A Dark Matter (51 page)

The world changes, said the Eel, who had rather enjoyed the last part of his rant.

“Yeah, you got that right, kiddo. They can’t ride the rails anymore, Skid Row is done for, the Bowery is middle-class, gentrified all to hell, public tolerance is over, it doesn’t exist any more—turns out, to have lousy shiftless self-destructive bums, first you have to have a generous society, go figure.”

But what was the right answer?

“The right answer to what? You’re beginning to get on my nerves. I was told, you know, hey, take a little confab with this girl, and here we are, but I have to pack up my stuff now, because this here is like the Bowery—it isn’t going to exist much longer, you know?”

What is the opposite of love? asked the Eel.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot the topic.”

Engaged again, the demon drew up one leg and knitted his fingers around its knee, making him look more than ever like an eager academic in front of a class. He was grinning at her.

“Hate can’t be the opposite of love, dummy. You still don’t get it, do you? Hate
is
love. The opposite of love is evil. Of course, evil does
include
hatred, but it’s only a small subset. When love goes bad and wrong, that’s when evil is created.”

He released his knee and leaned forward and threw out his arms. For a moment, his eyes flashed a traffic-light red. His craggy, bearded face moved forward, pushing toward Eel through the stale air.

“You stupid human beings, the whole thing is right in front of you, but on you go, debating whether evil is internal or external, inherent in everyone or created by circumstance. Nature or nurture, I can’t believe you’re still debating that dim-witted opposition.
The world is not divided into two
. You have evil within you, you
contain
evil, that’s the basic idea. When you open the door, what do you get, the lady or the tiger? Whoops, sorry, you get both, because the lady
is
the tiger.

“Let’s not even get into death, okay? Millions of dumbbells believe that death is evil, as though they thought they should be immortal. Without death, you would have no beauty, no meaning … and when you try to work around death, or when you act as though you can avoid it, right then evil is set free.”

The Eel told him that she did not think she really understood what he was saying. As she spoke, she was surprised to feel tears on her face. She had not known she was crying, nor did she know for how long.

“It will come back to you, in bits and pieces,” said Doity Toid. He pushed himself off the desk and gave her a kindly, brown-eyed look. “Just make sure you remember the part about the lady and the tiger. It might help you out, when you get to the last stop.”

The last stop?

“Walk up those stairs and open the door. We have to leave our lovely Mr. Hayward before Badshite gets his teeth into him. Walk over to the bus stop and get on the bus.”

The bus?

“It’s waiting. Hurry up, now. None of us have much time.”

She wiped tears off her face with the palm of her hand and realized that what had made her cry was the demon’s kindness. That was all, nothing more. Then she gasped. No, there was one more thing. She did not know how she could have left it until now.

Keith was going to save her life, and maybe Hootie’s, too, by throwing himself before Badshite, was that right? He
volunteered
, wasn’t that what her new friend had told her? So evil didn’t have to stay that way, did it?

“Stay what way? You’re still thinking either/or, you dummy, when there is no either/or, it’s both. Mallon, the poor dope, he was right about that part, at least. And maybe Keith was more interested in something like Badshite than he was in you and your little towheaded buddy. It could be as simple as that, you know.”

He really did say
towheaded
, as if his favorite author was Booth Tarkington or someone like that. Later in her life, the Eel remembered all those books he’d been packing up, and she thought that many of them had probably been novels. Demons like Doity Toid, they were a sort of literary bunch.

Anyhow, he had dismissed her and turned back to his packing, so the Eel looked to her left, saw against the wall a steep flight of stairs that looked like the steps up to an old attic, and waved good-bye. He did not see the gesture. The fecal smell she had noticed earlier reached her again, and she fled as quickly as she could.

The narrow white door at the top of the stairs opened out onto an empty urban street late into twilight. Exhaling puffs of white exhaust beneath a harsh yellow sodium arc light, a double-decker bus containing only the driver and a conductor waited at a bus stop across the wide sidewalk. Tall, dirty brick buildings lined the street. Lamps burned in only a few windows, a couple of inches of light shining beneath pulled-down shades. It seemed that she was in London.

The conductor bent to peer at her through one of the side windows, and she trotted across the sidewalk and stepped up onto the open back of the bus. Immediately, the driver dropped the transmission into gear, and the bus set off with a jolt that nearly sent her sprawling into the street. The conductor, a beefy man with deep wrinkles in his forehead and a permanent frown, grasped her arm and tugged her firmly into the body of the bus.

Where should I sit?

Turning his broad back to her, the conductor asked, in an accent she would have guessed was perfect Cockney, “Why should I bloody care where you sit?”

Sir, could you please tell me where we are going?

“We
ar
e
not going anywhere,” the conductor said in a choked, indignant voice. Still he would not turn to face her. “
I
am going to White City.
You
are going elsewhere.”

Do you know where?

At that, he did swivel his upper body and again revealed his face to her. Tiny, caramel-colored eyes peered at her out of a ruined moonscape. His mouth slid to the left and twitched open into a smile crowded with broken teeth.

“TAKE A SEAT, IF YOU PLEASE.”

She walked up a few rows and dropped into an empty seat. Then she moved over to the window and watched the empty city roll by. Wherever she was, it was a long way from the agronomy meadow, Mallon, and Hootie. Twin was even more distant. A moment of profound doubt claimed her: she was lost in an unknown and unreal world, and instead of trying to escape it, she was speeding deeper into its territory. The driver accelerated down the avenues and thoroughfares, blowing past the bus stops that were almost always empty. Twice, and at widely separated stops, a man in a long gray coat, a gray fedora, and sunglasses attempted to stop the careering bus by raising an arm punctuated with a black-gloved hand, and both times, to the Eel’s immense gratitude, the driver ignored the summons and rocketed past. The men in gray, Eel felt, wanted to throw her off the platform, or pull her off—they wanted to thwart her mission, they wanted to keep her from arriving at the last stop.

Intending to jump onto the back platform, the second man had run after the bus, but the reckless driver picked up more speed and left him stumbling down the middle of an avenue called (she thought) Indignation Heights. So fast were they moving, Eel was unable to make out most of the street signs they passed. Every time they zoomed around a corner, the bus seemed to tilt into the curve like a motorcyclist.

A long straightaway named Climber’s Corner? A wide, reeking avenue called Wherewithal Way?

From a neighborhood of great public buildings filmed with soot and pierced with blackened windows they sped into broad streets (Warlove Terrace? Blooded Place?) lined with solid, respectable residential buildings, each with a massive bow front and a great Georgian door.

Without a sideways look, the burly conductor clumped up the aisle and dumped himself into the seat immediately behind the driver. Around another corner they wheeled, into a sunken, down-sloping region of three-story brick commercial buildings where immense stone churches with towers, arches, and darkened columns sprouted like giant toads at every other corner.

To get farther from the conductor, Eel slipped out of her row and moved well back. When she sat down again, the conductor leaned toward the driver and whispered something. When he straightened up again, he turned his head and looked straight at her, brimming over with hostility and something else, something like resentment. He blamed her for having to work this endless route as evening fled into night. The simmering conductor and the stolid but reckless driver were her chauffeurs, piloting her through this endless city.

The shops and churches fell behind them, and the streets narrowed. The buildings grew shabbier, smaller, huddled side by side instead of arrayed in ranks like soldiers. The dark, unclean windows shrank. Dodger Place, the Hatters, Mandolin Terrace. A tight, rackety corner yielded to Slightly Street, then Crumbledun Row.

Street after street of dark tenements flew past the rocketing bus, with never a light in the scanty windows. The Eel slumped in her seat and rested her head on the bar of the next row forward. The tenements grew smaller and meaner. The bus rolled past a sign that announced either Mysterium or Mysteriac (graffiti had obliterated the final letters) Place. The sodium lights had dimmed and stood only one to a block.

At Tremens Passage, the bus hurtled around a corner, rolled twenty or thirty feet, and jerked to an abrupt halt. The driver swiveled in his enclosure; the conductor heaved himself to his feet and, with the expression of an executioner setting off for the scaffold, advanced down the aisle. The bus had halted before the meanest tenement on the meanest of all the streets down which they had flown. The dark, narrow building looked as though its neighbors propped it up.

I can’t get out here, the Eel said. Please, don’t make me.

Implacable, the conductor moved forward until he reached the Eel’s row. She scooted sideways to the last seat.

How do I get home? What am I supposed to do?

“I’m sick of your whining,” said the conductor, and reached forward and trapped her wrist in his enormous hand. “And I’m sick of you.”

What am I supposed to do?

“You could always curl up and perish in the street.” He pulled her from the seat and into the aisle as if she weighed no more than a kitten.

Up in his enclosure, the driver cackled.

She tried to shriek, but only a dry, barely human moan came out of her mouth.

The conductor dragged her to the platform and threw her off the bus. In less than a second, long before the Eel could have gathered herself and tried to jump back on, the conductor had whirled around and hooked a pole with his elbow, and the bus was racing off, dwindling as it disappeared into the night.

The weak arc light seemed to turn its idiot head toward her. Maybe the stupid light was curious about what she intended to do next. As if in guidance, a whisper of sound, more the suggestion of sound than sound itself, an exhalation without air, seemed to reach her from the repulsive, unsafe-looking building before which the bus had dropped her. Eel regarded the tenement for a while.

To get a closer look, she took a step toward it. On the instant, the front door clicked open. Her heart gave a quick extra beat. At the top of the steps, the door moved forward in its frame by no more than a subtle quarter of an inch.

Something
wanted her to go up those steps and through the door. In a window on the top floor, a curtain seemed to flicker. Was she being invited in? Stupid, stupid question. Of course she was being invited into this wretched building, this site of an endless succession of tears and sorrows and murdered hopes. But why in the world would she … ?

Then it was as if all the joy and sweetness that had ever existed behind the door at the top of the stairs had come coiling down, as invisible as a fragrance, and wound itself around the Eel. A great impersonal beauty spoke from the center of the joy, and a great, exquisite pain pierced her heart with awareness of the loss at the heart of all the world’s sweetness. The Eel felt as though a great curtain had been rolled away from before her emotional life, and that for a long second she stood within an ultimate meaning: the meaning that beat at the center of the piercing sadness within the extravagant beauty and joy of every moment on earth. Then almost as soon as it had been experienced the sense of a revealed meaning slipped away, and even then she knew she would not be able to remember that astounding, slippery moment in all its interlocking, swooning parts. It did not leave her;
it fled
.

That’s the way it was, thought the Eel, you did what you could with the little bit you managed to keep. The next thing that came to her was that, no matter what it might cost her in the long run, she had to get into that amazing house as soon as she could move her legs.

   “Sorry about all these tears,” said the Eel, who had sobbed during this latter portion of her account.

“Lee?”

She held out a wad of wet tissues, which I took from her and replaced with dry, folded ones.

“Oh, this is hard,” she said. “Please, stick with me.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I said. “Can you go on?”

“Oh, yeah.” She smiled in my direction. “If you can take it, I can.”

   Her coward legs didn’t exactly feel like moving,
said the Eel
, but she forced them to carry her forward onto the bottom step. The sense of a great revealed meaning still clung to her.

The Eel moved up the front steps and paused in front of the door. It hung open by maybe half an inch. The crack revealed only charcoal-colored darkness. For a moment, her enterprise showed itself to her as doubtful and riddled with danger. A thug in a bus conductor’s uniform had thrown her into the street before an evil-looking building on the verge of collapse: now she thought she should go inside? On the advice of a
demon?

Her trembling hand met the rough surface of the cracked paint at the edge of the door.

The paint seemed to be of no color at all. She did not believe in the existence of a non-color, yet here it was, neither gray nor white, nor green, nor yellow, nor alabaster, nor ivory, nor any of the actual colors it suggested in its nothingness. Though dead, in the gray light and the hint of a reflection from the sodium lamp, it seemed to shimmer, the shade of a raindrop as it squeezes from the underside of a cloud.