A Slice of the Dark
Would you like a slice of the dark?” Iris asked, looking up from the cake, a black-and-white.
“Certainly,” Harry said, and she sliced it neatly, slipped it on a plate, and handed it over. Strangely, there was no crumbly cake texture, no icing, no variation. It was a smooth block of dark. A slice of dark indeed.
He looked at it carefully, wondering what it was. Certainly not cake. She smiled and tilted her head a little.
“You know,” he said carefully, “I think I won’t. My tooth has been acting up severely, and I think the sugar would—”
“There is no sugar,” she said quickly.
He blinked a few times. “I don’t see how—”
“It relies on fruit juice only,” she said. “The recipe.”
He glanced down again at his cake. “What fruit would be this dark?” he asked. Then he harrumphed lightly. “Nightshade?”
Her response was something between a squeal and a snicker. “You always say the funniest things!” she cried. Then she took a slice of the dark for herself, put her fork into it, and ate a bite. “It’s really good, Harry. The fruit shines through.” She grinned, and a bit of the dark clung to her front teeth.
He smiled at her pleasantly—they had been friends since childhood, and they were still friends, not lovers, out of habit and out of choice. “I think I’ll pass. But let me take it home for later?”
She wrapped it up, and they had a pleasant visit, and he went home. He was divorced now for a decade, and used to it, and had routines that he looked forward to. One of these was to walk along Manhattan’s West Street in the evening, through the slim park they had planted along the river. Bicyclists and roller bladers and mothers running with their ergonomic strollers all passed him. The trees were in the long glow of autumn and the air was still warm. A large cruise ship began its blasting route out to the ocean. He regretted that sunset was getting earlier and earlier and night was taking over, once again. Closing in.
The age-old battle, he mused, between light and dark. That cake that Iris had made—the clear divide between black and white in the cake was misleading; the darkness crept in like a stain, not like a line.
“Oh, didn’t you see me?” a woman cried out in vexation as he felt something hit him in the side. The woman was running behind her stroller. Technically, she should have been running in the bicycle lane. He hadn’t seen her. He bent down to rub his shin.
“You came from behind,” he muttered.
“I was right next to you,” she hissed. “You even looked at me.”
He glanced around quickly and it seemed that this might be true, so he apologized, stepped away, and found himself stumbling. When he looked down to see what he’d tripped over, it was a rock, but a rock as dark as night. He had thought it was a shadow.
There were more shadows than usual, or maybe some of them just seemed deeper than usual. He studied the shapes and, indeed, some of the darknesses were objects. A paper coffee cup. A branch.
He picked up the black shape of the cup. He liked the feel of it in his hand.
“Good for you!” a biker cried, rushing past him. “Get that litter!”
He held it. It had the proper weight. He took the bag Iris had given him, with the slice of dark inside, and he added the paper cup and went home.
His home, at first glance, looked entirely the same. But then he found a pen, and a piece of mail, and an apple in his refrigerator—all dark. He took the objects as he found them and put them on the windowsill. Looking at them intrigued him and calmed him at the same time. Perhaps they would return to their true colors over time, but right now they were distinct and rare. They were his. He had never had anything like this before.
The long twilight spread through a clear sky and night came in like a tide. He sat for a while by the window, looking out at the one sliver of sky he could see above the building opposite, until suddenly it was dark. He got up and before turning on the light he looked back at the window and the windowsill. The objects he had found then placed there were now exactly matching the night. They were pieces of night left over in the day, he thought.
A light came on and he glanced out the window to see a figure in the building opposite his, about 30 feet away. He lived in the rear apartment of his tenement, and he faced the back of the tenement on the next block. Seeing someone across the way would happen occasionally—a figure stopping at the window over there who looked out just as he did. They would usually be embarrassed and quickly move away.
The man across from him turned all his lights on. His apartment was small and white and orderly, with a slate-gray couch and white pillows. He looked at Harry, nodded in a perfunctory way, and slid his slatted blinds down. The blinds weren’t completely closed. Light bled out from them.
When Harry woke the next day, he immediately looked at his found objects, his bits of night. It cheered him up to see them. They reassured him that there were still wonders in the world, and more importantly, that he could be part of the wonder. Up until he’d found them, he had always assumed that he would live and die as merely one of the multitudes. But he was determined now to search for more of these bits, and that’s what he did, day after day, just walking around the city and looking at shadows to see if they were shadows or in fact, objects of the night.
Harry felt a kindness towards these fragments, as if they were animals he was rescuing, or kittens staring at him with their wide eyes. He smiled at the thought, for he himself felt a little bit rescued when he found them. They felt right to him.
So he collected triangular pieces and round pieces and irregular pieces and pieces like pipes and shards like shoes and things that, when he picked them up, stayed smooth and bone black. His heart leapt now when he found one. They were artifacts from a different world, fallen into his world. Fallen into his life. No one else stopped when he stopped, bent down to examine the dark, felt it and picked it up and carried it home.
He placed what he found on the windowsill, often rearranging things so that they would be seamless, so that no daylight would pass between them, thus building a wall of night.
The oddest, least buildable pieces—the shoes, the wax papers, the cigarette butts—he heaped on the floor and let the pile dictate its own shape. Having night on the floor was a bonus. Having night at the window was a need. How strange that he used to turn lights on at night. It was better to sit and feel the dark, much better. It was soothing and sweet.
Once, a long time ago, he had read a book where a man had come across a cottage and in the cottage was a spigot that spilled out the dark, unrelentingly. The character had been desperate to scoop up the dark and contain it, before it buried everything.
He thought of that image longingly. He would love to visit that place and watch the dark cover the ground and begin to rise. He imagined it as soft and comforting, and rising up to his eyes. But he never imagined it going higher than that. Unrelenting night, seeping out, leaking out. What a wonderful idea.
The way he tucked night into the window was a little uneven. The left-hand side was filled up to the top of the window, but the right-hand side was still mostly open. He looked across and there was that fellow again, in the window opposite him, waving his arm. His face was angry. He wore a very clean white shirt and neat jeans.
Harry moved some of the dark to the floor so he could open the window. “I couldn’t hear what you were saying,” he called across the back way.
“Why are you piling garbage in your window? That’s all I can see now!”
“All you can see is the back of another building,” Harry said, surprised. “Do you keep staring at the back of a building?”
“This is a window,” the man said venomously. “It lets in light. And I also look out to see the weather. To see the day. You’re attracting rats. You’re collecting garbage. I don’t want to see garbage when I look out the window. I’ll call the health department. I’ll start a petition! I’ll get you evicted! Don’t hoard garbage!”
He slammed his window down.
Harry shook his head and lowered the window and straightened out the bits of night. He was not afraid of petitions.
He found a discarded night doll next to a broken bag of garbage when he went for a walk later on. It lolled; it flung an arm over another bit of darkness. He took it and shook it off and put it in his window. It looked particularly good there.
He added a single glove and soda can. He brought things home, placed them, and then sat down, watching them join the night. Being enfolded.
He went out a few days later, to continue collecting night, but his neighbor was waiting, and leapt out at him.
“Get rid of that garbage! I don’t want to look at it! I’ll call the police if I have to!” He grabbed Harry’s collar so tightly that he felt he was choking. The neighbor had half a foot on him, and more weight. And he smelled a little bit like peaches.
“Stop!” Harry gasped, and the neighbor released him, just a little. A small child came skipping down the street and stopped to watch what was going on. “It’s not garbage!” Harry said. “It’s the dark! Look again! It’s the dark.”
The neighbor, disgusted, shook Harry one more time and then left. He muttered more threats, about the police, about the Health Department, about the Housing Department.
Shaking, Harry went back to his apartment, taking what comfort he could from the bits of night that now covered most of the floor in addition to the window. He wanted more and more night, not less. The man across the way was crazy. That man just wanted to start a war.
Harry had reached a new understanding of life. It involved darkness and night and the peculiar curtain quality of night—how you could disappear into it, become a part of it. He had never felt more of a sense of belonging. He felt joy when he found another slice of dark, when he could hold it and claim it. And display it.
Beyond the window of dark, of course, was his neighbor’s window. And his neighbor had called the dark “garbage.” Well, of course, he understood that on some level, the dark he found was originally not dark at all. It had been transformed, just as he had been transformed.
He went to visit Iris the next day and she was appalled. “All of this just from some cake I offered you?”
“I never tasted the cake,” he assured her. “I put it in the freezer. Ah! Perhaps I should eat it and see what happens.”
“No,” she said. “Go to an eye doctor, Harry. Never compound a problem, that’s what I say. I can’t call what you are right now ‘healthy’—can you?”
“I feel perfectly fine,” he said, and took a deep breath. “I feel wonderful, in fact. I find the dark to be so completely soothing. It covers me like an ocean. I float in it even as I stand, because all corners of the world are the same in the dark.”
“That makes no logical sense.”
“Anything can be anything in the dark.”
“That makes more sense. Still, I don’t see the point.”
“There is no point in the dark.”
They sat there, chewing over that for a while. “My dear Harry,” she said finally. “If this is a disease, it’s staking out territory. If it’s not a disease, then why yes, of course enjoy it. I can see you love it, and I believe that no love is ever false if it hurts no one.”
“Thank you.” He bowed his head modestly.
“But still, as you know—I have no doubt you know—it’s not how you lived for over fifty years and thus it raises a question. That question being—is it killing you?”
“Ah.” It jerked him upright for a moment.
“See a specialist. See someone about your eyes. Start there. Do it for me.”
“Dear Iris,” he murmured.
And because they were good friends, he went to a specialist his doctor recommended, a great man with a booming reputation, who clicked lights in his eyes and magnified his retina, and put drops in and blew air on his eye, and gave himself a very satisfied “I see” at the end of the examination.
He sat behind his desk at the end, putting notations into his computer and giving Harry a sharp nod as he sat down opposite him.
“Oculitis nocturnalis,” the doctor said. “I’ve only seen this once before.” He had a firmly reassuring air about him. He had seen many things and conquered them. “You’ve had a sliver of the night get in your eye. In your case, both eyes. It’s like a splinter of glass, in a way, and your eye accepted it. Embodied it, in fact. In-cor-por-ated it. If you had the right equipment you could see it yourself. You don’t feel like there’s a foreign object, because it’s night after all. Night, strictly speaking, has no feeling at all when it touches you.”
“A sliver of night,” Harry murmured. He couldn’t help but feel a sense of recognition and delight.
“Don’t worry too much about it. It goes away in a month or two. What has it been now—a week? Oh, three weeks? I could give you drops, but to be honest, the drops are merely psychological, for those patients who can’t stand it. There’s a bit of a calming drug in it. But you seem quite secure?” He looked up from his typing, casting a severe glance in his direction.
“It will go away?” Harry repeated. He was beginning to feel reluctant.
“In a few weeks. A month at most.”
“And then it will all go back to normal?”
“Yes. I can guarantee that. The literature supports it.”
“But if I don’t want it to go away?”
The doctor stopped typing and looked up at him, surprised. He took the time to adjust his glasses.
“It’s beautiful,” Harry whispered.
The doctor bowed his head and then looked at him kindly. “Very often, there is a familiarity in a condition, even a new condition. A confirmation that it is, in some unique way, appropriate.”
“Yes,” Harry said. “Everything about it is right for me. The night, the comfort, the way there is no reason to be other than to be. I mean, we scurry around in the daytime but at night we simply are. We simply wait for time to unfold.”
“The same can be said for the daytime,” the doctor said kindly. “It’s just a question of light. You don’t change; the world doesn’t change.”
“But it does,” Harry said. “It does for me.”
The doctor looked at his screen and typed a few letters but then stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It will get better on its own.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yes.”
He nodded and thanked the doctor again in a wooden tone and left. It was a bright day. It had been cloudy for over a week, and now that it was bright again, Harry felt the sunlight lighting him up, as if in a spotlight, and he hated it.
He felt bombarded all the way home, unable to evade the daytime, the sunlight. He hadn’t known that about himself, that he belonged to the night, in the night, that he felt most truly authentic when the night fell, when the daylight fled.
For a while, and without identifying it, he had been happy. He had looked forward to the next finding of the dark, the next gift of it. He had felt increasingly cherished. He had felt confirmed.
And now, to find that he was merely one of a number of people who had fallen prey to a rare but temporary condition; it was intolerable. How was he to go back to what he’d been? What had the doctor said—a few weeks; perhaps only a month?
What was he to do with a mere month? He tried to remember that night he had walked to Iris’s place, how she had offered him that slice of cake. He took it from the freezer and ate it. Perhaps the doctor was wrong. Perhaps it had been connected to the cake. He believed it was the cake.
He sat in his apartment, in front of the bits and pieces of night, the slices of the dark. He felt good there. I could be swimming in the dark, he thought. I could be flying. I could be a new creature, composed of dark air and dark water. Someone built from the shadows and determined to return to the shadows. I have been trapped in daylight all this time, and I demand to be free.
And then something smacked against his window. He could tell that the dark shifted a little and then settled down.
He pushed some of it aside to see his neighbor across the way leaning out his window with something in his hand. Then he pitched it straight at Harry.
“You like garbage?” he yelled as the egg landed. “Here’s garbage!”
Harry opened his streaked window. “That’s enough!” he called to his neighbor across the way. “That’s assault!”
The neighbor sneered at him. “I’ve got plenty more where that came from!”
Harry lowered the window carefully, trying to keep the dark in place. He knocked a few pieces of it off the windowsill. He accidentally kicked the dark scattered on the floor. He heard another egg land, and ground his teeth.
Fury overtook him. He could recognize that this was war. In the past few weeks he had experienced a profound change, and it was threatened by a man he didn’t know, who didn’t know him, and who nevertheless intended to destroy his world.
This was more than he could bear. A lifetime of putting up with things, of letting this go, and letting that go—that whole lifetime had led to the moment when he’d discovered his love of the dark, his belief in the dark, his trust in the dark.
A lifetime of indifferent honor and compliant morality flew apart, just like that. When you first discover that you can claim beauty in your life, it is monumental; you quiver before it. And you believe you have it eternally. To be deprived of it is worse than being deprived of life—after all, he had had life, and it had been ordinary up until then.
The next day he went to various stores and bought small cans of lighter fluid, and some hair spray cans, and cheap cooking oil. He waited until late afternoon, when most people were out, and then he took his supplies and went down to the alley between the buildings and kicked in the basement window across the way. He soaked rags in oil and tossed them in and then finally lit one or two and tossed them in, and tossed in the hair spray can as well. Those things were supposed to explode. He studied the flames and threw in another rag doused in oil right on top of the hair spay can.
There was a whoosh! He hurried back into his own building, hurried back up to his apartment, made sure all his windows were closed, wet some towels and put them against the window facing his neighbor.
He hadn’t realized that the oil burner was near the window he’d kicked in. The burning rags and the exploding hairspray cans ignited the furnace and the place went up in a frenzy, much more than he’d ever imagined. He could feel the heat inside his own apartment, through the walls and the windows and the wet towels. He could hear the light of the fire screaming. He stood in the kitchen, which was an inside room, trying his best to defend himself against the hot brightness of the fire. He imagined his neighbor’s white room burned to ash.
His building was evacuated, and it was two days before he was allowed back in. He was gratified to see that his neighbor’s building was barely a shell. Barely anything. A brick skeleton.
But after that time, the dark began to fade. The pieces in his apartment turned dark gray, then medium gray, and then their colors starting bleeding through. The night reverted to normal night. Shadows became shadows again.
His neighbor’s building had blocked the morning sun. He hadn’t realized that. Now, as the building stood ready to have its last vestiges torn down, the sun shot through everything he put against the window, finding its way through impossibly tiny pinpricks in the shades he put up, pushing faintly through curtains as air currents made them shift.
He would happily burn his own building down, if it meant he could have the night back. He would do anything for a slice of the dark, the smooth gloss of it, the cozy, clean, enticing call of it, the way the dark was everything he’d ever wanted, though he hadn’t known it, and it was desolate to think there would never be any of it waiting for him—around a corner, tripping him up as he walked here and there—never would there be any of it again.
He refused to accept that this would be the end of it. He had lost the dark, and he had taken it out on his neighbor, but that had been at most a momentary relief. Now the sunlight filled his life and his apartment, and it was in his way wherever he walked, and he was fretful with the loss of the dark.
It had begun with Iris, and the cake, and he chose to suspect that if he repeated exactly the right steps, then it would happen again, and day after day, week after week—until Iris moved unexpectedly away—until then, he walked through the small park by the river, on his way to Iris’s apartment, with his head saying, Give me a slice of the dark. And he opened his eyes as wide as he could, on the way to see Iris, on the whole way back, demanding, once more, to find the dark, the night, the feel of it, the smooth, enticing comfort of it, the dark, the night, the slice, the joy, the smooth and soft and cold and all complete, the night.