light suddenly appeared in the blackness. “Olaf?” Matt called out. “That you? It’s me, Matt Polgrave from across the street.”
“Matt?” That was a man’s voice, sounding very faint.
“Olaf?” Matt replied.
“Yeah, it’s me. This flashlight isn’t working.” The speck of light disappeared. “Maybe it’s the batteries. I knew I should have picked some up on my way home.”
“My flashlight’s got the same kind of trouble,” Matt said.
“Vicky tried calling National Access, but she couldn’t get through. National Asshole, I call them. We’ll probably be the last ones in town to get our power back on.”
Olaf was very likely right about that, Lydia thought. They were on a cul-de-sac in the middle of nowhere, or so it had always seemed to her, since it took her a good five to ten minutes just to get to the highway and another half an hour after that to drive to work. “We’ll be able to have two cars,” Matt had told her before they moved, “and we won’t have to worry about parking.” She would have preferred just the one car and the parking hassles and her former ten-minute walk to her job at the library. She had felt freer in the city, with the sounds and movement of so many other people around her. Here, she often felt cut off, embedded, trapped. Inertia had become the ruling principle of her life.
“This is the third time since we moved here,” Matt said to Olaf. “How often does this happen around here, anyway?”
“Not this often. Not until the last few months, anyway.”
Another point of light appeared far to Lydia’s left, then vanished. Another neighbor, she thought, somebody else she didn’t know who was probably bewildered by the totality of the darkness. She began to wish that she had made more of an effort to meet the people here, that Matt had been more outgoing. It had been mostly his idea to move out of the city, to get away from worrying about burglaries and getting mugged and hassles with parking the car and to have more space for his computers and his workshop and all the other stuff that had cluttered and finally overflowed their condominium and the small office he had rented down the street.
“Want to come over?” Matt asked.
“I’d probably get lost crossing the street,” Olaf said. “Can’t see a goddamn thing. Anyhow, I better get back to Vicki, she’s got a thing about the dark.”
“See you,” Matt said, and laughed.
“That’s a good one.” Olaf’s voice sounded even fainter.
“Step back,” Matt said to her, and Lydia knew that he was going to close the door. She felt her way back through the doorway and had to grope her way back to the sofa, brushing her hand against the bookshelves as she passed them and taking tiny steps so that she didn’t hit her legs against the coffee table.
She felt as though she would never get to the sofa.
Her leg bumped up against an obstacle that felt like the sofa. She turned and sat down. Matt plopped down next to her.
“He was right,” she said.
“Who?”
“Olaf. About getting lost crossing the street. I read this article the other day that says if people don’t get certain kinds of cues, they end up walking in circles, that’s how people get lost in the woods. We could go out the front door now and end up just circling around to the back of our own house.”
Matt said, “You’re creeping me out.”
She had thought she was making a joke. Now she knew from the flat tone of his voice that he was really frightened. She felt around the coffee table for her cellphone, found it, and pressed a button with her thumb; it still wasn’t working.
“The radio,” Matt said. “You know, that old one we took with us up to the lake this summer. I think I left it in my workshop.”
“What about it?”
“We could tune into one of the local stations, find out what’s going on. Might as well find out if it’s a major blackout.” He brushed against her as he stood up. “Think I can get to the basement,” his voice said overhead. “I’ll take it slow.”
* * * *
The first power failure they had experienced in this house had happened in the middle of dinner, and the power had come back on just as Lydia was lighting a candle for the table. The second had actually turned into a pleasant experience, giving her a chance to talk to Matt while they finished some wine instead of her having to sit through a DVD of a crappy action movie.
This power failure was different. This darkness didn’t feel like only the absence of light. She could imagine it as something seeping into the atmosphere, thickening the air, leaking through crevices in the walls and windows and billowing throughout the house until they were drowned in the blackness.
“Planck’s constant,” Betsy Dane had told four high school students earlier that week, “is a physical constant, symbolized by h, used in quantum mechanics to denote the sizes of quanta.” Lydia and Betsy, a newly hired librarian, had spent half an hour helping the students locate references for a science project. Quantum mechanics, to Lydia’s surprise, had turned out to be a subject that greatly interested her coworker, who had minored in physics in college. But quantum mechanics was not what she needed to dwell on at the moment. It only reminded her that the normal, usually unexamined daily assumptions she made and acted upon—that there were such things as continuity and causation—might be illusions, that the light and space she sensed were only the product of her own perceptions, the way her senses ordered the world, and not a kind of absolute reality that existed independently of her relationship to physical phenomena.
I have to stop this, Lydia told herself. The lights would come back on any minute now.
She got up and walked slowly to the kitchen. There was a box of kitchen matches in the second drawer from the top of the counter, and there might be a candle in there as well. She found the drawer handle, pulled out the drawer, and found the box of matches. Leaning against the counter, she opened the box and struck a match.
The tiny flame danced, a spark against the darkness, but her hand and the match she held were invisible to her. Her hand shook. She blew out the flame and dropped the match on the countertop.
She shuffled back to the living room and sat down, then pulled on the sweater she had shed earlier. The living room felt cold for this time of year, and without any power, they could not turn on their furnace.
Matt was certainly taking his time looking for the radio; it felt as though he had been downstairs forever. There was no reason they had to sit here doing nothing just because of a blackout. They could drive to someplace where the power was still on and stay overnight at a hotel. She could always call in sick tomorrow, since she had some days off coming to her. If they stayed anywhere near downtown, she could even walk to work.
“Matt?” she called out, in case he had come back upstairs and she just hadn’t heard him. “Matt?” The air seemed thicker, harder to breathe, but that had to be her imagination. She waited silently for a few more moments. “Matt?”
“Found the radio,” he said from the direction of the dining room. “Couldn’t hear anything downstairs, though. Maybe we can pick up something up
