When the power goes out, I think to myself, oh, all right. If the universe wants me to flop down on the couch and read a trashy behind-the-scenes book about the O.J. Simpson defense instead of answering emails, so be it. It’ll come back on in a few minutes.

It doesn’t. It tries; my alarm clock keeps doing that “twelve twelve twel– oops, no. Oh, wait, twelve! Twelve twelve…no…twelve? Twelve! Sorry, my mistake” thing, and my fur-clogged printer is grinding away, trying to start itself over and over. Do you mind, printer? Trying to digest DNA evidence over here. I turn the printer off and sit back down on the couch. Then I get back up and check the fuse box. Nothing out of order.

Still with the grinding noise, except now it’s coming from the hall. The hell? I stick my head out and find half my neighbors out in the dim emergency light, staring with furrowed brows at the elevator, which is going through every gear in its arsenal trying to heave itself up to the nearest floor, and failing. I go back inside. It’ll probably come back on soon. I turn off the AC and a few lights.

The grinding stops, but now the apartment is filled with the sound of sirens and honking — not exactly unprecedented in this neighborhood, but at this hour, on a Thursday? What exactly is going on down there? I press my face to the window (I would open it, but I don’t want let the cool air out) to try to see down to 34th Street, but it doesn’t work. I remember the time I heard a bunch of honking and yelling late at night, and I ran downstairs preparing myself for a crime scene and found the circus crossing the city instead — a whole line of peaceful elephants and tiny ponies marching the avenue nose to tail.

After a few minutes, the sirens and the honking die down. I go back to my book. Then the sirens start again, more of them this time, and the honking, which seems to have changed in timbre from “bitchy” to “panicked.” I tell myself it’s nothing, probably just an overheated cab in the intersection or a messy fender-bender, but the cats have taken up listening posts by the door. Given that After-Lunch Naptime is scheduled to last another two hours, I do not take wakeful cats as a good sign. Something is going on out there.

I force myself back into my book, but after I read the same sentence seven or eight times, I put the book down, take a deep breath, and walk back to the window. Please, I say out loud. I force my eyes up to the Empire State Building. The big candle looks just fine — no smoke, no visible flames. Time to call out and see what’s happening, but I can’t get through on my cell no matter which number I try. “System busy.” The last time I kept getting “system busy”…something is going on out there, for sure. Something bad.

I get my dad out in Jersey on the land line. When I find out what’s actually going on — it’s a massive power outage, it’s probably not terrorism, the city should have juice by tonight — I realize that every muscle in my body is rigid. If I’d had to bundle up the cats and grab a fistful of clean undies and head for the hills…I dig up a dusty box of candles, grab a Diet Coke out of the darkened fridge, and start calling the phone chain to see if everyone’s okay.

Just as the light is starting to go, Tempus shows up with beer. He’s trooped up nine flights, and he’s drenched. It’s not awful in my apartment, yet, but the air isn’t moving much and it’s still pretty hot outside. We chuck the beer into the freezer, and I try to interest Tempus in a perishable snack.

“Shredded cheese? With, uh, mayo?”
“No thanks.”
“Cranberry-ketchup cocktail? I can just throw it in the blender with some mushr– oh. Shit.”

It’s all a grand adventure so far — candles in the kitchen sink and the bathtub, cats stalking around in the dusk and acting all important about it. I read, getting sweaty but feeling quite virtuous about my suffering. I pee by flickering candlelight, and when I flush, the toilet sounds a little put out by the whole thing, but I figure it only sounds that way because it’s so quiet in the neighborhood — no air conditioners running, no ambient hum, just sirens and the occasional muttered “I can’t see the ow dammit” from the hallway.

Tempus goes back down to street level to check things out. I stay inside; it’s hot, I have cramps, and I’ve spent enough time in that stairwell to know that, even under normal conditions, it smells like the rotted offspring of a pickle and a pork loin. I light a couple of candles instead, and nibble a cookie. Dad calls in; the power should go back on at midnight, he heard. Hey, no rush. We’ve got beer. We’ve got grand adventure. Really, it’s fine. Don’t get up.

Tempus returns. It’s a block party downstairs, he says. Everyone’s on camp chairs out front, eating ice cream. Now he wants to go up to the roof. I tell him to go on ahead, and off he goes, up nineteen flights. Hobey and I laze on the windowsill and watch the candles starting to appear in the windows. Little Joe stalks a bug.

I finish my beer and realize that I need to pee again, and it’s right about now that the first tiny pinhole appears in the balloon of grand adventure. I pee. I flush. The pee goes down with an ominously final series of glugs, a few inches of water slink sheepishly into the bowl, and…that’s it. The tank doesn’t fill.

Ohhhh-kay.

I try the sink taps. Nothing. Nothing in the kitchen either. The “drinkable” water in the house now consists of 1) a three-quarters-full glass of lukewarm tap water and 2) a pet dish with a bloated kibble fragment drowning in it. But hey — grand adventure! Only until midnight! No problem!

Tempus is back. It’s really nice up on the roof, he reports; you can see candles in all the windows, and we should go up later. It does sound really nice, but my enthusiasm for climbing two thirds of the building in the eighty-five-degree dark when I smoke a pack a day is, needless to say, limited. I agree to check it out later while hoping that the power goes back on before I have to actually do it, or that I can guilt Tempus into a piggyback ride somehow.

“Oh, by the way, the water’s off.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Yeah. Wait — ‘yeah’?”
“You do know it takes an electric pump to get water up here, right?”
“I…yeah! Yeah, of course I knew that. Of course.”

I didn’t know that, at all, and didn’t want to, but it’s only a few hours, so whatever. We set up the Scrabble board.

“‘Snarer’?”
“What’s wrong with –”
“Never mind, never mind, it’s fine.”
“It’s a word.”
“No, I know. It’s fine, forget I said anything.”
“I’ll do something else.”
“I said it’s fine! You should do ‘snarer.'”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s what supposed to mean? Just do ‘snarer’!”
“Okay, okay! All right, that’s one, four, five, six times two is twelve, plus one, two –”
“WHAT?”
“For the second word? At the end of ‘snarer’?”
“Oh, thaaaaaat’s just greeeeeaaat.”
“You know, you played ‘aa’ and I didn’t say anyth –”
“‘Aa’ is an actual word in the actual dictionary, Mr. — Mr. — Suffix Pants, first of all, and second of all, I did not steal a double word score that other people planned to –”
“Fine, fine, I won’t play it.”
“Ohhhh no you don’t. I don’t need your pity. Play it.”
“Fine. Okay, six times two is twelve, plus one, two, five –”
“I cannot believe you’re actually playing it.”
“Seventeen.”
“I hate you.”
“You told me to –”
“Hate!”

It’s getting stifling inside, and now we both have eye strain. Tempus insists that it’s cooler on the roof, and that we can climb slowly if I want to. I don’t want to climb at all, but if we do climb, I want to bomb up the stairs and get it over with. In the stairwell, where the sodium lights still give off a little bit of green glow, we charge up all nineteen flights in about ten minutes. At the top, I have an attack of sex legs and stagger into a chair with every muscle screeching, but once my heart stops pounding, it’s quite a view — or a non-view, really. The buildings that usually light up the night sky now darken it, just shadowy shapes. The Empire State Building is completely dark; the Chrysler Building has a single yellow light on at the top. A group of guys lies on lounge chairs and talks about the Mets, and once in a while, in the dark, we hear the “kssssshhh” of a can of beer opening. And…stars. Plural. Stars in the sky above Manhattan. Whole constellations, in fact. It’s lovely, but unnerving too. I put my feet up and look at the Big Dipper.

Back down we go. It’s harder to navigate going down, and it seems darker. In the apartment, it’s hot and boring. We stretch out on a tapestry in front of the window, waiting for a breeze and playing Leghorn. My dad checks in one last time; by morning for sure, he says.

“This is no reflection on you, but…I’m bored now.”
“Me too.”

Tempus, exhausted from so much clambering up and down, goes to sleep at around midnight. I stay up a little while longer to read, then blow out all the candles and stretch out next to him. Little Joe is all Walter Mitty at the other end of the apartment, pretending he’s a panther. Hobey curls up next to my hip.

Six-thirty the next morning. I open one eye and peer at the cable box. It’s dark. No power. I get up to pee, pee, and flush without thinking, but of course nothing happens, and I have the tube of toothpaste aimed at the brush before I remember that I can’t brush my teeth either. No problem, I’ve got mouthwash. Swishing the Scope, I wrinkle my nose — now, what’s that smell? Oh. It’s me. Wonderful.

I need water, and Tempus needs to get home, so I jam fifteen barrettes into my head and out we go. It’s pitch-black in the hallway now, and in the stairwell, because the sodium lights have given out. Tempus holds my Zippo and we scramble downstairs, and by the time we burst into the lobby, he has a burn on his finger and the Zippo is nearly out of fuel. We survey the streets for a moment — the traffic cop waving taxis through the light, the snack detritus all over the sidewalk, the commuters zombieing to work. All the women have their hair up in clips, and all the men have baseball hats on. If The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t already have an entry for Largest Group Case Of Bedhead, I think Murray Hill’s got a shot at it. Everyone’s very polite, very friendly, but also very sheepish, because we all look and smell terrible and we all know it. A man walks by, eating pepperoni straight from the casing and drinking milk.

Tempus takes off for home, and I head into The Friendly Deli, which is open but completely out of bottled water. Crap. Lingering by the watermelon display and debating a purchase (at least it has “water” in the name), I spot an overlooked bottle of Perrier. It’s dusty, and it’s warm, but it’s dusty warm Perrier or nothing, so I buy it and grab some matches. The rumor in the checkout line is that everyone above 79th has power, so it’s only a matter of time before ours gets turned on too. Ten o’clock, eleven at the latest.

In the stairwell, my matches won’t stay lit longer than a step or two. Okay, I can just feel my way up, right? Wrong. When I say it’s dark in the stairwell, I mean “dark” in the “complete absence of any light” sense. It’s not “hard to see” in the stairwell so much as that there is no seeing at all. It’s completely, profoundly black. I falter up half a flight, and then the dizziness hits, and it’s not dehydration or claustrophobia; it’s because I can’t see. I have an inner ear condition that forces me to rely heavily on visual cues in order to keep my balance, so without any of those cues, my physical-bearings system is going haywire. I manage to fumble out a cigarette and light the filter end of it, and that buys me a flight, but halfway between the fourth and fifth floors, the butt winks out. I get out the Zippo, still hot from the descent, and order it to cooperate. It lights. I take the stairs two at a time, slam into the ninth-floor hallway, and sprint down to my door, zigzagging like a drunken sailor. I can smell one of my fingernails frying, but it works.

Inside, I throw the Zippo into the sink and lie down on the couch to catch my breath. I have a wicked headache that means my capillaries want caffeine, but coffee is a pipe dream, so I shotgun a still-slightly-cool Diet Coke and lie down for a nap. My dad calls and reports that he has nothing to report. I go back to sleep.

When I get up, the headache is better, but I smell truly offensive — I racked up panic sweat in the stairwell on top of regular sweat. The cats won’t even sit near me, so I slather on two inches of deodorant and change my shirt. Then it’s time for revisions on my hair. Then it’s time to read.

Then it’s time to read.

Then it’s time to gossip with Wing Chun, also powerless and bored up in Toronto.

Then it’s time to read.

Noon. I peer into my pack of cigarettes; three left. I’ll have to ration them, because I dread dealing with the stairwell again. The air is heavy and hot and has started to smell faintly of pee even out here in the main room of the apartment, so I light a stick of incense and wave it around under my arms.

Then it’s time to read.

My dad calls. My dad immediately regrets calling, as my dad is promptly subjected to a top-volume tirade on the subject of Why The Fuck Is That Goddamn Gigantic Cup O’ Noodles In Times Square Lit Up Already When I’m Sitting Here Smelling Like Ass, Drinking Warm Perrier, And Peeing In The Sink.

“Don’t yell at me, I don’t work at Con Ed.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
“So, you’re…peeing in the sink?”
“No. Well, not yet.”

Four o’clock. The toilet situation is beginning to worry me, because twenty-one hours have now elapsed since the last honest flush, with all that that implies. When the water does come back on, how much can I ask of that first flush? Should I start using the wastebasket?

To take my mind off that dilemma, I head out for cigarettes. I remember to bring a candle, and happily, I run into a nice couple from the fourteenth floor bringing their dogs downstairs for a walk, and the husband has a flashlight. We have a very satisfying bitch session on the way down, and then, o happy day, the wife offers to let me use her hand sanitizer. Pouring it into my palm and rubbing it on my hands, I nearly weep. It smells so antiseptic, so clean!

Six o’clock. It’s too hot to fume, but I fume anyway; I have nothing else to entertain me. Why does every damn neighborhood but mine seem to have power? What the hell is going on? How did something like this happen in 2003, anyway? Why can’t they funnel some wattage from the despised Cup O’ Noodles over to my building? Gaaahhhhh!

Tempus calls. He has power and water, and invites me over to enjoy them both. I’d gladly accept, but I have exactly three dollars left and no working ATMs in my neighborhood, so I’d have to walk, and that’s just not going to happen. I tell him to call me in an hour or two, and I retire to the couch for a nice, long, smelly sulk.

I should take advantage of the last of the natural light to read, but my uncaffeinated head is pounding again, so I put the last cold-ish Diet Coke behind my neck and stretch out for another nap. It’s getting cooler again, a little, and I try to find a silver lining — at least you didn’t get stuck in the subway. At least you didn’t have to walk to Hackensack. At least you don’t live on 25, or in Cleveland.

I drowse. The cats drowse. Then, at around 7:45, I hear it. It’s faint, but unmistakable.

It’s a “woo.”

Then I hear another one, louder, four or five people at once. I sit up on the couch right as a big old neighborhood-wide “WOOOOOO HOO!” swells and breaks over the building like a wave. I run to my window and see all the lights going on and add my own “woo,” and then I bound into the kitchen and flip the wall switch. The light goes on.

Everything works. The lights work. The AC works. The fan, God bless it, and the little lamp in the shape of a frog, and the cable box, and all the appliances chanting, “Twelve! Twelve! Twelve!”

I wait for the water to look alive in the kitchen, and then, fearfully, I approach the toilet. I open the lid, clap a hand over my eyes, flush, and peer through my fingers. Glug…glug…glug? Glug! Success! Flush achieved! I caper around in the bathroom, overjoyed, and promise indoor plumbing that I’ll never take it for granted again.

On the radio (God bless the radio), the governor tells us to take it easy on the grid for a while. So, after taking a shower — cold, because the hot water heater hasn’t gotten its act together, but I don’t care — I turn off all the lights and dry my hair. Then I turn on one light and get dressed, and I turn that light off and answer email, and I turn the computer off and turn the fan on, and I sit in front of the fan with a beer that hasn’t quite gotten cold again yet, in the dark, admiring the big candle’s bright white light out my window. I could turn a light on, and therefore I don’t need to turn a light on. Tempus comes over, and we go out to a bar, and the bar has the jukebox and all the TVs on, and we drink the only beer they have cold, Budweiser in the can, and formulate our big plan for the evening, to wit: playing Scrabble on the floor directly in front of the AC.

“‘Qi’?”
“It is a word. Do not start.”
“If you say so.”
“Webster’s says so.”
“Webster’s is drunk.”
“Fine, fine, I’ll play something else.”
“Yeah, you do that.”
“There. Happy now?”
“Um.”
“Look, if you won’t let me play ‘qi’ –”
“Well, then I’m obviously not going to let you play ‘qkp’! How would you even pronounce that?”
“Oh, let me see. I believe it’s something like ‘this is what happens when you hog all the U tiles, jackass.'”
“I did not hog them.”
“Oh, you hogged, all right.”
“Whatever. Fine. Just do ‘qi.'”
“I will.”
“Fine.”
“Fine!”
“Fine!”

August 18, 2003

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