Darkest night, brightest light

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Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2006 03:47:00 +0000 (UTC)

Tod reached up and pulled the stop-cord and almost immediately the bus
sighed and rattled and pulled to a stop.  He made his way down from the
back - none of the other passengers bothering to look up - and got out, and
the driver threw the bus back into gear and it angled down the highway.  Tod
looked after it for a few moments but consciously shook his head and turned
to face the open fields.  He could still hear the diesel engine slowly
fading; out here on the flatlands it would be just about forever before it
was completely gone.

Tod shuffled his feet in the gravel of the driveway as he walked up to Ash
and Jev's house.  He glanced at the wooden pole they kept in the middle of
the front yard.  Just like last time he'd been here, he wondered what it was
for.  Ordinary people might have flown a flag or something, but they didn't
have any rope or fittings for raising one, and it was just not quite
straight enough to be a flag pole anyway.  Tod knocked at the door and Ash
let him in.  He hadn't phoned he was coming over but she didn't seem
surprised to see him.

Very little surprised Ash.  Ash wore her hair in a lot of little thin braids
with pony beads on the ends to keep them from unravelling.  The beads were
green and yellow and red.  She put on a big smile when she recognized Tod
but went serious as soon as she saw the look on his face.  Tod wasn't a
happy soul right then.  He sat down at the kitchen table without comment and
Ash sat down opposite and waited for him to speak.

"I think I'm going to take the big step," he said, suddenly.  "You know the
one I mean.  I've been thinking about it for a while and don't try to
bullshit me about this."

Ash just looked at him for a while.  Then she got up and was doing something
at the stove; a kettle that Tod could have sworn he hadn't seen when he came
in suddenly was boiling and Ash was pouring from it into a clay mug and
adding a spoonful of instant coffee, and some condensed milk from an
already-open and apparently unrefrigerated can on the shelf above the stove. 
"Coffee?" she asked, over her shoulder, having already started to fill a
second mug anyway.

"Yeah, thanks."

"You better appreciate it, if it'll be your last."

Ash sat down again and looked at the surface of her own coffee for a whole
minute and then she said the words she'd been carefully arranging in her
head.  "It is given to each of us to accomplish certain things before we
pass out of this world.  We come here and live for a while that's all too
short anyway and it's not something that there are exceptions to.  You don't
get to choose only the good stuff.  There's both joy and pain.  I don't know
what-all's weighing you down that you think you need to step out of here. 
But if you think it's just like, I don't know, stepping off the bus, and you
can catch another one later, it just doesn't work like that, Tod.  And the
harder you make this for yourself, well then the harder it's going to be. 
You have to take control for yourself instead of giving up."

"Don't you tell me about taking control!"

Brown eyes stared across the table at Tod, as if trying to look right
through his skin.  Ash waited for his anger to blunt itself a little before
asking, mildly, "What the fuck do you mean?"

"It's all very well for you to say I have to take control.  You don't know
what it means.  You've never had to take control of your life.  You're,
you're like a Goddess or something.  Every choice you've wanted to make
you've had the chance.  Me, I've had to earn it.  And budget it, see? 
Taking some power means having other decisions forced on me.  Without a
choice.  Just no choice at all sometimes."

He took a swig of the coffee.  It tasted foul.  That milk was spoiled.

"I know it's hard.  Maybe, okay, maybe it's harder for some of us than for
others.  But it's hard for us all.  You think it's easy for me?  You know
that pole out there in my front yard?  Do you know what that pole actually
means, Tod?"

"No.  Actually, I've been meaning to ask."

"Good!"  She laughed, and shook her head, making the beads clack together. 
"I'm not going to tell you!  At least, not today.  Maybe, I don't know, next
week or something.  If you're still walking the roads of this world.  Maybe
a little incentive to stick around.  But part of it's that maybe being me
isn't so easy as you think."

"Indian giver," he muttered, but Ash just giggled.

"The thing is, I've walked a lot of those damn roads.  I know this country
like, well, something I know very well I guess.  There's nothing left for me
here.  Time to step out.  Do you know I'm the oldest one left?"

"Time to get some new blood down at the community hall, I guess--"

"That's not what I mean!  Even with new folks moving in all the time like
they do I'll be the oldest one here.  Nobody from my age will ever move into
this place again, that's for sure.  And I shouldn't still be hanging around. 
I ought to have stepped out long ago."

"Well, better late than never.  But you don't get to skip over the hard
part.  Sure it'll take you a long time to get ready, all the more so because
you're starting so late."  Ash looked up, out the window, and just as if she
were commenting on the grey scene outside, even though it was part of the
lesson she was trying to teach him, she commented, "Gonna be dark soon. 
Gonna be the darkest night.  Gonna be the brightest light too.  That's
something to be looking forward to."

Tod was not comforted.  "You-- I-- Ash-- dammit, woman, have you not heard a
word I've said?  You're talking to me like I just got off the bus.  I'm not
going to wait around hoping and bow my head because I started late.  I
didn't start late.  I started early and I have already done my time.  I paid
my dues.  I walked every road.  Not that it matters, convincing just you of
that, but I'm overdue to step out.  The time for me to step out is like five
years ago, not ten years into the future.  I'm not going just to get started
getting ready.  I'm already long since ready and I'm sick of waiting.  Why
won't you listen to me?"

She didn't say anything and when it was clear she wouldn't, Tod asked,
trying to make his voice sound as not-angry as he could so she would know he
didn't really blame her, especially, he realized, because he'd never see her
again, he asked, "Is Jev around?"

"Yeah, I think he's in the garage.  Making something.  You know."  She was
trying to make that sound light too, even though she also must have been
thinking it was the last words they might exchange.

Tod went out to the garage, and Jev was there, carefully filing a piece of
aluminum angle.  He had a bunch more of them in different sizes laid out
along a workbench ready to be smoothed and have the edges broken, and
standing next to him was a thing on legs mostly made out of aluminum angle,
with some tubes bolted on at different angles and stuff.  Tod couldn't guess
what the thing was, but Jev cleared that up immediately.

"Hiya, Tod!" and he gestured at the half-constructed device.  "Making rain!"

Tod smiled.  Jev was always up to something like that.  At least this one
was better than the thing with the locusts.  "Funny," he commented, "I though
rain was, you know, water falling out of the sky."

"Fair enough, fair enough.  What I'm actually making is a machine to trigger
rain.  See these pipes are going to work like the father of all tin whistles
and generate ultrasonic waves that shake the water droplets out of the
clouds."

"Will that actually work?"

"Don't know until we've tried it, will we?  But I've got a good feeling
about this one.  I'm aiming to test it the long weekend; you'd be welcome to
come down--"  Tod felt a pang.

"Yeah.  Well, Jev, I really kind of stopped in to say goodbye.  I'm going to
be in the next world before the long weekend."

Jev put down his file and looked at Tod.  "Tod, I, I don't know what to say."

"You don't have to say anything, Jev."

"No, that's not right.  I do have to.  It's my job, and I am zealous.  But I
don't know what to say."  He thought for a bit.  "I guess it's just I never
would have taken you for a quitter, Tod."

Tod despaired, but only of making Jev and Ash understand.  "I'm not
quitting.  That's the whole point.  Quitting would be giving up and letting
you and your wife bamboozle me into staying around for another twenty years
in this dead-end world, and then yeah, at the end of that you or your son or
somebody being all surprised that I haven't started my time yet even though
I've done it a hundred times over already.  Already, see?  I'm not talking
about starting.  I didn't come all this way just to be told I should start
working.  I came all this way so that I could be finished.  Oh, why didn't I
step out already?"

Jev was busy again making the rain, and Tod didn't feel like talking
anymore.  He pressed the button on the wall to open the garage door.  An
electromagnet released a steel ball that ran down a tube and bumped a valve
which let coloured water into a cylinder and lifted a float that (after a
couple more similar steps) raised the garage door.  Jev had made that
opener, too, and its operation usually didn't fail to raise a smile from
him.  But now he and Tod weren't speaking just because it was better at that
moment to be still, and Tod walked out of the garage into the night.  But he
stopped just at the edge of the pool of light cast by Jev's work lamp, and
he called back, "Goodbye."  Jev said something in return that Tod didn't
catch.

The busses were unaccountably regular at that far-away stop and he didn't
have a long time to wait before he could pick up the next one - heading out
of town.  He had everything he'd ever need again in his pockets and didn't
feel like going back to where the community hall would, this very moment, be
filled with "new folks" younger than himself and with nothing to talk about
with him.  He was stepping out.

And so soon there came the moment where he stood on the edge and looked down
at a city far below.  There was little to see down there except the
pinpoints of streetlights.  Here, he could make out the steeple of a church
outlined against some lighter-coloured patch of foliage.  Down beside it, an
unlit area he knew was the graveyard.  Over there, the illuminated upper
storey of a hospital.  He thought about visiting each of these in turn.

Tod mumbled the names of Ash and Jev and stepped out into the darkest night.

He was falling and it seemed to take forever and already he was regretting
it and wished he hadn't done it but it was too late now and now he was
wishing for it to be over so he wouldn't have to suffer this rushing feeling
of everything being stripped from him but on thinking of that he realised
that that was how he'd felt all his time as far back as he could remember so
the fall and the eventual landing and whatever would come after it would be
merciful, in reality.  He hallucinated scenes from a life, his own he
guessed, not in any particular order except maybe order of importance. 
Birth and love and joy and danger and, eventually, always death.  Even
before he reached the bottom he was already forgetting what all those words
meant, and he didn't have any left when the sudden unbearable but
fortunately brief pain hit him.

Tod was surrounded by blinding light, so bright he'd never seen such a light
before.  He felt motion all around him and heard voices he couldn't 
understand and he tried to add his own to them but all that came out was a 
scream as firm hands lifted him, wrapped a blanket around his fragile body,
and placed him in his mother's arms.
-- 
Matthew Skala, CS PhD student, University of Waterloo
mskala@math.uwaterloo.ca  <-- school
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca  <-- home
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/   http://bonobo-conspiracy.ca/

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Copyright © 2006 Matthew Skala
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