The Pulse

in the perpetual light pollution of the city now filled the sky in the gaps between surrounding trees and houses, providing the only illumination to be seen other than a few candles and battery-powered flashlights visible through some of the nearby windows. Casey wasn’t afraid of the dark, but this complete absence of electric-powered lights was just creepy in such a dense urban environment. Adding to the closed-in feeling of near complete darkness was the unsettling quiet caused by the lack of automobile traffic and other mechanized sounds. She had not been aware until now of how pervasive the constant hum of machinery in the city had been until it was silenced, and now she heard human voices from the streets and nearby buildings that would have been drowned in the background noise before. They each stood looking and listening, lost in their private thoughts for a few moments, saying nothing until Grant suggested they go in and eat something.

Inside the apartment, Grant’s battery-powered lantern illuminated the small living room where he had begun sorting through his camping gear and organizing it into several piles according to each item’s priority. Casey was surprised at how much stuff he had, and wondered how they were supposed to carry all this on bicycles if they really had to leave the city that way. Once the compact sleeping bags and other items were unpacked from the duffel bags he kept them in, Grant’s equipment practically filled the room. Casey had only been camping a couple of times with her dad, and that had been years ago in a state park campground where they were able to set up the tent just a few feet from the car. There had been hot showers and vending machines, as well as lots of other friendly people around. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to camp along the road while riding bicycles, as Grant suggested, since 90 miles would be too far for them to travel in a day. Unlike Jessica, she could see that it was possible to ride that far, but she sure hoped they wouldn’t have to. Casey still held out hope that they would wake up in the morning and the lights would be back on—just as they had been after a tornado had ripped through the neighborhood and taken down the power lines when she was a little girl. Grant was convinced this couldn’t happen.

“This is different than any kind of conventional wind storm or lightning damage,” he said. He went on to explain that though wind can blow down power poles or trees and take out big areas of service by disrupting the transmission lines, and lightning can short out transformers and destroy other components along the lines or at the power sub-stations, the areas of damage in both cases are usually pretty limited. Katrina was an exception, to be sure, he said, because the power grid throughout most of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama was taken out in a single day by that storm. It took a staggering amount of work to get all those power lines that were pulled down by falling trees rebuilt and back online, even with utility companies from all over America pouring into the region and crews working around the clock for weeks. In some of the hardest-hit areas, it took nearly two months to get all the power restored—and that was with the resources to do it. Plenty of replacement parts were available everywhere outside the hurricane damage zone, as well as running vehicles and manpower to operate them and do the work. Grant asked them both, if this solar storm or whatever it was took out a bigger area than Katrina had, maybe even most of the United States, where were the crews and parts going to come from? “I don’t think we need to entertain false hope that this is going to be fixed any time soon,” he said.

“So you think it could be a few weeks before they can get it fixed?” Casey asked.

“No, I don’t even see that happening, more like a few months if I had to guess. But we really just don’t know the extent of it, so who knows?”

“I can’t just sit in some cabin in the woods for months,” Jessica said. “How am I supposed to let my parents know I’m okay? How am I supposed to know if they’re okay? And how is Casey’s dad going to get home? And if he does get back here, how will he find us?”

Grant was about to answer when he was interrupted by a loud banging on the door that startled all three of them. He picked up the long machete that he had shown them earlier—another souvenir from his trips to the South American jungles—and walked over to the door.

“Who is it?” he asked, before reaching for the knob.

“Is Jessica in there? She’s supposed to be at this address,” an impatient voice on the other side demanded.

“Joey!” Jessica jumped up.

After glancing in her direction and seeing it was obvious she knew his voice, Grant opened the door and introduced himself to the visitor standing on the porch. Joey looked as if he had been drinking all day, which he had. He was holding a beer in one hand and half a six-pack of cans dangling in their plastic rings in the other. He was wearing a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, flip-flops, and shorts, and looked as if he were coming to yet another in a long series of parties.

“I’ve been looking for you all afternoon!” he said to Jessica as he pushed past Grant, barely acknowledging him. “I thought you would stay home until I got back, or at least stay at Casey’s.”

“Well, I guess you can see that the lights are out, Joey. What was I supposed to do, sit there in the dark?”

“We came over here because my friend Grant has all this stuff,” Casey said, pointing out the lantern, the piles of gear, and the bags of groceries they had bought earlier that day.

Joey glanced around the room at all the gear and the three bicycles leaned against walls where they had brought them inside to keep them from getting stolen. “You must be a freakin’ Boy Scout, huh?” he said to Grant. “What the fuck are you gonna do with all this shit?”

“We were just making plans to evacuate the city,” Grant said calmly. “Things are not going to get better here before they get a lot worse.”

“That’s bullshit! I don’t know why everybody’s tripping out about a little blackout. They’ll have the lights back on tomorrow or the next day. Besides, how the fuck are you going to evacuate when nobody’s car will run? Mine sure won’t. They say we’re all gonna to have to get new computers in them because they’re fried. All we can do is wait ’til the lights come on and the parts stores open.”

“I don’t think they’re going to get this fixed any time soon, Joey.” Casey said. “Stop and think about it for a minute. What could we do if we stay here? What are we going to eat? The stores are already running out of everything.”

“Well, they still had beer back at the Circle K a while ago, even if it was just Coors Lite piss. But I’ve got a half a case of Abita back at my house, and plenty of sandwich stuff and chips. Come on, Jessica. Let’s go home. I can think of things we can do without lights.”

“I’m not walking all the way back to your house tonight, Joey. It’s too far in this dark. I’m staying here, and you should too. I don’t want anything to drink. I’m scared and I just want to be with friends until it’s daylight again. You need to just stay here with me; I’m not leaving tonight.”

Joey put up an argument but seeing that Jessica was not going to change her mind, he acquiesced, and opened another beer for himself when no one took him up on his offer to share the three that remained. Casey could tell that Grant would have been happy to see him go and she would have too, but since Jessica wanted him there Grant offered the two of them his room, where the only bed in the apartment was located. Then he stretched out his sleeping bag on the living room floor, giving Casey the couch, which was a bit narrow, but comfortable enough. Casey spent at least another hour awake that first night, lying in the darkness listening to Grant’s steady breathing from the floor and thinking of her dad, wondering if he and Larry had made it to land yet, and if so, if they had found the electricity still on in the islands. She also thought about how strange it was that here she was sleeping on the couch in Grant’s apartment, just a few feet away from him—a guy she barely knew but had thought about often since first meeting him. It was so strange how circumstances had brought them together in a situation where almost anything could happen. So much had happened already since she woke up this morning, she could barely comprehend it, and if this much could change in one day, she wondered what might be in store the next morning. Sleep did come at last despite her worries. When she woke and sat up on the couch it was daylight, and Grant was standing in the apartment’s tiny kitchen, pouring hot water he had boiled on his propane camp stove into a French press sitting next to it on the counter.

“Coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” he said when he looked her way and saw that she was stirring.

“That sounds great! Good thing you had that stove.”

“Yeah, I would imagine quite a few folks here in the city are going to be doing without their morning brew today.”

“Are they still asleep?” Casey asked, nodding towards the closed bedroom door.

“I guess. I haven’t heard anything from them.”