DROWNED DEEP INSIDE OF ME
THERE WAS A time when the only darkness I knew was inside of me. It suffocated every dream of happiness, every hope for the future, and then left me to drown at the bottom of a bottle in my narrow forgotten apartment.
I’m not certain when I first suspected there was another darkness coming, but it may have been while I sat at my third-story window, a drink in my hand that I could not remember pouring, and watched the teenaged boys on the street below me torture each other and laugh. They were oddly shaped, stuck in the midst of transformation, and though they had not yet become adults they were still too far from the beautiful children they once had been. In their upturned faces the decay was already clear, and yet I saw something else there, something that drew their attentions upwards. I doubt they were aware of it themselves, but each in his time raised his head in the same direction, aimed to stare westward into the cerulean sky.
And it was not only they who found themselves affected. Everyone on the bright streets was distracted, unknowingly, by the western sky. From my apartment I had a clearer view of the world, yet I saw nothing that might account for the attention. Some clouds perhaps, gathered at the edge of the horizon, signaling rain might be coming to provide cool relief from the bleaching sun.
Around my head swirled the notes of a small child singing, a noise sweeter than any I’d ever heard. The music slipped into my apartment through walls no thicker than the paper that peeled from them, and I was forced to stop momentarily and listen to that angelic voice permeate the walls of my private gulag. There was so much I missed, so much that had become forbidden to me, that I found it easier to desire nothing, to hide away from the world.
At least then I could drown my sorrows unabated.
When the darkness arrived two days later I did not at first realize it. I awoke from dreams of smiling children with a start, yet in the remnants of my drunken stupor I believed I’d only managed the first two or three hours of my sleep, and, as such, I was not immediately concerned that the world was still coated in midnight. What did concern me was that the power had failed during the night, and as a result I had no idea of just how early I had risen or how much I’d imbibed before collapsing in my sorrow. I was in a dark limbo where time had ceased to pass and I wondered if I might remain stuck in that pre-dawn moment forever.
It was the noises outside my window that finally made me question the hour. At that time of night it was not unusual to hear others stumbling home from their tiny neon pubs, but where they would normally scream until they were hoarse I instead heard quiet, if not frightened, voices conversing. It took a few moments to navigate to the window, and I realized then the outage was not local; it went on for as far as I could see. Looking down in the dimness I could make out a dozen people wandering aimlessly — far too many for so early in the morning. I took a seat and watched, waiting for some clue as to what was happening. Out on the horizon there was no sign of the approaching day.
A knock at my door startled me. After a short silence it returned, and was followed by a voice.
“Hello? Is someone in there?”
I crept to the door and put my hands and cheek upon it. I could feel a presence on the other side of the wood, yet I didn’t move. The voice continued.
“I live next door. I need your help. Hello?”
I heard then the whimper of a young child and looked through the peephole. A woman stood there, a candle in her hand and a small girl hiding behind her.
I wiped my mouth then opened the door.
“Come in,” I said.
The woman brushed past me and into the center of my apartment, her free hand cupped in front of the candle as a shield. The young girl stumbled in after, held fast to the hem of her mother’s skirt.
Not knowing what else to do, I closed the door. The woman’s candle lit the apartment faintly, though it left my shelves and bookcases thankfully hidden in shadow.
“I need a flashlight,” she said, hugging her daughter close. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
I shook my head, distracted from what she was saying. “The blackout? The power will probably be on by morning.”
Her eyes reflected candlelight in amazement.
“The morning? Don’t you know what time it is?”
I hesitated, then shook my head. “I don’t keep a clock.”
“It’s almost noon,” the woman said, and pointed towards the window. “It’s almost noon and it looks like the middle of the goddamn night!”
I stammered. The young girl looked out at me from behind her mother. She smiled.
“Do you have a flashlight or not?”
I looked back up at the woman. I shook my head again, though slower.
“Come on, Stacey,” she said, pulling the girl to the door. “We have to find a flashlight.”
I wanted to say more but knew I couldn’t. All I could do was watch as the woman took her child from the room. The girl kept her eye on me as she was led out. She waved just before she and her mother disappeared into the hallway.
All the light followed with them.
I remained alone in the darkness for some time, my mind racing with muddled thoughts. Projected upon the screen of night was a memory reawakened, the ghost of a child, and it took all the resolve in my bottle to turn away from it until I was sure it had disappeared. I rubbed my eyes, knowing it would soon return.
But instead it was the power that returned, eliciting the faint sound of cheering from somewhere beyond my window, muted by the thick blanket of darkness. I tried to tune my radio to find news about what had happened, some report that might explain the nightmare into which we had all awakened, but no matter how many times I turned the dial, I found nothing but static.
It wasn’t until later, when my neighbor and her child returned to my apartment, I learned how lost we all were.
“Everyone with a car is gone,” she said. “They started filing out a few hours ago. Didn’t you hear the honking? I guess there wasn’t that much, now that I think about it. Everyone was pretty calm, surprisingly. Do you think we’re all just getting used to these disasters? I mean, there’re floods and hurricanes everywhere now. Maybe everybody has secretly been waiting their turn.”
I shrugged my shoulders as she pondered this. I could feel the empty bottle I’d placed beneath my couch push against my heel, but neither my neighbor nor the soft young child playing at my feet noticed.
“They’ve left the rest of us behind. We’re stuck here for the duration. I know this one guy who went. He said he was only going to go far enough to see if there was an ending to this — this night — and then he promised he’d come back for me and Stacey.” She checked her watch again. “That was only a few hours ago.”
The girl had stopped listening and returned to the toy I had given her. She played innocently, and I wished the sight of her didn’t hurt as much as it did.
“Even if he doesn’t come back, we’ll be okay. Stacey and I will just find another way out, back to the sunshine. The world still has to be out there, right?”
I forced a smile.
The woman became quiet again and looked towards my blackened window. She had returned to my apartment looking for someone who might watch her daughter. At first I didn’t recognize her — in the light of the hallway, she seemed younger than I expected a mother to be — until I was close enough to see her eyes; they looked as though they had been worn down by a number of lifetimes. She introduced herself, but I was in no condition to remember her name, having just managed to hide my empty bottle. The sight of her daughter only made things worse for me.
“Can you watch her for a minute?”
“What? I —”
“Her name is Stacey. It’s just for a minute. I need to go downstairs, but I don’t want to risk taking her out in this. God knows what might happen to her.
“I — shouldn’t. Really, I —”
But by the time my words stumbled out, only the young girl was left standing bef
ore me.
She was tiny for her age, much like her mother, dressed in denim overalls and a shirt covered in small anchors. She spoke very little to me at first, instead choosing to walk around my apartment, investigating everything she could find. I stayed close to her.
“How old are you?” I asked in the sweetest voice I had.
“Five,” she said, drawing the word out.
“Do you like toys, Stacey?”
To this, she nodded, and I retrieved from my cupboard of hidden things a plush orange fish. Her dark eyes grew brighter at the sight of it, and I couldn’t help but smile as she reached out her hands.
“Mommy gave me a teddy bear, too. She said it was from Daddy.”
This made me feel nervous. I swallowed carefully.
“Where is your Daddy now?”
Stacey shrugged her shoulders and started looking around the room again, the stuffed toy held to her chest. I watched her move and a wave of urgency and regret washed over me.
Children should never grow old. Too many of them had done so already.
In my wistfulness, I did not notice she’d found what I’d forgotten in my stupor to hide. She lifted the framed photograph towards me as high as she could and asked, “Who’s this?”
I looked down into dark doe eyes and began to stammer. “That’s the picture of a little girl like you. I — I loved her very much.”
“Where did she go?”
“She’s gone,” I said.
Stacey looked at the photograph herself, analyzed it, then put it back where she found it.
“I miss my daddy, too,” she said, and put her hand in mine.
It felt warm.
Then, there was a knock at the door, and as it opened my neighbor said, “Hey, I’m back! Did you miss me?”
For a moment I was confused, as though I’d just woken from a dream. Then, when my hand was empty and Stacey was in the arms of her mother, I began to feel the blood climb back into my head. While the two were occupied, I slipped the photograph into the drawer with those of all the other children I could no longer hold.
Stacey’s mother smiled brightly, but her eyes were dull and glassy, and she rubbed her arms as though she were cold. I detected a slight wobble in her step and I asked that she and her child remain with me for a while longer.
Stacey sat on the floor, playing with the toy I had given her, while her mother and I took the couch. The entire apartment changed in the shared lamplight, and for the briefest moment I wondered if I too were a stranger within its walls.
My neighbor and I sat silently for a few minutes, her eyes hanging on me.
“We should have some coffee,” she said, and though I had also grown thirsty I wished to take a drink of something else — something I would not touch as long as she was there to watch me.
“I haven’t anything like that.”
“Really? Oh, well, I’ve got some next door.”
She was gone only a few minutes, during which time I watched Stacey play. I absolutely did not move from the couch. When she returned, she sat down beside me, though closer, and began to pour the coffee. I watched the dark liquid swirl as she spoke.
“My ex-boyfriend, Stacey’s father, left me alone with her a few months ago. He had a drug problem — we both did, but I got clean for Stacey. He didn’t. Or wouldn’t. Finally, I just had to tell him, ‘You better stop using around her or else!’ We always fought like that. So he just left one night while Stacey and I slept and I haven’t seen him since. Good riddance. We don’t need him, do we honey?”
Stacey shrugged without looking at her mother.
“No, we don’t. I think the two of us are doing fine. It can be hard, sometimes, and sometimes I remember how easy it can be to forget the hard times, but I try and keep straight for her.” She sniffled then, and wiped the tip of her nose with a pinch of her fingers. “We’ll be fine.”
Then the lines around her eyes deepened, and she looked away from me and at the murky window. The darkness seemed closer, seeping into my apartment and into our lives. It was a thick cloud, bringing what we thought had long ago drowned to the surface. I could do nothing but silently pray it all sank again.
The silence was broken by Stacey, who had until then been quiet, content to play with the toy I had given her. She looked up at me, at both of us, upon the couch, and in a plain matter-of-fact voice put into words what I’d not yet realized I had been thinking.
“Why is it so dark in here?”
At that moment my hand felt empty and my mouth dry. I wondered how much worse things would become.
The girl was right, the lamp in the apartment had dimmed as the darkness swallowed everything around us. Items I had once been able to see across the room only hours before had become lost in the shadows congealing in the air. I felt their weight upon my shoulders, and I turned and saw the others affected as well.
Something was coming. I didn’t know what it was, but it was coming just the same.
“Fishies!” Stacey said, and I must have looked perplexed because she began to nod vehemently. “Look at all the fishies everywhere!”
I turned to my neighbor. Across her face flickered an odd collection of emotions I could not decipher, then just as suddenly they were concealed beneath a pained smile.
“What do you mean?”
The girl responded only by walking to the window and pointing a small finger.
Both her mother and I followed. Outside, the air had filled with what looked like black smoke, shrinking the streetlamps to pinpricks in the dark. I heard fearful voices, and the deep rumbling of a storm, but could see nothing through the murk.
And, yet, when I peered closer at the air itself, I saw what Stacey had meant. The dark fog was comprised not of smoke but of tiny black wisps, millions and millions of them, swimming over each other like little fish. They did not look alive, rather as though they were caught in a great current, forming eddies around anything they passed.
Before I could stop her, Stacey reached out and tried to grab a handful, but her fingers slid right through them. They were insubstantial and yet their numbers still choked the sunlight from us.
Then, from the depth of the void, there was the sound of a horn.
Or, something very much like a horn. It was deep, almost below my hearing, and I felt the sound pass through me and rattle my core. I touched my chest where my heart would have been until it steadied. The note repeated, long and drawn out, and Stacey beside me covered her ears. Her mother was unaffected.
“Do you . . . see something?” she said.
I looked deep into the abyss, but could not.
“What?” I asked her. “What do you see?”
She was silent, but the noise from the street below spoke for her. The words were unclear, but the people chattered like animals before a spreading fire. They clearly saw something I did not, though I searched the night for it. Stacey came close to me then, standing right behind me as my heart continued to beat too fast. She pointed her small finger up toward the sky.
“There,” she said.
It was barely noticeable at first — I saw only a subtle shift in the sky from dark to dim — but I did not have to wait long before the sight was unmistakable. The darkness in the sky began to churn, beams of forgotten daylight swirling through the fog and allowing momentary glimpses of the world we once knew. The crowd below cheered wildly, and I heard the relief in my neighbor's breath.
The horn sounded again and it shook the windows and the walls until a fine dust fell from between the bricks. Then, through the darkness more lights followed. These were circular discs, moving in formation slowly across the dark clouds, and only when they were nearer did I realize what those bright shapes were.
They were but mere decorations. Portholes in the darkness.
I knew this because I saw the ship that bore them.
It moved slowly through the sky, the darkness sluicing off its wooden hull like water. The cheers on the street turned to gasps, then to awe, a
nd I could hear feet scurrying beneath the dark tide that had settled upon us. Even from the hallway outside my apartment I could hear noises, the voices of the other tenants as they ran past my door. My neighbor looked at me with eyes wide and anxious and said, “Let’s go to the roof! I want to see this.” I was hesitant, and her daughter began to shake her head.
“Come on, Stacey!”
The girl merely cowered further.
My neighbor was clearly displeased but she attempted to disguise it. I feared for the girl and wanted to hide her behind me, but I was too afraid to touch her.
“Stacey, Mommy wants you to come with her. It’ll be fine. Tell her it will be fine.”
They both looked at me, awaiting my answer. I said nothing for a moment, allowing my pause to be filled with the sound of the horn.
“It’s going to be all right,” I lied. “There’s nothing to worry about up there.”
The climb to the roof was easier than I’d expected; there was no one left in the narrow corridors but the three of us. The girl continued to struggle and pull until her mother had had enough and hoisted her up off the floor. Stacey’s screams echoed as she was being carried, and I was thankful for the shadows the darkness provided. The lock at the top of the stairs had long been broken, and when I stepped through the door I could see the other tenants scattered on the rooftop before me, bathed in the light of that great ship. They all stared upward.
It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. The ship’s hull was so close to us I thought I might be able to reach out and run my fingers along its surface. The vessel moved slowly through the dark, promises of light left in its churning wake. It was impossible to be sure how long it was — perhaps a kilometer, perhaps more. As the ship moved above us, I thought I could make out through the sea of darkness a giant blind woman, carved as though she had been lashed to the prow. Stacey cried for release, but her mother did not seem to notice, faced with what was before her. I must confess, for a moment I forgot the rest of the world as well.
Beneath The Surface Page 19
