I opened my eyes and turned around to find my neighbour looking at me from her window. I looked down, at her stillsurviving plant, the branches stripped bare because my grandchildren had torn off all the flowers one day. When I looked back she was gone, but she had left her window open, for the first time in a long while. For a moment, I saw a wind steal in to lift the curtains of her house, and I could see the curtain trimmings, the powerless, domestic lace. And like an answer or a question the warm amber lights in her living room came on.
DUELThere is this light that I see each night before I sleep. As I lie on my bed, it is the only bedroom light that is still burning on the black-cliffed block across the street. I’m guessing that my bedroom is the only other one that has its light on at that hour. My bedroom is on the second floor, the other person’s is on the eighth. Between them, I imagine a causeway of light through which those things attracted to light can make their pilgrimages. Moths, for example.
Kamikaze window-crashing beetles.
Horny winged ants.
Unidentified flying six-legged objects.
It bothers me sometimes what the person might be doing up so late. For me, I have a completely valid reason. I take long naps in the day. At night, I watch television until the Sellavision infomercials come on, where enthusiastic people try to sell you things by dropping their jaws or exclaiming, “That’s unbelievable!” I watch until it starts getting unreal, where alone in a sparsely furnished living room you witness how a blonde American woman with fluorescent teeth is showing off her fantastic abdominals on Venice Beach. I watch until the sense creeps in that I am sitting at the opposite end of the world and that it’s only a satellite, like a church pastor, who’s brought me and Miss Six-Pack together. Then I switch off the TV, usually with some wry comment to myself. I do this not so much because I’m afraid of the silence that sheets all afterthoughts, or the sight of the television screen, a ghostly square in the dark, still with an illusionary half-light. I do it the way cartoon characters go “That’s all folks” at the end of the show. Just the other night I was switching off the television and saying “Why the hell is the audience clapping like that, it’s like they’re on drugs,” and then making the remark, “What am I saying? I’m the one on drugs.” Then I’d laugh. At first it scared me to laugh all by myself, but when I later decided that I wasn’t laughing at myself I found it very comforting.
Anyway, after television I would stay in my room trying to read something or else, just thinking about things. I’d have my thinking pose, which was to lay the back of my head on my palms. I’d imagine that my armpits were sensitive information centres that picked up thought waves from the air. Like my mother’s death, for example. Ovarian cancer at 55, she left behind everything to her only son. I sold the Honda because I couldn’t drive and didn’t feel like learning, and kept everything else. I never told her about my condition, of course, because how do you break the news to someone whose precious waking hours were spent complaining of pain? I wondered sometimes whether pain was more bearable if you kept on talking about it. Come to think of it, we never had any important conversations as I kept watch by her hospital bed. She had her mood swings, which I blamed on the painkillers she took. Sometimes she would say, “I’m sorry that I’m doing this to you,” and sometimes she would tell me, “Why don’t you just go and bring home girls, there’s nobody around to nag at you anyway. I never asked you to be here. I never asked for anything from you in all my life.” One day it would be, “I can’t remember what my mother was wearing when she passed away,” and the next day she’d yell, “Can you stop staring at me as if I’m going to die?”
However there was one day when she woke up with a start, and reached for my hand. “I was dreaming of you,” she said. “Why did I dream of you when you’re sitting right here by my bed?” I had asked her then what her dream was all about. “The kind of dream that you can’t forget,” she said. “I dreamt that you were gone.”
Tonight is a special night for me. The thing is that, the light at the bedroom I was talking about had been bothering me for the past two weeks. Somehow or the other it seemed to challenge me. Each night while on my bed, I would watch for it to turn off, but it never did. I would be the one to surrender, falling asleep to wake up sometime before dawn to switch off the lights. By then, the other person’s lights would have gone out.
There was even one night when I decided to keep a whole night’s vigil. I drank two cups of Nescafé and laid still on my bed, watching his stark fluorescent ceiling lamp persist throughout the night. To occupy myself, I reached my hand out for the curtain and played peek-a-boo with the light. The novelty of that wore off within minutes, and that was when I started inventing stories for my oblivious late night companion.
He was a chronic insomniac, and just like me he didn’t wear a shirt to sleep, kept his windows
