The Sudden Dark

One

I was in a pub—only hardly knew which one—at some dismal part of the city tanned by moonlight, busy nursing a new glass of beer. One of many. By then I wasn't enjoying them anymore and was starting to endure them instead, starting to sway, starting to feel my senses shorten.

The place was too cozy to get lost in—small and intimate for the thin crowd of midnight drinkers, a football game playing in the corner to a silent audience, damp music for the pleasure of no one to dance to. Nobody spoke to each other, and nobody complained about loneliness because they were all too busy being lonely.

All of it reminded me of a play I looked at once; some old French play by a philosopher that I picked up and leafed through in the house of a couple of teenage druggies during a bust and haul years ago. I don't remember what it was called, but it was set in a Hell that looked like a plush hotel that no one could ever leave, not even if they wanted to.

I didn't think much of it then—the only thing I thought of was why a den of strung-out pushers were shooting up and reading old French plays—but I thought about it now. I was thinking that I should've read it closer, if we hadn't bagged it as evidence due to the traces of heroin globbed between the pages.

We managed to convict those kids on the heroin in that book. It sent them to Hell. I don't know what to make of something like that.

Anyway, it was sometime past midnight that I felt the arms of the barman steadying me up on my way from paying for another round.

'Easy there, mate,' he said, propping my balance like he was stringing a dinosaur skeleton bone-by-bone.

I mumbled something as he led me back toward my corner booth. His name was Wayne—I'd patronized the place long enough to have an informal relationship with him, just as I had plenty of other bartenders who let me use their establishments to torture myself. He was a sturdy man; short, squat-legged, broad-chested, and with the scars of deep teenage acne marked long ago in his face. He was young, too; couldn't have been more than thirty years old, but, then again, I'd never really had a reason to take a good look at him at all. All I looked at where the liquors he served me and the money he took from me all those nights I wasn't on the job.

But he seemed to be in a generous mood that evening, generous enough to help a damaged old drunk sit like me back in my wallowed gloom. He sat me down and straightened my glass and sat opposite me. I didn't know why.

'Look like you've had a couple, Maxie,' he said.

'Your job to measure drinks, or to pour them?'

He smiled a little, grim, low. 'Pour. The measuring's done in my spare time.'

I slouched forward and re-gripped my glass. 'Must be off the clock then.'

I took a drink. He watched me.

'You too,' he said.

The glass made an echo on the table, a louder thud than I'd expected. I looked at him.

'You...You're not on the force anymore, aren't you?' Wayne said. 'You mumbled something about it a while back.'

I didn't say anything, took another drink.

Wayne stiffed his posture and joined his hands over the table. His heavy eyes looked down and away from me.

Finally, I said, mostly to myself, 'Indefinite suspension,' not looking at him. 'Pending board evaluation.'

He tensed a little, and said nothing to that. There were thoughts hammering in the vein of his temple, the one directed across the booth at me. Finally, without matching eye contact, the barman said, 'So, you couldn't be on the job with anything right now, then?'

'On the job?'

'As in, you can't work cases or anything like that, huh? Officially, I mean. But—unofficially—I thought maybe I could talk to a second you about helping me out with something.'

'Call triple-zero,' I said into my drink.

Wayne was shaking his head. 'I can't really do that. Can you just hear me out for a second; maybe take something on not as an officer, but just, like, as a friend?'

I was looking at him now; not intrigued, not annoyed. Just looking. I wanted him out of my booth, out of my solitary misery already.

But I was also waiting to hear what it was he'd say.

With a cautious breath, Wayne said, 'I was thinking maybe you could help me find someone.'