Pitch Dark

by Renata Adler

  The turning point at the paper was the introduction of the byline.

  He ceased to be a writer from the moment he began to tape.

  The truth was, there was something in the ice cube.

  I don’t want these colloquies and asides, you know, any more than I want to hear how the reporter got the story. But so much of the story, for some time now, has been, says who?

  Grieved like, pined like…Why must there always be a simile? Why must you drive always to first questions, way beyond the goalposts every time. Well, what do you keep sacking our quarterback for, when it comes to that.

  She had loved him, you know, with the operatic intensity of a basset, or a diva, or a child.

  I find the turnoff to Castlebar all right. I’ve seen it on my way to and from the Waltons’. Then I drive straight, straight, and the rain stops, the sky is clear black, all the stars are there. I cannot see, on either side, the roadside, but I have the sense, always, of those long stone walls, meadows, sometimes the sea, the cows, the incredible unseen beauty of the Irish countryside. Only a car or two, at intervals of many minutes. On what errands can they be, on what errand am I, why are cars so few? And in the isolated houses, even in the towns, no lights in any windows, except, again many miles apart, one light, upstairs or down: a solitary insomniac, a worker on the night shift, a terrorist, a poet, who? But in the long spells of driving through the dark, there begins to arise in me an exaltation. I cannot see where this will end. I still have the sense, how to put this, that the land, even the sleeping country towns, know of me. That they are aware that I am passing, whether they follow or not: one car, torn fender, missing rental sticker, bound, they cannot yet know for where. Suddenly, street lights, curves, a traffic light or two. No sign that I can see, however, for Dublin, or any other major town. So I drive straight on, and when the lights and intersections recede, I assume that what I have just been through is downtown metropolitan Castlebar itself, such as it is. Straight on, exhilaration. Is it the hour? the passing over into crime? although I know in my legal heart I cannot yet have broken any law. What comes to me now, as I look up at Orion, and think of childhood knowledge of stars, myths, constellations, dinosaurs, is also the memory, the physical courage of that outlaw, that reckless vandal, fearless of death, that child. Into this kinetic scofflaw joy, the realization that I have, in all probability, missed my turnoff, the turning round, the car arrived too late to see me turn, so that, if he was following, I will have lost him now. And what, I have thought, if I’m caught actually getting on the plane at Dublin. Why, I’ll say I was planning to return tomorrow. Ask them at Cihrbradàn, ask also Captain Walton. And my car’s not due till then; look, I still have the key here in my pocket. At the airport, I will have bought a ticket to return, tomorrow, from London. Look, I have a ticket back to Ireland. And the missing rental sticker. I have already explained it. (I can’t say I don’t know how it came off; someone may have seen me remove it.) It’s in order not to be overcharged for car repairs. And I would use the argument of so many arguing from the botched nature of their crimes: Would I have done this, kept the key, parked the car with its torn fender facing out, peeled off the sticker, if I was really intending to abscond. Do you take me for such a fool, I mean, what kind of fool do you take me for. But I’m uneasy, uneasy, about what happens after that. Do they say: A likely story. No. But do I have to stay, and pay, right then and there, whatever extortionate price I’m becoming a fugitive to avoid. Almost certainly. I’m uneasy, in fact, about what happens as I get nearer to Dublin. If I am getting nearer to Dublin. And then I notice that the fuel gauge registers only slightly more than a quarter of a tank. I drive on, counting the miles I have driven back from the point where I turned around, wondering how much mileage I have wasted. What looms behind me, of course, is that immense truck. And when I flag him down, he stops. I ask him the way to route N.5 for Dublin, and there crosses his face that look of suspicion, hesitation, which I recognize even by night; I have now so often seen it. He says, I’m going to Dublin, you can follow me. We set out, and then I start to suspect him. My trust, in other words, is entirely depleted, and I wonder whether they have sent another of their agents, or alerted him, and is he headed now, not to Dublin at all, but straight back to the station at Castlebar. There is Kafka’s castle, of course, and the castle where I have been staying; and the bar, well, I leave that train of thought. And Mummy’s beach. All the time, there persists my own inexplicable impression that there has been something quite wrong in the course of these events, and I keep wondering what it is, apart from a small accident in which I have been at fault, wondering just what it is that they can want to frame me for, in the matter of this car. I think instead of ways to account for the man’s hesitation. I think, perhaps he thought I’m IRA, dressed like that, in the night, on whatever errand, in that scarred car, with my corduroy pants, and my down jacket. And then the other thought occurs, perhaps he’s IRA, and his truck is loaded with gelignite, and what accounts for his suspicion is that he thinks I am the police. And the sheer unlikelihood of this position, this situation, the sheer statistical implausibility of it, begins once again to strike me, and I am full of joy, only partially diminished by the fact that I am no longer quite alone. Solitude has seemed so much a part of the adventure until now.

  The schema is this, a jug band; the schema’s a clarinet quintet; the schema’s a guitar, a fado, an orchestra. Going with Paul Wiseman on his motorbike to the Boston Symphony; the little girl onstage playing an oboe in Gina’s kindergarten class; John’s saying, frankly, I think letting women into the Century would be as inappropriate as introducing a trombone into a string quartet.

  When I learned about the shrew, the poor unevolved, benighted shrew, which will keep jumping high in the air at a place in its accustomed path where an obstacle, a rock perhaps, once was but no longer is, well, I wondered about all those places where, though the obstacles have long been removed, one persists either in the jump or in taking the long way round. It seemed such an unnecessary jolt or expenditure of time and energy. And yet if you have acquired a profound aversion for just such a place simply because of an obstacle that once was there, or an incapacity to discern that the obstacle no longer exists, or an indifference as to whether it exists or not, or if the habit of pointless jumping, or detour, or even turning back dejected has become for you the path itself, or if you have a superstitious need to treat the spot as though the obstacle remained, or even a belief that the discovery that the obstacle is gone is in itself a punishable offense, if any of these things is true for you, then you are lost. Or probably lost, unless the habitual path, the compulsion, the leap, the turning back, the long detour have for you another value. Individuality, for instance, love, obsession. Or for that matter, art.

  Is this the way you lead your life? I said. You said no. I said, me neither. And that delayed it for a year.

  The road now is sometimes clear, sometimes overlaid for quite a stretch with mist. On both sides still, of course, in that intense, modulated dark, the incredible, unseen beauty of the Irish countryside. I look at my watch, 4:35, and since I’ve taken my eyes off the road, and since we are speeding, I think, Will it be said that she died while/because she was looking at her watch? I look at the fuel gauge. I look at the gas stations, every one of which is closed. I pass the truck, on the right of course, and, hazard lights flashing yet again, I wave, full of hope that he will not leave me now, I wave again for him to stop. I say I’m running out of gas. He looks shifty, suspicious, sly. I point to my fuel gauge. I ask whether there will be any gas stations open on the way to Dublin. He says not before nine-thirty. I say, Are there no all-night stations then in Ireland. He says no. I ask how much further it is to Dublin. He says, About a hundred twenty miles. I have not yet learned that distances in Ireland are so notoriously understated that there is an actual distance that the English call an Irish mile. But I say, I’ll never make it. My flight from Dublin leaves at ten. And I ask, Can I just drive till I run
out of fuel, and then ride the rest of the way with you. And he says, That would be all right. And he speaks softly, and has a stammer; but, as I say, I have grown by now to love him. We drive and drive, and there’s a sign reading Ballyhaunis 10. I wonder whether my car will make it that far. I wonder if, when I stop, he will just keep going. But we reach a town. He slows down, and so do I. This is evidently Ballyhaunis. Though there is a parking lot, of sorts, in the village square, with several cars parked, and several empty spaces, he suggests that I park my car elsewhere, beside the curb. I ask again, since I may have misheard him, whether I should lock the car. He says, Oh yes. So I lock the car. He waits. He opens his door. I hand my bags up to him. Since the cab is very high, and I’ll have to be unencumbered to climb on, I also hand him my purse. He shuts his door. I go around to the other side. He leans over and opens that door for me. I manage to climb aboard. I slam the door. I find I am still, for some reason, clutching the rental agency’s Irish map. And off we go.

  I ask whether my car will be all right, parked at that curb. He says, Yes, no one will notice; these towns are small. There is a long silence. He says, Where have you come from, then? I tell my first lie. I say, Just beyond Castlebar. Another silence. I say, The car belongs to friends, they can come and pick it up when I phone and tell them where it is. A pause. He says, Yes, with another key. I think, He obviously knows I’m lying. Maybe not. I ask where he’s from. He says Achill Island. I ask how often he makes this run to Dublin. He says, Two nights a week. I ask what load the truck is carrying. He laughs, says, A little of everything. It occurs to me yet again that he may be as much or as little of an outlaw as I am, that possibility. After a long spell, he asks where I’m from. I say, Boston, Massachusetts. He laughs, says, You are a long way from home, then. I say, Yes, I am. I’m flying to London, to see my brother. He says, Why not: To see your brother. I say, Well, he’s just passing through London. A very long silence. He says, Do you work in London, then? I cannot remember whether I have already said anything on this subject, so I say no; and then, improbably, that I may be transferred there. I watch the road, wondering what I shall say is my profession, and how I’ll explain what I’m doing here. He doesn’t, it seems, understand too well what I say, either, so it occurs to me that, if I’m caught in an inconsistency or a lie, he may think he’s simply misunderstood it. I say, I’m on vacation, I was supposed to come early this summer, but I couldn’t, I’m here now instead, and since my brother is passing through London, I’m going to see him. Just for the day. A pause. Come to think of it, I say, I don’t need to phone my friends. I can pick up the car myself, on the way back. He brightens, begins to tell me, in enormous detail, what sequence of buses I’ll need to take to return from Dublin airport to Ballyhaunis. In order to pick up my car. Our longest silence yet. I was going to tell him I work for a computer company, or perhaps a tool manufacturer. Finally, it comes to me. I’m going to say that I work for a religious organization, the World Council of Churches, perhaps, or Joint Church Aid. I am very pleased with this notion. I may even say that my brother is a priest. We drive and drive in silence, and then I ask him whether he belongs to a union. He says he does. I wonder, though I don’t ask, what the union is called. I suppose it isn’t teamster. He suddenly begins to complain, at length, that new rules will soon be in force. No hauls more than eight consecutive hours. A compulsory break every four hours. The speed limit for trucks, all over Ireland, thirty-five miles an hour. He says, No lorry driver will keep to it. I ask how they, they are going to catch every lorry driver who breaks the speed limit. The logs, he says, with some indignation; they don’t even have to catch you on the road and pull you over. They can get you on the logs. I sympathize with him, particularly about the thirty-five-mile limit, and we are now at one in at least this opposition to the law. He says again that no lorry driver will keep to it. I ask him whether they will strike. I do not understand the particulars of his answer, but I gather that the drift is Yes. (In the matter of logs, I am reminded of the black bus driver, on the route from Red Hill to the Port Authority, and the Connecticut trooper who pulled him over. The little insurrection of the passengers, who thought the trooper was questioning the logs because the bus driver was black. On that other bus, the passenger who took out from his flight bag, and held under his coat, a hammer. His shaven head, his pallor, the hammer in his hand.) More than an hour passes, partly in silence, partly in not understanding each other’s conversation. Then he tells a long story about an aunt of his, who came over from the States, near Boston, to see Dublin, and his truck, and the back of it, and its taking a bump, and how she laughed, and what he thought she would say when she got back to the States. I ask how old his aunt is, but this turns out, for some reason, to be an entirely dissonant question. He says, About fifty, and I realize or think he may already have said so. Then I say, You must come to Boston someday, and this seems better, though I still can’t understand what he says in answer. I have said very little about the religious organization for which I work, and he has not asked much about it. We are strangely reserved in what we ask each other. It still seems far from inconceivable that his A little of everything back there is gelignite. I realize that I am free to make up a lie of any kind, and so is he.

  As the miles and the hours pass, I realize that we are not going to ask each other’s names, or tell them. He says, So you’re going to smoke city. It is the first time I sense even a remote hostility toward England. I say, Yes, we have several missions there. A pause. I ask whether he takes a ferry from Achill Island. He says, There is a bridge. I ask whether the truck is his. He says, I wish it were. He says he has been a member of his union forty years, and that he will never consent to drive only eight hours on the nights he drives. How many hours does he like to drive, usually? I ask. He says, As many as I can. I think of the talk, at the Waltons’, about the Irish working man. Point, set, and match. I know I will not be able to offer him money when I leave his truck (he has said he will not drive me into Dublin, but leave me at a bus stop, on the outskirts, much closer to the airport, where I can catch a bus direct; more about this, in due course, but I believe him, naturally); and I’ve wondered how I’m going to thank him. Thinking now along the lines of my profession, I know I’m going to say: I hope we meet again and that I can do him a favor someday; but also, especially, God bless you. He asks why I don’t take a little time off, this morning, and have a look at Dublin. I say, But I would miss my flight, and miss seeing my brother. A long silence. He asks something about my friends beyond Castlebar, and my answer makes no sense even to me. As we approach Dublin, and the sun is just rising at the outskirts, he talks about the time it would take to drive me to the airport, direct, in all that traffic. And there does start to be a lot of traffic. At last, he drops me at a bus shelter. He hands me down my bags. I say thank you. I add, God bless you. He drives off.

  There are three young people standing in that bus shelter. I ask, Do all the buses from here go to the airport? And with that obdurateness, satisfaction, even mockery, they say, These buses don’t go to the airport. You’ll have to go into Dublin for a bus to get there; it’s the other way. And they exchange looks. I am a little stunned by this. I say, Shall I catch a bus from here to Dublin, then? And they say, That’s what you’ll have to do. One of the girls adds, If they’re not full. She starts to flag down a bus, which is just coming. It doesn’t stop, and she says, with great satisfaction, That one’s full. We wait. I see, by some miracle, a black car that appears to be a taxi, coming from the direction the lorry driver and I have come from. I say, I guess I’d better try and get a cab then, and wave to him. By another miracle, he pulls over and he has no passenger. I ask how much it will be to the airport. He says six or seven pounds. It barely crosses my mind to wonder whether the truck driver can have been mistaken, about the direction of the airport, about the itinerary of the buses; to wonder also why he did not take me, at least, into Dublin. But he is, by then, still so much my friend that I just have to assume it wa
s a mistake of some sort, and perhaps it was. I don’t believe it was. But, whatever his errand or intention may have been, he stopped for me. He didn’t have to. It prolonged his work day. Work night. He stopped for me. And whatever he may have thought my errand was, well, how else can I put it? I feel warmly toward him still. The fact, however, is that had it not been for that providential, empty cab, I would almost certainly, no, certainly, have missed my plane.

  The cab driver says, What time’s your flight? I say, Ten, but I ought to be there by nine-fifteen. I still have to get my ticket and check in. He says, Well, in this traffic, I’d better take you through the park. Where’ve you been staying, then? I say, Just outside of Dublin. A pause. Several minutes pass. I say, Is this way much longer. He says, No, actually it’s shorter. This is clearly untrue, else why would he have said we’ll go through the park, on account of traffic, in the first place. Also, we seem to have run into more traffic than he had expected. He becomes impatient. I say, The park is lovely. He says nothing. I think I ought to ask some sort of question. If I’ve been staying just outside of Dublin, of course, I don’t know what kind of question I would ask. (I suddenly remember a moment with the lorry driver: as we neared Dublin, and the sun was just rising at the outskirts, and it was clear that the time and distance were much longer than I had expected, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to deliver my car at any airport, having left it behind, of course, at Ballyhaunis. Also, that my argument that I planned to pick up that car tomorrow was pretty weak. How, then, explain that, having left a damaged car, in an obscure town, by night, I leave Ireland now, intending, all the same, to return the car to its rental agency by Friday afternoon. A problem, certainly. But I had my new, my religious identity, and suddenly it dawned on me: what I was going to do was to fly out of Ireland under another name. In order not to get caught at this, I would not use my credit card; I would use cash. And I would have to inquire, too, whether one has to show one’s passport, in leaving or in entering Ireland. As I recalled, one did not have to show it. I could pretend I was asking on behalf of someone else. My boss, perhaps, or my brother. If passports were required, I would of course have to risk my own name. Otherwise, I would just pay in cash, under whatever name, and leave. Traveling under a false name might be a crime of some sort. I should make the name as like my own as possible to account for the mistake. Alder, I thought. But then that does happen so often. I was afraid they might make the same mistake and be on the lookout for just such an Alder. So I thought, Hadley, since no one would look under H. And then, in my new hilarity, I thought, Why not Haddock. But that seemed going too far. So I settled, now, on Hadley.) At the airport, the meter registers nine pounds, and of course he had said six or seven. I have a sense now of his feeling somewhat contrite, or perhaps only abashed. But I am not thinking of it. I pay him ten pounds fifty. He stops, turns around, and says, It’s too much. I say, What do you mean? He says, The fare’s only nine pounds. I say, I know, I just wanted you to have something. And he says, God bless you.