The Daredevils by Gary Amdahl Page A

making a cast. He could see such a picture—could not help but do so, but it wasn’t himself he was seeing: it was a kind of photograph of Charles Minot, someone he had once known but lost touch with. An old friend, if he could be said, as the quaint old saying had it, to have had any friends. A character he had played, more likely, the idea of which still made him nervous, alert, ready for performance. He knew he ought to examine that inability to truly imagine himself fishing, but chose not to—or rather, he could admit it, was afraid of it—as it appeared to have something to do with wishing to fish in the dark. The dazzling dark of the Sufis, the dark light of the Gnostics, he thought. Was that a good, true image, from Zoroaster’s Good Mind? Or was it a bad image, from the Destructive Mind of a Person of the Lie? What he believed, secretly and more deeply than he thought possible, was that in the pitiful understanding of men, universal darkness was called celestial light.
    Because they were afraid of the dark.
    Because they were Bronze Age bullies and nitwits who worshipped the sun.
    The Devil lives in darkness because he hates the light? Demons crouch in dark corners? He begged to differ: the Devil lived in merciless light, light that showed through bodies, that exposed everything to everybody, that extended into space, a line, a bit of geometry that winked out once it left a man’s weak and suffering mind and entered the super-abundant emptiness of the heaven he could not imagine, could not perceive, but which he would come into, be born into, just as he had been born into life and light.
    He had seen this light at work: it had destroyed Little Joe. He was crouching in the dark and he was not a demon and the light had destroyed him.
    He could quote Tennyson, if anybody wanted to get tough with him:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  “Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Forever and ever when I move.”
    Heaven was dark.
    Heaven was a dark theater.
    A dark theater, the lights of which picked out Evil.
    The mounted policemen began cantering toward the little platform stage that the antiwar people had erected. The crowd, entirely pro-war as far as Charles could tell, was either unwilling or unable to disperse. People, mostly young men and boys, ran here and there and shouted. Charles thought he heard screaming as well. Distant screaming, which was hard to be sure of. In all likelihood it was feigned screaming, coming from behind and below him in the brand-new theater that Mother and Father had built for him—it was nearly impossible for them not to, if you understood that it was simply a consequence of rebuilding the city—exactly where the old theater had stood. He stayed with his arms spread and his hands on the handles of the French windows as if he had just flung them open and was going address the nation, until the crowds, dispersing and gathering and dispersing, were gone. Everybody seemed to be laughing, no matter what they were doing: getting smacked with a baton across the back of the head, watching someone else get smacked with a baton across the back of the head, smacking someone with a baton across the back of the head. It made no sense. Mounted policemen had made their way through group after group, but it had seemed like a carnival. He had heard screaming, he was sure of it, but had seen no one lying in a pool of blood, within a circle of strangers. The sun was setting, and in the deep clear twilight some fireworks were being discharged somewhere near; they rose and shone as if they were not only on fire but gave off a kind of glossy, lacquered light—everything looked that way, buildings, people, earth, sky—but he could not tell if they were the fireworks of patriots or of radicals. It was a carnival, and its theme had been