The Dark on the Other Side

by Barbara Michaels

  His newfound friend was on the alert, and signaled him with a jerk of the head when the performer appeared, but Michael didn’t need the signal. Even in this crowd he would have spotted Kwame.

  Such is the power of suggestion that Michael had unconsciously expected the performer to be black-with a name like Joe Schwartz, yet, he told himself. But the sparse expanses of skin visible were of the sickly tan that people choose, for some obscure reason, to call white. The hair was extensive; it made the efforts of the other boys look epicene. Now that, Michael thought admiringly, is a beard!

  It swept down in undulating, shining ripples to the boy’s diaphragm, where it mingled with the waves of long brown hair. Although the night was chill and damp, Kwame wore only jeans and a sleeveless embroidered vest, which flopped open with each step, displaying a cadaverous chest. He was barefoot. But his guitar had been carefully swathed against the damp. It was a twelve-string guitar, with a shining surface that might have been produced by Stradivarius or Amati. Expensive, loved, used, and tended like a baby.

  There was a tiny podium or stage, about the size of a dining-room table, at the far end of the room, and at another gesture from the waiter, Michael took his cup and moved down to an unoccupied booth near the stage. The other habitués were doing the same thing. Kwame, who had seated himself cross-legged on the floor, placed the guitar across his lap and sat waiting. His eyes moved incuriously around the room, and as they met Michael’s, the latter was conscious of an odd shock. Drugs. The eyes were unmistakable… And why, he wondered cynically, was he shocked? He read the newspapers.

  There was no announcement, no introduction. When everyone had seated himself, and silence had become profound, Kwame began to play.

  Michael’s first reaction was negative. Kwame’s harsh voice had little appeal for a post-adolescent square who concealed a secret weakness for old Perry Como records, and Kwame’s playing, though competent, was not remarkable. The songs were a mixture of legitimate folk music and modern rock imitations of folk music; a few of them sounded vaguely familiar, but Michael was not sufficiently knowledgeable about the popular repertoire to identify them. All had one theme in common: peace, love, innocence, and the annihilation of all these by man’s cruelty. The mushroom cloud billowing up around the kids playing in the daisy field, the blast of an explosion annihilating the kids in the Sunday School…Kevin Barry lost his young life again, and the lambs were all a-crying. But it was effective. The images were sure fire, they couldn’t miss.

  Two of the songs were different. Kwame ended his recital with them, and by that time Michael had succumbed to the same spell that held the rest of the audience. He couldn’t have explained why he was spellbound, none of the elements of the performance were that good. But in combination…

  Then Kwame swept his fingers across all twelve strings in a crashing dissonant chord, and broke into a vicious, and extremely funny, satire on the Congress of the United States. Like the others, Michael ached with containing his laughter; he didn’t want to miss the next line. At the same time the cruelty of the satire made him wince, even when he shared Kwame’s opinion of that particular victim. The laughter burst out explosively at the end of the song.

  Kwame didn’t give it time to die, but went right into the next number. It was a very quiet song. It was about love, too, and about peace and innocence; but these verses allowed beauty to survive and triumph. The words were very simple, but they were selected with such skill that they struck straight home, into the heart of every compassionate hope. They were articulated with meticulous precision; and as he listened, Michael felt sure that Kwame had written the song himself-and the one that had preceded it. The boy was a magician with words. He made strong magic, did Joe Schwartz… And then, with the suddenness of a blow, Michael realized who Kwame was.

  The performance ended as it had begun. Kwame simply stopped playing. Some fans came over to talk to him; and Michael looked up, blinking, to see the waiter standing by him.

  “Thanks for telling me,” he said. “I enjoyed that.”

  “He’s a good kid,” the waiter said.

  “Do you suppose I could buy him a drink, or-”

  “He don’t drink.”

  “…a cup of coffee? Or maybe a steak?” Michael eyed the protruding ribs of Kwame.

  The waiter grinned.

  “This isn’t Manhattan,” he said obscurely. “He’ll talk to anybody. Hey, Kwame-friend of mine wants to meet you.”

  Kwame looked up. He saw Michael, and his beard divided in a sweet smile.

  “Sure,” he said. His speaking voice was as harsh as the one he used for singing, but several tones higher. Two of his fans trailed him as he approached the booth and he gestured toward them, still smiling.

  “Okay?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “Join me.”

  They settled themselves, Kwame placing his guitar tenderly on a serving table against the wall, where it would not be jostled by passers-by. The waiter lingered.

  “You haven’t had dessert,” he said, giving Michael a significant glance.

  “Oh. Oh! That’s right, I haven’t. Will you all join me?”

  They would, and their orders left Michael feeling old and decrepit. Banana split, chocolate cake à la mode with hot fudge sauce, and a double strawberry frappé sundae for Kwame. Michael ordered apple pie and gave the waiter a nod of thanks as he departed. He ought to have realized that Kwame would be a vegetarian, and he was glad to have been saved from the gaffe of asking the boy if he’d like a steak. It would have been tantamount to offering someone else a nice thick slice off his Uncle Harry.

  The food was a useful icebreaker; conversation, at first, was difficult. Kwame spoke hardly at all. Smiling dreamily, he was far out, someplace else. His friends, a blond girl (were they all blondes these days?) and her escort, who had a long cavalry-style moustache, treated Michael with such wary deference that he felt he ought to have a long white beard-and a whip. Yes, that was what they reminded him of-two captured spies in the enemies’ clutches, refusing to speak for fear of giving away vital information. Name, rank, and serial number only…

  They loosened up after a while, as Michael plied them with coffee and sympathy, and he began to enjoy himself. They weren’t any more articulate, or sincere, than his generation had been; but they sure as hell were better informed. The much-maligned boob tube, perhaps? More sophisticated; superficially, yes, the little blonde was discussing contraceptives with a wealth of detail his contemporaries had never used in mixed company. Which was okay with him; his hang-ups on that subject weren’t deep seated. He wondered, though, if basically these youngsters were any wiser than he had been at their age. They knew the facts; but they didn’t know what to do with them, any more than he did. Maybe he was just old and cynical. He felt old. When he looked at Kwame, he felt even older.

  Time, and the double frappé, had had their effect; whatever drug it was that Kwame had taken, it was beginning to wear off. He sat up straighter and began to join in the conversation. His comments had no particular profundity. But the young pair responded like disciples to the utterances of the prophet. When Kwame cleared his throat, they stopped talking, sometimes in the middle of a word, and listened with wide, respectful eyes.

  Michael, whose mental age was rapidly approaching the century mark, found himself strangely reluctant to introduce the subject he wanted to discuss. He was relieved when Kwame gave him an opening.

  “You’re twenty-five now? You must have been a student, six years ago.”

  “Bright,” Kwame said. The blonde giggled appreciatively.

  “You were here when Gordon Randolph was teaching here.”

  “Right…”

  The response wasn’t quite so prompt.

  “I’m doing a biography of him.”

  “Groovy,” Kwame said.

  Michael persisted.

  “I’ve been interviewing people who knew him because I have a weird notion that personality, or character, or whatever, is
n’t an objective, coherent whole. It’s a composite, a patchwork of reflections of the man as he appeared to others.”

  That interested them. The blond girl nodded, smoothing her hair, and Kwame’s dreamy eyes narrowed.

  “Personality, maybe,” he said. “But not character. Two different things.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Character, you call it-soul, inner essence-not a patchwork. One integrated essence.”

  “All part of the Infinite Consciousness?”

  Kwame shook his head. The beard swayed.

  “I don’t dig that Zen stuff. All part of an infinite something. Names don’t name, words don’t define. You’ve gotta feel it, not talk about it.”

  “Hmmm.” The collegiate atmosphere must be getting him, Michael thought; he had to resist the temptation to plunge down that fascinating side track. “But that inner core, the integrated essence-that’s beyond the grasp of a finite worm like myself. All I’m trying to get is the personality. I’m hung up on words.”

  “All hung up on words,” Kwame murmured.

  “So you can’t tell me anything about Randolph?”

  “Man, I can’t tell you anything about anything.”

  This was evidently one of the proverbs of the Master. The blonde looked beatific, and her escort exhaled deeply through his nostrils, fixing his eyes on Kwame. Michael turned to them with the feeling that he was fighting his way through a web of gauze.

  “Neither of you knew him, I suppose?”

  “My sister was here then,” the blonde said. She sighed. “She said he was the sexiest man she ever saw.”

  “Great,” Michael muttered. “Haven’t any of you read his book? It’s a study of one of the problems that concern you-decadence, decay, the collapse of a society’s moral fiber.”

  Even as he spoke, he knew he was dropping words into a vacuum. They professed concern about certain issues, but the only opinions they allowed were the opinions of their contemporaries and those of a few selected “in” writers. Many of them rejected the very idea that any generation but their own had searched for universal truths. Unaccountably irritated, Michael turned to Kwame, who was nodding dreamily in rhythm to a tune only he could hear.

  “If you’re not hung up on words, why do you use them? You use them well. A couple of those songs were-remarkable. You wrote them, didn’t you? Words as well as music?”

  Kwame stopped swaying, but he didn’t answer for several seconds. When he turned dark, dilated eyes on Michael, the latter felt an uneasy shock run through him. He had reached Kwame, all right; he felt, illogically, as if he had said something deeply insulting or obscene.

  “Only two,” Kwame said. “I only wrote two of them.”

  “They were the best,” Michael said. “You ought to perform more of your compositions.”

  A spasm contorted Kwame’s face.

  “I don’t write songs now. Not for a long time.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t anymore.”

  Kwame put his head down on the table and began to cry.

  The other two were staring at Michael with naked hostility, but he hardly noticed. The fact that he did not understand Kwame’s distress did not lessen his feeling of guilt at having somehow provoked it. He felt as if he had struck out blindly with a club and maimed something small and helpless, something that responded with a shriek of pain.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean-”

  Kwame raised his head. The top fringes of his beard were damp, and tears still filled his eyes; but he made no move to wipe them away.

  “You don’t know what you mean,” he whispered. “You see the shadows on the wall of the cave and you think they’re real. Man, you don’t know what’s out there, in the dark, on the other side of the fire.”

  So they still read the old-fashioned philosophers. Michael recognized the allusion, it was one of the few images that remained from his enforced study of Plato. Humanity squatting in the cave, compelled to view the shadows cast on the wall by a flickering fire as the real world, never seeing the Reality that cast the shadows… But his original reading had not evoked the chill horror that gripped him at Kwame’s words. What Beings, indeed, might stalk the darkness outside the world, and cast distorted shadows? Whatever They were, Kwame knew about them. Michael had the irrational feeling that if he looked long enough into the boy’s wide, liquid eyes, he would begin to see what Kwame had seen…

  Drugs, he told himself. Drug-induced hallucinations…His incantation of the conventional dispelled the shadows, and he said gently, “It’s all right. I’m sorry. Forget the whole thing.”

  Kwame shook his head.

  “Can’t forget…anything. I need something. Need…” His eyes turned toward the others, silent, defensive, watching. “You got anything? Grass? Acid?”

  The blonde gulped, glancing at Michael. The boy, who seemed to have better control of himself, said calmly, “Nobody carries the stuff, Kwame, you know that. Not in here, anyhow.”

  “Then let’s go someplace.” Kwame shoved futilely at the table and tried to stand. “Let’s go-”

  The flutter of agitation had spread out beyond their table; other patrons were staring.

  Michael sat perfectly still. Kwame’s agitation was beyond reassurance; all he could do was refrain from any move or comment that might seem to threaten or condemn. In fact he felt no sense of condemnation, only a profound pity. After a moment, Kwame relaxed. There was perspiration on his forehead.

  “Sorry,” he said, giving Michael another of those sweet smiles. “We’ve gotta go now.”

  “I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” Michael said. “And I enjoyed your performance. You’re really good.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “And thanks for the food.”

  “It was a pleasure.”

  The other two were standing, looking nervous as singed cats. But Kwame seemed to be bogged down in a mass of conventionalities.

  “Sorry I couldn’t-”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Kwame brooded.

  “I knew her,” he said suddenly.

  “Who? Oh…” Michael knew how a policeman must feel when confronting, single-handed, a hopped-up addict with a gun. He didn’t know what was safe to say. Kwame spared him the trouble.

  “Linda. She’s his wife now.”

  “I know.”

  “Beautiful,” Kwame said; Michael knew he was not referring to Linda’s face or figure. “A beautiful human being. We tripped together.”

  Balanced between caution and curiosity, Michael still hesitated to speak. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Drugs might help to explain…Kwame seemed to sense what he was thinking.

  “Not pot, nothing like that. She didn’t need it. She was on a perpetual trip.” He sighed. “Beautiful human being.”

  “Yes,” Michael ventured. “Did Randolph take-”

  Kwame shook his head.

  “Oh, no,” he said gravely. “Not him. He didn’t need it either.”

  He started to walk away, his companions falling in behind him like a guard of honor. Then he turned back to Michael.

  “He always knew about it.”

  “About what?”

  “The dark,” Kwame said impatiently. “The dark on the other side.”

  Chapter 6

  I

  MICHAEL SHOVED AT THE TYPEWRITER. GLUED TO the table top by a two-year accumulation of dirt, spilled coffee, and other debris, it did not move; but the movement jarred the table, which proceeded to tip half a dozen books, an empty coffee cup, and a box of paper clips onto the floor.

  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.