Dark on the Other Side (13 page)

Kwame shook his head.

“Can’t forget…anything. I need something. Need…” His eyes
turned toward the others, silent, defensive, watching. “You got
anything? Grass? Acid?”

The blonde gulped, glancing at Michael. The boy, who
seemed to have better control of himself, said calmly, “Nobody carries
the stuff, Kwame, you know that. Not in here, anyhow.”

“Then let’s go someplace.” Kwame shoved futilely at the
table and tried to stand. “Let’s go—”

The flutter of agitation had spread out beyond their
table; other patrons were staring.

Michael sat perfectly still. Kwame’s agitation was beyond
reassurance; all he could do was refrain from any move or comment that
might seem to threaten or condemn. In fact he felt no sense of
condemnation, only a profound pity. After a moment, Kwame relaxed.
There was perspiration on his forehead.

“Sorry,” he said, giving Michael another of those sweet
smiles. “We’ve gotta go now.”

“I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” Michael said. “And I
enjoyed your performance. You’re really good.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

“That’s all right.”

“And thanks for the food.”

“It was a pleasure.”

The other two were standing, looking nervous as singed
cats. But Kwame seemed to be bogged down in a mass of conventionalities.

“Sorry I couldn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Kwame brooded.

“I knew her,” he said suddenly.

“Who? Oh…” Michael knew how a policeman must feel when
confronting, single-handed, a hopped-up addict with a gun. He didn’t
know what was safe to say. Kwame spared him the trouble.

“Linda. She’s his wife now.”

“I know.”

“Beautiful,” Kwame said; Michael knew he was not
referring to Linda’s face or figure. “A beautiful human being. We
tripped together.”

Balanced between caution and curiosity, Michael still
hesitated to speak. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Drugs might help to
explain…Kwame seemed to sense what he was thinking.

“Not pot, nothing like that. She didn’t need it. She was
on a perpetual trip.” He sighed. “Beautiful human being.”

“Yes,” Michael ventured. “Did Randolph take—”

Kwame shook his head.

“Oh, no,” he said gravely. “Not him. He didn’t need it
either.”

He started to walk away, his companions falling in behind
him like a guard of honor. Then he turned back to Michael.

“He always knew about it.”

“About what?”

“The dark,” Kwame said impatiently. “The dark on the
other side.”

MICHAEL SHOVED AT THE TYPEWRITER.
GLUED TO
the table top by a two-year accumulation of
dirt, spilled coffee, and other debris, it did not move; but the
movement jarred the table, which proceeded to tip half a dozen books,
an empty coffee cup, and a box of paper clips onto the floor.

Michael spoke aloud, warmly. The only response was a
growl from Napoleon, couchant before the door. He pushed his chair
back, slumped down in it, and moodily contemplated the single sheet of
paper before him.

It was raining in the city again. He could hear rain
pounding on the windowpane and see the dirty trickles that slid down
the glass inside, where the caulking had dried and flaked and never
been replaced.

Rain. Like all words, this one had its accumulated hoard
of images. Sweet spring rain, freshening the earth and washing the
grubby face of the world…The trickles on his window were jet-black.
There was enough dirt on the window, but God only knew what color the
rain had been to begin with.

The desk lamp flickered ominously, and Michael cursed
again. He had forgotten to buy light bulbs. There wasn’t one in the
apartment. He had already taken the bulb out of the kitchen.

It might not be the bulb, of course. It might be the
damned fuses in the damned antiquated building, or some other failure
of the outmoded and overloaded electrical system.

From the dark kitchen came a pervasive stench of scorched
food. In his mental anguish over the typewriter he had forgotten about
the pan of stew till it turned to a charred mass. One more pan in the
trash can…. He stubbed his toe groping through the dark kitchen. The
broken coffee cup was not one of the ones from the dime store, it was a
tender memento of something or other Sandra had given him. Sandra?
Joan? Hell.

The paper, the sole product of an afternoon of creative
effort, brought no comfort. It was filled from top to bottom with a
series of disconnected phrases that weren’t even passable prose.

And, at the very bottom of the page, dug deep into the
paper by the pressure of his fingers on the keys:

Damn the words, and damn the doped-up infantile little
hippie who had produced them, Michael thought. But this verbal
incantation didn’t bring relief. He saw his words too clearly for the
empty things they were. They didn’t describe Kwame, and they didn’t
cancel the impact of the words Kwame had used. He makes bigger magic
than I do, Michael thought sourly. Heap strong magic…The words haunted
him; last night he had dreamed of shadows and waked in a cold sweat,
tangled in bedclothes as if he had spent eight hours battling an
invisible attacker.

Still. Dismiss Kwame as a talented junkie, and what did
you have left? A series of epigrams, and damned dull ones at that. He
was heartily sick of that word “brilliant.”

Yet as the inconclusive interviews had proceeded, one
concept began to take shape. One thing about Randolph that was
significant, and hard to explain. Incompleteness.

Yet you couldn’t say he didn’t finish what he began. He
finished his book. As a writer, Michael knew the importance of that;
for every completed book there are a thousand beginnings. He had
finished teaching his course and he had apparently taught it well, even
brilliantly—damn that word! He had not abandoned tennis or swimming
until he had mastered both skills, and his retirement from politics had
followed a series of almost uncontested victories.

He mastered a skill, and then he stopped. Was it because
he found all of them too easy? No challenge? Or was it because, under
the façade of competence, he was somehow unsure of his ability?
That wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded. The severest critic was
internal. If a man couldn’t satisfy that, paeans of praise from the
outer world couldn’t convince him of his worth. He had to keep on
trying, fighting, accomplishing, and never succeeding, because the
inner critic was insatiable. So—eventually, suicide, alcoholism, drugs.
It had happened before.

But not, Michael thought, to Gordon Randolph. His life
had not followed that pattern. If he had quit competing, it was not in
the spirit of defeat. He had not retreated into any of the standard
forms of suicide. He seemed—yes, damn it, he was—a happy man, except
for one thing, the one thing in which he had not succeeded. The one
thing for which he cared most desperately. And none of the pat phrases
on that sheet of paper gave any clue to his successes, or to his one
great failure.

Michael reached for another sheet of paper and inserted
it into the typewriter. At the top of the page he wrote:

His wife tried to kill him.

Was that why he couldn’t make any sense out of the man
who was Gordon Randolph? Because, like so many of the others who had
known her, he was becoming obsessed by Randolph’s wife?

In her way, Linda was an even greater enigma than Gordon.
Not because the coalescing picture was incoherent. A beautiful human
being—they all agreed on the content of that, if not in the exact
words, including Randolph himself. He had groped for words and so had
Buchsbaum, but poor old Kwame had caught it. Then what had turned her
from a saint into a devil, from a beautiful human being into an
alcoholic, a haunted psychotic?

If I were writing a novel, Michael thought, they would
have a common cause—Gordon’s incompleteness, his wife’s madness. But
life is rarely so tidy or so simple. Or, if it is, the connections are
too complex for us to see.

The light bulb flickered again. Napoleon muttered. The
rain poured down harder. Michael got up and went into the kitchen. He
stubbed his toe—the same toe.

A moving streak shot past him, into the sink and out
through the slit in the window, its passage marked by a crash of
breaking crockery, which was Michael’s last saucer. Nursing his
throbbing toe, Michael restrained his curses and listened. He knew what
Napoleon’s abrupt departure heralded. After a moment it came. A knock
on the door; simple and ordinary. There was no reason why the sound
should have made an anticipatory shiver run down his spine.

II

Linda watched the rain ripple against the window of the
bus. The downpour was so heavy, it didn’t look like rain, but rather
like a solid wall of water against the window of a submarine. The warm,
stuffy bus was a self-contained, miniature universe; and the dark on
the other side of the window might have been the vacuum of outer space.
A few scattered lights, blurred by the rain, were as remote as distant
suns.

The bus was not crowded. Not many people would come into
the city in such weather and at such an hour, too late for the theaters
or for dinner. The seat next to hers was occupied by a young sailor. He
had come straight to it, like an arrow into a target. When he tried to
strike up a conversation, she looked at him—just once. He hadn’t tried
again. He hadn’t changed seats, though; maybe he didn’t want to seem
rude.

Linda didn’t care whether he moved or not. She was aware
of his presence only as a physical bulk; nothing else about him could
penetrate the shell of her basic need. Even her physical discomfort was
barely felt. Her shoes were still soaking wet and muddy. She had
squelched through the ooze of Andrea’s unpaved lane, hoping against
hope, even though she knew she would have seen lights from the road if
anyone had been at home. She had even pounded on the door, hearing
nothing except the yowl of Andrea’s pride of cats. Linda knew she could
get into the house without any trouble; but with Andrea gone, there was
no safety there. It was the first place they would look. Only a
senseless desperation had taken her to Andrea in the first place. She
wasn’t running
to
anything or anybody; she was
running away.

The impulse which had got her onto the bus was equally
senseless. She had a little money, not much, and no luggage. If she
paid in advance, she could get a room in a hotel; but how long would it
be before Gordon found her? If he didn’t want to call the police in,
there were other, more discreet, ways of tracking her down. Anna would
know what clothes she was wearing. There were hundreds of hotels; but
Gordon could afford to hire hundreds of searchers. She wished the bus
would go on and on forever, without stopping. Then she wouldn’t have to
decide what to do next.

When the bus reached the terminal, she sat unmoving until
all the other passengers had got off, until the driver turned and
yelled. She squeezed her feet back into the sodden leather of her
shoes. Another stupid move; the driver would remember her, now that she
had lingered and made herself conspicuous. He wanted to clear the bus
and go home; he stood by the door, tapping his fingers irritably on the
back of the seat.

Linda walked through the terminal and out onto the
street. It was still raining. She walked. She walked a long way. In her
mind was the vague idea of confusing the trail by not taking a taxi
directly from the bus station. Not that it mattered; he would find her
sooner or later. But she had to keep trying.

Finally she came to a brightly lighted street where there
were many people. Cars, too, on the pavement. Taxis…Yes, this might be
a good place from which to take a cab. She stood by the curb and lifted
her hand. Cars rushed by, splashing water. Some had little lights on
top. None of them stopped. Linda blinked vacantly as the water ran down
off her hair into her eyes. Rain. That meant taxis would be hard to
find. She remembered that fact from some obliterated past.

A taxi skidded to a stop a few feet beyond her and she
walked toward it, but before she could reach it a man darted out,
opened the door, and jumped in. The taxi started up, splashing her feet
and calves with water. She stood staring after it. Another car stopped,
almost at her elbow. The driver leaned out and flung the door open.

“Okay, okay, lady; if you want it, grab it. Hop in.”

She got in, sat down.

“Where to?”

The address was written down on a slip of paper inside
her purse, but she didn’t need to look at it. She had known, all along,
that she meant to go there.

“Must be from out of town,” the driver said, pulling out
into the street. “Figured you were, that’s why I stopped right by you
so nobody could beat you to it. Chivalry’s been dead for a long time,
lady. You gotta move fast if you wanta survive.”

“It was nice of you,” Linda said politely. “Thank you.”

She didn’t have to talk, he talked all the rest of the
way. She remembered to tip him; it was an obvious thing, but tonight
nothing was obvious, every movement and every idea was a long, arduous
effort. What she did not remember until it was too late was that she
had meant to leave the taxi at some indeterminate corner and walk the
rest of the way. Too late now…

The street was dimly lighted, lined with buildings. In
the rain and the dark, everything looked black—sky, buildings, windows.
She dragged herself up the flight of steps, her shoes squelching.

There was no list of tenants’ names outside the door, and
no lobby—only a small square of hallway, with the stairs rising up out
of it, and two doors, one on either side. Cards were affixed to the
doors. She squinted at them through the rain on her lashes. Neither
bore the name she sought. She went up the stairs.

Not the second floor, not the third. Another floor,
surely it must be the last. There was no elevator; it had not occurred
to her to look for one. She went on climbing. The wood of the stair
rail felt rough and splintery under her fingers. The whole structure,
stairs and rail, felt alive; it yielded, protesting with faint sighs,
to the pressure of hands and feet.

The light was dim, a single naked bulb on each landing.
Luckily for her, she reached the topmost landing before they failed,
every light in the building simultaneously, plunging the place into
abysmal darkness.

Linda threw herself to one side, feeling for the wall,
for any solid substance in the darkness; heard a door flung open and
felt the rush of something past her. Something plunged down the stairs,
sliding from stair to stair but never quite losing its footing, never
quite falling. It sobbed as it went.

III

So much for premonitions, Michael thought.

It was Gordon Randolph who had knocked at his door. Not
Gordon’s wife.

Randolph’s dark hair was plastered flat to his head; the
ends dripped water. The shoulders of his tan trench coat were black
with wet. Wordlessly Michael stepped back, inviting Randolph in with a
gesture of his hand. Closing the door, he wondered what he ought to
offer first. Coffee, a drink, dry clothes…But one look at his guest
told him that any offer would be ignored, probably unheard. Randolph
stood stock-still in the middle of the rug. Only his eyes moved,
darting from one side of the room to the other, questioning the
darkened doorways.