Lights Out

by Peter Abrahams

  The harem girl arrived with new glasses and a new bottle. She popped the cork and poured. Paz covered his glass when she came to him. He rose and knocked a cylinder of cigar ash into the pool.

  “Glad to have met you, Mr. Nye. And glad we’ve cleared up our little misunderstanding.” He started away.

  “Who is we?” Eddie said.

  Paz stopped, turned, smiled. “And especially glad it was just that-a misunderstanding.” He went away.

  Eddie emptied his glass. “He’s right.”

  “About what?” said Sookray.

  “Krug. It’s the best.” He refilled his glass. Two days ago-or was it three? — he’d been eating shit and drinking swill. Now he was eating caviar and drinking the best champagne in the world. A thrill went through him, strong and physical: he felt his freedom through and through. It made him want to move.

  “Who are the Panzers?” asked Sookray.

  “They were hot in their day,” Eddie replied. “How about that dance?”

  Sookray shook her head.

  “I thought it was paid for.”

  “If you insist,” she said.

  Eddie gave her a closer look: he’d only been joking. He saw that the mockery had gone out of her eyes; they were dull and tired. Her body too had lost its vitality. She sagged in her chair.

  “I don’t insist,” Eddie said.

  Sookray smiled at him, a little smile, almost shy. “You can come home with me, if you keep it a secret.”

  “A secret from who?”

  Sookray’s eyes darted in the direction Paz had gone but she replied, “Just a secret in general.”

  Eddie smiled back. “Forget it.”

  “You don’t want me?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Because I’m a whore.”

  “No,” Eddie said, although that was probably part of it. The rest of it had to do with Paz; and El Rojo.

  “How do you know El Rojo?” Eddie asked.

  Her eyes narrowed and all at once were wide awake. “Who said I knew him?”

  “He’s our mutual friend, remember?”

  Sookray said nothing.

  “What’s his relationship to Paz?” Eddie looked around. “Does El Rojo own this place?”

  Sookray bit her lip. “I don’t feel very well,” she said. “Do you mind if I go to the bathroom?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sookray left. A harem girl arrived with more Krug.

  “I don’t think we ordered that,” Eddie said.

  “Drink up,” said the harem girl. “It’s all on the house.”

  Eddie drank up. Soon-at least Eddie thought it was soon-a beautiful woman-at least Eddie thought she was beautiful, although he wasn’t seeing too clearly-asked him to dance and he said yes. He wanted to dance with Sookray, but more than that he wanted to dance.

  Eddie and the woman went up on the battlements and danced. He forgot about Sookray. He and the woman-she had platinum hair and taut skin everywhere but under her chin-drank another bottle or two of champagne. After that they set out across the sand. They rolled around on the dune for a while. There was some kissing, some more champagne. A crescent moon floated over the desert and the sky filled with stars. The shadow of a huge bird passed overhead. The oasis grew darker and darker, the moon and stars brighter and brighter, the music louder and louder. The bass boomed through the earth with a seismic beat.

  “I’m free,” Eddie shouted into the woman’s ear; taking up where he’d left off fifteen years before, having fun on the sand and winning races in the water.

  She laughed hysterically. “Me too. We’re both free, free as the fucking wind.” She bit his ear.

  14

  Eddie awoke at the base of a date palm, his face in the sand. He felt like someone who had been wandering in a real desert: head pounding, mouth parched, cells desiccated.

  He was alone. Sookray and Paz, the harem girls and the fire eater, the crescent moon and the skyful of stars: all gone. The dancers were gone too, and the music was over. The only light, an orange glow, came from inside the casbah. The only sound was the trickling of water. Eddie rose, steadying himself on the date palm. It tipped over and fell to the sand with a soft papier-mache crunch. Eddie followed the trickling sound down to the pool.

  The pool was round, with irregular edges that might have been found in nature, and muddy banks. The trickling sound came from a fountain in the shape of a silver breast that hung over the other side. Eddie walked around the pool, stuck his finger into the flow and tasted the water. Unlike the date palm, the water was real; cold and metallic, but drinkable. Eddie lowered his head and drank.

  And felt a little better almost at once. He stripped off the sweats. Two or three cigarette butts floated in the pool, but it smelled clean. Eddie lowered himself in. The water came almost to his waist, just deep enough. He pushed off and began a slow lazy crawl.

  The movement and the coldness of the water got his blood going. The fog of alcohol lifted from his mind, and the headache soon went with it. Eddie swam back and forth across the pool until he grew tired of making all the turns. Then he climbed out, dried himself with a cloth napkin from one of the tables, dressed. Time to go. He walked over the dune and onto the flat stretch of sand that led to the studded leather door.

  It was locked. Locked from the inside, like a cell.

  Eddie went back across the sand, past the pool, into the casbah. He entered a bar called Le Chameau Insolite. It had whitewashed walls, Persian rugs, plush divans, mosaic tiles. Behind the bar was a swinging door on which hung a calendar where the year was 1372. Eddie pushed through it, into a stainless-steel kitchen of his own era and civilization.

  A man in coveralls was piling green-plastic garbage bags on a trolley. He saw Eddie and said: “Are you the new guy?”

  “No.”

  “Then where the fuck is he?” The man waved his hand through the air, accidently striking the trolley. The bags slid off and tumbled on the floor.

  “That’s all I fuckin’ needed,” the man said, giving the nearest bag a murderous kick with his work boot. Lobster tails and champagne bottles sagged through the hole he made. The phone on the wall started ringing. He snatched at it, barked, “What is it?” listened for a few seconds, cried out, “That’s what he always says,” and banged down the phone. He glanced down at the garbage bags, stopped himself from kicking them again, turned to Eddie.

  “Wanna make a quick twenty bucks, buddy? Or thirty?”

  “Doing what?”

  “My job. I’ve got to do some other asshole’s.”

  The job: bagging the night’s garbage, piling it on the trolley, wheeling the trolley out the kitchen, down a long hall, into a freight elevator, up to a loading bay, out to a gray-dawn street. It took three trips. When Eddie returned from the last one, the man, now dressed in a tuxedo, was on the phone again.

  “All done,” Eddie told him.

  Without looking at him, the man offered a twenty.

  “What happened to thirty?” Eddie said.

  “Jesus,” said the man. “No, not you, him,” he said into the phone, adding a five. “Everybody wants everything,” he said. He raised his voice. “Not you, I said. Him. Him. Him.”

  Eddie took the bills, zipped them into his back pocket next to the hundred, and left, out through the loading bay. “Out there you got to earn it,” Dr. Messer, Director of Treatment, had warned. He was making it hand over fist.

  A cold wind was snapping at the tops of the garbage bags and blowing scraps down the street. This wasn’t the same street where Sookray had double-parked the night before, but a narrower, meaner one, lined with soot-covered buildings. Eddie raised the hood on his sweatshirt, tied it tight, and walked off with the wind at his back.

  After a few blocks he came to a used bookstore. It had a faded sign, a dusty window, and a bin of twenty-five-cent paperbacks outside. Eddie paused and went through them. Westerns, science fiction, horror: all faded and yellowed, as though the paper wer
e in the process of recycling itself. At the back of the bin, behind a copy of We the Savage Reapers, he came to a slim volume with a red-and-black cover. Monarch Notes: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

  Eddie took it inside.

  A bell tinkled as he went in. The store was dark and narrow, lined with books from floor to ceiling. A boy stood on a stepladder at the back. Half-a-dozen books lay on the top step, waiting to be shelved, but the boy, balanced on the ladder, had his nose deep in another one: The Codebreakers. He didn’t seem to have heard the bell.

  The floor creaked under Eddie’s feet. The boy heard that and looked up from his book. The sight of Eddie made his eyes widen; afraid simply of his size and appearance.

  Eddie held up the book. “I’d like to buy this,” he said, trying to make his voice sound gentle.

  The boy climbed down off the ladder. He was short and thin, almost scrawny, and wore a skullcap.

  “Twenty-five cents,” he said.

  Eddie gave him the five-dollar bill. The boy went to the desk at the front of the store, opened a drawer, and got change. He handed it to Eddie. Perhaps the fact that Eddie had turned out to be a customer rather than a hold-up man gave him the courage to say, “We’ve got the genuine article for a dollar, if you want it.”

  “The genuine article?”

  “The poem. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’ Paperback, but in good condition. What you’ve got there is just a crib.”

  “I know the poem already.”

  The boy blinked. “You know it?”

  Eddie recited the first thirteen stanzas. For a few lines he was hesitant; then the story took over, using his voice but passing through him without any act of his own will. All fear, and even some of the shyness, left the boy’s eyes. Eddie stopped after

  And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

  As green as emerald.

  Not that it seemed a good place to stop. But it reminded Eddie of the ice on the river in his hometown, and broke the flow of the poetry through him.

  “So what do you want the Monarch for?” the boy asked. His voice cracked.

  “I’ve got some questions.”

  “Like?”

  Like. Eddie recalled his unsuccessful discussion with Ram Pontoppidan, but he tried again. “Like why he shoots the albatross in the first place.”

  The boy didn’t laugh at him. Instead he looked worried. “You won’t find the answer to questions like that in the Monarch.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they just want to make sure you pass the test.”

  “So?”

  “Questions like that aren’t on the test.”

  “What kind of questions are on the test?”

  “Show how Coleridge uses repetition in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ to reinforce theme. That kind of thing.”

  Eddie knew he could think of many examples of repetition in “The Mariner”-“Day after day, day after day / We stuck, nor breath nor motion / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean”-came to mind right away-but he didn’t know what the theme was, wasn’t even sure of the definition of theme. It was quiet in the bookstore; the books might have been silent living things, like plants.

  The boy spoke: “It’s about penance and redemption, right? I mean, he’s not exactly subtle about it.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  The boy looked surprised. “Coleridge.”

  Another pause. Eddie had given a lot of thought to the Mariner’s motives, but none to the poet’s. He said: “Penance for killing the albatross?”

  “Yes. But it didn’t have to be an albatross, or killing at all, for that matter. It could be anything. The albatross is just a device, the MacGuffin.”

  “The MacGuffin?”

  “Like in Psycho-the fact that the motel guy was abused by his mother or whatever it was. The secret that gets the plot going; useful, but not the reason you keep watching.”

  “Killing the albatross is just a device?”

  The boy nodded.

  Didn’t that make the whole question of why the mariner did it irrelevant? There had to be more to the story than that. The boy was smart, much smarter than he was, but Eddie wasn’t buying his explanation. He gazed out the dusty window, closing in on the thought that would show the boy he was wrong. Outside two men went by in a hurry. One was Eddie’s employer in the tuxedo. The other was Senor Paz.

  Eddie went to the window, looked down the sidewalk. The two men turned onto a busy street at the end of the block and disappeared in the crowd. For a moment Eddie had the crazy thought that they were looking for him. He’d drunk all that champagne, eaten caviar, and hadn’t paid a bill. But there hadn’t been a bill, had there? It was all on the house. Eddie relaxed.

  The boy was sitting at the desk, tapping at the computer keyboard. After a few moments, the printer whined on, un-scrolled two or three pages. The boy tore them off, handed them to Eddie.

  It was a list of reference books on “The Mariner.” “These might help,” the boy said. “They’re all in the library.”

  Eddie took the list, looked down at the boy. He had hollow cheeks, pimples, a wispy mustache, didn’t even seem healthy. Eddie liked him more than anyone he’d met in a long time.

  “How come you’re not in school?” Eddie said.

  All the talk had relaxed the boy. He blurted, “Are you the truant officer?”

  Eddie laughed. “Do I look like a truant officer?”

  The boy started to answer, stopped himself.

  “Go on,” Eddie said.

  The boy licked his lips. “You look like a hit man.”

  “A step up from the truant officer,” Eddie said. But he stopped laughing.

  The boy saw that and quickly gave the straight answer. “No school today. It’s a holiday.”

  “It is?”

  “Purim,” the boy said.

  “I don’t know that one,” Eddie said.

  “Esther saving her people,” the boy said. “We bake these to celebrate.” He picked up a bowl containing three-cornered pastries and offered one to Eddie.

  Dry, and tasting of poppy seeds: not nearly as good as Ram’s Holesome Trail Mix. Eddie ate it; he didn’t want to hurt the boy’s feelings. He was a smart boy, good with books; good at finding information.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Eddie said.

  “To bump off? Sorry.”

  “You’ve been seeing too many movies.”

  “I don’t see any movies. I’m not allowed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Bad influence.” The boy smiled to show he thought the restriction was silly but he wasn’t chafing under it; a nice smile that made him seem stronger, less undernourished. Eddie pictured him for a moment in jail; the image turned his stomach.

  “Maybe I could help,” the boy said.

  “How?”

  “I’ve got access to all sorts of directories.” He sat at the computer. “The phone book is primitive compared to what this can do. What’s the name?”

  “J. M. Nye. And Associates.”

  “Type of business?”

  Eddie wasn’t sure. They tried stockbroker, tax adviser, financial consultant, investment counselor. It took fifteen minutes.

  The boy read from the screen. “J. M. Nye, president, Windward Financial Services.” The address was a suite in the Hotel Palazzo. “Very upscale,” said the boy, giving Eddie the printout.

  “What do I owe you?” Eddie said.

  “Nothing.”

  Eddie found himself wishing he had some Holesome Trail Mix to give him. But he didn’t, so he just said, “Thanks,” and walked to the door. He opened it, letting in a cold gust of wind, then paused.

  “I’ve got an idea about the albatross,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It doesn’t ask anybody for anything.”

  “Go on,” said the boy; there was excitement in his eyes.

  “That’s why he kills it.”

  “Very Christian,
” the boy said. He thought. Eddie watched him. The wind blew into the bookstore. After a minute or two, the boy shook his head and said, “The text doesn’t support your theory.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s just the MacGuffin. Sorry.”

  15

  The boy told Eddie how to use the subway. It was easy. You sat in a metal box packed with unhappy people. Eddie was an expert. The motion made it almost pleasant. He opened his Monarch Notes, and on a coffee-stained page found this:

  There is no explanation at all given of why the Mariner chooses the person he does to hear his story. In fact, the poem is full of actions and events that are left unexplained; indeed one may say that a principal theme in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is the ambiguity and ultimate mysteriousness of motive. The central crime of the poem, the Mariner’s killing of the Albatross, is a crime capriciously committed.

  Eddie reread the paragraph twice. The boy had been right: he wasn’t going to find the answer in the Monarch. Two things bothered him. One: Why should motives be ambiguous while consequences were so clear? That made it impossible for him to accept the Monarch’s explanation of the killing. Two: He didn’t know the meaning of capriciously. He thought he had figured it out from the context but wasn’t sure, and therefore wasn’t sure he understood the passage.

  Eddie turned to the woman beside him. She was reading a book called Violence and Seduction: The Praxis of Patriarchy.

  “Excuse me,” Eddie said. She’d have the definition on the tip of her tongue.

  The woman looked at him.

  “Can you tell me what capriciously means?”

  She got up and moved to the other end of the car.

  Wearing Prof’s sweats with his lost-and-found Speedo, the Monarch, the boy’s printout, and $124.75 in the pockets, Eddie walked into the Hotel Palazzo. He’d learned a little from his visit to L’Oasis, enough to understand this was just another stage set. But there was nothing papier-mache here. The make-believe was as real as it could be, and the play promised to run forever.

  Richly dressed people sat around the lobby in chairs almost as finely covered as they were. A Japanese woman in a black dress played the violin. Waiters glided by bearing trays of glittering glasses. Everything was lit with a golden light. A perfect world.