Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “Hey, Marie,” he said.

  “I couldn’t get the TV to work.”

  “Sorry, kid,” he said, trying not to show exhaustion. “I’ll get it fixed tomorrow. You should be asleep.”

  “I should be,” she said.

  “How was Mrs. Jackson?”

  “Her usual,” Marie said.

  “How’s the pain?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Paul went over and kissed his little sister on the forehead. “I need to go to bed. You should, too.”

  “I hate what you did to me,” she whispered.

  She said this more than he cared to remember.

  “I hate it, too,” he said. Trying not to remember why she could say it in the first place. “You keep your oxygen on all day?”

  She may have nodded; he couldn’t tell in the dim light.

  “I hate what I did to myself,” she whispered, but he wasn’t sure. She may have said, “I hate what I do to myself.” Or, “I hate what I want to do to myself.” It was late. He’d had a couple of beers. She had whispered.

  The three possibilities of what she said played through his mind every now and then, and in the next few days (staying up late, staring at the ceiling, hearing the hum of the machines that helped keep his beautiful sister alive) he was sure she’d said the last thing.

  I hate what I want to do to myself.

  6

  The clean up crew had been through, photographers got their pictures, the apartment was cordoned off.

  Paul stood in the doorway, giving a brief nod to one of the detectives.

  He glanced around the apartment; it was trashed.

  The bathroom light seeped like pink liquid from under the door.

  He didn’t go in.

  He didn’t want to.

  He didn’t want to think about the torso or the magician or even the lizard he’d seen scuttle into the bathtub.

  But it was all he thought about for the next six months.

  7

  On his nights off, he’d sit in the living room with Marie and watch television. Marie loved television, and besides her books and magazines, it was the only thing that got her out of herself.

  “I saw a great movie last night,” she told him.

  He glanced over.

  The small thin plastic tubing of the oxygen hung from beneath her nostrils, hooked up to the wide machine with blinking lights. The braces on her arms connected to a brace around her torso that nearly made her look robotic.

  Still, she looked like Marie under all the metal and wire and tubing.

  Pretty. Blond hair cut short. Her eyes bright, occasionally.

  Sometimes, he thought, she was happy.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Which one?”

  “I can’t remember the name. It was amazing. A man and woman so in love, but they were divided by time and space. But he wanted her so badly. He sacrificed his life for her. But they had this one…moment. I cried like an idiot.”

  “You should be watching happy movies,” Paul said, somewhat cheerfully.

  “Happy or sad doesn’t matter,” Marie said. “That’s where you mix things up too much. Happy and sad are symptoms. It’s the thing about movies and books. It’s that glimpse of heaven. No one loves anyone like they do in movies and books. No one hurts as wonderfully. I saw this other movie about a woman in a car wreck — just like ours — and she couldn’t move from the neck down. Her family spurned her. A friend had to take care of her. She thought of killing herself. Then, the house caught on fire. She had to crawl outside. A little boy helped her. The little boy couldn’t talk, and they became friends. But she’d lost everything..”

  “I don’t like things that make you sad,” he said.

  “This,” Marie nodded to the machines and the walls. “This makes me sad. The stories get me out of this. They get me into heaven. Even if it’s only for a few minutes, it’s enough. You want to know why people cry at movies even when the movie is happy? I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s because life is never that good. They know that when the screen goes dark, they have to go back to the life off-screen where nothing is as good. People who have cancer in movies have moments of heaven. People who have cancer in real life just have cancer. People in car wrecks in movies and stories get heaven. In real life…”

  “So you feel like you’re in heaven when you read a story?”

  She nodded. “Or see a good movie. Not the whole movie, just a few minutes. But a few minutes of heaven is better than no heaven at all.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “You know what I dream of at night?”

  “No machines?” he said.

  She shook her head. “No. I dream that everything is exactly like it is, only it’s absolutely wonderful. Then, I wake up.”

  “Some dream,” he said.

  “Paul,” she said as if just realizing something important. “I know why people kill themselves. It isn’t because they hate anyone. It isn’t because they want to escape. It’s because they think there’s no heaven. Why go on if there’s no heaven to get to?”

  8

  Paul went to see Fazzo the Fabulous on Death Row. Fazzo had gained some weight in prison, and looked healthier.

  “I have to know something,” Paul said.

  “Yeah, kid?” Fazzo looked at him carefully. “You want to know all about 265, don’t you? You been there since I got arrested?”

  Paul nodded. Then, as if this were a revelation, he said, “You’re sober.”

  “I have to be in here. No choice. The twelve step program of incarceration…Let me tell you, 265 is a living breathing thing. It’s not getting rented out any time soon, either. It waits for the one it marked. You’re it, kid. It’s waiting for you, and you know it. And there’s no use resisting its charms.”

  “Why did you kill that woman?”

  “The forty million dollar question, kid. The forty million dollar question.”

  “Forget it then.”

  “Okay, you look like a decent kid. I’ll tell you. She was a sweet girl, but she wanted too much heaven. She and me both. Life’s job is not to give you too much heaven. But she got a taste for it, just like I did. You get addicted to it. So,” Fazzo gestured with his hands in a sawing motion. “She got in but the door came down. I mean, I know I cut into her, using my hands. I know that. Only I wasn’t trying to cut into her. I liked her. She was sweet. I was trying to keep it from slamming down so hard on her. They thought I was insane at first, and were going to put me in one of those hospitals. But all the doctors pretty much confirmed that my marbles were around. Only all that boozing I did made me sound nuts.” Fazzo leaned over. “You got someone you love, kid?”

  Paul shrugged. “I got my little sister. She’s it.”

  “No other family?”

  “I got cousins out of state. Why?”

  “No folks?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “Okay, now it’s clear why 265 chose you, kid. You’re like me, practically no strings, right? But one beloved in your life. Me, I had Joey.”

  Paul grimaced.

  “Hey!” Fazzo flared up. “It wasn’t like that! Joey was a kid whose family threw him out with the garbage. I gave him shelter, and that was it. Wasn’t nothing funny about it. Sick thing to think.” Then, after a minute he calmed. “I gave Joey what was in 265 and everything was good for awhile. Joey, he had some problems.”

  “Like what?”

  Fazzo shrugged. “We all got problems. Joey, he had leukemia. He was gonna die.” Then it was as if a light blinked on in the old man’s eyes. “You know about Joey, don’t you? It touched you in there, and it let you know about him. Am I right? When it touches you, it lets you know about who’s there and who’s not, and maybe about who’s coming soon. You know about Joey?”

  Paul shook his head.

  Fazzo seemed disappointed. “Sometimes I think it was all an illusion, like my bag of tricks. In here, all these bricks and bars and grays. Sometimes I forget what it was like to go through
the door.”

  “What happened to Joey?”

  “He’s still there. I put him there.”

  “You killed him?”

  “Holy shit, kid, you think I’d kill a little boy I loved as if he were my own son? I told you, I put him there, through 265. He’s okay there. They treat him decent.”

  “He’s not in the apartment,” Paul said, as if trying to grasp something.

  “You want me to spell it out for you, kid? 265 is the door to Heaven. You don’t have to believe me, and it ain’t the Heaven from Jesus Loves Me Yes I Know. It’s a better Heaven than that. It’s the Heaven to beat all Heavens.” Fazzo spat at the glass that separated them. “You come here with questions like a damn reporter and you don’t want answers. You want answers you go into that place. You won’t like what you find, but it’s too late for you. 265 is yours, kid. Go get it. And whoever it is you love, if it’s that sister of yours, make sure she gets in it. Make sure she gets Heaven. Maybe that’s what it’s all about. Maybe for someone to get Heaven, someone else has to get Hell.”

  “Like that woman?”

  Fazzo did not say a word. He closed his eyes and began humming.

  Startled, he opened his eyes again and said, “Kid! You got to get home now!”

  “What?”

  “NOW!” Fazzo shouted and smashed his fist against the glass. The guard standing in the corner behind him rushed up to him, grabbing him by the wrists. “Kid, it’s your sister it wants, not you. You got caught, but it’s your sister it wants. And there’s only one way to get into heaven! Only one way, kid! Go get her now!”

  9

  Paul didn’t rush home. He didn’t like giving Fazzo the benefit of the doubt. He’d be on shift in another hour, and usually he spent this time by catching a burger and a Coke before going into the station. But he drove the murky streets as the sun lowered behind the stacks of castle-like apartment buildings on Third Street.

  It looked as if it would rain in a few minutes.

  Trash lay in heaps around the alleys, and he saw the faces of the walking wounded along the stretch of boulevards that were Sunday afternoon empty. He passed the apartments on Swan Street, doing his best not to glance up to the second floor.

  265.

  No one would live there, not after a woman’s torso was found in the bathtub.

  Even squatters would stay away.

  Paul drove home. He just wanted to see if she was watching her movies or reading.

  He didn’t believe Fazzo.

  10

  In the living room, the television was on, but without sound.

  Soft music played from the bathroom.

  Paul knocked on the bathroom door. “Marie?”

  After four knocks, he opened it.

  The machines were off.

  She lay in the tub of red water. On her back. Her face beneath the water’s surface like a picture he’d seen once, when they’d both been children, of a mermaid in a lake.

  Scratched crudely on the tile with the edge of the scissors she’d used to cut herself free from life, the words:

  I don’t believe in heaven.

  11

  It was only years later, when Paul saw the item in the papers about Fazzo the Fabulous finally getting the chair, after years of living on Death Row, that he thought about 265 again.

  He heard, too, that the apartments on Swan Street were being torn down within a week of Fazzo’s execution.

  Paul had led what he would’ve called a quiet life. He’d been on the force for fifteen years, and the town had not erupted in anything more than the occasional domestic battle or crack house fire.

  He kept Marie’s machines in his apartment, and often watched television in the living room feeling as if he were less alone.

  But one evening, he went down there, down to Swan Street, down the rows of slums and squats where the city had turned off even the streetlamps.

  Standing in front of the old apartments, he glanced at the windows of 265. The boards had come out, and the windows were empty sockets in the face of brick.

  He carefully walked up the half-burnt staircase, around the rubble of bricks and pulpy cardboard, stepping over the fallen boards with the nails sticking straight up.

  The apartment no longer had a door. When he went inside, the place had been stripped of all appliance.

  The stink of urine and feces permeated the apartment, and he saw the residue of countless squatters who had spent nights within the walls of 265.

  Graffiti covered half the wall by the bathroom, all of it spray-painted cuss words, kids’ names, lovers’ names…

  Scrawled in blue across the doorway to the bathroom, the words:

  THE SEVEN STARS.

  The bathroom had been less worked-over. The shower curtain had been torn down, as had the medicine cabinet. But the toilet, cracked and brown, still remained, as did the bathtub and shower nozzle.

  Paul closed his eyes, remembering the woman’s bloody torso in the tub.

  Remembering Marie in the pink water.

  When he opened his eyes, he said, “All right. You have me. You took Marie. What is it you want?”

  He sat on the edge of the tub, waiting for something. He laughed to himself, thinking of how stupid this was, how he was old enough to know better…how Fazzo the Fabulous had butchered some woman up here, and that was all. How Marie had killed herself at their home, and that was all.

  There was no heaven.

  He laughed for awhile, to himself. Reached in his pocket and drew out a pack of cigarettes. Lit one up, and inhaled.

  Sometime, just after midnight, he heard the humming of the flies, and the drip drop of rusty water as it splashed into the tub.

  In a moment, he saw the light come up, from the edge of the forest, near the great tree, and two iguanas scuttled across the moss-covered rocks. It came in flashes at first, as if the skin of the world were being stripped away layer by layer, until the white bone of life came through, and then the green of a deep wood. The boy was there, and Paul recognized him without ever having seen his picture.

  “You’ve finally come to join us, then,” the boy said. “Marie told me all about you.”

  “Marie? Is she here?” Paul’s tongue dried in his mouth, knowing that this was pure hallucination, but wanting it to be true.

  The boy—and it was Joey, Fazzo’s friend—nodded, holding his hand out.

  The world had turned liquid around him, and for a moment he felt he focused a camera lens in his mind, as the world solidified again.

  The great white birds stood like sentries off at some distance. A deer in the wood glanced up at the new intruder. He saw something else, like a veil, through which he could see another person.

  Someone watched him from the other side of the gossamer fabric.

  Lightning flashed across the green sky. A face emerged in the forest—from the trees and the fern and the birds and the lizards. A face that was neither kind nor cruel.

  And then, he saw her — Marie — running to him so fast it took his breath away. She was still twenty, but she had none of the deformities of body, and the machines no longer purred beside her. “Paul! You’ve come! I knew you would!”

  She grabbed his hand, squeezing it. “I’ve waited forever for you, you should’ve come earlier.”

  Joey nodded. “See? I told you he’d come eventually.”

  Paul grabbed his sister in his arms, pressing as close to her as he could. Tears burst from his eyes, and he felt the warmth of her skin, the smell of her hair, the smell of her—the fragrance of his beautiful, vibrant sister. He no longer cared what illusion had produced this, he did not ever want to let go of her.

  But she pulled back, finally. “Paul, you’re crying. Don’t.” She reached up and touched the edge of his cheek.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said.

  “Yes, you did,” Marie said. “You believed in 265 all along. They told me you did. They knew you did.”

  “Who are they
?” he asked.

  Marie glanced at Joey. “I can’t tell you.”

  “No names,” Joey whispered a warning.

  The rain splintered through the forest cover like slivers of glass, all around them, and the puddles that formed were small mirror shards reflecting the sky.

  Marie grasped Paul’s hand.

  He could not get over her warmth. “How…how did you get here?”

  She put a finger to her lips. “Shh. Isn’t it enough that we’re here now, together?”

  Paul nodded his head.

  “It won’t last long,” Marie said, curiously looking up at the glassy rain as it poured around them.

  “The rain?” he asked, feeling that this was better than any heaven he could imagine. This was the Heaven of all heavens.

  “No, you being here. Each time is only a glimpse. Like striking a match, it only burns for a short while.”

  “I don’t understand,” Paul said.

  Marie looked up at him, and all he felt was joy. He had never remembered feeling so alive, so much part of the world, so warm with love. Again, his eyes blurred with tears.

  “It’s only a glimpse,” she whispered. “Each time. When Fazzo was executed, he was the sacrifice. But they need another one. This time, they want the sacrifice to be here, on the threshold. It works longer that way. Just one. Each time, for you to be here.”

  Her mood changed, as she smiled like a child on her birthday. “Oh, but Paul, it’s so wonderful to see you. Next time you come I’ll show you the rivers of gold, and the way the trees whisper the secret of immortality. The birds can guide us across the fire mountains. And I have friends here, too, I want you to meet.”

  “I don’t understand,” Paul whispered, but the rain began coming down harder, and a glass wall of rain turned shiny and then melted, as he felt her hand grab for him through the glass.

  He was sitting in the darkness of the bathroom at 265, a young woman’s hand in his, cut off at the wrist because the door had come down too hard, too soon.

  12

  For Paul, the hardest one was the first one. He found her down in Brickton, near the factories. She was not pretty, and looked to him to be at the end of her days from drugs and too many men and too many pimps beating her up. She had burn marks on her arms, and when she got into his car, he thought: I won’t be doing anything too awful. Not too awful. It’ll be like putting an animal out of its misery.