Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Sweet Alice, lost in some dream world. She stirred, her fingers curled, once, her hand went to her throat, once, she seemed to weep but it was like a puppy sound—a puppy at the door to a room that she wanted to be set free from.

  She awoke in the early morning, her eyes opening wide. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Just watching you.”

  “Why?” She wiped her face with her hands as if washing away a mask of sleep. “You scared me for a second.”

  “What was it like?”

  “What?”

  “What we did last night.”

  “Weren’t you there?” She grinned, giggling.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Oh stop it. It’s too early for jokes.” She looked across the bed to the clock. “It’s only five-thirty. I can sleep some more. That is,” she arched an eyebrow, “if you’d quit staring.”

  She turned over, facing the window. The sunlight had crept up.

  “Can you close the curtains?” she said. “I need some dark.”

  4

  Jim wandered downtown, walked along the river, along the railroad tracks, alongside the boat slips and the chemical factory—miles of walking at dawn, when the town seemed to wake like a baby, from a gasp to a full cry. When the sun was fully up, he got a cup of coffee from the doughnut shop and walked out to the pier, watching the ferry as it crossed to Newburyport.

  The 7:15 blew its whistle, coming into the station, and he turned to watch it—remembering the train crash of a few weeks earlier, and the first time he remembered being in the silver British hospital as Mrs. Earnshaw.

  Then it came to him. That had not been the first time. That had been the first time he’d remembered it so vividly. Closing his eyes, he recalled an incident when he’d been four or five, and he’d been in a hospital—was it the same one? Only, it was not in England. It had been in Massachusetts, when he’d been taken to visit Grammy Evans, her drinking out of control—the white and green rooms, the silver flask she hid even there to take a nip now and then when the nurses weren’t looking.

  “Hold this,” she’d said, passing him the silver flask. “Don’t let them see it.”

  So he’d hidden it in his shorts, feeling the cold metal against his thighs. Then he’d wandered the halls of the hospital while the grown-ups talked and did not notice him missing. He began playing “Spy” and decided that the doctors were Secret Agents. When he came across one, he’d run up some stairs and down some others, and through double doors and hallways with words written in bright red and yellow along them. And then he’d come to a room where four men in green masks stood about a table.

  On the table, a naked old woman who was probably dead.

  Jim had kept himself hidden away, and he watched as the four doctors injected something terrible into the old woman so that she sat up screaming.

  It had made Jim scream, too, and one of the four men turned and saw him, and before he could get out the door, someone else grabbed him.

  “What in God’s name is this kid doing in here? Where the hell is security?” a man said.

  The woman screamed again, and then began coughing.

  Jim, sitting on the pier, sipped his coffee, trying to remember more, but that had been all.

  What he knew without a doubt was that the woman on the table had been Mrs. Earnshaw, and that she was dead when he was a little boy and that somehow this was all a hallucination caused by a traumatic incident.

  The coffee grew cold as he closed his eyes.

  He decided to go into Mrs. Earnshaw in the hospital.

  He willed a headache to come on, he tried to simulate the pain that arrived, and the flickering lights.

  After an hour, he gave up.

  Several days later, while he was sitting on the toilet, he arrived into Mrs. Earnshaw again.

  She sat in the garden with Nora. Nora was reading one of her magazines, and Jim was doing a little needlepoint.

  “Nora. Tell me about myself,” he said.

  The nurse glanced up.

  “All right. I suppose this is good.”

  “It seems I’m losing bits of me,” Jim said, nodding as if to the will of the universe. “I’m not sure where I fit in with all this.”

  “Well, that was the issue, after all,” Nora said. She set her magazine aside and crossed her leg. “Mind if I light up?”

  “Go right ahead, dear.”

  Nora drew a cigarette from her breast pocket and struck a match along the edge of the low brick wall she leaned against.

  After the first puff, she said, “You’re a psychiatrist from Bristol who worked with NASA and spent a good deal of time in Belize working on the Arc Project.”

  “What’s that?”

  Nora shrugged. “I wish I knew.” She said this warmly and without a trace of deception. “All I know is my end of this.”

  “The Arc Project doesn’t even sound familiar to me.”

  “All of you were involved with it. That’s all any of us knows.” Another long drag on the cigarette. “You have the mind link to this man named Jim, as do the others, to various people. And you’re dying.”

  “I had no idea,” Jim said, setting his needlepoint on his lap. “Why am I called Catherine Earnshaw? That’s obviously not my real name.”

  “You picked it. All of you picked names from books and movies. You liked the name Cathy.”

  “Do you know who I am, really?”

  Nora closed her eyes for a minute. Smoked. Scratched a place just above her eyebrows. Opened her eyes. “Not really.”

  “Doesn’t all of this seem inhuman?”

  Nora sighed. “We have to trust that this is saving something important for us.”

  “Saving from what?”

  Nora dropped her cigarette to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of her white shoe. “From loss. The information has to be retained, and it’s not like you’re a computer that can just be downloaded.”

  “I wish I could remember the information you’re talking about, but really, I can’t. There seem to be great gaps in my memory.”

  “It’s just the connection,” Nora said.

  She stepped over to the wheelchair and crouched down before it. She placed her hands over Jim’s and looked up into his eyes. “I know that Mrs. Earnshaw is leaving us. I know that you’re this other person, this Jim. I can see you when you come into her.”

  Jim trembled, and felt sweat break out along his neck. “Really?”

  Nora nodded. She glanced about, slightly nervous. “I have to tell you something, Jim. There’s someone here, an intruder from the Arc Project. I’m not sure who it is, but Mrs. Earnshaw is in danger.”

  Jim shivered. “What’s this all about? Am I crazy?”

  Nora grinned. Then she grew serious again. “Maybe. I never would’ve thought I’d be involved in this too. None of us really thought it would work. But someone is after you, Jim, not here, in this hospital. But the intruder’s already trying to track you down.”

  “I don’t understand. This whole ‘intruder’ thing.”

  An old man in a white jacket walked up beside them.

  “Dr. Morgan,” Nora said.

  “Here, the rain’s coming again,” the doctor said. “Let’s get Mrs. Earnshaw inside for another series of shots, shall we?”

  As Nora wheeled Jim across the path toward the door, as the first drops of rain fell, Jim whispered, “She’s already dead, isn’t she? Mrs. Earnshaw?”

  Nora put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing slightly. She waited until they were in the corridor before she said yes.

  5

  And that was the last of it for Jim.

  He returned to work the following day, sitting behind the glass, selling tickets for the train. He tried to induce the headaches, but they seemed to be gone for good. His aspirin bottle stayed full, and he had a feeling of well-being that he almost despised. Occasionally, when he didn’t even realize he was doing it, he glanced at his hands, half expec
ting to see Mrs. Earnshaw’s in their place, her wedding ring on her slightly wrinkled finger.

  A woman said, “Two, plus a child, for Penn Station.”

  “One hundred fifty-two,” he said, typing the information into the computer.

  She passed him the money, he counted it out. As he passed her three tickets, he said, “Boarding on the river side. Train’s delayed by ten minutes. Arrive Penn Station at 7:30.”

  “I wanted to get there by seven.”

  He looked at her. She was forty, trim, brown hair cut short in wisps.

  “Sorry, ma’am. It won’t happen.”

  “It has to happen.”

  “You could try the airport.”

  She shook her head.

  “Damn it,” she muttered. She reached for the tickets, grabbing them. Her husband and little girl stood back, near the benches. She turned away, then faced him again. “Is this the same Deerwich where the train crashed once?”

  Jim chuckled. “Everyone asks that. Yep, it is. Just to the north, when it crossed the bridge over the river.”

  The woman frowned. “It’s dangerous to cross bridges. I hope there aren’t too many bridges between here and Manhattan. I never fly, and I don’t like to cross a bridge that’s already had a crash on it. Bad luck.”

  She and her family went to wait for the train, but Jim sat there with his mouth open. She’d said it and it felt like a secret code. It’s dangerous to cross bridges. I don’t like to cross a bridge that’s already had a crash on it. Bad luck.

  On his break at 9:30, he took a walk out along the tracks, trying to remember the night of the train crash when he’d first had the experience. He followed the track up to the bridge over the Sparrow River. He saw the place where it had been repaired; where the train had cut loose and gone off.

  The investigation was ongoing. Maybe they’d never know what had malfunctioned about the train on the tracks.

  He stood there, staring at the tracks, thinking about the woman complaining about the danger of travel, and remembering Nora’s words:

  The first to cross the bridge.

  And then he knew, even before he found the list of names in the newspaper from several weeks earlier.

  It read like a joke list of names from books and movies, the names of the dead:

  Juliet Capulet, Norman Bates, Paul Bunyan, Zazu Pitts, Ramon Navarro, Silas Marner, Gregor Roche.

  The list of the dead included, he believed, everyone he met in that group in the hospital room.

  Every single one.

  In that list, too, was the name Catherine Earnshaw.

  All just happened to be in the one car of the train where all were killed.

  Another name, too, that he recognized: Nora Fitch.

  He sat down in the library with the newspaper and wept. He drank too much that night and went wandering along the docks and backstreets, as if somehow the answer would reveal itself if he searched hard enough.

  Finally, after two a.m., he ambled home.

  As he lay down next to his sleeping wife, he wrapped his arms around her, wanting to feel safe from a world he no longer understood, all the mysteries and strange coincidences and dreams-that-seemed-real of another world he’d somehow been thrust into, whether through madness or design.

  Alice’s skin was almost too hot to the touch. She seemed burning with fever. She moaned slightly in her dream.

  She woke with a start, and said, “What are you doing?”

  “Sorry,” he said, his breath a blast of whiskey. “I just needed to touch you.”

  She rolled onto her back, staring up at the ceiling.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Sure am,” Jim said, wanting to touch his wife so badly, wanting to wrap himself around her and be part of her so he wouldn’t feel so alone in his mind.

  “Go to sleep,” she commanded. “In the morning you’ll be sober and we can talk about things.”

  “What things?” he asked, ready to fall into the coma of drunken sleep.

  “Things about us. Things we should talk about. Things we need to talk about,” Alice said. She sat up. Switched on the bedside lamp. He looked at her naked back, wishing it could be pressed against his chest and stomach.

  “I love you,” he whispered hoarsely, unsure whether or not he had really said it aloud or had only wanted to say it.

  “I’m not who you think I am,” Alice said, still not facing him. “Not anymore.”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “Of course you are. You’re my wife. You’re Alice.”

  But he hadn’t said Alice, had he? As he lay there, the fear washing over him like a warm bath, he knew he had said “You’re Juliet,” because something within him knew it was Juliet, the Mrs. Earnshaw part of him knew, had known, and had been trying to tell him in her own way, had been trying to tell him that this was no longer the woman he loved but a woman who called herself Juliet Capulet and might not even be a woman at all or even a human being as far as he knew.

  The Mrs. Earnshaw part of him let him know that this was the intruder in his bed.

  He lay there, feeling his heartbeat accelerate as Alice slowly turned in the lamplight, a half-grin on her face. As her smile curled up and her eyes glimmered with a dark onyx that might have been shadow, might have been stone, she said, “We have to have a long talk, you and I, about what really is going on inside that mind of yours.”

  “Juliet?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I’m Alice. Alice. Remember? Your Alice.”

  She sat there, watching him all night; and he stared back at her, too afraid to look away.

  In the morning, she rose and went to shower.

  Jim lay there, frozen, waiting for what was to come, remembering the woman on the table surrounded by doctors. He realized that in some respects he was still there in that room watching Mrs. Earnshaw—or whoever the body had been—being brought back to life, or some form of life, some kind of intelligence within the skin that had so recently been shed.

  And how he had felt a presence in that room when he was four, a presence that was not entirely human, not entirely like a middle-aged woman whose heart had given out and who now was going to have another being within her.

  When the water stopped, he heard Alice sing as she toweled off, and then she opened the bathroom door and something that was not entirely Alice moved like silver liquid toward him.

  But even as he felt something warm and metallic inject itself into his throat, he had the sense that he was not Jim at all, but something that lived within the skin of a nice lady sitting on a moving train as it headed down the New England coast.

  6

  You mustn’t pass this on, because I know who you are on the inside, but you haven’t crossed the bridge fully, have you, dear? You’re still only halfway across, feeling the warm rain, the glimmer as it warms you, but it hasn’t burst within you yet.

  Mustn’t make this worse than it is. It’s only a train after all, and travel by rail is so safe these days.

  Look at that little town we’re coming to now.

  Isn’t it lovely?

  Across that river.

  Across that bridge.

  Get ready, dear. Our connection’s coming up shortly.

  The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon

  1

  Sunland City was the last place in the world Jesus was ever going to come looking for Roy Shadiak.

  He returned to his hometown in his fortieth year, after he felt he could never again sell Jesus to the rabble. Something within him had been eating him up for years. His love for life had long before dried up, and then so had his marriage and his bitter understanding of how God operated in the world. He’d gotten off the bus out at the flats, and brushed off the boredom of a long trip down infinite highways. He stood awhile beside the canals and watched the gators as they lay still as death in the muddy shallows. He’d been wearing his white suit for the trip because it was what his mother liked him to wear, and because it was the only suit of his that
still fit him. And it fit Sunland City, with its canals and palmettos and merciless sunshine. It was a small town, the City was, and they would think him mad to arrive on the noon bus in anything other than creamy white. He would walk down Hispaniola Street and make a detour into the Flamingo for a double shot of vodka. The boys in there, they'd see him, maybe recognize him, maybe the whores, too, and call him the King, and he’d tell them all about how he was back for good. He’d tell them that he didn’t care what the hell happened to Susie and the brats and that doctor she took up with. He’d tell them he was going to open a movie theater or manage the A & P or open a boat rental business. He’d tell them that anything you really needed, and all you could depend on in this life, you could find in your own backyard. Didn’t need God. Nobody needed God.

  God was like the phone company: You paid your bill, and sometimes you got cut off anyway. Sometimes, if you changed your way of thinking, you just did without a phone. Sometimes you switched companies.

  Oh, but he still needed God. Within his secret self, he had to admit it. Roy Shadiak still needed to know that he could save at least one soul in the world. His feet ached in his shoes. He had only brought one suitcase. He had just walked out on Susie. It was in his blood to walk. His father had walked, and his grandfather had walked. They probably got tired of Jesus and all the damn charity, too. Even Frankie had walked, as best he could. All leaving before they got left. Roy had blisters on the bottoms of his feet, but still he walked.

  He passed beneath the Lover’s Bridge, and the Bridge of Sighs, with its hanging vines and parrot cages. He walked along the muddy bank of the north canal, knowing that he could close his eyes and still find his way to Hispaniola Street. All the street names were like that: Spanish, or a mix of Indian and Slave, named like Ocala and Gitchie and Corona del Mar. All the canals were thick with lilies, and snapping turtles lounged across the rock islets. The water was murky and stank, but beautiful pure white swans cut across the calm surface as if to belie the muck of this life. Roy saw three men, old timers, with their fresh-rolled cigarillos and Panama hats, on a punt. He waved to them, but they didn’t notice him, for they were old and half blind.