The Light is the Darkness Read online

  Dad’s shoulders were roughly the span of a mattock handle under a plaid coat. He looked like a bison hunched at the wheel, not a lunatic physicist hell bent for leather to the airport. He was a second generation Swede. His own father got bayoneted on an atoll in the sunny South Pacific during WWII. Dad staunchly refused to drive Japanese imports. Wouldn’t touch sushi. He didn’t even glance out the window at the mountain.

  Conrad realized he was not alone in the backseat. There was an old guy beside him, and he resembled Dad, but much older and dressed in weird clothes, a space suit or something, and he stared at Conrad in a way the boy would grow accustomed to over time. His eyes bled pity. There followed a psychedelic moment like Borges shaking hands with himself. And Conrad knew him because they’d met before. The old man said, Time is a ring, then fractured into motes of sparkling dust.

  1980, 1980. For Conrad, 1980 was the magic number, albeit in the cursed, black magic sense. Ten years old and on the road to Hell.

  The Navarro family shipped off to the Pyrenees and sought a miracle from Dr. Drake in his converted Thirteenth Century Abbey that locals referred to as The Cloister. Over the final months of Ezra’s decline, Mom, Dad, Imogene, and Conrad camped in the hostel of Blanco Village a few miles from the base of the mountain retreat and awaited a miracle.

  That was a muddy spring and brutal summer. A summer of goats, flies and sluggish, crawling heat fended off with mosquito nets and pails of shaved ice. Sullen locals and ugly foreigners—Americans and Brits, mainly—clumped in the hostel taproom, or loitered near the well house in the village square, pecking each other like pullets in a too-small cage, squabbling over the news casts on the Armed Services Radio Network, the papers that came in the weekly mail run. It was a uniformly mournful time. The Cold War was colder than ever and an American embassy was in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Nobody in the village of Blanco seemed overjoyed about anything from the muddy roads that ate corduroy for breakfast, to the great louse infestation among the hens, to the low supply of drinkable whiskey in the hostel cellars. One of the Germans even complained publicly and bitterly that the farm girls weren’t as free with their charms as peasants in “more civilized” provinces. Tempers ran hot and led to several ungainly, drunken brawls in the damnable mud, although everything was usually patched up with a handshake and a few rounds of cheap booze.

  Every day, the family mounted the bus, a relic from WWII, and endured the kidney-crushing trip up the switchback trail. Mom and dad usually sat near the shipping tycoon from Essex, or, if they were in the mood, exchanged pleasantries with another American couple, vociferous college professors from Madison Wisconsin. Imogene hung around with the youngest daughter of an Austrian diplomat and the pair traded earrings, braided each other’s hair and nattered incomprehensibly. Conrad remained apart, stoically regarding the sheer cliffs and smoky ravines beneath the bus wheels, his ears ringing with the girls’ false laughter.

  In the beginning, the bus was overloaded with patrician families eager to make the daily pilgrimage. As days blurred into weeks and months, more empty seats appeared. New, fresh faces arrived on occasion, cowed into abject timidity by the shopworn expressions of those who remained from the spring. Come the glowering days of late August, Conrad was once more pressed to the edges of a boisterous, sweaty crowd composed of mostly strangers.

  Ezra got a little worse each visit and everybody cried and sleepwalked around with red eyes and broken veins in their noses. Mom was the one who kept them together for the most part, diluted the incipient hysteria into a persistent mood of shrill grief, although she was a bag of bones and raw nerves before it was through. She’d taken to arguing with Dad. Not little arguments, either, but real bruisers and they went out into road for the worst of them, stood in the rain and shouted down the thunder.

  Mom hated what Dr. Drake and his cronies were doing to Ezra. She wasn’t sure precisely what they were doing as no one was allowed to see behind the curtain. Drake interacted with the families via intermediaries, a duo of ancient, hook-nosed men who might’ve been twins with their identically thick Greek accents and dusty suits, their matching expressions of reptilian dispassion. The Greeks didn’t give away anything, ever. All anyone really knew about Drake’s technique was that it involved hypnotic regression via multiple mediums, and routine injections of an experimental medicine. There were side effects, of course. Pain and suffering. Nightmares and night sweats; exploding neuroses. None of it would’ve passed muster back in the States, but this was the refuge of last resort.

  Mom begged Dad to call it off, to take Ezzy home and let him spend his remaining days in familiar surroundings. He missed his dog, his friends, his roomful of trophies.

  Then, one day between summer and autumn, it was time to go.

  Mom and Dad lovingly dressed Ezra in his Sunday best, packed his remains in a wooden box and shipped him overseas on a gigantic cargo plane flown by pock-cheeked men in parkas and goggles.

  Conrad slept most of the way home across the Atlantic, drugged by growling turbines, the clink and jostle of nets and straps. There had been a funeral, although Conrad didn’t recall much, and after the dirt was shoveled on and the adults drowned themselves in alcohol and misery at the reception, nothing else was said. The coffin lid, the book of Ezra, was closed. Well, mom sailed her Supercub into a mountainside the next summer and dad went to pieces, lost his job at Drome Corp. and took a permanent vacation at Grable, the swankiest funny farm west of the Mississippi, and eventually died on the toilet, just like Elvis—then the incident was finished.

  …The dream skipped forward…

  Years later, when they’d grown and shuffled off to their respective colleges, long after Conrad was well on his way to cult fame and ruin and Imogene was a superstar graduate from the university of J.E. Hoover, and they’d reconciled themselves to Dad never getting out of the loony bin, his little sister summoned him for dinner at the Monarch Grill, a hole in the wall they haunted as teenagers. She’d materialized from the midnight blue, smiled that hard, sharp smile of hers and kissed him. Little sister was bittersweet, like gourmet European chocolate. She didn’t understand him, didn’t respect his choices, considered his shadow-career as a latter-day gladiator a colossal waste of superior genetic material. Her points were well taken—a Navarro was capable of almost anything, even Conrad whose talents ran to the brutish end of the spectrum. Daddy, a physicist cum Olympic caliber power lifter; Mom, a PhD poet and ace pilot; Ezra, the teen baseball star and internationally published essayist.

  Conrad could’ve been an artist, a space shuttle pilot, a decathlon champion, except with advanced degrees in theology and quantum mechanics. Like the rest, he’d excelled at everything he’d attempted. He was stronger than Dad and smarter than Ezra, a million magnifications more artistically gifted than either of them and maybe a bit superior in that department to Imogene. Imogene was the rapier wit, the pop psychologist and crack shot with any light caliber sidearm, the deductive genius with metaphorical balls of steel.

  Imogene had always been the mean one of the bunch, too. She opened up the old wounds with a casual swipe of her claws.

  Kill anything interesting lately, bro?

  An attack-trained orangutan.

  With your bare hands, Tarzan style?

  Hell no! Ka-Bar.

  Wimp. Why do you pick on poor beasts, huh?

  It was gonzo. Spent its whole life in a cage being pumped full of growth hormones and zapped with a cattle prod. The thing wanted to eat my liver.

  Good for it!

  Hey, it’s almost never animals now. I’m in the major leagues. I get to slaughter big, sweaty Turks and axe-wielding Slavs.

  Oh my. Clubs and knives, oh, oh—and tridents?

  And whips and nets. I crash chariots; the ones with spiked hubs like Kirk Douglas drove. Circus Maximus, sis.

  Lucky you. You guys prance around in costumes like Mexican wrestlers, except you try to murder or maim each other.

  Yeah.

/>   Who pays for this spectacle? Ever really ponder that one, Connie? Ever think about what sort of people arrange this secret world you star in?

  Rich folks.

  Guess they’d have to be to recreate Caesar’s favorite pastime. That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire?

  These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill.

  Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there.

  It’s a living.

  Over steak and wine, she played with her knife, which was an unsettling bookend to her smile, and said Ezzy didn’t die of cancer. Ezzy was murdered. Drake murdered him, murdered a bunch of people, probably. Why? Because Drake was a devil. Quite possibly, the good doctor was Old Poger himself, horns and tail.

  Conrad was unsure how to assimilate this new information. Seeing Sissy was cool, but he had a lot on his plate, what with the strict schedule of arena events and the jet-setting debaucheries accorded a celebrity of his stature; command performances. He nodded and composed a semi-credulous reply that didn’t fool either of them.

  Imogene was always the smart one of the kids. When it came to Conrad she was practically telepathic. Fuck it. Forget I said anything. How’s your goddamn steak tare tare? You eat like an animal. Dress you in some skins, you’d fit right into a cave man exhibit. Fucking troglodyte.

  Genie—

  Fuck it, I said. Got any toot? You rich bitches have snow falling out of your pockets, don’t you?

  Sure. I know a guy, fix us right up.

  Conrad lost his appetite. Not much later, he lost his sister too…

  III

  Mr. Navarro?”

  And the dream ended like a soap bubble bursting.

  Light—too much, too red—came through the water; then the wavering oval of an elongated face, a blotch of tapestry, the pulsing glow of a slide projector. He sat upright in the great marble tub and gasped. Water streamed from his face and goggles. The goggles had ceased transmitting, but their after-images crackled behind his eyelids, asynchronous to the rapidly shuttering patterns on the white-lit square of wall.

  Dr. Enn rose from the table with the complicated recording equipment and brought him a towel and gently retrieved the goggles. Dr. Enn returned to his table, careful not to trip over the loops of wires and plastic cords. Agents Marsh and Singh lounged across the room, sipping scotch from glasses, the bottle on a small table between them.

  The temperature in the room was a balmy eighty degrees, and yet Conrad shivered and his hands were blue. He wiped his face and staggered from the tub to a patio chair and pulled on his flip flops. Conrad was not a tall man, but immense through shoulders and hips, and his legs were grotesquely thick such that he walked with an odd, shuffling gait. His skin was burned and dark and terribly scarred as if a shark had taken bites out of him then dragged him face down across the coral. He said, “Time.” His was a rusty voice, a drinker’s voice, the voice of a man who’d survived a hanging.

  Dr. Enn consulted his watch. He was much lovelier and infinitely fragile compared to his subject. His hair was tight and black and he might’ve been a runway model. His pretty face bore the elastic expression of a man knuckling under to sea-sickness; sweat oozed from him. He said, “Seventeen minutes, forty-three seconds. I’m impressed…although it’s hardly a record.”

  “How is Esogi? Bangkok, right?” Dr. Esogi was Dr. Enn’s colleague at the institute researching Conrad’s ‘compellingly bizarre’ physiological and neurological activity.

  “There’s a symposium. Very prestigious.”

  “Old Burt’s golfing and whoring it up between panels, I bet.”

  “Yes—I was hoping to accompany him.” Enn managed a smile.

  Conrad laughed and found his cigarettes and matches on the coffee table and lighted one. He studied Enn as Enn’s face gathered the unwholesome light from the projection beam. “Are you ok, Doc?”

  “Oh, ha-ha, don’t mind me.” Worms crawled across Enn’s cheek. A butterfly sloughed its chrysalis and fluttered against his forehead. The sun was a black disc rising from his left eye. “Do you mind if I kill this—?”

  “Please.” Conrad gestured indulgently. His hands had steadied, his pulse rate begun to drop into the high-normal range.

  Dr. Enn shuddered and clicked off the projector and the room was flush with soft blues and blacks. After a significant pause, he said, “Dr. Esogi mentioned your unorthodox modalities, but I must confess...” He referred, of course, to the dull gray tube on the table, its tightly rolled sheets of waterproof paper with their diagrams and formulas; micro-slides of photography that ranged from disquieting to monstrous, and the monstrously incomprehensible. “We’ll resume the battery when you’ve rested.”

  “Thanks, doc. This’ll be the last session for a while, so be thorough.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Sorry, doc. My public demands an appearance.”

  “I think I’ll detour to the bar and have a drink. Gentlemen.” Dr. Enn nodded to the agents, grabbed his coat and left in a reasonably dignified hurry.

  “The fuck is this operation you got going?” Marsh said. “I told you, Leo, we dig through a few phone records, make a few calls, follow that fruity little doc around, we find out where our boy disappears to.”

  “Yes, what is this operation?” Singh nodded at the machinery, the tangle of leads.

  “Sensory stim,” Conrad said without a hint of irony. “Big match coming up in a few weeks. I use all kinds of techniques to get my head in the game. Hypnotherapy, regression. Whatever.”

  “But…if that little fellow is correct, you just held your breath for over fifteen minutes. That isn’t humanly possible.”

  Marsh said, “Where did you get that collage?” He was still staring at the projector and what had beamed from its eye. “That’s vintage Cold War eyes-only shit. Some kind of mind-conditioning protocol. What the hell you want with a military grade brainwashing protocol.”

  “I don’t want it. Imogene left it behind.”

  “Doesn’t explain why you’re enacting the procedure. This isn’t the kind of shit you play with, Connie.”

  “Trying to get into my sister’s head,” Conrad said. As always he told most of the truth. It was the only way to stay half a step ahead of the bastards. You told ninety-nine percent of the truth and saved the lies for emergencies. “She’s after something, I don’t know what. Maybe she’s trying to shed some light on a moldy old government conspiracy. Maybe she wants to prove my dad was locked away because he knew too much. She didn’t bother to tell me.”

  “We’ll be taking these materials off your hands,” Singh said.

  Conrad smiled. “Easy come, easy go. She found them lying around somewhere.” Somewhere included abandoned bunkers and secret stashes and lost government installations around the world, a few decommissioned black ops facilities. “The stuff you’re looking at belongs to a file under MK Ultra. Way before we were born to this veil of tears. Project TALLHAT, I think.” He waited for a flicker of recognition, of fear or surprise, but the agents just stared like fish. “And on the subject of Genie—”

  “Haven’t heard anything since the South America rumor,” Marsh said. “Which, as you discovered, was a wild goose chase.”

  “She’s dead, Jim,” Singh said and gazed sadly into his empty glass.

  “Dead or burrowed in like a tick,” Marsh said. He refilled both their glasses. The men sipped and kept staring at Conrad with those fish-eyed expressions. “We can’t figure out what she was up to.”

  “We haven’t quite decided what you’re up to.” Singh lighted a cigarette.

  “Me? Fighting. Looking for my sister. She was obsessed with finding some guys. Cold War guys. Guys associated with this TALLHAT program. I need another name. Maybe two. Figure you boys can help me. These papers gotta be hooked into a
database somewhere.”

  “No shit,” Marsh said. “Want us digging up bones in an the Old Spooks Graveyard? Could be dangerous. Gonna be costly, for sure.”

  “How do you plan to compensate us?” Singh breathed smoke. “Planning to sell a house? One of your bolt holes? Is that wise? You seem to worry about death from above more than anybody I’ve met.”

  “I worry about death from every direction. There’s a payday coming. What do you say?”

  “Yeah? Who are you up against?” Marsh appeared intrigued.

  “The Greek.”

  “He’s the number three contender,” Singh said. “I’m impressed.”

  “They must be betting on him to murder you,” Marsh said. He glanced at the ashtray full of cigarette butts and smirked. “The Greek carves you then gets his own shot at the title. You’re a tune up match.”

  “Something like that. He won’t carve me, though. He’s a grappler. He’ll pull off my arms.” Conrad smiled and lighted another cigarette. He’d watched several dozen videos of the Greek, a hulking brute who favored exotic helms of savage beasts. The Greek had once snatched a full grown lion from the ground and broken its neck with a quick twist. Some whispered he dwelt in a cave in the mountains like old Polyphemus. “It’s a mortality ludus, so the money is good. When I get it.”

  “Uh-uh, sweetheart. Cash up front. We’ve got operating expenses…wives, girlfriends, bookies.” Marsh made a face and drained another glass.

  “Okay, Connie,” Singh said with a sharp glance at his partner. “Robert and I didn’t fly all the way out here to break your balls, as the kids say. We’ll see what we can find about TALLHAT. Cash on delivery.” He stood and stretched, then walked to the projector and gathered the film and the photographic plates piled there on a tray.

  “Thanks, boys,” Conrad said.

  The three remained a while longer, smoking cigarettes and polishing off the scotch. And when his self-appointed watchdogs had gone, Conrad made reservations for a flight to the United States, set the machinery in motion for the next phase, perhaps the final phase of his quest.