Another set of lights came on in Isaac’s apartment. He was walking back and forth across the living room, rubbing his hand over his head. He turned toward the picture window, but from my angle I couldn’t see his face clearly.
I reminded myself that if I were my mother I would have left by now.
I rolled down my window. I wasn’t positive, but it looked as if his mouth was moving. He might have been talking, laughing, or crying. Whatever he was doing, he wasn’t alone.
I leaned the top of my head out of the car so I could see better. There was a shadow on the wall that wasn’t Isaac’s. It was much shorter, rounder, and when seen against the wall, had little or no hair.
I heard my mother’s voice again. This time she was telling me to run, to close my eyes and drive away, but what good would that have done? Had I driven all the way to the coast, east or west, I would still have been sitting on that block, watching the shadows.
I took the key out of the ignition and threw it into the glove compartment. I thought of slashing the tires of my car, unplugging wires from the engine. I didn’t trust myself not to run. After a while I closed my eyes. David was right — this wasn’t the type of neighborhood to do that in. Every time I felt myself drifting off, I looked back up to Isaac’s window. There were small surprises. It looked briefly as if the shadows in the living room weren’t just talking but arguing, with arms raised and fingers pointed. Then, seconds later, everything seemed perfectly calm. For twenty minutes, Isaac sat on the couch and hardly moved while the other shadow sat opposite him. I realized I felt more comfortable when I thought they were fighting.
I never took my eyes off the window, but at some point I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, there was no one sitting in the living room. I had just begun to worry that I had missed out on something vital when the man who looked liked the shadow on the wall left Isaac’s building. I saw him for only a few seconds, while he was standing under the porch light, looking for his car. He was much older than I had expected, bald, but not as fat as I thought.
As soon as he got outside, he lit a cigarette and took his keys out of his pocket. He started walking toward me. I slipped to the bottom of my seat, but my window was open. I heard a car door near me open and close. I heard the engine and could see the headlights. He had been parked on the other side of the street, maybe two or three cars behind me. I could feel the car as it neared me, but just in case I’d missed him, the man rolled down his window and said, “Good night, Helen,” as he passed.
ISAAC
Isaac and I were half asleep on the chairs by the time we were allowed back into the house. By then the girls and the house guards had gone off to the servants’ quarters. The cicada lights had gone off, as had all the lights in the city. It was two weeks since the government had started cutting off the streetlights after midnight, but I had never noticed until then how complete the blackness was. Looking out at the capital from our secluded corner reminded me of a story my father had told me about a city that disappeared each night once the last inhabitant fell asleep. He was good at telling stories — not great, like my uncles and grandfathers, who reveled in the theatrics. Compared to them, a story was a solemn occasion delivered in a calm, measured voice that nonetheless left a lasting impression on anyone who was listening. He told me that story about the city that disappeared at night shortly after I developed a sudden, irrational fear of the dark. I must have been ten or eleven at the time, old enough to have known better than to be afraid of something so common and simple as the end of the day, and well past the age of bedtime stories, but for the first few nights of my terror, my father indulged me. He told me one night about the countries thousands of miles to the north of us where months went by without the sun setting — hoping I would find comfort in knowing that the world didn’t end simply because the lights went out in our village.
According to my father, the city in the story was once a real place. “I’m not inventing this for you,” he said. “Everything I tell you is true.” I believed him in that semiconscious way that children have of dismissing reality in the hope of finding something better. “For hundreds of years,” my father said, “that city existed as long as one person dreamed of it each night. In the beginning, everyone kept some part of the city alive in their dreams — people dreamed of their garden, the flowers they had planted that they hoped would bloom in the spring, or the onions that were still not ripe enough to eat. They dreamed of their neighbor’s house, which in most cases they believed was nicer than their own, or the streets they walked to work on every day, or, if they didn’t have a job, then of the café where they spent hours drinking tea. It didn’t matter what they dreamed of as long as they kept one image alive just for themselves, and in many cases they would pass that image on to their children, who would inherit their house, or attend the same school, or work in the same office. After many years, though, people grew tired of having to dream the same image night after night. They complained. They bickered and fought among themselves about whether they shouldn’t abandon the city altogether. They held meetings; each time, more people refused to carry the burden of keeping the city alive in their dreams. ‘Let someone else dream of my street, my house, the park, the intersection where traffic is terrible because all the roads lead one way,’ they said, and for a time, there were enough people willing to take on the extra responsibility. There was always someone who said, ‘Okay, I will take that dream and make it my own.’ There were heroic men and women who went to sleep each night when the sun set so they could have enough time to dream of entire neighborhoods, even those that they had rarely if ever set foot in, because no one else would do so. Eventually, though, even those men and women grew tired of having to carry all the extra parts of the city on their backs while their friends and neighbors walked around, carefree. They also wanted other dreams, and one by one they claimed their independence. They said, ‘I am tired. Before I die, I want to see something new when I sleep.’ Then the day came when no one wanted to dream of the city anymore. On that day, a young man whom few people knew and no one trusted went to all the radio stations and shouted from the center of the city that he alone would take on the burden of keeping their world alive each night. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll dream of everything for you. I know every corner of this city by heart. Close your eyes at night and know that you are free.’ ”
From then on, everyone in the city believed they were free to dream about foreign lands, countries they had read about or that had never existed, the lovers they hadn’t met yet, the better husbands or wives they wished they had, the bigger houses they wanted to live in someday. The people gave that young man their lives without knowing it. They had given him all the power he wanted, and even though they didn’t know it, they had made him their king.
Weeks, months, and then years went by. People dreamed of living on the moon and the sun. They dreamed of castles built on clouds, of children who never cried, and while they dreamed each night, their king erased a part of the city. A park disappeared in the middle of the night. A hill that had the best view over the city vanished. Streets and then homes were erased before dawn. Soon the people who complained about the changes went missing. One morning, everyone woke to find all the radio stations and libraries gone. A secret meeting was held that afternoon, and it was agreed that the city should go back to the way it had been before. But by then no one could remember what the city had looked like — buildings had been moved, street names were changed, the man who ran the grocery store on the busy intersection had vanished. There was another problem as well. When asked to describe what the city looked like now, no one could say for certain if Avenue Marcel and Independence Boulevard still intersected, if the French café owned by a Mr. Scipion had closed or merely moved to a different corner. It was years since anyone had looked at the city closely — at first because they were free to forget it, and later because they were embarrassed and then too afraid to see what they had let it become.