Man in the Dark (8 page)

The dream stops there. Someone is shaking Brick’s shoulder and barking words at him in a loud voice, and as the groggy dreamer at last opens his eyes, he sees a large man with broad shoulders and muscular arms towering above him. One of those bodybuilder types, Brick thinks, Duke the boyfriend, the guy with the bad temper, dressed in a tight-fitting black T-shirt and blue boxer shorts, telling him to get the fuck out of the apartment.

I paid good money—Brick begins.

For one night, Duke shouts. The night’s up now, and out you go.

Just a minute, just a minute, Brick says, raising his right hand as a sign of his peaceful intentions. Molly promised me breakfast. Coffee and toast. Just let me have some coffee, and then I’ll be on my way.

No coffee. No toast. No nothing.

What if I paid you for it? A little extra, I mean.

Don’t you understand English?

And with those words, Duke bends down, grabs hold of Brick’s sweater, and yanks him to his feet. Now that he’s standing, Brick has a clear view of the bedroom door, and the moment he catches sight of it, out comes Molly, securing the sash of her bathrobe and then running her hands through her hair.

Stop it, she says to Duke. You don’t have to play rough.

Pipe down, he answers. You made this mess, and now I’m cleaning it up.

Molly shrugs, then looks at Brick with a small, apologetic smile. Sorry, she says. I guess you’d better be going now.

Slipping his feet into his shoes without bothering to tie the laces, then retrieving his leather jacket from the foot of the sofa and putting it on, Brick says to her: I don’t get it. I give you all that money, and now you throw me out. It doesn’t make sense.

Rather than answer him, Molly looks down at the floor and shrugs again. That apathetic gesture carries all the force of a defection, a betrayal. With no ally to stand up for him, Brick decides to leave without further protest. He bends down and picks up the green backpack from the floor, but no sooner does he turn to go than Duke snatches it out of his hands.

What’s this? he asks.

My stuff, Brick says. Obviously.

Your
stuff? Duke replies. I don’t think so, funny man.

What are you talking about?

It’s mine now.

Yours? You can’t do that. Everything I own is in there.

Then try and get it back.

Brick understands that Duke is itching for a fight—and that the bag is merely a pretext. He also knows that if he tangles with Molly’s boyfriend, there is every chance he will be ripped apart. Or so his mind tells him the instant he hears Duke issue his challenge, but Brick is no longer thinking with his mind, for the outrage surging through him has overwhelmed all reason, and if he allows this bully to get his way without offering some form of resistance, he will lose whatever respect he still has for himself. So Brick takes his stand, unexpectedly wrenching the bag out of Duke’s grasp, and immediately after that the drubbing begins, an assault so one-sided and short-lived that the big man floors Brick with just three blows: a left to the gut, a right to the face, and a knee to the balls. Pain floods into every corner of the magician’s body, and as he rolls around on the tattered rug gasping for breath, one hand clutching his stomach and the other clamped over his scrotum, he sees blood dripping from the wound that has opened on his cheek, and then, lying in the gathering puddle of red, a fragment of a tooth—the lower half of one of his left incisors. He is only dimly aware of Molly’s screams, which sound as if they are coming from ten blocks away. A moment after that, he is aware of nothing.

When he picks up the thread of his own story, Brick finds himself on his feet, maneuvering his body down the stairs as he clings to the banister with both hands, slowly descending to the ground floor, a single step at a time. The backpack is gone, which means that the gun and the bullets are also gone, not to speak of everything else that was in the bag, but as Brick pauses to reach into the right front pocket of his jeans, the trace of a smile flits across his bruised mouth—the bitter smile of the not quite vanquished. The money is still there. No longer the thousand that Tobak gave him the previous morning, but five hundred and sixty-five dollars is better than nothing, he thinks, more than enough to get him a room somewhere and a bite to eat. That’s as far as his thoughts can take him now. To hide, to wash the blood off his face, to fill his stomach if and when his appetite returns.

However modest these plans might be, they are thwarted the moment he leaves the building and steps onto the sidewalk. Directly in front of him, standing with her arms folded and her back resting against the door of a military jeep, Virginia Blaine is eyeing Brick with a disgusted look on her face.

No monkey business, she says. You promised me.

Virginia, Brick replies, doing his best to play dumb, what are you doing here?

Ignoring his remark, the former queen of Miss Blunt’s geometry class shakes her head and snaps back: We were supposed to meet at five-thirty yesterday afternoon. You stood me up.

Something happened, and I had to leave at the last minute.

You mean
I
happened, and you ran away.

Unable to think of an answer, Brick says nothing.

You don’t look so good, Owen, Virginia continues.

No, I don’t suppose I do. I just got the shit kicked out of me.

You should watch the company you keep. That Rothstein’s a tough fellow.

Who’s Rothstein?

Duke. Molly’s boyfriend.

You know him?

He works with us. He’s one of our best men.

He’s an animal. A sadistic creep.

It was all an act, Owen. To teach you a lesson.

Oh? Brick snorts, indignation rising within him. And what lesson is that? The son of a bitch knocked out one of my teeth.

Just be glad it wasn’t all of them.

Very nice, Brick mumbles, with a sarcastic edge to his voice, and then, all of a sudden, the final chapter of the dream comes rushing back to him: the All-American Dental Clinic, Flora and the pliers, the new face. Well, Brick thinks, as he touches the wound on his cheek, I got my new face, didn’t I? Thanks to Rothstein’s fist.

You can’t win, Virginia says. Everywhere you go, someone is watching you. You’ll never get away from us.

According to you, Brick says, not yet willing to give in, but knowing in his heart that Virginia is right.

Ergo, my dear Owen, this little interlude of dawdling and hide-and-seek has come to an end. Hop into the jeep. It’s time for you to talk to Frisk.

No dice, Virginia. I can’t hop, and I can’t run, and I can’t go anywhere yet. My face is bleeding, my balls are on fire, and every muscle in my stomach is torn to shreds. I have to patch myself up first. Then I’ll talk to your man. But at least let me take a goddamn bath.

For the first time since the conversation began, Virginia smiles. Poor baby, she says, simpering with compassion, but whether this new concern for him is real or false is far from clear to Brick.

Are you with me or not? he asks.

Climb in, she says, patting the door of the jeep. Of course I’m with you. I’ll take you back to my house, and we’ll fix you up there. It’s still early. Lou can wait a little while. As long as you see him before dark, we’ll be okay.

With that reassurance, Brick hobbles over to the jeep and hoists his sorry carcass into the passenger seat as Virginia slips in behind the wheel. Once she starts the engine, she launches into a long, meandering account of the civil war, no doubt feeling an obligation to fill him in on the historical background of the conflict, but the problem is that Brick is in no condition to follow what she’s saying, and as they lurch along over the potholed streets of Wellington, every jolt and bump sends a fresh attack of pain coursing through his body. To compound the trouble, the noise of the engine is so loud that it nearly swallows up Virginia’s voice, and in order to hear anything at all, Brick must strain himself to the limit of his powers, which are diminished at best, if not entirely obliterated. Clutching the bottom of the seat with his two hands, pressing the soles of his shoes onto the floor to brace himself against the next bounce of the chassis, he keeps his eyes shut throughout the twenty-minute drive, and from the ten thousand facts that come tumbling down on him between Molly’s apartment and Virginia’s house, this is what he manages to retain:

The election of 2000 . . . just after the Supreme Court decision . . . protests . . . riots in the major cities . . . a movement to abolish the Electoral College . . . defeat of the bill in Congress . . . a new movement . . . led by the mayor and borough presidents of New York City . . . secession . . . passed by the state legislature in 2003 . . . Federal troops attack . . . Albany, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester . . . New York City bombed, eighty thousand dead . . . but the movement grows . . . in 2004, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania join New York in the Independent States of America . . . later that year, California, Oregon, and Washington break off to form their own republic, Pacifica . . . in 2005, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota join the Independent States . . . the European Union recognizes the existence of the new country . . . diplomatic relations are established . . . then Mexico . . . then the countries of Central and South America . . . Russia follows, then Japan. . . . Meanwhile, the fighting continues, often horrendous, the toll of casualties steadily mounting . . . U.N. resolutions ignored by the Federals, but until now no nuclear weapons, which would mean death to everyone on both sides. . . . Foreign policy: no meddling anywhere. . . . Domestic policy: universal health insurance, no more oil, no more cars or planes, a fourfold increase in teachers’ salaries (to attract the brightest students to the profession), strict gun control, free education and job training for the poor . . . all in the realm of fantasy for the moment, a dream of the future, since the war drags on, and the state of emergency is still in force.

The jeep slows down and gradually comes to a stop. As Virginia turns off the ignition, Brick opens his eyes and discovers that he is no longer in the heart of Wellington. They have come to a wealthy suburban street of large Tudor houses with pristine front lawns, tulip beds, forsythia and rhododendron bushes, the myriad trappings of the good life. As he climbs out of the jeep and looks down the block, however, he notices that several houses are standing in ruins: broken windows, charred walls, gaping holes in the facades, abandoned husks where people once lived. Brick assumes that the neighborhood was shelled during the war, but he doesn’t ask any questions about it. Instead, pointing to the house they are about to enter, he blandly remarks: This is quite a place, Virginia. You seem to have done pretty well for yourself.

My husband was a corporate lawyer, she says flatly, in no mood to talk about the past. He made a lot of money.

Virginia opens the door with a key, and they walk into the house . . .

A warm bath, lying in water up to his neck for twenty minutes, thirty minutes, inert, tranquil, alone. After which he puts on the white terry-cloth robe of Virginia’s dead husband, walks into the bedroom, and sits down in a chair as Virginia patiently applies an antibacterial astringent to the gash on his cheek and then covers the wound with a small bandage. Brick is beginning to feel somewhat better. The wonders of water, he says to himself, realizing that the pain in his stomach and nether parts has all but vanished. His cheek still smarts, but eventually that discomfort will abate as well. As for the broken tooth, there is nothing to be done until he can visit a dentist and have a cap put on it, but he doubts that will happen anytime soon. For now (as confirmed when he studied his face in the bathroom mirror), the effect is altogether repulsive. A few centimeters of missing enamel and he looks like a brokendown bum, a pea-brained yokel. Fortunately, the gap is visible only when he smiles, and in Brick’s present state, the last thing he wants to do is smile. Unless the nightmare ends, he thinks, there’s a good chance he’ll never smile again for the rest of his life.

Twenty minutes later, now dressed and sitting in the kitchen with Virginia—who has prepared him toast and coffee, the same minimal breakfast that nearly cost him his life earlier that morning—Brick is answering the tenth question she has asked him about Flora. He finds her curiosity puzzling. If she is the person responsible for bringing him to this place, then it would seem likely that she already knows everything about him, including his marriage to Flora. But Virginia is insatiable, and now Brick begins to wonder if all this questioning isn’t simply a ploy to hold him in the house, to make him lose track of the time so that he won’t try to run off again before Frisk shows up. He wants to run, that’s certain, but after the long soak in the tub and the terry-cloth robe and the gentleness of her fingers as she put the bandage on his face, something in him has begun to soften toward Virginia, and he can feel the old flames of his adolescence slowly igniting again.

I met her in Manhattan, he says. About three and a half years ago. A fancy birthday party for a kid on the Upper East Side. I was the magician, and she was one of the caterers.

Is she beautiful, Owen?

To me she is. Not beautiful in the way you are, Virginia, with your incredible face and long body. Flora’s little, not even five-four, just a slip of a thing, really, but she has these big burning eyes and all this tangly dark hair and the best laugh I’ve ever heard.

Do you love her?

Of course.

And she loves you?

Yes. Most of the time, anyway. Flora has a huge temper, and she can fly off into these maniacal tirades. Whenever we fight, I begin to think the only reason she married me was because she wanted her American citizenship. But it doesn’t happen very often. Nine days out of ten, we’re good together. We really are.

What about babies?

They’re on the agenda. We started trying a couple of months ago.

Don’t give up. That was my mistake. I waited too long, and now look at me. No husband, no children, nothing.