Empire of Light

by Michael Bible

  ALSO BY MICHAEL BIBLE

  Sophia

  Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City

  Simple Machines

  My Second Best Bear Rug

  Gorilla Math

  Empire of Light

  Copyright © 2018 Michael Johnson

  First Melville House printing: April 2018

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com

  facebook.com/​mhpbooks

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781612196442

  Ebook ISBN 9781612196459

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Richard Oriolo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bible, Michael, author.

  Title: Empire of light / Michael Bible.

  Description: First edition. | Brooklyn : Melville House, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018003190| ISBN 9781612196442 (paperback original) | ISBN 9781612196459 (reflowable)

  Classification: LCC PS3602.I24 E48 2018 | DDC 813/.6–dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018003190

  v5.2

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Michael Bible

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  When I was twelve years old

  A Note About the Author

  “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”

  —CARSON McCULLERS

  When I was twelve years old, I caused a stranger’s death. I was living in a foster home in the foothills of North Carolina. It was a snow day, no school. One of the other kids, this boy they called Bird, asked me to go sledding beside the cemetery. The whole town was covered in ice. The hill was a sheet of glass and we went faster than we’d ever gone before. It got dark but we didn’t feel like going inside yet, so we sat at the top of the hill and watched cars pass under the amber glow of the streetlight. It was Bird’s idea to throw snowballs and see if we could hit something.

  Next car is mine, he said. Bet you a dollar I can hit it from here.

  Bird packed up a snowball. A truck with big mud tires was passing under the streetlight. Bird lobbed it up high and it came down like a grenade and landed with a thud on the truck’s hood. The driver rolled down the window and gave us the finger. We laughed.

  Next one’s yours, Bird said.

  He packed a snowball and handed it to me. The next car was an old grey Ford. I wound up like a baseball pitcher and threw it as hard as I could. It smacked the windshield and the driver lost control. The Ford ran off the road and slammed into the streetlight. The horn was damaged on impact and moaned out into the night. Bird didn’t move but I ran to the car, slipping on the ice the whole way down. The driver was an elderly woman, she was pinned inside.

  Call for help, I yelled to Bird, but he couldn’t hear me over the sound of the car horn.

  What, he yelled back.

  Call for help, I yelled again.

  Steam came out of my mouth as if the words themselves hung there in the night. The driver’s side door was stuck so I ran around and opened the passenger side door. The woman was slumped over the wheel like she was sleeping. I crawled over but couldn’t get her out of the seat belt. There was a bouquet of azaleas in the backseat undisturbed among the glass and blood. The strange amber glow from the streetlight filled everything.

  Can you hear me, I asked.

  The woman let out a low sound, a word maybe. Was it an accusation? Had she seen me throw the snowball? I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the horn. I looked through the cracked windshield and saw people beginning to come out of their houses. A few stood on their porches and watched. No one wanted to get involved. I tried again to get the woman free but she was stuck. There was nothing I could do but hold her hand.

  You’re going to be OK, I said.

  It seemed like forever but finally a fire truck arrived. It was bright and loud and strange, as if a spaceship had landed in the snow. I ran out to it.

  She’s pinned inside, I said to the fireman.

  Get the hell out of here, kid, he said.

  A police car had pulled up too and the fireman put me in the backseat. Bird was already there, a policeman sat up front sipping coffee. We watched one fireman put up a blue camping tarp over the car to block it from view while the other firemen worked to pry her out. Finally someone cut the battery and the horn slowly died away, from a constant moan to a whimpering silence.

  Tell me what you saw, the policeman said from the front seat.

  She lost control on the ice, Bird said. Hit the streetlight.

  Where were you standing, the policeman asked.

  Up on that hill, Bird said.

  What were you doing up there, the policeman asked.

  There was a long pause. Bird looked at me.

  Nothing, he said. We weren’t doing nothing.

  The ambulance arrived. They worked under the blue tarp for a while. I knew the firemen had freed the woman from the car because the ambulance driver got the stretcher out.

  Is she going to be OK, I asked the policeman.

  He turned around. He was young for a police officer. Maybe in his twenties. He looked like he wanted to say something that he didn’t know how to say.

  She’s going to be fine, he said. You did the right thing.

  Behind him they loaded her into the back of the ambulance in a body bag. It was the first time I realized that people lied to protect you from the truth.

  That was five years ago.

  I never saw Bird again. Last I heard he got adopted in Florida. The foster program bounced me around to a half-dozen families and schools. I began to have discipline problems. Minor stuff. Cutting class. Smoking cigarettes. Then one night I got drunk on cheap wine and rode a stolen horse through a school dance. They were gonna send me away to juvie for that one. I wanted to see the wide-open country so I hitchhiked west. I saw the sun die pink over the Rio Grande, walked the streets of Hollywood penniless and was taken in by an aging starlet until she tired of me, and I lied about my age to become a dishwasher on a cross-country train. There were strange nights out there and I longed for a steady place to lay my head. I got busted smoking a joint behind a Waffle House in Tennessee and spent a night in lockup till they got my records straight. Judge gave me two choices: big-boy jail (his words) or back to foster care in North Carolina. I chose the latter.

  I was sent to another nowhere town on the way to somewhere better. My neighbor was a wayward girl my age named Molly Everhart. We sat on her side porch in old white wicker chairs and watched big storms roll in. It’s what passed for entertainment in that little Carolina town. The rain fell in long blue curtains over the roof like we were trapped inside a waterfall. Molly’s hair was the color of wild honey, same as her eyes. She leaned back in the wicker chair and smacked her gum. The yard filled with puddles so deep the water splashed back skyward like it was raining in both directions. She wore a pink sweater and white jean shorts and when she stretched I noticed a tiny birthmark on her hip in the shape of a dagger.

  Where did you come from, she asked.

  A city, I said. An electric city.

  I closed my eyes.

  There was a city up ahead that pulsed and glowed. For me, life and death were learned by heart. There were canyons up ahead with walls painted like a child bride’s face. Princess Hypochondria was on a sheer cliff, the long train of her dress flowing out with her hair.

  Princess, I called.

  I’m dying, she said. I have every disease
.

  * * *

  —

  MY LEGAL GUARDIAN was a man named Frank Mulberry, a conservative Christian who made his money in dry cleaning. When I first moved to town he told me he was the former mayor. Molly said he got voted out after the discount cigarette emporium closed. She said it was once the biggest supplier of cheap death and steady work this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. All that was left was a crumbling building on the edge of town with a hand-painted sign on the door that read, STOP LEAVING DEAD CATS HERE!

  Frank was always building his miniature model of the town in the basement, a memorial to his dead wife. He was precise about each detail with tiny brushes and tools under a huge magnifying glass. The tiny courthouse and city hall were built to scale, the town clock even had peeling green paint just like the real thing. Each park bench and mailbox was accounted for, every church and hospital and school. If a tree fell in the real town, he removed it from his model. He showed me pictures of the tiny town through the years. He’d change the flowers with the seasons, in winter he covered everything in a light dusting of fake snow.

  At suppertime I would keep my eyes open when Frank bowed his head to Jesus. We always ate in silence while he watched the news. Before bed I read about distant cultures in anthropology books I’d found in a dumpster outside the library. I learned about tribes who believed in Dreamtime, a yearless region where all things past and future were happening at once. I enrolled in the local high school down the street. It had the same bland institutional white brick walls as all the rest of them, the same smell of sharpened pencils and stale milk, the same plump vice principal with his motivational posters framed in his office. He waddled down the hall to show me my classes. Someone had written VANITY OF VANITIES; ALL IS VANITY in spray paint on the wall. I peeked into the classrooms and fell into an acute despair. The dull fluorescents and beige carpet reminded me of so many youth court hallways and government waiting rooms. Places void of hope and natural light.

  As I walked back from the vice principal’s office with my schedule I saw Charlie West, the janitor, cleaning the writing off the walls. I’d met him my first night in town when I convinced him to buy me beer outside Food Lion. He was a former soldier turned peacenik. If you got him going he’d admit he leaned communist, but mainly he said he just hated greed and war. He had stories for miles about the old days when things were wilder and truer. He took me to smoke blunts on top of the water tower. We listened to bootlegs on his boom box and looked down at the lights. Charlie started talking about his army days in Afghanistan.

  I can’t explain it, he said. Sometimes I was afraid I would die. Other times it got so bad I didn’t want to survive.

  He passed the blunt as we looked down over the real town so small and fragile from up here, like Frank’s little basement version of it. Felt like I could erase it from the earth with the sweep of my hand.

  I named my horse Forever. He was chasing a swarm of crimson butterflies. I saddled him up. He wore an old eye patch over his good eye that made the bad one better. I built a fire for him and sang a song. Princess tried to hang herself but lived, then laid by the water as I checked her for tumors. She escaped toward the moon, searching for cures.

  * * *

  —

  MRS. EVERHART, MOLLY’S mom, was my English teacher. When she came down the hallway to the classroom in her high heels it sounded like machine-gun fire. Her husband had died of cancer a few years before. Molly told me her parents met when her dad was an army captain fighting in the Gulf War. Her mom was from Syria, a translator and journalist. They were married in the Middle East and moved back to his hometown and had Molly. If it wasn’t for that war, Molly wouldn’t have existed.

  After Mr. Everhart died, Mrs. Everhart got work at the high school. She always taught class with the windows open. Sunlight from the schoolyard illuminating her like an Italian fresco of a dying martyr. She read us haikus aloud, transporting me to a place of snowcapped mountains and oxen in the sun. I could hear the most gorgeous lonesomeness in her voice. When the bell rang everyone rushed for the door, but I wanted to stay there forever and listen to her read to me. It was between desire and death.

  One day after class I saw this kid walking out to the parking lot. He was tall with wild blond hair and he turned to me. It was the first time I remember anyone looking at me like that. His jaw was square and his eyes were the color of deep-blue flames. He turned away and I followed him to the parking lot. He walked out to an old convertible MG, canary yellow. I was right behind him. A few feet away. He turned suddenly and looked into my eyes again.

  You’re new here, he said.

  My first week, I said.

  I’m Miles Armstrong, he said.

  The name’s Maloney, I said.

  There was a pause as if he were taking me in, considering if I was worthy of his time. A strange light reflected in his eyes making them bluer than blue, they were the bluest things I’d ever seen, like two tiny earths inside his face.

  You need a ride, he said. I’m headed downtown.

  What happens downtown, I asked.

  Nothing, he said. Guess we could just drive around.

  I got in and we sped away.

  He wore aviator sunglasses and a monogrammed golf shirt. Penny loafers with pennies in them and a crocodile belt. There were crushed packs of French cigarettes all over the floor of his car. A paperback novel on the dashboard, the cover curling from the sun. I stuck my hand out and let it float on the wind.

  We don’t get too many new kids around here, he said. Where you from?

  All over, I said.

  I’ve lived here my whole miserable life, he said.

  He turned down on the state highway south of town toward the lake. There were weird old mansions everywhere with crumbling docks. We parked near a clear spot with no houses nearby. It was like a mystery cove that no one else knew.

  My family owns most of this lake, he said. Hell, they own half the county.

  Must be nice, I said.

  Not really, he said. They’re all giant assholes.

  There were ghostly shapes of light on the lake. The insects pulsed in the trees. Something incommunicable rose between us. A charge of electrons in the air. We talked about whatever. Aretha Franklin, René Magritte, the escaped Confederate officers who settled in Brazil. We tried to solve the world and then gave up. It got late and the sun began to go down.

  Take my father, Miles said. He played football in college. He tells me I don’t have to play, but I don’t have to eat either. What kind of thing is that to say to your son?

  I shrugged.

  Miles jumped out of the car and walked down to the edge of the water. I got out too and sat on the hood of the MG and smoked one of his French cigarettes. He looked into the water, maybe at his own reflection.

  I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, he said. I don’t even really know you.

  I walked down to the water beside him.

  Your secrets are safe with me, I said.

  Then, without warning, he dived into the cold water with all his clothes on.

  Get in, he said. Feels great.

  I stripped to my underwear and jumped in.

  We floated on our backs as the sun went down.

  Now you have to tell me a secret, he said. That’s how I know you’ll keep mine.

  I don’t have any secrets, I said.

  Bullshit, he said. Everybody’s got secrets.

  The clouds passed over the dying sun like torn cotton. I realized at that moment it was turning into one of the easiest days of my life. Without meaning to, I began to confess to him. Not because I felt I owed him something but because my thoughts and the words describing them registered simultaneously and leapt from me without permission.

  And I might be in love with my neighbor, I said.

  Forever kicked up dust near a disco on the edge of town. There was redness in the air. A burnt rose smell. Zorn was the name of the king in this time and space. He was a shifter, a
n epoch jumper. The electromagnetic winds sat heavy in the west. We rode on.

  * * *

  —

  ONE LAZY AFTERNOON I went over to Molly’s house to snort her study pills. We crushed them up on her dad’s old Hank Williams record. Mrs. Everhart was staying late with the drama club and we had the place to ourselves. As I smoked a cigarette out the window I noticed a bra on the floor. I picked it up and put it on.

  How do I look, I said.

  Like a lady, Molly said. A fine, upstanding lady.

  She wore her father’s old army jacket with ripped-up blue jean shorts and tapped out “Heart and Soul” on a small electric keyboard. From a neighbor’s pool I could hear a kid shout Marco, half a dozen Polos reply.

  I want a fashion show, she said. Go in the closet, find something to wear, and come out and surprise me.

  Really, I asked.

  Yes, really, she said. Don’t pull some macho shit.

  I went into her closet and shut the door, turned on the light. I squeezed into a tiny black cocktail dress and came out and did a little dance.

  Oh no, she said. Something more elegant than that.

  I went back into the closet and stripped naked, put on a pair of her panties and a bra. They were soft on my skin and smelled of her honeysuckle perfume. I looked for a dress I remembered her wearing. The simple blue sundress she wore on Sunday mornings. I found it and put it on and walked out slowly.

  Oh my God, she said.

  I look stupid, I said.

  No, she said. Let me get a closer look at you.

  She took out black lipstick and put it on my lips slowly and turned me toward the mirror.

  You’re beautiful, she said.

  She lifted up the dress.

  Are you wearing my panties, she asked.

  Maybe, I said.

  She grabbed my ass and kissed me.

  The winds blew fresh mystery our way. A thunderclap right over top of us. Lightning cracked the sky. Forever arched his back the faster we rode. Princess squeezed me tight. We were shivering in the darkness. The world was heavy and strange.