In a Perfect World

also backed up for miles, at least it was moving.

As she drove, Jiselle could see to the left and right that the streets sprawling out around the freeway were completely dark. The windows of the houses were black, causing her to waver a bit in her hope that the power outage had affected only the city, that they would reach home to find heat, lights, television. How long, if the power was out, might it stay out?

Jiselle closed her eyes briefly, and then snapped them open when a truck pulled up next to her and blew its bullhorn—impotently, furiously—waking the children. Sara sputtered to life, coughing. Camilla blinked, looking around as if she had been peacefully asleep for many years. Sam, still holding his Game Boy, sat up and said, “This scares me.”

Jiselle reached behind her, patted his knee. “Nothing to be scared of, Sam,” she said. “People just don’t know how to behave when something unexpected happens. The power will be back on soon. And your dad will be home tomorrow.”

Sam nodded, as if Jiselle knew what she was talking about.

She tried to speed up then, but she had only just managed to bring the Cherokee up to twenty miles per hour when she had to come to a full stop again, when the traffic got too thick, too slow, merging into two lanes from three to avoid a lane of orange cones. She drove a few more miles slowly until Camilla said, “What if the power’s out at home?”

“Well,” Jiselle said, trying to sound optimistic, “we’ll have to light some candles. Do you kids have any flashlights?”

“No,” Camilla and Sara said in unison.

“There’s a Wal-Mart,” Sam said, pointing into the distance.

Jiselle looked in the direction of his index finger, and saw it. Somehow, surrounded by darkness, the Wal- Mart sign had remained lit. Its prisonlike cinderblock had faded into the night, but the parking lot was crowded with cars, and there was no mistaking the brilliance pouring through its automatic glass doors for anything but business as usual.

“There’s always a Wal-Mart,” Camilla said, “and it’s always open.”

Jiselle glanced over at her. Like so many things Camilla said, it was completely noncommittal, completely lacking in emotion or judgment. A statement of fact.

“We’ll get off here,” Jiselle said.

“Good thinking,” Camilla said.

Camilla and Sara waited in the Cherokee while Sam and Jiselle went into Wal-Mart, where flashlights and candles were being sold faster than they could be hauled out of the stockroom. The workers in their red vests were harried and troubled looking. No one understood, it seemed, how the generator that kept the store lit up and operational worked, or how long it would last. A few of the employees seemed to feel cheated.

“Damn,” a pregnant girl in one of the red vests said. “Every store closed for miles around, and Wal-Mart’s still up and running.”

“It can’t last,” an older woman said as Sam and Jiselle stood waiting for the teenage boy who’d gone to the stockroom for more flashlights. “Power’s out from here to the city.”

“I know,” Jiselle said. “We just came from the city.”

The woman continued. “I have a salt-water fish tank at home. Tropicals. They’ve got to have just the right temperature to survive. When I get home, they’ll all be dead.”

“My sea monkeys died,” Sam said sympathetically.

“Oh, poor little boy,” the woman said. “What’s a sea monkey?”

Sam didn’t have time to explain. The lights overhead surged. The cash registers all bleeped and buzzed at the same time. A cheer, and a sigh, and the pregnant girl’s audible groan went up through the store: The real electricity, not the generated electricity, had come back on. The fish tank woman turned away from them, back to the rack of bungee cords she’d been arranging, as if the electricity had flipped a switch somewhere inside her, too. No more time to waste. In fact, the whole celebratory strangeness of the atmosphere of Wal-Mart ended abruptly. The hubbub subsided, and with it the sense of rush and excitement. The crisis was over. Sam said, “Can we still get some flashlights?”

Jiselle looked at him. The rims of his ears were red. She could see his scalp through the soft hair that had grown back on his head. She said, “Of course.” There was nothing Sam liked more than a new gadget. A can opener would have sufficed, but Jiselle said, “Let’s get a whole bunch.”

“Cool,” he said.

When the stockroom boy emerged from behind the aluminum stockroom doors, bearing nothing, not even looking in their direction, Jiselle called out to him, “Excuse me!”

He turned. “Yeah?”

“Were there any flashlights back there?”

The boy looked at her blankly. “You still want ’em?”

“Yes,” Jiselle said.

Of course—for the next time, or just in case. Shouldn’t that be obvious? Wouldn’t anyone who’d come into Wal-Mart during a power outage, owning no flashlight, still want one?

No, it seemed. The boy in the red vest pointed to the shelf that had been empty of flashlights only moments before. They were back, returned by customers who’d decided they weren’t needed. The plastic packages had been shoved sloppily on to the hooks they’d been taken from or thrown down below the hooks. “Well, there you go,” the boy said. “Help yourself.”

Sam picked out two red ones, two blue ones, and a yellow one. Jiselle grabbed some matches and batteries on the way to the front of the store, to the register, where there was no line. The cashier was a small man, shorter even than Sam, with a long gray beard and a brilliant flash of gold in the center of his smile. “Somebody’s thinking ahead,” he said to Sam and Jiselle approvingly. He took the money, slipped it into the cash register, handed Sam the bag of flashlights. “Just you wait, folks. You’re going to be needing these.”

He said it with such authority that it crossed Jiselle’s mind that this little man in his red vest was the one in charge of the power grid. That he knew something they didn’t.

No sooner had they reached the electric doors to Wal-Mart, bearing their plastic bags, than the power surged, brightening strangely, before the lights went out again just as the door slid open, this time plunging Wal- Mart into total darkness.

Jiselle grabbed Sam’s arm, hurrying him away from the doors, which hesitated once and then closed with an electrical finality behind them. “Shit!” someone shouted from inside the store, and there were more shouts following it—curses, cries of dismay, protest, exasperation, disbelief muffled by the glass between the world and Wal-Mart.

At home, as Jiselle had feared, there were no lights. She used her flashlight to make Sam and herself some peanut butter sandwiches for dinner in the kitchen. Camilla and Sara both said they weren’t hungry and disappeared into the darkness of their rooms.

Jiselle lit a candle, put it on the table, and turned on the radio. Apparently the outage had swept the Midwest to the East Coast. A power grid problem. “The infrastructure of this country is collapsing!” a caller to WAVT shouted. “This isn’t the weather; this is a collapse of a culture!” On another station a caller blamed the outage on the flu. “People are dying! We’re not going to be able to keep the lights on!”

Jiselle snapped the radio off so Sam wouldn’t hear. In the flickering light across from her, he looked like a figment of a fevered imagination—the light leaping around on his face giving him the appearance of something made of fire, made of pure energy.

“Won’t it get cold?” he asked.

“I’ll build a fire,” Jiselle said, “after it gets cold, if the power doesn’t come back on. It’ll be cozy.”

She tried to sound like someone with a plan, but she was hoping that the power would come back on before she needed to build a fire, since she’d never built one before—and, in fact, Mark had warned her not to. “There’s something wrong with this flue,” he’d said one day, leaning into the fireplace, looking up. “I don’t want to risk the ashes or flames blowing back on you. Don’t use the