Almost Dark

by Letitia Trent

  That morning, as she put the Farmington Banner on the reading room table, she saw a headline that made her stop and put down the pile of books she’d been holding.

  Beans Plan to Buy and Renovate

  The New England Textiles Factory

  A company named Beans was in the process of buying the factory to convert it to a boutique store, offering a coffee and snack bar, chocolates, and gourmet gifts. The district manager, who would personally oversee the design, explained that they would hire over twenty-five employees from the area and would give visitors “yet another reason to come to Farmington.”

  Claire laughed at this quote—there really weren’t any reasons to come to Farmington to begin with. A bunch of statues marking minor points in the Revolutionary War, the Farmington Monument, pointing upward like an enormous phallic symbol in the sky, and a college so expensive that hardly any locals could actually attend it. Claire loved her town, but she knew its weaknesses, and she knew flattery when she read it.

  She set down the paper. They were going to re-open the factory.

  Claire folded her hands in her lap and stared at the brick wall across from her, at the poster of Oprah holding a Toni Morrison book, encouraging people to read. Oprah smiled widely, as though really everything that went wrong could be solved with a good book, with a positive thought, with the right mantra or attitude toward unhappiness.

  There isn’t anything I can do about it. Claire said this aloud. The empty library creaked and echoed back to her. It seemed the most occupied when empty, all the small noises that much more amplified, its high ceilings throwing down each small sound. I can’t stop them.

  After Sam’s death, the idea of even walking past the factory, and later driving past it, made Claire short of breath, as though the muscles in her throat protested even if her voice couldn’t.

  Five years after Sam’s death, the factory had re-opened. It had been converted into a battery factory, completely renovated. She had gone once to look—the only time she’d done so. She’d crouched down to see through the narrow basement windows along the ground. They were smaller than she remembered; she wouldn’t have been able to fit through one now. She saw only boxes full of unrecognizable things and some large machines covered with sheets.

  The battery factory had left town after only a few years. Unlike most other businesses and factories in town, it had not left because of economic downturn; it left because people could no longer stand working there. The employees reported nightmares, terrible headaches that no medication could cure. Their doctors prescribed them Vicodin, painkillers that made them woozy and forgetful. One woman caught her hand in a conveyor belt while in a Vicodin daze and lost the tip of her finger. Another woman fainted in the bathroom and cracked her head on the tiles. Her co-workers found her in a pool of blood. She didn’t die—it was only a minor bump—but the accidents and illnesses had driven away workers, which had in turn driven the company out of the town. The factory had been empty now for about ten years.

  Based on what she’d heard, teenagers went there to smoke weed or have sex, various indigent people slept there, and the windows were probably broken—it was probably filled with beer bottles, slack, sticky condoms, and soiled blankets. But she couldn’t imagine it that way. She could only imagine it empty and dusty and Sam down in the basement, calling to her.

  Claire didn’t know who owned the factory, though as a librarian she knew much more than most people about the inner workings of the town. She knew all of the members of the Farmington Historical Society—ancient men and women, their papery hands moving over dusty photographs, their lives devoted to keeping every record of Farmington history filed neatly in its proper place in the archive room on the top floor of the library. It seemed strange to her that she didn’t know. Perhaps people didn’t let her in on information that might upset her.

  Claire folded the paper and placed it at the centre of the table. She finished putting away the books and opened the doors at nine o’clock sharp. A group of library regulars were outside, seated on the front bench and on the concrete perimeter that circled a small green area in front of the library. They were teenagers—bookish ones who didn’t have friends, most wearing black, baggy clothes, listening to tiny earbuds—and older men and women who brought big sheaths of notebook paper and plastic bags full of notes and pored over books all day, researching something that only they understood, probably, or writing epics, manifestos, or historical volumes that would end up in boxes in their basement only to be eventually thrown away by bewildered relatives.

  She liked them all. They were trying to uncover information, to formulate theories, to find God—to do something crazy and disconnected from the everyday world of waking, driving, eating, and sleeping. Claire wished she were brave enough to be more like them.

  Claire shelved books and smiled at the regulars, nodded at the teenagers with their heavy backpacks and nervous, downcast eyes. She wanted them to know that she was friendly. At that age, they imagined that everyone was looking at them, laughing at the books in their bags, at their attempts at meeting or resisting some current trend (inside-out sweatshirts, Claire had noticed, was the latest). She wanted them to believe that she understood how it was to be a person at the margins of something larger, a person who was not quite recognized as real.

  IV

  August

  Justin drove to Farmington alone. He brought along music that Karen would never let him listen to, like Steve Reich’s Different Trains, which she said sounded like a skipping record backed by an orchestra endlessly tuning its instruments.

  As Justin drove, he thought about the eagerness with which Karen had met the news that he was leaving for a long weekend. She’d kissed him enthusiastically that morning, still dressed in her nightgown. She’d hugged him hard and ran to the kitchen to get him a bag of snack mix that she had purchased for the occasion. She presented it to him proudly. Karen came from a family so wealthy that before going to college, she had never gone to a grocery store, and even then avoided chores that involved choosing and purchasing small household items. Justin did the shopping. The first and only time she’d done the shopping she’d come home with a loaf of French bread, an enormous triangle of triple cream brie, and a box of old-fashioned liquorice, bitter and sticky in its paper bag. She had looked so proud that he hadn’t had the heart to critique her. From then on, he brought home groceries after work.

  She likes me better when I’m leaving, he thought. She’s sleeping with somebody else. Justin felt this was true, though he had no concrete proof, only a feeling that he did not quite meet expectations that somebody else had exceeded. He had once taken a test in Cosmo magazine while waiting for his dentist. It was titled “Twenty Signs Your Man is Cheating,” and Karen had met eighteen of them. She had met signs that he hadn’t even known were signs, such as a desire to try new sexual positions. He’d thought this was a good thing, but afterward looked upon her experiments with suspicion.

  He imagined her home now, dressed after a shower, flipping through television channels or Vogue Italia. No, Justin thought, he should be more charitable to Karen. She could be doing something more substantial. She liked to paint with watercolours—wet little scenes from the kitchen window, quite beautiful in their formless, bleeding way. She was going through a phase where she’d paint the same scene out the window at different times of day.

  Her paintings hung all over the apartment, even in the bathroom, where they rippled and curled from the humidity and the paint left faint streaks down the white walls. She had gotten her BFA in art and had always intended to do something with it. But she and Justin had started dating just after her graduation, when she was a temp at Beans’ eastern headquarters, and she hadn’t quite recovered her enthusiasm for art post-graduation. She couldn’t gather her ideas; she couldn’t concentrate. Justin told her that he was sure it was only an adjustment period. All artists need to recharge. So she painted her watercol
ours and waited for her inspiration to come back.

  Justin imagined her in front of an enormous canvas, one of the canvases she had bought and kept in the attic—five canvases leaning against each other, their exposed edges dusty. Maybe she’d had an idea. Maybe she was painting her masterpiece.

  But maybe she had never gotten dressed that morning. Maybe she had waited by the window, lighting a cigarette. He knew she sometimes smoked; the smell drove him crazy and she carried it in her hair and clothes for days. She might be smoking by the window, her hands nervously picking at a pull in her robe, until she saw a car drive up and a man emerge from the driver’s side. She’d rush to the door to meet him, wrapping her arms around him, pressing her head to his chest. He’s finally gone, she’d murmur into this man’s shirt. He finally gave us a weekend alone.

  Justin tried to focus on the road before him, a twisting, treacherous thing carved into the side of a mountain. It had come up quickly after a long stretch of flat, featureless highway. As he slowed and struggled up a hill, his economy car made small, complaining sounds. Other cars and trucks behind him sailed easily past, and he slowed to let them.

  Justin was on his way to meet with the owner of the factory in Farmington and take a tour of the building. He imagined the worst—the foundations impossibly cracked with no possibility of getting the place up to code, water damage, fire damage. He prepared himself for the possibility that it wouldn’t work.

  After he ended the winding, downward portion of the mountain and wiped the sweat from his palms, he reached into his pocket and touched his cell phone. He pushed the speed dial for home. He tried to hum along with the sound of Reich’s repeating screams of violin, as if to prove Karen wrong from miles away.

  “Hello?” Karen answered quickly. Maybe she was expecting a call.

  Justin paused for a beat, listening for background noise. Nothing. No music, no television.

  “Hi sweetie. It’s me, Justin.”

  “Oh, hi, Justin.” Her voice fell from alertness to boredom. “Did you forget something?”

  Justin paused. He had forgotten to create a legitimate reason for calling. Calling just to hear your voice was absurd—he had never done such a thing before.

  “I was just calling to see if I left my address book on the kitchen table. I’m on the road now, so I can’t check, but I’m afraid I might have. Would you mind checking for me?”

  “Okay,” she said, and set the phone down on the counter. He heard the clatter and reverberation. As he listened, knowing that she would come back empty handed (he could see his address book on the passenger seat next to his laptop and the unopened bag of Chex Mix), he thought he could hear the faint sounds of conversation. Maybe it’s the TV, he thought. But the sounds were mumbling, erratic, not like that rat-a-tat of sitcom talk, the punctuation of laughing or clapping or music. As he was still trying to make out the sounds, he heard the phone scrape across the table.

  “It’s not here,” Karen said. “I guess you brought it with you.”

  “I guess so,” Justin said. “Thank you very much for looking for it.”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s not a problem.”

  Justin imagined he could hear her rolling her eyes, tapping her toes, doodling on the pad of paper they kept on the table for messages.

  “I’ll see you on Tuesday,” he said.

  “Awesome,” she said. This was her usual exclamation, one so familiar that it had come to mean exactly the opposite of its dictionary definition. “Be careful,” she said.

  “Love you.”

  “You too,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  By the time that Justin arrived at the factory, he had put his Karen troubles away in their own little folder in his mind. He even imagined it that way, as if his brain was a big filing cabinet, neatly labelled. He had learned this trick at a company retreat. That day he’d also been forced to take part in a drum circle and get a massage from a woman with magenta hair who had told him about his aura (tinged with black, she’d said, though she had not elaborated). But nothing else had stuck with him as much as the exercise in visualizing one’s life as a manageable set of folders. “The room might be enormous, and there might be dozens and dozens of cabinets and folders, but you will always find the one you need,” the workshop leader had said. “And whenever you need to set an emotion aside, you can go to the right folder and put those feelings away until later, when you can deal with them.”

  His childhood, from birth through age ten, was in its own cabinet; his teenage years filled almost three (each drawer labelled with an age, and within each drawer, folders marked with events—first kiss, braces, first time starting on the basketball team, first major sexual humiliation); and his adult life filled many more. Karen had her own drawer. He imagined putting away her file, slipping her photograph in a manila folder and shutting the drawer. He breathed deeply. He was ready.

  He pulled into the factory parking lot, the new gravel popping crisply beneath his wheels. There was an enormous red truck in the driveway, mud-stained, and a man in a baseball cap wearing flannels, dark jeans, and brown work boots leaned against the passenger door, watching Justin as he drove in and parked crookedly next to the truck.

  “You must be Mr. Graves,” Justin said. He offered his hand and Graves took it. He had a cold, tough hand, hard bumps where callouses bloomed on his palm. Justin used to have callouses like that, when he was younger, but not anymore. He was aware of his soft hands, his clean fingernails.

  “And you must be Justin.” Graves squinted and motioned to the factory. “So your company wants to buy this old place?”

  “We certainly do, sir.”

  Mr. Graves shook his head. “All right then. I guess you’ll want to take a look.”

  Justin nodded. “Lead the way.”

  Graves unlocked the deadbolt hanging from a knotted chain laced through the door handles. He turned the knob and pushed the door open. Justin blinked and pinched his nose to hold back a sneeze. He could see nothing but a thick fog of dust.

  “I brought my flashlight,” Graves said, rooting around in the large apron-like pockets of his flannel jacket. He took out a small flashlight and flicked it on, the light bobbing around in the dusty, still room for a few seconds as he adjusted it so that it shone in a wide swath.

  Justin had once been afraid of the dark, as many children are, but he had been particularly ashamed of this fear. It had been visceral, enough to make him cry and run to his mother, something he loathed to do. He had never told anyone about it (he didn’t believe in psychiatrists, or psychiatric medicine—most people he knew who went to counselling ended up crazier than they’d been before they started). He had mostly gotten over it once he turned ten or eleven, but the memory of the fear still came back to him sometimes when he stepped into a dark room. He could remember the way his stomach would feel sick and empty, how he would have the urge to curl his body around that sickness, to tighten up in a ball and close his eyes to keep anything crawling and clutching in the dark out by contracting his muscles.

  Mr. Graves flashed the light around the room, narrating as they walked.

  “This here is the main work floor,” he said. “This is where they used to have sewing machines back when this was a textile factory. Then the battery factory was here and they took out the machines and put in conveyor belts and whatnot, put them all in the basement. Mess down there. Kid fell down there years ago and died. Tragedy, but no company liability—the kid broke in and fell. Probably drunk or high or something.”

  Justin nodded, as though this was just another fact in a long line of similarly pleasant and pointless facts, though he could see his own body falling through a basement window (he imagined himself being sucked down the hole like bath water down a drain).

  Graves shook the flashlight at a jumble of machinery, most of it halfway disassembled, overturned, or clearly broken. “You’ll have
to get all that hauled out,” he said. He shook the light up and down the jumble, illuminating wires, springs, and a telephone receiver, its cord severed from the base.

  “It’s a good space,” Graves said. “Nice and big. You could do whatever you want with it.”

  “Yes,” Justin said, clearing his throat. The dust thickened in his lungs and nose. “What’s wrong with the windows?” he asked, clearing his throat again. “Can we get some light in here?”

  Graves shined his light at the rectangles of dull fabric and plastic that covered the glass.

  “It’s just the shades down,” he said. “I was just about to do that. I’ll do it now, if you want.”

  Justin nodded again, pointlessly, as Graves couldn’t see him. He felt again like a frightened child wheezing in the dark, fists tight, a hard knot of muscle and bone under his blankets, in his dark room where he could smell the wood smoke curling up from between the imperfect seams of the kitchen woodstove. If he crawled out of bed barefoot and sniffling, his wet and snot-sticky hands balled at his thighs, and went to his parents’ room, he was just as likely to be shooed away as he was to be let into the bed and held. He never knew which it would be.

  Graves, though not much older than Justin, seemed like somebody’s father—a man who didn’t have time to be afraid or panicked in the dark.

  As Graves pulled down on the shades and let them snap back up around their cylinders, the room grew lighter. Justin saw that the room was indeed almost bare—it had been gutted, and only the leftover, unnecessary things that weren’t worth the effort of packing remained: telephones tangled in their wires, paperclips, littered equipment that Justin couldn’t identify. But the room was enormous, high ceilinged, the floor relatively empty. It was everything that he had hoped for.

  “This is amazing,” Justin said. When he swallowed and breathed in slowly, deeply, he could hold down the sense of being slowly suffocated.