“This is the third time since we moved here,” Matt said to Olaf. “How often does this happen around here, anyway?”
“Not this often. Not until the last few months, anyway.”
Another point of light appeared far to Lydia’s left, then vanished. Another neighbor, she thought, somebody else she didn’t know who was probably bewildered by the totality of the darkness. She began to wish that she had made more of an effort to meet the people here, that Matt had been more outgoing. It had been mostly his idea to move out of the city, to get away from worrying about burglaries and getting mugged and hassles with parking the car and to have more space for his computers and his workshop and all the other stuff that had cluttered and finally overflowed their condominium and the small office he had rented down the street.
“Want to come over?” Matt asked.
“I’d probably get lost crossing the street,” Olaf said. “Can’t see a goddamn thing. Anyhow, I better get back to Vicki, she’s got a thing about the dark.”
“See you,” Matt said, and laughed.
“That’s a good one.” Olaf’s voice sounded even fainter.
“Step back,” Matt said to her, and Lydia knew that he was going to close the door. She felt her way back through the doorway and had to grope her way back to the sofa, brushing her hand against the bookshelves as she passed them and taking tiny steps so that she didn’t hit her legs against the coffee table.
She felt as though she would never get to the sofa.
Her leg bumped up against an obstacle that felt like the sofa. She turned and sat down. Matt plopped down next to her.
“He was right,” she said.
“Who?”
“Olaf. About getting lost crossing the street. I read this article the other day that says if people don’t get certain kinds of cues, they end up walking in circles, that’s how people get lost in the woods. We could go out the front door now and end up just circling around to the back of our own house.”
Matt said, “You’re creeping me out.”
She had thought she was making a joke. Now she knew from the flat tone of his voice that he was really frightened. She felt around the coffee table for her cellphone, found it, and pressed a button with her thumb; it still wasn’t working.
“The radio,” Matt said. “You know, that old one we took with us up to the lake this summer. I think I left it in my workshop.”
“What about it?”
“We could tune into one of the local stations, find out what’s going on. Might as well find out if it’s a major blackout.” He brushed against her as he stood up. “Think I can get to the basement,” his voice said overhead. “I’ll take it slow.”
* * * *
The first power failure they had experienced in this house had happened in the middle of dinner, and the power had come back on just as Lydia was lighting a candle for the table. The second had actually turned into a pleasant experience, giving her a chance to talk to Matt while they finished some wine instead of her having to sit through a DVD of a crappy action movie.
This power failure was different. This darkness didn’t feel like only the absence of light. She could imagine it as something seeping into the atmosphere, thickening the air, leaking through crevices in the walls and windows and billowing throughout the house until they were drowned in the blackness.
“Planck’s constant,” Betsy Dane had told four high school students earlier that week, “is a physical constant, symbolized by h, used in quantum mechanics to denote the sizes of quanta.” Lydia and Betsy, a newly hired librarian, had spent half an hour helping the students locate references for a science project. Quantum mechanics, to Lydia’s surprise, had turned out to be a subject that greatly interested her coworker, who had minored in physics in college. But quantum mechanics was not what she needed to dwell on at the moment. It only reminded her that the normal, usually unexamined daily assumptions she made and acted upon—that there were such things as continuity and causation—might be illusions, that the light and space she sensed were only the product of her own perceptions, the way her senses ordered the world, and not a kind of absolute reality that existed independently of her relationship to physical phenomena.
I have to stop this, Lydia told herself. The lights would come back on any minute now.
She got up and walked slowly to the kitchen. There was a box of kitchen matches in the second drawer from the top of the counter, and there might be a candle in there as well. She found the drawer handle, pulled out the drawer, and found the box of matches. Leaning against the counter, she opened the box and struck a match.
The tiny flame danced, a spark against the darkness, but her hand and the match she held were invisible to her. Her hand shook. She blew out the flame and dropped the match on the countertop.
She shuffled back to the living room and sat down, then pulled on the sweater she had shed earlier. The living room felt cold for this time of year, and without any power, they could not turn on their furnace.
Matt was certainly taking his time looking for the radio; it felt as though he had been downstairs forever. There was no reason they had to sit here doing nothing just because of a blackout. They could drive to someplace where the power was still on and stay overnight at a hotel. She could always call in sick tomorrow, since she had some days off coming to her. If they stayed anywhere near downtown, she could even walk to work.
“Matt?” she called out, in case he had come back upstairs and she just hadn’t heard him. “Matt?” The air seemed thicker, harder to breathe, but that had to be her imagination. She waited silently for a few more moments. “Matt?”
“Found the radio,” he said from the direction of the dining room. “Couldn’t hear anything downstairs, though. Maybe we can pick up something up here.” There was doubt in his voice.
“I’m over here,” she said, worrying that he might lose his way even along the short distance to the front of the house.
He thumped down next to her, at her right this time. “I know it’s on,” he said, “and I found the tuner dial, but nothing’s coming in.”
“Maybe the battery’s dead.”
“I know it’s not dead, because I put in a new battery just the other day.”
“I went to the kitchen again,” she said, “and lit a match, and even…” She sighed. “Even the flame wasn’t acting right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I could see the flame, but nothing else, not even the match.”
“What’s so strange about that? You’re not going to get much light from a match anyway. You’re too suggestible. The flashlight doesn’t work, so now you’re imagining that fire doesn’t, either.”
She wanted to accept that. She always had been suggestible, even gullible at times.
“I mean, you’re too damn suggestible.” He seemed intent on establishing that fact, an assumption that would cut off other possible theorizing about their situation. “Damn radio.” She heard him sigh. “Maybe there’s nobody on the air,” he continued, “because this is a really big outage, like the one that knocked out the whole East Coast a while back.”
It isn’t just an outage, she thought; she knew that and was sure Matt knew it, too, deep down, however much he resisted the fact. Flashlights that cast no light, a darkness so pervasive that nothing was visible, even the feeling that air was beginning to congeal around her—this was more than just a power failure.
“Matt,” she whispered, “I was thinking. We don’t have to stay here, you know. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“We’d feel awfully stupid when the power comes back on, driving around and wasting time and gas when we could just be patient.” Matt had always been practical. Living in this house gave them more space for less cost than they’d had in the city, even with the second car; keeping their old furniture and making use of old appliances like the radio was econ
omical; and there was no point in going on a vacation somewhere else this year when they could enjoy their own back yard. Of course Matt had wanted to leave the city, she thought. The house gave him even more of an excuse to keep to himself, to anchor himself to one place, to surround himself with certainty, to become almost immovable.
“I’ll keep fiddling with the radio,” he said. “Think you can make it to the front door, see if anything’s going on outside?”
“Sure.” The power would come back on any second now. The world would become continuous again.
She got up and inched toward the front door, hands out, until her fingers found a surface. She pressed her palms against the door, found the doorknob, and pulled the door open.
She stepped outside; the darkness took her, starless, cold. She wrapped her arms around herself. As she turned to go back inside, she glimpsed a faint glow to her right. The glow became two globes of light; there was the sound of a motor. A car was coming down the small hill at the end of the cul-de-sac, and it seemed to be moving very slowly, maybe no more than five miles an hour.
She retreated inside, closed the door, and shuffled back to the sofa. “It’s still just as dark,” she said, “but somebody was driving down the hill at the end of our street. The headlights—they were doing the same thing as our flashlight. I mean, I could see them, but I don’t know how the driver could see the road or anything else.” They wouldn’t be able to drive out of here, with no way to see where they were going.
“Nothing,” Matt said, and she knew that he was referring to the radio. “Everything’s out.”
She sat down. Maybe they should get out of here, whatever the risks. Anything would be better than sitting helplessly, passive victims of whatever was going on outside. Maybe the blackout, or whatever it was, had taken out the whole country this time. Maybe all of North America was dark and cold. Maybe terrorists had finally managed to knock out the entire grid. Maybe somebody had finally started a nuclear war. Thoughts of terrorists and nuclear war didn’t frighten her as much as they might have. At least they were familiar possible causes of potential disasters.
“Hey!” That was a woman’s voice, and very faint. “Hey!”
“Did you hear that?” Matt asked.
“Yes.” Lydia was already up, shuffling toward the door. She pulled the door open and leaned outside. “Hello?”
“I’m here,” the voice said. Lydia guessed that the woman had to be somewhere near the edge of their lawn. “In my car.”
“I’m Lydia Polgrave,” Lydia said. “My husband Matt and I live in the two-story brick house next to the white Colonial at the bottom of the hill.” It suddenly seemed ludicrous to be introducing herself to someone she could not see.
“I know the house. My name’s Gretchen Duhamel, and I live in that gray shingled job with the screened-in porch at the end of the road.” The alto voice was strong, almost reassuring. Lydia tried to visualize this woman she had never seen. She sounded like a tall woman, maybe somewhat overweight, with a short, no-nonsense haircut. “Can’t see a darned thing, so it probably isn’t a good idea to keep driving. Only trouble is, I don’t know if I could even find my way home now, in the car or on foot.”
Lydia thought of asking her inside. Under the circumstances, Matt was unlikely to object, and might even welcome the company. Even the presence of a stranger would be better than sitting there stewing by themselves. “You could stay with us for a while,” she said. “Think you can find your way to our door?”
“I should be able to get that far,” Gretchen Duhamel replied. There was the sharp chunk of a car door being slammed shut. “Aren’t you the house with those flagstones on your front lawn, kind of like a pathway to your front steps?”
“That’s us.”
“For a minute there, I couldn’t remember if it was the brick house or the Colonial with the flagstones, and I’ve lived in this neighborhood for over ten years, must have driven past your house a million times. Funny what you can’t remember when you can’t see anything.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Keep talking,” Gretchen Duhamel said. “All I’ve got to go on is the sound of your voice.”
Lydia tried to think of what to say. “Uh, we moved in about four months back. I’ve got a job in Findlay, at the downtown branch of the public library.”
“The library?” Gretchen Duhamel sounded closer.
“I’m a reference librarian there. My husband runs his own consulting business from home.”
“Then I take it he’s the guy I’ve seen mowing your lawn. The tall skinny guy in the Red Sox cap.”
“That’s Matt.”
“I’m retired, but I used to teach introduction to physics at the community college. You know, I’ve been trying to get National Access on my cellphone the whole way here. Can’t get through.” The woman sounded really close now.
“Be careful. It’s four steps up to the door.”
“I’m being careful,” Gretchen Duhamel said. Lydia heard footfalls on the steps, and then something brushed against her. “Sorry.”
“You’re almost there. Just keep coming.”
* * * *
By the time Gretchen Duhamel was settled in the easy chair next to the sofa, Lydia had learned that she was a widow and that her late husband had died five years ago. The woman went on to mention a son who lived in Seattle and her two cats, Bartholomew and Percy, whom she had left behind in the fenced-in back yard of her house.
“They’re indoor cats,” the woman continued, “but I’ve got one of those kitty doors in the back, so they can get in and out of the house, but they can’t get out of the yard.” She went on at length about the felines’ favorite foods, their luxuriant black and white fur, and the way they loved to chase their favorite toy, a ball of aluminum foil. Normally such a conversation would have bored Lydia mightily, but now she welcomed the distraction, the feeling that things would soon return to normal. The lights would come back on, and Gretchen Duhamel would go home to her cats and toss them their balls of aluminum foil.
“I’ve lived with those cats for almost four years now,” Gretchen went on, “so they’re almost like my kids. You don’t have any kids, do you?”
“No,” Matt replied.
“Not yet,” Lydia added.
“People around here aren’t having so many kids these days,” Gretchen Duhamel said, “and they’re older when they do. It’s like they can’t count on a stable, normal life any more, doing what they’re supposed to do and having things work out. Nothing’s that predictable any more. The couple that used to live in your house must have been over forty when they had their first.”
“I think that big blond guy across the street has three kids,” Matt said.
“Olaf Janssen?” the woman said. “Don’t know where you got that idea. He and Vicky just have the one boy, Lars.”
“I’ve seen three kids over there.”
“You must be thinking of Josh and Becca, the Bloom kids. They’re over there all the time. They and Lars Janssen are as thick as thieves.”
Gretchen Duhamel fell silent. Lydia waited for the woman to say something more, anything to distract them from the darkness and the cold.
“Wish I hadn’t left my cats,” Gretchen murmured.
The power had to be restored soon. The light would restore everything to its previous state. Lydia was getting herself worked up over nothing, only imagining that the air was even thicker and colder around her. It was the waiting that got to her, the feeling that there was nothing she could do except wait there in the dark.
The front doorbell rang.
Lydia started. “Who could that be?” Gretchen said.
“Has to be one of our neighbors,” Matt said.
“Not necessarily,” Gretchen said. “Might be looters or burglars and such. And we can’t even call the police.”
&nbs
p; Matt said, “I’ll see who it is.” He let out what sounded to Lydia like a forced laugh. “I’ll find out who it is.” She felt him get up from the sofa. The floor creaked slightly as he moved toward the door. “Who’s there?” he shouted.
“Olaf,” a muffled voice replied, and Lydia heard the door whoosh open.
* * * *
Olaf had found a long length of rope in his garage and had tied one end of it to his front door knob, reasoning that if he got lost crossing the street, he would at least be able to find his way back to his house. As she listened to him, Lydia found herself admiring his resourcefulness and wishing that she had thought of such an idea herself or else that Matt had.
“Good thinking, young man,” Gretchen said when Olaf fell silent.
“That you, Miz Duhamel?” Olaf asked.
“Sure is. Anyway, it’s good thinking on your part assuming this is just a power failure and not something a whole lot weirder. You know what it’s like? It’s almost like the light’s going out, everything’s slowing down, and space is filling up.”
Lydia froze. She had been thinking almost exactly the same thing.
“My wife and my boy are still back at our house,” Olaf said after a long pause, “but I’ve been thinking there’s no point in just sitting around.”
“I tried to drive out,” Gretchen said, “but you can’t see a blessed thing, not even with the headlights on.”
“I thought of driving out myself,” Olaf said, “but no way. This just isn’t normal, this kind of dark. You know what I saw just before the lights went out? For a second, everything looked kind of like these gray shadowy things in the dark, like I was seeing in the infrared or something. Vicky’s face was like this pale blob with black pits instead of eyes.” He was silent for a bit. “We could still try to walk out of here.”
He outlined his plan. They would tie whatever lengths of rope Matt happened to have in his house to Olaf’s rope. They could use the rope like a belay, going on to the next house, picking up more rope, and continuing on that way until…
Puss in D.C. and Other Stories Page 22
