Waltz Into Darkness

18

It was dark now, the town had dropped into night. The town, the world, his mind, were hanging suspended in bottomless night. It was dark outside in the streets and it was dark in here in the room where he stood.

There was no eye to pierce the darkness where he stood; he was alone, unseen, unguessed-at. He was something motionless standing within a black-lined box. And if it breathed, that was a secret between God and itself. That, and the pain he felt in breathing, and a few other things.

Then at last pale light approached, rising from below, ascending the stairs outside. As it rose, it strengthened, until at last its focus came into view: a lighted lamp dancing restlessly from a wire hoop, held by Aunt Sarah as she climbed toward the upper floor. It paled her figure into a ghost. A ghost with a dark face, but with a sifting of flour outlining its seams.

She came up to the level at last, and turned toward his room; the lamp exploded into a permanent dazzle that filled the doorway, burgeoning in and finding him out.

She halted there and looked at him.

He was standing, utterly, devastatingly motionless. The light fell upon the pile of dresses strewed on the bed, tumbled to the floor. It flushed color into them as it revealed them, like a syringe filled with dye. Blue, green, maroon, dusty pink, they became. It flushed color into him too, the colors a waxen image has, dressed to the last detail like a live man. So clever it could almost fool you; the way those things are supposed to do in waxworks. Verisimilitude without animation.

He was like one struck dead. Upright on his feet, but dead. He could see her, for his eyes were on her face; gravely gazing on her face, that part of the body which the eye habitually seeks when it looks on someone. He could hear her, for when she whispered half-frightenedly: “Mr. Lou, what is it? What is it, Mr. Lou?”; he answered her, he spoke, his voice came.

“She’s not coming back,” he whispered in return.

“You been in here all this time like this, without a light?”

“She’s not coming back.”

“How much longer I’m going to have to wait for supper? I can’t keep that chicken much more.”

“She’s not coming back.”

“Mr. Lou, you’re not hearing me, you’re not heeding.”

That was all he could keep saying. “She’s not coming back.” All the thousands of words were forgotten, the thousands it had taken him fifteen years to learn, and only four remained of his whole mother tongue: “She’s not coming back.”

She ventured into the room, bringing the lamp with her, and the light eddied and fluxed, before it had settled again. She set it down upon the table. She wrung her hands, and knotted parts of her dress in them, as if not knowing what to do with them.

At last she took a small part of her own skirt and wiped sadly at the edge of the table with it, from old habit, as if thinking she were dusting it. That was the only help she could give him, the only ease she could bring him: to dust an edge of the table in his room. But pity takes many forms, and it has no need of words.

And it was as though she had brought warmth into the room; warmth at least sufficient to thaw him, to melt the glacial casque that held him rigid. Just by being there, another human being, near him.

Then slowly he started to come back to life. The dead started to come back to life. It wasn’t pleasurable to watch. Rebirth after death. The death of the heart.

Death-throes in reverse. Coming after the terminal blow, not before. When the heart dies, it should stay dead. It should be given the coup de grace, struck still once and for all, not allowed to agonize.

His knees broke their locked rigidity, and he dropped down at half-height beside the bed. His arms reached out across it, clawing in torment.

And one of the dresses stirred, as if under its own impulse; rippled in serpentine haste across the bed top, and was sucked up into the maelstrom of his grief; his head falling prone upon it, his face burrowing into it in ghastly parody of kisses once given, that could never be given again, for there was no one there to give them to. Only the empty cocoon he pleaded with now.

“Julia. Julia. Be merciful.”

The old woman’s hand started toward his palsied shoulder in solace, then held itself suspended barely clear of touch.

“Hush, Mr. Lou,” she said with guttural intensity. “Hush, poor man.”

She raised her outstretched hand then, held it poised at greater height, up over his oblivious, gnawing head.

“May the Lawd have mercy on you. May He take pity on you. You weeping, but you ain’t got nothing to weep for. You mourning, but you mourning for something you never had.”

He rolled his head sideward, and looked up at her with sudden frightened intentness.

As if kindled into anger now by sight of his wasted grief, as if vindictive with long-delayed revelation, she went to the bureau that had been Julia’s. She threw open a drawer of it with such righteous violence that the whole cabinet shook and quivered.

She plunged her hand in, unerringly striking toward a hiding place she knew of from some past discovery. Then held it toward him in speechless portent. Within it was rimmed a dusty cake, a pastille, of cheek rouge.

She threw it down, anathema.

Again her hand burrowed into secretive recesses of the drawer. She held up, this time, a cluster of slender, spindly cigars.

She showed him, flung them from her.

Her hands went up overhead, quivered there aloft, vibrant with doom and malediction, calling the blind skies to witness.

She intoned in a blood-curdling voice, like some Old Testament prophetess calling down apocalyptic judgment.

“They’s been a bad woman living in your house! They’s been a stranger sleeping in your bed!”