After the People Lights Have Gone Off (22 page)

Good for Janet.

This is what really committed boyfriends think. What boyfriends with plans and futures think. That’s just how they are.

On-screen, now—they’d pre-recorded what was supposed to be the narrator’s point-of-view at the end of the story, fumbling through atlas after atlas. Looking for Xebico. Looking faster and faster, more and more desperate, like finding it could save everything.

It was jarring, seeing him do this from the side, on a drafting table, while at the same watching what he was seeing, on-screen and enlarged, but it was also just intensely pleasant in a way I think only the theatre can finally ever pull off.

After a few atlases of this the narrator stood, was obviously lost, this was too much for him, and from the edges of the curtains behind him—what we were to understand as the open windows, the cracks under the doors of this last outpost of civilization—the inevitable fog started to drift in. And you could tell from the narrator’s face that he knew that this fog, it carried death with it.

And then—maybe Herr Director had planted a freshman in the audience, in street clothes?—somebody from the far side of the auditorium screamed, her voice cutting through the manufactured six o’clock gloom. I knew better than to flinch but did anyway, and looked to Wendy to see if it had caught her off-guard as well.

She wasn’t there.

I cast around for her distinctive cocktail dress, that flash of leg again, but the fog was in the aisles, and rising.

Xebico, a voice said through the big speakers, and this was a haunted house now, not a play.

I loved it.

At least until a woman near the front stood in an unscripted panic, tried to step across a guy’s lap to get to the aisle and faceplanted, her glasses skittering under the chairs.

She was the trigger, the crack in the dam, the snake under the horse’s hooves. Like, when she fell she’d dissolved into a fine mist of panic. Everybody was breathing it in, passing it on, blind with it, standing just to fall, trying to claw their way up, screaming for help, until, from the stage, in a voice you had to obey: “Lights!”

It was Herr Director, glaring out at us, his hat exactly the kind he had to be wearing. That he had to have been born in.

His terrified crew turned all the lights on, and that made it worse, like pulling your brights on against a fogbank. The whole room was glowing now. More screams. A few hesitant, guilty laughs.

I hunkered down, held onto my armrests.

In the flash that I remembered to remember, Wendy’s seat was still empty. Meaning she’d never even been there. Meaning I’d put here there. In that unlikely dress. In this unlikely place. The last place I wanted to see her.

Or else—or else Janet had comped her a ticket, right?

You always whisper the worst things to yourself.

I shook my head no, closed my eyes and opened them to nothing. The crew was correcting their error, was shrouding us all in wet darkness now. The fog made it closer.

I wanted to laugh but didn’t want to open my mouth, in case somebody was about to crash into me.

“Sit, sit!” Herr Director told us all then, his voice cutting through the blindness, and, slowly and by audible degrees, the audience calmed.

The house lights rose slow, the smoke machines cycled down. The joke was over. Everybody was smiling into their shoulders, looking around for confirmation that smiling was the right thing to do, here.

The first place I looked, of course, it wasn’t to Janet’s usual place just off of stage left. It was to Wendy’s seat.

She was back, delivered by the fog, by the darkness. But—her dress.

Where had she been?

It was dirty. She must have fallen, I told myself. Into a grave.

I shook my head in affected disgust—this stunt was too much—rubbernecked for other grimed-up theatregoers. Everybody was still just wearing their normal going-out clothes, though.

I came back to Wendy. Who wasn’t Wendy at all.

Her hair, it was a different color. How had I not noticed? Brown where it had been streaky blonde. And it was higher up on her head, old-fashioned. The kind I associated with those cat-eye glasses from sockhops and malt shops, from movies with races in concrete culverts.

But then she turned to get a line on the door, and her face, it was grey, and hollow, and not timid. No cat-eyes, no glasses at all, just a sloughing off that suggested decay, and—but it had to be the lights—no irises, no sclera, no pupils. Just those terrible egg-whites.

My lips went numb, my eyes hot, my fingers digging more into my armrests.

First-year make-up student, I told myself. Too long in the chair. Contacts, it was Little Orphan Annie contacts.

But I knew better.

•

In H.F. Arnold’s story, the one thing I could never—until that moment in the theatre—wrap my mind around, it was how it must have felt to be dead in your chair but typing anyway.

When that thing looked back to me, though, I got a taste. A whiff.

In a flash like cards shuffling, a face in there that shouldn’t be, the world shifted around me. Under me.

Was I still in Janet’s living room, plugged into my laptop, trying to ignore the phone?

Kind of, yeah. Opening night was still weeks away.

It was just a defense mechanism, just my way of making the theatre something on an index card, something I could report on from the safety of a faraway second-floor apartment, but still. It felt as real as anything, and I think it might have been. Like I actually was in two places at once. Until I had to choose.

Or until the choice was made for me.

I pushed up into the worn-out cushion of row 19, seat M, and the seat retracted up under me, creaking alarm.

Nobody heard.

Like it was her duty, her exit fee, her camouflage, the woman in Wendy’s seat started a round of applause that swelled through the house. Everybody standing behind it like they do, Herr Director staring back at them, his teeth set, his neck gills surely open, to drink all this in.

I started to stand with them but a clammy thick hand came down on my shoulder, held me down.

I looked up into the dead eyes of John Morgan.

He patted me once and was wide enough that for too long, for agonizing pieces of a single second, I couldn’t see the seat I needed to see. Where Wendy who wasn’t Wendy was. If she was going to be there waiting for me when John Morgan’s hulking form was gone. If she was going to be right there.

I pushed back into my seat, ready to…I don’t know, take her hand when she offered it? Run? Collapse?

All of the above.

After John Morgan had shuffled his way past, the woman was just then standing from Wendy’s seat, her dress one she had to have been buried in, except I knew better than to be thinking like that. I knew better than to allow that kind of thinking.

But then the night trespassed on itself. Went beyond all thinking.

The woman, when she stood it unbalanced her, so she reached out with a veiny arm to steady herself, her waterlogged bare breast flashing through the tattered side of her dress, my eyes locking on it as it moved under its own skin, the puckered nipple pale, drawn back, retreating like something that doesn’t want to strike, but will.

It made me see her as a girl, standing at the end of her dirt  driveway.

It made me see her as a bride, her husband in his dress greens beside her.

It made me see her in what they once would have called her dotage, her eleven-year widowhood. Holding for a moment too long the magazine one of her stories had shown up in, then burying it on the shelf with the rest, pushing her cart on down the aisle. Me the next aisle over, tracking her through the dead space between the books.

Wendy.

She was crying and trying not to.

She was coming up the aisle of the theatre at me, older now, placing one foot intentionally in front of the next.

I fell back into my chair, and when I turned to leave and never look back, to not let her touch me like I knew she was going to, like I knew I was going to let her do, everybody else was making for the door as well, their breath close to me, their bulk surging me ahead with them, the rush of shoulders and elbows and shuffling feet delivering me to the parking lot, to the last bits of the surprising daylight.

I stood there blinking, the crowd suddenly gone. Or else me standing in place long enough for them to drift off.

It’s always like this after a good play. Like the world’s been remade, and just for you.

I shook my head about it all and only turned back to the theatre when somebody called my name.

Janet, in the doorway, her pantyhose hand raised, calling me to the after party. Telling me the night had been a success. That I was part of that.

In my pocket was a pair of earrings for her.

I lifted my hand to her and it was an awkward enough move that it unbalanced me, made me reach down for the hood of the car I was parked by.

The alarm didn’t go off and the dog inside didn’t explode against the glass.

I started to step away, to the after party and then the rest of my life, but found myself hesitating. Like I’d heard something. Or—not heard something.

The dog. It wasn’t barking.

I angled myself politely away from the car and came closer at the same time, the way you do in case the owner’s watching, and leaned over to cut the last of the glare.

The dog was on the front seat, slit open from throat to tail. Like something had been torn up from it. Like something had been birthed. Like something had been waiting there all along.

I cocked my head, tracked past this locked door, these unbroken windows. Tracked over the vinyl top of the car to Wendy.

She was standing on the grass that leads to the lake, and was young again. Herself, except for the ragged dress. A slightly smaller, still-wet dog on a leash by her side, licking its side, its eyes missing like they’d never been there. Like it didn’t need them, where they were going.

That Winters girl, I heard in my head.

That dirty-kneed Winters girl.

But still.

I tugged at a sudden hot point just under my throat, perfectly between my collarbones, and looked back once to Janet, still holding the door open, parentheses around her eyes now, and then I didn’t look back anymore, just stepped forward, around the car, into Xebico.

lor had been older, say, even a year old, if he’d made it to his first birthday, would I then need more time to grieve, as presumably, I would have had more time to become attached? More than two months, I mean.”

Dr. Corinth leaned back in his high-backed chair to study Maddy.

She kept her face pleasant, her hands still.

Like the bowler, watching his ball hurtle down that slick lane.

“Maddy,” Dr. Corinth finally said—a playful, fatherly scold to his voice.

“I need to work,” Maddy said. “The experiment is in a crucial phase.”

“And you’re sure you can—”

“I’m fine. Thank you for your concern.”

It was a lie, of course, but everything had been a lie for the past two weeks. Why should work be any different?