Artificial Light

by James Greer

  Over time, the ash collected in layers around the huge stone hearth, drifting like gray snow, and was left undisturbed until replaced by real snow (also gray, in the ashen light of dawn) later in the winter. One morning we woke up to find a snowy semicircle had formed around us while we slept. It’s not true that we then built a snowman and waltzed around the frozen ballroom, as Mary tried to say—and who can blame her? It’s what we should have done, not just then but the three or four other times the snow repeated its nocturnal trick; but hungover first thing on a cold winter morning is maybe not the best timing for a waltz. I do remember that one day Joe Smallman tried to start a snowball fight. His effort went unloved by the recently sleep-enfolded rest of us. First task in the morning, for those of us who hadn’t managed to stagger home before passing out, was almost always rekindling the fire, which most of the time was the sole source of heat in Albion.

  The ballroom wasn’t the only room, obviously, just the biggest, and the one I knew best. The kitchen was as oversized as everything else at Albion, and as rust-riddled, dappled with dirt, dusty, and disused. I doubt anyone could have cooked in that kitchen. When we got hungry, late at night, we ordered food delivered—usually sandwiches or similarly simple stuff, but sometimes sirloin or burgers from the Pine Club, a nearby steakhouse. Most often somebody called The Sandwich Champ, our local deli (which, conveniently, kept late hours because of its proximity to the University of Dayton—UD was a Catholic-run college specializing in churning out narrow-minded philistines; I’m generalizing, of course).

  We drank and ate and smoked and talked in the ballroom, happily, greedily, backlit by the ruddy glow from the fire—white ash (Fraxinus americana), Chinquapin oak (Quercus muehlenbergii), and buckeye (Aesculus glabra) gathered from Albion’s two acres of semi-wooded backyard—which Mary Valentine could not resist worrying, constantly, with a long polished stick (some kind of hardwood, possibly hickory) that served us in lieu of a standard fireplace tool. Kurt always paid for the meal, which was one among many reasons why Albion’s popularity grew so swiftly in the brief period of its ascendancy. In addition, he would produce, to augment our own cheap beer or liquor, wine from an apparently endless supply he kept in crates stacked in the kitchen, from which we never dared filch—good wine, too, rubious Cabernet and hearty Côtes du Rhône (I’m not sure what hearty means in relation to wine, but I like the way it sounds) and dry, green-apple-cheeked Chardonnay from somewhere Chardonnay is vinted. You knew the wine was good because the bottles were filmed with grit and the corks smelled mildewy on top but heavy and fruited and vaguely sweet when extracted. Kurt decanted the wine into a glass pitcher that was one of his few extravagant items, then poured it into whatever we had handy—I usually drank from a “Birthplace of Aviation” coffee cup that Kurt found funny. (“If man was meant to fly, God would have given him wings,” he would scold, ironically, slopping the wine over the brim.) We gossiped and got into fights and told bad jokes and even worse stories, and eventually fell asleep in front of the fire. This was then repeated to infinity, or until repealed by fate.

  Sometimes, when the weather allowed and the night was damp with stars, we climbed a spiral staircase with our cups of wine and cigarettes and sat on the roof looking over the city. Any city, no matter how small, has a skyline, and Dayton had one, too, and from Albion’s roof you could see the whole thing, spread like the embers of our unattended fire, glowing warmly in the blackness. You could see the Mead Paper building, and National Cash Register, and the hunched shoulders of the giant Cúchulainn, trimmed with amber gems. Or you could lie on your back and guess at the names of the constellations. Kurt kept quiet while Amanda Early and Joe Smallman and Mary Valentine and the Rose Scholar and Daryl Hawes and Co-Daryl Hawes and even, occasionally, Magnetic Tom and Henry Radio and Violet McKnight and Jesus Of The World (there were others, unnecessary of mention) plied us with drunk stupidities, pointing out random stellar groupings and inventing or pretending to invent astrologies.

  You could also see our two rivers, glittering darkly in the spaces between buildings or through notches in the low hills. The Great Miami River, which was not great and did not flow to Miami; and Mad River, about which much more much later, circumscribed Dayton like the arms of an enervated naiad. The satanic mills of Dayton included a corn oil processing plant and several car parts factories, all of which at some point had dumped waste of one sort or another into both rivers—although not anymore, I’m sure. As a result our waters were muddy, and usually gelid. I never knew anyone who tried to swim in either river. I don’t believe you could fish fruitfully, either—anglers went north to one of the Great Lakes, or south to the Florida Keys. You didn’t have to go all the way to the Keys, obviously, but many did. Key West was a popular Dayton getaway—straight shot by powerful automobile down the interstate to Florida, which you could make in ten hours, then another five or six down to Miami and across the long bridge to paradise. This is how it was explained to me one night by either Daryl Hawes or Co-Daryl, his twin brother, one of whom liked to fish.

  You could see a lot of things from the roof. One thing we could not see was each other, and on occasion this sham anonymity led to drink-fueled fumblings of an erotic nature, involving most often Mary or Amanda and one or two of the boys. I did not see how anyone could prefer the crude thrill of sex to the spangled beauty of the night sky at Albion, but I’ve decided that I may be unusual in this regard.

  In the late Cretaceous, just before the mass dinosaur extinction, Dayton was a much different place. According to the fossil record, we had for a while marsupials (possums and early versions of platypus and kangaroo and wombat) and some weird early placentals like the plageomenid, a gliding mammal that could spread a sail of fur. Flowers, in this period, first inclined their pretty heads toward the sun. Flowering plants are called angiosperms to distinguish them from the gymnosperms that preceded them (conifers, ginkoes, etc.—needled or broadleafed trees, in essence, or their forebears); the name refers to the type of seed produced. Gymnosperms made naked seeds, easily accessed by foraging vegetarians (not to mention insects, which started up a symbiotic relationship with the angiosperms, about this time, that continues, happily, to this day—120 million years, give or take a few). The angiosperms, by contrast, developed the familiar anther/stigma setup, which helped protect the seed (wrapped safely inside the ovary), and which brought about pollen, which in turn required the invention of bees.

  The hills and plains of the Miami Valley were densely forested, and thick with animal life, some reptilian or even saurian in nature. The weather: subtropical, meaning hot and moist. I would have liked to live here then, not so much because of what existed as what didn’t exist. I would have enjoyed perfect isolation, although I’d need my allergy medication. And my books. The only form in which I can meet the human mind without causing or being caused pain is books, and I know exactly how awful and self-absorbed and cowardly and immature that sounds. I know because I’m a human being.

  Le Vaillant, in his Voyage de Monsieur Le Vaillant Dans L'Intérieur de L'Afrique Par Le Cap de Bonne Espérance Dans les Années 1780, 81, 82, 83, 84 & 85 Avec Figures (1791), records that “L’intérieur de l’Afrique, pour cela seul, me paroissoit un Pérou. Cétoit la terre encore vierge.” “La terre encore vierge,” virgin territory, is what I think I’ve been looking for ever since I lay in bed one summer’s night in the renovated-by-dead-dad Lewisburg church, eight years old and unable to sleep, the branches of a honey locust scraping against my half-opened window, and decided never to marry. The decision was purely practical: I did not yet know what sex was, but I was well-acquainted with loneliness, and did not see how that loneliness could be relieved by another person. Certainly my mother’s love—unconditional, unearned—didn’t seem to help. How could anything? Even at that age I saw solitude as a blessing, and little since then had happened to change my tune (solo clarinet, sadly tootling). The advent of puberty brought lust and selfconsciousness, neither of which I’d recommend to a
friend, although please don’t think me reflexively prudish, or unalterably opposed to the idea of romantic love. But I can only speak from experience, and mine has been meager and unrewarding in the area of human relations.

  And yet, when I first came to Albion, its strangely intoxicating aura of decay, twined with a developing sense of community I’d never before encountered in the bars or bedrooms of Dayton, held the allure of an unexplored land. I thought—and here I was very wrong, but also right, right, right—that a new and better world might open itself to me. That nothing came of my notion can be ascribed to the shortcomings of all human striving as much as to the particular failings we brought to the slumber party. We are not built to last, but we keep on trying to come in first. Hurray!

  Kurt’s money was a mystery we were not anxious to plumb. He seemed to have plenty, and yet lived in Albion with what’s usually called monkish asceticism. Never once would he let us pay for a meal, or a drink, and the wine, as I mentioned, didn’t look or taste cheap. He didn’t drive, didn’t spend a dime on creature comforts—to say nothing of furniture—and never appeared to work or have to deal with music business interests. I don’t think I ever even saw him open a piece of mail. I don’t think the postman ever rang once, as a matter of fact. I did one time come across a fax machine while wandering around upstairs, a plain-paper fax without a tray to catch its output. There was a small white hill of faxes scattered on the floor, and even as I peeked in, the machine was belching out another one, but no evidence that Kurt had ever so much as picked up one of these dead letters.

  One night—emboldened by wine, and by the fact that Kurt and I were the only ones awake—I began, on an impulse, to tell him about my father’s death, in a fatuous attempt at provoking pity. His response was gentle and forbearing. He told me he was sorry, and said that it must have been hard growing up without a father. He asked about my mother, too, which naturally led to a discussion of my religious upbringing, in which Kurt expressed unusual interest, although it’s true he showed unusual interest in discussions of any religion. So he heard about my mom, and the mornings we spent before the school bus came reading passages from the Bible and their corresponding exegeses in Science and Health, all according to a weekly lesson plan distributed by the Mother Church, in Boston. The lesson was arranged according to now-archaic-sounding headings derived from Mrs. Eddy’s text; so often did I listen to and recite these, groggy at the kitchen table, my cereal bowl pushed to one side, my orange juice leaving concentric circles on the oilcloth that competed for my attention with my mother’s quiet voice, that most are burned into my memory: “Ancient and Modern Necromancy, Alias Animal Magnetism, Denounced”; “The Doctrine of At-one-ment”; “Are Sin, Disease, and Death Real?” Mrs. Eddy was an eloquent writer, and a persuasive spirit. I explained all this to Kurt, and he never once looked impatient or bored, though the whole discussion took hours, long into the night—two bottles of wine worth of talk. It’s easier to measure wine than time.

  I told him, too, what I had never told anyone, that when I was old enough to understand the tenets of my religion I went daily to the cemetery where my dad lay buried and sat cross-legged in front of his ugly rose granite gravestone and tried to raise him from the dead with the power of prayer and right thinking. This would have been third grade, because I remember we were learning the names of wildflowers in school at that time, and I was distracted in my prayer occasionally by the sight of an evening primrose (Oenothera biennis) or false foxglove (Gerardia laevigata). Jesus could heal the sick and raise the dead, and Christian Scientists were supposed to be able to recreate Jesus’ feats, so it seemed reasonable to me that my father would rise wrapped in graveclothes and roll away the stone like Lazarus when called. I called a lot. I remembered from the Bible that it had taken Jesus—God’s only child—three tries before succeeding, so I cut myself some slack, and tried and tried again. This went on for about six months. I would come home from school and head straight to the cemetery, which was only three blocks away from our house, on a sloping hill in back of Lewisburg’s only (real) church. My father was buried under the shadow of rugged elms and one huge yew, alongside the rude forefathers of our hamlet. A little further off was a stand of pines in which nested doves, who would swoop, cooing, overhead and sometimes stop to rest on a stone, perched like the sail of a tiny sloop in the green-andgray sea of graves. In winter, snow lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. I came anyway, every day. I came in every sort of weather, thinking that if God were paying attention to my prayers, He would likely notice if I stayed away because of snow or high wind or rain or failing will. But try as I might, with the purest mind I could muster (constantly berating myself for the selfishness of my goal), my dad stayed dead, his tortoise-shadow soul still trapped like Zeno’s arrow under the thousand and thousand idols of the sun, and I gradually lost faith in my abilities as a healer. The great thing about Christian Science is that failure on the part of the adherent is blamed on the adherent’s imperfect faith, and no taint of imperfection adheres to the doctrine itself.

  To my surprise Kurt did not mock my childish simplicity; he said instead that he shared Mrs. Eddy’s distrust of doctors, and further that he’d had a baffling and very painful stomach condition for years, visited fourteen different specialists, received fourteen different diagnoses and fourteen different ineffective courses of treatment. I was glad to be talking about something other than my dead dad. Whenever I discussed my father I felt guilty, as if I’d somehow betrayed a confidence—because the secret of his dying should remain, like everything true, unnamed.

  I never asked Kurt where he came up with the name for the house. No, that’s not true. I did ask, once, late at night in The Pearl, but he just smiled in reply and turned a page in his notebook. I’m not entirely stupid, I know it’s what the Romans called Britain, probably derived from albus, white, a reference to the White Cliffs of Dover (maybe—etymologists remain unsure, some claiming a cognate in Celtic of indeterminate meaning, and I wouldn’t put it past Kurt to have uncovered that uncertain simile); I’m also aware of the neo-mythic uses to which William Blake among others put the name, but none of this makes any sense in Kurt’s context. I can’t help but feel I’ve missed something important, but there are limits to my intellect and my will, and this riddle overmasters both.

  It’s not true that when someone you love dies you gradually forget, that their memory fades and the pain of loss grows dull and unhurtful. At least, I think it’s not true—I have evidence times three. Another thing: The word repeat and the word repeal are separated by one lousy letter. Anyone can make a mistake.

  Notebook Eight

  As autumn deferred to winter and the impact of Kurt’s arrival slowly turned from green to dingy yellow and fell from the tree of our attention, we began at his invitation to turn Albion into something like our afterhours clubhouse. Where in the past we had argued and complained and worried about whose turn it was to allow the rest of us to trash his place, annoy his roommates, placate the cops, we now had a place which was already trashed, and whose owner did not care what we did to further the damage, who had no roommates, and who lived far enough from anyone else that no one ever called the cops, nor would the cops have come, because Kurt’s house was in Oakwood, not Dayton. You could speed down Far Hills Avenue at fifty in a thirty-five zone, at half-past closing time, weaving from one side to the next, and if you happened to fall prey to one of the omnipresent cops stationed in the median to catch out-of-town drunks and/or speeders, all you had to do was flash your driver’s license with an Oakwood address and his demeanor would change like a traffic light from stern to chiding and he would bid you drive with an increased eye for detail the shortest way possible home. Oakwood cops were charged with protecting Oakwood residents from outsiders, from people without enough money to pay Oakwood property taxes (rapacious), and were neither equipped nor inclined to deal with offenses committed within Oakwood by
Oakwooders. So while we were at Albion, we were protected, not only from the law, but from ourselves. In this way Albion became our safe house, and for a while the atmosphere we created there held me in enchantment. Wine is strong, the king is strong, women are strong, but the truth overcomes all things. The spongy leaves of some sea-wracks, ficus, oaks, in their several kinds, found about the shore, with ejectments of the sea, are overwrought with network elegantly containing this order which plainly declares the naturality of this texture. And how the needle of nature delights to work, even in low and doubtful vegetations.

  Albion seemed to develop a personality of its own. The pulse of the place was its hearth, the enormous stone fireplace in the main room. There was a time, not distant, a time I can just about reach out a finger and poke, when the flames would draw us like hellbent moths to its crackling maw, and we would drink and talk in haphazard groups, squatting or standing or sprawled or otherwise arranged, bodies at rest, bodies in slow motion, bodies attracted to other bodies, bodies repelled, bodies with nothing in common but the darkness, and a continual craving for light.

  Sky was the first who ruled over the whole world. And having wedded Earth, he begat the hundredhanded, as they are named, who were unsurpassed in size and might, each of them having a hundred hands and fifty heads. We created a community at Albion. We were able to create this community partly because we were not trying to create anything. I believe that environment exercises a powerful pull on human disposition, at least I believe that now. In a sense I think Albion created us, that its stately decay reflected or even magnified our inner decay, which was why we immediately felt at home there.