Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

  INTO THAT DARKNESS

  INTO THAT DARKNESS

  Steven Price

  a novel

  THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS

  TORONTO

  Copyright © 2011 by Steven Price

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Price, Steven, 1976–

  Into that darkness / Steven Price.

  ISBN 978-0-88762-737-8

  I. Title.

  PS8631.R524I57 2011 C813’.6 C2010-907346-0

  Editor: Patrick Crean

  Cover design: Michel Vrana

  Cover image: kallejipp/photocase.com

  Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

  a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

  390 Steelcase Road East,

  Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada

  www.thomasallen.ca

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

  15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Text Printed on a 100% PCW recycled stock

  for Esi

  Who can tell what purpose is served by destinies And whether to have lived on earth means little Or much.

  —CZESLAW MILOSZ

  This book would not exist without the extraordinary grace of Lise Henderson. For advice, support, and encouragement, I am also grateful to John Baker, Jeff Mireau, and Anne McDermid; to my family, Bob & Peggy, Brian, Kevin Potato; to Patrick Crean, for his judicious eye; to Jack Hodgins, for his wisdom and friendship; and especially to Jacqueline Baker, who is, as ever, a light and a reason.

  CONTENTS

  INTO THAT DARKNESS

  IN THE ROARING

  THE LABYRINTH AND THE THREAD

  THE INTERRUPTED MAN

  MEANS AND ENDS

  QUESTIONING THE DEAD

  INTO THAT DARKNESS

  INTO THAT DARKNESS

  The child was breathing quietly at the parlour cabinet, his teeth glinting small and sharp in the half-light.

  It’s alright, his grandfather said. Go ahead. Open it.

  He looked up.

  His grandfather’s shaggy head, upraised and watching. A law-book clutched in one fist, a knuckle marking the page. When the old judge shoved back his chair and walked over and ran a hand along the child’s neck his seamed palm felt ghostly and cool. What you’re looking at there would be a million years old at least, he said to the child. The oceans were once full of them. He fumbled with the book in his fingers. Your father found it for me. Do you know where he found it? Under the trestle in Sooke. In the mountains.

  In the mountains?

  In those days all this was under the ocean. Even the mountains.

  The child cradled the fragment of shale in his hands with great delicacy. Its surface was small and very black and tattooed upon it was a tiny black chambered shell spiralled like a goat’s horn.

  His grandfather took the fossil from his open palm and stooped looking down at it. I once thought it was very valuable, he said. I thought myself lucky to have found it. For it to have come down across so many millennia to end up here, in this room, in my hands. Can you imagine. It’s a piece of a vanished world, Arthur, a world that will not come again. Wouldn’t you think that’s worth something?

  The child nodded. Yes sir.

  His grandfather cleared his throat as if from a long way off. Set the fossil down again on its shelf. He shut the cabinet fast and the glass door pinged as it shivered to. Well, he said. I guess I did too. I guess I keep it as a reminder. Of another kind of law. He clasped his hands in the small of his back and leaned in and peered at the fossil as if to read a secret writ upon it.

  There have been many ends of the world, he said softly. This was one of them.

  IN THE ROARING

  I’ll be buried here too.

  You don’t think about that when you’re young. Or it isn’t the same somehow. I was born in this city and I’ll be buried in it. My parents are buried here, and my grandfather, who raised me. He was a big man, his skin was grey as old paper. He served as a judge for half his life. He considered it a kind of duty. He told me a question doesn’t have to be something you ask. It’s a way of looking at the world. I don’t know. I guess I’ve tried to look at the world like that. It’s strange to think he was younger than I am now when he died.

  I go out to his grave sometimes to pick off the dead flowers, lay a fresh bouquet. I think the dead deserve more from us. That might just be my age talking. My eyes drift over the low iron fences, the crumbling monuments, the shady tree-lined paths to the sea. The sea like wimpled metal. The sea with its terrible coins of light. I don’t like to look at it now, it hurts my eyes.

  When I go to his grave I think mostly about my own life. What I didn’t achieve. What I didn’t hold on to. The work I might have painted, but didn’t. Not about what’s come apart down in that darkness, the wood planks, his second-best blue suit that looked so green in the coffin. His body. I don’t know if that’s selfish or just the way we’re built. Maybe a bit of both.

  Two years back I remember going out to his grave and finding the stone overturned, broken at its base. Someone had spray-painted something on the stone I couldn’t read. It was in purple paint. I guess it was kids. You see them sitting on the streets begging for change, or running out to wash windshields at intersections. They have hard eyes, flinty eyes. Still I don’t know what would make a kid do a thing like that. I don’t understand it. I guess we must have been that way too once. But we never desecrated the dead. We never would have done that.

  I looked a long time at that mess.

  Callie always said I had a draftsman’s eyes, not a painter’s. I suppose she was right. I don’t know that I ever saw anything truly. I tried. I guess you could say that was the real work. Seeing. Callie would have laughed at that. She didn’t think truth was something you saw. She said change was the only constant in the world, and it was change she wanted to find in her sculptures. She saw with her hands, her fingers were her eyes. Callie had enormous hands. Her palms were always hot. She would put them on my naked back in bed and it would be like a furnace. I can still feel that heat. The pressure of her knuckles, like she was shaping me as I slept.

  We were young together once. It’s strange to think about now. I could have gone after her I guess. I could have left too. I don’t know. She wanted so much to love, it was as if she loved. It was never enough for me. I wonder if it would be enough for me now.

  His wife did not die in autumn and yet autumn was when he dreamed of her. He sat on the edge of his bed, an old man now and coughing in the darkness, white sheets tangled at his waist. His dead wife blurred and fading from the curtains. He sat and he coughed and he rose.

  On the stairs his bare feet tracked moist half-prints over the oak which shrank at once and were sucked up invisible. He wore pale corduroy trousers soft as the skin of a peach and a collared white shirt and a hea
vy silver watch on his left wrist. The big waist of his trousers was cinched tight with a belt notched to the last notch but one. When he came down into the kitchen the low sun in the east was red and the easterly sky red also and at the table he stood drenched in that light as in another man’s blood and it was this light he saw by.

  The cupboards were bare. He filled an old kettle and set it to boil on the stove and he took his mug from its hook above the sink. Unscrewed the lid of a white ceramic jar. Spooned out coffee and left the lid off and the spoon standing in it and when the water was boiled he poured and stirred and drank his coffee. It was the second Tuesday in September, the end of his sixty-ninth year. His name was Arthur Lear.

  Some days he would speak to no other living soul. Some days he would scrape at his memories like charcoal, rub his past between dry fingers. This house had been erected in the third decade of the last century and with its arched ceilings and narrow corridors and weird arterial plumbing some days the pipes in the walls would mutter and hiss eerily like a chorus of the dead, and those ghostly voices would be the only voices he’d hear.

  Days and days.

  The old man took his greatcoat down from its wooden pin and went out.

  Locked the deadbolt deliberately, pocketed the key. Then standing in the street he turned back to double-check the door. The grey cedar shakes on the sides of his house were splitting. Yellow spears of grass sprouted under the low casement windows, the boot-pulped porch steps slumped crazily. He had been a painter for most of his life and he wondered when he had stopped noticing such details. In the bay window he could see the shapes of old canvases, props, brushes fanned out in unwired jars. But that was all of another life. That was another life.

  He went on up the street, his big hands curled at his sides like grey spiders. At the first intersection a black dog loped across the street some soft thing in its jaws and the old man watched it go. The streets were quiet here. His black shoes were clean but unpolished, their hard heels clicked softly. The sidewalks looked bleached and windblasted. An early sunlight was etching the very edges of things.

  When he reached the neighbourhood pub he peered into the glass doors and ran a hand through his hair. Waited for a break in the traffic, jogged across to the bank on the far side. The coins in his long pockets swung heavily. The streets were filling with figures scarved and pale and moving with purpose towards parked cars, bus stops, the city itself. The old man glanced at the faces he passed but no one met his eye.

  Then he turned the corner and peered across the street at the tobacconist’s. Through the windows he could not make out her shape. Her shop fronted a square of shops and boutiques below an old wooden theatre and on the far side stood a bench and fountain where he would often sit and read in the mornings. Just beyond these a big oak tree thrust forth rooted and powerful from the cobblestones like a great upwelling of earth. In a café window next to the tobacconist’s he saw a black child’s face pressed against the glass, his thick plastic eyeglasses distorted and watery in the light, and then the boy was craning his neck upwards. Two women in tailored coats had paused beside the old man and were pointing at the sky and then a rushing sound like fast water could be heard and the old man too raised his eyes.

  He raised his eyes. A dark cloud of gulls burst over the storefronts down the street and poured past inland and he stood amazed. Seabirds many hundred strong. Flying fast and silent and sinister in their silence over the streetlights and trees and old buildings.

  They passed from sight. The sky felt all at once larger, darker.

  Then a second flock hurtled up and over the buildings as if following the first. The old man shivered and lowered his gaze. The black child in the café window was watching him and raised one light-skinned palm to the glass in what might have been a gesture of greeting or farewell.

  The old man hurried across.

  The boy watched the old man long and thin in his greatcoat striding along the far side of the street and thought: I did not want to go anyway and even if I did want to go I would not go now. Thought: They will find out it was Tobey and then they will be sorry. He had one sharp elbow pressed into the math textbook open before him and he was chewing small ribs into a pencil as he brooded when the old man stopped suddenly and lifted his drained grey face and all at once a darkness poured like dampness down the building behind him.

  The boy shivered. There was a warpling in the upper windows along the street as if the very glass itself were bending and the boy blinked and adjusted his eyeglasses on his small nose. He rubbed one elbow on the café window though his mother did not like him to do this. Then he lifted up his eyes.

  He lifted up his eyes and saw them. The seabirds. Rivering past in a thick black torrent.

  And he could not help himself and whispered, very deliberately: Holy shit.

  Then glanced quickly back at the counter. His mother had not heard. He pressed one palm to the cold window his fingers splayed as if to blot the shadowed street out but the rope of birds was already thinning, already the last stragglers like scraps of cloth were being blown past. When he lowered his eyes the old man was coming towards the square.

  He flushed suddenly, as if he had been caught out. And thought again: No I would not want to go even if they wanted me to even if I was allowed. Thinking of the museum with its moth-eaten tusked mammoth, its creaking old explorer’s ship, the dark streets of its mining town on the second floor. The smell of tar and the clatter of horses and the recorded cries of miners in their tunnels. Then thinking of his classmates in the school bus and the plastic seats with the stuffing frothing up out of the seams and his teacher in his stiff angry manner glaring back at them. Thinking of that and then not thinking of that.

  The boy set his chewed pencil with a click sullenly down. Pulled the textbook into his lap and curled two hands over the top corners. The espresso machine roared, steamed off.

  The door banged open in a gust of cold air and the old man stamped in. He scraped his shoes twice on the mat. The boy saw his own watery reflection swing into view in the door, his tight black hair cut short to the skull, his nose and lips small in his wide face. His mother often told him he had his grandfather’s face but he was not so sure. He was ten years old and short for his age but his narrow shoulders and compact arms were strongly built and he was not finished growing.

  The old man met the boy’s eye and the boy looked away.

  What can I get for you? his mother asked.

  The old man stood six and a half feet if anything. His skin was grey, leeched, and in his old greatcoat he loomed over the boy’s mother like some terrible figure from nightmare. His voice dry as old leaves.

  Coffee, he said. Just a small coffee.

  Then reached deep into his left pocket and withdrew a lean brown billfold. His knuckles were red with the cold. The boy could see very distinctly the old man’s silver wristwatch and the hour hand where it pointed to twelve o’clock. The big brass clock on the wall read ten past nine.

  The woman hauled a rack of steaming mugs from the dishwasher and set it clattering to cool. She looked at her son, thought of him that morning and of his quarrel with his sister. She could not recall why they had fought. His sister was sixteen. She supposed that was reason enough.

  Then the door banged open, an old man ducked in. With his white hair and grey skin and pale clothing he might have been covered in dried clay, so grey and ghostly and strange was his pallor. He was very tall and made taller by his reserve. Only his eyes were dark.

  Just a small coffee, he said gruffly.

  And reached down, took his change, nodded to her. His fingers were callused and cold. When he was gone she stood a moment with one dark wrist pressed to her brow watching the space where he had been and then she grimaced and smoothed her skirt over her thighs. Her torso was ribbed and sexless like a dancer’s and she was proud of her thinness after two children.

  I’ll be checking that, she called across to her son. Don’t think I won’t be.


  The boy glanced at her then again down at his math book. He was sitting at the table beside the electric fire. It was a narrow coffee shop she owned but the windows were tall and blue in the early blue light. The red leather couch behind him gleamed.

  I don’t see you writing anything down, she said. You better have one heck of a memory.

  He blew out his cheeks, picked up his chewed pencil. He picked it up very slowly.

  It was then that the woman realized the old man had left his billfold standing open on the counter. Shit, she muttered. And glanced quickly at her son to be sure he had not heard. Mason, she called to him. I’ll be right back honey.

  He looked up.

  Someone forgot their wallet. I won’t be a minute.

  I can watch the counter.

  She snorted. You just tell anyone who comes in I’ll be right back.

  In the square outside she found the old man with his thorny hands clasped in the small of his back and the coffee held there by its lid and his greatcoat bunched up under the elbows. He was stooped, peering down at a window display where a mobile of a clown in a circus tent turned lifelessly. The leaves of the big oak tree rustled in the square behind them. In the street the traffic was slow and the stoplights swayed though there was no wind.

  Someone in the crosswalk was shouting. The brake lights of a truck flared.

  You forgot this, she said. Feeling the cold through her shirtsleeves. Sir? She touched his sleeve softly and he turned, startled, peered down at her.

  She held out the billfold. You left this on the counter.

  He took it. His fingers touched hers.

  And just then something, a tremor, shuddered up from under her feet. Something in her stomach pitched and rolled and the old man caught her elbow with his left hand.

  Are you alright? He was holding her elbow and his grip was gentle.

  I’m fine, she said. She was not certain that she was. She shook her head. He was looking at her, waiting, and suddenly she blushed. You didn’t feel that? Just then?