The Color of Night (20 page)

On the morning after, in the bleak daylight and the gritty, parching wind of the desert, we went our separate ways.

Love. The notion troubled me. The word. Since Laurel had last uttered it. Back in the day, it was all love this and love that and luvluvluv till the sense was all rubbed away from the sound and all that remained was a little squeak of nothingness. The last exhalation of a mouse as its spine popped in a trap. Though once upon a time it had meant something.

 … I am your love …

That whisper kept plaguing me as I plied my bolt cutters in the effort to get into the place the television called Ground Zero—that is to say, those charnel pits where the towers had once been. The chains and padlocks were too heavy to cut, and finally I had to go through the links of the storm fence. In the process I dislodged more of the relics strung up along the wire. Down fell a photo, a note, a holy medal, and an origami crane. I followed, skidding on my heels, then finishing the slide on my tailbone.

Up rose the dust, a toxic silt. My nostrils thickened with the odor of death. So many deaths, hundreds upon hundreds. The smoke of the sacrifice rising on high.

Here it was very, very dark, and in my descent I had come to rest on one sore hip, holding up two claws full of dust. This whole zone of the city was blacked out still and the sky above the well where I lay was very far from clear.

Zero

0

0

I sifted the dust in my two hands and found in one what seemed to be a locket on a chain. The other held a jagged shard of bone. I pressed its point into the muscle of my palm and I began to hear a hum—

00000000000

—a kind of ghostly screaming. Or maybe it was song. So many dead, the smoke of the burning fat twisting up between the horns of the altar:

0

0

A hole in the world. Anything could come through it.

I stroked the groove in the bone where the marrow had been, surprised at the sudden sharp pain in my heart. In Laurel’s office I had remembered D——, not the shell of his carcass lying in bondage, but D—— in his transfigured form—and when we slew him as a child one of us held a mirror to his face, not only to distract him from the knives but also to catch and fix his soul for its next coming. Sure to come.

In the end they said that all we ever had was murder but there had been love too among the People.

0

what there had been

my love …

Even here was a little fugitive radiance and up above I could see a faint light catching on the storm-fence diamonds, brighter on the broken links where I had just now cut them, though down in the bottom of the well where I lay, there was the most absolute silky darkness, the color of night, unless it was some fault in my vision that I only saw it in monochrome. That ghostly singing rose, expanded—a crying wind. I clasped and unclasped the bone in one hand and in the other the locket popped open but it was too dark to see the picture and in any case the picture was reduced to the merest white feather of ash. How I missed the People after all, and to my dismayed surprise, I found that I missed other people too. Some whose names I’d long forgotten. Laurel most of all.

As if this perfect blackness had torn itself completely open, permitting me to see all of them, in all their spectral colors. How it must weaken me, this … 
feeling.
As if mortality bore down upon me too. As if mortality could bear me down.

I thought with a still deeper dismay,
What if I can’t do what I have come to do?

There was not yet any sign of daylight, but somehow the armor of darkness was weakening. At a distance, the noise of a crane … If I stayed here much longer, I would be seen.

There in the corner I could see a way to climb out, and I moved toward it. My hands empty now, for I had lost the tokens that they’d held.

I wanted to lick the blood from my face, but it was only water.

Do you think I want to die this way?

Perhaps I hadn’t thought it through. I sat in the iron-railed triangle park, alone except for two homeless men, heaped in their rags on two parallel benches, now and then stirring in their sleep. Beneath them, tatters of newsprint blew fitfully between the claw feet of the benches.

The light came up; it would be a clear day. Sunny. In the bare branches of these trees there was a twittering of I don’t know what birds.

I had expected children, funneling out of the side streets toward the school. But their vacation had begun, so they would still be sleeping.

As for the other mortals, they pursued their errands in the most ordinary way.

The door below the vine-wreathed lion’s head opened. Here she came, tightening the scarf around her shoulders and her neck. Quick confident steps advancing into the brightening day. In the ground glass of the rifle’s scope, she looked almost an abstract figure. Crosshairs settling on the hollow of her throat.

She saw me then, and her chin lifted. Her eyes and her whole face lifting and lightening as she hurried to our meeting.

Her life at my fingertip, one more time.

I have no other story to tell but this one.

ALSO BY
M
ADISON
S
MARTT
B
ELL

ALL SOULS’ RISING

In this first installment of his epic Haitian trilogy, Madison Smartt Bell brings to life a decisive moment in the history of race, class, and colonialism. The slave uprising in Haiti was a momentous contribution to the tide of revolution that swept over the Western world at the end of the 1700s. A brutal rebellion that strove to overturn a vicious system of slavery, the uprising transformed Haiti from a European colony into the world’s first Black republic. From the center of this horrific maelstrom, the heroic figure of Toussaint Louverture emerges as the man who would take the merciless fires of violence and vengeance and forge a revolutionary war fueled by liberty and equality.

Fiction/978-1-4000-7653-6

MASTER OF THE CROSSROADS

Master of the Crossroads
delivers a stunning portrayal of Toussaint Louverture and his struggle against the European powers to free his people in the only successful slave revolution in history. At the outset, Toussaint is a second-tier general in the Spanish army, which is supporting the rebel slaves’ fight against the French. But when he is betrayed by his former allies and the commanders of the Spanish army, he reunites his army with the French, wresting vital territories and manpower from Spanish control. With his army one among several coalitions, Toussaint rises as the ultimate victor to take control of the French colony and establish a new constitution.

Fiction/978-1-4000-7838-7

THE STONE THAT THE BUILDER REFUSED

The Stone That the Builder Refused
is the final volume of Madison Smartt Bell’s masterful trilogy about the Haitian Revolution. The trilogy “must be considered among the most important artistic accomplishments of our … century [and] could easily cement Bell’s reputation as one of his generation’s greatest authors” (Harold Bloom). “[It] will make an indelible mark on literary history—one worthy of occupying the same shelf as Tolstoy’s W
ar and Peace
” (
The Baltimore Sun
).

Fiction/978-1-4000-7618-5

TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE

At the end of the 1700s, French Saint Domingue was the richest and most brutal colony in the Western Hemisphere. A mere twelve years later, however, Haitian rebels had defeated the Spanish, British, and French and declared independence after the first—and only—successful slave revolt in history. Much of the success of the revolution must be credited to one man, Toussaint Louverture, a figure about whom surprisingly little is known. In this fascinating biography, Bell combines a novelist’s passion with a deep knowledge of the historical milieu that produced the man labeled a saint, a martyr, or a clever opportunist who instigated one of the most violent events in modern history. The first biography in English in over sixty years of the man who led the Haitian Revolution, this is an engaging reexamination of the controversial, paradoxical leader.

Biography/978-1-4000-7935-3

DEVIL’S DREAM

With the same eloquence and grasp of history that marked his award-winning fictional trilogy of the Haitian Revolution, Madison Smartt Bell turns his gaze to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most celebrated and reviled general of the American Civil War. Here we see Forrest on and off the battlefield; we see him treating his slaves humanely even as he fights to ensure their continued enslavement; we see his knack for keeping his enemy unsettled, his instinct for the unexpected, and his relentless stamina. As
Devil’s Dream
moves back and forth in time, a vivid portrait comes into focus: a rough, fierce man with a life full of contradictions.

Fiction/978-0-307-27991-0

VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com