Dark Forces

by McCauley, Kirby

  “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so lovely. Please sit down. Forgive.”

  They finished off the dessert and with a great display of tossing down his fork and wiping his mouth with his napkin, Johnathen Hughes cried, “That was fabulous. Dear wife, I love you!” He kissed her on the cheek, thought better of it, and rekissed her, on the mouth. “You see?” He glanced at the old man. “I very much love my wife.”

  The old man nodded quietly and said, “Yes, yes, I remember.”

  “You remember?” said Alice, staring.

  “A toast!” said Johnathen Hughes, quickly. “To a fine wife, a grand future!”

  His wife laughed. She raised her glass.

  “Mr. Weldon,” she said, after a moment. “You’re not drinking…?”

  ****

  It was strange seeing the old man at the door to the living room.

  “Watch this,” he said, and closed his eyes. He began to move certainly and surely about the room, eyes shut. “Over here is the pipe-stand, over here the books. On the fourth shelf down a copy of Eiseley’s The Star Thrower. One shelf up H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, most appropriate, and over here the special chair, and me in it.”

  He sat. He opened his eyes.

  Watching from the door, Johnathen Hughes said, “You’re not going to cry again, are you?”

  “No. No more crying.”

  There were sounds of washing up from the kitchen. The lovely woman out there hummed under her breath. Both men turned to look out of the room toward that humming.

  “Some day,” said Johnathen Hughes, “I will hate her? Some day, I will kill her?”

  “It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I’ve watched her for an hour and found nothing, no hint, no clue, not the merest period, semicolon or exclamation point of blemish, bump, or hair out of place with her. I’ve watched you, too, to see if you were at fault, we were at fault, in all this.”

  “And?” The young man poured sherry for both of them, and handed over a glass.

  “You drink too much is about the sum. Watch it.”

  Hughes put his drink down without sipping it. “What else?”

  “I suppose I should give you a list, make you keep it, look at it every day. Advice from the old crazy to the young fool.”

  “Whatever you say, I’ll remember.”

  “Will you? For how long? A month, a year, then, like everything else, it’ll go. You’ll be busy living. You’ll be slowly turning into… me. She will slowly be turning into someone worth putting out of the world. Tell her you love her.”

  “Every day.”

  “Promise! It’s that important! Maybe that’s where I failed myself, failed us. Every day, without fail!” The old man leaned forward, his face taking fire with his words. “Every day. Every day!”

  Alice stood in the doorway, faintly alarmed.

  “Anything wrong?”

  “No, no.” Johnathen Hughes smiled. “We were trying to decide which of us likes you best.”

  She laughed, shrugged, and went away.

  “I think,” said Johnathen Hughes, and stopped and closed his eyes, forcing himself to say it, “it’s time for you to go.”

  “Yes, time.” But the old man did not move. His voice was very tired, exhausted, sad. “I’ve been sitting here feeling defeated. I can’t find anything wrong. I can’t find the flaw. I can’t advise you, my God, it’s so stupid, I shouldn’t have come to upset you, worry you, disturb your life, when I have nothing to offer but vague suggestions, inane cryings of doom. I sat here a moment ago and thought: I’ll kill her now, get rid of her now, take the blame now, as an old man, so the young man there, you, can go on into the future and be free of her. Isn’t that silly? I wonder if it would work? It’s that old time-travel paradox, isn’t it? Would I foul up the time flow, the world, the universe, what? Don’t worry, no, no, don’t look that way. No murder now. It’s all been done up ahead, twenty years in your future. The old man having done nothing whatever, having been no help, will now open the door and run away to his madness.”

  He arose and shut his eyes again.

  “Let me see if I can find my way out of my own house, in the dark.”

  He moved, the young man moved with him to find the closet by the front door and open it and take out the old man’s overcoat and slowly shrug him into it.

  “You have helped,” said Johnathen Hughes. “You have told me to tell her I love her.”

  “Yes, I did do that, didn’t I?”

  They turned to the door.

  “Is there hope for us?” the old man asked, suddenly, fiercely.

  “Yes. I’ll make sure of it,” said Johnathen Hughes.

  “Good, oh, good. I almost believe!”

  The old man put one hand out and blindly opened the front door.

  “I won’t say good-bye to her. I couldn’t stand looking at that lovely face. Tell her the old fool’s gone. Where? Up the road to wait for you. You’ll arrive someday.”

  “To become you? Not a chance,” said the young man.

  “Keep saying that. And —my God— here—” The old man fumbled in his pocket and drew forth a small object wrapped in crumpled newspaper. “You’d better keep this. I can’t be trusted, even now. I might do something wild. Here. Here.”

  He thrust the object into the young man’s hands. “Good-bye. Doesn’t that mean: God be with you? Yes. Good-bye.”

  The old man hurried down the walk into the night. A wind shook the trees. A long way off, a train moved in darkness, arriving or departing, no one could tell.

  Johnathen Hughes stood in the doorway for a long while, trying to see if there really was someone out there vanishing in the dark. “Darling,” his wife called.

  He began to unwrap the small object.

  She was in the parlor door behind him now, but her voice sounded as remote as the fading footsteps along the dark street.

  “Don’t stand there letting the draft in,” she said.

  He stiffened as he finished unwrapping the object. It lay in his hand, a small revolver.

  Far away the train sounded a final cry which failed in the wind. “Shut the door,” said his wife.

  His face was cold. He closed his eyes.

  Her voice. Wasn’t there just the tiniest touch of petulance there? He turned slowly, off-balance. His shoulder brushed the door. It drifted. Then:

  The wind, all by itself, slammed the door with a bang.

  Lindsay and the

  Red City Blues

  Joe Haldeman

  The ancient red city of Marrakesh,” his guidebook said, “is the last large oasis for travelers moving south into the Sahara. It is the most exotic of Moroccan cities, where Arab Africa and Black Africa meet in a setting that has changed but little in the past thousand years.”

  In mid-afternoon, the book did not mention, it becomes so hot that even the flies stop moving.

  The air conditioner in his window hummed impressively but neither moved nor cooled the air. He had complained three times and the desk clerk responded with two shrugs and a blank stare. By two o’clock his little warren was unbearable. He fled to the street, where it was hotter.

  Scott Lindsay was a salesman who demonstrated chemical glassware for a large scientific-supply house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Like all Washingtonians, Lindsay thought that a person who could survive summer on the banks of the Potomac could survive it anywhere. He saved up six weeks of vacation time and flew to Europe in late July. Paris was pleasant enough, and the Pyrenees were even cool, but nobody had told him that on August first all of Europe goes on vacation; every good hotel room has been sewed up for six months, restaurants are jammed or closed, and you spend all your time making bad travel connections to cities where only the most expensive hotels have accommodations.

  In Nice a Canadian said he had just come from Morocco, where it was hotter than hell but there were practically no tourists, this time of year. Scott looked wistfully over the poisoned but still blue Medite
rranean, felt the pressure of twenty million fellow travelers at his back, remembered Bogie, and booked the next flight to Casablanca.

  Casablanca combined the charm of Pittsburgh with the climate of Dallas. The still air was thick with dust from high-rise construction. He picked up a guidebook and riffled through it and, on the basis of a few paragraphs, took the predawn train to Marrakesh.

  “The Red City,” it went on, “takes its name from the color of the local sandstone from which the city and its ramparts were built.” It would be more accurate, Scott reflected, though less alluring, to call it the Pink City. The Dirty Pink City. He stumbled along the sidewalk on the shady side of the street. The twelve-inch strip of shade at the edge of the sidewalk was crowded with sleeping beggars. The heat was so dry he couldn’t even sweat.

  He passed two bars that were closed and stepped gratefully into a third. It was a Moslem bar, a milk bar, no booze, but at least it was shade. Two young men slumped at the bar, arguing in guttural whispers, and a pair of ancients in burnooses sat at a table playing a static game of checkers. An oscillating fan pushed the hot air and dust around. He raised a finger at the bartender, who regarded him with stolid hostility, and ordered in schoolboy French a small bottle of Vichy water, carbonated, without ice, and, out of deference to the guidebook, a glass of hot mint tea. The bartender brought the mint tea and a liter bottle of Sidi Harazim water, not carbonated, with a glass of ice. Scott tried to argue with the man but he only stared and kept repeating the price. He finally paid and dumped the ice (which the guidebook had warned him about) into the ashtray. The young men at the bar watched the transaction with sleepy indifference.

  The mint tea was an aromatic infusion of mint leaves in hot sugar water. He sipped and was surprised, and perversely annoyed, to find it quite pleasant. He took a paperback novel out of his pocket and read the same two paragraphs over and over, feeling his eyes track, unable to concentrate in the heat.

  He put the book down and looked around with slow deliberation, trying to be impressed by the alienness of the place. Through the open front of the bar he could see across the street, where a small park shaded the outskirts of the Djemaa El Fna, the largest open-air market in Morocco and, according to the guidebook, the most exciting and colorful; which itself was the gateway to the mysterious labyrinthine medina, where even this moment someone was being murdered for his pocket change, goats were being used in ways of which Allah did not approve, men were smoking a mixture of camel dung and opium, children were merchandised like groceries; where dark men and women would do anything for a price, and the price would not be high. Scott touched his pocket unconsciously and the hard bulge of the condom was still there.

  The best condoms in the world are packaged in a blue plastic cylinder, squared off along the prolate axis, about the size of a small matchbox. The package is a marvel of technology, held fast by a combination of geometry and sticky tape, and a cool-headed man, under good lighting conditions, can open it in less than a minute. Scott had bought six of them in the drugstore in Dulles International, and had only opened one. He hadn’t opened it for the Parisian woman who had looked like a prostitute but had returned his polite proposition with a storm of outrage. He opened it for the fat customs inspector at the Casablanca airport, who had to have its function explained to him, who held it between two dainty fingers like a dead sea thing, and called his compatriots over for a look.

  The Djemaa El Fna was closed against the heat, pale-orange dusty tents slack and pallid in the stillness. And the trees through which he stared at the open-air market, the souk, they were also covered with pale dust; the sky was so pale as to be almost white, and the street and sidewalk were the color of dirty chalk. It was like a faded watercolor displayed under too strong a light.

  “Hey, mister.” A slim Arab boy, evidently in his early teens, had slipped into the place and was standing beside Lindsay. He was well scrubbed and wore Western-style clothing, discreetly patched.

  “Hey, mister,” he repeated. “You American?”

  “Nu. Eeg bin Jugoslav.”

  The boy nodded. “You from New York? I got four friends New York.”

  “Jugoslav.”

  “You from Chicago? I got four friends Chicago. No, five. Five friends Chicago.”

  “Jugoslav,” he said.

  “Where in U.S. you from?” He took a melting ice cube from the ashtray, huffed it on his sleeve, popped it into his mouth, crunched. “New Caledonia,” Scott said.

  “Don’t like ice? Ice is good this time day.” He repeated the process with another cube. “New what?” he mumbled.

  “New Caledonia. Little place in the Rockies, between Georgia and Wisconsin. I don’t like polluted ice.”

  “No, mister, this ice okay. Bottle-water ice.” He rattled off a stream of Arabic at the bartender, who answered with a single harsh syllable. “Come on, I guide you through medina.”

  “No.”

  “I guide you free. Student, English student. I take you free, take you my father’s factory.”

  “You’ll take me, all right.”

  “Okay, we go now. No touris’ shit, make good deal.”

  Well, Lindsay, you wanted experiences. How about being knocked over the head and raped by a goat? “All right, I’ll go. But no pay.”

  “Sure, no pay.” He took Scott by the hand and dragged him out of the bar, into the park.

  “Is there any place in the medina where you can buy cold beer?”

  “Sure, lots of place. Ice beer. You got cigarette?”

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “That’s okay, you buy pack up here.” He pointed at a gazebo-shaped concession on the edge of the park.

  “Hell, no. You find me a beer and I might buy you some cigarettes.” They came out of the shady park and crossed the packed-earth plaza of the Djemaa El Fna. Dust stung his throat and nostrils, but it wasn’t quite as hot as it had been earlier; a slight breeze had come up. One industrious merchant was rolling up the front flap of his tent, exposing racks of leather goods. He called out “Hey, you buy!” but Scott ignored him, and the boy made a fist gesture, thumb erect between the two first fingers.

  Scott had missed one section of the guidebook: “Never visit the medina without a guide; the streets are laid out in crazy, unpredictable angles and someone who doesn’t live there will be hopelessly lost in minutes. The best guides are older men or young Americans who live there for the cheap narcotics; with them you can arrange the price ahead of time, usually about 5 dirham ($1.10). Under no circumstances hire one of the street urchins who pose as students and offer to guide you for free; you will be cheated or even beaten up and robbed.”

  They passed behind the long double row of tents and entered the medina through the Bab Agnou gateway. The main street of the place was a dirt alley some eight feet wide, flanked on both sides by small shops and stalls, most of which were closed, either with curtains or steel shutters or with the proprietor dozing on the stoop. None of the shops had a wall on the side fronting the alley, but the ones that served food usually had chest-high counters. If they passed an open shop the merchant would block their way and importune them in urgent simple French or English, plucking at Scott’s sleeve as they passed.

  It was surprisingly cool in the medina, the sun’s rays partially blocked by wooden lattices suspended over the alleyway. There was a roast-chestnut smell of semolina being parched, with accents of garlic and strange herbs smoldering. Slight tang of exhaust fumes and sickly-sweet hint of garbage and sewage hidden from the sun. The boy led him down a side street, and then another. Scott couldn’t tell the position of the sun and was quickly disoriented.

  “Where the hell are we going?”

  “Cold beer. You see.” He plunged down an even smaller alley, dark and sinister, and Lindsay followed, feeling unarmed.

  They huddled against a damp wall while a white-haired man on an antique one-cylinder motor scooter hammered by. “How much farther is this place? I’m not going to—”


  “Here, one corner.” The boy dragged him around the corner and into a musty-smelling, dark shop. The shopkeeper, small and round, smiled gold teeth and greeted the boy by name, Abdul. “The word for beer is ‘bera,”’ he said. Scott repeated the word to the fat little man and Abdul added something. The man opened two beers and set them down on the counter, along with a pack of cigarettes.

  It’s a new little Arab, Lindsay, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption. He paid and gave Abdul his cigarettes and beer. “Aren’t you Moslem? I thought Moslems didn’t drink.”

  “Hell yes, man.” He stuck his finger down the neck of the bottle and flicked away a drop of beer, then tilted the bottle up and drained half of it in one gulp. Lindsay sipped at his. It was warm and sour.

  “What you do in the States, man?” He lit a cigarette and held it awkwardly.

  Chemical glassware salesman? “I drive a truck.” The acrid Turkish tobacco smoke stung his eyes.

  “Make lots of money.”

  “No, I don’t.” He felt foolish saying it. World traveler, Lindsay, you spent more on your ticket than this boy will see in his life.

  “Let’s go my father’s factory.”

  “What does your father make?”

  “All kinds things. Rugs.”

  “I wouldn’t know what to do with a rug.”

  “We wrap it, mail to New Caledonia.”

  “No. Let’s go back to—”

  “I take you my uncle’s factory. Brass, very pretty.”

  “No. Back to the plaza, you got your cig—”

  “Sure, let’s go.” He gulped down the rest of his beer and stepped back into the alley, Scott following. After a couple of twists and turns they passed an antique-weapons shop that Scott knew he would have noticed, if they’d come by it before. He stopped.

  “Where are you taking me now?”

  He looked hurt. “Back to Djemaa El Fna. Like you say.”

  “The hell you are. Get lost, Abdul. I’ll find my own way back.” He turned and started retracing their path. The boy followed about ten paces behind him, smoking.