He was very happy. He had forgotten
how happy he could be. Sitting with his new friend talking about his past life, he
remembered that there was once a time when he had slept in a warm bed snuggled against his
woman's back, his arms enfolding her, his large hands cupping her round full breast. He
recalled the smell of brownies baking and children giggling while they licked the spoons
clean.
Now, his days were filled with
monotony and dread, his body thin and wasted, drained by drink and heroin. Whenever he
managed to drag himself out of his daze, he became aware of his urine-stained pants and
dirt-encased body. But this didn't seem to matter anymore. For two nights, he had
spent time reminiscing with his friend, following the dark form down moonlit alleys and
garbage-strewn streets, oblivious to the strangeness of it all.
He sat quietly on the park bench,
drinking aged scotch and nibbling on a large sandwich given him by the mysterious person:
roast beef on rye with mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato.He savored the whiskey,
letting it roll off his tongue and trickle slowly down his throat. It tasted a bit
different at first, but his new friend had said that was just because he had been drinking
only the cheap stuff for so long. The taste of the scotch mingled with the taste of the
food, warm and caressing in his stomach. He took small bites of the sandwich, not really
wanting it, only coveting the spreading warmth of the liquor. He kept stealing glances at
his friend. This figure crouched beside him, shrouded in the dark, encased in blackness,
features obscured by a soft wide gray hat, the only part of the ever moving shadow
that reflected light.
The man now fought to recall how
and when this apparition had entered his life, but his life was beginning to fade from
him, passing through his lips and fingers, feet, and toes.Suddenly, the truth dawned on
him, and he asked, "Are you the Angel of Death?" The apparition sat silently,
waiting, watching with quiet intensity as the man, his question unanswered, sank slowly
into oblivion.
The figure stirred slowly. Moving
forward with quiet dignity,it kissed the brow of the dying man and left taking with it the
remains of his last meal.
The next morning a man walking his
dog would discover the frozen body of the man, curled up on the park bench a smile on his
face and his right arm encircling empty space.
2
Everyone I know thinks of the
night as either dark and frightening or mysterious and exotic. Poems and stories have been
written serenading its power and beauty. The darkness they speak of is an omnipotent
entity, cold and engulfing. Night,with its uncertainty and danger is like a god, superior,
distant, and judgmental.
I, however, have never feared
the night. She isn't some dark devouring monster, alluring and repellant at the same time.
She is a warm inviting mistress who seduces with the rhythm of her body, the softness of
her lips, and the perfumed moistness of her sex. Nothing about her is absolute darkness.
She is only a shadow who moves through the light.
I am horrified of the light
with its revealing power. All ugliness and stupidity is revealed in the daylight. We think
of night as evil, because many crimes are done in her shadows. That is not true! The
crimes done within night's cloak are ones filled with shame. Shame supposes a conscience
which means an understanding of truth.
Crimes committed in the day
signify a disregard of truth, a total lack of shame. They shout to be viewed. The
perpetrators of daylight crimes are evil; they enjoy flaunting their malevolence. Those of
us who save our misdeeds for the shadows are not amoral soulless creatures. We know the
vileness of our acts, and we accept the shame. But we are helpless to stop. To not act as
we must would be immoral in itself. A being who denies its true nature goes against the
natural order of the universe; this I think is the greatest evil of all.
3
Lara stood on the subway platform
waiting for the downtown train to Brooklyn. She was a little tense and unusually nervous
glancing around cautiously so not to offend anyone by her appraisal.
The platform held the normal
assortment of early nighttime travelers, no one too bizarre. There were women and men
standing with briefcases gripped between their knees or clutched tightly in their hands.
Two homeless men stood by one of the large green dumpsters arguing over a piece of
half-eaten Roy Rogers chicken. She looked at them intently, but they were too engrossed in
their dispute to notice her.
"I found the fucking chicken
first."
"Screw you! You couldn't find
your own ass even if you sat on it. That's ow dumb you are."
"Dumb! You're one sorry
mother. You know that?"
Lara's glance moved away from them.
Tuning them out, she swung her worn leather knapsack up over her shoulder. Stepping to the
side of the platform, she peered into the murky darkness for signs of the downtown train.
She was being paranoid. No one was
watching her. What was t here to watch? She was tired and imagining things; she argued
with herself. The train pulled into the station spluttering and moaning, wheezing to a
last stop. She had been waiting eagerly for it to come, and now she could hardly drag her
body forward, lurching the last three steps into the car. Practice rather than conscious
effort brought her around and into the waiting seat.
"God", she thought,
"They must think I am drunk or on drugs." Peering around furtively, she realized
that everyone else was lost in his or her own thoughts. They were preoccupied with getting
home, wanting to avoid anything that might engulf them, thus preventing their safe
arrival.
Lara rummaged in her knapsack for
her train book. "Ouch!"She pricked her right thumb on the metal spring of a
sketch pad.Every semester she made a mental note to herself to state clearly in her
syllabus that homework sketch pads should not be wire bound; however, she never did. There
were lots of things she told herself that she would do if so and so happened or did not
happen. She had told herself that once she got a full-time permanent position teaching art
in college she would stop adjuncting at the Art League at night, but here she was riding
the subway at night and imagining all sorts of strange paranoid stuff.
She settled back in her seat,
smiling. She had this conversation with herself at the beginning of every semester. Lara
suspected it was because she listened so much to Tony's stories. Every day it seemed that
he and his transit counterparts arrested hundreds of crazed killers and pedophiles who
committed their crimes in the dimly lit subways and then retreated to the light above
ground. She uttered a tired sound and then adjusted herself more comfortably in her seat
to read.
A figure hovered on the perimeter
of her vision, startling her and propelling her out of her seat. No one stood near her.The
car was not crowded. Everyone had a seat, except for the homeless man curled up on the
floor, blocking the car's rear door. He had been there for several hours, snoring in
rhythm with the train's movement over the tracks. No one is watching me. She kept
repeating this as if it were a litany over and over to herself.
Somewhere from the far corner of
the train, her observer smiled and blew her an unseen kiss.
4
Lara walked slowly home from the
subway station savoring the night air, seeing if she could detect the sting of winter in
its bite. She was in Brooklyn now, two blocks from her brownstone,and she felt safe as
always. She kept peering up into the heavens through the city fog and polluted air, trying
to glimpse the waning moon, which sagged as it faded into nothingness behind a dark
rain-laden cloud. Lara loved the colors in the night's sky, a dark rich blue, touched ever
so lightly by the pale yellow of the dying moon. But tonight, she did not stand watching
the moon as was her custom. A sudden movement in the vacant lot to her right brought her
around sharply, and she quickened her steps.
Turning the corner, she forced
herself to slow down. She had never been this jittery before. She wasn't the nervous
type.She knew someone was there, and it was not one of the men who always hung out
aimlessly on the street corner. This was Brooklyn, and there were always people standing
on the side walks or sitting on someone’s stoop until the dead of winter, even in
Park Slope. However, the presence she felt wasn't a familiar one. There was something
jarring and unnerving about it. She didn't know how she knew, but it seemed to Lara that
her pursuer wanted her to know that he was there.
Lara hurried again, her feet
rapping out a sharp tattoo on the sidewalk. It felt as if she were walking on her own
heartbeat. She reached her gate and opened it, stopping and spinning around quickly only
to get caught on a rambling rosebush which even without its flowers still sported its
thorns in winter. Something wet and soft rubbed against the right leg of her pants. Good
God! She gave a startled jump, almost tripping over Jeremiah the cat, whose bright
unblinking eyes shone at her out of the darkness.
"God, what a dork!" Lara
examined the silent street stretching before her, but she detected nothing. Feeling
slightly foolish, she mounted the steps quickly and let herself into the dark hallway of
the parlor floor.
From across the street, a silent
figure slipped slowly out of the concealing folds of a dark doorway. He watched the door
of the brownstone until it slammed shut. Then pulling up the collar of his windbreaker, he
walked briskly toward Alfredo's Deli a block away.
Lara was about to call out when she
heard suppressed giggling coming from the top of the stair leading to the third floor. She
moved away from the stairs and walked in through the door leading to the living room. By
finding out what light was left on she would be able to know what they wanted her to do.
From the living room she could look through into the dining room and kitchen. All the
lights were off except the one in the kitchen. That was the light left on when someone was
out and everyone else was upstairs. If everyone was out, the middle light, the one in the
dining room, was usually left on; therefore, they wanted her to think that they were all
in the bedroom watching the new television.
"Hey, I'm home." She
started mounting the stairs, knapsack in hand. She paused near the self-portrait that hung
on the wall just at the foot of the stairs. It was a reminder of her realist days when she
was in her mid-twenties and had not developed her style yet. She had wanted to remove it
and put one of her more current paintings there, but Tony wouldn't let her. He said that
he always spoke to it when she wasn't around. Now she nodded at this much younger self,
who looked down on her, as she called up the stairs, "I'm going up to my studio to
drop off my stuff, then I'll come back down." There was no answer as she expected,
only hasty whisperings from David, suppressed giggles from the twins,and loud theatrical
shushes from Tony, designed to warn her. She came to the third floor landing, turned and
made her way down the hallway toward the final staircase leading to the fourth floor and
her studio.
Two small hurtling shapes detached
themselves from behind the door of a built-in closet and flung themselves at her,snarling
and growling as hungry monsters were wont to do. A third larger shape also sprang at her,
growling and snarling even more loudly and viciously than the first two, then it paused
and in the middle of a particularly nasty snarl, asked in a voice on the verge of
changing, "Mommy, did you suspect us all along? I bet you didn't, until he started
his shushing." He said in exasperated disgust, as light from the bedroom flooded the
hallway. A huge figure, covered from head to toe in a blue-striped sheet, stood framed in
the doorway. Head bent forward slightly, it was drooling from a hole in the sheet and
making a piercing squeak reminiscent of rusty bicycle brakes.
Screaming in mock terror, the
children threw themselves on the figure, propelling it backward into the room and onto the
bed. The sheet was torn off the threshing howling creature to expose a tall,
broad-shouldered man with black graying hair and a bushy mustache framing a pale angular
face.
The twins attached themselves to
either side of him, their brown little arms and legs straddling his broad frame, while
they covered his face in the saliva of kitty kisses. Lara watched as David joined in the
fray, punching, tackling, and pulling at his father, his face one big smile, as he pitted
his strong adolescent body against his father's larger one.
Watching her husband engulfed in a
sea of struggling bodies,she began to move slowly toward the door trying to make her
escape before Tony noticed and yelled, "Get Mommy! It's Mommy's turn."
Outside, the figure returned and
settled down for the night in the alley that ran between the brownstone and the
neighboring store. He looked up once or twice at the lighted bedroom window hearing the
squeals of glee that floated down softly on the night air. Pulling his coat around him, he
prepared for an all night vigil.
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