My Inner Darkness

Somebody filled his tank at eleven forty-one on a Tuesday night, in a town he has never been to, and paid cash. The receipt is in his own car, in his own door pocket, clipped in date order with the rest.

He can explain it. He can explain all of it. Explaining is what he does.

For eighteen years he has stood at the same bench on the Massachusetts coast and found the one bad part in a floor of gray steel. He is the best there is at it. His hands do not drift. Nothing he ships comes back. His wife, who could make him laugh from the far side of a room, has stopped trying. A half-wild stray came in out of the rain and stayed, and she laughed and called him Apollo, and the name held. Nights, he drives the highway south past the tower to the place where his thoughts finally arrive one at a time, and then he turns around and drives home.

Then the jeans, torn at the knee, that he does not remember tearing. The mud on the car. The stranger on the sidewalk who knows his name and is glad to see him. Two hours in a cold yard with the empties in his glove and nothing on the record. And somewhere in the dark of the house, a cat who may no longer be there to feed.

None of it proves anything. He would be the first to tell you so. Each of it asks the one question he has spent his whole life asking of everything but himself: is this still true?

MY INNER DARKNESS is the slow, luminous coming-apart of a decent, careful man who goes on trusting the last instrument he has long after it has stopped reading true. It is a novel of isolation, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to keep standing, told with the cold precision of Kubrick and the waking dread of Lynch. There is no creature at the door. There is only the night the voices in the car start telling him where to turn around, and he keeps going.

The diagnosis is never named. What is left of him by the last page is the reader's to decide.

Everything can pass and still be going wrong.