Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

“Misanthrope?”

  “Yeah, in a big-ass way.” She drank down the rest of her martini and went to get another. Her back to him, she said, “Maybe something different, too. He had this whole spiritual side to him, like he believed there was a god in everything alive. Trees. Birds. Even the air.”

  “Sort of a pagan transcendentalist then,” Rob said.

  She was drinking her martini at the sink, half turned to him, looking out the window.

  “Everything. Even unto the smallest,” she whispered.

  Rob noticed that a trail of ants running from a crack near the top of the kitchen wall, all the way down beneath the sink. No wonder she leaves crumbs and scraps everywhere.

  Celeste was watching the ants, as well, but made no move to kill them. As he followed the trail from its highest point he noticed that the ants went down to the corner of the shelf at the sink and trooped across shiny tile to within an inch of her hand.

  6

  He lay in bed that night with a reading light on. He thought about Maggie, about her gardenia smell, a garden of earthly delights—and somehow this reminded him of the ants in Celeste’s apartment, for he wondered what kind of urban garden they made their nest in. Finally, he turned out the light and fell asleep.

  He awoke sometime in the night hearing the sound of a woman moaning from nearby.

  Through the wall.

  Celeste. Having a very loud nightmare. The moaning continued, escalating to muffled cries, and he guessed it was not nightmare but a private pleasure. He heard the humming buzz of what could only have been a vibrator, and he thought: good for her.

  Strangely, it aroused him, and the more he listened, the less aware he was of his own left hand slipping down beneath the elastic of his Jockey shorts.

  Just as he was closing his eyes, dreaming about a faceless but beautiful woman, the moaning from the other side of the wall turned into a scream.

  He threw on his bathrobe and dashed to the hall, but by the time he knocked on Celeste’s door, it was silent. The hallway light flickered and buzzed; the bulbs would need replacing. He stood there, looking around at the other apartments, wondering if anyone else had heard the woman’s scream. He started knocking again, and this time he heard her moving around, as if drunk, knocking things over as she made her way to the door. Maybe she’d had another martini or two after he’d left; she’d certainly gulped them down fast enough.

  He saw her shadow beneath the space between the floor and the door. She was standing on the other side of the door, looking through the peephole at him.

  “Celeste? Are you all right?”

  She must’ve been scraping her nails on the door.

  “Celeste?”

  The shadow beneath the door vanished; he heard noises as she moved back down the corridor.

  From within the apartment, the chime, of a clock.

  Two a.m.

  He turned to go back to his apartment, shaking his head. Had he imagined the scream? Was it a cry of pleasure?

  As he climbed back into bed, he thought he heard the buzzing of her vibrator again, just at the wall. A little louder than before. He closed his eyes, wondering if he should investigate further. Maybe she’d just tripped on something and screamed, maybe she was drunk, maybe she didn’t even scream with pain, maybe it was the way she climaxed —who the hell knew?

  He was asleep, probably dreaming, but he imagined that an enormous cockroach was riding Celeste’s ass, its feelers stroking the back of her neck, and its face turning slowly to look at Rob as it diddled his neighbor, its face all brown and callused, with flecks of dirt across the broad platform between its eyes, and its eyes looking just like the Rasputin eyes of Horace Grubb.

  The phone rang, both in the dream and out of it; in the dream, Rob went running down a long corridor in search of the phone; in reality, he awoke with a groan and reached to the table by the bed.

  “Hello?”

  He heard static on the line.

  Then: “Help me.”

  A woman’s voice.

  Its very weakness shocked him awake.

  “Celeste?”

  “Help me,” she said, and then a sound like high-pitched humming, like the Vienna Boys Choir humming one note without taking a single breath. The hum filled the phone, and it felt like a needle thrust in his ear.

  He dropped the receiver.

  7

  The door to 6C was open.

  The sun was still not quite up, although the honkings and screechings of morning traffic had already begun outside.

  Her apartment was lit with red lights, like a bordello, and he thought of Celeste’s grandmother decorating the place with her New Orleans touches. The furniture seemed bloodied by the light, and it made him queasy as he walked through the front hallway. He had a sense that there was movement all around him, just on the periphery of his vision, but every time he glanced at the red-shrouded furnishings, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

  The phone, off its hook, lay in the kitchen.

  A smell, too, like clothes that had been sweated in and discarded on a heap to rot for months. The window that had formerly held the view of the park was blackened over with dark cellophane.

  Again, he sensed a slithery movement, and scanned the floor, but saw nothing. He glanced down the slim hallway that led to the three bedrooms.

  “Celeste?” he asked.

  A sudden noise, as of someone rushing to a door and throwing herself against it, sliding down to the floor. Sobbing. Muffled, as if a mouth were taped over.

  His first instinct was to walk back to the door, go to his apartment, and call the police.

  He took one step back, and stood still when he heard another sound: a repetitive vibrating sound, like monks chanting aum over and over.

  But it was a woman; it sounded like a synthesis of a woman and a machine, for the vibration of her voice seemed to increase beyond what a human might be able to, and he felt the vibrations in the floor and walls.

  Someone threw herself at the door again.

  Door Number Three.

  He could not bring himself to turn around and run for cover.

  He recognized the voice. It was Maggie’s, humming louder. It made him want to cover his ears.

  Then it was as if he were being swept along with a tide, for he found himself moving toward that door, that dark red-stained door, moving smoothly straight forward, moving his feet, not one after another, but together, as if he were in a dream and not in contact with the ground at all. His heart was beating like a vibrating drum; or it was not his heart, but her humming; his mouth had dried up; he swallowed dryness.

  When he reached the door, he twisted the knob, opening it.

  The room was dark.

  The stench came at him in waves of heat; it smelled like a compost pile.

  He stepped inside and reached for the light switch.

  The switch was low, as if made for someone in a wheelchair (her grandmother had been in a wheelchair, she’d said, and had left tracks all along the floor, he thought as if explaining away what bothered him).

  The light came up, also red, from the solitary bulb dangling from its thin chain at the center of the room.

  The room itself was small and its floor was covered with dark earth and wet leaves.

  Maggie lay in mud just a few feet in front of him.

  She was naked.

  She stared at him, and he could see the vibrations of her lips as she hummed.

  Bruises, too, all along her arms, stomach, breasts, legs.

  Her humming increased to a shattering pitch.

  There was a twitching, almost, no, a wriggling of skin along her arms and belly, too, and as he leaned forward to touch her…

  As the humming seemed to vibrate the entire building …

  He felt the edge of an antenna stroke featherlike down the back of his neck.

  Celeste whispered in his ear, “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  He turned around, and Celeste was dressed in a gown made entir
ely of wasps, all with wings twitching, diamond heads, their thousand legs clinging to her. “I am their chosen, Rob. For what my grandfather did for them, his many kindnesses, I got chosen as their midwife. They won’t hurt you, Rob, I wouldn’t let that happen, as long as you don’t try to hurt me, you’re gonna be fine.”

  The wasps moved along her shoulders, over her breasts, her living clothes shimmering in the light.

  He gasped, “What did you do? What in God’s name?”

  “Nature is God,” Celeste said, “we only live to serve. People build cities like this, and what, you think it’s all for us? It ain’t. It’s for them. We’re just part of a big-ass colony, Rob. God’s a maggot, turns the flesh to earth. We’re less than maggots, don’t you get it?”

  “What about Maggie? What did you do to her?”

  Celeste shook her head, clearly disappointed that this was his interest. “It ain’t like she’s in any pain, you know, one of the mothers paralyzes her while they lay their eggs under her skin. I ain’t gonna make anybody go through pain. Not what’s not natural, anyways.”

  The scream on the other side of the wall.

  Maggie’s scream.

  Maybe. Maybe.

  Maybe it was Celeste, maybe she was mating with a wasp, maybe the scream was pleasure, maybe it’s her eggs inside Maggie’s body.

  It was then that Rob felt his mind leaving his head, as if it were leaking out of his ears and drifting in a cloud of smoke, to dissipate in the hall. Something short-circuited for him; he could not easily remember words or how to make his arms or legs move right; for a moment, he wondered if he knew how to breathe.

  Celeste reached out and took his hand in hers. He watched her do this and felt like an infant, unable to make sense out of the world in which he’d found himself. She stroked his hand. “If I want, they’ll choose you, too, to help. I want you to help. I feel like you’re a friend,” she said, drawing his hand to her bosom. “It’s so lonely sometimes, being chosen. It’s so lonely sometimes being the one to do this.”

  He watched the wasps travel from her hand to his, then up his arm, sometimes biting, but it didn’t bother him, he didn’t mind, he didn’t mind. He felt them everywhere, all over his skin, and when he listened carefully he began to understand what they were saying, all of them at once, through their vibrations and feelers and bites.

  8

  The season was a hard one, for the earth needed turning, and there needed to be others; for, once these young came up, the mothers would need to lay more eggs after the mating time.

  When it was over, he remembered the picture.

  He remembered the picture when he looked at Maggie as they were coming out.

  The caterpillar, its skin green and translucent and wet.

  The bumps beneath the caterpillar’s skin.

  Beauty beyond conscience.

  The cruel face of nature.

  But as he was watching it happen, Maggie’s eyes on him, her humming at a pitch, he knew it was the most glorious and selfless act that any human being could ever perform, and he wept with the intense and silent beauty as her shiny skin ruptured with conquering life.

  Damned If You Do

  Calhoun was sweating up a storm, and it was only ten, but this was La Mesa in summer, and he actually found the talk radio soothing while he worked. He could hear, beyond the chattering radio, the children in the schoolyard across the street, all yelling and pounding the blacktop while they played dodge ball. He could smell the jaw-aching sweet stink of the fat lemons in the trees that Patsy had planted when they’d first moved into the bungalow ten years before. The old shepherd, Vix, was chawing on a lemon, which made the dog whine with sour hurt as the juice got into his gums—and still, he wouldn’t let go of a lemon once he got hold of it.

  Cal’s beard itched, too, another annoyance on a particularly annoying day, and his shovel struck the flat rock again, or maybe it was a pipe this time—the sewage system ran this way and that across the back of the property, and who the hell knew why since the toilets were always backing up and the garbage disposal ran rusty brown nine times out of ten.

  “Mother—” he began, then held his tongue, laughing because Patsy didn’t like strong language or strong drink in her house.

  Her house.

  It’s my house as well as yours.

  He had been digging for twenty minutes—the ground was dry and hard, and there weren’t many places left.

  Not that he’d left any markers, but he had a memory like a trap, and once he saw something, he always remembered it.

  I remember you, you, and you, he thought, blinking his eyes in the sun, looking from one patch of garden to another, or there, in the mulch pile.

  He went back in for a Pepsi and one last piece of apple pie—she had baked it the night before, and he had had one too many pieces, but he loved her pies. The radio was louder in the kitchen, echoing, and a man was on it talking about his problems with his wife, and how he wanted to leave but couldn’t because he loved her.

  The call-in DJ, who claimed to be a therapist, although she doled out advice about as bad as any Cal had ever heard, the Radio Lady, as Patsy called her, said, “Love is not just a state of being, but an active, everyday thing, you know—know what I mean? Like you maintain your house and your car, you also have to every day maintain your relationship, like a tune-up…

  Patsy always had that thing blaring, always talk radio, from morning till night till morning.

  The Radio Lady jabbering, nattering, bantering.

  He wanted to turn it off, but if he did then they’d know.

  The neighbors.

  They’d know.

  Old Fat Broad over the high wall with her arms of beef and face of jug, always leaning over and saying, “Whatcha doin’?” Or that brat of hers trying to get over to pick lemons, looking in the windows, trying to slide through the casement windows into his woodshop.

  Mr. Erickson, whom Patsy called Ear-Ache, complaining about the volume of the radio, wouldn’t he think it strange when the radio went off? Ear-Ache once came over to be neighborly, and asked Cal, “So, you’re retired now, what was your business, anyway?”

  And Cal had told the truth, although he sometimes lied because he hated when people pried. “I used to be a principal of a school down in Dauber’s Mill, back before they consolidated. I liked teaching better, more hands-on work, but they needed a principal more than they needed a woodshop teacher, so I had at it for a good fifteen years.”

  Ear-Ache and Fat Broad, eyes, ears and mind on him all the time, wondering if they were looking, if they were watching.

  He never did his work at midnight or in the wee morning hours, because he had learned in his sixty-three years that you could do anything you wanted in life as long as you did it in broad daylight, when nobody believed what they saw anyway.

  He took a bite of pie and a swig of soda, and looked out across the lawn at the shallow trench he had begun.

  Maybe I’ll just put her with that pigtailly girl, in the mulch.

  The problem with the mulch pile, or with any mulch pile, is you couldn’t put anything salty in it or you’d ruin it for sure. No bacon drippings, no skin, nothing that had a high salt content. The pigtailly girl was easy enough to scrape, and even though she still had plenty of salt in her, he just had to bury her deep and hope for the best. Dead mice you could put on the mulch, and even dead birds, but nothing too much larger or you had a pile of shit that was just a pile of shit.

  Cal set the can of soda down, stroked his walrus mustache, scratched his chest through his sweat-stained T-shirt.

  Can’t scrape Patsy, though. Can’t do it

  Take much too long, and then I’d have to flush too much scrapings. More backup in the toilets, maybe too much, and maybe they’d have to come out and dig up the lawn to check on the sewage pipes, and then what?

  “No more woodshop, for sure,” he said aloud.

  He whistled for Vix to come inside, then he turned and went down the
narrow hallway with its family pictures tattooed on the wall, all the kids they’d had in all those years. The radio noise got louder, this time just a commercial. He hated the way on TV and radio, how they made the commercials louder than the shows. They were advertising for Squeaky Kleen, a deodorant. Cal didn’t use deodorants, although he made an excellent natural soap in his woodshop, using an old recipe he’d found in a book from the turn of the century. It was a little bit of lye and a little bit of animal fat, and it got skin so clean it practically took the hair right off, with a fresh smell, like children on their birthdays.

  He went into Patsy’s room—they had separate rooms, ever since he’d retired, because she wouldn’t put up with his night fears anymore. So he had the little guestroom, what used to be the nursery off the second bathroom, and she kept the master bedroom, which looked out over the backyard. She was simple in her tastes, which is what he always liked about her anyway, and difficult in her emotions. She had a bed, a table with a reading light, her mother’s rocking chair, and the radio. It was an old one, a big jobbie that she’d had since the fifties, hell, it took four big fat batteries to run it, and like his old Royal typewriter she had it repaired constantly rather than replace it with something newer and easier to use.

  On the radio, a woman began crying, and the DJ lady said, ‘It’s all right, it’s good to cry, hey, I’d cry, too, if that happened to me. But you do have a choice, sweetie, you can walk right out that door and get a life! It’s the thing to do, get…a…life. It’s easy. When you do it, you’ll see. You’ll call a friend, or a family member, and see if you can’t stay with them for a while, until you’ve got your feet on the ground, and then you’ll get a life. Sound good?”

  The woman on the line said, “I guess. I thought this was my life.”

  “What you described is not a life. I know it hurts to hear this, but it’s why you called in, isn’t it? It’s not a life, I repeat. A life is something you participate in and draw some satisfaction from. All right?”

  Cal wanted to shut that damn radio off more than anything, but he knew if he did, someone somewhere nearby would think something, would wonder about something, might even look in a window somewhere.