Madison Smartt Bell - The Color of Night (Vintage Contemporaries)

MADISON SMARTT BELL
The Color of Night

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of fifteen previous works of fiction, including All Souls Rising (a National Book Award finalist), Soldiers Joy, and Anything Goes. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Goucher College.

http://faculty.goucher.edu/mbell/

Also by Madison Smartt Bell

The Washington Square Ensemble

Waiting for the End of the World

Straight Cut

Zero db

The Year of Silence

Soldiers Joy

Barking Man

Doctor Sleep

Save Me, Joe Louis

All Souls Rising

Ten Indians

Narrative Design: A Writers Guide to Structure

Master of the Crossroads

Anything Goes

The Stone That the Builder Refused

Lavoisier in the Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution

Toussaint Louverture: A Biography

Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore

Devils Dream

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, APRIL 2011

Copyright2011by Madison Smartt Bell

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bell, Madison Smartt.
The color of night : a novel / by Madison Smartt Bell.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74241-4
1. Card dealersFiction. 2. Las Vegas (Nev.)Fiction. 3. Marginality,
SocialFiction. 4. Social isolationFiction. 5. Psychological fiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.E517C65 2011
813.54dc21
2010019104

www.vintagebooks.com

Cover photograph: Douglas Kirkland/Corbis
Cover design by Kimberly Glyder

v3.1

Pou myst ki te mandem fl

I have always said that my work is dictated to me by daemons. People probably think thats a figure of speech; maybe this book will prove it literal. Surely it is the most vicious and appalling story ever to pass through my hand to the page, so inevitably some people will hate it. I thank Jane Gelfman, Marie-Catherine Vacher, and Deborah Schneider for believing in its value when no one else did; Edward Kastenmeier, Sonny Mehta, and Diana Coglianese for the catalytic roles they played; and (especially) Dan Frank, for seeing in a different light.

This book was completed with support from the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Forgive is too weak a word. Recall the idea of At, which was so real to the Greeks. At is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of At. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have then to pass it on, to use the power on others.

IRIS MURDOCH , The Unicorn

Until the day the towers fell, Id long believed that all the gods were dead. For years, for decades, my head was still. Only sometimes, deep in the desert, the soughing ghost voice of O. But still, the bell of my head was silent, swinging aimlessly over the void.

I could watch it again, as much as I wanted, since the TV kept playing it over and over like a game of Tetris no one could win. No limit to how many times I could consume, could devour those images. Again and again the rapid swelling, ripening to the bursting point, and then the fall. The buckling, crumbling, blooming outward in that great orb of ruin before it showered all its matter to the ground. Those gnatlike specks that swirled around it proved to be mortals, springing out of the flames. Wrapped in the shrouds of their screaming, they sailed down.

It didnt matter how many saw one watching, since none can know anothers heart or mind. I had not known my blood could rise like that. Still, again, despite the years, the withering of my body.

Sometimes the television showed a plane biting into the side of a building, its teeth on its underside where the mouth of a shark isthen flame leaped up from the wound like the red surge from an artery. Then there were shots of living mortals on the street, wailing, raking the flesh from the bone of their faces, or some of them frozen, prostrate with awe.

So I saw Laurel for the first time again, Laurel kneeling on the sidewalk, her head thrown back, her hands stretched out with the fingers crooked, as weapons or in praise. Blood was running from the corners of her mouth, like in the old days, though not for the same reason.

Inside the casino, it never happened. Nothing there can enter in. Only the whirl of lights and the electronic burbling of machines, rattle of dice in the craps table cups, an almost inaudible whisper of cards, the friction-free hum of roulette wheels turning. Nothing is permitted to change.

It is a sort of fifth-rate hell, and I a minor demon posted to it. A succubus too indifferent to suck. I have my regulars, of course. Sometimes I even know their names. I deal them cards and they lose money. Occasionally one of them wins, of course, but not for long.

Mae, tonights mark says. My names a little sinister in his faint Slavic accent. Hes told me his but Ive forgotten. A retired airline pilot, I think he said. Some would find him good-looking, in that square-headed way all the pilots have. Silver hair and a face burnt to wrinkly leather. It takes a long time to catch a buzz from the watered drinks they give free here, but my regular has the determination to do it.

When you get off work, Mae? When you coming home with me? I part my painted lips to show my pleasant teeth to him, smooth away the black wing of my hair. I am conscious of not looking up at the dark bulb in the low tiled ceiling, where the two of us are captured by a fish-eye lens. I am older than he, perhaps a lot older, but as far as I know he doesnt know it.

I show my hole card: eight to a jack. Not much of a hand, but my regular took a hit too many and hes busted.

I might have worked a double shift, meaning sixteen hours straight. Sometimes I do. I dont get tired. Even in a fifth-rate hell there is no sense of the passage of time. I dont remember anything unusual that dayif there were fewer people than we normally got, a sudden emptying of the place, illumination from outside. No, I dont think there was that. It hardly matters what I recall, since no one is going to call me to witness, at least not on that point.

Probably two hours of darkness remained by the time I got into my car. It takes barely a quarter of that to drive from the casino to my dwelling. I dont listen to radio. I dont like the chatter, and I dont like music with singing in it, and I dont like to hear guitars or strings. Maybe I listened to piano during the dark drive, Bach or Chopin, in a minor key. No voice told me what rent had been torn in the world that day. When I went into the desert, I still didnt know.