Dark on the Other Side (12 page)

“You busy tonight?”

“No,” Michael admitted, wondering what form the
conventional offer would take this time.

“You like music?”

“Well—some kinds,” Michael said, surprised and curious.

“Stick around then, have another cup of coffee. Kwame is
due in a few minutes. He’s not bad, if you like that kind of music.”

“Kwame?”

The waiter, a tired-looking man with receding hair,
grinned.

“That’s what he calls himself. Real name’s Joe Schwartz.”

“What does he play? The sitar? The viola d’amore?”

“Just the guitar. But, like I said, he’s not bad. If you
like that kind of music.”

He moved on to the next table, leaving Michael feeling
ashamed of his cynicism. Maybe he ought to get out of the big city more
often. It was a hell of a note when you were surprised by ordinary
human amiability. The conversation was a lesson for him in another way;
it emphasized his point about personality stereotypes. The weary
middle-aged waiter was not the sort of person you’d expect to enjoy the
music produced by somebody named Kwame, even if he didn’t play the
sitar.

His newfound friend was on the alert, and signaled him
with a jerk of the head when the performer appeared, but Michael didn’t
need the signal. Even in this crowd he would have spotted Kwame.

Such is the power of suggestion that Michael had
unconsciously expected the performer to be black—with a name like Joe
Schwartz, yet, he told himself. But the sparse expanses of skin visible
were of the sickly tan that people choose, for some obscure reason, to
call white. The hair was extensive; it made the efforts of the other
boys look epicene. Now that, Michael thought admiringly, is a beard!

It swept down in undulating, shining ripples to the boy’s
diaphragm, where it mingled with the waves of long brown hair. Although
the night was chill and damp, Kwame wore only jeans and a sleeveless
embroidered vest, which flopped open with each step, displaying a
cadaverous chest. He was barefoot. But his guitar had been carefully
swathed against the damp. It was a twelve-string guitar, with a shining
surface that might have been produced by Stradivarius or Amati.
Expensive, loved, used, and tended like a baby.

There was a tiny podium or stage, about the size of a
dining-room table, at the far end of the room, and at another gesture
from the waiter, Michael took his cup and moved down to an unoccupied
booth near the stage. The other habitués were doing the same
thing. Kwame, who had seated himself cross-legged on the floor, placed
the guitar across his lap and sat waiting. His eyes moved incuriously
around the room, and as they met Michael’s, the latter was conscious of
an odd shock. Drugs. The eyes were unmistakable…. And why, he wondered
cynically, was he shocked? He read the newspapers.

There was no announcement, no introduction. When everyone
had seated himself, and silence had become profound, Kwame began to
play.

Michael’s first reaction was negative. Kwame’s harsh
voice had little appeal for a post-adolescent square who concealed a
secret weakness for old Perry Como records, and Kwame’s playing, though
competent, was not remarkable. The songs were a mixture of legitimate
folk music and modern rock imitations of folk music; a few of them
sounded vaguely familiar, but Michael was not sufficiently
knowledgeable about the popular repertoire to identify them. All had
one theme in common: peace, love, innocence, and the annihilation of
all these by man’s cruelty. The mushroom cloud billowing up around the
kids playing in the daisy field, the blast of an explosion annihilating
the kids in the Sunday School…Kevin Barry lost his young life again,
and the lambs were all a-crying. But it was effective. The images were
sure fire, they couldn’t miss.

Two of the songs were different. Kwame ended his recital
with them, and by that time Michael had succumbed to the same spell
that held the rest of the audience. He couldn’t have explained why he
was spellbound, none of the elements of the performance were that good.
But in combination…

Then Kwame swept his fingers across all twelve strings in
a crashing dissonant chord, and broke into a vicious, and extremely
funny, satire on the Congress of the United States. Like the others,
Michael ached with containing his laughter; he didn’t want to miss the
next line. At the same time the cruelty of the satire made him wince,
even when he shared Kwame’s opinion of that particular victim. The
laughter burst out explosively at the end of the song.

Kwame didn’t give it time to die, but went right into the
next number. It was a very quiet song. It was about love, too, and
about peace and innocence; but these verses allowed beauty to survive
and triumph. The words were very simple, but they were selected with
such skill that they struck straight home, into the heart of every
compassionate hope. They were articulated with meticulous precision;
and as he listened, Michael felt sure that Kwame had written the song
himself—and the one that had preceded it. The boy was a magician with
words. He made strong magic, did Joe Schwartz…. And then, with the
suddenness of a blow, Michael realized who Kwame was.

The performance ended as it had begun. Kwame simply
stopped playing. Some fans came over to talk to him; and Michael looked
up, blinking, to see the waiter standing by him.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “I enjoyed that.”

“He’s a good kid,” the waiter said.

“Do you suppose I could buy him a drink, or—”

“He don’t drink.”

“…a cup of coffee? Or maybe a steak?” Michael eyed the
protruding ribs of Kwame.

The waiter grinned.

“This isn’t Manhattan,” he said obscurely. “He’ll talk to
anybody. Hey, Kwame—friend of mine wants to meet you.”

Kwame looked up. He saw Michael, and his beard divided in
a sweet smile.

“Sure,” he said. His speaking voice was as harsh as the
one he used for singing, but several tones higher. Two of his fans
trailed him as he approached the booth and he gestured toward them,
still smiling.

“Okay?”

“Sure,” Michael said. “Join me.”

They settled themselves, Kwame placing his guitar
tenderly on a serving table against the wall, where it would not be
jostled by passers-by. The waiter lingered.

“You haven’t had dessert,” he said, giving Michael a
significant glance.

“Oh. Oh! That’s right, I haven’t. Will you all join me?”

They would, and their orders left Michael feeling old and
decrepit. Banana split, chocolate cake
à la
mode with hot fudge sauce, and a double strawberry frappé sundae
for Kwame. Michael ordered apple pie and gave the waiter a nod of
thanks as he departed. He ought to have realized that Kwame would be a
vegetarian, and he was glad to have been saved from the gaffe of asking
the boy if he’d like a steak. It would have been tantamount to offering
someone else a nice thick slice off his Uncle Harry.

The food was a useful icebreaker; conversation, at first,
was difficult. Kwame spoke hardly at all. Smiling dreamily, he was far
out, someplace else. His friends, a blond girl (were they all blondes
these days?) and her escort, who had a long cavalry-style moustache,
treated Michael with such wary deference that he felt he ought to have
a long white beard—and a whip. Yes, that was what they reminded him
of—two captured spies in the enemies’ clutches, refusing to speak for
fear of giving away vital information. Name, rank, and serial number
only…

They loosened up after a while, as Michael plied them
with coffee and sympathy, and he began to enjoy himself. They weren’t
any more articulate, or sincere, than his generation had been; but they
sure as hell were better informed. The much-maligned boob tube,
perhaps? More sophisticated; superficially, yes, the little blonde was
discussing contraceptives with a wealth of detail his contemporaries
had never used in mixed company. Which was okay with him; his hang-ups
on that subject weren’t deep seated. He wondered, though, if basically
these youngsters were any wiser than he had been at their age. They
knew the facts; but they didn’t know what to do with them, any more
than he did. Maybe he was just old and cynical. He felt old. When he
looked at Kwame, he felt even older.

Time, and the double frappé, had had their effect;
whatever drug it was that Kwame had taken, it was beginning to wear
off. He sat up straighter and began to join in the conversation. His
comments had no particular profundity. But the young pair responded
like disciples to the utterances of the prophet. When Kwame cleared his
throat, they stopped talking, sometimes in the middle of a word, and
listened with wide, respectful eyes.

Michael, whose mental age was rapidly approaching the
century mark, found himself strangely reluctant to introduce the
subject he wanted to discuss. He was relieved when Kwame gave him an
opening.

“You’re twenty-five now? You must have been a student,
six years ago.”

“Bright,” Kwame said. The blonde giggled appreciatively.

“You were here when Gordon Randolph was teaching here.”

“Right…”

The response wasn’t quite so prompt.

“I’m doing a biography of him.”

“Groovy,” Kwame said.

Michael persisted.

“I’ve been interviewing people who knew him because I
have a weird notion that personality, or character, or whatever, isn’t
an objective, coherent whole. It’s a composite, a patchwork of
reflections of the man as he appeared to others.”

That interested them. The blond girl nodded, smoothing
her hair, and Kwame’s dreamy eyes narrowed.

“Personality, maybe,” he said. “But not character. Two
different things.”

“How do you mean?”

“Character, you call it—soul, inner essence—not a
patchwork. One integrated essence.”

“All part of the Infinite Consciousness?”

Kwame shook his head. The beard swayed.

“I don’t dig that Zen stuff. All part of an infinite
something. Names don’t name, words don’t define. You’ve gotta feel it,
not talk about it.”

“Hmmm.” The collegiate atmosphere must be getting him,
Michael thought; he had to resist the temptation to plunge down that
fascinating side track. “But that inner core, the integrated
essence—that’s beyond the grasp of a finite worm like myself. All I’m
trying to get is the personality. I’m hung up on words.”

“All hung up on words,” Kwame murmured.

“So you can’t tell me anything about Randolph?”

“Man, I can’t tell you anything about anything.”

This was evidently one of the proverbs of the Master. The
blonde looked beatific, and her escort exhaled deeply through his
nostrils, fixing his eyes on Kwame. Michael turned to them with the
feeling that he was fighting his way through a web of gauze.

“Neither of you knew him, I suppose?”

“My sister was here then,” the blonde said. She sighed.
“She said he was the sexiest man she ever saw.”

“Great,” Michael muttered. “Haven’t any of you read his
book? It’s a study of one of the problems that concern you—decadence,
decay, the collapse of a society’s moral fiber.”

Even as he spoke, he knew he was dropping words into a
vacuum. They professed concern about certain issues, but the only
opinions they allowed were the opinions of their contemporaries and
those of a few selected “in” writers. Many of them rejected the very
idea that any generation but their own had searched for universal
truths. Unaccountably irritated, Michael turned to Kwame, who was
nodding dreamily in rhythm to a tune only he could hear.

“If you’re not hung up on words, why do you use them? You
use them well. A couple of those songs were—remarkable. You wrote them,
didn’t you? Words as well as music?”

Kwame stopped swaying, but he didn’t answer for several
seconds. When he turned dark, dilated eyes on Michael, the latter felt
an uneasy shock run through him. He had reached Kwame, all right; he
felt, illogically, as if he had said something deeply insulting or
obscene.

“Only two,” Kwame said. “I only wrote two of them.”

“They were the best,” Michael said. “You ought to perform
more of your compositions.”

A spasm contorted Kwame’s face.

“I don’t write songs now. Not for a long time.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t anymore.”

Kwame put his head down on the table and began to cry.

The other two were staring at Michael with naked
hostility, but he hardly noticed. The fact that he did not understand
Kwame’s distress did not lessen his feeling of guilt at having somehow
provoked it. He felt as if he had struck out blindly with a club and
maimed something small and helpless, something that responded with a
shriek of pain.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean—”

Kwame raised his head. The top fringes of his beard were
damp, and tears still filled his eyes; but he made no move to wipe them
away.

“You don’t know what you mean,” he whispered. “You see
the shadows on the wall of the cave and you think they’re real. Man,
you don’t know what’s out there, in the dark, on the other side of the
fire.”

So they still read the old-fashioned philosophers.
Michael recognized the allusion, it was one of the few images that
remained from his enforced study of Plato. Humanity squatting in the
cave, compelled to view the shadows cast on the wall by a flickering
fire as the real world, never seeing the Reality that cast the
shadows…. But his original reading had not evoked the chill horror that
gripped him at Kwame’s words. What Beings, indeed, might stalk the
darkness outside the world, and cast distorted shadows? Whatever They
were, Kwame knew about them. Michael had the irrational feeling that if
he looked long enough into the boy’s wide, liquid eyes, he would begin
to see what Kwame had seen….

Drugs, he told himself. Drug-induced hallucinations…His
incantation of the conventional dispelled the shadows, and he said
gently, “It’s all right. I’m sorry. Forget the whole thing.”