In the Dark

by C. P. Boyko


Here's what happened: I arrived at the Sandstone at about a quarter 
to seven and, after a quick look around upstairs, settled down to a 
pint at a table near the entrance. At five to, I experienced the 
first perfunctory pang of worry that you wouldn't show. Then my 
imagination, which seems to have something against me, suggested that 
perhaps you'd thought I meant the Sandstone on Iverness, which is 
after all just a block and a half off Eighth _Street_ -- an almost 
conceivable mistake, given that all I'd asked was whether you knew 
the Sandstone on Eighth. 

So I waited until exactly one minute to seven before slamming down 
the remains of my beer and dashing out into the street like a drunk 
fleeing the onset of DTs. By eight minutes past seven I was satisfied 
that you were not at the other Sandstone either. So I dashed back out 
into the street. With a little less gusto I returned to the original 
rendezvous point by about a quarter after seven. There I drank 
another beer and watched the door, and drank another beer and watched 
the door. Then I went home.

Did you perhaps turn up at one minute past seven and leave 
disappointed thirteen or less minutes later? 

I'd like to think it was just a misunderstanding. 

*

A few weeks ago I was making french fries. I was cutting potatoes and 
one of them got away from me, rolled off the table and onto the 
floor. I finished chopping the others before pushing my chair back 
and bending over to look for the errant spud. It wasn't under the 
table. It wasn't under my chair. It was nowhere to be seen. I got 
down on my hands and knees and searched every square inch of the 
kitchen floor. The potato had been too big to roll under the stove or 
the fridge, but I pulled both appliances away from the wall anyway. I 
carried all the chairs into the living room. I shifted the table to 
one side of the kitchen, then the other. I even looked under the sink 
-- as though a potato could, if properly motivated, open a cupboard 
door and slip inside. But it was not hiding out among the detergent 
bottles either.

A potato disappeared in my kitchen. But potatoes don't just disappear.

I can't explain it. It still bewilders me. I would probably pay a 
great price to learn the fate of that vegetable. It's not what I 
might learn; the explanation would be sure to be mundane. It's just 
that not-knowing is maddening.

*

I don't know what to think. Or rather, I don't know what _not_ to 
think. Every possibility, every interpretation, every story I come up 
with seems utterly plausible at the moment it occurs to me. But 
they're all built on sand.

Why won't you pick up the phone?

 Maybe you thought the more compassionate act was to break it off 
clean, to amputate the limb at the joint. Or maybe you thought it 
gentler, less injurious to my fragile self-respect, to permit me to 
cherish a glimmer of hope that I had not been stood up, had not been 
rejected. 

In fact, I'm perfectly capable of handling rejection. My self-respect 
is quite robust. 

I don't really need or want to know why I'm wrong for you. After all, 
I could never put words to what I felt was missing in any of my exes 
(those times when there was something missing) and would hardly have 
expected them to be any more eloquent about my own flaws and 
failings. What good would a critique do, anyway? We can change 
ourselves only superficially, can improve ourselves, I sometimes 
think, not at all. By my age, and perhaps even your age, each of us 
has been incarcerated within her personality, has been left to 
forever pace the narrow cell of his character. 

I don't need you to tell me what was lacking. I only need to know 
that something was.

*

Maybe you're on holiday. Or maybe there's been an illness. A death.

*

I don't know what to think. Your phone has been disconnected.

This can't be about me. 

*

Do you know how many used bookstores there are in this city? 

Twenty-seven. Four have someone named Angela working for them.

Naturally, you never told me your last name.

To be honest, I'm a little afraid to visit these shops. I'm a little 
afraid of what expression you might have on your face when you look 
up from the till or the shelving cart and see me standing there, 
dipping into Hardy or Bergson, nodding my head appreciatively, 
pretending to be transported by Hardy's divine prose or humbled by 
Bergson's perspicacity. 

So I walk by, glance in windows, and do not see you.

I'm not pining for you. I liked what we had, I think, what there was 
of it. But now, to be honest, I hardly recall what you look like.

I am sick of being alone, though that's not what this is about. I 
don't know you well enough to know if you'd be a cure for solitude.  

I'm only curious. I have an inquisitive mind. I am a scientist, after 
all. Science strives to shed light on those parts of the universe 
that remain veiled in darkness. Science pursues truth impersonally, 
dispassionately, disinterestedly. 

"The aim of science," wrote Hegel, "is to divest the objective world 
of its strangeness and to make us more at home in it."

I'm not really lonely. I'm homesick. 

*

I called one of the stores and asked, "Do you have an Angela who 
works there?"

"Yes," said the voice on the line, "this is she."

It didn't sound like you but nevertheless I panicked. 

"Sorry, I think I must have the wrong number."

Brilliant.

*

It's an unofficial tradition in computer science that the first 
output of any new program should be the two words: "Hello, world." 

I remember the first program I ever wrote, it must be nearly twenty 
years ago now, in an antiquated programming language aptly named 
BASIC. It was two lines long and ran as follows:

10 print "Hello, world!"

20 goto 10

This innocuous-looking program caused a cataract of "Hello, world!"s 
to spill down the left edge of the screen, ad infinitum, effectively 
crashing the computer. 

At the time I thought it was funny. Now I think there's something 
depressing about a dumb machine stubbornly blurting out an endless 
stream of cheerful salutations to an oblivious, utterly indifferent 
world.

*

There are cafés across the street from two of the bookstores and a 
little parklet across from another. That left one shop uncongenial to 
surreptitious surveillance. I finally worked up the courage to go 
inside.

In an old jean jacket Chuck left behind one Christmas, a baseball cap 
that I paid too much for at a Sportmart, and with contact lenses on 
behind cheap aviator sunglasses, I don't look much like the man you 
met twice.

I'm incapable of walking out after half an hour of browsing without 
buying anything. Already I've spent almost seventy dollars on books 
I'll probably never read. Seventy dollars I can ill afford, now that 
I've used up the last of my paid sick leave for this year.

Christmas gifts. Do you like Thomas Hardy? 

This Bergson chap isn't half bad in spots. My favourite lines so far:

     Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, 
creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew 
itself by a constant effort. It is dogged by automatism. The most 
living thought becomes frigid in the formula that expresses it. The 
word turns against the idea.

Though it contradicts itself. Here, at least, for once, the word 
serves the idea. 

Besides, what alternative do we have?

*

I think I found you. Or maybe I should say that you found me.

I was puttering around Bob's Book Nook in my undercover outfit when I 
received a sharp tap on the shoulder.

"Can I help you with anything?"

The way he (Bob?) asked made it clear that he already knew the answer 
and could give it to me if I didn't.

"No thanks, just browsing really."

"Are you looking for anyone in particular?"

That "anyone" sent my heart clattering. 

"I don't know. I'm really just looking around."

"I noticed. What's your name?"

"Jim," I said, before the strangeness of the question could occur to 
me. "Say, do you know what time it is?"

He raised the wristwatch arm automatically but overrode the reflex by 
keeping his eyes fixed on me. 

"I have an appointment at two," I said. I could feel my own watch 
dangling just below the left cuff of my brother's jacket.

"It's well past three," he said, without having to look. 

"Oh Christ," I muttered without much feeling, "thanks, sorry, I have 
to -- excuse me."

Why would you tell your boss about me? You should have just talked to 
_me_.

"Listen, I work at Bob's Book Nook, but please don't come around. I'm 
sorry I didn't respond, but [circle one] (a) I was called out of town 
suddenly; (b) I've been in the hospital; (c) my computer crashed and 
I forgot my voice mail password and then the phone company cut off my 
service; (d) I was trying to let you down gently; (e) I wasn't really 
attracted to you physically; (f) my ex and I have decided to get back 
together; (g) aren't I a little too young for you?"

He did say "anyone" and not "anything," didn't he?

*

I spent most of this weekend sitting in coffee shops or walking along 
the river. Thinking. Making up stories.

I hate not being master of my own thoughts. There's nowhere I can go 
to get away from them. 

I know that if I were to see you or talk to you it would probably 
only make matters worse. 

But I would make it worse. I don't care. I'd make everything worse if 
I could.

*

"Bob's Book Nook," said someone other than Bob.

"Hi, I was wondering if Angela Roberts is working today." 

"You mean Angela Hastings?"

"I don't think so. No. It can't be. I have the wrong number."

There's a "HASTINGS, A" in the book. The phone number's not your old 
disconnected one. There's an address too.

*

I sent you a letter. 

I regret now the tortuous wording and the overly formal tone. But 
naturally I wanted to impress you with my calm, my reasonableness, my 
imperturbable sanity.

I didn't put my name or return address on the envelope. Not that I'm 
hiding anything. I was afraid you might toss it in the garbage, 
unopened. Of course I can't think of anything preventing you from 
tossing the thing after one quick glance at my name, lying there so 
vulnerably at the bottom of the third page. I have no way of knowing 
if you read a single word. You can't make someone listen and you can 
never know if they hear. All speech is prayer.

*

I got your machine. Your voice on the outgoing message sounded 
different. Maybe I just don't remember what you sound like.

I didn't leave a message. I didn't know what, short of everything, to 
say.

I would like to tell you everything. I would like to open myself up. 
I would like to show you my organs. 

*

Where should I begin? You didn't read my letter. It's sitting here 
beside me on my desk, unopened. I can't understand that. The lack of 
curiosity.

I came by. You weren't home, at first.

I only stepped into the vestibule out of an obscure desire to see 
your name listed in the directory. There it was, two thirds of the 
way down the first column, for all the world to see. "Hastings 
Angela." I found it strangely touching, if also faintly obscene, the 
unguarded nonchalance of this little exposure, contrasting so 
strongly with the paranoid secrecy you apparently reserve for me. 

Someone else entered the lobby. Reflexively, my fingers flew to the 
number pad. Because I had just been staring at it, I entered your 
code in a sort of delirious panic. (What if that was you who had just 
come in and now stood fumbling with her keys three feet behind me?) 
The intercom had just begun to ring when the woman behind me pulled 
open the door unnecessarily wide and, as a common gesture of 
politeness, held it open for a fraction of a second longer than 
necessary. Casually I reached out and caught the door before it swung 
shut. The intercom stopped ringing. I watched the woman, your 
buildingmate (it is appropriate that we have no word for these 
strangers, our accidental neighbours), stride purposefully into an 
elevator, jab a button, then stand glaring out at me. Still holding 
the door, I entered your code again, looked at my watch, bounced up 
and down in place a little, just like a man who'd come to visit 
someone he would be disappointed to find not at home. The elevator 
doors slid slowly shut like hands brought together in prayer. The 
intercom clicked off unapologetically, mid-purr. 

I looked outside. The wet sky was fading from weak gold to grey above 
the leaf-strewn street. I went inside.

I wouldn't have entered if that woman had not, however briefly, held 
the door open for me. I was only being civil, only acknowledging her 
courtesy. Don't you feel obliged to put a little extra hurry in your 
step when someone lingers to hold a door for you, even though it's 
actually less trouble to pull the door open yourself when, in your 
own good time, you reach it? 

I would never have climbed the stairs to your floor if you had 
answered the intercom. And I wouldn't have knocked if I'd heard any 
sound, even that of a television, coming from inside your apartment. 
And I would never have tried the doorknob if there'd been any 
response to the knock. In fact, I'd probably have sprinted away down 
the hall if I'd heard so much as approaching footsteps or the sound 
of your cat rubbing herself against the door. But there was nothing.

People don't leave their doors unlocked. It was so unexpected, so 
very odd, that I felt a visceral premonition that something was 
wrong. The thought occurred to me that you might be hurt. In one 
suffocatingly vivid flash I even saw you dead inside your apartment. 
You'd been lying there on the linoleum (I saw you in the bathroom, 
for some reason), lying there for weeks. Since the night we were 
supposed to meet, in fact. And wouldn't that have explained 
everything?

Pushing your door open and stepping inside, I half expected to be 
repulsed by the nauseating odour of decaying human flesh. Instead, I 
got roast chicken. I took this to be the memory of a meal, not the 
promise of one. If I'd turned right, gone into the kitchen first, I 
might have noticed the light on the stove. 

I turned left, into the living room. Your cat was curled up on the 
sofa. She (to me, all cats are female until proven male; dogs the 
opposite) began humming like a radiator when I petted her but didn't 
crack an eyelid. I took this as a sort of welcome, I guess. I started 
looking around. 

Where I grew up, we had one movie theatre. They screened exactly two 
movies a month. One show on a Friday, the same show the following 
Saturday, then a different flick the next Friday, and so on. There 
was no money in it. Everything was run by volunteers. Half a dozen 
men took turns threading scuffed-up reels into the projector and half 
a dozen women took turns watching the cashbox and supervising the 
couple dozen kids who took turns running the concession stand. My 
parents, I guess, were among the civic-minded. My dad was among the 
half-dozen men, my mom among the half-dozen women. And I, despite my 
limp protestations, was among the couple dozen kids. That meant we 
had a key to the theatre. 

I borrowed it a few times. Mostly I just sat in the darkened theatre 
(I didn't know how to turn on the lights) and dreamed up my own 
movies. Sometimes I helped myself to stale popcorn. A couple of times 
I relieved the concession stand's change-drawer of its dimes. Once I 
filled my coat with Snickers, Oh Henry!s, wine gums, jawbreakers, and 
chocolate-covered cherries (which I didn't even like, and threw away 
rather than give them to my brother). 

These little misdeeds gave me a thrill of a particular kind. When I 
unlocked the theatre door, after glancing casually up and down the 
street, I always felt a warm tingling in my belly that at first I 
confused with fear. Later, however, when I dumped my loot onto my bed 
and sat down to admire it, the pleasurable twinge I'd felt revealed 
its true nature. I discovered I had an erection.

I felt the same dimly erotic tug when I started looking around your 
apartment. Not an erection or the prelude to one, but a brief, not 
unpleasant prickly feeling in the gonads. 

Why should going where one's not supposed to go be so exciting? 

You scared the living hell out of me when you came back. And you can 
be sure the _frisson_ vanished, just as it would have if my mom had 
walked in on me revelling in my plunder all those years ago. There's 
nothing sexy about getting caught.

My reconnaissance hadn't progressed beyond the living room. I'd only 
had time to stroke your cat, dreamily admire your furnishings, and 
discover my letter on the back of your sofa. Face up, unopened, like 
a piece of evidence being preserved for trial.

Then the sound of the doorknob turning, the hinges creaking, brought 
a scream up my throat like a bubble of blood. I must have swallowed 
it. 

I ducked into a room, what turned out to be your bedroom, and, with 
all the inspired resourcefulness of the mortally petrified, hid 
myself behind the door. My lungs were labouring loudly in their 
effort to bring extra oxygen to my thundering heart. I battled with 
them and won, but only ended up more out of breath. For what felt 
like an hour, I could hear nothing but the thudding and wheezing of 
my own body. I was self-deafened and self-blinded. You could have 
walked in on me at any moment. 

Slowly the clangour subsided, slowly the innocent domestic sounds of 
you preparing a meal -- tap tap tap, clink clink, chop chop chop, 
snick snick -- began to reach me through the fog of terror in my 
brain. You were whistling. The tune, which I've still got in my head, 
was maddeningly familiar. The odd thing about recognition is that 
it's felt most acutely when incomplete. No sense of familiarity, no 
_déjà vu_ washes over me at the sight of my mother. But that woman 
on the bus . . . _Where_ have I seen her? It's enough to drive a 
person crazy. I've spent hours trying to recall names or bring to 
mind specific words. It seems appropriate that it is the _tip of the 
tongue_ that burrows so compulsively into all the unfamiliar nooks 
and grottoes of the mouth, no matter how tender those pockets, no 
matter how painful the probing. What were you whistling? Mozart, 
maybe, or one of Mendelssohn's string symphonies. Maybe this will be 
the first thing I ask you. The second.

I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stand there all night, but 
neither could I slip out unnoticed. Unless you took a shower . . . 
But your bathrobe was hanging on the back of the bedroom door, three 
inches from my face. 

As for the blue bottle, the vase, the one on top of your armoire, the 
one filled with the pink plastic flowers and the unplastic pussy 
willows (my mother used to pick those too; I can still see them in 
their jam jar, on the table between us as we ate) -- I can only plead 
fear, fuzzy thinking, self-defence. At the time, it seemed prudent 
and rational to arm myself. What if you came at me with a knife? I 
didn't know what you might be capable of. After all, I hardly know 
you.

I thought you were still in the kitchen. You surprised me. There you 
were, there we both were, facing each other in the doorway.

I don't think I would have done it if you hadn't screamed like that. 

I can understand it, of course. Suddenly face to face, in your own 
home, with . . . who? A thief? Stalker? Abductor? 

Tell me -- _this_ will be the first thing I ask -- did you recognize 
me? Did you have time to, before you screamed? Because I don't think 
so. I don't think you could have. I hardly recognized _you._ We'd met 
in dark bars, weeks ago. You'd done something to your hair. 

I think I can understand how you must have felt. But that scream! To 
scream like that -- what good does it do? What does it _say_? 

Was it a cry for help? A cry for help is something, at least. An 
attempt at communication of a sort. At the time, though, it sounded 
less like language than a yelp of pain. As though I'd already hit you.

As a cry for help it wasn't wasted. Almost immediately there was a 
knock at the door. This time it was perhaps good that I wasn't 
thinking straight, that I called out: "Come in, come in, the door's 
not locked," because your neighbour helped me carry you down to my 
car. I couldn't have done it alone. I wouldn't have tried.

I told him, your buildingmate, that you'd tripped over the cat, hit 
your head, smashed the vase, screamed and passed out when you saw the 
blood. I don't think he completely believed me. But I was obviously 
distressed, lunging about your apartment like a lunatic. I kept 
insisting that we had to do something, had to get you help, take you 
to a hospital. So don't blame him. What would you have done in his 
shoes, ask to see my ID? 

None of this was an act. I really did, at that moment, have every 
intention of rushing you to the hospital. In fact, it was the only 
thought in my head. I'd checked that you were breathing, that your 
heart was beating, but I had no idea what kind of damage I might have 
done. What if I'd cracked your skull or something? 

What if I hadn't?

The only thing that terrified me more than the thought that you might 
not come to was the thought that you would, there in the back seat of 
my car, while I was driving. 

When you started mumbling I almost veered off the road. I was 
relieved, of course, that you were okay or were going to be. But I 
was soon overwhelmed by alarm. You were about to wake up. What if you 
started screaming again? Hurt, bleeding, in the back of some strange 
car. How you would have screamed!

I'd never given much thought to how difficult it is to make someone 
who doesn't want to be unconscious unconscious. There had been times 
when I'd been ill and exhausted and wanted nothing more than to be 
nothing for a few hours. And I'd been unable to knock myself out. The 
body fails us, hurts us, falls apart on us. But when we want it to 
just go to sleep, the body has ideas of its own.

Pretty soon you were forming words and half sentences. Then, quite 
clearly, you asked, "Where are we going?" 

I didn't know what else to do.

I would have cleaned you up a bit and brought something down for you 
to eat if you'd only stayed blacked out a little longer. If you 
hadn't started trying to stand up. If you hadn't given me that sad, 
hateful, bewildered look and asked, "Why are you doing this?"

I'm sorry about the rope and the gag. It seems cartoonish, I know -- 
something out of a gangster movie. But I didn't know what else to do. 
I needed time. Time to explain myself.  

I just looked at the clock. Almost eleven. You really will be hungry 
by now. I could order something. I'm not much of a cook. I guess I 
don't understand what people see in food. Eating bores me. I make 
whatever's fast and easy. Bacon and eggs, grilled cheese, soup, 
french fries. I take a lot of empty cans to the recycling depot. 

"Why are you doing this?" That's what you asked me. 

Why am I doing this? Why am I doing what? What am I doing? 

I'm trying to explain. Trying to tell you everything. Trying to make 
you understand.

Haven't you been paying attention? 

Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I should start again. From the beginning. 
Tell you everything. I'll be clear. I'll choose my words with care. 
I'll get it right. The word shall not turn against the idea. 

But where do I start? How far back should I go? This morning? That 
day in Bob's Book Nook? The night you stood me up? (_Did_ you stand 
me up? I still don't know. After all this, I'm still in the dark.) 
The night we met? 

The last time I was really drawn to a woman? The last time I was on a 
date?

The day I met my wife? The day I proposed to her? The day she left? 

The delirious afternoon I lost my virginity to Eloise Parker, who was 
supposed to be my brother's girl? 

The moment I discovered that there was, after all, nothing wrong with 
me -- that I too was capable of loving and of being loved?