After the People Lights Have Gone Off (20 page)

“They rise then, but not as their former selves,” the tall man said. “As—as animate husks.”

Sai looked up and up to him.

Was he taller than he had been before?

“But what if—what if you say it at the right time?” Sai heard himself say.

“Then the cycle continues unabated,” the woman said. “As intended.”

“You’re saying,” Sai started, then started again: “You’re saying that if you say someone’s secret name after they’re dead, then that person—”

“Continues,” the tall man said.

“Otherwise it all becomes madness,” the third man said. “Otherwise there is no reason to—” but the woman touched her palm to his chest, shushing him.

“Apologies and forgiveness,” she said to Sai. “He doesn’t mean to offer description of your world.”

“He does,” Sai said.

“You just throw them away,” the tall man said, amazed. “Nowhere else does this happen. We had to see for ourselves that the legends were—”

“We bury them.”

“You don’t have to,” the woman said, and smiled her remote-controlled version of a smile.

It made Sai look away, to the deadspace their forms were leaving in the glare of the front window.

When he looked back to them, they were gone.

•

At the hospital, instead of waking Marissa for her secret name, Sai held her hand. For eight days.

On the ninth, she squeezed his index finger once and died.

The nurses let him have twenty minutes alone with her. He kept the side of his head to her sternum the whole time, his eyes closed.

At the funeral four days later, there were no interlopers. No strangers.

Walking away after everyone was gone, though, there was something.

A white cardboard box for mailing packages. The free kind from the post office.

There was no address on it. The flap wasn’t even closed. It still had the strip of paper on it, protecting the glue.

Inside, a phonebook.

Sai held it, looked all around, and left it flapping on the curb by his car, along with the white box.

He hadn’t really followed anybody, he told himself.

It was wishful thinking. He’d needed the universe to be large enough to accommodate the remote possibility of Marissa surviving, and so had invented alien tourists who knew, and could divulge, the secrets of the universe.

It was wishful thinking.

Feed anybody days of vending machine cookies and complimentary coffee, let them breathe the second-hand antibiotics of a hospital, then load them with enough worry for the rest of their life and usher them out into the city.

Of course Sai had seen meaning in every interaction. Even to the point of walking through a haze of his own making, fabricating those interactions.

It was all a way of putting off the inevitable, wasn’t it?

It was all a way of not dealing with what he was going to have to deal with.

That the interlopers had conveniently disappeared after Marissa’s death only confirmed that they’d been coping devices all along. Defense mechanisms. A way to avoid, to stall.

Still, for four nights in a row, Sai didn’t go to Group. He did answer his phone, though, and assured each worried caller that he wasn’t going to pull a Dava, no. That Marissa had made him promise, “she’s still saving my life,” at which point his voice would crack and he could escape again.

He just needed some time alone, he told himself. To cope. To find new tasks, new moments.

Most days he ended up at the curb by Marissa’s cemetery.

Twice he staked out the post office, but that’s all it was. That’s all it had ever been.

When people die, they’re dead, right?

What other option could there even be?

The world didn’t work on magic, on fantasy.

And of course, at the cemetery, he wasn’t alone.

There was a woman, a completely human woman, who visited a headstone some four times a day. She would collapse, lie there for minutes, then gather herself, leave only to come back three hours later.

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.