Blackout

by Erica N. Cardwell

The sky is black. I insist stars.

“Oh! Oh you can see some!”

A chuckle hits my ear in rightful disbelief. My mother managed to get through, to hear her daughter’s laughter. I couldn’t tell which direction her pendulum swung. Always seeing what she wants to see, she must have thought.

The northeast blackout of 2003 happened the same summer that my mother died. I spent the evening on a rooftop in Murray Hill, counting the speckles in the indigo ocean above me.

On that night in 2003, I will learn that weightlessness is everywhere. That with no electricity, the city’s stars could finally be seen. That maybe, maybe, someone else saw them, too.  I adjust my position, sinking further into the cool unevenness of that rooftop in Murray Hill, switching phone ears. My mother laughed into the phone when I discussed the stars with her that night, I don’t remember why. Most likely it was disbelief, but I’m keen to consider what I’ve always known her to enjoy about me; the way that I editorialize things, a babbling hyperbole that only a mother could love. In fact, the “why” was unimportant: I laughed, too, mimicking her sound—tender in my gut, an eruption to the tune of a bowled over kindergartener with a smoking habit. This, and the candles, made the night less lonely.

On that night in 2003, I will learn to die. That the blackout isn’t the dying and the dying isn’t the blackout. It is the slow down—the pace that leaves you wandering, the pace that keeps you thinking yourself alive.

*

For the next 17 hours, the packed city streets forced strangers to turn to one another and talk about fear. Do you know when the lights are gonna come back on? drawled out in forced and bashful jumbles, belying the ease we most often pretend. Folks were stranded with the other folks they make small talk with in elevators at work. I heard things won’t be back to normal until the morning. Some showed up on the doorstep of the coworker who hosted last year’s holiday party, “the one in Manhattan” because when the trains stopped everyone had to walk. This calls for a drink, must have been said over a thousand times, by the smartest and most carefree, the folks that understood the moment’s emotion, a now-relic of only fifteen years.

I was with a motley crew of coworkers from the restaurant—an intimate 10 Things I Hate About You bunch of theater majors fixated on the early millennial pulse of fame. I was an odd tag-a-long who made them uncomfortable with my unusual comments and naive flirting. Which is why I stayed on the roof for as long as I could. We had spent our breakfast shifts hustling toast at an upscale diner, and because we were children still, the restaurant was the first place we went to when the city went dark. This apartment was just a few blocks away. I was brown shoulders and pink leather lips by then, increasingly more aware that the city was raising me.

But Manhattan is young, a child, regressing now, like a pack of toddlers let loose in a room full of pots and pans; a noise that is most certainly always there, now amplifed by the absence of light, a darkness that extended to the East River and angled its way down to Chinatown. The sound entangled my impulsive core, making me want to dance. I’m sure that if I flung myself onto another rooftop, I would have found the party that I was looking for. But the rejection preoccupied me, the infatuation with the cute boys, the friendships where I didn’t recognize the intimate humor. Even though these people didn’t want me around, there was little choice. My apartment in Astoria was too far, the subways and buses weren’t working and the sidewalks were dangerously crowded. I didn’t want to walk home because I didn’t think that I knew how to get home. At any rate, I’d long been hard-wired at over-staying my welcome. On the roof, I could hear other voices, trading the strain of the disconnect for all the delicious possibilities in this advantageously long night—heating up dinner with grills on their fire escapes or snuggling under blankets until sunrise. At that time, being alone in New York was eager for this tension: a willingness to observe desire troubled by a willingness to pursue risk. 

Before the blackout, I had been napping in Union Square Park, a typical resting place after my early shift and before my late night stage manager gig at an off-off-off Broadway theater. There was never enough time to go home to Queens to nap between jobs in Manhattan. A few of my coworkers had followed me to the park, but when they saw that I was readying myself for a nap, they whispered to each other and quickly retreated. Unbothered, I tilted my head down, next to my tiny black shoes—Chinese slippers from Pearl River Mart, at its original location below Grand across the street from the Women Make Movies loft.

In the park that day, she wasn’t dead yet, and the romantic serendipity of Manhattan was still interesting. A stale coffee sat nestled in the warm city earth next to me. I learned how to drink coffee from standing in line at a bodega—light and sweet. The sugar crystals floated around my tongue and rested inside my gums, while I busied myself with perfecting the premature dour of the abandoned. With a chin resting pertly above the Village Voice classifieds, I watched. Which white boy will look at me, fluttered my eyelashes to the tune of reliable notes.

“The lights went out!” cried a voice in the park.

The doors of Virgin Megastore swung open, spewing people out like the insides of a squeezed tube of toothpaste. My Village Voice crunched underneath me as I flopped onto my belly to ask someone what happened.

Did my life begin when my mother died, or in New York?

The following morning all of the newspapers featured a morning view of the city skyline encased in black, then sunrise. Its orange haze portrayed the rippling soul of reawakened rhythm and a return to chaos. The lights were back on and the black was like a dream, a moment that I remembered only in the presence of that image. A friend kept the New York Times cover. It depicted the cityscape, breaths before daylight. He kept the image taped to his kitchen wall for several years, in a worthy claim that we survived something.

The blackout ended after one night, but I stayed out for three, making my way from the heady assholes in Murray Hill to a friend’s place on the Upper East Side. I would speak about this friend in rumored tones, as if Kim were an imaginary friend, a myth, called into existence. Her white body was small—a shorter, sexier version of a Barbie, yet more of an old fashioned doll, the freckles on her face coming to a point at the end of her nose. She had several boyfriends, all with enormous penises that wouldn’t fit comfortably inside of her tiny vagina. She told me this over beer six or seven, in elaborate comedic rants, or confiding while we marched down sunny 3rd avenue, bloated and ignorant starlets. I even accompanied her to the tanning salon and waited while her skin boiled into a peach-y neon orange. I want to be your color, she explained in a whisper, skimming her ivory fingers across my brown, lotion-soft skin. We knew nothing about one another. When we were together, our only concern was the performance.

The first morning after the black out, the MTA ran the buses for free; a gesture reminiscent of 9/11, only two summers before. Each bus inched uptown like a centipede fat in the middle, the arms and legs of pedestrians dangling out of the windows, toppling and teetering its weight all over the boulevard. The crowd was still thick with bodies and stench—the glory of the free-for-all wearing thin, now sticky with miscellaneous over-thaw. Bottles of beer swam around in large tubs full of crystal-clear water. I watched people jump out of the braided mass to fish out singles from the depths of their pockets, their purses, the sidewalk, for something cold to drink. The previous darkness professed a unity that could be enjoyed for these brief days. Whatever you got is what it cost. Somewhere around 51st street, I got on the bus.

“Hey, sexy.”

Kim lived in a corner apartment on the first floor, a few blocks from the 86th Street 4/5/6 train. I was a smelly little black girl peering into the Upper East Side window of a white girl’s apartment, still naïve to how this appeared. Her window was cracked so I knocked wildly.

 “AAAAA!” She jumped from her seat, faltering back a bit. When she saw me, Kim ran to the window, stopped, rolled her eyes, and sped to the door to let me in, letting her neck lazily whip her head forward to catch up with her.

“Hey.” She said, opening the door to me. “Why’d you do that?” I walked in, quick with ownership, brushing past her.

“Phone’s dead. There’s a blackout, remember?”

The soul in my voice tumbled out in a soft growl. Our energy always began gruff and rude, before it peeled away into tenderness.

“Isn’t it over?”

“Trains aren’t working.”

Kim began to slow herself down, relieved too that I was okay—that I was with her.

“Want a beer?”

Most of our evenings involved a waiting game. Whether we were playing cards or ridiculous college beer games, I could always be found by her side, addicted to her presence. Always by night’s end, Kim and I would collapse into her day bed, with its graceful white wrought iron railing. Our bellies were inflated piggy banks of beer, clanging against sheets. The boys were sent home by then, or to another party, so we could pass out, and start a new very similar day. I loved our messy disregard; our priority for the superficial. The fact that she was a white girl and I was not, fell right in line with my denial of this charade during those tirelessly formative years. Her gaze—the ability to be appealing and apathetic—was incredibly fascinating to me. When I was with Kim, I could pretend to be that way, too. She saw the world differently. I was a fool, attempting to participate in her perspective. That night we fell into our routine. First, on top of the blankets, delirious from dehydration and heat. I would wait to offer my arm. Until her lashes weren’t flapping, until her breathing appeared to relax. Then, I would place my brown arm across her body. Moments later, she would join me, laying her white arm across mine. We woke up in different positions, facing opposite walls or the broad emptiness of her bedroom. Together, we were scene partners; our routine intimacy was never questioned because in some way, this was reality, one that I was living in stolen, liberated fits. The next morning, we feasted on scrambled eggs and fries at a diner—the only foods that survived the lapse in refrigeration that only such darkness can cause.

Two weeks later, my mother died. I never heard from Kim again. Liberty such as this can never be fully recovered; I would become someone else, and the innocence would seek another form.

Erica N. Cardwell is writer, critic, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bomb Magazine, The Believer, Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She teaches writing and social justice at The New School and is a member of the editorial board of Radical Teacher Journal. Visit her at erica-cardwell.com.