LIGHTS OUT

Nashville, Tennessee, 1963

Snow sprinkled softly into the darkened quadrangle. Stripped cherry trees, backlit by hazy streetlamps, clawed jagged shadows on the dormitory walls. A shelf of blue vapor seeped across the ground.

Evelyn gazed down from her garret window. As she watched, the streetlamps changed before her, abstracted themselves into pure light—sidereal flashes, pulses in a void, a chorus of heliographs flickering cryptic code.

She turned to face the room in which she stood.

She glanced at the far bed, noting the crisp hospital corners executed that morning by her roommate just before leaving for home. The steam radiator clanged and hissed. Above her own bed the round clock face read quarter-past-twelve.

An old-fashioned desk lamp with a stained-glass shade, teardrop crystals dangling from its rim, glowed on her desk, bathing both walls and ceiling with jumbled smears of color. At the base of the lamp lay her journal, a thick volume bound in rich green cloth and brown leather.

Evelyn crossed to the desk, sat, opened the book to its first creamy page, and took up her pen.

Now I am in a different place.

I remember my sunny bedroom back home, shorn bare of every keepsake and filled almost to the ceiling with steamer trunks and boxes.

Mother was inconsolable. We watched her, Father and I, scurrying from room to room.

On the road to Tennessee, I sat behind them in the over-freighted station wagon and cast my gaze from one to the other. From Father I gained the impression of furious intensity tempered by a playful love of adventure. He’s always had a gift for infusing the most ordinary events with epic grandeur, and I could palpably detect his perception of our journey as a dazzling upward sweep into the glorious future. Mother remained apprehensive, as always. She is animated, I believe, by an almost unbearable tenderness.

An image formed before me, just above the horizon where the highway crested a distant hill—the reflection of my own face. I saw again how my features had been composed of theirs, and it was as though their loving union were consummated afresh in my own heart.

I passed into a new world.

A little less than a month ago, as I descended the steps of the library with a boy named Peter, a girl ran past us screaming, wailing, as though she’d been set on fire. We soon learned why. Over the next several nights, my dreams filled up with pictures I could scarcely have conceived the week before—exploding skulls, bullets, blood, shattered teeth and bone.

That Sunday a group of us huddled around a television in the student center lounge. Peter sat beside me on the sofa, leaning away. All day long he’d regarded my grief with tight-lipped irritation and now, spurred on by his friends, made brave to speak his mind.

“Pretty boy pinko deserved what he got, you ask me,” he said.

I broke with Peter not long afterward. Something about me angered him deeply, drove him to wound me like an elephant mauling an intruder.

Later, as I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, I felt a wall in the back of my head crack. I tumbled into vast emptiness. My body lay perfectly still, but now I seemed to hover just outside it, peering over my own shoulder as the darkness around me expanded. I saw bricks and sheetrock dissolve into mist.

After a time I traveled through a whirlwind of light, a corkscrewing tunnel illuminated by bursts of color. I emerged, suddenly, into an empty white room—and there, dressed in a white silken gown, stood a beautiful little girl.

There are times, though not when I’m actually sleeping, when I seem to rise into a sunlit, windowed parlor. Here the world reaches me aslant, as through a wall of prisms.

Once upon a time, in a faraway mountain village, there lived an old widowed gardener. His few muddy acres, humble cottage, and meager potato patch resembled those of all his neighbors. Like them, too, he seldom spoke or ventured far off his little plot. He would have drawn no notice at all, in fact, had it not been for his magnificent greenhouse.

It stood like a cathedral on the crest of a hill. The old man had built it himself over a period of years, one precious pane of glass at a time—then filled it to bursting with life. Marigolds, geraniums, tulips, ferns, daffodils, daisies, jonquils, roses, buttercups, lilies, violets, carnations, azaleas, chrysanthemums, black-eyed Susans—these and dozens of other plants blossomed inside.

But the gardener’s favorite flower, of which he possessed only a single specimen, was an iris.

He named her, in fact, Iris.

And for this Iris he constructed a special platform at the center of the greenhouse, complete with its own sunlamp. All day long, as he made his rounds among the other, more abundant flowers, he always kept an eye on Iris. Sometimes he even addressed her directly.

“Ah, Iris,” he would say while watering the bluebells, “I am old, it is true, and alone—but today I am very happy!”

On such occasions, Iris, too, felt happy and stood up straighter on her stem, the better to please the gardener. At last, when he’d finished all his other chores, the old man approached her. By this time she would be very thirsty, the soil in her pot brittle and dry. Caressing her soft petals with the fingers of one hand, with the other the gardener lowered the watering can’s long, curved spout.

So the time passed for many a year—until one day the gardener entered the greenhouse in a state of deep sorrow. He pulled up a stool before Iris’ platform, sat, and covered his face with his hands. He announced in a heavy voice that a drought had descended upon the land.

In the weeks that followed, the flowers in the greenhouse received strictly rationed allotments of water, always a little less with each day that passed. Iris noticed, with some trepidation, that she alone remained exempt from these restrictions. Soon all the pretty blossoms around her drooped and withered, until at last nothing remained but Iris herself and hundreds of chalky pots bristling with stiff brown stalks.

Again the gardener sat before her on the stool. Iris gazed upon him there—then, lifting her purple bloom, reached deep into the soil with her roots and drew up a single drop of water. It dangled like a tear from her nethermost petal. When it fell with a splash onto the platform below, the gardener did not notice. So Iris repeated the procedure, sending forth drop after drop until, like a primed pump, she gushed a steady, sparkling stream.

Only now did the gardener lift his face—just in time to see Iris transformed into a mighty geyser. A great column of water erupted from her pot, rocketed to the ceiling, then rained down in sheets over the barren greenhouse.

“Iris!” cried the gardener, weeping with joy. “My beautiful Iris!”

But she could not hear these final words. Iris, poor flower, had vanished forever.

Sprung from the blood of the Gorgon’s severed head, sired by Poseidon, birthed by Perseus, and tamed by crafty Bellerophon with the aid of a golden bridle, winged Pegasus, magical stallion with fountain-begetting hooves, delighted to gallop the air.

His heroic rider, a man beset by devouring desire, treasured him above all others. Pegasus, in turn, bequeathed his charmed protection.

Together they triumphed through many trials. For the murder of his brother, for inflaming the lust of the Queen of Argos, and for the sin of pride which unmade his earthly father, Bellerophon suffered to be sent on three certain-to-be-fatal missions—to slay the Chimaera, whose lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail inspired such withering fear; to battle the Solymi warriors; and finally to conquer the Amazons.

Astride his stalwart mount, armed only with quiver and bow, Bellerophon accomplished all with ease.

Upon his return, the King of Lycia released him from further penalty, awarded him his nubile daughter, and thereafter loved the champion and called him a favorite son.

But the restless Bellerophon could not be satisfied. Blinded by dreams of still further glory, he urged his steed upward to the crest of Olympus, there to claim his rightful seat in the throne hall of the gods. Pegasus bucked him—and the wretched man fell.

Thereafter he wandered alone the barren steppes, banished, exiled, a cannibal of his own heart, harried always by pitiless wind and the distant mocking laughter of children.

I wish the whole world could have seen my friend Ella dance last Saturday night.

The lights went down in the studio, a beam switched on from the rafters, and suddenly she appeared.

She began in a crouch, arms wrapped loose around her buckled legs. Her face rested atop her limbs. As the music gained momentum, Ella twitched gradually to life. When at last she stood on her feet, the stage lit up with green, gold, and rose-colored lights, revealing a vast yet spartan set, suggesting by its few details a fanciful toy shop.

During the course of her performance, Ella learned unsteadily to move, burst into a frenzy of joyful leaping, pined before an outsized window for an end to her loneliness, brought to life shelves of invisible toys and led them in a march, romanced a tin soldier before his agonizing death in battle, mended a doll, pirouetted in the sun, gave birth—with a wave of her hand—to a gaggle of pretty puppet-daughters, played muse to a cobbler, and finally, as the lights faded once more to black, returned to the crouch from which she’d risen.

It was clear by the expression on her face, as she reclined her head into the nest of her arms, that her brief taste of life had been pleasing, that her heart—whose stricken longing set the dance in motion—now healed, fulfilled.

Afterward, as I walked alone through the night, images of Ella swirled in my mind. The narrow cement path glowed beneath streetlamps placed at regular intervals, and each fragile globe, burning with chalky light, resembled a tiny translucent planet within which I saw, as through a crystal ball, distant episodes from my own life.

I stopped before the entrance to my dormitory, gazed up at the facade. Rough blocks hewn from granite, stacked and tightly mortared, rose into the sky, thrusting blunt wedges against a field of stars. Across the length of this wall, at least a dozen casement windows burned with light. Though most were veiled by curtains, I did catch glimpses of darting silhouettes.

Then the scene split down the middle, parted like a rent curtain. The familiar walls peeled back, revealing an infinite expanse of luminous, transparent chambers. I could see that the structure converged as it deepened, culminating in a wheel of spinning fire, and that the creatures who danced within its glassy cells moved in time to a rhythm I couldn’t hear.

That night I dreamed I stood on a hill just below the Kentucky border. I could see for miles in every direction, and my body tacked like a weather vane in the wind.

To the north, a lake, scooped out of the land by some unfathomable force of nature, glittered like foil; to the east, a smoldering sun rose over acres of well-cultivated crops; to the south, a cluster of tiny buildings—barns, sheds, a pair of clapboard farm houses—huddled in a rippling meadow; and to the west, hemmed in by a crumbling stone wall, mossy headstones and gaunt iron crosses leaned amid a tangle of vines.

I lifted my face to the sky. The sun shone directly above, and I closed my eyes to let its beams wash over me. Red light flooded through my lids, filling my head, and from there seemed to flow down into my body like warm honey. I felt it pool in the soles of my feet, then steadily rise.

I lowered my face, opened my eyes again.

Now I stood circled by destruction.

Twists of acrid smoke spewed from craters, emitting the nauseous stench of rotten meat. A stubble of blasted plant life shadowed the barren slopes. Looking closer, I saw corpses strewn among hacked stumps, scattered rubble of skulls, sticks, and flung bone.

A black disk, ringed by a diaphanous corona, floated in a void. The disk rolled slowly aside, unmasking the sun.

Then everything shrank to miniature scale. I stood atop the planet like an acrobat balanced on a beachball. I could feel the atmosphere eddy around my body, and my head, just above the surface, reached into outer space.

Early the next morning, still groggy with sleep, I sat up in bed.

I set out on a long stroll through the city.

As I walked, watching the buildings glide by, studying the crowds of cars and people, I imagined all the music that had ever been made here filling the air around me. I spied a radio tower in the distance, studded with blinking lights. Static crackled in my ears.

Then, as though my own body were an antenna, I began to pick up snatches of songs, scraps of disc jockey patter, advertisements, news reports—all manner of curious transmissions. At first, I heard only what might have actually been broadcast on that day. Soon enough, though, I began to receive messages from farther away in time.

I felt like a lookout facing backward in the crow’s nest of a ship. I could still see the harbor from which I’d departed—a shallow channel lay between me and it, and the wake of my short passage fanned out below. I knew the time had come to turn around, to face head-on the bluff gale blowing at my back.

Something had changed.

I turned.

Wave after wave of buttery light rippled outward from the sun, setting the sky ablaze and spilling a burning carpet over the endless sea ahead.

Then once again I stood at the bustling intersection. The roaring traffic and surging crowds hit me like a maelstrom.

I blinked and shook my head. My senses ignited.

I started walking past shops, warehouses, recording studios, saloons—then on into the suburbs, across lawns and around swimming pools, until at last I reached the country.

My legs buckled from exhaustion. I lay on my back in a field.

I’ll never be a child again.