In a Perfect World

by Laura Kasischke

  Jiselle looked at him. The rims of his ears were red. She could see his scalp through the soft hair that had grown back on his head. She said, “Of course.” There was nothing Sam liked more than a new gadget. A can opener would have sufficed, but Jiselle said, “Let’s get a whole bunch.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  When the stockroom boy emerged from behind the aluminum stockroom doors, bearing nothing, not even looking in their direction, Jiselle called out to him, “Excuse me!”

  He turned. “Yeah?”

  “Were there any flashlights back there?”

  The boy looked at her blankly. “You still want ’em?”

  “Yes,” Jiselle said.

  Of course—for the next time, or just in case. Shouldn’t that be obvious? Wouldn’t anyone who’d come into Wal-Mart during a power outage, owning no flashlight, still want one?

  No, it seemed. The boy in the red vest pointed to the shelf that had been empty of flashlights only moments before. They were back, returned by customers who’d decided they weren’t needed. The plastic packages had been shoved sloppily on to the hooks they’d been taken from or thrown down below the hooks. “Well, there you go,” the boy said. “Help yourself.”

  Sam picked out two red ones, two blue ones, and a yellow one. Jiselle grabbed some matches and batteries on the way to the front of the store, to the register, where there was no line. The cashier was a small man, shorter even than Sam, with a long gray beard and a brilliant flash of gold in the center of his smile. “Somebody’s thinking ahead,” he said to Sam and Jiselle approvingly. He took the money, slipped it into the cash register, handed Sam the bag of flashlights. “Just you wait, folks. You’re going to be needing these.”

  He said it with such authority that it crossed Jiselle’s mind that this little man in his red vest was the one in charge of the power grid. That he knew something they didn’t.

  No sooner had they reached the electric doors to Wal-Mart, bearing their plastic bags, than the power surged, brightening strangely, before the lights went out again just as the door slid open, this time plunging Wal-Mart into total darkness.

  Jiselle grabbed Sam’s arm, hurrying him away from the doors, which hesitated once and then closed with an electrical finality behind them. “Shit!” someone shouted from inside the store, and there were more shouts following it—curses, cries of dismay, protest, exasperation, disbelief muffled by the glass between the world and Wal-Mart.

  At home, as Jiselle had feared, there were no lights. She used her flashlight to make Sam and herself some peanut butter sandwiches for dinner in the kitchen. Camilla and Sara both said they weren’t hungry and disappeared into the darkness of their rooms.

  Jiselle lit a candle, put it on the table, and turned on the radio. Apparently the outage had swept the Midwest to the East Coast. A power grid problem. “The infrastructure of this country is collapsing!” a caller to WAVT shouted. “This isn’t the weather; this is a collapse of a culture!” On another station a caller blamed the outage on the flu. “People are dying! We’re not going to be able to keep the lights on!”

  Jiselle snapped the radio off so Sam wouldn’t hear. In the flickering light across from her, he looked like a figment of a fevered imagination—the light leaping around on his face giving him the appearance of something made of fire, made of pure energy.

  “Won’t it get cold?” he asked.

  “I’ll build a fire,” Jiselle said, “after it gets cold, if the power doesn’t come back on. It’ll be cozy.”

  She tried to sound like someone with a plan, but she was hoping that the power would come back on before she needed to build a fire, since she’d never built one before—and, in fact, Mark had warned her not to. “There’s something wrong with this flue,” he’d said one day, leaning into the fireplace, looking up. “I don’t want to risk the ashes or flames blowing back on you. Don’t use the fireplace if I’m not here, okay? Until I have a chance to get it fixed.” Obviously Mark hadn’t anticipated that there would come a time when a fire would be the only source of heat.

  “Do I have to sleep in my room?” Sam asked, and Jiselle remembered then—his night-light: a frog plugged into the electrical outlet next to his bed. Sam couldn’t sleep without that.

  “No,” she said. “We can camp out. On the floor. In the living room. Until the power comes back on.”

  His eyes widened, and he smiled.

  After Sam and Jiselle were done with their sandwiches, they took their flashlights to the linen closet and hauled out the spare blankets and a couple of pillows. Sam held the flashlight while Jiselle made pallets for them on the rug on the floor of the family room.

  They didn’t bother with pajamas. Sam lay down on the floor in his khaki pants and green sweater, and Jiselle lay beside him in her black slacks. He’d brought the book of tales with him from his room, and Jiselle rolled over, opening it beside her, holding the flashlight on the page they’d marked the night before:

  They stopped at a little hut.

  The roof sloped nearly down to the ground, and the door was so low they had to creep in on their hands and knees.

  There was no one at home but an old woman, who was cooking fish by the light of a train oil lamp.

  “Sam?” Jiselle whispered after another page or two.

  No answer.

  He was asleep.

  She closed the book and snapped off the flashlight. It surprised her how total the darkness was. And how quiet. From the girls’ rooms there was no sound at all, and outside there was nothing but the tick-ticking of icy rain on the deck. She closed her eyes, and after what seemed like a long time listening to the sputter and hiss of rain on wood, she fell asleep, dreaming of sitting beside the old woman from the story, who was cooking a fish. The fish glowed with a kind of reflected light from the oil lamp beside the woman—silvery, like a moon in the shape of the fish—and she was leaning over it with a knife when a sudden, brilliant, digital, pealing music slammed into the silence, and Jiselle’s eyes snapped open, and she caught her breath and sat up fast, recognizing her cell phone theme, “The Blue Danube,” and found herself jumping, moving toward it instinctively, still mostly asleep—but where the hell was it?

  Stumbling toward the music into the family room, she banged her shins against the coffee table. “Fuck.” She got on her hands and knees and scrambled toward the music, which was apparently coming from somewhere deep in the couch—a tiny technological box with a relentless orchestra stuffed inside it. “Shit.” Sara must have taken it when they’d gotten back to the house in the dark, talked on it in whispers in her room. This happened every few weeks, when, Jiselle suspected, Sara’s own monthly minutes were used up. Afterward, she’d stuff it into the cushions of the couch so Jiselle would think she’d misplaced it herself.

  Jiselle felt around among the upholstery and crumbs until she touched something solid and cold, pulled it out, opened it, and held it to her ear. “Hello? Hello?”

  “Jiselle?”

  “Mark?”

  “Jiselle, I—”

  “Mark,” she said. “Where are you? The electricity’s gone out. Completely out. What do I do if…” She did not know how to finish the question, so she just listened, waiting for an answer, which didn’t come. In the silence, however, she thought she heard Mark sigh. She did hear him clear his throat, she was sure of that, but still he didn’t speak. Finally, to the silence, Jiselle said, “Mark?”

  Crackling between them, she suddenly understood, was an ocean. She could hear the waves. There were ships on that ocean, she thought, listening to the silence. Ships bearing good news and bad. False documents. Stowaways. Silk flowers. Parrots in cages. Diamonds in felt sacks. But before the static of all that ocean was yanked away and replaced by the true silence of a connection gone completely dead, Mark said, “Jiselle, I don’t know when I’ll be back. They’ve got us detained here. We—”

  “What?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Detained.”

  “De
tained?”

  “Well,” Mark said, “that’s what I just said, Jiselle. Detained. Don’t you know what detained means?”

  There was an exasperated huff, and Jiselle felt tears spring into her eyes. Her heart rose into her throat. Of course she knew what detained meant, but it wasn’t like Mark to speak in jargon. If there had been mechanical problems, he’d have said, The fucking incompetents can’t get their plane put together. If it had been political, The fascists snatched our passports. If there had been a strike or a storm, We’re stuck on this toilet until tomorrow.

  Detained? He was supposed to be home in twelve hours. He was going to take her out for Valentine’s Day. They had reservations. She’d pictured champagne and candlelight, and their knees touching beneath a white tablecloth, opening that small red package he’d spirited away in his sock drawer—a silver bracelet or gold. She could barely speak, but she finally managed to say, “Of course I know, Mark. But—Mark?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Mark?”

  Nothing.

  Jiselle took the cell phone from her ear then and looked at it.

  Dead.

  Some kind of blind hope made her bring it to her ear again and say his name once more, but still there was no answer. Only the sound of her own ear.

  And that ocean.

  Ships going down in that ocean. Swallowed without a sound.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jiselle didn’t sleep again that night. She tried over and over to call Mark at the number he’d phoned her from, but there was never any answer. She let it ring for what seemed like hours, and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door so she wouldn’t wake the children, and tried to call the airline.

  “We don’t have that information,” she was told, and Jiselle knew the airlines well enough to know that, if this was what they’d been told to say, it was hopeless—that she could dial a hundred numbers, explain who she was, invent stories (His mother’s in the hospital, his children are missing, the house burned down, we have to get in touch with Captain Dorn…) and it would make no difference. They weren’t going to tell her anything whether they had anything to tell her or not.

  She lay back down beside Sam on the floor, keeping her cell phone on her chest, and tried to go back to sleep, but the phone never rang again, and she never fell back asleep, and the power never came back on. When the sun finally rose high enough that she could see to make her way through the house without stumbling, she went to the bedroom and opened the little red package in Mark’s sock drawer.

  She couldn’t help herself.

  It was Valentine’s Day.

  Inside the box, it turned out, were both the gold bracelet and the silver bracelet she’d imagined. Jiselle put them back in the box, wrapped it again, put it back in Mark’s sock drawer, and then stood for a moment practicing the bright smile she’d flash when he gave the gift to her.

  The power was still out later that morning. Jiselle went to the refrigerator, somehow surprised when the light didn’t come on when she opened the door. She had spent most of her childhood believing that the light in the refrigerator was always on, until her mother explained it to her, showed her the darkness inside by opening the door only a crack and telling Jiselle to look in.

  This time not only did the light not come on, but the smell of spoiled milk, bacteria, and lunch meat gone bad had filled up the darkness. Jiselle took out a garbage bag and started dumping the things she was sure couldn’t be salvaged.

  She took the bag to the garbage can outside and marveled at how warm and bright the day had turned out to be after the rainy ice of the night before. What snow there was before the storm had been washed away by the rain, and the ice had melted. The lawn rolling toward the ravine, which had been covered in slush for a month, looked like a carpet of crushed green velvet.

  Perhaps, Jiselle thought, she’d better go over to the Schmidts’ to see if they were okay over there without electricity. Who knew what kind of special needs the elderly might have that depended on electricity?

  She went back in the house to get a sweater and saw that Sara was awake, standing barefoot in front of the refrigerator, with the door open, staring into its emptiness.

  “Where did the food go?” she asked, and then, “Why isn’t the light on?”

  Pulling on her sweater, Jiselle considered explaining to Sara, as her mother had to her, that the light in the refrigerator was not always on, but she felt sure this was something Sara, so full of her own inner darkness, would have been born knowing. She said, instead, “Well, no lights are on, and the food was rotten.”

  “When’s Dad getting back?”

  Jiselle decided to wait to say anything about that until she knew more. “Soon,” she said, and went out the sliding doors to see to the Schmidts.

  Brad Schmidt opened the door wide enough to let Jiselle in, but he didn’t invite her to sit down. “Sure we’re okay,” he said, waving his hand in the air as if to wave her concern away. He said he’d grown up in a sod house in Nebraska. He was prepared for the inevitable. He’d always known the electricity was going to be the first thing to go. Gas was going to be next, then food, and then water. “When’s your husband getting back?”

  “I don’t know,” Jiselle said. “He’s been”—for a few seconds she couldn’t think of the word—“detained.”

  Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows leaped, as they always did when he heard bad news. “That right?” he said.

  “Yes. I mean, I guess. He called last night, but I haven’t been able to get in touch with him since.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “Germany,” she said, and Brad Schmidt snorted through his nose, a kind of knowing chuckle. “He’ll be back when—”

  “When hell freezes over!” Brad Schmidt said. “They warned us! You gotta give ’em that. The Krauts aren’t like Americans, you know. They’re not just gonna let a bunch of foreigners in and tell them they can spread their disease all over the place.”

  “Well, they’ll send them back in that case,” Jiselle said. “Why would they keep them?”

  “It’s obvious!” Brad Schmidt said. “To teach us a lesson!”

  “That would be against the law,” Jiselle said.

  “Whose law? What law? You think the Europeans have any sympathy for us? Ha! We burned that bridge, and all the other bridges are burning as we speak.”

  “I don’t think—”

  But he cut her off, seeming to be gesturing to the door or to the world, suggesting with the gesture that she should go. “Good luck, Mrs. Dorn. I suggest you get yourself a rifle. I’ve got one, and enough water to last me a year.”

  “I’m not worried about—”

  “Of course you’re not,” Brad Schmidt said, smirking. “You don’t seem like the worrying type. But, in the meantime, you need a weapon.”

  Jiselle was just turning in the doorway when Diane Schmidt wandered out of a back room wearing what looked like an old wedding dress and curtsied to Jiselle.

  Before she realized she was doing it, Jiselle was curtsying back.

  Back at the house, the children were gathered around the kitchen table eating peanut butter on bread and drinking warm Coke.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Sara said when Jiselle slid into a chair at the table with them.

  “I don’t know,” Jiselle said. She suggested that they listen to the radio. Did they own a radio that didn’t have to be plugged in? Sam and Camilla left the table to try to find one, but Camilla came back with the only thing they had, dangling it by its electrical cord.

  “Call Dad,” Sam said.

  “Well,” Jiselle said, trying to use the voice she’d needed so often (and so often failed to have) on planes, during turbulence, during lightning storms, during snowstorms, “everything is fine, but your father called last night, and he’s in Germany. He’s been”—again, the word escaped her for several heartbeats—“detained.”

  “What’s that mean?” Sam asked, his mouth full
of peanut butter sandwich.

  “Well, they seem to be holding the crew—and, I don’t know, actually, maybe the passengers. I think it probably has to do with—”

  “How long?” Camilla asked.

  “We’ll find out,” Jiselle said. “Later. He’ll call. I’ll call. If I can’t reach him, I’ll call the airline.”

  It seemed to her that, as she looked at them, the children were exchanging a look among themselves.

  When it got lighter outside, the house was bright enough to clean it up a bit. Sam was playing with two small soldiers and a truck on the family room floor. Camilla was reading on the couch. Sara was in her bedroom, and it sounded to Jiselle as if her pen were scratching wildly across the pages of her diary, the pages flipping fast. She tried not to think about what Sara might be writing.

  She picked Camilla’s sweater up off the floor.

  Sara’s balled-up white knee socks.

  She could find only one of the shoes from Madrid she’d let Sara borrow—lying abandoned on the floor of the family room, as if Sara had stumbled out of it.

  Jiselle got on her hands and knees, looking under the couch, under the chairs, for the matching shoe, finding nothing.

  “Sara?” she called.

  “What?”

  “Where’s my other shoe?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Sara called back. “We were in the dark when we came home. Maybe it fell off outside.”

  “Well, if it fell off your foot outside, wouldn’t you have noticed that you were wearing only one shoe when you came inside?”

  “No,” Sara shouted, as if the question were absurd. “It wasn’t my idea to wear your shoes.”

  Jiselle closed her eyes for a moment. There would be, she knew, no point in continuing the conversation. She held the one shoe in her hand before taking it to the bedroom and placing it carefully at the bottom of the closet. Afterward, she went to the front door and looked out to see if she might find the other shoe, discarded on the lawn.