Long, Slow Dark

When he was eighteen, Darren Young left home. He did not say goodbye, not to his parents or his sisters or even to Patty Williams, who said that she loved him. He didn’t believe that she loved him, not really, but rather that she wanted to love him. Or maybe, he thought later, he simply didn’t love himself and found the idea that she loved him too outlandish to believe. Still, she said the words and he said them back, because he was young, and a romantic, and because they were naked on a blanket. He said the words and knew them for a lie.

He took her home and they stood together beneath the porch light. The sun had set and true night was settling over the small town. She stared up at him, her eyes huge and brown under the light. He was holding her hand and pretending not to feel the heavy weight of her father’s eyes from the window. Patty’s father didn’t like Darren and made a point to say so whenever Patty wasn’t in the room.

“Say it again,” Patty demanded.

“I love you,” Darren lied, knowing what she wanted to hear.

“I love you too, Darren,” she said, her cheeks flushing.

That was the moment he decided, although he did not know it. He smiled at her and she beamed up at him. He leaned in and kissed her. It was a chaste kiss. The kind that awkward teenage boys know will let them avoid a beating from a teenage girl’s father. It was not like the kisses they shared earlier.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” said Patty.

“I’ll be waiting,” said Darren, with an intuition that he was lying about that, as well.

He waited until Patty was inside, and the door firmly, shut before he walked down his car. He opened the driver side door. Things were moving inside him, shifting into a new configuration. Just for a moment, he felt preemptive nostalgia for what he was about to lose. He heard the front door to Patty’s house open and the tenuous nostalgia evaporated. Her father walked down to the sidewalk. Darren closed the door to his car and waited.

Patty’s father was a short and bearded. He taught European history courses at a nearby university and the man reminded Darren of a jellyfish. He was pale, amorphously shaped, and not precisely frightening; but, something that might hurt you if you tread without care. Mr. Williams took up station on the far side of the car and offered Darren a pinched, doughy, dour expression. Then, Patty’s father gave Darren a longer look and his expression softened, like butter.

“Mr. Williams,” said Darren. “Good evening.”

“Darren,” said the man, still staring. “I wanted to talk to you, but it seems that won’t be necessary.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“You’re leaving,” said Mr. Williams. “It’s all over your face. You didn’t tell Patty, did you?”

Darren stood there, silent, for a moment. He had not known, not until he heard the words spoken aloud, that he was leaving. Once the words were in the air, though, he recognized their truth.

“I guess so,” said Darren. “I didn’t tell her.”

Patty’s father looked off to the horizon and spoke in a hushed whisper, “I’d take it as a kindness if you didn’t tell her. Just go.”

At the realization that he was leaving, Darren found it easy to ask a question he had always avoided.

“Why do you hate me so much? I’ve never done anything to you.”

Mr. Williams kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, but Darren saw him wince.

“I don’t hate you. I’m afraid for Patty. She’s smart, headed for college, but she’d leave with you. Or stay here to be with you. She can do anything, but not if she’s with you.”

“Why not?” Darren demanded.

“You’re lost, Darren. She can’t build a life with someone who’s lost,” Mr. Williams paused. “You might find yourself or you might drown while you look. I don’t want her to drown with you.”

Darren was struck speechless, the words like embers on bare skin. The bitterness he’d always felt for Patty’s father transmuted into a quiet hatred. The idea that Patty’s father could be right terrified Darren. Lost. The weight of that word pushed Darren into his car. He might not love Patty, but he didn’t want to drag her under with him. In the deep night, he packed a bag, gathered the money he’d squirreled away, and left.

Darren sipped his beer. He had told the story, as he always did. He told it the way some people cast the evil eye or perform the sign of the cross, as a warding off of evil. What he didn’t know was what evil he meant to keep at bay. He reflected that perhaps the tale wasn’t a warding off, but simply a warning. He was a man that leaves.

“That’s quite a story,” said Maggie from across the booth.

She was small woman, with dark eyes that revealed nothing but a hard shell. There was a telltale tingle along Darren’s breastbone when she looked at him, telling him what she wasn’t. Not that it bothered him. Even the damned sought solace in the long, slow dark. He knew that better than anyone.

She wore a pale, cream pantsuit and Darren expected she was in town for a business meeting or a trade show. He’d chosen the bar at random and it was nice enough to attract a better class of drunks. She picked him out and made her approach, like a shark. He was the kind of man that women like her took to their hotel rooms on business trips, often without regard for their wedding rings. Maggie’s hand was free of jewelry.

“I suppose it is,” he offered, noncommittal.

The story had passed his lips so often that the words were just empty shapes and noise in the air, like an oft-repeated catechism, and absent anything but vestigial meaning, or so he’d told himself countless times. He had almost convinced himself that telling the story wasn’t penance.

“What happened to her?”

Darren said nothing, at first. The question was off script.

“Her who?” He asked.

“Patty.”

“I have no idea,” said Darren.

It wasn’t a precise truth, but not quite a lie either.

“You never looked her up? Never asked anyone about her? Not even a search online?”

“No. I never did. Never saw the point.”

“You’re some kind of cold bastard, aren’t you?”

The question should have been accusatory, but her tone was a tangled mess. There was admiration, blossoming lust, and even some of the casual damning such as story deserved. There was also an undercurrent to it, something flinty that Darren read as self-loathing on her part. That was her problem, though, Darren told himself in no uncertain terms.

“Only when it counts,” he said, giving her a hollow, predatory smile.

Maggie paid her tab and, on script once more, took him back to her hotel. It was a nice hotel, which Darren had learned over the years simply meant that the staff acted nicer and things looked cleaner. He had concluded, after a while, that nice hotels were worse than cheap ones. Cheap hotels wore their indifference on their sleeves. He shrugged it off. He wouldn’t be there long enough to care.

“You don’t talk much,” said Maggie, as they rode the elevator up.

“That a problem?”

“An observation,” she offered.

He followed her off the elevator and to her room. She slid the plastic key-card in the slot above the handle and pushed open the door. She walked in, tossing her purse onto a small table.

“Do you want a drink?” She asked.

“Sure.”

He walked to the window and looked out. Cities at night, from a height or a distance, enthralled Darren. They were starscapes at ground level. Darren wondered, on occasion, if he liked cities at night because darkness hid the decay and offered the illusion that the cities lacked substance. At night, only the white shimmer of fluorescents and the orange haze of sodium-vapor bulbs gave them shape or form. Those cities could be great parades of angels or fairies, returning home after a long war. During the day, there was no illusion to comfort him.

“Here you go,” said Maggie.

She held the drink out to him. He took the glass and sipped from it. The vodka, expensive and smooth, left a comfortable burn in his throat. She stepped toward him, unbuttoned his shirt, and pulled it open. She ran a finger down the center of his chest, along a slightly puckered scar. The scar tingled again.

That was the moment, he thought. If she was going to try to kill him, that was the moment she would choose. He was tired and envious of those illusory armies he imagined returning home from a long war. His war had also been long, but no parades waited for him. At best, he might be mourned by a handful of people like himself.

Choosing to bed the enemy started out as a cheap thrill. When the thrill wore off, he learned to live for those telltale moments when Maggie, or something just like her, might try to take his life. He lived for those moments and he lived on his hope that one of them might succeed in killing him. His war had been a long one and Darren Young was tired.

“Heart surgery?” She asked.

The moment passed and Darren’s hope receded.

“Something like that,” he said and knocked back the rest of the vodka.

If he thought about it, Darren might have said he used her or, perhaps, they used each other. If he thought about it longer, he would have admitted it was a poor, temporary balm that soothed a deeper yearning. Darren didn’t think of such things. He was a romantic no longer. He poured two glasses of the vodka. He felt her eyes on him, tracing the map of scars on his arms, his legs, and his back: a visual history of pain.

She lay on the bed, covered to the waist. Her small breasts moved slowly as she breathed and watched him. He walked over to her and handed her the glass, or he tried to hand it to her. She looked up at him.

“You know what I am, don’t you?” She asked.

He shrugged and tried to hand her the glass again. She took it in a shaking hand. Vodka sloshed over the lip of the glass. She took a hurried drink and then set the vodka on the stand next to the bed.

“Does it matter?” He asked.

“Are you here to kill me?”

“Why would I do that?”

Darren picked through the pile of clothes on the floor, pulled on his boxers and jeans, then sat down at the end of the bed.

“I’ve heard about people like you,” she whispered, “mortals that hunt the damned.”

“I didn’t come looking for you,” said Darren. “I’m just passing through.”

They looked at each other across the expanse of sheet, Darren’s pale green eyes meeting Maggie’s dark brown eyes. He wondered if she might try to kill him after all. He thought he might even let her, if she could be quick enough.

Darren rolled down the window and the roar of highway noise crashed into the car like a wave. He shifted uncomfortably and glanced at the passenger seat, where Maggie sat. He didn’t know why she came with him. He didn’t know why he offered, except, deep down, he did know why. She had watched him finish getting dressed, her fear like a third person in the room. She watched until he opened the door to leave.

“There’s money in my purse. Cash,” she said.

He looked back at her, not sure whether shock or offense was the appropriate response. Then, she cried, silent, terrible tears that were harder for Darren to watch than sobs or keening ever would have been. They weren’t tears of sadness. Those were the tears of someone who had left sadness behind, because sadness belongs to the living, belongs to souls. Maggie’s tears were tears of regret.

“Just go. Leave me alone,” she said.

An old understanding, from a time before his body had been covered in scars, from a time when he had been stung by the words of a young woman’s father, stirred inside Darren. He didn’t want to be alone and he didn’t think that Maggie, whoever or whatever she was, did either. He looked out into the hall and thought for a moment.

“I’m heading west,” he said. “For now, anyways.”

Maggie said nothing.

“You can come with me, if you want. I’ll wait in the lobby for fifteen minutes.”

He went to the lobby and, good to his word, waited. He didn’t imagine she would come down, but she did. She looked as dumbfounded to find him there as he felt to see her there. They didn’t speak to each other. Not when he put her small bag in the trunk or opened the door for her. Not when he pulled onto I-70 and they escaped the city limits of Indianapolis. It was only after he opened the window and the roar of noise and wind hit his face that Darren spoke.

“This is complicated,” he said and regretted stating the obvious.

“Just drive, Hunter,” said Maggie.

“My name’s Darren,” he said.

“Your name is Hunter,” she said. “Now drive, before sanity catches us.”

Hunter drove.