Kyra Simone

Bleu Électrique

[an excerpt from Radiant Cities, a novel-in-progress]

Some people in the building slept in rooms with other bodies. At night the bodies became vacant forms, mere shapes that represented people but in fact were impenetrable entities, dumb figurines that one could barely tell were real. Until a mumbled sound was breathed from someone’s mouth, or the lump of sheets shifted with some characteristic motion. Sometimes one body turned and nestled against the other, sometimes it eclipsed the one beside it and buried it with its own weight, stealing all the covers and leaving the other exposed, or wandering away from it into the subconscious. Sometimes a smaller body snuck into the bed between the two bigger bodies and all the shapes laid there together, knowing and not knowing the others were there.

But these were not the only sorts of bodies, nor the only way they could be configured in rooms. No one showed them on television or wrote about them in books, but there were some bodies that never emptied of their spirits, some that laid awake all through the night, with no astral essence projected from them into the ether, no shock of feeling it jolt back into their chests. Many bodies slept in beds alone, some clinging to ghost impressions of a person that wasn’t there. A vast abundance of solitary figures under blankets would never feel the solidarity of others like them in other rooms, clinging to different ghosts but similarly adrift. Some held their childhood dolls on nights when it got too lonely, some woke to find themselves with their arms wrapped around pillows. Some slept on one side of the bed regardless of the fact that there was no one on the other side of it, not knowing if they did this in the spirit of leaving a karmic space for the person that might one day be there, or if it was a clinging to a past someone who would never return. There were some who craved the emptiness and slept at the center of the bed, committed to breeding a certain metaphor of taking up the entire space themselves. And sometimes there was a person who occasionally felt the phantom grip of another presence clinging back, an invisible force from somewhere beyond reaching an arm over their torso for the silk eye mask on the nightstand, brushing the hair from their face, or gathering the blanket over them where they slept. But in the morning one always woke to find no such presence there.

The woman who lived on the top floor was one of these singular bodies. She always watched television before bed. Tucked into the sheets in the dark, past 9pm the only light in the whole house was the blue glow of the screen, faintly flickering in her window if seen from afar. Studies had shown this wasn’t a good habit, that the light emitted from screens could interfere with the brain’s production of melatonin and make it more difficult to fall asleep. It was recommended that one set a cut off time for oneself—no TV after 11pm or within an hour before bedtime. Best practice was to prohibit oneself from watching in the sleeping chamber at all. The woman who lived on the top floor knew all of this, but for whatever reason she couldn’t stop doing it. "If you watch too much television, your eyes will go square,” her mother used to say when she was a girl. Now, as an adult, there were many nights when the images she had stared at for hours crept into her consciousness as she slept, sometimes infiltrating her dreams or her mind during the day. Sometimes she forgot if a thing had happened to her or had only appeared to her in a film. “If my life was a movie, I would walk out or fall asleep,” she remembered someone saying in a television show, a nymphomaniac trying to describe her depression to a therapist. The woman on the top floor had tried using the same line once in college, but the elderly counselor hadn’t had much of a reaction when she said it. Therapists in real life never had as much to say as the therapists on film.

When humanity failed there were other outlets, even if they came in cold hard shapes. In the loneliness of childhood or adulthood, there was always the antidote of a more compelling world, to be had somewhere in the alternate universes of movies and books, a square or rectangular frame one only had to observe or forget oneself in, whether it brought illumination or an escape from a seemingly plotless life. It was possible to pause one's own story and be absorbed into the blue glow. This was the reason the woman on the top floor would never be one of those people who wore special glasses made to protect the eyes from the unfiltered light before bed.

Lately, she had been thinking about a story that had been in the news about a serial rapist. His method was to observe women who lived alone, to watch them from afar for long periods of time and then break into their houses at night without leaving any evidence. Once inside he would assault them and take a single picture of it for his records, then meticulously clean every surface he had touched and erase the scene of any proof that he had been there. The women were usually drugged and some slept through the assault. Some knew something had happened to them, whether they were fully awake for the event or thought it had been a delusional experience they perhaps had only dreamt. Now, in the evenings, when she went around her apartment carrying out the small tasks one attended to at bedtime—turning out the lights and making sure that all the windows were locked—or, as she lay naked in the bath for her quotient of nightly reading, it had occurred to the woman on the top floor, that she was the perfect candidate for such a crime. Sometimes, she checked herself in the mornings to see if anything felt off about her body and each night propped the blinds open with her fingers before bed. Perhaps there was some person watching her out there, keeping track of her patterns and routines, knowing when she took the trash out or pulled back the curtains. She both feared and secretly relished this possibility. It was a dark thought she hadn’t expressed to anyone.

Before retiring to the bedroom at the end of each day, the woman on the top floor liked to stand at her kitchen sink and look out the circular window above it. She stationed herself there to do the dishes after dinner but then lingered for a while. There was a lace curtain that hung over the glass, the kind of thing that could be from another century, a beautiful fraying piece of fabric that one might imagine fluttering poetically in some dramatic period film, as the wife left back home has an interior monologue about the memory of the lover away at war, fingers intertwined as they wander through dreamy fields of grass. Sometimes the woman stood there picturing a face on the other side of the window, the way orphans invent imaginary friends that are really just their own reflections, a desire to know a mirror self that contains all the things one wishes for in a person.

There were certain films she often returned to, though it’s hard to say why. Not all of them were brilliant. Devastated by the late childhood realization that it was impossible to read all the books or see all the movies or visit all the countries that existed in the world, it seemed arbitrary now, which ones of all those things she would actually encounter and why some of them more than once. Sometimes she just wanted something that made her stop thinking, like comfort food or a song whose lyrics hold no bearing yet still makes you want to dance. One of her staples was the famous movie about the woman who dreams of being a card dealer at a big casino, but works as a waitress in a seafood restaurant. She comes home every evening and washes her breasts in the sink to get the smell of fish off her body, a tape deck on the windowsill playing opera music to narrate her motions. In the film, an older man in the facing apartment watches her do this everyday and eventually she knows he is watching. "I watch you,” he tells her, when they are finally in the same room together, striped shadows falling softly through the blinds over their faces as he describes in great detail every step of her ritual, from the blue box of soap she uses, to the way she unbuttons her blouse and runs her hands under the faucet to test the temperature. “I protected you,” he says after the two of them become involved in an epic May-December romance and hatch a scheme to beat the system at the seaside casinos. The man says it as though this “protection” he provides her reinvigorates him with a certain manhood, one that he fears has begun to fade from him in his old age.

This is what the woman on the top floor held onto from the film, though the man later discovers he is unable to protect her, though their love story is ultimately only a passing moment in each of their lives, albeit an awakening. She watched the movie alone at night sometimes. The woman in the film has curly hair like she does. She has beautiful breasts. She lives alone and dreams of greater things. Now, as she played the scene out in her mind again at the sink, the woman on the top floor looked down at her own covered chest. She wondered where these people were. These people who watched. These people who found each other. These stories that emerged one day out of the blue. Washing the single dish used for her solitary dinner, she thought briefly of an older man she once knew years ago and a trip they took together to the Carlsbad Caverns when she was younger.

“This is the only place I haven’t seen yet,” he said to her, as they pulled up to the wooden sign by the side of the road in his old maroon Pontiac, parking in front of the diner that marked the entrance. They had driven through many places she had never seen to get there, through fields of petrified tree stumps and sunset-colored rocks, plants that were as swollen and malformed as balloon animals at a children’s birthday party. It was all gorgeous in its deadness, a place that had been vacuumed of any utility, but still possessed the memory of itself. Approaching from the road one could imagine the faces pressed against car windows that once passed through, kids on family road trips, young men with fantasies of wandering the plains, looking for the adventure worlds from all the songs on their parents’ mixtapes.

Her older man had studied footage of these caverns as a boy—a black and white rendering of the natural wonder told through the lens of an esoteric television series about two young drifters traveling a famous highway. He made her watch the episode about the caverns before they visited the site. In the show, as the drifters arrived in Carlsbad, the opening scene showed a gaggle of men rushing along the endless pathway that spiraled down to the caves, on their way to sabotage an unusual visitor, a scientist from out of town who believed some nuclear apocalypse was coming. There was of course a love story somewhere in the subplot involving one of the drifters and a local woman, along with soliloquies about the end of the world. There was also some great epiphany about the environment and the human soul, how each person was only “a gallery of faces” one could never know completely, followed by a tragic farewell. Everything her older man had seen as a boy on television was in black and white. The worlds his generation was given to imagine were void of color. When he saw the real thing it was more magnificent than the fantasy. For her these terms were different. Everything was a disappointment in reality. All felt like a myth of something that didn’t really exist, enhanced by technology to appear to contain more magic than could be found with the naked eye. Sometimes she longed for a black and white world.

Her older man had given her the boxset collection of the television show about this life he had aspired to in boyhood, but she couldn’t watch the episodes anymore because the device one needed to play them was now obsolete. All she had was the projection in her mind, the real experience of the caverns as they appeared when they visited them together, many years changed since he had viewed them on screen as a boy, and a place she herself had never imagined at all. They had often communicated by sending each other films in the mail, imparting visions to one another of their own distinctly distant eras. She had shelves of unwatchable collections he’d sent to her over time—Garbo and Dietrich, Chaplin, Truffaut. Years passed since they had seen each other now, there was no record of him in any digital archive, no secret folder within a folder on a hard drive in a drawer. She had lost the remaining photos from the trip to the caverns, a roll of real film they had taken with a disposable camera, glossy panoramas one could hold in one’s hands. They were more piercing than the images of people that existed now, all locked behind screens, even further removed from the original moment. There was something to be said for physical objects, for touch over thought, life over cinema. But even these wouldn’t last forever. Digital or analog, the colors would fade from the squares of celluloid, the file become inoperable, its contents to deteriorate to virtual or cosmic dust. Memory still outlasted machinery.  A human life was longer than the duration of any single technology. And yet loss was inevitable, whatever form one clung to. Bodies would die and their vaults of memory with them.

The woman on the top floor didn’t want an old man. She wanted a young one, or one close enough to her own age. It was not just a body she yearned for in the night, but the right body, one that would cling back and let go at the right velocity. Like other people who slept alone, she imagined some automatic kinship that would come from sleeping in a bed with another person. But rarely did one consider the illusion of this togetherness. Few people could actually sleep tangled up in each other. Bodies eventually detached, and even when awake the fact of lying beside someone did not negate the possibility of simultaneously being miles apart. Sometimes this was a greater loneliness than being the only person in a room. It didn’t matter how many bodies surrounded one’s deathbed or occupied one’s house. If everyone died alone, perhaps everyone slept alone. And lived alone too.

Whatever age, whatever century, in color or black and white, the woman on the top floor wanted to be a body that was protected. She wanted to be a body that was observed, her own life a story worthwhile enough to be watched like a film. She wanted people to know that she had suffered and to be recognized for the strength it took to be alone. But there, in the sea of windows to be seen from where she stood again today, there wasn’t a single face looking back at her. No eyes through the blinds, no gangsters in the shadows, no seagulls dispersing from the rooftops of the casinos. All of the windows were as empty as she was, only containing fragments of the same blue light. Perhaps no one was watching her. Perhaps no one had noticed her come and go. Perhaps this was the darkest thought of all.

“I’ll take you to Atlantic City,” said the old man in the movie that night. "We’ll win the jackpot and I’ll be young again.”

As the room around her flooded with blue, the woman on the top floor stood at the sink and began to unbutton her blouse.