After the People Lights Have Gone Off (21 page)

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 pretending 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.

With those who had showed up it counted, I mean.

Want to guess what font the assistant director’s loyal boyfriend told her would be perfect for the poster pasted up all across campus? It dripped, it bled, it told you to show up if you dared.

Only about half of the usual crowd had dared.

Herr Director was going to lay that on Janet, of course, and of course I’d try to take what of that blame I could, look over her shoulder at a point on the cabinet and try to think of nothing at all.

This is the way relationships work, isn’t it?

I leaned back so I could rest my head against the back of my chair, cocked my knees up against the vacant seat in front of me, and that big white screen Herr Director had for a back wall, that I’d thought had to just be temporary, a placeholder, it lit up. From the backside.

I smiled.

That part in the story, where the narrator’s reading John Morgan’s typings, his newsfeed or whatever it is?

Instead of having him say it out loud all stupid, they were showing us what was inside his head.

It was perfect. They’d even used an actual typewriter to do it, but what really impressed me was that they must have typed it backwards, then copied it onto a transparency, then flipped that transparency on the overhead they were using, to splash the letters up there backwards from how they were on the clear sheet, but now in the right order for us. Meaning that when you looked at it before the projector light pushed through it, it would be another language, an ancient spell. Not words at all. The illegible inside of the narrator’s head. Of H.F. Arnold’s head.

The typed words even flickered when the narrator scratched at his temple—scripted or accidental?—and it was so perfect that I wanted to clap. Except I’d been coming to these long enough to know better.

Somebody couldn’t help it, though.

Eight rows up, to the side, her heels off the ground, toes pointed in polite excitement, her already-short cocktail dress riding up her leg.

Wendy?

She kept her face forward, prim and proper, clapped two more times.

•

Because I knew to watch for it, I’d seen John Morgan slip under his desk when the spotlight was farthest away from him, our trusty narrator juggling a coffee mug with wax coffee in it that could never spill, and one time I saw Janet’s black-gloved hand come past the curtain—they were as thin as pantyhose—make a stop gesture to some crewdude in the lighting rig.

I felt the change in my lungs, too, when the fog started to drift in.

It was kind of perfect.