Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Her father said, “she shouldn’t be crawling around like that. She looks like an animal.”

  “Sweetie,” her mother said, stroking her hair. “don’t You think you need to get back in bed?”

  She glanced up at her mother, “I love them,” she said, unable to control an enormous smile, “I love them so much, Mommy.”

  Her mother wasn’t look at her. She said, “I’m taking her to a doctor right now.”

  7

  “Hello, Naomi.” The doctor was bald and sweet looking, like a grandfather.

  “Hello,” she replied.

  “That leg’s healing okay. Looks like whoever stitched it, did it right.”

  “Mommy did it. She used to be a nurse.”

  “I know. She used to work with me. Did you know that?”

  No reply.

  “What seems to be the problem?” he asked. He put the stethoscope against her chest. She breathed in and out. Then, a funny looking thermometer, which he called a “gun,” went in her ear. Lights in her eyes. A tongue depressor slipped to the back of her throat almost gagging her.

  “I don’t know,” she said, finally.

  “Your Mommy’s really worried.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “She says you listen to the walls.”

  Naomi shook her head. “Not the walls. The five.”

  “Five what?”

  “Kittens. Each of them know me. I love them so much.”

  “How did the kittens get there?”

  She looked at him, unsure if she should trust him. “I can’t tell you.”

  “All right, then.”

  He gave her a shot in the arm, which she didn’t feel at all. She thought that was strange, so she told him.

  “Not at all?”

  “I didn’t even feel it.”

  He put his hand under his chin. Then he reached to her arm and pinched.

  “Did you feel that?”

  She shook her head.

  Then, he went over to a counter on the other side of the room. He returned with a plastic bottle. He took the lid off and held it under her nose. “Smell this.”

  She sniffed.

  “Sniff again,” he said.

  She sniffed hard.

  “What does it smell like?”

  “I dunno. Water, maybe?”

  He was trying to smile at her response, she could tell, but couldn’t quite do it. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “Anything. Your Mommy or Daddy. How you feel about things.”

  She thought a minute, “nope.”

  And that was it, he took her out to the waiting area where her mother was sitting. Then, she was asked to sit and wait while her mother had a checkup, too.

  On the way home, in the car, her mother was in a mood. “Are you playing games?”

  “Uh uh.”

  “I think you are. Are you trying to destroy this family? Because if you are, young lady, if you are…” Her mother’s hands were shaking so hard, she had to pull the car over to the side of the road.

  Naomi began to say something, but she saw that her mother wasn’t listening, so she shut her mouth.

  And as her mother started lecturing her, Naomi realized that she could barely hear a word her mother said.

  8

  The nights were peaceful. She could press her ear against the wall, and hear them, playing and hunting and crawling around one another. She kept trying to think up good names for them, but each time she came up with something, she forgot which was which.

  Then, when the bedroom door opened—which didn’t happen very often anymore—she listened to the cats (for they had grown in size), and sometimes, if she closed her eyes really tight, she could almost imagine what they looked like. All gray tabbies like their mother, of course, but one with a little bit of white in a star pattern on its chest, and two of them had green eyes, while the rest had blue. One had gotten very fat from all the mice and roaches it had devoured over the past weeks, and another seemed all skin and bones, and yet, not deprived at all.

  9

  One day, a woman in a suit came by. She had some manila files in her hand. Naomi’s mother and father were very tense.

  The woman asked several questions, mainly to her parents, but Naomi was listening for the sound of the five.

  “Naomi?” her father said. “Answer the lady, please.”

  Naomi looked up; her father’s voice had gotten really small, like it was caught in a jar somewhere and couldn’t get out. She looked at the lady, and then to her mother. Her mother’s forehead held beads of sweat.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She looked back to the lady.

  “How are you feeling, dear?”

  Naomi said, “fine.”

  “You were sick for awhile.”

  Naomi nodded. “I’m better now. It was the flu.”

  “Have you had a good summer vacation?”

  Naomi cocked her head to the side; she squinted her eyes. “Can you hear them?”

  The lady said, “who?”

  “All of them. They just caught something. Maybe a mouse. Maybe a sparrow got in. I thought I heard one. Do you think that’s possible?”

  10

  After the lady left, her father exploded with rage. “I am so sick and tired of you running our lives like this!”

  Who was he talking to? Naomi heard the runt of the litter tearing at the bird’s wings, feathers flying. The five could be brutal, sometimes. They stalked their prey like lions, and brought a bird or mouse down quickly, but then played with it until the small creature died of fear more than anything. Something beautiful about that; taking something so small and playing with it.

  “There are no fucking cats in the fucking walls,” her father’s voice intruded. He came over to her; lifted her up from under her arms. “I am going to tell you what happened to those kittens, right now,” he said.

  Her mother said, “Jesus, Dan, you’re going to hurt her like that,” but the voices rushed beneath some invisible glass, caught, silent.

  Her father began screaming something—she knew by the movements of his mouth—but all she heard was the one she was calling Scamp tussle over the sparrow’s head. Yowler tore at the beak with her claws, but lost most of the skull, which Scamp took down in one gulp. Hugo ignored them—he was not one to join in when food was being torn apart—he preferred to lick the bones clean later, after the carcass was stripped.

  “I’m going to show you once and for all,” her father’s voice came back, and she was being dragged out the backdoor, around to the carport wall. He dropped her to the ground, and went around the wall, into the carport; she heard Fiona whisper something to Zelda about some centipedes that she had trapped in a spider web behind the wall at the back of the refrigerator.

  Her father came back around the corner with a large hammer.

  “You just watch what you see,” he said, and slammed the hammer into the wall, down where the kittens had once been born. Back and forth, he worked the hammer, chips of wall flew up, and beneath them, chicken wire, and there, in a small mound, surrounded with bits of cloth and newspaper were small dried things.

  “See?” her father said, poking at them with his hammer. From one, a dozen wriggling gray-white maggots emerged. “Do you fucking see them?” He shouted, his voice receding again.

  She looked at them, all stiff and bony and withered like apricots. Her heart was beating fast; she thought something wet came up her throat; light was flickering. Were they the bodies of the mice that the five had caught, in storage for a future meal?

  And then she thought she was going to faint. She saw pinpricks of darkness play along the edge of her vision, and then an eclipse came over the sun. The world faded; her father faded; and she reached her hand into the new hole in the wall, and pressed her head through, too. Her whole body seemed to move forward, and she saw pipes and wires and dust as she went.

  11

  “I can hear her
,” her mother said, “I think she made a noise.”

  Her father said nothing. After a minute, “for three days, she does her weird, unintelligible sounds, and now she snarls her upper lip and you think she’s on the road to recovery.”

  “She said something. Honey? Are you trying to say something?”

  But Naomi didn’t care to speak with them at the moment. She held Hugo in her lap, stroking him carefully, carefully, because he didn’t like his fur ruffled. Scamp was playing with the ball of thread; the others slept, piled together.

  “Look at her,” her father said.

  “Sweetie?” her mother said, beyond the wall. “Are you trying to talk? Is there something you want to say?”

  “You think holding her is going to help?” her father said. “You think she’s ever going to get better if you coddle her like that? All that rocking back and forth. She knows what she’s doing. She’s not stupid.”

  Zelda rolled on her back and stretched out, a great yawn escaping her jaws. Her whiskers brushed against Naomi’s ankle. It tickled.

  “Sweetie?” her mother asked.

  “She’s just doing this,” her father said, “it’s all for attention. And look at you, giving it to her. She’s just doing this to hurt us.”

  “No, look at her lips. She’s trying to say something, look, Dan. My god, she’s trying to talk. Oh, sweetie, Nomy, baby, tell Mommy what’s wrong. Are you okay? Baby?”

  On the other side of the wall, Naomi pressed her face into the dust-covered fur, and listened to the purring, the gentle and steady hum beneath the skin that was like a lullaby. It was warm there, with the five, with the walls around them.

  Her father said, “my god, she’s starting in again.”

  “Shut up, Dan. Let her.”

  “I can’t stand this. How can you sit there and cradle her and not scream out loud when she does this?”

  “Maybe I care about her,” her mother said.

  Naomi mewled and rocked and mewled and rocked, safe from predators, safe in the wall.

  She watched as one of the cats sat up, her hackles rising, hunting some creature that had the misfortune of entering this most secret and wonderful domain.

  The Dark Game

  1

  I saw a painting once, by an artist unknown to me. The painting was of a man’s hands, bound together. The title was “Victory is freedom of mind and body.” I believe that is true. I would go further and say that victory is freedom of mind from body. Separation from the thing that imprisons us. Flight. Perhaps freedom from life itself. That is victory.

  Life is brutal. It is like this whip and these ropes. It hurts. It scars. But we must take it.

  We must find some pleasure and solace within this terrible lashing.

  You want to hear it all? You want me to tell you how it went, in the prison camp? Why I like the ropes? You want to play the game with me?

  First let me tell you this: youth is something you put in a drawer somewhere, you lose the thought of it behind socks and letters and medals and old passport photos and keys that no longer fit locks. You wear it when you’re of the right age, and you do things that you ought not to, and then as you gain perspective with age, you put it away, and you close the drawer.

  And you lock it.

  Then, you live the life you’ve built toward, and no one needs to see what’s in that drawer.

  A secret is something to be hidden, and if it is hidden well enough, it never becomes a fact. It is just something that is not there when you go to look for it. It is the thing missing, but the thing that is not missed.

  That is how I feel.

  That is why I don’t revisit those times, often. The camp.

  Or the motel room.

  Or the smokehouse.

  But since you have me here, like this, I’ll tell you. Maybe you’ll leave after that. Maybe you won’t want to stay here once you know about me.

  2

  Before the war, I was in a motel room with a girl I met outside the base, and for fun she tied me up and when she did it, I went someplace else in my head. My hands tied, my feet bound.

  I remember she smelled like orange blossoms, and she enjoyed tightening the thin ropes around my hands. But my mind was just gone — drifting upward into darkness, into another place. Back to Burnley Island, I guess, and that’s where I’ve always ended up — my memories, my family, my home.

  I was just not there anymore. The game had taken me over.

  It had become automatic for me.

  It was second nature.

  My name is Gordon Raglan.

  Gordie, to my friends.

  Captain to folks on Burnley Island.

  In the war, things got worse for me.

  The game got worse.

  But it wasn’t so bad when I was a kid.

  3

  Early memory: winter.

  Bitter cold.

  Wind whistling around me, boxing my ears, as I trudged through three feet of snow to get out to the smokehouse. I was ten, perhaps. Heavy with a burden. It was the dog I’d had since he was a foundling of two or three years old, and I was too young to remember bringing him home from a walk in the woods. He was dying now, of some undiagnosed malady. In those days, you didn’t take the dog to the vet when it was its time. You took him someplace and you shot him. And this freezing February day, that was what I was to do. My father marched behind me. I could not bring myself to turn and look over my shoulder to see how he kept pace. I was weeping, and it would be the first and last time I would weep for years. I held my dog — a small mutt, no bigger than my arms could carry — and he looked up at me as if he understood that something not wonderful was to come.

  At the smokehouse I stopped and prayed. I wished that God would intervene, just this once. I would trade, I promised God, my life for this dog’s. I would do anything God wanted me to do if he would just take a minute and breathe new life into my dog’s body. I would build a chapel. No, I would build a cathedral.

  The snow bit at my cheeks and nose.

  My dog, whose name was Mac, whimpered and groaned.

  “Go on, son,” my father said.

  He called me son more than he called me Gordie or Gordon. Sometimes I thought he wasn’t sure of my name. That I was just another son to him. Another child to deal with before I became a man.

  I reached up, and opened the door to the smokehouse. I barely kept my balance, for the dog had grown too heavy for me.

  My father lit the lantern inside the smokehouse — it was old fashioned, and my mother felt it was a fire hazard, but my father insisted on using it. A yellow flickering light filled the small room.

  When I’d set Mac down on some straw, I kissed him on the muzzle and kept my prayers going — my deals with God to change this, somehow.

  Then, my father handed me the pistol and told me to get it over with quickly. “Misery is terrible. That animal is in misery. When you brought him home, you promised to take care of him. That is a commitment. This is a way to take care of him, so he won’t be in any more pain. You can stop his pain. He won’t get better, son. He won’t.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You have to. You promised. You promised me. And you promised that dog when you brought him home. He has had a good life here. But now he’s sick. And he needs to be taken care of.”

  I looked at my dog’s face and saw the terribleness of all existence in his eyes. In his shivering form.

  And that is when I learned about how life doesn’t matter at all. Not one bit. It is a misery. A wretchedness foisted on us by a God who turns His back on all. We live on a planet of ice, and the only thing we human beings can do is endure it and try to make sure that we don’t add to the misery too much.

  4

  Here is my life. I was born on Burnley Island, in a house called Hawthorn, and I grew up in a family called Raglan that had a history on that island. We were shepherding people, I’m told, originally. We came with Welsh and Scots and English in our blood, and w
e were dark and swarthy, as I am, a perfect descendant of the Raglan clan. My father was a brute, and I don’t say that lightly. He was a man more likely to lash with a belt or a switch than to scold with words. He was quick to judge, and hot tempered, and I suppose I joined the army to get away from him more than anything else. I went off to see the world and fight the good fight, and found myself one dawn in the heat of a jungle, in the boredom of a company that was lost, our communications screwed beyond all measure, and I had a “fuck all” attitude toward the war and the jungle. I was nineteen, and the last place I wanted to be was in that miasma of heat, humidity and the stink of swamp.

  And then, before much time had passed, the enemy got us.

  No need to go into specifics. It was ugly. There were a dozen of us originally, but by the time I regained consciousness, tied like a pig to a stick, there were only eight or so — counting me and my buddy, Gup (short for Guppy, which was a kinder name than his original nickname, which was Shrimp), Davy, who seemed too young to be a soldier, a man I had no liking for named Larry Pastor, and Stoddard. I knew what to do if captured — name, rank, serial number, and nothing else, but the truth was, I was scared spitless and we’d all heard the stories of the POWs and how no Geneva Convention was going to stop our enemy from torturing us and then dropping us in some mosquito breeding ground, dead, when it was all over. None of us was commander. We were just soldiers, and we had no valuable information at all, and no reason for a negotiation with our commanders.

  But hope is the last thing to go, and so we had it — I had it, and Gup had it, although Stoddard had already told me that he knew he’d die in the jungle and he didn’t give a damn because his girl was already pregnant by some other guy and his folks had disowned him for some reason he wouldn’t say, and what the fuck was the point? That was his attitude, and even though I felt we lived on Ice Planet and life was a hurdle into chaos, I still hoped. For the best. For life. For good to come out of bad.