THE NIGHT LIGHT

“What is that?” I asked my friend.

He was holding a white object in his hand and was about to plug it into the wall. From far away it looked like one of those automatic air fresheners, but it wasn’t.

“Oh,” he said, “It’s a small light.”

“A light?”

“Yes. A pluggable light.”

“Do you… sleep with a night light?”

“It’s not a night light. Not really.”

But it was! Plugged into the wall the night light illuminated a corner of the bedroom and the ghoulish green and white striped wallpaper. The open doorway leading into the living room was pitch-black.

                             ***

     I had been living in Chicago for a number of years. I moved there after college and worked at the advertising firm ever since. The company that hired me specialized in television advertisement. They were the ones making sure the housewives, the single mothers, and the unemployed, anyone who stay home in the middle of a day and persistently watch the infomercials, that all of them were inclined to buy more junk they didn’t particularly need. Sure, when I put it this way it sounds like an awful job to do, but it wasn’t. I was just a clerk, pushing papers and trying to pay the rent like most of the people who work at places like that. In other words I was then, and still am just an ordinary guy, with an ordinary job, and an ordinary life.

Nothing interesting happens to me.

I do however get to travel for work often, and that’s how I came to New York City that one time. I had to meet with a couple of clients and my company had offered to pay for a hotel so I could stay there overnight and catch the flight back early in the morning. Despite that I gave a call to an old friend whom I hadn’t seen ever since his mother passed away.

My friend lived in a small apartment on the 12^th floor, in one of the many buildings of New York’s Upper East Side. He inherited it from his deceased mother a couple of years earlier and was living there ever since with his new wife whom I had never met. She was a stewardess. They had no children.

At the time of my visit his wife was on a job overseas, so he had no objections towards me crashing overnight. On the contrary, he was rather surprised and happy to hear from me. We haven’t spoken since the funeral. There was no reason for the silence, we were just both busy living our lives, that’s all. It had been a while and I figured it will be nice to catch up.

I spent a whole day with the clients. The day was busy, but successful. We settled on a deal and I was happy with it. Only when I called my friend to ask if I could come over, I realized how hungry and tired I was. He was happy to hear everything went well. I wrote down the address and hailed a cab.

***

     “We’ve met on the flight, dig it? How romantic! I was traveling through the Northern Europe, flying from Reykjavik to Oslo. She was my flight attendant and the hottest thing I’ve ever seen! You know I’m the sucker for pretty girls, but she was a whole different kind of pretty. It sounds cheesy, I know, but she had that perfect eyes-to-smile combination. You know the one I’m talking about? The kind that sneaks up on you. You see her face once, then twice and you can’t help it, can't look away. And you keep on glancing and glancing, and eventually come across as some creep. Well that’s what happened to me!"

He was telling me this over a glass of whiskey.

“You became a creep?” I asked.

“I would have reached that stage if I had continued, but I knew I had to make a move. After all the time was running out – the flight from Reykjavik to Oslo is only a bit over two hours. And then I would get off and never see her again.

"So I knew I had to do something about it. I just felt it in my gut that if I didn’t talk to her I would regret it for the rest of my life, you know? So I went for it and flat-out asked her out when she came back with my beer. And she said yes.”

     “So easily? She just said yes?”

     “That’s right. Although later she told me she had also thought I was attractive, but couldn’t do much about it. Work ethics and all, you know.”

“And now you’re married?”

     “And now we’re married! Can you believe that? I feel just right where I am in my life right now. I’m so content with my home, my wife, my job.”

     “Well I’m glad to see you happy.”

     “I am happy. She is the kind of a woman I always wanted.”

     “Doesn’t it bother you that she’s flying somewhere half the time? I’m sure she runs into a lot of attractive guys on the plane. God knows what could happen.”

     “No. It makes me miss her more,” he said with such assurance in his voice I didn’t doubt him one bit.

Although my friend’s apartment was small – just two rooms – the tall ceiling and lack of cluster gave the unit an airy feeling of a large open space. He didn’t have a lot of furniture. The living room was also the dining room. A miniature kitchen occupied a corner. A wide-screen TV rocked the wall. The wedding photograph hung up on  wall exposed two big smiles.

She did have a nice “eyes-to-smile ratio,” I had to admit. A good catch. My friend was lucky.

We sat at the large dining table in this room and he poured us two whiskey shooters on the rocks to enjoy after the take-out Chinese food dinner he ordered earlier. We reminisced of college. We talked about people we had classes with. We wondered what happened to some of them, the ones we didn’t keep in touch with anymore. We talked about our parents, and after I was done with my drink, he poured me another one. I told him about the daily routine of my job, and he told me about his business and the married life. I told him I felt slightly jealous of his happiness. “A positive envy,” as I put it. He thanked me. We sipped whiskey till there was nothing left in our glasses but ice, then I got up to use the bathroom and wash up. He went into his bedroom to bring out some bed sheets and a couple of pillows.

I was going to crash on the living room couch.

***

     My question upset him. I could tell from the way he looked at the dimly lit corner of his bedroom. “I’m sorry,” he said, “Does it bother you? I could close the door. It’s just that the air conditioner is here in the bedroom and it gets too hot in the other room if the door is closed.” I told him to leave the door open. It didn’t bother me.

“I’d like to keep the light on the whole night. I hope it is okay with you.”

“Sure it’s okay with me. It is your apartment after all, do what you need to do. But may I ask why do you sleep with a night light on? You’re a grown man.”

My friend sighed.

“That is precisely why I don’t tell anyone about this. It’s kind of childish to admit to it, but I have a problem.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t like the dark.”

“What? Why?”

“Something… surreal happened to me a long time ago. Something made me feel the way I feel, but really, I don’t like the dark. When I’m surrounded by complete darkness – I feel distressed by it. As if I’m swallowed by it, if you will. Those are not the right adjectives to describe the feeling I get, but to sum it all up - it gives me the biggest creeps.”

“Something surreal?”

He wiped his palms onto his pajamas and glanced at the doorway. The light coming from the bedroom illuminated a narrow path on the living room carpet, but the rest of the room hid in the shadows. Only when I looked him in the eye did I see his true fear. My friend wasn’t kidding. He was downright terrified of the dark.

“Could you get me another drink?”

“Sure,” I said. I turned the living room light back on and poured us two more whiskeys.

Then he told me this.

 

***

 

     You know, I am a pretty level-headed guy, right? I don’t believe in ghosts, or magic, or anything like that. I like to think of reality based on the five senses – touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. I believe that anything that is irrational only appears to be irrational, and further detailed investigations always reveal perfectly rational explanations.

     That’s the kind of guy I am and my understanding of fear would be more related to nuclear weapons, or a natural disaster, or a sickness, anything like that, but not the darkness, right? I understand how irrational my fear of the dark is. I don’t tell many people this, but I am seeing a therapist. And he’s been saying what everyone else says – that it should go away with age. But I’ve been hearing this for decades, literally, and nothing has changed.

     Anyways, what I’m about to tell you happened one winter night, when I was eight years old. My parents, they were still married, lived in a house in an eastern part of Long Island. The neighborhood was small and rather secluded, all completely surrounded by the woods. Away from the rest of the world it was a safe place to raise a family.

You can imagine how quiet and dark it gets out there at night.

That particular night it was snowing like it was the last snow storm ever. The wind was so hard that the flakes flying by the windows from left to right and right to left made it seem like it was snowing sideways. That night my parents weren’t home. My grandmother fell sick and was in the hospital, so they drove over to New York to visit her and were hit with the snow on their way back. It was snowing so hard that they had to pull up in one of the rest points on the side of the road and wait for the weather to clear up.

“There’s no way of driving in this weather,” my father said to me on the phone, “so we might take a while. Don’t stay up too late champ. I’d like to see you sleeping when we get back!”

     I was home with a babysitter, this really pretty neighbor girl named Brenda who would watch me at times when nobody else could. She was a college girl with a head constantly jabbed in a book, so watching a quiet, peaceful boy like me was an easy job for her. The phone call upset me a bit, but Brenda told me that it’s a good thing that they were not driving in the snow and that they will be back before I knew it. She made us some tea, turned the TV on and I curled on the couch next to her.

     “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” was on. We watched Harrison Ford roll through the catacombs in the little trolley when suddenly something happened. There was a slight, almost inaudible click, and the whole room submerged in darkness.

     Now I wasn’t too fond of the dark back then either, so when the lights and the television went out I gasped a little too loud. But Brenda was right there with me, and she assured that it’s just a power outage. She told me that in New York where she went to college it was normal for the electricity to go out in a radius of two or three blocks during a storm. It would always come back in a short while. We just need to hang on and wait.

     She was right. After a few very long minutes the lights went back on and I let go of her hand that I was involuntarily squeezing the whole time. We finished watching the movie and only when the clock in the hallway stroke eleven we realized that it was long past my bedtime. I brushed my teeth and Brenda tucked me in.

     There was nothing out of the ordinary so far about that night, and if it wasn’t for the unusually strong snow storm, the night would have been just like any other night, except it wasn’t.

     I woke up several hours later to a dead silence. This particular kind of silence struck me, because I’ve never heard anything like this before. I was used to the silence, it gets really quiet there at night, but even so there still are sounds – the wind that rattles the shutters, the neighborhood dogs, and things like that, but I didn’t hear a thing.

     I sat up in bed and looked around.

     I can’t even begin to describe the strange feeling that I got. The place I awoke at was my room – same desk and a chair, a drawer with my toys and books, a clothing cabinet - except it wasn’t. It didn’t feel like my room at all. Instead it felt distant and macabre, as if everything that surrounded me was just an illusion only resembling my room, an identical replica of a real place far away.

     It was so quiet. And dark, darker than on the waxing moon nights. I got out of bed. I flicked the light switch on the wall, but the light didn’t work. I peeked outside the window, but couldn’t see further than the glass. I didn’t know if it was still snowing, or if the storm had stopped. The world outside was pitch black.

     As I told you, I wasn’t fond of the darkness even then. It took me a lot of courage to get out of bed, but I felt I had to do it. I couldn’t stay lying down and expect for this bizarre sense to go away on its own.

     I opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The strange feeling that the place was not really my house only intensified. The light switches here weren’t working either and I could barely see in the dark. Everything – the hallway, the stairs, the pictures of my folks and other relatives on the walls – everything was dull and lifeless, as if it had never seen the light of day before.

     I peeked into my parents’ room, but I immediately knew they weren’t back. I remembered Brenda tucking me in before she went downstairs, but I immediately knew she wasn’t there either.

     I was all alone.

     More alone than a survivor washed ashore on a tropical island after a ship wreck. More alone than the only soldier taken hostage by the enemy as the rest of the squad got executed. I understood I was alone not only in this strange house that wasn’t my home anymore, but in the whole neighborhood too, and possibly the whole world.

     Or maybe I wasn’t?

     Indeed I felt as if someone was watching me. Someone, who I couldn’t see, who may or may not have been human, but who has been watching the back of me ever since I got out of bed. I felt the incomprehensible loath that presence felt towards me. I knew it didn’t want me there. And I knew I had to be careful. I looked behind me, but of course I couldn’t see anything, only the dark.

     Relying mostly on the sense of touch I walked downstairs. Just as I’ve guessed, the living room was empty. There was no sign of Brenda ever being there, as if she sublimed into the heavy air of this peculiar place.

     The giant hallway clock stood dusty and still and only then I realized it was not ticking. I could always hear it ticking, and it would strike the time every hour, and yet tonight it was mute. I remembered it working earlier and signaling that my bedtime had passed, but even though it was still plugged into the wall – it was dead. Time stood still.

     The power outage!

     That must have been it. I decided to go into the kitchen and get the flashlight out of the drawer. It always had batteries in it, so it must work, right? Well, you can imagine my terror when the flashlight did not work. I pressed the light switch and nothing happened. The batteries were inside, it was definitely not broken; and yet it seemed as if upon this night, the light completely escaped it, making this flashlight a totally useless object.

     There I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, in the dark, with a dead flashlight in my hand and that evil look still piercing my back. I felt it more and more with each passing minute, but no matter how many times I glanced behind my back – there was nothing there.

     Nothing that I could see, only the darkness.

I had no idea what else I could possibly do. My parents weren’t there. Brenda wasn’t there. I was alone with someone or something behind my shoulder waiting for a moment to strike.

It was clear to me I had to get out of there. I made it back into the hallway, and pulled the exterior door open.

Right away I knew I shouldn’t have done that.

I couldn’t see anything.

It was as if somebody erased the outside world, got rid of it leaving only the opaque canvas. The world outside as I’ve known it was gone and I faced the kind of darkness I never knew existed. If I thought before, that the feeling that tortured me ever since I got out of bed was scary, the open doorway made it almost intolerable. The presence lurking in the shadows now began to materialize and by opening the door I let it in and gave it a purpose.

Of course I couldn’t see it, but every living cell of my body felt it approaching. I felt its eyes, if it had any eyes, lusting for my blood and the back of my pajamas got instantaneously soaked in cold sweat. I was petrified. My stomach turned into knots and I would have thrown up right there and then if I could have. But I couldn’t.

I had no time to think.

I flung the door shut and the slam echoed through every corner of the house.

Now I knew I was dead for sure.

I don’t know how I found the staircase or how I climbed up to the second floor and got back into my room, but that’s what I did. I knew it was too late, but I had to do something. I had to hide, although I had no place to hide in. I knew it would find me, whatever it was.

I locked the door of my room, got into my bed, and threw the covers on my head, leaving only a tiny opening so I could see the door.

I listened.

     There was not a sound, just like when I awoke, but I knew that the being was approaching me. I listened for the footsteps, or crawling, or anything like that, and although I couldn’t hear a thing I knew it was searching for me with an intensity and hatred. I shivered and took deep breaths, hoping it wouldn’t hear me, but I was sure the thumping beating of my heart could be heard everywhere, especially outside the door.

     And then I saw the door handle of my room turn. I don’t know how I saw it, since it was so dark. Maybe my fixed look at where the door of my room was helped my vision to familiarize with the shadows. The handle turned once, but the door was locked. It turned again, and rattled.

The being was right outside my door, in the hallway, and worse, it knew I was inside.

     I took a deep, deep breath, as quietly as I possibly could.

     And then with the earthshaking bang the door of my room flung open and I let out the biggest scream.

     I didn’t see or hear anything after.

     I screamed, and screamed, and screamed. I squeezed my eyes shut till I saw white and red. My whole body was running in waves of hot and cold. I was shaking uncontrollably and screaming, hoping anyone will hear me, if anyone was still out there.

     But I knew my screams did not leave the house.

***

     “When I regained consciousness,” my friend continued, “my parents and Brenda were beside me. All three were worried and I was lying in the middle of my room wrapped in the bedsheets. The bedsheets were cold, soaked in my own sweat. The lights were on and everything seemed as ordinary as it did before Brenda laid me to sleep. I could hear the television downstairs and the snow storm outside had subsided. I was back home from that terrifying place but it took hours for me to calm down. I eventually stopped shaking.”

     He rattled the melting ice in his empty glass.

     “Notice, that I never once called it ‘a dream’?”

     “But it was a dream, wasn’t it?”

     He slowly shook his head.

     “As I said, I do not believe in ghosts, or magic. I believe in the five senses. The doctors and therapists, as well as my parents all kept telling me it was a dream that I had, but what happened to me that night was no dream. It was no dream at all. The place I was at was as real as you and me, and this ice in my glass, I assure you. I was there, in that strange, dark house, frightened to death, and I can still feel the intensity of that bloody look I felt on my back that whole time. I can still see the darkness I encountered that night and I do not wish that upon anyone, not even my worst enemy.”

                        ***

Lying awake on the living room couch I watched the stillness of the green and white stripes of the wallpaper in my friend’s bedroom. Through the opened door I watched the small light illuminate a corner of the bedroom, providing him with a peaceful night’s sleep. I listened to his quiet snore, although it wasn’t really a snore, just calm, evenly distributed breaths. I thought about the story he told me and what it meant to him. Although it seemed like a really vivid dream to me, it was indeed very real to my friend. So real that even all the whiskey we drank that night couldn’t keep his mind off of his fear. But I knew better than to judge him for it and I knew he appreciated that. For a little while I wondered if him and his wife make love with the night light on.

Right before I closed my eyes to sleep I saw the green and white stripes of his bedroom wall flicker and disappear into the darkness with a slight, almost inaudible click.

The night light burned out.

THE FIRST TIME IN A LONG TIME

It was a hot Friday afternoon. I sat on the bench outside my building. Friday is usually the day the new shipment of coffins arrives and I would’ve had to be there, but today Jerry was replacing me at the funeral home. I had just begun working there and it was my first day off in a whole month.

I didn’t have any plans, so I opened a new jug of wine. I poured myself tea cup brimful, sat on the bench outside and smoked. Someone in my building was listening to the radio out loud, so I did too.

     Around five or six o’clock a mother and her two children came out of my building. The mother took the kids out to the playground across the street and left them there to play alone. She went back up to the building and continued to check in on them through the open second floor kitchen window.

      The two kids were a boy and a girl. The girl – eight or so, clearly a couple of years older than her little brother – grabbed his hand and they walked over to the fountain in the center of the playground.

      This metal fountain, shaped in the form of a dragon, was partially broken. The water squirting out from the few faucets that still worked made the teal paint peel off the dragon’s neck. The children didn’t care. They started splashing each other and laughing. They seemed to enjoy it.

      I hated the water when I was a kid. I hated how it felt inside my nose and ears. Every July my family vacationed at the same beach resort, and every July I made it my goal to stay out of the water. Back then I still believed that my father was capable of everything and that my mother loved us. 

     I heard voices coming from the second floor kitchen. The voices were louder than the radio. A man was yelling something, a woman was yelling back, and then I heard a plate smashing into the wall.

     I wondered if there was food on that plate, and if all families acted this way sometimes. My parents didn’t. They broke apart quietly. One July I went to the beach resort with my dad alone. My mother was gone; I was told she was living someplace else now. My dad always did the best he could do, but it just wasn’t good enough. And I hated being replaced. That summer I finally learned how to swim.

     I went back inside to pour another drink. When I came out the screaming upstairs had subsided and I could hear the music again.

     I looked over across the street. The kids hadn’t heard all the noise. The girl was now sitting on the bench. She opened a pack of cookies and called her brother over. They shared those cookies and she made him, to his disproof, wash his hands and mouth in the fountain. The boy obviously hated following orders. 

I hate to be told what to do too, but like so many others, I want to be taken care of. And for a long time I had no one. I had to work as a newspaper delivery boy all throughout high school. My dad developed a chronic heart problem and I helped with paying the rent. His health got bad though, real bad. He had to get himself a full time nurse; he eventually fell in love with her and later they got married. I had moved out long before that. I got through two and a half years of journalism school at the state university before the tuition became too big of a bite to chew. I put it on hold and left to find a job that paid better.

     I never went back to school.

     I got hired at the grocery store as a bagger, and later got promoted to a stock supervisor. I watched over the vegetable counters. A while ago a Beatles song had made me believe that all I need was love and one night at the bar I met Sarah. I bought her a drink and we slept together that very same night. She moved in a month later, essentially changing my life. We would talk, because we wanted to not because we needed to. Things that I never gave a thought about before, like the future, the universe, and the amount of possibilities, all of a sudden seemed plausible. I wanted her and she told me she loved me. It seemed great, no matter how rough the path we walked was. It didn’t even bother me that we always made love with the lights out.

     The neighborhood smelled like dinner, but the children across the street didn’t have to go home yet. The boy was crying when I looked over. They were playing tag when he fell and bruised his palms. His sister washed his hands in the fountain and wiped his tears off with her sleeve. The boy sat on the bench and stared at what probably was the first bruise he ever got chasing women. He didn’t know yet the game would only get harder.

     Sarah, for instance, was easy to catch, but hard to contain. We fought a lot. The reasons were always stupid - who broke the coffee mug or who had to change the light bulb in the walk-in closet – but they quickly escalated. I had lost count of how many times I angrily pounded her to climax as she howled my name into the night. I had lost the count of how many times I slammed the door on my way out just to come back later, or how many times she had done just the same. I thought that I needed her. She told me she loved me and it felt right again for a little while. Sometimes I sobered up before coming back home, and sometimes I didn’t. After a while I gave up on peace.

The grocery store didn’t make enough and eventually went under, leaving me and the rest of the crew unemployed. It just happened so, that my lack of motivation, Sarah’s consistent neurosis, and this whole emotional tumor we had been harvesting led her and me into our worst fight yet. She screamed that I am irresponsible and I called her selfish. We both knew that our disconsolate balloon had popped, and when she left I got drunk for seven days and seven nights. It felt different this time.

I thought I heard rumbling in the distance and noticed that the clouds of rain beginning to gather. Across the street the kids were taking it easy. They were both sitting on the bench and she was reading him a book with lots of big, bright pictures in it. I watched them. They read the whole book through together from the front cover to the back, then flipped it over and began reading it again.

When I stopped drowning my nights at bars, I started reading more. After Sarah left it got pretty bad. I didn’t look for a job any more, lost the apartment, and nearly died one night. I was out drunk and a driver flipped me over. He says he didn’t see me on the side of the road and I don’t remember what happened. I am alright now; I feel better. After I got out of the hospital I got hired at the local funeral home where I now manage the shipments of coffins, candles, ribbons, and such; I also take down the orders for the tombstones. I spend my days ensuring the dead get fancy burials, and I read till I fall asleep. The first month of responsible labor was over, and I earned my day off, my jug of wine, and my smokes. For the first time in a long time I felt at peace. When Sarah called three nights prior I didn’t know what to say. She kept quiet, and I kept quiet and we both needed to speak, but neither one of us wanted to. I eventually hung up.

The mother called the kids up for dinner and I watched as the girl walked the boy across the street and into the hallway. Once the two of them were gone it was just me and the radio.

I lit a cigarette.

The music made me think of a distance – an emotional distance, as well as a place far away - where serenity meets mystique. I looked over the empty street, the broken fountain, the playground swings, and the trees above it. I was alone. And for the first time in a long time I felt lonely.

I gulped the rest of my wine and smoked the cigarette to the filter, and before the first drop of the rain hit the pavement I went inside and cooked dinner.