The Color of Night
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),
Soldier’s Joy,
and
Anything Goes.
He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Goucher College.
Also by Madison Smartt Bell
The Washington Square Ensemble
Waiting for the End of the World
Straight Cut
Zero db
The Year of Silence
Soldier’s Joy
Barking Man
Doctor Sleep
Save Me, Joe Louis
All Souls’ Rising
Ten Indians
Narrative Design: A Writer’s 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
Devil’s Dream
A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, APRIL 2011
Copyright ©
2011
by 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 author’s 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 dealers—Fiction. 2. Las Vegas (Nev.)—Fiction. 3. Marginality,
Social—Fiction. 4. Social isolation—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.E517C65 2011
813’.54—dc21
2010019104
Cover photograph: Douglas Kirkland/Corbis
Cover design by Kimberly Glyder
v3.1
Pou mystè ki te mande’m fè’l
I have always said that my work is dictated to me by daemons. People probably think that’s 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 Até, which was so real to the Greeks. Até is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of Até. 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
Contents
Until the day the towers fell, I’d 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 didn’t matter how many saw one watching, since none can know another’s 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 is—then 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,” tonight’s mark says. My name’s a little sinister in his faint Slavic accent. He’s told me his but I’ve 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 doesn’t 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 he’s busted.
I might have worked a double shift, meaning sixteen hours straight. Sometimes I do. I don’t get tired. Even in a fifth-rate hell there is no sense of the passage of time. I don’t remember anything unusual that day—if there were fewer people than we normally got, a sudden emptying of the place, illumination from outside. No, I don’t 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 don’t listen to radio. I don’t like the chatter, and I don’t like music with singing in it, and I don’t 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 didn’t know.