powerless (deborah)
On Labor Day, I woke up in the middle of the night to pee and noticed that the toilet seat was cold. Then I noticed that it was completely dark outside. Totally quiet. The sonic strata dissolved, each layer gone: the hum of the bidet, the neighbor’s air conditioner, someone’s outdoor lights, the loud bedroom fan, the refrigerator, the oscillating living room fan, the Bluetooth speakers, the electric resonance of everything. I crept back into the bedroom and looked at the blank clock on the nightstand and told J, who was half-asleep: “The power is out.”
In the morning I looked at my phone and saw that the outage had knocked out all the streets around us, a huge swath of the city map. I snuck the milk out of the fridge, very briefly, for my breakfast cereal, thinking hopefully that the outage wouldn’t be much longer. I saw an estimate for 9:30am, another for 12:30pm. I had the holiday off and planned to meet up with friends, but J was supposed to work that day, had important things he needed to do. I kept hitting the light switch, reflexively, whenever I went to the bathroom, to wash my face, to wash my hands. It’s so dark in here, I thought, and pressed the switch, with no effect. But I was thankful we still had running water, even some hot water, when J washed the dishes.
When it was past 11am and the power still wasn’t back, I asked J to go out for lunch. We drove through a dark intersection, then a couple ones where the traffic lights were all operational, then another set of blinking red lights, then nothing again. How does this power grid work, we wondered. I wanted a fried egg sandwich with a hash brown, but the restaurant was terribly busy and short-staffed so we went across the street for ramen. J got us both a copy of the alt-weekly to read while we waited. The ramen arrived, a milky tonkotsu broth with curls of scallions. We both had a thick slab of chashu in our bowls, unctuous but also too chewy, forcing us to gnaw indelicately when a bite would not suffice. “It should have been sliced,” we agreed. “The egg too.” I stabbed the whole egg with my chopsticks until I could get to the jammy core, unfurl the yolk into the broth.
We headed back and we hit the same streetlights again, in reverse this time, and they were the same. We passed empty storefronts with papers taped to the closed doors, I imagined, to reiterate that they were closed. It was almost 12:30 and J was still hopeful that the power would return. I plugged in our phones to external batteries. I left and drove to my friends, wandered a bookstore, ate rice paper spring rolls at a food cart that were mostly iceberg lettuce with two shrimp folded inside. There were so many people out enjoying the holiday, flocks of us on the crosswalks. J texted that the power still wasn’t back yet. We were lucky that it was a cooler day, breezy and in the 70s. I scrolled local subreddits, refreshed for updates, signs of life, speculations, laments, farewells to the groceries just purchased yesterday.
When I went home, nothing had changed. It was still quiet. I alternated reading two paperback books, both by Madeleine L’Engle, then put each down and looked at the same Reddit posts again. I saved the posts so I wouldn’t have to keep hunting for them. We ordered fast food, cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets in the shape of stars, onion rings. J scavenged a single ketchup packet from our drawers since the ketchup bottle was ensconced in the fridge. He proposed watching TV on his phone, then gave up when it didn’t work. I read a New Yorker article about The Great British Bake-Off by a former contestant, which was very good. At one point I asked J if he’d read it because I wanted to talk to him about something in the article. He said he hadn’t yet but it was in the very New Yorker issue he was reading (later he said it actually wasn’t because it was online-only, as stated in the small print in the table of contents, and then he guessed that the part I wanted to talk to him about was where it’s revealed Paul Hollywood’s rubric for proofing dough is that it should feel like a woman’s breast). I tossed Miso her allotment of chicken and she caught each bit in a deft staccato. We put away the paper detritus and the condiments.
Then I got up to pee and at the very moment I sat down to the cacophony of the bidet whirring up again, beeping, and the fan turning on in the bedroom and the noise everywhere again after 15 hours. We rejoiced. J immediately turned on the TV.
