After the People Lights Have Gone Off

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Sai felt sorry for her, but knew better than to approach.

  What she needed, he knew, were some imaginary alien tourists, to give her hope.

  He smiled to himself and went home, and stayed there for a record two days.

  On the third, he was back.

  It was dusk.

  He had asked the aliens all the wrong questions, he knew now.

  How was he supposed to know the right time to say the secret name? Was it pre-ordained, or different for every case, every death, every—he chuckled, saying it—every calamity.

  Except it was the right word.

  And, if you did whisper someone back with their secret name, if you said it at the right time, would they remember you, or would they be starting all over? And would they be decomposed, embalmed?

  Or, no: other worlds, they wouldn’t embalm, of course. That was stupid.

  And they wouldn’t bury, either. Rather, the dead were probably laid out on a table, their loved one vigilant, always there, waiting for that right time to say the secret name, bring this one back for another round.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Sai knelt by Marissa’s headstone and slammed the sides of his hands into it.

  When the groundskeeper on duty approached, Sai ran away at right angles, so as not to step on anybody.

  He wound up in the subway entrance. At a bank of phones nobody used anymore.

  Four of them were shiny new. No gum, no graffiti, no grime. They even still had phonebooks.

  Sai felt his way there, opened one of those phonebooks, his lips moving over the names, and, turning a page, he looked three blocks down, to the cemetery, could already see himself hunched over Marissa’s grave this night or the next, reading all these names to her.

  One of them was going to be right, he knew.

  One of them was going to be right and, down there in the darkness of her casket, her eyes were going to roll open, and the world, it wouldn’t be different at all after this, it would just be exactly the same as it had been, as it should be.

  Sai knew. And he pulled at the phonebook until it came free.

  This is how it started.

  I had my Library Science degree in one hand, a beer constantly in the other. Officially, I was taking a post-graduation break before entering the rat race. Just catching my breath before putting my soul on the auction block, all that. Unofficially, two of the three professors I’d asked for recs were putting me off.

  Under my library degree, though, there was an undergrad one in American Lit. And that was Janet’s excuse for coming to me for help. Never mind that I’d just fallen into American Lit my last semester, when my advisor noticed that if I took this one class on the Beats, I’d have a specialization, and specializations look a lot like intent and focus to grad app selection committees.

  I got into library school, so I guess it worked, and luckily nobody ever quizzed me on Hawthorne or Woolf.

  According to Janet, though—she didn’t know about my missing rec letters—I was on my way to permanent barista status. To stocking the produce at the grocery store and calling that enough. From where she was, still in the thick of her studies, my little vacation was threatening to become permanent, I mean. And I can’t say she was completely wrong on that.

  Helping her with the research for this production, then, I guess it was supposed to spark me awake. Make me remember why I’d wanted so badly to become a reference librarian at a research university.

  So, in that regard, I guess her plan was a complete success.

  In other regards, though, I think she might have killed us all.

  •

  The short story Herr Director was having his capstone class adapt up for the stage was from 1926, “The Night Wire.” He gave the whole crew double-sided photocopies that you had to hold right up to your face to read. As for why a story instead of a real actual play, it was so everybody could learn about staging, adaptation, all the compromises and discoveries that are supposed be built into the process. As for why something that old, it was that Spring had always been for period pieces, so the wardrobe specialists and set-designers could get hands-on experience with that particular kind of headache, and so the actors could all study the old tapes in the basement, for enunciation, body language, how to hold a highball like Jay Gatsby.

  And the story this time around, it actually wasn’t bad.

  I crawled into the library’s database from Janet’s living room, poked around for this H.F. Arnold, who’d written the story.

  It was one of three he’d ever done, evidently. Before dying in 1963, his death decidedly not going out on the “night wire” specific to his story. And, to further complicate the background I was supposed to be getting together for the program, (“since I wasn’t doing anything else”), H.F. Arnold was more than likely a pen-name. Because these stories had shown up in the pulp mags. The supposition was that whoever Arnold really was, he was in journalism in some way, didn’t want to mess his real name up, but, again: nobody knew.

  The story, though, this “The Night Wire,” it was one of those that have such a simple premise you wonder how nobody’d done it before. Even in 1926. All it was was two guys working the night wire—I picture a teletype clacking, though that’s complicated, as I’ve never actually seen a teletype—two guys sitting back-to-back, essentially taking dictation from some analog version of a news crawl. They don’t even pay attention to what’s going in through their eyes, out their fingers. Just copy, copy, copy.

  My undergrad profs who taught me about “Bartleby the Scrivener” never knew about “The Night Wire,” no. Its first printing was in Weird Tales, though, which I guess explains that.

  Anyway, one of these two guys is our trusty narrator and the other is the workhorse John Morgan, who’s known in the business as a “double man,” meaning he can have his hands on two typewriters at the same time, and type different things into both of them.

  For me, that’s exactly where the story steps into fantasy, but for everybody else—Janet really liked the story—it’s when John Morgan starts entering data for some killer fog creeping into the town of “Xebico,” and people in that fog get into all their predictable screaming and dying. Our narrator can’t keep his eyes off of this newsfeed, either, is hanging on Morgan’s every keystroke, until—dot dot dot—it turns out that not only has John Morgan been dead and cold for a few hours now, typing from the other side, as it were, but this town of “Xebico,” it doesn’t exist in any atlas. It doesn’t exist at all.

  Legitimately creepy, yeah?

  The lighting guys were going to have fun with this one, I was pretty sure.

  But the program guy, he was kind of coming up short.

  Luckily he knew his way around a research project, though.

  •

  In the movie version of my life, the digging-up-facts part of this would be an action sequence, like when the boxer’s training for the big important fight: lots of music, close-up on my bloodshot eyes, the ragged toe of my left shoe tapping, a stern-faced librarian shushing me when I finally stand up with a discovery.

  I wish.

  And that stern-faced librarian who would never shush me, it’s because her name’s Wendy, and we had Methods together once upon a good time, and used to meet up on the fifth floor stacks, well before Janet. Maybe not “well before,” okay, but they hardly overlapped.

  File this with my non-recommenders, under Things Janet Doesn’t Need to Know.

  But, H.F. Arnold.

  I forget where I picked this up, or maybe I just figured it out, but anytime you see an old-time writer using initials, don’t fall into the trap of assuming that that writer’s male, and just had an ugly name.

  My knee-jerk , twentieth century suspicion—this was a play, after all, and he was a playwright—it would have been Horton Foote, of course.

  It wouldn’t have been that far off.

  “Hortense Francis Arnold.” Maiden name “Winters.”

  She was hiding, not pr
etending to be a guy, but letting people think whatever they wanted. It’s a male narrator, after all, and a cheap-o horror story.

  Yet, and in 1926, Hortense, she had some inside information on the world of journalism, yes?

  Another action sequence of me digging, digging, digging through the microfiche, and the money shot at the end, it’s this nobody guy who died in 1952. Who actually might have worked in a newsroom up in Fresno in the twenties.

  Mr. Samuel G. Arnold.

  His marriage certificate showed him married to H. Winters in 1920, freshly minted as a World War I hero, shrapnel limp and all, I’m sure.

  I waggled my fingers over my keyboard like they were magic, like I could conjure anything.

  And who knows.

  •

  The coincidence part of this that I was banking on was that H.F. Arnold was going to be buried in some overfull cemetery within driving distance. That I was going to be able to steal Janet away from rehearsal for an afternoon, deliver her to some picturesque leaning headstone, show her that I was more than a lifetime barista.

  H.F. Arnold died in the Midwest, though, where, according to her birth certificate, she’d been born. Where she’d retreated to.

  It wasn’t “Xebico” county, either.

  When I picture her there as a girl, she’s Dorothy from Oz. Waiting for this impossible soldier to sweep her away. Three stories burbling in her head, filling her eyes, a Shirley Jackson in waiting.

  I was kind of getting a crush on her, yeah.

  Nine years after she died, her story was reprinted in one of the new and temporary pulps, something called Terror Tales, a title that shows up in exactly the dripping font you’d expect. The pencil illustration over the story shows a woman’s bare breast for some reason, though there’s no bare breasts in “The Night Wire”—no women at all. The year H.F. Arnold died, though, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest would have still been a big thing on the roundracks at the drugstores, even in the Midwest, I’m sure. The book with Nurse Ratched’s bare breast figuring quite prominently.

  It’s probably nothing, I told myself. You’re being stupid. Just because you know some American Lit doesn’t mean you get to apply it wherever you want.

  I gathered my notes, went to rehearsal.

  •

  For weeks already, Janet had been telling me that casting this, it was an Of Mice and Men kind of thing, where George is the crux of the moral dilemma, sure, he’s the character who can finally change, who can win or lose and have to live with it, but it’s the big hulking Lennie who’s the real center of it all.

  Our Lennie was John Morgan, typing while dead. Even though he’d only have a couple of lines, still, when his chair spins around—he was going to be every bit as important as Norman Bates’ mom.

  The problem, though, it was make-up. For the stage, your face gets all amped up, overshadowed. He couldn’t play dead just by letting his jaw go slack. He’d need some real time in the make-up chair. And “The Night Wire,” the way Herr Director’s class had written it, it was a one-act play. No intermission.

  Until I went to rehearsal, I had no clue how this was going to work.

  That didn’t stop me from picturing John Morgan, though. Just the way H.F. Arnold had written him: a heavyset guy in a too-tight worksleeves shirt, his hair flyaway and greasy, skin pasty from the night shift, both hands kind of potentially busy. Voice meeker than you’d expect.

  Evidently that was how Herr Director had been picturing him as well. Even from the back of the auditorium, my research clutched to my chest, I could tell. It was like John Morgan had stepped up from 1926.

  Janet was working him through his blocking. In the story he never stood up, but fiction had the luxury of being static like that, of course. Actors, though, they like to walk and talk. To be grand and dramatic and sweeping, whether the story calls for it or not.

  I settled into a seat halfway down and watched Janet work, and felt more than heard somebody sit down behind me, more away from the aisle than I was.

  Herr Director, I figured, about to cut in on Janet, tell her how to tell somebody to block—that, what, did she want to ruin this whole semester’s work? The usual, I mean. Janet hadn’t named him after Hitler for nothing.

  As for the set, it was historically accurate, as near as I could tell. Except for the huge white screen that took the place of what I’d think would have been a ratty window on the back wall. But what do I know about theatre.

  Whoever it was behind me chuckled to himself when John Morgan sat down in his chair and it wasn’t wide enough. His hips caught on the wooden arms and the chair wheeled back so that John Morgan had to stab a hand out, clutch onto Janet, who held him up but just barely.

  I looked back to, I don’t know, share the moment, commiserate—where were they going to find a chair with the right girth?—but then I flinched so hard I dropped all my precious papers.

  It was John Morgan.

  The double man.

  He looked over to me slowly, settled me in his dead eyes.

  A twin. Fresh from his first make-up test, his face grim-reapered up.

  He smiled and stood, and, as he passed me by, clamped a large hand onto my shoulder, telling me it was all right.

  I swallowed, didn’t believe him.

  •

  I forwarded my H.F. Arnold bullet-points to the address Janet gave me, and was already dreading what Herr Director’s student writers were going to do to my simple yet elegant facts. Maybe at least they’d see that this was going to be first time Hortense Francis Winters from Nebraska was going to be this close to the story she’d made up.

  Well.

  Made up or heard, I guess.

  I mean, it could be that the dead night-wire operator was an urban legend by 1926, right? Melville’s “Bartleby” had to be sixty or seventy years old by then—old enough for somebody to have read it, half-forgot it then told it again at the bar, making it actually exciting.

  Or maybe it had really happened to her husband, Samuel G. Arnold. Maybe “The Night Wire” was her way of exorcising it.

  Get enough people to feel that guilty chill the story had, then laugh it off, and it would be like maybe it was made up, right? Like it had never even happened.

  But I kept thinking of that pencil-lined bare breast over the word “Xebico” in that 1972 Terror Tales—the year I was born. Like this story had been waiting these past seventy years for Janet to bring it home to me. Like H.F. Arnold had been waiting for it to get to the right reader.

  You wouldn’t think it, but your heart can just pound from research.

  To keep my hands busy—and Janet happy—I put in an application to manage a jewelry kiosk in the mall. Just for temporary.

  When the phone rang, though, I just let it ring.

  I’d had the idea that keeping necklaces in line on their felt necks would be like cataloging books, like arranging them all spine-out, LC numbers lined up. I wasn’t having that idea anymore, though.

  Just because she was there, I guess, I took another run at H.F. Arnold, trying to exorcise her, and dug up those other two stories. 1929 and 1937, “The City of Iron Cubes” and “When Atlantis Was.” But then I couldn’t read them. And I knew if I looked those years up the right way, they’d be somehow important for “Herr Wolf.” For Hitler. And Herr Director was definitely Janet’s alpha these days.

  But none of it mattered, either. It was all just me spending too much time alone in the living room, my face too close to the laptop. Not enough lights on around me.

  And it might have had something to do with Wendy, too, if I’m going to be honest. Wendy, the student librarian I’d talked up to the fifth floor after microfiching Hortense Winters up from the past. As celebration. One last time.

  It might have been her ringing Janet’s phone all those times, I mean. Not a guy wearing a gold rope chain.

  And Janet—I don’t know.

  She didn’t suspect, couldn’t have, but somehow that was making it all worse. Even
though I never would have been at the library looking for Hortense Winters if not for “The Night Wire.”

  It wasn’t my fault, I mean.

  Any of this.

  And never mind who I saw on the fifth floor that day when I closed my eyes in the PN1995.9 aisle.

  That’s Library of Congress for movies and stageplays. For drama.

  Not for Dorothy, standing at the end of her dusty driveway somewhere way back in the past.

  And it wasn’t Dorothy anyway.

  •

  The night of the opening, I drank five and a half beers before leaving Janet’s apartment. The last half of the sixth I poured into her sink, because a whole six-pack would have broken my promise to her. I was supposed to show up sober, and not clap like an ape.

  I flashed my retired student ID to get the discount price—Janet said she couldn’t comp me, and I of course was reading everything into that (had she picked the phone up one of those times, heard the fifth floor yawning in the silence?)—took my program and zeroed in on the two rented smoke machines under the table.

  The “fog” was going to drift in at the end of the play, just creep in on ghost toes, be there before the audience could really register it—everybody was going to be trapped inside the fourth wall tonight—and then, though this was going to be a judgment call, the other John Morgan was going to walk in with that fog, all of Xebico wailing behind him.

  He’d be available for that because, early in the play, after his last line but before his “death,” he was going to slip through the trapdoor at his knees, be replaced by his already made-up twin. Easy as that. Leaving him to get made-up himself backstage, then wait up front, the unexpected twin.

  It should have been a Fall production, yeah. Halloween.

  I took my seat, studied the abomination they’d made of my bullet-points and flipped it over to the back, to see if I was acknowledged.

  Ha. But screw it.

  Soon enough the light drained from the auditorium, the muttering faded, the shoes stopped scraping, and the pressroom on stage glowed awake. “The Night Wire” was creaking open.

  The audience was rapt.

  It was short, they knew that—crossing the parking lot, at least one car in every row had had a dog yapping in the front seat for what was just going to be an hour, the windows cracked enough for me to offer them the back of my hand, let them be my breathalyzer—but it was also a story this particular crowd never encountered, and that counted for something.