Into That Darkness

by Steven Price

  Well. If somebody could invent a machine that told you happiness when you were in it, I guess they wouldn’t have to eat potatoes ever again. I guess not.

  Is there no coffee? he grimaced. Tilting the steel canister.

  A table of nurses glanced up from their trays.

  Hang on, the counterman said. Ladling up grey scoops of potato. Scraping the mess towards him and banging the spoon on the dish and wiping his fists in his stained apron. Coffee?

  The old man nodded.

  Can’t sleep, eh?

  A flurry of muttering from the nurses’ table. Sad frowns his way.

  I’m not much for it myself. Some people just want to roll over and go to sleep when something like this hits. The rest of us just can’t. The counterman swung the shining canister down and lifted a second from near his shoes. Flicked a red switch along one side.

  You a doctor then?

  No.

  Well. You got that look.

  Surgeonlike himself in his apron, sleeves rolled high past his elbows. Doffing his white cap. A tall and stove-chested stranger in a pair of yellow galoshes, rumpled clothes, two dirty adhesive bandages set crosswise low at his throat and puckering outward as he dropped his chin.

  The old man watched him at his work. Scraping and stacking an empty silver tray, wiping down the server’s counter. Hefting a pail of watery soup into place by its handles. A brown fluid slid down the walls of the pail, hissing. He watched it, thinking of Aza with Callie long years ago, the soft sepia light in the parlour windows where they sat laughing softly, dark-tressed heads bent together, and then Callie’s wide angry mouth lifting towards him as he came foolishly in and saw too late that they were not laughing but crying. He glanced around.

  What?

  I said, are you hungry.

  The old man blinked, a cup of coffee in each hand. Some pink meat sore-looking and inflamed in its dish of thick grease. Pale noodles slick with mucus. Platters of fried eggs sweating under heat lamps, beans leached and grey.

  He took a step back. I guess not, he said.

  Well, said the counterman. If you are.

  Thanks.

  He set down one cup and pocketed a handful of creams and packets of sugar. An old cook coughed in the kitchen beyond, his shadow in the door’s light. Ropy black loops of electrician’s wire overhung the crossbars of that dining tent and the caged fluorescent lights were buzzing softly overhead by whatever miracle illumined their lives. He slid between the rickety tables and out into the warm night.

  He made his way along the dirt path, ascended the grassy slope. The coffee hot through the paper cups, the deep smell of it rich and fine. He could just make out the gardener’s truck, the tailgate standing down where the woman sat with her legs swinging slightly.

  Arthur? she called softly. Is that you?

  He came up to her in the darkness.

  Mason’s sleeping, she said. How are you holding up?

  He sat next to her, held out a cup. White dust rising in the rubble below, men standing about tiny and shadowy against the halogen lamps.

  Regret giving up your bed yet? he asked.

  No.

  How’s the arm?

  She said nothing, blew on her steaming coffee. Then she frowned. You want the truth?

  I guess so.

  It hurts.

  The old man nodded, grunted at the crews far below. I see they’re still at it.

  I keep thinking it doesn’t feel real.

  He lit a cigarette, straightened, breathed out. I was just thinking the opposite. It’s so real I don’t know what to make of it.

  Yes, she said with a nod. That too.

  He knew that she was thinking of her daughter and after a moment he said, Mason was sure he’d find you. He never doubted it for a moment.

  He’s like that. He’s always been like that.

  He was so sure.

  She scratched at her bandaged arm. But you weren’t.

  No.

  She gave him a searching look and he saw this but said nothing and then she was picking at the frayed white threads in her jeans. Out of the floodlit ruins a caravan of trucks was passing. The old man shifted on the grooved metal tailgate and watched their windshields flare and vanish like halos in the false light.

  Arthur? the woman said.

  What.

  I wanted to thank you.

  He sat staring at his hands and they were trembling faintly. Then he twisted around to see through the dirty window where the boy slept with his face dark against the pale leather seats and he said, very softly: He was just a rumour down there. Both of you were. I could hear him singing to you.

  Her dark fingers cradling her shattered elbow. The slouch of her shoulders in silhouette.

  I’m sorry, he said. You wanted to know.

  I do. I do want to know.

  It was another man who did most of the work. Pike. He was digging all night. If you want to thank somebody you should thank him.

  He thought I was dead. He left me in there.

  So you do remember.

  She shook her head, uncrossed her legs. Gazed unseeing at the broken taillight by her knee. I can’t make any sense of it, she said softly. I don’t think I’m the same as I was.

  No.

  It scares me.

  There was something in her voice as she said this and he did not ask and she did not say.

  He wet his lips, drew long on his cigarette. He was thinking of the tobacconist polishing the brass railing in her shop and the glint of silver in her mouth when she smiled. He winced in the darkness.

  I wonder if we could have known this was coming, she said. If there were signs.

  He sipped at his coffee. What do you mean. Like warning tremors?

  Maybe.

  Do you mean signs from God?

  An inky black shine in her eyes as she smiled at him. I don’t mean from God.

  He held her gaze a moment. You’re being so polite, he said.

  I’m not being polite, she said. It wouldn’t even occur to me. God doesn’t even come into it for me. I can be rougher if you want.

  Be rougher.

  You believe in God?

  The old man drew deeply again on the cigarette and lifted his chin and blew out the stars. The tobacconist in her shirtsleeves in the sunlight, peering up at him. Her leathery spotted hands. I don’t think that’s the sort of question anyone can answer, he said. Not honestly.

  No?

  You don’t agree, he said. You think you can answer it.

  She said nothing.

  You think you can. But you can’t. That’s the trouble with it. I don’t know how to make sense of what happened today. Was I given a chance at goodbye? Or did I just fail her twice?

  You can’t think like that, she said softly.

  The cigarette burning between his grazed knuckles. The smell of that surgery tent and the sharp cloudy stink of the iodine. I’ll tell you a story, he said. This happened in a small town in southern Alberta. Just east of the Rockies.

  Is this a true story?

  It really happened, if that’s what you mean. He brushed at his trouser legs and then waved his hand large-knuckled and knotted and white at the darkness to dispel the smoke in the air. He tipped the ash from his cigarette into the dirt. He said, There was a teacher in the local high school, a good man. But not a lucky one. Some years earlier his wife had been killed in a car accident and in his grief he’d turned to drink, and then, drunk, he’d turned to God. I don’t know how exactly. But in the end he was reborn, he was saved.

  Saved, she said.

  Yes.

  Is this how you answer my question? Or how you avoid it?

  He cleared his throat. I don’t know, he said. Maybe both.

  So this man, he went on, this teacher. He kept a faded pocket bible buttoned in his shirt flap and he consulted it often. He came to believe it the word of God given to men for safekeeping and that all things written in it were true. That all men are brothers in that th
ey are sprung from Eve and that God in his goodness created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. This man’s faith in such creation stories became his compass, and he guided his life by it. A good life, lived among his fellow men, and he didn’t drink or walk in temptation.

  The woman rolled a sore shoulder, frowned.

  But this faith influenced his teaching, and his teaching influenced his students. As will happen, I suppose. One of his students wrote in her graduating essay that only the church had been brave enough to challenge the scientists. She wrote that evolution is an attempt to take people away from God and the truth. She thought it was sad that so many people in the world today do not want to know the truth of their origins. This man, her teacher, wrote in the margins of that essay: But the real evidence has been suppressed and most people don’t realize it.

  You’ll think I’m making this up, the old man said. I’m not making this up. All of this was printed in the newspaper when the fighting broke out. There were more examples. Another student argued for the necessity of teaching all theories of creation in the classroom, and in this way allowing the students to decide whether they came from apes or not. An honour-roll student acknowledged the global conspiracy of scientists to discredit facts that proved the earth to be not even twenty thousand years old. Scientists, they argued, should not be allowed to brainwash people any longer. It was clear to them that all evidence confirmed evolution to be impossible. The scientists needed to be stopped.

  He gazed fixedly at the white storm of lights below, the shadowed wicker of bent girders and gaping masonry and the men trudging through it. He touched the paper cup gingerly to test its heat but did not lift it nor move it. Then he grunted deep in his throat, tapped the ash from his cigarette. Our inclination to believe begins early, he murmured. We all of us have to rely on advice, on opinion. That’s how we learn.

  What did the parents think of all this? the woman asked.

  The parents of the students? You’d expect them to be outraged?

  I don’t know. Yes.

  The old man grimaced. This man, this creationist, entered his classroom one morning to find the principal and a school board official waiting for him. The three men sat facing each other in the small desks and while the principal spoke the creationist folded his hands before him on the desk. He had big scarred hands, a strangler’s hands.

  It seems complaints had been lodged. Newspapers had been notified. On the evening news in Calgary a segment had been aired and the teacher was now to be fired and a replacement from the city brought in. You must understand, the old man said, how difficult it was. These men were friends. All three attended the same church and all three believed vehemently in the literal bible. But to the creationist, there could be only the one moral path. God allowed for no half measures. And so he cleared out his desk that very morning and carried his possessions—pens, paperweights, books—in a cardboard box out to his truck and set them rattling down on the floor and slammed the door shut and he didn’t teach in that town again. It’s an old story. The man of God set ablaze in his beliefs suffers the more for them. Had he believed less fiercely or lived less admirably he’d have met with less misfortune. Can I help you with that?

  The woman shook her head. With her good hand she was prising off the lid and then she blew the steam from her coffee and drank.

  The old man continued. And so a replacement teacher drove out from the city that very week. He arrived in an old sedan and rented a room in a local boarding house and there he shelved and drawered his few books and clothes. There were news reporters from the city staying nearby who wished to interview him but he asked them to leave. He was a tall man with a wind-pitted face and hard black eyes and he was very thin. A man more voice than flesh who in his spare time was something of an amateur geologist.

  I think I can see where this is going, the woman said.

  You think so?

  What happened to the geologist?

  Well. He was a man of science, of course. But he believed the true value of science lay not in the opening of nature’s secrets, but in the opening of men’s minds to such secrets. He believed truth holds no value except to the extent that it leads us back to ourselves.

  He doesn’t sound like much of a scientist.

  No? He understood that men do not hunger for truth but for belief.

  Is that right. And what do women hunger for?

  Men.

  She smiled.

  In any case, he said. Truth holds little sway in the hearts of the devout. The geologist had wanted this assignment. He’d been angered by what the creationist had done, he was eager to teach the truth. But he found that nobody believed what he said. His students were suspicious of his science and countered his facts with the creationist’s theories.

  How? What did they say?

  The old man shrugged. What are facts when stripped of their authority? Just testimony. The students demanded the geologist account for various mysteries in the world and when he’d fumble for an answer they’d laugh. What is air for? they’d ask. What’s the point of water?

  The geologist was troubled by this. But when he spoke to his colleagues he found many of them had been persuaded by the creationist’s claims as well and he too began to doubt. Not the facts, of course, the old man said quickly. But the purpose behind the facts, whether it mattered what men believed. He would lie awake in his small rented bed at night with his heels hanging over the edge of the mattress and he’d watch the headlights slide across the far wall. The school library had many books which supported creationism and when the geologist brought in books and films with photographic images of erosion, fossils, sedimentary deposits, all were dismissed as fakes. Evidence from assorted journals was shrugged off. The students believed it was all a scientific hoax of the greatest magnitude, a conspiracy. The creationist’s firing had only fuelled their conviction. What source could be believed? What evidence upheld? In their minds, if all the world was deceived, who could be trusted?

  He regarded her, wetting his lips as if unsure how to proceed. He said, At last it occurred to the geologist to take his students on a field trip. He’d show them the badlands. He’d explain to them the sandstone hoodoos eroding there beyond the old museum. He rented an old bus. Its folded doors leaked and whistled with wind while he drove and its tires roared up through the steel wells so that he had to shout to be heard but still it took his students there in one piece. And so they went.

  The old man described the features of that country with great precision and care. The low grey sky and its flat light and the alluvial shifts and patterns of wind. A moonscape of sheer rock wall and hawks in slow spirals overhead like curls of blown dust. The museum itself an inelegant wood structure flexing and contracting in the dry air through whose dark windows their watery reflections strode warping and strange. In the grainy light sat cabinets of tagged bones and water-stained skulls many millennia lost. Garish paintings. Herds of monster lizards. A gruesome wire-strung devil like a thing of nightmare suspended in the air overhead. A local guide led them along a walk discussing the rock formations and her voice shivered and distorted in the smooth rocks and came back and faded. Lichens and weeds and fierce yellow grasses among the stones. The geologist had phoned in reporters from the city who also spoke with the students. Free books were distributed. A film shown. In the museum courtyard boys clambered up the spine of the Albertosaurus and girls grinned shyly under its painted fangs and the geologist snapped their photos.

  Surely it failed, the woman said. Surely they weren’t convinced.

  On the contrary. They returned to their town convinced by evolution and of the gradual nature of geologic change. And that evening they all watched the national news. It was a program on the students and they were interviewed and discussed.

  The woman frowned. What about the parents?

  The old man nodded. The parents. The parents had been convinced by the creationist’s claims too. The school board’s forcefulness on this iss
ue appalled them. They kept their children home from school in protest. A public meeting was called one Tuesday night in the high school gymnasium. A chance for all sides to speak out. And so once again the reporters came back.

  The old man watched his cigarette stub burn steadily down and with great delicacy he transferred it to his other hand. Thin webs of stars were shining in the blackness.

  Chairs were set up in rows and the big steel doors wedged open onto the night air as the hall filled. The parents were seated in the folding chairs, and in the back other townsfolk stood in a blue haze of smoke under the basketball netting where the backboards had been dragged aside and tied off. A microphone stood at one end of the aisle.

  Anyone who wished to speak was allowed. One man said that if the earth were even half its age the land would have eroded as flat as a table millennia ago. A woman announced that studies had proven the ocean’s accumulated sediments not older than four thousand years. The local pastor plucked the microphone from its stand and spoke about grace and God’s presence among them and of the uprightness of their town. Shaking and with the microphone unclipped and pacing the aisle with the strut of his god in him like a revivalist preacher.

  The coffee was still hot and the old man removed its lid and sipped grimacing.

  You’re not exaggerating? the woman asked. Just a little?

  The old man held out a hand. In the end the creationist’s sister got up and made her way to the microphone. The hall went quiet. Her left arm was withered and she held it to her side by its wrist but despite this she was very beautiful. It seems this girl had slipped from a wagon as a child on a patch of sandy earth and landed under the rear axle and been crushed but in a sort of miracle hadn’t died. As if she were touched by that very grace their pastor swore to. The old man coughed and held up the glowing stub of his cigarette as if to consider its worth. He blew on it, its ember flared briefly. Then he continued. She spoke not of what was true but of what was right. She said there were many truths all of them credible but of varying worth and she said it seemed to her the immorality of evolution should not be ignored.