Dopecentury XXX --- Play Darkness
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The band leader turned to the audience and lifted his hands. “Y’all might think this is just a song title, or a metaphor, but it ain’t! Tonight, we’re going to search out and find darkness! I promise this to you.”
He turned away from the audience to face the nineteen-piece band. “Play darkness,” he said. Not shouting, but loudly enough for the band to hear, for the microphone near the bell of his sax to pick up this command, for the whole audience of nearly a thousand people to get the whisper of it through the PA system.
The band leader raised a hand and as he brought it down, lifted the mouthpiece of his saxophone to his lips. A slow, piercing grind ran out through the stacked speakers of the PA and spread slowly over the crowd. The snares of the two drummers rattled, the horns blew a sustained chord, the bass held one long heavily-plucked note while backing the guitar up to the speaker and curling into a tired groan of feedback, the keyboards held and shifted, shifted and held. And every member of the band had their eyes on the band leader, who was maintaining an unchanging unvarying note on the sax, sustained through circular breathing, that cut across the top of the mayhem, turned up loudest in the mix. The band watched him, looking for indications that the sound they were creating was what he was after, looking for nudges and indications that something needed to shift.
But it wasn’t right. Not one particular thing wrong, an entire set of them. They were not getting closer to darkness. The band leader raised his hand and brought it down and the wall of noise faded out of the speakers, and blew away across the expansive field of the park, lost up in the trees and small hills that surrounded and partially obscured the view of the gray city from the stage.
The band leader was facing the band again. “No no, y’all. I need you to play darkness. OK? Ready?…”
A cacophony that was of a distinctly higher timbre: rolling high-hats, a discordant guitar solo that wound and spun, a repeating pattern played in round on the keyboards, a tambourine shaking incessantly, and of course the blasting note of the saxophone — the only instrument that seemed to be seeking a lower register this time.
It went on for some minutes, but it twisted in the wind ineffectively. The band leader gripped the fingering on his sax with one hand, but the other slowly came up, and with all the band member’s eyes on his hand, swept down and around and the sound faded quickly away, the last clattering ring of a crash symbol chasing it all into oblivion.
“It’s not there. Not in that place. Search lower my friends. Darkness is lower down, somewhere in the depths, I think.” He lifted a glass of water from the stool next to him, and took a sip. He looked back at the band, raised his hand, “play darkness.”
His hand came down.
This time, a low rumble. Kick-drums and blast beats, A minor chord held on the far left end of the keyboard, a bass guitar pounded with fists. The band leader leaned way over, as if trying to dig something out with the bell of his sax.
The band leader looked up, looked out over the audience, his eye caught the eye of the person at the sound board, and the band leader waved his palm upward. The volume increased. A speaker cabinet in the rear started smoking.
And every light in the city went out.
The sound dropped away to nothing but the far away unamplified hum of the saxophone and the rolling drums behind it. This was soon joined by a soft murmur of awe from the crowd. People reached for their phones and found themselves faced with black screens that no amount of contorted button-holding could induce back to life.
There was a new moon, and the darkness was total, For a few moments it felt like the whole world had been washed to the deepest part of the sea, far beyond even the dimmest glimmer of the surface. The band leader could be heard laughing from the stage.
Then eyes adjusted and stars appeared in their tens-of-thousands. Too dim to light the ground, but cutting into the hard line of blackness at the horizon. The stars clustered and grew brighter, and did their best to fight back the darkness. But the darkness was winning.
In the middle of the audience, he turned to her, “How will we ever get home?”
“I’ve never seen blackness like this. I don’t even know which direction we’re facing.”
He felt until her found her hand. “Don’t let go.”
And then the fireflies pitched in to the effort to hold back the darkness. Small glowing lights of cold yellow electric sex. They excitedly warmed up the luciferous chemicals of their guts; darkness was their medium. The blinking initially was low in the grass of the park, but when they realized their opportunity, the fireflies rose up into the air. They swarmed in their millions, spreading across the city. The light was strong enough to pierce through. The darkness gave way to them.
“Look… I think we can find our way by the light of the fireflies.” They each put one arm out ahead of them, so as not to run into anyone else, but it was almost unnecessary.
The blinking fireflies brought the starlight down to ground level and the whole crowd — and soon the whole city — understood they could move by the light of the fireflies.
They made their way cautiously across the park, swimming through the blinking lights. One landed on her nose, and glowed steadily for half a minute, lighting up her face for him so for that brief time her beauty floated next to him through the gloom.
He led her to a small grassy hill, where the ground was still warm from the summer sun of the day. “Let’s not go home quite yet.” They lay down, head to head and holding hands, and just watched. The voices of other people moved through the darkness around them. The fireflies glowed above their heads, blinking bright enough to wipe out the stars, and going out to allow the stars to fade back into view. In places the fireflies traced short paths across the firmament above, or cut slices into the darkness around them.
“This is the only truly beautiful thing ever seen,” they said.