After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  And then, as if to complete the process, she drifted into a busy intersection under the false safety of a green light.

  The police came to my office to tell me about the accident, took me to the morgue.

  I identified her, I called her parents, we buried her, and now I had a handheld laser IR thermometer to show for our three-year marriage.

  I unboxed it, batteried it up and held it to my forearm like a science-fiction hypodermic, pulled the trigger: 98.4 degrees.

  Perfectly normal.

  •

  According to the packaging, home inspectors were big on these handheld thermometers. It made their job worlds easier.

  Supposedly you could use it to double-check the temperature in your oven, or track pipes in the wall, or do something I didn’t understand with the hot-water heater. You could find air leaks around windows, too, especially in winter. The living room might be a balmy, draft-free seventy-two degrees, but run this dusty red light around that dried-out caulk line in the sill, and you’ll see where your electricity bill’s really being spent.

  I took it to work, checked the heat on the electric pencil sharpener, on the copy machine, on the coffee pot, on my supervisor when he was walking away. My deskmate Randall shoved it down the front of his pants before I could stop him, pulled the trigger to prove how hot he was.

  The microwave was nearly the exact same temperature off or not. The only difference was its light bulb, probably.

  On the bus a woman across from me screamed when I pulled it from my pocket.

  I got off at the next step, my hand still on the pistol grip.

  When Teresa and I had first been dating it had been winter. One of our things was to walk to the liquor store seriously bundled-up in scarves and jackets and stocking caps, so that, cutting across the parking lot, we’d joke about how we were going to stick the place up—at least that’s what the clerk was going to think when we walked in.

  Walking home after the bus, I stopped by a different liquor store, paid for a six-pack, the thermometer’s grip warm against my stomach.

  The beer was Teresa’s brand. I didn’t even notice until my first drink.

  I drank it anyway, had two gone by the time I made it home.

  Later, I settled my red pointer on the late-show host’s cheek. It made me feel like a sniper.

  And then I checked the living room out.

  The walls were warmer behind the set, cooler by the door. The lamp that I’d had on while eating was still comparatively hot. The doorway to the kitchen was the same as the wall. My foot was the same as the wall. The late-show host was on fire. The window was the Arctic, the ceiling indifferent, the carpet the same.

  I tried to write my name on the wall but wasn’t fast enough.

  Finally I was able to draw a heart, slash an arrow across it.

  The audience on television exploded with laughter.

  I nodded in acknowledgement, sighted along the top of the gun down the hall, to my bedroom, but stopped at Teresa’s instead.

  Everywhere else in that darkness, the temperature was hovering around seventy.

  There was a spot right in her doorway, though.

  It registered as body heat.

  I sucked the red light back into my hand.

  •

  The next morning I called in when I knew I was going to be late if I tried to make it. One more tardy and I’d have to talk to somebody about it. I was a widower now, though, right? Surely they’d give me a day or two extra.

  After the sun was up and the neighbors had gone to work, I strolled around the front yard to make sure I was alone and then checked the faucet under the window, followed the hose—frozen solid—around the side of the house, where I was aiming.

  I peeked through Teresa’s window.

  Her room was just her room, her doorway her doorway.

  So I aimed the gun in.

  Nothing, no one.

  I nodded that this made sense, this was right, thank you, and spent the day at the movies, and walking around, and buying more batteries.

  We hadn’t had insurance on each other, but the other driver’s policy had given me a big enough check, I suppose. Not enough to buy a person, but I could buy an ATV if I wanted. Maybe two. Or all the batteries I could carry.

  I would have felt guilty taking the money, as she was kind of a careless driver, even if she had been in the right this time, but we had bought that car together. I told myself it was kind of like getting my investment back. And out of the marriage to boot.

  When I got home, a package was waiting for me on the stoop.

  It was a little handheld movie camera, with nightshot.

  I left it in its box.

  •

  Three days later, the thermometer had lost its novelty. And I wasn’t turning the light in the hall off anymore.

  Sitting in my chair in the living room, I could lean over, have a clean line all the way down to my bedroom—to the one I’d claimed in the bad old days. Those days being the ones when Teresa was alive, yeah.

  Now, in these good and unawkward days, I could stake out the master bedroom again.

  Except I wasn’t.

  The morning after the camera came, I’d finally pulled Teresa’s door shut, nodded to myself that this was good, that it wasn’t my job to clean it out.

  That afternoon, it was open again.

  And that doorway, it was always a few degrees warmer than the hall. And the curtains over her window had shifted, so I couldn’t stand in the bushes and see inside anymore.

  I filed it all under Things You Never Expected to Know, and went to work, the camera in my bag.

  Randall bought it from me for a hundred and fifty, half to be paid next check, half before summer.

  That night he called me for a refund.

  “You didn’t pay me anything,” I told him, still trying to watch the show I had on.

  “I mean on owing you,” he said.

  He dropped the camera off, stood on the porch like I was supposed to invite him in, and finally looked to the street behind him like somebody was waiting, sloped off for the bus stop.

  I fiddled with the camera over a second microwave dinner.

  Three beers of the six-pack I’d bought were still in the refrigerator. They weren’t an offering, but I couldn’t seem to drink them either.

  At work they’d asked if I wanted to see a grief counselor. I’d said thanks, but no. Because there was just show-grief, not real loss, real sadness.

  As hard as I tried, even at the funeral with her parents and little brother there, still, it felt more like relief than sorrow. Like I’d hit the lottery without even buying a ticket. Game over, reset, start again.

  There was no way what had happened was my fault. And, as far as everybody knew, we were happily married, pretty much. As happy as anybody. Except for the debt she’d been piling up, mail-ordering stuff, we didn’t even have anything to argue about, really. And the card was in her name.

  Instead of throwing the camera away—the invoice said it had cost her three-fifty—I flipped through the manual, arguing with Randall in my head that it was brand new, no way could it be broke.

  I fell asleep with it in my lap, woke to a distinct pop.

  The kids in the street, cracking baseballs into the horizon.

  I dragged my blanket to the couch, sat on it backwards, on my knees, and parted the curtains, watched them.

  They were letting the new kid swing. And he could. He so could.

  Without thinking, I raised the camera, zoomed in on him, and, like I hadn’t been able to make the camera do all last night, the little red record-light glowed on in the eyepiece.

  Because nobody had catcher pads, the kids had rigged a soccer net behind the batter.

  The new kid didn’t need it, though.

  He lofted ball after ball into the sky, everybody craning to track it each time, run it down, his little brother—they were like different stages of the same kid—ready to collect the ball, if an
y of them made it over the imaginary plate.

  I left them to it, trolled the refrigerator for the nothing I already knew was there then skirted Teresa’s door, aiming for my own.

  And it hit me, the smell.

  From her room.

  It was one of those thick smells that are like particles in the air, that feel like an oil on your skin.

  I fell over dry-heaving, trying to hold it in because I didn’t want to clean it up.

  After throwing up in the toilet, I hitched my shirt up over my lower face and stood in her doorway—it didn’t feel warm—flicked her light on, but it was dead.

  I came back with the flashlight, cruised its yellow beam over her magazines and pillows, her shoes and purses. Over me in her dresser mirror, standing there in my boxers. Nobody staring over my reflection’s shoulder, even though my skin was crawling.

  That dead-raccoon smell, though. I could feel it settling on my face.

  And then, over my shoulder, the skin there sensitive in a way it hadn’t been since childhood, something crashed.

  At first I thought it was a hand, clamping down.

  Then, rationalizing at a furious pace, I told myself it was one of the beers in the refrigerator, exploding.

  Wrong, wrong.

  It was the shorted-out doorbell, hanging right behind me. Pile-driving into my ear, the sound straightening my back so fast that it was going to be sore.

  Somebody was at the door.

  I made myself smile.

  Probably the new kid. He’d fouled a ball into the backyard, wanted to walk through.

  Sure, sure.

  I opened the door.

  It was another package.

  I stood there, opened it, the white peanuts drifting down to the floor, some clinging to my legs.

  Air freshener. Twenty-four cans of it.

  •

  This was all because I’d faked my way through the funeral, I knew. Or, it was all in my head, was just coincidence—she’d ordered all this weeks before—but, if it was all in my head, was just guilt, then that meant I could fix it, too.

  Right?

  I took the remaining three beers to the cemetery, poured them into her dirt, drinking the last drink of each like we were sharing. Like I was letting her go first. Because it hadn’t all been bad. There had been a time when we—well, we weren’t going to conquer the world, show them how it was done. But we were going to close the front door of our house, and do whatever the hell we wanted in there. Wear pajamas all day, eating chips and playing videogames. We weren’t going to play by the world’s rules, we were going to make our own. Screw the rat race, all the pressure to be upstanding, start a family, leverage our way to a bigger house, better car. We could fake it for work, sure, but after we left our cubicles, we were just us.

  Because we felt the same about all that, I guess we figured that was love. Or close enough. And I’m not saying it wasn’t. That it couldn’t have been.

  I stood at the bus stop to go home but then crossed the street, went the other way instead. Just walking.

  I left the camera on the slanted-frontward brick ledge in front of a liquor store window, the manual folded back as well as I could, tucked under. The world could thank me later for that.

  Then, when I finally made it back to the house, the baseball kids stalling their game so I could hunch-shoulder past without getting beaned in the forehead, I came back onto the porch with a screwdriver, pried the middle two numbers out of our 1322, put them back as 1232.

  And I pulled Teresa’s door shut again, and this time looped a bungee cord over the handle, tied it off on a cinderblock I dragged in from the backyard, and when I shouldered it open enough to reach in, make sure the light switch was off, I was pretty sure there was a shape in the mirror that had two shoulders, couldn’t have been me.

  I let the door click shut quietly, didn’t want to draw any extra attention.

  My heart just slamming in my chest.

  I went to the refrigerator to reload and stopped a couple of steps away.

  The floor was tacky.

  With beer. It had come from the refrigerator. No empties in there.

  I laughed, rubbed my smile in with my hand and turned on all the lights in the house, even the front and back porch lights, then set there with my thermometer pistol, checking each bulb from my chair.

  Teresa’s door never opened. Exactly like it shouldn’t have. And none of the light bulbs exploded for no reason at all.

  It was just me, sitting awake all night. The kids out there playing night ball, the baseball dipped in rubbing alcohol and lit with blue flame, just like some big brother had showed them.

  With nightshot, it would have looked so excellent.

  I thought I was dreaming it until the two police cars rolled in, to keep the city from burning down.

  Or maybe we were all dreaming.

  •

  By now I was carrying the thermometer in my pocket at all times. And calling in for the week.

  Randall messaged me but I let it slide. I had enough cash from Teresa to ride it out for a few weeks if I needed to. If it came to that.

  In a way, it was being loyal to Teresa, really. I wasn’t playing the world’s game, wasn’t doing what it expected me to do.

  Or, I was being loyal to the Teresa I’d married. Not to the one who I’d kind of started thinking was looking in a different way at my sisters, maybe. At their perfect, reasonable, cookie-cutter lives. Their husbands and their nice neat families. Their living rooms that were grown-up living rooms.

  We didn’t want all that, though. It’s not what we’d signed on for.

  I sat the day out, cleaning my recorded TV shows off the DVR, telling myself this was a chore I had to get through. That I wasn’t hiding, I was doing stuff, I was taking care of things.

  Because I still didn’t trust the refrigerator, I ordered a pizza.

  Thirty minutes later the doorbell chugged in its diabolical way.

  It wasn’t the pizza delivery guy but one of those respectable dads. With a letter for me that had shown up in his box.

  I nodded thanks and he reached past me, tapped the street numbers by my door.

  “This is why,” he said.

  I turned as if just seeing them.

  “Kids,” he explained, and we laughed together and he asked if I needed help getting his address off my house, and the question under that was about his mail, if I’d been getting it.

  I told him I’d flop the numbers, it was nothing, and thanked him, stepped inside, left him there.

  Behind me, the whole house was dark. For the first time in days.

  Finally the dad stepped away, walked down the sidewalk instead of crossing the grass.

  I aimed my thermometer at the letter. It was just normal.

  I aimed it at all the light bulbs, knowing where they were by instinct, now. They were all cool, like they’d never been on.

  The letter was from the city, had never touched human hands, was just machine-printed, machine-stuffed, machine-stamped, and machine-mailed.

  It was a traffic ticket.

  Teresa was being cited for the light she hadn’t run. When the other driver had run it, it had triggered all the traffic cameras in the intersection.

  The picture—black and white and grainy—was down in the corner of the ticket, supposed to be proof that she’d really done this.

  I didn’t look, didn’t look, and then I did.

  The camera had her from above, of course, and from the front.

  And it was her, no doubt. That wasn’t the part that made me try to step away from what I was holding.

  What made me step away was what she was clutching to her chest. Over her shoulder.

  A baby.

  •

  To show I could, I left all the lights off, slept curled up in my chair, the thermometer pistol-gripped in my hand, pressing into my face.

  Once when I woke I’d been pushing the trigger in my sleep, the beam lasered straight down the
hall. Not making it all the way to the end. Stopping at something there.

  I clicked the gun off, didn’t look at the temperature. Made myself close my eyes again.

  She was telling me something.

  I shook my head no, though. That I didn’t want to know. That no way was I going to call the coroner, ask if that woman from the wreck had been pregnant.

  It wouldn’t mean she’d been seeing somebody else. Six weeks ago, like a game of chicken, like we were each daring the other to enjoy it less, each waiting for the other to call it off, say it wasn’t worth it, call uncle, we’d had sex and ended up laughing afterwards. At ourselves.

  So she could have been pregnant. I guess. Her parents could have been grandparents, had she not pulled into that intersection. My sisters could have been a gaggle of perfect aunts.

  No.

  Even if she was, it’s better the way it happened. Even if she was secretly thrilled about it, it’s better she pulled in front of that car. That he was late to wherever he was going.

  It’s wrong to say it, I know, but it’s the truth.

  If three people bit it in that wreck instead of two, then okay. Now her and that unborn baby, they could be together forever, I guess.

  Which covers no distance at all in explaining why she’s still here.

  The doorbell rang again and I slammed the door open.

  It was my pizza.

  I took it, ate it with water from the tap. Remembered splitting pizzas with Teresa.

  Our first date had been pizza, then the arcade in back.

  When we were going to make it forever.

  I don’t know if I missed her, but I missed that, I guess.

  I nodded thanks to her, stood with a mouthful of the past, went to her door and pushed it open, the bungee cord humming with tension by my leg.

  The heat billowed out like a rancid breath.

  I came back with the air freshener she’d thought to send, sprayed two cans’ worth, until I was coughing and laughing, my hand leaving tomato-sauce stains on the wall by her door.

  Somewhere in there, I cried. I tried to tell myself it was for her, for us, for what we’d had, what we’d meant, but I don’t know. It just hit me, that I was here, now. Alone. That this was it. That everything was just going to keep getting worse, now, from here on out.