When George got home, he found Jamie asleep on her side. He slid his arms around her belly and tried to stay still, tried to keep his breaths shallow so as not to wake her. The mindful stillness kept him awake. He felt pinpricks along his back and wondered if he was itching, so that then he was itching. He wondered if he had let a mosquito get him in the cemetery. He spent the whole night wondering, eagerly awaiting the sun so Jamie would stir and he could ask her to check the skin he couldn’t see. She would groan when the sun filtered through the blinds and struck her face, now round with the pregnancy. He would bring her pomegranate juice. She had been craving it in the mornings. Last month he had complained about the price (each large gulp she took was a dollar), and she had listed the ways he would need to step up to be a good father, like the juice was the red flag tipping her off finally, after all these years together, that he was insufficient.
Maybe he was. He resented how easily his thoughts turned to escape, how often he could imagine with a morbid fixation how the last argument could derail them irreparably.
He would bring her the juice. He wouldn’t complain, and after she had finished the last drop, he would ask her to check the skin on his back. Her fingers would graze over him. She would scold him for going outside. Why would you do such a thing? she’d ask. He would swear not to be so reckless. He would do better.
Am I safe? Am I okay? he’d ask. Are you sure?
LANDLINE
Right before the power went out, Eva was Skyping with her boyfriend in Bogotá. He had been unreachable the other night, out late with a new friend, a woman, an artist who made mixed-media collages of pornography — specifically, cutouts of genitalia — layered over ancient Greek and Roman images and Reagan-era political propaganda. She gave him some weed and took him to a concert, then bars until sunrise, and they had really “hit it off, but,” he said, “nothing happened.” The woman had shellacked his Facebook wall with pictures of them dancing together and cuddly selfies. There was even a kiss emoji on one of them.
“You should maybe just establish some boundaries with her,” Eva said.
“You should just trust me,” he said. On the pixelated screen, Eva could see his lips pressing into a stubborn slash.
It was the same old fight they always had since the one time he slipped up, only a few months before he left. At the time, they had still lived in Arkansas, where Ben was earning a pittance working an entry-level tech position at a radio station while Eva finished her master’s in art history. She had been at a conference. He had been at a local bar. There was a college girl. As he put it when she pressed him, they didn’t have sex but they “didn’t just make out.” He told her he’d freaked himself out about surviving two years apart. He wasn’t sure he could do it. She wasn’t sure either, but she couldn’t tell him that, because then the whole thing would blow up right then and there, and she at least wanted to try. Perhaps she clung too much to memories of the two of them together that burned like lens flares in the photo album of her mind. She often thought about how it touched her that her partner would know her when she was young and girlish and serve as witness to her transition into her present womanly self. That was a form of knowing that could not be replicated. Perhaps it was sunk cost fallacy — she had invested so much in knowing him that the resultant emotional attachment was obscuring a real cost-benefit analysis. She acknowledged this on some level, but she also wondered if emotional attachments were the overriding benefit regardless of any pro–con list she could tally.
“Can you at least maintain the semblance of monogamy on the internet?” she said. “That seems manageable.”
“That’s not fair,” he said. “You’re being unreasonable.”
At the exact same moment that she clicked on her mouse with the intention of closing out the Skype window and thereby disappearing her boyfriend’s unruffled expression, the world went dark. The sudden silence was alarming. The computer’s fan ceased its incessant whirring. The air-conditioning rumbled, then released a final gasp. The refrigerator and icemaker stopped buzzing and knocking. Eva’s night vision was notoriously ineffective, so at first it seemed the world had descended into a cavernous darkness, but her eyes strained and adjusted until she could make out the cool glimmer of moonlight sifting through the narrow windows. Somewhere, a dog barked. Others soon joined him. Eva thought that maybe the dogs — conditioned to hear the silence of nature as unnatural — were trying to resurrect the noise of so many machines.
She found her cell phone in the kitchen and checked the time. It was only 1:00. The house, a small duplex, gave the slight tremor it always did when her neighbor slammed the front door. Then the doorbell rang.
Eva smoothed her duckling-print shirt — the one she wore because Ben thought it was cute — and wiped at her eyes. Upon opening the door, she was blinded by an industrial flashlight.
She turned away. “Ralph?”
“Sorry about that.” He switched off the light.
After a moment of mottled blindness, she could see Ralph standing in his bright blue TSA shirt, the glint of a badge in the darkness.
“This isn’t a normal power outage,” he said.
“It’s not?”
He leaned into the doorframe. “This is a real event.” He looked behind him at the empty cul-de-sac. A few neighbors stood on their patios or wandered in their yards, ghostlike in pale nightwear.
“What do you mean, a real event?”
“Can I come in?”
He strolled past her, guided by the wide beam of his flashlight, and seated himself on the couch.
Ralph often invaded her space. She’d be lounging in her hammock on the patio when he’d appear above the low cinder-block fence separating their property and invite himself over. This usually resulted in an hour of him chain-smoking and lamenting his recent divorce while she served multiple cups of coffee and politely nodded, uttering variations of, “How terrible.”
“The power is out as far as I can see,” he said.
“How far is that?” She crossed her arms and stared down at him.
“If it’s what I think it is, this could be the whole region, the whole coast even,” he said. Then, in a fervent tone, “It’s a solar storm. Electromagnetic radiation wreaking havoc on all our technology.”
Eva had doubts about Ralph. He flirted with her in ways that were just ambiguous enough to make it impossible for her to acknowledge it or shut it down. When he found out she had a boyfriend in the Peace Corps, he made a few derisive jokes about Jimmy Carter and then segued into his experience as a bomb squad guy in the Marines. Then he barely looked at her for a couple months. She would see his head above their patio partition, bobbing over his grill, but for a while he would not even share the briefest hello.
But then her air-conditioning unit broke on a day of record heat, and Ralph insisted that she stay with him. During the day, she had monopolized his saggy black leather couch, working on her laptop and basking in the cool mechanical breeze. In the evening, the heat dissipated a bit. When she packed up her belongings, Ralph asked her why she was leaving. He insisted it was still too hot, but she couldn’t imagine sleeping in his space. His house was spare, minimally furnished, impeccably clean, without a television or any books in the living room. Perhaps he was an ascetic or a transient, but the austerity felt unnatural to her.
“Or maybe this is just a normal outage,” she said. It had been over a hundred degrees for days.
Ralph turned off his flashlight and leaned back so that his eyes were faint glimmers in the moonlit interior. “Serious flares were spotted days ago, and they’ve already detected EM radiation.”
“Ralph, I’ve had a rough night.” Eva could feel the crust of dried tears and mascara congealing her lashes. The level of abnormalcy was compounding the surreal feeling that her four-year relationship might be over.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“Check your cell phone,” he said. “I bet you don’t have service.”
She pul
led her phone out of her pocket and saw the missing bars.
“Can’t a normal outage do that?” She suddenly realized how little she knew about how her cell phone worked. She thought about looking it up on the internet, then quickly realized the futility.
Ralph shook his head. “Unlikely. The FCC requires most towers to have backup power.”
She swiped to her favorite contacts screen. She skipped Ben. She didn’t want to try him while Ralph was there, at least not after their last conversation. And she scrolled past her mother. That would result in an interrogation about the outage that could lead to the unintentional revealing of personal information. She settled on her college friend Jane. At 1:00 in the morning, Jane was probably at a bar in L.A.
The call failed. She tried a few more times while Ralph watched her, his posture expansive, hands dangling over the arms of the couch. No call would go through.
“Mark might have a landline,” Ralph said. “And we can see the Strip from his sundeck. But you should be the one who asks. He’ll say yes to you.”
“Say yes in a creepy way?”
“He’s annoyed with me.” Ralph fiddled with the lens of his flashlight, half unscrewing, then rescrewing the concave plastic.
“Don’t you know anyone other than Mark we can ask?” Ralph was the only person in their small, gated community that she saw with any regularity, and that was only because they shared a wall. She knew who Mark was because he had a flat-screen TV installed in his garage with a couple of upholstered recliners. He’d blare game shows or conservative news pundits with his garage door open while he threw back beers. Sometimes a neighbor would march over to his driveway and ask him to turn it down. And sometimes, while sipping tea or wine and absorbing the pastel desert sunsets, Eva would watch from her stoop, mildly entertained by the predictable conflict. But there were also times when she returned from walking the loop, the road that skirted the containment wall of their neighborhood, that she could feel Mark’s eyes on her. She’d glance over, and he’d be sipping a beer, making eye contact without a nod or wave her direction.
Despite this, she wanted to see the lights of the Strip glaring in the distance. Then she’d know Ralph was on one of his catastrophizing kicks.
“Only if you go in with me.” She surprised herself, placing trust in Ralph. He was weird, but she realized then that she didn’t think he’d ever do anything.
Eva found a battery-operated lantern in her garage. Ben had bought it for a camping trip the summer before he left. They had found a wide clearing and peeled back the outermost layer of the tent so that a fine mesh separated them from the outside. They shared a double sleeping bag and curled up to stare at the stars. At twilight, she’d woken with a hint of hangover and had quietly unzipped the tent and tiptoed clumsily to a narrow passage between two nearby rock formations to take a piss. Ben snuck up on her, scandalizing her as she still had her shorts around her ankles. When she was done, she was embarrassed, but he grabbed her and pressed her against the blood-red boulder. She felt animal then. Was it just the unpredictability of him? Of that moment? In a desperate way, she welcomed the power outage. Didn’t it produce the same effect?
She switched on the lantern, comforted by its warm glow. She swung it like a purse from a loose strap as she and Ralph walked across the cul-de-sac. On the way, Ralph filled her in on facts about solar storms. Did she know that solar flares had destroyed transformers? Or that it could take months to replace them? Or that in the worst solar storm in history, telegraph machines could spark and set paper on fire without even being connected to an electrical source? Eva imagined her computer igniting, suddenly ablaze.
“Can that happen to computers?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Ralph said. He walked the rest of the way in silence. The stars were brighter. She could see more of them than usual. The moon was half-full and waning.
Mark’s house looked exactly like Eva’s and Ralph’s houses — faux stucco and clay tiles — except that it was two stories and had an incongruous wooden deck appended to the roof. It was an eyesore, and every so often there was an HOA vote, but Mark had grandfathered it in as the first resident of the community and refused to take it down. On sunny days, Eva could see him up there, a plump silhouette in a lawn chair with metallic reflectors folded across his stomach to bounce the light onto his face.
Ralph gestured to the door. “He should see you first.”
Eva hesitated.
“Don’t worry. I have a taser.” Ralph patted his hip holster and winked.
It took a couple tries, but after the third set of knocks, Eva could hear footsteps, then violent coughing.
Mark, bald with white, whiskery stubble, opened the door, dragging the yellowed sleeve of his mostly white bathrobe across his mouth. “Goddamn lights aren’t working.” He finally looked at Eva. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Eva gestured to Ralph, behind her. “We need your help.”
Mark eyed her. “You’re his neighbor. The one with the guy in Mexico?”
“Colombia.” She gave Ralph a look of incredulity.
It was odd to think that her neighbors, whom she barely spoke to, talked about her.
“I think we’re having a really bad solar storm,” Ralph said. “We wanted to see if the power is out on the Strip.”
“Oh, Christ,” Mark said, “not this shit again.”
Eva felt relief. Ralph probably was just paranoid. She wanted to go to bed and wake up to a world of alarm clocks and scrambled eggs and engage in reconciliation messages on social media with Ben. Or maybe she needed to fight with Ben more and see how that shook out. Even if they broke up, she’d rather have the closure of seeing his face as they terminated their relationship than be stuck in unknowing limbo because a solar flare had cast Nevada indefinitely into the dark ages.
“It’s probably no big deal,” Eva said, “but what’s the harm in looking?”
“Go to bed, Ralph. The lights will come back soon.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’d still like to have a good sleep either way.”
Ralph edged closer to Eva and Mark. “If it’s anything like Carrington was, this could be a mini-apocalypse.”
“Mini?” Eva couldn’t resist smiling.
“Like a temporary apocalypse.”
Eva laughed.
“You won’t be laughing when you can’t access your bank or use your cards. No gas. Traffic lights shut down. Car crashes. Hospitals will run out of generator power. Or maybe the generators aren’t working right either. It’s not just a power outage. The electromagnetic radiation can cause surges, sparks, fires. Machines going on and off at random, like a haunting. Maybe the city burns down with us in it.”
“Okay, fine,” Mark said. “If it will shut this guy up.” He nodded toward Ralph, then swung the door wide.
As they walked past the kitchen, Eva noticed a profound mustiness that was rare in the desert. It reminded her of how her crawl space in Arkansas had smelled — dank and toxic. She could feel the peeled corners of linoleum crunching beneath her shoes.
They felt their way up a narrow carpeted staircase at the end of the hall. At the top, Mark led them into a room with skylights. In the faint moonlight, Eva could make out a plastic chair and card table covered in piles of papers. Mark unlatched a sliding door and stepped onto a small, dark, wooden balcony. He had constructed a wooden ladder that ascended to the roof and his splintered sundeck, affixed to the house by a few rugged beams.
“You guys go ahead,” Eva said, staring up at the shoddy rungs of the ladder. “I’ll wait here.”
“It’s just a few steps,” Ralph said.
Eva shook her head. Once, on a hiking trip with Ben in New Mexico, she had climbed a tall ladder embedded in the side of a cliff in order to see a kiva deep in a recessed pocket of the mountainside. Halfway up, she had made the mistake of looking down. A line of people, tiny specks below her, were waiting to ascend. The sudden comprehension of
the distance, of the potential severity of a fall, had sent her into a panic attack. She had hyperventilated and hugged the ladder until Ben convinced her to think of the ladder as a vehicle for mindless, mechanical steps, like a treadmill. He counted with her, reminding her to breathe, only moving if she moved, stopping if she stopped. The next day, she couldn’t walk without limping. The climb had been easy. What had overstretched her muscles, she thought, were those moments she had gripped the ladder, each limb straining to resist the fall.
Ralph and Mark were on the deck only a minute before Ralph returned to the ladder and extended his hand.
“You should see this,” he said. His excitement worried her.
She stared at his hand, unsure.
“I’ll help you up,” he said. “Just eight steps.”
She handed up her lantern. “I’ll need you to count with me.”
Ralph echoed each number and hauled her up as soon as she touched the top.
There was so much darkness. There wasn’t the ruddy halo of light pollution that usually embraced the city at night. A hot wind whipped across the deck.
“The Strip is that way.” Mark pointed west.
She could see the outline of the mountains, blacker than the abysmal blue of the sky beyond. The valley was a bowl of dark oblivion. Her eyes strained to make sense of it. Normally, the garish lights of the casinos anchored her spatial understanding of the city. She always complained about the wasteful beam that shot out of the top of the Luxor pyramid, but she also came to view it as a guide and center. You could see it from anywhere in the city. You could see it driving in from the surrounding desert, an audacious claim on the uninhabitable land.
But it wasn’t all darkness. Now she noticed fires in the distance, perhaps in Summerlin. They seemed small, but she realized she had no sense of scale.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 15