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FICTION
2022
When the Night
When the night comes, it’s all one can do not to get lost in the dark. Gao and I remind ourselves as much as possible, even wrote it above the doorway - carved it into the wood of the frame in unintentionally ominous gashes, like Norse runes. Remember.
Because that’s the flip side of things, isn’t it? Remembering is simply the opposite of the danger, of forgetting. Where you’re going. Where you came from. When the night comes, people think they’re running from monsters in the dark, something to snatch them when they’re alone. But the danger is them. It’s already in their heads, it’s getting lost.
The night always comes. They just never remember.
We don’t leave the house unless we tell the other where we’re headed. It wasn’t a discussion; it happened naturally, coincidence into habit into something more calcified. Maybe if we talked about it, we would mention safety. Maybe we would mention danger. I’m the one who carved into the door.
“Four blocks south,” I say, and Gao nods and says, “Love you,” and I say, “Love you” back, and then the door closes.
“Corner market,” he says, and I say, “Bring back those canned peaches, if they have them?” and he says, “I’ll keep an eye out,” and then the door closes.
Mr. Mendoza hasn’t been seen since last Tuesday. His door is closed the way he left it.
I kiss Gao on the forehead before I leave. I’m still deciding where I’m going, leaning over the back of the couch where he’s sitting with another dog-eared mystery novel. Its cover is missing, but I think he’s written Hammett on the first page so he doesn’t forget. Such utilitarian desecrations are more or less forgiven now.
I blurt out the furthest place I can think of.
“Library,” I say. Gao smiles.
“Tell Henrietta I say hello.”
“Of course,” I say, and try to smile back. I’ve surprised myself. I try to remember what I’m supposed to ask next.
“Want me to pick anything up for you?”
Gao narrows his eyes and closes the book on his thumb, saving his progress. He scratches the stubble on his chin. “How about… a classic? Orwell, maybe, or Verne.”
“Got it.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.”
“Love you.”
“Love you.”
I grab my purse from a hook near the door and shake my wrist out of something like compulsion. The thin wire bracelet around it rattles as the tiny metal charms collide.
“See you in an hour.”
“An hour,” Gao says. He’s gone back to reading.
I run my hand over the carvings in the doorframe and walk outside.
It is, I think, noon.
I will be safe at home when the night comes.
When the night comes, it moves fast and smooth like mercury. We carry noisemakers in our pockets, in our shoes, on our wrists. We do nothing but rattle in case the sky gets dark so someone might be able to find us again, so we won’t get caught alone. Our quieter neighbors worried more as their numbers dwindled and now they rattle, too. Layla from next door has a small bell she ties in her hair like a Christmas elf. Benny Hutchison wears nothing but tap shoes, dragging his sister, Marie, by one hand while she swings a maraca in the other. It’s easier to hear each other if we close our eyes. We are a loud neighborhood.
Mr. Mendoza had a whistle.
I take the main road until it stops, where the asphalt gives way to weeds in one neat line of demarcation. We didn’t sign any treaties, but the borders are clear - we know the geography of our paved neighborhood. It’s harder to get lost if you’re following a road.
Marie Hutchison cha-chas along the divide with one foot on blacktop, one disappearing into wild daisies and dandelions, a dual citizen. She rattles at me.
“Hullo, Mrs. Glass.”
“Hello, Marie.” I jangle at her in return.
“Sun’s going down.”
“Isn’t it always,” I say, and step over the daisies. The sky is pale and gray like a newborn dove.
“Sun’s going down,” she says.
My feet sink into the undergrowth beyond the asphalt. I trample weeds on my way to the library. Marie’s maracas fade like light. Past the road, tree boughs and listing emerald leaves blot out the gray. Past the road, it should be a straight shot. Risky coincidence that the library lies just beyond safety, a transitory space, a comma. We don’t know the world beyond the road; we don’t know much of the world anymore.
But I know the library, don’t I? I have to remind myself, I’m still not quite sure why I’m here and I almost think too much about the weeds and turn around until I see the sign. Even though it fell down a few years back - even though, when the night comes, things tend to fall down from where we’ve placed them. Henrietta nailed it to a weeping willow near the corner so we can still find our books if we have a mind to look for them. Not enough of us have a mind for there to be a path yet.
I let my feet fall harder than necessary. It flattens the grass, and it makes my wrist jangle. Henrietta greets me at the door because she heard me coming.
“Ms. Glass,” she says, stomping her feet and slapping her shoulders and hands in a polyrhythm, playing her body like an instrument. Her words fall in line like soldiers, like steel-cut nails, every syllable exactly where it’s meant to be. “What a pleasure. How is Gao?”
“Enjoying the haul of mysteries, thanks. He says hello.” The words meet her rhythm without me trying. It’s hard to have a conversation with Henrietta that doesn’t turn into a duet.
I shake my wrist out of something like compulsion, the sound I make so others don’t lose me. It dislodges something from the dark. I came here for a reason. It sounds familiar.
“Do you have any history books?” I ask.
“History books?” Henrietta’s heels stomp into the wooden floor. “History books. Hi-sto-ry-books. No one asks for history.” A triplet-tap of thinking. “Let me check the back rooms.”
“Thank you,” I say, and then, an afterthought like a reflex, “I’d take a couple Orwell paperbacks if you’ve got them, or Verne,” and my own heels thrum with the thumping of feet as Henrietta chugs back toward the stacks. The tiny prongs of my bracelet pinch like teeth against my wrist.
How have I never asked about history?
When the night comes, the day doesn’t leave. It sits there behind the dark, a child waiting for permission. We know when the night comes because the day goes silent like powerless machines, the sound of being unplugged. We wait with the day until we can come back out, too. Usually most of us can. It is safer to stay put, to make noise until someone comes, they say, we assume. It is safer to wait it out.
Every once in a while I wonder, when the night comes, if everyone in the world is staying put. If anyone is really coming to get us.
No. That was a lie.
I wonder all the time.
“Did you hear about Mr. Mendoza?” I ask.
“We have no history,” Henrietta chants, and she hands me a pair of moth-eaten books: on one, a massive night-black eye; on the other, a watercolor sea monster hiding in oceanic dark. They stare at me. They are silent.
I hold them gently in loud hands. “I just want to know- I don’t think I remember what it was like before,” I say, it sounds small and stupid out loud but I mean it. Henrietta goes staccato to accompany me.
It’s an old thought. I can feel it, the resistance of recalling. Countries. Wars. Cultures.
“Stories,” I say, “and people, there were people, so many, but I haven’t… I can’t-”
“Anomalies,” Henrietta stomps. She sounds the same as the TV anchors, back when we had things like TV, and power, and anchors.
“Have you seen Mr. Mendoza?” I ask. My hands are going sweaty where the skin presses against the books. So important, I’m thinking now: these books, these Before Books, colored paper reliquaries of Old World words. The Orwell. The sea. Revolution; police state; propaganda, mythology. Norse runes, I’d said. Norse. The days, I think, are shorter up north.
“Haven’t heard him,” Henrietta says.
We call it the night because of the dark, but that’s incomplete. It’s always been incomplete. We’ve always tried to fill in the gaps.
Layla thinks it’s a side effect of climate change. Nothing but a trick of the light as the planet wanes and we lose track of ourselves. Gao is an astrophysicist, used to be an astrophysicist, likes to speculate about extraterrestrial life. He thinks the night is alien. “Aliens,” says Benny Hutchison, who pluralizes, who doesn’t have to think because he knows.
I think I used to teach history to sixth- and seventh-graders. We would crowd into an otherwise empty room and talk about dead things and the ways they come back. My students would come back too, wouldn’t they; they would return from chemistry and art and English spouting new words, and on good days we would ask each other questions forever, and we would plug the answers into the rest of the world.
Then they called them “anomalies,” when the weather went sour and erratic. My students and the TV anchors and politicians with sweat-slicked foreheads. They brought back different words. We drilled too deep; we built too high. The planet was punishing us and thinning our numbers in sporadic secret, unrelenting, illogical. People went missing in the unnatural dark.
Our puzzle pieces didn’t fit together on their own, my students and me. Every day seemed like a bad day.
So we panicked.
I asked myself questions forever. Did we know about the night before we lost ourselves in it? Could we have predicted its arrival? Could we have mapped out its topography? Could we navigate it like deep-sea divers, unfazed by its ability to devour our senses? Did we know, once? Three months later, I think it was three, the otherwise empty room held five of us. One of my students told us a story he had heard from his father about military experiments gone catastrophic, he worked on a base in Virginia, he had seen through closing doors, he knew. One of my students said Mother Earth was punishing us for betraying Her hospitality. She was reclaiming what we had taken. Another student couldn’t stop laughing. (I’m afraid I don’t remember their names.)
“There’s only one real way to know what the night is,” we agreed.
I think the night isn’t an anomaly. I think the night has been around longer than we have. I’ve been unplugged for a long time.
Mr. Mendoza liked questions, and anomalies, and stories. From the Latin: historia.
I should have asked him.
I haven’t left the library, and it makes Henrietta nervous. I can tell by her syncopation.
“He had a whistle,” I say, and then I shake my wrist, I frown. I should’ve asked before. I should’ve. “No history at all?”
Henrietta does an electric military strut, eyes fluttering, hands blurring.
“Nobody knows, nobody’s written, nobody,” she chants. “We have economics, plate tectonics, hydroponics, but we don’t. Have. Any. History-history-history,” she says, and that’s when the night comes.
It’s Henrietta who tells me. I almost don’t notice, don’t see how it’s light until it isn’t, but then her feet stop. Her hands stop. We stand in the library in half-dim, because even when the night comes there is some light somewhere keeping us from going blind.
I clutch the paperbacks to my chest and rattle my wrist as hard as I can. A metallic klaxon; a reflex of senseless noise so someone who knows what to do can come find me and take me back where the roads are paved.
But then that stops too. Henrietta’s hand is warm and steady where it smothers my wrist. I am stilled.
“Henrietta,” I say. The library is silent. “Henrietta?”
“Hush, Ms. Glass.”
She’s looking out into the street, I think. Where there are no walls, no shelves, no books to protect you from the night. Henrietta’s always been brave. It’s been a while since I’ve tried to be quiet.
“What do you think the night is?” I whisper.
The hand on my wrist slides to my palm and squeezes. Henrietta slips the words to me in near-silence like a piece of sedition. Out of rhythm; sotto voce; terrifying.
“Only one way to know,” she says.
Something outside the library thumps against the solid ground. Once, twice, three times - a marching triplet. Something outside the library tramples dandelions. Something in the night moves.
“Henrietta,” I say. The reliable presence, the potential rhythmic energy next to me is gone. I can feel where she used to be. I can hear the musical rest. I can find her edges until they go dim, and then dark, and then the night gets quieter than silence.
Anomalies, I think. It’s hard to hear anything without being silent.
I slink towards the library entrance, waiting to disappear. I press my body against the rough of the door where there is no hum of life beyond it, where darkness sounds like shrinking, and I slowly raise my head to the window.
When is the last time I have seen the night? We have stayed inside, we have locked our rattling bodies away so safely for so long the way we were told. I have remembered that the night is not full-black like the eye on the Orwell, like the aquatic depths of the Verne. The night beyond the library is a dim like goose down. It is a softness that can be seen through. There is a weeping willow outside the steps that says P arson Lib ry where prying leaves have stolen letters away but not meaning. There are flowers in muted yellows and rebellious reds. There is, between the matted grasses and shreds of broken asphalt and stooping branches, the barest whisper of a path winding away through the overgrowth. I think. I remember.
Do we disappear? Do we go?
My palm sticks to the covers of the books.
My palm sticks to the handle of the door.
I saw the world dim for the first time from a classroom window. The third time, I sat sleepy on a blanket in the park at midday dusk, overhearing the evacuation warning from a nearby police station PA system. Once I was meditating in the grass when they told us to find the nearest shelter and stay there. The curfews came earlier and earlier in the day.
People left. Disappearances, the anchors called them, because they had not told us where they were going. And then the power grid went and our neighborhood had to anchor itself. The city council looked at our maps and folded them in at the edges. We gave ourselves borders from Roosevelt Ave to the interstate, we stocked up on candles and canned goods, I was handed a bracelet to wear in case, in case. Mr. Mendoza protested by sitting on his porch at all hours, squinting into the sun, plastic whistle hanging from his neck.
I lost count, eventually. Past simple to present habitual. I watch the world dim from my living room window, meditating as things grow soft and golden and lovely in the nighttime.
I think.
I tuck the books close and push open the door. My feet carry me between the clusters of flowers choking on broken asphalt, amidst a chaotic samba of human footprints. I can’t see Henrietta but I can see the trees, the dull distance-glow of the night spilled out in front of me. I can see the path.
I wait for aliens to abduct me. I wait for Mother Earth to swallow me whole. I wait to be unplugged.
The bracelet slips from my skin and falls, whispers into the dandelions through a silvered mouth. I shake my wrist out of something like compulsion. I let my feet fall harder, trampling the grass. When there is no more noise to make, all that’s left is listening.
I step into the night, and think I hear a sound like music.
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