became the proprietor’s new best friend.

  Across the road was a line of shantytown stalls filled with items hoping for a second life. Africans may not have invented recycling, but they’ve mastered it. Besides a few stands of withered fruit and a kid who mended shoes using dental floss, all the other tables were stacked with items begging for another go at it. Cracked porcelain mugs, a handleless pot, skirts Frankensteined together, and totes made from the blue tents the UN provides refugees—all carcasses of items long stripped of purpose.

  Wedged in the middle of the mess was an herbalist selling homebrewed cure-all remedies. Shielded from the sun by a tattered tarp, the woman sat at a table crowded with corked glass Coke bottles filled with an amber-green liquid. A crudely painted sheet of canvas advertised ABEGONE’S MIROCLE’S ELIXIR with vibrant images of a man breaking a chain tethering him to the liquor bottle and what appeared to be a woman burning a penis.

  On my fourth day at the Paris Amerika café, the woman ambled heavily across the sweltering road toward me, a bottle of elixir in her hand. Her face was a fire-scorched log: charred, glossy, and crackled. She spoke in French. I replied with my Berlitz.

  “You are American?”

  I hedged—Canadian. No one ever said bad things about Canadians.

  She held out the Coke bottles. “You are interested.” It wasn’t a question.

  “What is it?” It looked like urine mixed with lime Jell-O.

  “It is Abegone’s Mirocle,” she said. “It kills vices. And helps the digestion process. Your skin, too. And vision.”

  “What doesn’t it do?”

  She shrugged.

  “So it kills vices?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Any particular vice it’s good at killing?”

  “It kills them all.” She settled into the chair next to me.

  The proprietor clapped his hands at her like he was scaring off a bird and upbraided her in French.

  She snapped her fingers at him, gave him an evil look, and shooed him off. The man backed away, frightened. The woman had power, and not just physical.

  Holding out the bottle, she said to me, “If you are a man who likes alcohol, you will no longer like alcohol. If you are a man who steals, you will not steal. If you are a man who cheats on his woman, you will not cheat.” She rolled the bottle about in her hands, her dark eyes on me. “One bottle will kill the vice. It attaches to the seed that powers the bad and burns it out of your body. Destroys the”—she groped for the word—“impetus of the act.”

  The impetus of the act.

  I took the bottle and uncorked it. It smelled of grass clippings and gasoline, like an overheated lawn mower. Still, I peeled off francs and laid them in her palm. It was the easiest way to get rid of her.

  Encouraged, she urged me to buy more; five, ten bottles. “I give you a discount.”

  I didn’t see myself handing out Abegone’s Mirocle’s as gifts. “Why would I need more than one bottle?”

  “One bottle cures one vice. And I can tell,” she said, laying her hand on mine, “that you’re a man of many vices.”

  Chapter 28

  After I spent eleven days slathered in an African sweat, Higgles texted to say the Abidjan gig was scrubbed. “The beavers have found the biscuit,” he wrote.

  I had no idea what he meant. All I knew was that I was pissed. I hadn’t traveled half the world for a stench that wouldn’t wash off and a stomach virus that had me vomiting and shitting every twenty minutes. But that’s what I got.

  That, and a bottle of Abegone’s Mirocle’s vice-killing, all-purpose elixir.

  After showering for the sixth time that day, I pulled the scratchy blanket off the bed, folded it, and sat on it in my underwear. The once cream-colored linoleum was worn to a scuffed pewter gray. Fluorescent bulbs buzzed and ticked overhead, kicking out their thin blue light. I couldn’t sleep, and the thought of food made my stomach wince. It wasn’t yet 10:00 p.m. I had some eight hours before my flight out. Cairo, then London, then the States. Home, or at least the place I kept my clothes.

  I said my real name aloud, then said it again, over and over. I hadn’t heard it spoken in so long, it sounded strange to me. Foreign. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had used my name.

  My mother only called me by my full name when she wanted to share a secret she didn’t want my father knowing, like the fact that she regretted taking his last name in marriage. “When I hear my name, it makes me think of a funeral home,” she once told me. There was no lyricism in saying it, no lilt or joy. “It’s a terrible last name, not one I would wish on anyone.”

  I pointed out that it was my last name.

  Ignoring me, she said, “I should have held on to my maiden name.” Her eyes gathered tears. “There are a lot of things I should have held on to.”

  “Like what?”

  She wouldn’t say. Taking my hand in hers, she said, “Whatever you do, promise me you won’t make the mistakes I made.”

  What were her mistakes? What had she done wrong?

  She shook her head. “Just promise me.” />
  I promised. It was a blind, pointless promise. Did she really expect me keep it?

  Time and distance rarely brought clarity. If anything, things grew more muddled. But with her death, I think I understood what mistakes my mother was referring to. They weren’t mistakes of action, things she’d done, then come to regret. Her mistakes were mistakes of definition. Husband, wife, family, happiness, commitment. The dictionary my mother referenced was vastly different from that of my father’s. She had thought she knew what he meant when he said he loved her, only to discover too late that the words they used held unique meanings for each of them. They spoke the same language but couldn’t understand each other.

  There in Africa, sweating and sick, my body was speaking a language I didn’t understand. I sat cross-legged on the floor, shook a cigarette out of the pack, and lit it. I don’t smoke, but it tamped down the taste of bile I kept choking up.

  Aspirin, whiskey, tea. I’d tried everything to settle my stomach. Nothing seemed to work.

  I picked up the bottle of Abegone’s Mirocle’s elixir. If it killed vices, maybe it killed viruses, too. Certainly smelled like it would.

  I poured a Styrofoam cup full, then hit the toilet, my bowels once again revolting.

  Ten minutes later, after I showered yet again, I found that the elixir had eaten through the cup, spilling over the table and onto the floor. The table’s finish had turned milk-white, and the splatter on the floor had bleached the tile.

  I stayed clear of the elixir, kept both my virus and my vices.

  They killed less quickly.

  Chapter 29

  My father had a special trash can in the garage for garbage he couldn’t admit was ours. Things he felt tarnished the family name, like frozen-pizza boxes, period pads, used Q-tips, empty tubes of hemorrhoid cream. He had a master list of things he didn’t want the trash collectors to see. “Those garbage guys go through everything,” he said. “They’re urban archeologists. And what they find says a lot about us, the type of people we are.”

  “They’re garbage men,” my mother said, making a face. “They’re idiots. They have a high school education at best.”

  Wrong, he said. “Where do you think the term ‘trash talk’ came from?”

  So, this unworthy trash of ours had its own bag. And every Tuesday and Friday night, under the cover of darkness, my father would sneak down the street to dump the incriminating bag beside the Marksons’ or Peabodys’ or Sterns’ trash.

  As for his liquor bottles, he had an entirely different system. I never did see an empty bottle in the trash.

  The night before my high school graduation, after his midnight trash run in a downpour of rain, my father woke me, his breath ragged and sour with drink like he’d just run the length of the county, stopping at every bar along the way. Soaked, he sat heavily on my bed, causing my sheets to snug me tight, trapping me like a straitjacket. Silhouetted in the darkness of the room, he loomed over me, threateningly. I lay still, my throat clamped shut with fear. Bending toward me, he said he had something important to tell me, something I had to know. “And don’t tell your mother I told you,” he said, the weight of his wet body heavy on me.

  I worried he was going to say something terrifying, that he’d just hacked up the neighbor’s dog and needed help burying it, or that he’d cheated on my mother with my gym teacher­—something I didn’t want to know. Something that would shift our relationship, turn it even more awkward, more stilted. Parents are parents, not friends. Not equals or companions. And definitely not confidants.

  He said my name twice, then told me his secret.

  Babe Ruth, he said, never pointed out where he was going to knock a homer. He was holding up two fingers, indicting the strikes against him.

  The storm lasted through the night and all the next morning. By late day the rain had stopped, leaving the road glistening. Saturday collapsed into evening.

  My parents were arguing over the best route to the restaurant, who would drive, the time of the reservation, whether the place took American Express.

  I’d just graduated from high school and—as the card my mother gave me read—I’d “exited one stage of life and entered a new one.” My aunts, uncles, and cousins were coming to the house the next day for a party. But tonight my parents wanted to take me out for a celebratory dinner.

  My mother said, “I’m driving and that’s final.”

  My father snatched the keys out of her hand and actually growled.

  “Well then,” she said, like she had any say in the matter, “you can drive. As long as you promise me you won’t order the fried chicken for dinner. You know how you get after eating their fried chicken.”

  He violently jangled the keys as he unlocked the car door. “Please, tell me,” he said, his voice flaring with irritation, “how do I get with chicken?”

  We climbed in the car, me in the back.

  “Crabby. Or crabbier.” My mother turned the rearview mirror to study her makeup. “What’s your problem tonight?”

  “I have no problem.” He readjusted the mirror, then started the car.

  The problem was that he was sober. And my father was a terrible dry drunk.

  I was the reason he was sober.

  That morning, my best friend Clement had come by on his new bike, a used red Kawasaki Nighthawk. Five hundred ccs. His graduation gift. We’d grown up riding dirt bikes, the puttering 125ccs that kicked out a trail of black smoke and a whiney howl. Now Clement had moved into the big leagues, or a bigger league.

  I was envious. We always competed, tried to one-up each other. He’d beaten me with the bike, but I’d won out on plans after high school: I was going to college while he was staying in Windstop. School wasn’t Clement’s thing. He’d struggled through English, cheated his way through math, and spent more time in the principal’s office than science class. None of it mattered to him. He’d always claimed to want to leave Windstop, but it was always his plan—or at least his parents’ plan—that after he got out of high school, he’d take over the day-to-day operations of the family business, the town’s one hardware store.

  In a way, Clement had it made. Everything was laid out for him, the burden of choice eliminated. His purpose defined for him. I could easily see him getting married in a year or two, probably to Marianne Clark, the girl he’d been dating since his junior year. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had two or three kids by the age of twenty-two. Clement would happily live out his life in Windstop.

  My own plans were more directional than defined. I was going to college, had been accepted to University of Iowa for the Fall term. Beyond that, I didn’t know, though. That didn’t stop people from constantly asking. When I tried to think beyond the high school graduation parties I was going to that night and the lazy summer ahead, I couldn’t see much. The years ahead were vague shapes against the present, like trees at dusk, darks against the fading light of the sky.

  Clement had let me take his new bike for a spin. I tore around the neighborhood, then hit a county road and opened the throttle. The wind crashed about my face. It was a terrifying, freeing feeling, the tires spinning smoothly as asphalt blurred beneath me. I felt I could ride forever.

  Clement grinned when I rolled back up my driveway. “Pretty sweet, yeah?”

  “Yeah, very.” I slid off, my legs a little stiff.

  Clement sidled up next to me. “Hey, man,” he said, “my hook-up fell through. Think you can get some liquor off your dad? For tonight?”

  I thought a moment. Why not? I’d snuck drinks before, watering down the bottle to cover my tracks. All the other dads drank beer or cheap whiskey, but vodka was my father’s drink. He thought that no one could smell the fumes on his breath. I pilfered a liter from his stockpile in the garage, shifted the bottles around to hide the theft.

  After lunch, my father asked if there was something I wanted to tell h
im. He’d been in the garage, had instantly noticed the missing bottle. “Maybe something you accidentally took without thinking,” he said. An offer of amnesty.

  I mulled it over—or acted like I was—then said, yes, I had taken something of his. A pair of his socks. “I was out of clean ones. Sorry.”

  He was thrown. “Anything else?”

  I shook my head. “What are you missing?”

  His face folded with confusion. Had he drunk that liter already? Had he become so secretive with his habit that—somehow—he’d hidden his drinking even from himself? The idea seemed to rattle him, which I guess is why he decided sobriety would be the song of the day.

  We all regretted his commitment. With no fuel of drink, he lost his calmness, grew cagey, sharp, and grouchy. He snapped at me and my mother, got irritated by the tiniest things.

  At the restaurant, my father didn’t like the table we were seated at. He asked that we be moved. The second table was no better. We moved again. Instead of the fried chicken he wanted, he ordered steak, medium rare. He sent it back because it was too rare—then sent it back again because it overcooked.

  My scalp prickled hot with embarrassment. Clement was probably getting primed for the parties while I was stuck watching my mother slowly cut, then chew each bite of her meal, resting between each forkful like she’d just climbed a flight of stairs. They ordered dessert.

  Finally, the table was cleared and the check came. I stood. “Sit down,” my father said. “I want to tell you something.”

  Speaking in a grumble, like he begrudged the fact he had to speak at all, my dad told me how proud both he and my mother were of me. Finished, he reached into his inside jacket pocket, pulled out an envelope. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. It was five hundred dollars, a graduation gift.

  Anxious to get home and to the parties, I offered to drive.