Our Share of Night

by Mariana Enriquez

But to believe is not always to obey. The things the Darkness tells them cannot be interpreted on this plane. The Darkness is demented, it’s a savage god, a mad god.

No sé para qué volviste, si ya empezaba a olvidar, no sé si ya lo sabrás, lloré cuando vos te fuiste, went the song, y que pena me da saber que al final de este amor ya no queda nada.

Even with all the hatred, contempt, ambivalence, and repulsion he felt toward the Order, that power was still his, and he didn’t possess many things. Renunciation is easy when you have a lot, he thought. He had never had anything.

Gaspar had inherited the crippling headaches from him. They were impossible to explain to the fortunate people who only suffered from regular headaches: the hammering blows beneath the skull, eyes like two stones embedded in the face, the light like a knife, every noise amplified. And the nausea.

“She wasn’t lying. It’s very common with an amputation. I think the brain still has an area for that missing member, and it produces sensations that it considers logical. We don’t feel with our skin, son, we feel with our brains. Pain is in the head.”

How he hated those movies and TV shows with heroic patients who bore their suffering in silence and inspired others. He’d been around hospitals and illness enough to know that most sick people were bossy and mean and tried to make the people around them feel just as bad as they did.

Even though he knew his dad was sick, he seemed invincible and dangerous. Sometimes wounded animals were like that, much stronger than when they were healthy.

You have something of mine, I passed on something of me to you, and hopefully it isn’t cursed, I don’t know if I can leave you something that isn’t dirty, that isn’t dark, our share of night.

Again, the box of ashes on a shelf. That’s what it meant to be an orphan: to have boxes of ashes and not know what to do with them.

The feeling that something horrible was going to happen was very clear, at least for him, but he acquiesced, he went along. The house had sought them out and now it had them, in its hands, in its claws.

Money is a country where some cities are more prosperous than others, but they are all rich, he told me.

It’s the house my mother hates, because she hates everything beautiful and wants to destroy it; that is her true faith and her nature.

That is also what it is to be rich: that contempt for beauty and the refusal to offer even the dignity of a name.

I’m grateful to have been born into this family, but I don’t idealize it, or at least I try not to. All fortunes are built on the suffering of others, and ours, though it has unique and astonishing characteristics, is no exception.

That was when I learned that it’s customary in the Order to let members leave without trying to retain them. My mother says they must be allowed to go because they always come back, they come crying back, all beaten down, because the Darkness is a god with claws that sniffs you out, the Darkness catches up with you, the Darkness will let you play, the way a cat lets go of its prey just to see how far it can get.

The Order always kept up its profile in research and study: the Darkness had to be interpreted, not merely worshipped blindly.

Love is impure, that’s what Anne’s eyes were saying. And it was true. It contaminates you and makes you possessive, savage, destructive.

He’s not sad. It’s his temperament. And even if he was sad, so what? He is the way he is. Getting plastered and shouting to high heaven isn’t for everyone. We make noise to fill the hole we have inside.