by Rumaan Alam
“You startled us. We weren’t expecting anyone.” Amanda didn’t mind admitting it. She calculated that it might establish her upper hand. She thought it might say This is our house, now what do you want?
There was wind, and it sounded like a chorus of voices. The trees swayed, their heads tossed with abandon. A storm was coming or out there somewhere.
The woman shivered. Her linen clothes could not keep her warm. She seemed pitiable, elderly, ill prepared. She was smart, and she’d been counting on this.
Clay could not help feeling bad, or rude. The woman was old enough to be his mother, though his own mother was long dead. Good manners were a tool that helped you deal with moments this strange. “You caught us by surprise. But what can we do for you?”
The black man looked at Amanda, and his smile warmed further. “Well, you must be Amanda. Right? Amanda. I’m sorry, but—” The breeze eddied around them, through their summer clothes. He said her name a third time because he knew it would be effective. “Amanda, do you think we could come inside?”
8
RECOGNIZING PEOPLE WAS ONE OF AMANDA’S SKILLS. SHE bought cocktails for the apparatchiks from Minneapolis and Columbus and St. Louis who paid her. She remembered who was who and asked after their families. This was a point of pride. She looked at the man and saw only a black man she had never seen before.
“You know one another!” Clay was reassured. The breeze raised the hair on his legs.
“We’ve not had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face.” The man had the practice of a salesman which was, ultimately, what he was. “I’m G. H.”
The letters meant nothing to her. Amanda couldn’t figure whether he was trying to spell something.
“George.” The woman thought the name more gentle than the initials, and this was a moment when they needed to seem human. You never knew who had guns and was ready to stand their ground. “He’s George.”
He thought of himself as George. He spoke of himself as G. H. “—George, right, I’m George. This is our house.”
Possession was some fraction of the law, and Amanda had deluded herself. She’d been pretending that this was their house! “I’m sorry?”
“This is our house,” he said again. “We emailed back and forth—about the house?” He tried to sound firm but also gentle.
Amanda remembered, then: [email protected]—the formal opacity of those initials. The place was comfortable but sufficiently anonymous that she had not bothered to try to picture its owners, and now, seeing them, she knew that if she had bothered to picture them, her picture would have been incorrect. This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived. But what did she mean by that? “This is—your house?”
Clay was disappointed. They were paying for the illusion of ownership. They were on vacation. He closed the door, leaving the world out there, where it belonged.
“We’re so sorry to bother you.” Ruth still had her hand on George’s shoulder. Well, they were inside; they’d accomplished something.
Why had Clay closed the door, invited these people in? It was so like him. He always wanted to handle the business of life but was not fully prepared to do so. Amanda wanted proof. She wanted to inspect the mortgage, a photo ID. These people and their disheveled clothes could be—well, they looked more like evangelists than criminals, hopeful pamphleteers come to witness Jehovah.
“You gave us a bit of a fright!” Clay didn’t mind confessing his own cowardice, since it had passed. A bit barely counted, and it was, importantly, their fault. “Goodness, it’s cold out all of a sudden.”
“It is.” G. H. was as good as anyone at predicting how other people would behave. But it took time. They were inside. That was what mattered. “Summer storm? Maybe it’ll pass.”
They were four adults standing about awkwardly as in those last anticipatory moments at an orgy.
Amanda was furious at everyone, Clay most of all. She twitched, certain one of these people would produce a gun, a knife, a demand. She wished she’d still been holding the telephone, though who could say how long it would take for the local precinct to get to their beautiful house in the deep of the woods. She didn’t even say anything.
G. H. was ready. He had prepared, tried to guess how these people might react. “I understand how strange it must be for you, us turning up like this unannounced.”
“Unannounced.” Amanda inspected the word, and it didn’t hold up to scrutiny.
“We’d have called, you see, but the phones—”
They’d have called? Did these people have her number?
“I’m Ruth.” She extended a hand. Every couple apportioned labor by strength, even or especially at such moments. Her role was to shake hands and make nice and put these people at ease so they could get what they wanted.
“Clay.” He shook her hand.
“And you’re Amanda.” Ruth smiled.
Amanda took the stranger’s manicured hand. If calluses meant honest labor, did softness imply dishonesty? “Yes,” she said.
“And I’m G. H., again. Clay, nice to meet you.”
Clay applied more pressure than he normally might have, as he had a point to prove.
“And Amanda, it’s nice to meet face-to-face.”
Amanda crossed arms over her chest. “Yes. Though I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting to meet you at all.”
“No, of course not.”
“Maybe we should—sit?” It was their house, what was Clay supposed to do?
“That would be lovely.” Ruth had the smile of a politician’s wife.
“Sit? Yes. Fine.” Amanda tried to communicate something to her husband, but one look couldn’t contain it. “Maybe in the kitchen. We’ll have to be quiet, though, the children are sleeping.”
“The children. Of course. I hope we didn’t wake them.” G. H. should have guessed there would be children, but maybe that helped the situation.
“Archie could sleep through a nuclear bomb. I’m sure they’re fine.” Clay was his usual joking self.
“I think I’ll just go check on them.” Amanda was icy, and tried to imply that it was her habit to peer in at her sleeping children every so often.
“They’re fine.” Clay couldn’t understand what she was up to.
“I’m just going to go check on them. Why don’t you—” She didn’t know how to complete the thought, and so she did not bother.
“Let’s sit.” Clay gestured at the stools at the kitchen island.
“Clay, I should explain.” G. H. took this on as a masculine burden, like arranging rental cars for trips out of town. He thought another husband might understand. “As I said, I would have called. We tried to, actually, but there’s no service.”
“We stayed not far from here a couple of summers ago.” Clay wanted to establish that he had some hold on this geography. That he knew what it was like to have a house in the country. “Impossible to get a signal most of the time.”
“That’s true,” G. H. said. He had sat, put elbows on marble, leaned forward. “But I’m not sure if that’s what’s happening at the moment.”
“How’s that?” Clay felt he should offer them something. Weren’t they guests? Or was he the guest? “Can I get you some water?”
Down the dark hall, Amanda used her cell phone as a light. Having confirmed that Archie and Rose still existed, lost in the unworried sleep of children, she tarried just out of sight, straining to hear what was being discussed while trying to get her phone to engage. She gazed at it as if it were a mirror, but it did not recognize her—maybe the hallway was too dark—and did not come to life. Amanda pressed the home button, and it lit up, showing her a news alert, the barely legible T of the New York Times and only a few words: “Major blackout reported on the East Coast of the United States.” She jabbed at it, but the application did not open, just the white screen of the thinking machine. This was a specific flavor of irritation. She couldn’t be mad, but she was.
“Tonight
we were at the symphony.” G. H. was in the middle of his explanation. “In the Bronx.”
“He’s on the board of the Philharmonic—” Connubial pride, it couldn’t be helped. She and George believed in giving back. “It’s to encourage people to take an interest in classical music . . .” Ruth was overexplaining.
Amanda came into the room.
“The kids are okay?” Clay did not understand that this had been only pretense.
“They’re fine.” Amanda wanted to show her husband her phone. She didn’t have any news beyond those eleven words, but it was something, and represented some advantage over these people.
“We were driving back to the city. Home. Then something happened.” He wasn’t trying to be vague. Even in the car he and Ruth hadn’t spoken of it, because they were afraid.
“A blackout.” Amanda produced this, triumphant.
“How did you know?” G. H. was surprised. He had expected to have to explain. They’d seen nothing but darkness all the way out, and then, through the trees, the glow of their own house. They couldn’t believe it because it didn’t make sense, but they didn’t care to make sense. The relief of light and its safety.
“A blackout?” Clay was expecting something worse.
“I got a news alert.” Amanda took her phone from her pocket and put it on the counter.
“What did it say?” Ruth wanted more information. She’d seen it with her own eyes but knew nothing. “Did it say why?”
“Just that. There was a blackout on the East Coast.” She looked at the phone again, but the alert was gone, and she didn’t know how to return to it.
“It is windy outside.” Clay felt that the cause and effect was clear.
“It’s hurricane season. Wasn’t there news about a hurricane?” Amanda couldn’t recall.
“A blackout.” G. H. nodded. “So we thought. Well, we live on the fourteenth floor.”
“The traffic lights would have all gone out. It would have been chaos.” Ruth didn’t want to bother explaining in more detail. The city was as unnatural as it was possible to be, accretion of steel and glass and capital, and light was fundamental to its existence. A city without power was like a flightless bird, an accident of evolution.
“A blackout?” Clay felt like he was simply offering the word to someone who had forgotten it. “There’s been a blackout. That doesn’t seem so bad.”
Amanda didn’t buy it. It didn’t seem true. “The lights seem to be working here.”
She was right, of course. Still, everyone looked at the pendants over the kitchen island, like four people seeking hypnosis. You couldn’t explain electricity at all, neither its presence nor its absence. Were her words an act of hubris? There was the sound of the wind against the window over the sink. Immediately thereafter, the lights flickered. Not once nor twice; four times, like a message in Morse that they had to decipher, like a succession of flashbulbs, but it held steady, it held course, the light held the night at bay. The four of them had breathed in sharply; all four of them exhaled.
9
“JESUS CHRIST.” THE LORD’S NAME IN VAIN MEANT BLASPHEMY but also futility. Jesus cared nothing for Clay, but the power didn’t go out. Clay had already imagined Amanda and the other woman (what was her name?) screaming. Maybe it was unkind to equate femininity with fear. He’d have to reason with them—a windy night, a far-off corner of Long Island. The world was so big that much of it was remote. You could forget this if you lived too long in a city. Electricity was a miracle. They should be grateful.
“It’s fine.” G. H. said it to himself, to his wife.
“So there was a blackout, and you drove all the way out here?” Amanda couldn’t make sense of this. Manhattan was so far away. It didn’t make any sense.
“These roads—they’re familiar. I barely even thought about it. We saw the lights go, and I looked at Ruth.” G. H. didn’t know how he would explain what he didn’t entirely understand.
“We thought we might stay,” Ruth said. No sense dancing around it. Ruth had always been direct.
“You thought you might stay—here?” Amanda knew these people wanted something. “But we’re staying here.”
“We knew we couldn’t drive into the city. We knew we couldn’t walk up fourteen flights. So we drove out here and thought you might understand.”
“Of course.” Clay understood.
Amanda looked at her husband. “What he means is, of course we understand—” Did she, though? What if this was some con? Perfect strangers worming their way into the house, into their lives.
“I know it’s a surprise. But maybe you can . . . This is our house. We wanted to be in our house. Safe. While we figured out what’s going on out there.” G. H. was being honest, but it still seemed like he was selling something.
“It’s our good luck we had gas.” Ruth nodded. “Honestly, I don’t know how much farther we could go.”
“Aren’t there any hotels . . .” Amanda was trying not to be rude, but she knew this sounded rude. “We’ve rented the house.”
Clay was thinking it over. He began to say something. He was persuaded.
“Of course! You’ve rented the house.” G. H. knew they’d talk about money, because most conversations got there eventually. Money was his subject. It was no matter. “We could of course offer you something. We know it’s an inconvenience.”
“You know, we’re on vacation.” Amanda thought inconvenience too mild a word. It felt like a euphemism. That he’d been so quick to bring money into it seemed more dishonest.
G. H. had silvered hair, tortoiseshell glasses, a gold watch. He had presence. He sat higher in his seat. “Clay. Amanda.” This was something he’d learned at business school (in Cambridge): when to deploy first names. “I could absolutely refund you your money.”
“You want us to leave? In the middle of the night? My children are sleeping. And you just come in here and start talking about refunding our money? I should call the company, can you even do that?” Amanda walked to the living room to get her computer. “Maybe there’s a phone number on the website—”
“I’m not saying you should leave!” G. H. laughed. “We can refund you say, fifty percent of what you paid? You know, there’s an in-law suite. We’ll stay downstairs.”
“Fifty percent?” Clay liked the promise of a less expensive vacation.
“I really think we ought to look at the terms and conditions—” Amanda opened the laptop. “Of course it’s not working now. Maybe the WiFi needs to be reset?”
“Let me try.” Clay reached toward his wife’s computer.
“I don’t need your help, Clay.” She did not like the implication of her inability. They both had a proximity to youth—college kids for him, for Amanda an assistant and junior staff. They’d both been subject to that humiliating inversion: watching, gleaning, imitating, like toddlers playing at dressing up. Once you were past a certain age, this was how you learned—you had to master technology or be mastered by it. “It’s not connected.”
“We heard the emergency broadcast system.” Ruth thought this explained a great deal. “I thought to turn on the radio. ‘This is the emergency broadcast system.’” Her tone was not mocking but faithful, sounding the right stresses and intonation. “Not ‘a test.’ Do you understand? Not ‘This is only a test.’ That’s the only way I’ve ever heard it, so I didn’t even notice at first, then I kept listening and I heard it again, again, again, ‘This is the emergency broadcast system.’”
“Emergency?” Amanda was trying to be logical. “But of course, a blackout is a kind of emergency.”
“Surely. That’s one of the reasons we thought it best to just come home. It could be unsafe out there.” G. H. rested his case.
“Well, we have a lease agreement.” Amanda invoked the law. Fine, at the moment that document was filed away in cyberspace, a shelf they could not reach. Also the whole business felt off in some way she could not explain.
“May I?” G. H. pushed his stool
back and walked to the desk. He took the car keys from his blazer pocket and unlocked a drawer. He produced an envelope, the sort provided by a bank, and flipped through the currency inside it. “We could give you a thousand dollars now, for the night? That would cover almost half of what you’re paying for the week, I think?”
Clay tried not to, but he always felt moved in a very particular way by the sight of lots of money. He wanted to count it. Had that envelope just been in a drawer in the kitchen all this time? He wanted a cigarette. “A thousand dollars?”
“There is an emergency outside.” Ruth wanted to remind them of this. It seemed amoral to have to pay them, but she hadn’t expected anything else.
“It’s up to you.” G. H. knew how to persuade someone. “Of course. We would be very grateful. We could show you how grateful we are. Then, tomorrow, we’ll know a little more. We’ll figure it out.” He did not commit to leaving, which was important.
Clay continued to prod his wife’s work-issued computer. “This doesn’t seem to be responding.” His intention had been pure. He wanted to be the one to show them that the world was chugging along, that people were still photographing their Aperol spritzes and tweeting invective about the mismanaged public transport system. In the minutes since that news alert had been issued, some intrepid reporter had likely figured the whole thing out. He could still hear the wind that he blamed. It was always some innocent thing. “Anyway. I think one night—”
“Perhaps we could discuss this privately.” Amanda did not want to leave these people unattended.
“Right. Of course.” G. H. nodded like this was the most sensible thing. He put the fat little envelope down on the counter.
“Yeah.” Clay was flustered. He didn’t know what there was to discuss besides that bundle of money. “Maybe we’ll just go into the other room?”
“Say, you wouldn’t mind if we have a drink?”
Clay shook his head.
G. H. used the keys once more, unlocking a tall cabinet by the sink. He rummaged around inside.
“We’ll be right back. Make yourself—” Amanda didn’t finish the sentence because it seemed silly to.