Long Past Midnight
Originally published in Say… what time is it? edited by Gwenda Bond and Christopher Rowe. “Long Past Midnight” is offered in observance of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day 2008. Enjoy.
Long Past Midnight
by David Moles
On Saturday, May 24th, at 11:14AM, the lights went out, and remained out for a period of seventeen minutes and forty-one seconds. The darkness lasted long enough for irritation to become first concern and then panic. People went into hysterics; they sobbed, prayed loudly, made sudden declarations of love.When the lights came on again, eleven people were dead, and the living avoided one another’s eyes in embarrassment. Among the dead were three suicides, six heart attacks, one industrial accident — and, the coroner later determined, one murder.
They put a hood over Paul Federsen’s head, and loaded him aboard a train, and took him out into the suburbs, into the deep and permanent black outside the circle of the lamp towers. He felt asphalt and dead grass beneath his feet; heard the police shaking their flashlights, cursing as they stumbled over curbs and sprinklers.
Shelly was there, of course. She was a cop, after all.
Somewhere off to his left, she said: “Why did you do it, Paul?”
He hadn’t answered the police down at the station and he didn’t answer Shelly, either.
Eventually, as the police intended it, he was able to free himself from his bonds. He found the buckles of the hood and loosened them one by one, delaying the moment when he would have to admit he was in darkness. When he had removed the hood he stood still, swaying slightly, until his heart quieted and his ragged breathing became even. Then he knelt down and, the polished wood of the floor cool and hard beneath his hands and knees, began to explore his cell.
The house where they had left him was a small one, and old-fashioned: a small kitchen, a living room with a couch, a breakfast nook with a round table. One bedroom. The bed had been stripped, but he found sheets and blankets in the linen closet, and a pillow. The front and back doors were locked, the doorknobs reversed so they could only be opened from the outside. There was still glass in the windows, but the frames had been nailed shut. The light bulbs had been removed from the living-room lamps, and the ceiling fixture in the bedroom, and the vanity mirror in the bathroom. Cautious experimentation proved that to make doubly sure, the outlets had been disconnected as well.
In the kitchen the refrigerator was still running — so there was one working outlet in the house — but the light bulb inside was gone, and the refrigerator itself was bolted to the wall, the outlet inaccessible behind it. There was a gas stove, but the gas had been shut off.
You’re a lamplighter, he told himself. They can’t break you. You’re stronger than they are.
There were cans in the pantry, and a can opener. He counted the cans. There were thirty-eight.
He wondered how long they were expected to last.
Unable to tell one can from another in the dark, he made himself a dinner of cold chicken broth, stewed tomatoes, water chestnuts and pear halves. He cut himself three times, opening the cans.
There was a clock somewhere, an old-fashioned pendulum clock; he could hear the tick. When he had finished his dinner he groped along the walls until he found it. His fingers found the glass cover and opened it; found the raised numbers and the little hole for the key.
The hands, however, had been removed.
He slumped to the floor and quietly began to cry.
He slept, and woke, and ate, and slept again. There was nothing else to do.
The pantry was down to fifteen cans when he woke in the dark, convinced he’d heard a noise. There was no wind here, no rain; the only sounds in the house, other than those he made himself, were the gurgle of the hot-water heater, the hum of the refrigerator’s compressor, and the ticking of the clock.
The clock.
It wasn’t a noise he’d heard after all.
It was the clock. The clock had stopped.
Without the ticking of the clock, the darkness was suddenly full of sounds: rustlings, hummings, ringings; sometimes music, or muffled voices. Sometimes he thought one of the voices was Shelly’s; sometimes he thought one of them was his own.
Once, on the edge of sleep, he thought he heard Jack Bolden’s voice. He scrambled out of the bed in a cold sweat and stood, turning slowly, listening.
“No,” he said shakily, his voice hoarse with lack of use. “No,” he repeated. “You’re dead.”
The sounds — voices, rustlings, everything — stopped, and he knew then for certain he’d imagined them.
He cleared his throat. “You’re dead,” he repeated, more confidently.
He went to the kitchen sink and turned the cold-water knob just enough to start the faucet dripping. Then he went back into the bedroom and got the blanket. He curled up on the living-room couch and fell asleep listening to the irregular drip of the water.
He rehearsed what he would say when the jailers came again, as they surely would; to replenish the store of canned food, check on their prisoner’s health, wind the crippled clock. He would tell them — he didn’t know what he would tell them. Anything, he supposed, anything that would get them to give him a little light.
He opened the last ten cans one at a time, trying to make them last as long as possible.
The third to last can was artichoke hearts. The second to last was diced beets.
He saved the last as long as he could. But once he stopped eating, there was nothing to measure time with at all.
The last can was still unopened when he heard footsteps on the grass. He turned toward the window, but there was nothing; he reached up to his face and groped for his eyes, to make sure they were open, and received an explosion of purple phosphenes and a painful poke that started tears streaming down his cheeks. But no light.
Have I forgotten how to see? he thought.
Suddenly, fearfully, he scrambled back from the window; found the edge of the table and scrambled under it, curling himself into the corner, against the wall.
“Paul?”
Shelly’s voice. He heard the rattle of the lock.
“Paul, are you there?”
I don’t know, he said, but no words came from his mouth.
He remembered the heavy cloth of Jack Bolden’s lamplighter coverall bunched in his fists, the weight at first as he lifted the other man up and the sudden freedom as Bolden went over the rail of the number three lamp tower. The yelp of surprise, cut short; the slap of the body against the unseen pavement, far below.
“Paul?”
But he stayed hunched in his corner as she blundered around the house, now barking her shins on the chairs, now knocking over a water glass or a pile of empty cans.
“The lights have gone out, Paul. The lamp towers, all of them, they’ve gone out.” He heard her breath, ragged and fearful. “I don’t think they’re coming on again, Paul. I had a flashlight, but the battery went dead. It took me two days to walk here. Paul, I’m afraid. Answer me.”
What was the question?
I don’t know, he tried to say. I don’t know why I did it.
But that was a lie. This was why. When the lights had gone out and stayed out he’d decided it was the end of the world. And he’d decided that if it was the end of the world he wanted to spend it with Shelly Bolden. Alone.
He hadn’t been wrong; just early. He’d murdered his best friend for this moment, and now he was too afraid of the dark to move or speak.
Eventually Shelly stopped talking. Paul heard her crying, for a little while, in the back bedroom. Then he heard the front door open and shut, and heard her footsteps on the grass, getting fainter.
He stayed beneath the table. He slept; for an hour, perhaps, or a day. When he awoke he knew he had lost his mind, because he could see.
Not well; but it was like the ordinary darkness of the city with the lamps turned low, now, not the deep black of the suburbs. The walls, the furniture, were there, in dim grainy outlines. He crawled out from beneath the table and stood up. There was a red glow, ever so dim, from the front windows. He looked out and saw, for the first time, the silhouettes of the houses across the street, black against the red-black sky.
He went to the door. Shelly hadn’t bothered to lock it. He opened it and went out onto the porch.
He smelled smoke.
Back in the house, he opened the last can of food: creamed corn. He ate it, as slowly as he could.
Then he started walking.
After a mile he came across the train tracks. After five miles the red glow filled half the sky. After ten miles he came to the railroad bridge, and across the river he saw the city, burning.
He picked his way across the bridge, drawn to the light as surely as a moth.
The city seemed almost as empty as the suburbs. From time to time he heard shouts, or smashing glass, and once the mad irregular howling of an ambulance siren. But always the sounds came from away on some other block, and he turned aside to put even more distance between them.
He found the body of a lamplighter hanging from some construction scaffolding on Forty-First, a lynching or a suicide, there was no way to tell. He avoided looking at the dead man’s face as he stripped him of his keys and his tool belt; it was almost sure to be someone he knew.
From the top of the number three lamp tower the city was a patchwork of darkness and red light. The wind was in the east, carrying the smoke off and away into the suburbs; the fires had spread that way, too, until they were checked by the river. They seemed to be dying out, now; perhaps there were no matches left to start new ones, or no survivors left to use them.
He climbed onto the railing on the east side of the tower, the same railing over which he had thrown Jack Bolden. He stood there, swaying slightly in the wind, which now carried an unfamiliar scent, river water and salt and something like the taste of a woman’s hair. He looked out into the night, the black night that he and Jack Bolden had struggled against their entire lives, and he seemed to see a line of light growing there, far out in the darkness, brighter than the fire, brighter than the arc lamps of the towers, a lamp as big as the world.
Paul Federsen laughed quietly to himself, knowing now that he had lost his mind after all.
He spread his arms and fell forward, into the sunrise.
©2008 David Moles.