Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Inside the store, the fluorescent lights flickered. The old man who worked the pharmacy stood up on his platform behind the white counter, measuring his nostrums and philters. Jim walked the aisles, glancing briefly at the magazine covers and the greeting card displays. Finally, he turned the last aisle and saw the large bottles of aspirin.

  The fluorescent light above his head flickered in a dark way, as if it were just about to go out. As Jim reached for the aspirin bottle, he watched as his hand seemed to go through water and touch—not a bottle of aspirin, but a green tile on a bathroom wall. As the light flickered again, he sensed that he was no longer in a drugstore down near the train station in Old Deerwich, but in a small bathroom with lime green tiles and a large mirror above the toilet. He glanced in the mirror and for a moment thought he saw the aisles of the drugstore behind his reflection, but this faded, and all was green tile.

  He almost said something, as if someone stood near him, but he was most definitely alone.

  He turned about, facing a door. He pushed at the door, and it opened out onto a room that was all green and white and smelled of rubbing alcohol with an undersmell of urine. Flowers on the windowsill. The window looked out on a courtyard and garden, and there, as he went to look out it, were half a dozen or more patients. He knew they were patients by their bathrobes and by the nurses that pushed some of the wheelchairs, or stood beside a patient who used a walker or cane to get around. Across the courtyard, a silver metal building, probably precisely like the one he occupied at the moment.

  “Mrs. Earnshaw,” someone said at the door. British accent. He knew he was in a British hospital.

  Jim turned, sensing others’ presence in the room.

  The fluorescent lamp flickered a liquid green.

  Jim glanced up at the light overhead—a large brown water blotch spread like the profile of a face next to the ice tray lamps.

  “It’s terrible,” someone said as he glanced down again.

  He was in the drugstore, holding a bottle of aspirin in his hand. A woman looked up at him queerly.

  “I can’t imagine anyone survived.”

  Jim had to squint a moment to focus on his new environment. His head throbbed now. He calmed himself with the thought that the pain in his head had caused the brief and vivid hallucination of the hospital room.

  The little old woman, half bent over, reached for a box of arthritis pain reliever. “Did you see it?”

  “No,” Jim said. Then, “See what?”

  “The crash. I was in my car and driving down Water Street, and I heard it. It was terrible. It’s so unsafe.”

  “Yes.” Jim nodded.

  “Travel is always dangerous. To get there from here, one must risk one’s life these days,” she said, nodding as if they’d understood each other.

  Jim stood there a moment. Then, feverishly, he opened the jar of pills and grabbed three, tossing them down his throat.

  When he paid for the bottle, the pharmacist said, “Finally found what you wanted.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The aspirin. I saw you standing there reading labels for nearly half an hour.”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Bad headache, huh? You probably drink too much caffeine.”

  Jim walked out into the rain, feeling as if he still vibrated with his hallucination. He remembered his brief romance with peyote in college, and began to worry that this might be the flashback from that. He forgot about it for days—the hospital—and buried himself in work.

  The photographs in the local papers showed all angles of the train crash. It had fallen on its side, plunging seventy nine people into the river, all of whom died. Another two hundred and fifteen people were injured.

  What struck Jim most about the pictures of the fallen train was that it looked—if you squinted at the photos—like a sleeping person made entirely of metal, lying on a gray blanket.

  The flashes began a week or two later.

  The first time, when he tried to unlock his car, a small Honda Civic, and found that the lock was jammed. He twisted the key so hard that it broke off in his hand. Again, the headache kicked in, and he saw the aspirin bottle on the passenger seat inside the car. He felt angry suddenly—angry at the car for not opening, angry at his job for its dullness, angry at his parents for not really preparing him for the world in the way he’d wished.

  Then the flash—he thought it was heat lightning. In the same moment, he was in the hospital again. This time, he sat in a wheelchair in the courtyard as a light rain fell.

  “You all right, now?”

  “Yes,” he said, adapting quickly to his new environment. “It’s only a little rain.”

  “A little rain.” The pretty nurse beside him smiled. “Yes, that’s all it is. But all the others have gone inside.”

  He looked about the path through the garden with its iris and hibiscus, and saw that they were indeed alone. The silver of the buildings dulled in the gray rain, but he liked the fresh smell of it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Nora,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. “Your reading’s going to get soaked,” he said, nodding.

  “I don’t mind. It’s only a little rain, after all.” She had a warm smile, and her eyes were a toasty brown. “Been feeling good today, then, have we?”

  “Very,” Jim said. “The pains are gone.”

  “A few days is what they said.”

  “Yes, and they were right,” Jim said.

  Then he bit his tongue slightly. “Where am I?”

  “Holyrood,” she said.

  “What town?”

  “Oh, you.” Nora laughed. “More tricks. Is this like that dream you told me about? The one where you’re a railroad man taking tickets in some little town in—where was it?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “That’s right Connecticut. The effects should’ve worn off by now,” Nora said, glancing at her watch. “You were only on the IV for two hours before ten. It’s nearly three.” Then she reached over, patting Jim’s hand. “All of this for just a little information. It does seem daft, doesn’t it? You holding up? No more weeping at midnight?”

  “No,” Jim said, feeling more lost and yet extremely comfortable. “Was it the aspirin?”

  “Or lack thereof,” Nora said. “Do you ever read these?” She held the magazine up. It was the London Telltale magazine. “All these royals and celebs knocking each other up. You’d think they’d have other things to occupy them, don’t you?”

  “What town are we in?” he asked.

  “Why,” Nora shook her head, glancing at the magazine, “just look at what the Prince is up to today.” Then, “What dear? Town? Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to tell too much. You know that more than anyone, Mrs. Earnshaw.”

  Jim felt a warm salty taste in the back of his throat. He glanced down at the hand that she had just finished patting. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman, and the hospital bracelet he wore read, “Catherine Earnshaw.”

  When the lightning flashed overhead and the rain began coming down in earnest, Nora said, “Oh, dear, let’s get the two of us in out of this nasty weather, shall we?” But then there was no Nora, and she faded, and all that was there was the Honda and the rain and his headache and a man who was not sure why he was going mad at the age of twenty-nine.

  2

  You didn’t think he was married? Well, of course Jim was married—they’d tied the knot at twenty-four, almost got divorced at twenty-seven, but managed for a couple of more years because their jobs put them at opposite shifts so that every weekend was a honeymoon. Her name was Alice, and she worked at the sandwich shop on Bank Street. When she got off work at five, she went first to the library, since she was an avid reader, and then to the video shop. Her evenings, while Jim worked late, were mainly spent with the cat and a good book and a mediocre movie nine times out of ten. She’d slip into bed around
midnight, fall asleep with a glass of wine, and then feel him next to her just before she got fully awake at seven in the morning. She’d cuddle with him, unbeknownst to Jim, and then get up to make a pot of coffee and begin the day again.

  The movie that night was to be an old musical, and the novel, a light romance to take her mind off her worries. She slipped into the tub at about seven-fifteen, and while she dried herself off, the bathroom door opened. At first Alice was frightened, but she saw quickly it was her husband.

  “Jim? What are you doing home?”

  “Called in sick,” he said. “I’ve been napping since six.”

  “Migraine? Poor baby.”

  “It’s not that.” But he nodded anyway.

  “Come here,” Alice said, reaching her hand out. Jim approached her, his head down. She touched the back of his neck, squeezing lightly. “You’re tense.”

  “Baby, I think I’m going nuts,” he said.

  “You’ve been nuts a long time.”

  “I mean it,” he said, and his tone was so serious it almost shocked her.

  Later, by the fire, she held him and told him it would be all right, and he wept.

  Then he told her.

  At first she had a hard time not laughing.

  But when he told her the woman’s name, she cackled.

  He looked hurt.

  “Oh, honey, that’s a name from a book. Catherine Earnshaw. It’s from Wuthering Heights. You must have seen the movie.”

  He shook his head. “Was she in a hospital?”

  Alice grinned. Her grin was not as warm as Nora’s, but it was familiar. “No, no. It must be some kind of dream brought on by those headaches. Let’s get you into the doctor’s for a checkup.”

  “A head exam?”

  “So you’re an invalid woman in a British hospital with silver buildings and your name is Catherine Earnshaw. What an imagination,” Alice said, kissing his forehead. “My big baby. It’s your job. It’s getting to you. I told you, you needed to finish your degree and maybe get into computers or something.”

  Jim glanced at the fire as the flames curled and flickered. He closed his eyes, his head beginning to pound, but he was going to fight it off, the pain, the throbbing, the near blindness that the headaches brought with them when at their worst.

  When he opened his eyes, he was sitting in a large white room with no windows. In an uncomfortably hard chair. In a circle, with others. Some men, a few women—nine in all. The nurses stood toward the back, sitting on chairs, crossing and uncrossing their legs, looking at their watches now and then, seeming to reach into their breast pockets for cigarettes or mints or something they needed desperately but were unwilling to give themselves.

  A man sitting across from Jim chattered away, and gradually Jim began to understand what he was saying.

  “It’s not as if we all aren’t going through the same thing. What did they call it? Adjustment?”

  A woman laughed. “Mine told me to get used to it.”

  Someone else chuckled at this. “I was told it was a period of containment.”

  “Well, it’s been working for me to some small extent,” the man continued, his voice slight and nervous as if he were afraid of being overheard or of making a mistake in what he said. “At least in the mornings. The mornings are good. It’s only about now.”

  “Yes,” another man said, just to the left of Jim. “At about three every day. Sometimes as late as four. These flashes.”

  “Flashes of insight,” a woman said.

  “Hot flashes,” another woman said, and they all had a good laugh. “Not that you can’t have those, Norman.”

  Norman, the man who had originally been talking, blushed. He was handsome, mid-forties, and reminded Jim a bit of his father. Actually, the more he spoke, the more Jim was becoming convinced that Norman was related to him in some way. The thin tall frame, the thick black hair, the nose a bit beaky and the chin a bit strong and the teeth a bit much.

  “Well,” Norman said, “since we’re all in this together, and since they,” and he nodded backward, to the row of nurses behind him, “seem to want us to get it all out in these groups, I think we should tell everything we know.”

  “Not everything,” another man said. “I couldn’t. It’d be too much.”

  “All right, then,” Norman said. “Whatever we feel comfortable with.”

  “You’ll have to begin, then, Norman. Mine is rather embarrassing,” the laughing woman said. “It involves me and another man, and I can’t tell you what we seem to do all day long.”

  More laughter.

  “Mine isn’t that…invigorating.” Norman smiled. “I’m just a little boy of ten, perhaps eleven. I live in a small village in Morocco.”

  “Sounds quaint,” the woman said. “Unless you’re employed in some house of thieves.”

  Norman lost his smile. “Nothing like that. I help bring water to the house, feed some animals, and run errands. I’m constantly hungry, and I can’t seem to talk with others there, even though I understand them.”

  “Oh!” the woman gasped. “So interesting compared to mine. I’m the wife to a man who hallucinates.”

  Listening to all this, Jim almost laughed; something in him told him to laugh a bit. He glanced down at his hands and saw the wedding ring on the left hand. He drew it carefully off his finger as the woman told her story.

  He looked inside the ring. “Cathy and Cliff Forever.”

  “Yes, and while he’s at work in his dull job, I go have mad affairs up and down Main Street,” the woman continued, “only … it’s not called Main Street. I find this entertaining, if disconcerting. My husband really is a fool. He surprised me a bit today, however.”

  Jim reached up and felt his neck. It was slender. He drew his fingers across his throat and up around his chin—a small slightly round chin—up to his fullish lips, his small nose, around his eyelashes, which seemed long and feathery.

  “Dear,” someone whispered behind him, “you’ll smudge your makeup.”

  He recognized the voice; it was Nora.

  He put his hands down.

  “You should listen to the stories,” Nora whispered. “It might help your condition.”

  Jim nodded, glancing over to the woman who was just finishing up her tale.

  “He hasn’t a clue,” she said. “He lies constantly himself. It’s easy to fool a liar.” She looked over at Jim. “Mrs. Earnshaw, you haven’t told yours, have you?”

  The woman seemed to look at Jim with a special knowledge. He’d nearly forgotten he was Mrs. Earnshaw to all of them. He began to feel his skin crawl a bit. A coldness seeped into his voice as he spoke.

  “There’s not much to tell, really. To be honest, I think I’m more there than here.” Laughter across the room. “This feels less me than the other. I know so much about him.”

  “Him?” The woman laughed. “Oh, Lord, you got to change sex. Do you play with it much?”

  “Juliet!” Norman exclaimed. “What a filthy mind you have.”

  Jim felt slightly offended, particularly for Mrs. Earnshaw, whom he imagined to be a very circumspect and polite woman of fifty-two.

  “Really,” he said. He reached down, smoothing the lines of the bathrobe. “Even now, sitting among you, I feel more him than me.

  “Tell us about him,” Norman said.

  “Yes,” another chimed in.

  “Perhaps I will.” Jim paused a moment, wondering where to begin. “He’s a nice young man in his late twenties who works for the rails in a little New England town. He is happily married, drives some kind of Japanese car, an older model, and likes rock and roll music from the 1950s. He has terrible headaches …”

  After a moment, Jim continued. “Actually, I’m more convinced that I’m him than I’m sure that I am, well, me.”

  Norman’s eyes lit up as he nodded. “That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it? They said you get a gleam at first.”

  “A glimmer,” the woman named Juliet
said. The smile on her face grew impossibly wide. “They called it a glimmer. It feels like … like …”

  “A warm rain,” another said.

  “Yes, and then,” Norman nodded as if feeling a religious transformation, “the warmth spreads over you.”

  “Like you’ve been rewired,” another said.

  The woman next to him said, “Well, Mrs. Earnshaw’s certainly been rewired if she’s a man now.”

  “He’s not just a man,” Jim said, and for the first time noticed that he spoke with Mrs. Earnshaw’s voice. “He’s a special young man. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s very special.”

  Behind him, Nora touched his shoulder. She whispered, “I knew you’d be the first, Mrs. Earnshaw.”

  Jim leaned his head back slightly. “The first to what, dear?”

  “The first to cross the bridge,” the nurse said.

  3

  When Jim next recollected anything, he was in bed with his wife, in their small apartment on Hop Street, the peppermint smell of the nearby toothpaste factory assaulting his senses.

  Alice snored lightly, and as Jim glanced around in the scrim darkness, moonlight and the summer steam pouring in through the open window, he saw evidence of sexual abandon—the packet of condoms, open, on the dressing table, the clothes strewn about the floor in a trail, the half-empty glasses of red wine, one spilled on the carpet. Had they been animals? He wished he could remember. Because of their schedules, they didn’t make love all that often, and now he had been in some kind of dream support group in a British hospital rather than in his Alice.

  Then a disturbing thought occurred to him: was someone else occupying his own body while he occupied Mrs. Earnshaw’s? Did Mrs. Earnshaw herself enter his skin and make love to Alice and drink his wine?

  He sat up most of the night, just watching Alice as she slept.