Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  “You heard,” he said.

  “Yep. Did you actually talk to the News?”

  “What do you think?”

  She didn’t answer; he realized that he sounded grouchy. She opened the kitchen drawers in search of the corkscrew.

  “It’s in the basket on the fridge,” he said. “My guess is some poor bastard junior reporter is stuck down at the precinct waiting for the dirt on a rape or riot, and he looks at the schedule of events and sees a baby-in-a-dumpster story. My name’s right there. He can’t file the story he’s after ‘cause nothing’s in on it. So he ties this in with all those other dead babies left out to die stories and voila—an urban legend begins. With my name attached to the most recent one. The Man Who Found A Dead Infant In The Laundry Room Of The Famous Lonsdale Apartments Right Off Central Park West.”

  “You’re a star,” she said, pouring the Merlot into two glasses.

  “I didn’t know about the bugs, about how they’d been… doing that to the baby’s skin,” he said, shivering a little, going over to her, taking the wine, reaching around her back with his free hand, between the jacket and her skin. “You smell good. Like a garden of earthly delights.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been gargling with cologne. It’s not too strong?”

  “Not at all,” he said, smiling, loving her little insecurities because they made her seem less perfect, more human. He drew back, sipped wine, rotated his head around to relieve tension in his neck. “God, Maggie, a baby. They said it was less than a day old.”

  “It’s a rough place, this world,” she said, and drew him to her. “You ever wanted a baby, Robby?”

  He almost was going to cry, thinking of the dead thing in his arms, whatever brief and terrible life it had to endure; but he held back. Kissed her with gentleness. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Someday I want a baby, but—don’t get that fearful bachelor look—not yet, and probably not from you, unless you play your cards right.”

  After dinner they watched television, and as he lay on the couch with her, he saw a roach on the wall. He picked up his shoe and threw it across the room, but missed it. The shoe made two loud thuds as it hit the wall and then the floor.

  A few seconds later, the phone rang. He leaned over her head (“massive hair,” he murmured, “like a scalp jungle”) and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Six D?”

  He didn’t recognize the woman’s voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Six C. Your neighbor. I got your number from the super. You all right? I heard a noise.”

  “Oh, hello. Yes. I lobbed a shoe at the wall.” She seemed to accept this explanation.

  Maggie looked up at him, her eyebrows knitting.

  He shrugged and mouthed: Nextdoor neighbor.

  The woman on the line said, “It scared me. After all the news.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “It was you who found it,” she said.

  He felt drained. “Yeah.”

  “Were they hurt?”

  Rob pulled his ear from the phone and looked at it. What the hell?

  “Was what hurt? You mean, the baby?”

  But she’d hung up the phone.

  “My neighbor lady is spooky indeed,” he said as he rested the phone back in its cradle.

  After midnight, he had a craving for frozen yogurt. There was this place down on the corner that made the best cappuccino nonfat yogurt, a favorite spot of his. So, while Maggie slept, naked except for her panties, her breasts creamy and lovely above her small, indented belly, her dark hair obscuring one side of her face, he slipped on his jeans and tucked his cotton shirt in, stepped into his shoes, and tiptoed out of the apartment. He forgot to lock the apartment from the inside; so he stuck the key (three strikes and you’re out, bubba, he thought as he finally got the sucker in the keyhole on the fourth try) into the door on the outside, and turned it so it was locked twice over. Never be too sure, even in a building like the Lonsdale, seventeen hundred a month for a junior one bedroom, even if you’ve been here for ten years, he thought. Babies in the garbage chute, roaches on the wall, anything can happen. He was a little drunk from the wine, and the thought of frozen yogurt, even with the October coolness outside, sobered him a bit; by the time he got to the elevator, he was standing up straight and wiped the grin of requited lust from his face.

  He had to stand in line behind six others, all frozen yogurt fiends like himself, and by the time he’d gotten up to make his order, he decided on the largest size possible. He got two plastic spoons, and tasted the treat on the walk back to the apartment. He fiddled with his pockets, because he couldn’t locate the keys. Had he left them upstairs? Damn it. He’d have to wake Maggie up after all. He buzzed the apartment. Three times. The last one, a long sustained buzz. Finally, she picked up the intercom.

  Her voice was sleepy. “Rob?”

  He giggled, high on Merlot and frozen yogurt. “Hey, sweetie pie, I locked myself out getting some dessert for the one I love and me.”

  As if she couldn’t hear him, she asked again, “Rob?” She was still waking up, he could tell. He looked at the small black plastic of the intercom as if he could maybe see her through it if he concentrated. “Is it you?” she asked.

  He pressed the button on his side. “Yeah, yeah, I got melting yogurt, Maggie, and I’m starting to feel a draft.”

  “Rob?” she asked again, weakly, and it sounded, for just a second, like she wasn’t sleepy at all but about to pass out. About to cry, or something — something almost whimpery and breathless. Not like sleepiness at all.

  And then he remembered: He’d left the keys in the door to the apartment.

  Don’t panic, he thought.

  Pressed the button. “Maggie? You okay? Buzz me in, okay?”

  He let go of the button.

  Waiting for her buzzer. The intercom finally got pushed, but there was just the ch-ch-ch sound of dead air.

  He pressed the button for the super. “It’s Rob Arlington, Six D. I left my keys inside.”

  The super, ever vigilant, buzzed him in with no further identification required.

  Rob ran to the elevator, and, luckily, it was on the first floor. He got on and pressed Six. The elevator gave its characteristic lurch. He realized that he was clutching the cup of frozen yogurt so tightly that it was all twisted, with dripping cappuccino yogurt spreading down his hand. He dropped it in the elevator. When he reached the sixth floor, he sprinted down the hall, tried the door. No keys. Locked. He rapped on it several times. “Maggie? Maggie! Maggie!”

  He heard a noise, and glanced to his right.

  The woman in 6C stood there, in a navy blue bathrobe. “She left.”

  “What do you mean she left?”

  “She knocked on my door about ten minutes ago. She told me she had to go home, and she didn’t know where you went off to. Here,” the woman held her hand out, “she just left a second ago.”

  In her hand, his keys.

  He looked at her, at the keys. “I just talked with her on the intercom. I came up on the elevator. I would’ve seen her.”

  The woman seemed annoyed. “She comes banging on my door at God knows what hour and tells me you left the keys in the door and then we hear the buzzer go off and she goes back to the apartment, and mister, I can’t tell you what else she did, because I came back inside kinda pissed off that I now gotta wait up for you ’cause your girlfriend wants to split. If she takes the stairs or something, it ain’t my business. She’s a nice lady, seems like, but I can’t read her mind. You want these or what?” she asked, finally tossing the keys to him. As she stepped back inside her apartment, he noticed the light blue bruises,like polka dots on her pink legs.

  Maggie’s answering machine picked up for three days, and then he stopped calling. He dropped by her place one night with flowers, but she didn’t answer the door. Even though the lights were out in her apartment, he sensed that she was standing behind the door, looking through the peeph
ole.

  Then, on Monday morning, she called.

  “It’s me.”

  “Jesus, Maggie, I’ve been worried sick. What happened to you?”

  “What do you mean, what happened to me? What happened to you?”

  “I went out for some yogurt. You were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  Silence on the line.

  “Something frightened me.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, Rob,” she sounded close to tears, “I can’t talk about it. Not like this.”

  “Will you meet me somewhere? Cafe Veronese?” He heard her slow breaths, as if she needed to calm down.

  She whispered, “Okay. After work. Six.”

  When they met, she moved away as he tried to give her a friendly hug. Her eyes were circled with darkness, and bloodshot. Her lips were chapped. Something about her skin was shiny, as if she had a fever. They sat at a booth in the back, and she, uncharacteristically, withdrew a cigarette from her purse and lit it. “I didn’t know where you went. The door was wide open. The lights were off. Someone was inside with me. I knew it wasn’t you.”

  He noticed that she kept glancing down at her fingers; and then he knew why. She was afraid to look him in the face.

  He said nothing.

  “I was just about naked, and scared. I reached for my jacket, but…it…it grabbed my arm.”

  “A man,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “A woman?”

  Maggie laughed once, bitterly. “None of the above. It crawled up my arm.”

  He looked at her face, thinking it was a joke. “It was a bug?”

  She glanced up, saw his grin. “Fuck you,” she said.

  “Sorry. But you got scared by a bug?”

  “It wasn’t just a bug, Robert. I knew I couldn’t talk to you.”

  He sipped his coffee, she smoked her Camel. Her fingertips were yellow-brown from smoking.

  As if suddenly inspired, she rolled the sleeve of her sweater up and thrust her arm under his face.

  Dark bruises, in a diamond pattern.

  He touched along them and felt thin blisters.

  “It attacked me,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he gasped, “Maggie, you’ve got to see a doctor. This isn’t just some bug.”

  “Exactly,” she said, triumphant. Tears shone like jewels in her eyes. “It’s like a disease. It feels like a disease. It’s taking me with it. Whatever it is. Inside me. It did something. But this,” she nodded toward the diamond bruise, “this was only where it held me. The others…”

  “Others?”

  Maggie’s expression turned again to stone. “You don’t believe me.”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “They opened me up.”

  4

  “She doing okay?”

  Rob was checking his mailbox. He glanced around the corner, and there was the woman from 6C. It was eight o’clock, and he had walked Maggie home, put her to bed with a stiff drink, made her promise to see a doctor in the morning, and then walked home. He was hoping to just go to bed early, himself.

  The woman said, “Your girl. I heard from the super she got attacked. He said it was a spider from South America or something. He started talking exterminating again—sounded like Adolf Hitler, you ask me.”

  “Better,” he said, “she’s doing better. I haven’t talked with her since Monday, though. I think maybe she just needs to be alone for a while.”

  “You think she imagined it, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She seemed nice. I don’t think she’d make it up. I mean, I seen spiders big as birds at the museum. She doesn’t seem like the lying type, your girl.”

  “I didn’t say that. Something definitely happened.”

  “You was thinking it, though. Hard for guys to deal with things like that, I don’t know why, happens every day in this city—bugs and thugs. You probably don’t believe about the gators in the sewer, but I know two cleaning women who swear by them. Guys, they never believe it till it hits them butt first in the face. But you ain’t like that, right? You half believe her, don’t you?” The woman gave a hopeful smile. “I got attacked in the subway three months ago. My hip still ain’t too good. You give me a choice between getting bit by a spider or jumped by a hoodlum, I choose spiders every time.”

  He managed a smile.

  “My name’s Celeste. Celeste Pratt. We talk a lot in halls and junk, but we never been introduced.” She extended her beefy arm. She’d dressed all in black, which somehow brightened her face. “I didn’t know she got bit that night. I’m sorry I ragged on you so much. I was tired. Friends?”

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  “Glad to hear she’s doing better. You think it was a black widow or something?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t see a doctor.”

  “I don’t like doctors neither,” Celeste said, shaking her head. “I believe in homeopathy and stuff like that. The mind, Rob. The power of the mind. And nature. It’s weird to believe in nature when you live in a city like this, ain’t it? But I always lived here, all my life, and you look for nature where you can find it. The law of nature, way I see it, is we got to sometimes give ourselves up to it, like we’re part of this big system, and your legs—like, say, mine—get bashed, but you just let the pain of healing take over, you let nature run its course. It’s like Grubb’s Nature Theory, about survival and adaptation. Know what I mean? You tell your girlfriend I hope she gets better, okay? Do that for me? She’s always been so nice and friendly to me, I hate to see nice people get hurt, but in this city, you know, it happens every day, but better some spider or something instead of a guy with a butterfly knife, right?”

  Rob stared at her as if he could not quite believe she existed. He blinked twice.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, then headed for the elevator. Celeste got on with him and smiled, but didn’t volunteer another river of conversation. On their floor, he let her off first, then got off, stood just on the other side of the elevator door, and watched Celeste go to her apartment.

  When she had put her key in the lock and turned it, he said, “Excuse me, Celeste.”

  She turned to him, beaming.

  “Downstairs, did you mention something about someone named Grubb?”

  “Grubb’s Nature Theory. Yes.”

  “Is that Horace Grubb?”

  She nodded, blushing.

  “My grandfather,” she said.

  5

  Celeste invited him into her apartment to show him her grandfather’s books. Rob accepted out of curiosity, as much to see the large apartment as the texts. The apartment had three bedrooms, “although it was once this entire floor, a fourteen-room affair, but it was divided up in late ’29, when everyone with anything lost it. My grandmother, she was from New Orleans. She redecorated like crazy,” Celeste pointed out the French touches, “and the apartment, what’s left of it, is pretty much the way she wanted it. She was off the deep end, you ask me. ‘Course, she ruined the floor, the beautiful wood floor, what with her wheelchair scraping along. It’s why I got all these fancy carpets and runners all over the place, to cover up the damage. My mother never wanted to live here ever since she married back in ’48, but Grammy left it to me. Who else? She knew I’d take the right kind of care of it. But I ain’t much of a housekeeper. The bedrooms, you should see, all disaster areas—I do all my crap in them—but, here, come over here, we can have a nice martini at the window.” She led him to the kitchen, which was dark like the rest of the place; the floors were thick with layers of dust and crumbs, as if she never cleaned up after herself; the windows were painted black, supposedly because her grandmother, at the end of her life, could not handle light because of eye problems. Celeste pressed a small latch to the left of the pane, then pushed open the larger of two windows.

  The view was of the nearby park, shrouded in night, and was not blocked
by the Cavanaugh Building, as it was from Rob’s small apartment

  After making the martinis, Celeste sat down opposite him and raised her glass. He clinked his to hers and sipped. Strong.

  He said, “I saw a picture of your grandfather. In the papers.”

  She rolled her eyes and flapped her hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Oh, God, my grandfather, twice as nuts as Grammy, and all that business. Grampy’s book was called De Naturis and it basically was nothing but his theory, which always sounds loony-tuney in the light of day. Oh, right, right, you want to know about it, don’t you? It was like something about how man’s role in Nature was to be a farmer. That kind of thing. We ain’t here to control nobody’s nature, he said, but ‘cause we got to do stuff, ease the birth he said, so nature can keep on keeping on, or something like that”

  “How’d he get in trouble over that?”

  “Different time, you know, back then, nobody liked the message. World War One just started, and it had something to do with soldiers going to France, and some papers Grampy gave out. He got attacked. Terrible. Would’ve killed him, too. Things worked out eventually. But it made the news here for about ten minutes before the war took over. Grammy used to tell the story like he was some kind of saint. Which he most definitely was not. Put the Lonsdale on the map, though.”

  “Was he anti-war?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, her breath strong and gin-soaked, “not by a long shot. He loved war, he said, ‘cause it meant more human flesh got put in the ground, which was good for crops. Crazy I know. Genius but crazy. He believed the best use of human beings was as compost or incubators. Imagine thinking that. But is sold newspapers. And his book. But that’s really where the trouble was, in his big fat mouth. He thought dead people was the best food nature’s got. He had people, you know, who agreed with him, listened to him and stuff. Wrote a lot of pamphlets. They called themselves Grubbites. He was definitely a class-A weirdo. He wasn’t a cannibal or nothing like that, even though they all thought he was. Got arrested five times, just for causing a ruckus. He was a…what do you call it?”