The Bigger Light Read Online Free Page B

the Italian barbershop, he didn’t have to engage in serious conversation or discuss Black Power (the Italians spoke in Italian: and the only word he could understand was “soccer”); nobody talked to him about his race, and he didn’t have tohide his conservatism on these matters, nor exhibit either a knowledge or a consciousness of them. In the Italian barbershop, he was not forced into becoming a black militant.
    He was becoming tired because of all this change in his life. And he was trapped inside his new material success. He was determined now to live within the measure of that success, in proportion to that success. What prevented him was all the noise which he found around him. All this noise made him retreat into the frame of mind and of behaviour that had him now like a man without direction, without any light in his life, a man gone cold.
    So much so that now, just past midnight on a Saturday night, he was sitting sprawled on his back on the couch, his necktie loosened, just as he had seen some of the men in the stockbrokers’ offices loosen theirs, and he could think of nothing to make him happy. He thought of the stock market men, how they worked late at night as he moved silently around them wiping off the sweat of their labour and profits from their desks with the chamois cloth, as they counted millions of dollars on small writing pads and adding machines, as he admired and envied their relaxed posture. They did not make any noise when they counted money. He worshipped their secure movements, and he liked the way they could loosen their ties and still command power and respect in their employees. He was sure they commanded the same attention in their homes.
    A Scotch-and-water was in his hand, and a filter-tipped cigarette was firmly between his lips, and Dots was inside the bedroom with the door locked and was moving around waiting for him to do something to release the painful pressure that was like a boil filled with poisonous inflammation on both their minds. He had put a record on, and was listeningunattentively to it. “Both Sides Now,” sung by Judy Collins. He had first heard this song about clouds on Bloor Street, and Dots was with him at the time. Now he was surprised to find this album among his collection. He had bought it and had forgotten it. Soon after Henry’s death, he stopped playing calypsoes, and buying them. Instead he began buying records which were more quiet and peaceful. He even thought of buying classical music, and opera, but he never got around to them. He had not often played these “quiet” records, for he didn’t know too much about their rhythms and their lyrics. He had come upon this music by chance, and had liked something about it. He did not know what it was, above and beyond the fact that the music was quiet. He leaned over now, and turned the record up a little more and settled back into the couch.
    Dots appeared at the door.
    She looked in his direction, not at him, not into his eyes as she would have done in happier days, but
on
him.
    “I trying to sleep!”
    “I trying to listen.”
    “What’s wrong with you, eh, man?” she asked him.
    Judy Collins was singing about clouds. There were clouds. Clouds were up in the sky, and Boysie was thinking of aeroplanes and the kinds of clouds he had seen from the plane coming at him with force, as if the clouds were about to change into a cloud with body and more force and destroy the plane. He saw these clouds years ago. Now there were clouds of snow falling down in front of his picture window. And he was thinking of incorporating, and of how very peaceful it would be, very peaceful indeed, he thought, to live in a cloud, while Dots remained standing in front of him.
    “How could you sit down there on your arse like that, on a Saturday night, and listen to all this blasted
dead
music. Idont know, Boysie, but I swear … I see you ackking-up here of late, in a funny way. I can’t tell what happening to you,