Darkness Falling

by Peter Crowther

  Virgil looked across at the Honda, the rust, the dented sidepanels, the cracked headlamps, and then looked down at the plush green upholstery of the Pontiac. It was no contest. Shifted into first and turned the car around slowly until he was facing the city again. Then he pulled Suze Neihardt's body off of the flatbed and moved her across to the Pontiac, where she had a nice warm trunk all to herself.

  A few minutes later, he was on his way again.

  And best of all, he had Flaming Lips on the CD player.

  Life was good. It was strange, but it was very good indeed. And all the signs were it was going to get better.

  Virgil Banders, the Last Man on Earth.

  He liked that. It had a nice ring to it.

  Wayne Coyne must have thought so, too: With all your power / with all your power / with all your power… he and the guys sang.

  "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah," Virgil chorused, the words drifting out of the open window of the Pontiac and floating up, way up, into the early morning air to mingle with the smoke that hung over the city like a graveyard mist. A gentle rain had started up and it seemed to Virgil Banders like a spray sent to clean the world.

  (6)

  Over in Lakewood, just a few miles from where Virgil Banders was driving his stolen car through the silent streets, Sally Davis also felt cleaned by the rain.

  Sally had been out on the street since the bright light had filled her world, standing there wide-eyed, her hair hanging a little lank and limp around her face. She was dressed only in a skirt and cardigan sweater, her arms folded about her midriff like one of the women from the fuse factory over near the Project. Watching, feeling the rain patter on her head, her head tilted to one side, seeing it spread darkness across the sidewalk. It felt real good. In fact, it seemed to freshen the voices inside in there, seemed to liven them up with renewed energy and vigor.

  Maybe the light had been lightning. Maybe there was a storm coming. She craned her head back and looked up into the early morning sky which, despite the rain – little more than a cooling wet mist, if she were absolutely honest – was cloudless.

  Yes, well, Sally nodded to herself, there could be a storm coming – but it wasn't no regular meteorological event, and you could take that one right to the bank. Yessir. You didn't need to be one of those guys on the weather channel, waving their arms about pointing to cold fronts and hot areas. Hell, it was plain to see. Sally breathed deep and smacked her lips. She could taste energy in the air and in the misty rain, could taste electrical charge.

  The voices agreed.

  Sally had heard the voices even before her husband Gerry had left the house that fateful morning seventeen years ago last August – the fifteenth if anyone was wanting total precision – when good ol' Ger drove out to Fenham's Woods, parked up his Chevy and scattered his brains all over the back seat. No note, no explanations, no goodbyes.

  Just a cooled-off shotgun and a crotch full of fertilizer, Sally had heard the policeman who took her downtown tell one of his colleagues, a desk sergeant, Sally assumed, the sergeant watching Sally over the patrolman's right shoulder, leaning on his desk kind of awkward, like he needed to go pee or something, giving Sally an uneasy smile. But Sally had known the sergeant didn't want to pee. He wanted to shut the other guy up, what with her standing there right behind him, her purse in her hand, all disheveled. Wanted to tell the cop to quiet it down but not quite knowing how. Wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up, maybe, cos the guy's old lady's standing right there, large as life, wondering what the hell was going on.

  And then the patrolman had finally cottoned on, turning around real slow, his voice, while not stopping, lowering a little, like someone had the volume doodad on the TV remote and was just running it down, the way Sally Davis did during a commercial break in her favorite TV show, Six Feet Under maybe (my, but Sally surely did enjoy that show) or Desperate Housewives.

  Yessir, that was Sally, OK, sure as shooting. One mighty desperate housewife – particularly back then (it was raining that night, too, Sally suddenly realized, standing out in the street and an otherwise empty world, just her and the rain, and the silence), with good ol' Ger's mortal remains still cooling off down in the precinct house basement, covered over with a sheet and a rubber-banded note fastened to his big toe:

  Davis, Gerald Mortimer

  And maybe with his date of birth on there, too:

  3/27/58

  And maybe the way he'd died:

  Suicide

  Or even:

  Sucking on a double-barrel shotgun.

  Standing out in the rain in a deserted side street in an uncharacteristically quiet Lakewood, Sally recalled watching the patrolman all those years ago, recalled his face starting to redden like one of Cora Pohlsson's McIntosh apples brought to ripeness in fast speed the way the people at Disney used to do on their Wonderful World TV programs.

  As he had started to stammer out an apology, Sally told him no matter, patting his arm with an impassively calm touch. Then she had turned around again to sign for her husband's rings – the gold-plated band with the sun face that his parents had bought him for his twenty-first and a worn-thin wedding band that looked as tired, tarnished and lack-luster as had its wearer – car keys, and a handful of money comprising a ten and three fives plus a couple of quarters, a dime, a nickel and a mess of pennies. She would keep this little collection with her at all times from that moment on, at first not realizing that she still had it and then, later, attaching some kind of ghoulish, talismanic importance to it. She rattled them now, feeling their warmth in the deep pocket of her corduroy skirt. Listened to the sounds they made as they rolled and bounced into one another, like puppies or kittens at play.

  She looked around and breathed in deep. Somewhere over in town, something was burning. Sally could see the smoke over the houses, could smell it in the air. Maybe that was what she had smelled before, not a storm coming. Maybe there had been an accident of some kind.

  But no, not an accident. She knew that, deep down. The world had been mysteriously vacuumed of life and sound. She knew even without going to doorways and knocking or ringing bells, pressing buzzers, knew that there would not be an answer. She didn't know what it was nor why it had happened. She just knew it had happened, the way you sometimes knew things without any reason. Instinct. That's what it was.

  She guessed it had been instinct years ago that had told her Gerry didn't love her any more. (Sally preferred to say 'Didn't care for her any more'.) But she was prepared to go with it and not make waves. After all, she could have been wrong.

  But then the voices told her, and they didn't use Sally's preferred phraseology. They told her it was because Ger couldn't take it anymore and that he didn't love her, that he had never loved her. That last part, Sally found real hard to take. She couldn't believe that. No way. And so, on the evening of the first anniversary of her husband's suicide, she had driven out to Fenham's Woods, parked up the car – she was still driving the old Chevy, though her sister Maizie had said for her to sell the car, but Sally couldn't do that – and she positioned herself outside the car, waiting for Gerry to show up and do it all again. Like a repeat performance, or an encore, maybe.

  And sure enough, he had showed up, at a little after 11 o'clock, when the sun was almost at its highest and the farm buildings and the patches of trees on the sloping hillside across from the car parking area seemed like a half-finished painting, shimmering in the heat haze.

  Gerry Davis was shimmering, too, sitting in the driver's seat, large as life and close enough to reach out and touch. Only she knew that he wasn't alive and couldn't be touched. Not anymore. Sally could see clear through him to the window winder on the driver's door.

  As he lifted up the ghost of his old shotgun, Sally got up from where she was sitting and knocked on the window, asking her husband if it was true that he didn't love her and hadn't ever done so. He turned to her, not looking at all surprised that she was there, nodding, sad-faced as he mouthed the word 'yes'
. It was true: he had never loved her. Then, with the slightest of shrugs, he slipped the shotgun barrel into his mouth – the mouth that, one time, long time ago, had kissed Sally's mouth or her cheek or sometimes the nape of her neck, or maybe whispered sweet nothings to her the way all lovers did – and pulled the trigger.

  Because he was turned to face her, across the passenger seat in the front, a whole load of blood and tissue and bits and pieces scattered across the front seats and onto the back window. Those bits and pieces were mostly brain, she would suppose hours later when, sitting in front of her beloved television set watching Gus Grissom in CSI, her mind replayed the entire incident in singleframe Technicolor. Good old Gus Grissom. Sally loved that show, too, but only that one, not the spin-offs: Miami, with that guy from the old NYPD Blue show, who always wore shades and stood around with his hands on his hips; and the New York variant, even though she liked Gary Sinise well enough.

  It answered the question posed by one of the voices that visited her from time to time: why wasn't Gerry facing forward when he pulled the trigger? What was he looking at across the passenger seat?

  She figured it was her own ghost, come from the future to ask him if he loved her. Sally had always wondered if ghosts couldn't be from something that would happen instead of always something that had happened. That clinched it for her.

  Her husband's body was no longer in the car when Sally Davis drove back home but the interior smelled of hot metal, gunpowder and shit. When she got back to the house her checked cotton two-piece – a matching skirt and blouse item she'd bought for $29.99 from the Kmart catalogue one time for a special meal with Gerry's boss, Richard – was soaked through to her pants. But when she went inside and peeled everything off there was no stain to be seen and the skirt was as dry as sun-bleached grass.

  Sun-bleached grass. That about summed up their marriage, too: dry, arid and parched – devoid of life, bereft of hope and singular in its monotonous promise of sameness.

  They had had money. Gerry was an account executive at Willard and Drew, a successful advertising broker firm just down from the Art Museum on 14th Avenue Parkway, and they didn't really want for anything. Except, as far as Sally was concerned, just one thing: children. Sally Davis wanted a child in the worst way. She wanted one so badly that it hurt.

  It hurt most on summer nights when she and Gerry used to take to their separate beds and Sally would try to read her book, halflistening all the time to the sound of her husband snoring and the gentle creaks and sighs of the house settling down and sleeping without her. Leaving her behind… behind and still awake.

  It was then that she would imagine what it would be like to have another small body lying in a cot by her bed, smelling of fruit purées, talcum powder and the almost indefinable pinkness of new flesh. Then she would get up and go over to Gerry's bed, roll him over on his side so that his snoring wouldn't interfere with her imagining of the baby's soft breath rolling in and out of its tiny mouth.

  Sally had bought maternity clothes which she wore when Gerry was out of the house, stuffing them with cushions and an assortment of underwear and hose and walking around splatter-footed, holding onto her back as though the weight she carried were pulling joint and muscle. She did that for seven months and then, one magical day, she stood in the kitchen – Gerry was out at the office – and she pissed herself. "My waters!" she cried jubilantly, and she rushed to the bathroom and tore off her clothes, threw them into the bath and pulled the doll she had bought from Gamble's toy store out of its hiding place behind the central heating boiler in the airing cupboard. She rubbed the doll between her legs until it was completely wet and then the two of them got into the bath together.

  Sally had dried the baby off on the boiler during the afternoon and then, at night, when Gerry was asleep, she powdered it, dressed it in a pretty one-piece from TJ Maxx and took it into her bed. Pretty soon it was nuzzled up against the warmth and sustenance of her breasts which, she was delighted to discover, had started to lactate to such a degree that she had to wear small tissues in the cups of her brassiere.

  Before long, Sally was rolling Gerry over so that he wouldn't wake the doll that slept so soundly in a Gamble's bag beneath her bed.

  She shook her head at the memories and, re-folding her arms, she pulled her cardigan sweater tighter around her.

  As the years went by, the child grew older. Sally knew that it was a girl but what kind of girl? She could never fully decide.

  Did she like broccoli and carrots?

  Did she like to watch the rain running down the window in the autumn and early spring?

  What was her favorite color?

  Sally did not know the answers to any of these questions. So many of them, and so many possibilities, so many alternatives.

  Sally knew that if she were to talk to her child as it grew older then it would have to talk back to her. Communication was, after all, a two-way thing. Thus, it had to have a voice of its own. But the voice that she would have to provide would need to be a composite of all the myriad possibilities of its life. The answer was simple: she would give it many voices.

  "Like me," a scrawny voice whispered in the silence.

  "Yes," Sally said, nodding her head, "just like you."

  "And me!" said another voice, testily.

  "And you," Sally agreed, smiling.

  One by one, the voices came, looking for assurances, looking for warmth. And each one of them received those assurances before disappearing once again.

  Sally remembered the voices starting.

  Some of them came only in the spring, when the trees started to grow new leaves and Gerry performed his annual repair work on the Chevy. Maybe, she often thought in the later, lonelier years, maybe even then, as he hummed and whistled away beneath the car's hood or lay spread-eagled beneath it, his face scuffed with oil and grease marks, maybe then he was already making at least mental preparations for blowing off the top of his head in that very same car.

  Some of the voices came only in the summer, filling Sally's head with the electricity of heat-haze and the scent of freshly-squeezed lemons whose resulting questionable vintage was sold by the roadside from huge aluminum bathtubs by tow-headed kids for a dime a plastic cup. It was one of these voices, these blue-sky birdsong confidences, that told Sally her husband had never loved her.

  "Have you forgiven me?" a low voice inquired.

  Sally considered this, her eyes taking in the empty streets around her. "You told me what I needed to know," Sally said at last.

  "Yes," croaked the voice – and was that the hint of a smile creaking around those words? – "but have you forgiven me?"

  A few seconds went by before Sally was able to say, "It's very hard," her voice barely above an exhalation of air.

  She looked at her watch. Almost six o'clock.

  Other voices came to her mainly in the autumn, when the leaves started to wither and drop and the air smelled of exhaust fumes and garden fires, whispering to her, full of sadness and thoughts and questions.

  And still more came to her in the heart of winter, those cold and introspective months when the bone-cold winds blew through Colorado and the world was silent and still, and the snow filled the sidewalks and piled up against the trees in the fields. These were the dark voices, cold tones, lost and alone and unloved, filled with the poison of aggression and bitterness.

  But while each of the voices had special characteristics and an individual personality, all of them had one thing in common: they all called Sally Davis mommy.

  And though she loved them all, in a sometimes frightening confusion of different reasons, her special affection was for the voices of the winter. For it was these that most matched the coldness and emptiness of her heart. It was the winter voices that told Sally about the woman across the street, and about her daughter.

  And Sally liked to go outside and watch through the windows, secretly, late at night. But tonight, the storm had come, bringing with it the mother and father (
and maybe a handful of aunts and uncles and even grandparents) of all lightning flashes, Sally standing out in the drizzling rain and the darkness, her hand endlessly kneading the tattered notes and the couple of quarters, a dime, a nickel and a mess of pennies nestled in her pocket, and a voice had said to Sally, Nobody is in there, mommy.

  And then, with the voice still whispering to her in her inner ear as the rain ran down through the wool of her cardigan sweater and a lick of wet, greasy hair dropped over her eyes, Sally looked around at the world and recognized in an instant that–

  "Something has happened here." Sally Davis said these words to an unhearing and unsympathetic world, speaking them in hushed tones and, somewhere in the sky behind her, across fields and woods and black-topped roads going here and leaving there, a rumble of thunder sounded a somber agreement. "Everyone has gone," she said. "And left me."