He had been able to do it, but no more. It was hard even to remember exactly what it had felt like. So “he sat in the room with dogs that lapped his hand and cats that purred and monkeys that moodily scratched their asses and sometimes showed their teeth in apocalyptic, fang-filled grins that were obscenely like Pynchot’s grins, and of course none of the animals did anything unusual at all. And later on he would be taken back to his apartment with no doorknobs on the doors and there would be a blue pill in a white dish on the counter in the kitchenette and in a little while he would stop feeling nervous and depressed. He would start feeling pretty much okay again. And he would watch one of the Home Box Office movies-something with Clint Eastwood, if he could get it-or perhaps The PTL Club. It didn’t bother him so much that he had lost his talent and become a superfluous person.
5
On the afternoon of the big storm, he sat watching The PTL Club. A woman with a beehive hairdo was telling the host how the power of God had cured her of Bright’s disease. Andy was quite fascinated with her. Her hair gleamed under the studio lighting like a varnished table-leg. She looked like a time traveler from the year 1963. That was one of the fascinations The PTL Club held for him, along with the shameless carny pitches for money in the name of God. Andy would listen to these pitches delivered by hard-faced young men in expensive suits and think, bemused, of how Christ had driven the money-changers from the temple. And all the people on PTL looked like time travelers from 1963.
The woman finished her story of how God had saved her from shaking herself to pieces. Earlier in the program an actor who had been famous in the early 1950s had told how God had saved him from the bottle. Now the woman with the beehive hairdo began to cry and the once-famous actor embraced her. The camera dollied in for a close-up. In the background, the PTL Singers began to hum. Andy shifted in his seat a little. It was almost time for his pill.
In a dim sort of way he realized that the medication was only partially responsible for the peculiar changes that had come over him in the last five months, changes of which his soft weight gain was only an outward sign. When the Shop had taken Charlie away from him, they had knocked the one solid remaining prop out from under his life. With Charlie gone-oh, she was undoubtedly somewhere near, but she might as well have been on the moon-there seemed to be no reason for holding himself together.
On top of that, all the running had induced a nervous kind of shellshock. He had lived on the tightrope for so long that when he had finally fallen off, total lethargy had been the result. In fact, he believed he had suffered a very quiet sort of nervous breakdown. If he did see Charlie, he wasn’t even sure she would recognize him as the same person, and that made him sad.
He had never made any effort to deceive Pynchot or cheat on the tests. He did not really think that doing so would rebound on Charlie, but he would not have taken even the most remote chance of that happening. And it was easier to do what they wanted. He had become passive. He had screamed the last of his rage on Granther’s porch, as he cradled his daughter with the dart sticking out of her neck. There was no more rage left in him. He had shot his wad.
That was Andy McGee’s mental state as he sat watching TV that August 19 while the storm walked the hills outside. The PTL host made a donations pitch and then introduced a gospel trio. The trio began to sing, and suddenly the lights went out.
The TV also went, the picture dwindling down to a bright speck. Andy sat in his chair, unmoving, not sure just what had happened. His mind had just enough time to register the scary totality of the dark, and then the lights went on again. The gospel trio reappeard, singing “I Got a Telephone Call from Heaven and Jesus Was on the Line.” Andy heaved a sigh of relief, and then the lights went out again.
He sat there, gripping the arms of the chair as if he would fly away if he let go. He kept his eyes desperately fixed on the bright speck of light from the TV even after he knew it was gone and he was only seeing a lingering after-image… or wishful thinking.
It’ll be back on in a second or two, he told himself. Secondary generators somewhere. You don’t trust to house current to run a place like this.
Still, he was scared. He suddenly found himself recalling the boys”-adventure stories of his childhood. In more than one of them, there had been an incident in some cave with the lights or candles blown out. And it seemed that the author would always go to great lengths to describe the dark as “palpable” or “utter” or “total.” There was even that tried-and-true old standby “the living dark,” as in “The living dark engulfed Tom and his friends.” If all of this had been meant to impress the nine year-old Andy McGee, it hadn’t done. As far as he was concerned, if he wanted to be “engulfed by the living dark,” all he had to do was go into his closet and put a blanket along the crack at the bottom of the door. Dark was, after all, dark.
Now he realized that he had been wrong about that; it wasn’t the only thing he’d been wrong about as a kid, but it was maybe the last one to be discovered. He would just as soon have forgone the discovery, because dark wasn’t dark. He had never been in a dark like this one in his life. Except for the sensation of the chair beneath his butt and under his hands, he could have been floating in some lightless Lovecraftian gulf between the stars. He raised one hand and floated it in front of his eyes. Arid although he could feel the palm lightly touching his nose, he couldn’t see it.
He took the hand away from his face and gripped the arm of the chair with it again. His heart had taken on a rapid and thready beat in his chest. Outside, someone called out hoarsely, “Richie! Where the fuck are ya?” and Andy cringed back in his chair as if he had been threatened. He licked his lips.
It’ll be back on in just a second or two now, he thought, but a scared part of his mind that refused to be comforted by mere rationalities asked: How long is a second or two, or a minute or two, in total darkness? How do you measure time in total darkness?
Outside, beyond his “apartment,” something fell over and someone screamed in pain and surprise. Andy cringed back again and moaned shakily. He didn’t like this. This was no good.
Well, if it takes them longer than a few minutes to fix it-to reset the breakers or whatever-they’ll come and let me out. They’ll have to.
Even the scared part of his mind-the part that was only a short distance away from gibbering-recognized the logic of this, and he relaxed a little. After all, it was just the dark; that’s all it was-just the absence of light. It wasn’t as if there were monsters in the dark, or anything like that.