Nota bene: this is a sexually explicit novel. If you’re not comfortable reading fiction of this sort, please don’t download Darkness and Light. The other tales at the link below are considerably less daring and more conventional.
Having inherited a million dollars from his mother, a retired North Dakota school teacher, Byrd Holland has moved from Silicon Valley, California to rural Colorado. He’s bought a large, sunny house and a network protection software company on the brink of failure. He intends to turn the company around, build it up and take it public or sell it, and retire in luxury.
He’s a hard-driving, adroit middle-aged salesman who sells for the joy of selling and the feeling of getting away with things. He doesn’t know a great deal about business management, but trusts he’ll figure out what he needs to know as he goes along. He doesn’t have time for a wife or children, friends or pets or hobbies. He sets Sunday afternoons aside for “entertainment.”
Rebecca isn’t still a callgirl—unless she’s just playing hard to get. She’s about thirty, inelegantly dressed, unsure of herself, elusive. Byrd can’t read her well, but her first massage is one of the best he’s ever enjoyed, so he resolves to sell her on the idea of making an exception for him.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Not a wife, no. Nothing demanding and complicated like that. I did the marriage thing twice, and all I got out of it was one wife who turned out to be screwing everything in pants for drugs—no coke in those days, but pot and every kind of pill that was floating around—and one who wouldn’t or couldn’t cut me even a nickel’s worth of slack.
Maybe a girlfriend, more or less.
Paying for what you get is a lot simpler. Frankly, I had to figure it’s more honest, too, because it’s open. You ask for what you want. You negotiate. You make a deal. You get what you dickered for—no pun intended—and you pay the lady and you’re done. No hassles. No hurt feelings. Nothing left hanging over anybody’s head. Nothing to argue about. No mind reading. If you like the girl, you bring her back. If you don’t, you don’t. It’s fair. Everybody goes away happy.
It’s no different from buying a piece of software or ordering the meatloaf special at the burger joint down the hill from the office or staying in a hotel suite overnight and signing the credit card slip in the morning. It might not be true love forever and ever like in all the love songs on the radio—but if there’d never been any love in it, how come I still kept thinking about Mai? If you can pay a gal keep accounts for your company, why shouldn’t you pay another gal to rub your back and suck your dick and spread her legs? If you can see a doctor about your achy back, why not a callgirl about your achy balls? They’re only a few inches apart.
Boyfriend-girlfriend hadn’t done much for me. Girlfriends I’d tried on for size over the years since Jodie—without even a single exception—had made it plain they expected to get promoted to wives, and the sooner, the better. Meanwhile, it was buy me this and take me there and treat me to something else, and maybe you’ll get a nice missionary-style treat out of the deal Saturday night—and maybe you won’t, too, pal. If I’d wanted bullshit, I’d have called a damn farmer.
Mai had ended up being about 25% girlfriend. She’d made herself a callgirl plus—a callgirl who gradually came to mean more than just massages and blowjobs and fucks. She wasn’t pretty enough to be a regular girlfriend—but I’d sincerely liked her. I not only showed it with trinkets and toys and cash, but meant it, too, and still missed her and had to figure I probably always would. I still thought about Mona sometimes, too, didn’t I?
Was there a proposal in there somewhere? A plan I could lay on the table that Rebecca and I could talk over? I had to be suspicious of the whole boyfriend-girlfriend idea. For starters, if I was 54 and she was about 30, we’d have a sizeable number of years to bridge. For another thing, I’d already fallen in love with two little girls and lost them, and didn’t feel like going through that kind of ugliness all over again. Unofficial so-called “loans” and “gifts” and “favors” getting swapped for kindness and affection? Untidy, but probably workable in theory—something you could feel your way through bit by piece. You’d no doubt end up with a mostly unspoken price list. That seemed awfully sloppy—there’s nothing in the world more straightforward than cash—but if I stopped to think about it, how was that so different from sorting out who did what in the office? The employees got paid, plus we all hoped we’d be friends, too, right?
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Both reluctantly, Byrd and Rebecca embark upon something like a personal relationship. She entertains him generously, sometimes lavishly. He gives her $250 every Sunday, or “Rebeccaday,” as he calls it. They begin to exchange cautious confidences. He cooks dinners for her, gives her presents, listens to her troubles, plans to buy her a car.
Having cut his staff in half, Byrd devotes the rest of his time to making sales, figuring out how to manage his company, making more sales, struggling to develop new products, and making still more sales. What he lacks in scruples, he makes up for in determination. When the first big deal arrives, he’s ready for it, quick to push it through to full advantage.
There wasn’t any discrepancy between my numbers and Mary Beth’s. I took a quick deep breath and trusted I didn’t look as relieved as I felt, then told her for a $250 discount, I’d need the Kingdom logo on the finished product.
She said it wasn’t going to be a finished product—just a utility that only authorized network admins could work with. Unauthorized end users wouldn’t even be able to see it, much less access it and mess things up and make their net admins’ jobs more difficult than they already were. Mary Beth said, “J & J puts its name on the box, not the bandaids.”
I said, “I think it says ‘Band-Aid’ on the little paper pieces you— Hey, you’re good!” I interrupted myself as Amy, hastily rummaging through her purse, produced a bandaid. I gave her ankle a light, silencing kick under the gleaming conference table. I didn’t open the translucent paper wrapper because I wasn’t sure the backing strips were brand-marked.
Mary Beth eyed Amy impenetrably with glacial blue eyes. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see her smile—but a frown wouldn’t have astonished me, either. She said, “I guess I can see your point, Byrd. Everybody brands. They’re overproliferated already, and it’s getting worse every day—but let’s never mind that, okay?
“Let’s be reasonable and just call it your choice—would you rather have your Kingdom name on the splash screen that only a few hundred tech geeks in the whole world are ever going to see, or would you rather bump the price up to $155? And not a penny more,” Mary Beth added with finality, and showed me what a big, steady index finger she had.
Ignoring Amy’s kick, I asked, “How many copies?”
Mary Beth replied, glancing at her notes, “I believe that was nailed down yesterday, Byrd. 1,200 installations ASAP, 250 to 300 a month plus or minus—more likely plus—and it’ll be our accounting, totally fair and square, of course, and we’ll call it net 30 from the end of each calendar month—although in all honesty, I’ve got to tell you that’ll probably actually be closer to net 45 between now and Q1, 2003. It’s a cash flow situation.”
I said, “We’re on at $155, Mary Beth, your brand on the splash screen.”
She bobbed her head and smiled another hearty smile as she stood up to reach across the table for my hand, then Amy’s, then Randy’s. She said emphatically, “Good,” as she found her cell phone to call in the person who’d draw up and sign the contract. Mary Beth excused herself with another 250-watt smile and hoped we’d have a nice flight home.
The meeting had lasted 14 minutes.
Suddenly squirming like a six-year-old girl with an extremely full bladder, Amy reached for the bandaid I’d kept in my closed left hand since taking it from her. When I pocketed it and gestured for her to shut up and sit still, she found another one in her purse, shredded the wrapper, and saw the backing was plain white. Amy gawked at me with wide, awed eyes.
I winked as if to say, “Settle down, kid. I told you to trust me to play the cards, didn’t I?”
Byrd’s account of his efforts to rescue the struggling company gradually reveals him as a facile liar, a hustler, a whoremonger, an ex-convict, a bisexual with a vicious streak, a pederast, a racist, and a man haunted by monstrous fears and seething hatreds. Obliquely at first, he dares to look into the darkness inside himself with nascent honesty. As his company inches out of the red and his lively, still largely amorphous relationship with Rebecca deepens and turns warmer, he begins to unbend, look around himself with a less predatory eye.
The band was Silence. The only song it had put out that I’d ever heard of was Star Waltz, which took up both sides of an LP record. I’d heard it the first time in C block at Camp Lorimer in the rainy, gusty early winter of 1971. Younger guys, black and white alike, listened to a Seattle station that played jazz and blues late at night. The DJ, who called himself “Lord” somebody or other, said he didn’t know anything about the band—for all he knew, it was white—but hey, give a listen, peoples, ’cause it was miles past cool.
It was.
Rebecca held her arms near her torso through the first movement. She let them wave out, brought them back, turned and turned as the music whirled and the drum finally came in. The drum still sounded out of sync with the guitars at first—but it couldn’t have been, or she wouldn’t have been able to show me the rhythm and counter-rhythm. Plain drumming by modern standards, but it was where it needed to be—back behind the lead guitar that never shrieked or screeched or relied on rock and roll tricks, but just sailed on its solitary way, miles and miles high above everything else.
She moved with it. She played rhythm against counter-rhythm as if she were one of the instruments. She danced around the bass and rhythm guitar, not following the lead, but one with it, true to it. Her feet moved left-left-right, then right-right-left as they followed her hips that led her shoulders that somehow weren’t connected to her neck and head the way I’d always seen.
Where was the piano? Had I only imagined it? Misremembred it?
I’d paid $.50 for the cassette tape at a yard sale in Brentwood Jodie had wanted to check out a couple weeks before we’d gotten married. I probably didn’t play it three or four times before it broke. It didn’t occur to me the record might have been reissued on CD. Why hadn’t I thought to look for it on the internet?
Tears stung my eyes as I watched her bounce into the second movement. She was all elbows and wrists and knees going every whichway at once as the music went rollicking into the liveliest, jauntiest boogie-woogie of all time. The saxophone came in briefly, not to be heard again until the very end—and even then only distantly, almost like an afterthought or a loosely connected memory.
It was whooping, stomping, laughing, finger-snapping, whooping louder blues. It was rampaging blues from smoke-filled after hours clubs on the South Side of Chicago. It was a boogie-woogie for Saturday nights in the riotous, righteous years when I’d been the property of the state of Washington. We listened to the music late at night on scratchy-sounding cheap radios. We saw it on TV. We just couldn’t join it.
Rebecca jitterbugged and lindyhopped, dipped and bounced and twirled and made the streamers wave and float in the air. No, the piano wasn’t just my imagination. There it was—cascades of crystalline notes spilling down and down and down, endlessly down and down in whirling, swirling patterns.
The piano and rhythm guitar made me think of two high school girls dancing themselves silly together because the boys were still holding up the walls, too shy to venture out on the floor.
The lead guitar strutted and stomped, strutted and sauntered, sauntered and rolled and dipped and spun around and took a brief break—then rocked on back to show the whole wide world how it was really done. It was so good, there was nothing else to compare it to. It was the heart and soul—the very essence—of boogie-woogie. It was loose as Rebecca’s knees, but tighter than a guitar string wound to the point where another quarter-turn would snap it. It went this-this way and that-that way and this-this way faster than the ear could even hope to hear.
Star Waltz was what white college girls did variations on the twist to—but what skinny 15-year-old anthracite ghetto girls danced their twitchy nigger asses off to. It was boogie-woogie with a vengeance—with an attitude and a half. It went nine ways from nowhere and back around again. It never let up for an instant—and gorgeous half-naked Rebecca went all the way with it easily as if she were strolling around the yard looking at flowers on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It was easy as breathing for her. The girl should have been a ballerina.
Without warning, Byrd finds himself in police custody. He can’t decipher whether Rebecca is a cold-blooded murderer or the light of his life. He can’t guess whether he’ll succeed in talking his way out of his self-inflicted predicament or lose everything and end up back in prison. Nothing makes sense. Suddenly, everything he’s ever believed turns out to be a lie.
That’s when Byrd Holland’s life comes crashing down around him.
Darkness and Light is the first full-sized piece of fiction I’ve written since the late 1980s. I didn’t want anything to do with this tale. I’ve never found evil even remotely interesting. I put off writing it the larger part of a year. I tried to sabotage it. Even after laboring through several draughts, I shoved it aside for several months to write Line, a far less complex, far kinder novella. Some tales simply demand to be told: that’s all.
It’s serious literature, complete with finely crafted narrative voice, richly woven plot, and a central character you’d have to be less than human not to loathe, but won’t ever forget. Darkness and Light is compelling; it’s lyric; it’s at once diffuse and dense; it’s businesslike; it’s sexually explicit. This 200,000-word tale is modern as tomorrow’s news on the internet, timeless as Greek tragedy.
Now, if you’ll forgive me, it’s time to return to painting.