Live By The Side Of The Sea by C. David Ray

Live By The Side Of The Sea by C. David Ray

     We endured the dying of the Watchlight before Kelvin, finally, decided that he would go to feed it.

     Grimly, he began to withdraw himself from the boiler circle. We had taken to sleeping in a circle around the boiler, both for warmth and to have the flicker of its fire to distract us from the Watchlight’s own flickering.

     Kelvin seemed intent on going up to the Watchlight without saying another word. I managed to delay him with a non-verbal croak. We had been sitting around the boiler for so long that my throat was dry from the smoke, and both Kelvin and I each left subtle man-shaped reliefs in the dust on the floor when we rose.

     He was stopped with one foot already on the first step up the long, spiral staircase that ascended the body of the lighthouse. One of his palms tightened white around the handrail while the other produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. The cigarette cabinet upstairs, on the commissary level below the living quarters, kept us well-supplied so I was not surprised to see Kelvin’s pack nearly full even though we had not gone upstairs for several days. His lighter, however, had run out, and after flicking it uselessly several times he finally let me light his cigarette for him. Its smoke zigzagged from his trembling fingers.

     In morose silence we smoked to the filters. It was only when he was tamping out his cigarette on the long-blackened sole of his shoe that we spoke.

     “Still don’t think it’s a wall.” He raised his eyes upwards, apparently indicating the Watchlight, whose dimming light spasmed unevenly across the dull stone interior of the lighthouse. “Just can’t take it anymore.”

     I said nothing. I couldn’t even meet his eyes with mine. I understood. The moral arithmetic of it was impenetrable. He was already nearly gone; he’d claimed to have been here the longest among those of us who remained, and he therefore was furthest down the glide-path to decay. I’d seen him tracking the motion of things that weren’t there with his eyes, heard him respond to the whispers and groans that he heard far more than the rest of us, all the symptoms we who remained shared but that he now experienced most acutely.

     Peter had gone before him, and Peter was nothing but splinters by the end. This roughly established the order of our departure. Length of time in the lighthouse roughly correlated with rate and amount of mental collapse, though Peter’s had proven more precipitous, and we all agreed it was because he had gone outside. Nobody held it against him. It was a worthwhile experiment, and we were effusive with our gratitude when he decided to go up to the Watchlight knowing it was his venture outside that had put him there before Kelvin.

     Without Kelvin we would be down to five, though we expected replacements to arrive soon enough. Kelvin had claimed that he was tending the wires connecting the dumbwaiter to the fusion reactor when Peter had arrived, and then Elise, then Pablo, then myself, and I witnessed Pavel’s arrival. As such, I could at least confirm that Pavel’s arrival had been like mine.

     The others were unanimous in sternly insisting, perhaps pleading, that I let Pavel – his name not then known to me – sleep as long as possible. It was something of a last kindness, they insisted, and I agreed. The total impossibility of sleep in the first day or two after the first awakening had proven unshakable. Poor Pavel had tried pounding his bald head against the side of the boiler, stooping himself into it again and again like a duck surging its skull into the water for flecks of waterlogged larvae, but this had only produced deep black bruises, and maybe a concussion, but never unconsciousness, no matter how he tried.

     And oh, how he tried.

     “Anyway,” Kelvin continued. And that was it. I returned to the circle of smoke-grayed faces sitting around the boiler and we listened to the dull rhythmic clonging of his footfalls as they died away up each spiraling flight to the commissary, then the living quarters, then the Watchlight level.

     Then a silence.

     There was a moment in that silence where we all looked around to each other, guilty expressions both for the looking and the facial expressions we wore. Between us all there were two faces only: one which said maybe this time nothing will happen, and another which said please for God’s sake let the Watchlight brighten.

     The only sound at the conclusion of his ascent was the slow mechanical grind like the sound of teeth clattering across pavement of the door to the Watchlight opening, and then the softer, almost frictionless glide of the same door back shut. We all held a long inhale, and released it together when light from far overhead cascaded in a great, blazing curtain down the cone of the Lighthouse. Impossibly, cartoonishly, the light expanded down and across the walls scarcely faster than Kelvin would have fallen if he had thrown himself off the railing of the Watchtower level to splatter down here on the concrete floor of the lighthouse instead of feeding it. We had speculated on this, too, without success.

     If Kelvin’s was anything like Peter’s, the Watchlight would blaze bright and healthy for several days before it would, again, begin to flicker and dim. The light offered no comfort otherwise, least of all to Elise, whose face already showed her sullenly mulling over her new place as the senior among us. Now illuminated by the refreshed Watchlight, I could see that a new intensity had replaced the fear I had seen there since I had arrived.

     I rested in one of the rusted metal chairs ringing the boiler for some time. Since we were all waiting for somebody else to speak, nobody spoke, and I could only tolerate this for a few minutes before going up to the commissary to start making dinner.

     How exactly the commissary worked remained unclear to me. Kelvin and Peter had showed me. Like all the floors it was circular, filling most of the width of the lighthouse with a gap between the edge of the floor and the wall. That clear space between the floor and the wall ran all up and down the interior of the lighthouse, and the unequal size of the gaps between each of the three floors and the wall gave the impression that they had been built at different times, possibly by different builders.

     The commissary perimeter was ringed by imitations of appliances but none of them could possibly work. I thought Kelvin and Peter may have already been insane the first time I watched them “prepare dinner.” They moved like children, pretending to chop invisible vegetables, adjusting immobile dials on the non-functional appliance-shaped protrusions from the floor of the commissary, pantomiming the preparation of a meal. I laughed out loud when Peter said we could take a break while the food cooked. I remember how startled they both seemed by the sound of my laughter. We did mechanical chores while the food “cooked” before returning to the commissary. Peter pressed the button to send the empty dumbwaiter down to the boiler level, but when we went down there and Peter opened the gate of the dumbwaiter, three plated, fully-cooked hot meals, with water and coffee, were there for us, and I ate in stupefied silence.

     Tonight I wanted to prepare something to take our minds off of Kelvin. I couldn’t figure out how to tell the commissary that I wanted alcohol. Something brown and cheap that would burn all the way down and make us angry, or make us want to dance, or feel anything other than stupefied defeatism. I worked at it in my mind while preparing the food. While the food cooked I tried pantomiming the unscrewing of a cork, or the preparation of a highball glass with one perfect sphere of ice the way I once enjoyed, or levering the cap of a beer bottle off with the side of the table. I used to open beer bottles with the butt of a lighter, a minor party trick, but I stuck with the motions that should have looked right.

     The food came out exactly as intended, sufficiently rich for enough people that it took the dumbwaiter two trips to bring it all down to us. Plump, pinkish rare steaks, mashed potatoes, and asparagus on their own separate plates, utensils, a couple of packs of cigarettes, all looking and smelling real and rich, except for the disappointing coffee and water.

     I made a few, pathetic attempts at conversation but nobody would have it. Pablo ate quickly and retired without a word, depositing his dishes back into the dumbwaiter with a pronounced clatter of frustration, his footsteps up the stairs deliberate with anger. Elise being next in seniority, and Pavel being last, would give them each their own reasons to be drowning in silence. I couldn’t even get reactions about Kelvin, or any conversation about the schedule of the mechanical chores.

     Partway through my recitation of the order of connections we’d need to stitch over the next few days, something acute and white-hot convulsed through Elise and she surged to her feet.

     “What is wrong with you?” she roared towards me, and I felt something important in the way that sharp, high-pitched voice echoed up through the interior of the lighthouse slowly, as the light from the Watchlight did.

     Since sound travels so much more slowly than light, it was at least two full seconds before the echo of her cry washed down over us like mist falling through fog. Waves propagate more slowly here, I recited internally, though the silence I caused by not responding immediately seemed to make Elise only more agitated.

     “We’re losing our fucking minds here. Kelvin wanted to leave, too. We have to find a way out. The real way out.” The way she looked away from me to Pablo and Pavel each in turn suggested a solicitation for consensus. Hearing none, she took a cigarette from the pack she had left resting on the floor by her chair and lit it. Through a cloud that rushed out of her nostrils, she continued. “We still have enough marbles in our heads to do mechanical chores. I’m not going crazy here, and I’m not feeding the Watchtower.”

     That last part proved striking to me in a way that felt slightly adrenal, the beginnings of panic. Our instructions, such as they were, were unambiguous in this regard:

     You must feed the Watchlight with your bodies or the false vacuum will decay and the universe will die.

     Kelvin, who must have had a scientific profession before the lighthouse, had tried to explain what this meant. “False vacuum” was a term of art in a very complicated kind of physics. Its use in our instructions suggested that their author was at least a competent physicist. Together with the incongruous technological sophistication of the lighthouse – which had a fusion generator and a seemingly-magical dispenser of food and cigarettes, separated by a rickety 19^th century-looking spiral metal staircase and a water boiler for heat – I suspected that the lighthouse had been constructed by forces of incredible technological achievement who had a childish understanding of humans. While they were for all purposes unknowable, I often thought of them as absent-minded parents.

     We also did not know if whatever forces had assembled the lighthouse were the same as whoever had put us there. We never had even a hint of an opportunity to communicate with whomever, or whatever, was responsible for our situation. In this regard the lighthouse was much the same as everywhere else.

     My reply felt meek before I even said it, as if it had worn itself out traveling up my throat. “But our instructions say we’ll die if we don’t.”

     “We’ll die if we do!” Elise’s reasoning was more emphatic than persuasive. We’d only seen our priors enter the Watchlight room; what happened in there was not known to us. I wondered then if Elise was already starting to crackle apart. To suggest that we let everybody die just to avoid following our instructions struck me as irrational. “Why should we die now just to avoid dying later?”

     I found her question to be distressing. Her tone suggested that she found no sacrifice to be worthwhile, that in principal she should prefer to live as long as possible at the expense of everything else. I was also becoming frustrated that Pablo and Pavel weren’t participating. Even quietly acquiescing to the idea of abandoning the Watchlight and our instructions was a betrayal of what I felt to be a compelling moral duty to follow our instructions.

     “Because one of us dying now prevents everybody from dying – everybody.” I hoped a certain profundity to that answer would buy me the time to begin another cigarette, but Elise continued immediately.

     “Bullshit. There is nothing so destructive as what the instructions describe that could be stopped by a lightbulb, even a very big lightbulb-”

     Pablo cut her off with an acute grunt when he rose from the circle around the boiler. He started towards the stairs, but stopped by the boiler. He looked at it for a moment, the look of annoyance his face had assumed during the conversation turned to something more serene. None of us said anything when he reached his hand out and pressed his palm flat against the rust-flaked flank of the boiler. There was a hiss of his skin unspooling, the water in his tissues vaporizing and carrying a convection of annihilated flesh into the air. Sharing the stagnant air with cigarette smoke, the lingering flavors of the food, the foulness of human bodies even alive, it filled the lighthouse completely. I imagined that this was what the interior of a long-occupied coffin smelled like.

     I squeezed my thumb under the other fingers to suppress a retch, forced to imagine my lungs, like the lighthouse, as polluted chambers now brimming with the fetid fog of Pablo’s behavior.

     He seemed able to prevent himself from wincing from what must have been intense pain. Nobody moved or spoke until he was finished. When he withdrew his palm from the boiler, little sinewy strings of melted skin briefly connected them together until they separated far enough. With his other hand on the railing he resumed escalating. We at the bottom of the lighthouse watched him go together, eyes following the sound of his footsteps on the cool metal steps as the circled up one flight, then two, then stopped in the living quarters.

     Pavel, Elise, and I said nothing for the rest of the evening. We each silently concluded it was best to leave Pablo alone for now so we slept down there without making a sound, except for when Elise briefly went upstairs to “get” some water to clean the charred palm-print from the side of the boiler with her shirt.

& & &

     We awoke to Pablo looking down on us from midway up the stairs. “New arrival. New arrival.” I heard him say it several times, each a little louder than the time before it. Without knowing why I pretended not to hear him while Pavel and Elise stirred, keeping my eyes closed and my body curled with my belly facing the boiler. When he reached a “New arrival!” pitch I finally sat up.

     “When?” Elise was already ahead of us. She had been almost non-verbal when I’d first arrived; her seniority seemed to have awoken, or perhaps reconvened, something inside her, and I wondered if she’d been somebody’s boss before coming to the lighthouse.

     Pavel and I followed her, but Pablo stopped her at the top of the stairs and pressed his index finger to his lips. “Quietly.”

     Quietly? “Why?” I whispered hoarsely from behind Pavel. New arrivals were usually so deeply asleep upon arrival that they could only be stirred awake by physically shaking them. Kelvin, Peter, Elise, and Pavel had let me sleep through most of the day.

     “It’s different,” was all Pablo told us. We followed the example of his soft tiptoeing steps back to the second staircase leading up to the living quarters we’d mostly abandoned. The group still used the living quarters when I’d first arrived, but the lowest level with the boiler had proven warmer, and sleeping in proximity to the Watchlight had become increasingly nerve-racking, especially after poor Peter had, in his declining final hours before feeding the Watchlight, suggested that it might be radioactive. None of us believed that it was, but the suspicions Peter planted didn’t rely on real evidence for their power over us.

     Up we crept, carefully silent. One at a time, as their respective heads rose above the level of the floor, I noticed Elise and Pavel each becoming rigid but not apparently agitated or fearful. They had formed a line a couple of steps below the floor, giving the startling impression that they somehow didn’t know how to proceed. When I joined them in the narrow remaining space on that lower step, I understood why, and what I saw made my heart murmur.

     The living quarters were six simple beds arranged in a circle around the central spire around which the staircase was wrapped. Four sinks ringed the central spire at equal intervals, though where their water came from or went had proven unknowable. When we still used the residential quarters we hadn’t had to assign beds because we simply kept the bed in which we each arose. This system seemed consistent with the lighthouse’s instincts, since no new arrivals ever awoke in a claimed bed unless its occupant had gone to feed the Watchlight.

     How or when new persons arrived was another mystery to us. Kelvin had claimed that someone who had departed before my arrival had tried to stay up for several days, staring at the one unclaimed bed intently to witness an actual arrival, only to be thwarted when someone had arrived in the span of a single blink.

     Our instructions had forbidden us to inquire of new arrivals’ former lives. This rule was somewhat self-enforcing, operating more as a mere enunciation of what felt like a natural and sensible taboo, like asking a cellmate what they were in for. I had speculated, of course, building elaborate backstories for these strangers. I might see the roughness of Kelvin’s hands, for example, and assume he had been a laborer, or built model ships. Maybe he juggled his pet porcupines.

     Upon seeing our newest arrival I turned to look down the row of faces crowding the stair beside me. Something felt vaguely disorderly about the absence of dread I saw there. I felt that a new arrival was supposed to be funereal, a dead-man-walking affair, at best calling for a boring discussion of how to give the new arrival all of the rules. Then the new arrival would have lots of questions we couldn’t answer, sometimes panic or anxiety, sometimes a reflexive need to immediately violate the rules. Kelvin had handed down to us a story re-told down through a prior group of a new arrival that had immediately run outside, spent the night there, then returned inside and dashed up to the Watchlight just as quickly as she’d left, and that had been that.

     We were already down a couple of spots in the group, and I’d anticipated that this would be the day that they – whoever they were – would start repopulating the unoccupied bed slots today. And they had, though what this new arrival might herald for us proved dizzying even to contemplate.

     For there lay, with its tail dangling like the curlicue of an alto clef over the side of the bed, a dozing jet-black cat, its chest visibly and slowly rising and falling with its peaceful deep breaths.

     A fog of indecision fell over me. The disconnect between cognitive and executive functions was complete; I couldn’t connect any possible action to any possible decision. I therefore felt relieved, fortunate even, when Elise emerged first out of our gathered gaggle. She managed silent footfalls across the metal floor of the living quarters until she was close enough to squat, and then sit, by the side of the bed facing the cat.

     The cat recoiled from her, pulled its long paws back against its belly, and rose. It didn’t hiss or swipe; it simply turned and bounded off Kelvin’s old bed, its paws clacking like little teeth against the metal floor as it explored. We watched it quietly but quickly circle the living quarters floor, stopping only twice: once to give each of mine, Pablo’s, and Pavel’s stationary feet a quick inspection, and once at the foot of the staircase leading up to the Watchlight.

     The cat paused for a moment. Elise, still seated beside the bed, craned her head back to exchange a glance with us, as if trying to gauge what the cat knew or intuited about the Watchlight room. The cat stood and then sat in front of the stairs looking up. It sniffed the air, its erect ears panning side to side across the angle of the staircase. The cat announced its conclusions with a sneeze. It finally toddled back to the bed and mounted it with a silent leap, sniffed Elise’s nose, then slumped into an oval and returned immediately to sleep.

     We watched in such silence that I had to manually resume breathing when she forwards to stroke the cat’s fur. My heart fluttered when the cat stirred, but it only stretched, paws horizontal and spine a closed parenthesis. The cat yawned massively and settled its head back down to sleep. It apparently took the cat a moment to realize something was off, its eyes popping open with a startled incline of its head.

     “Ssshh,” Elise told it, while slowly raking her fingertips with the grain of the cat’s fur across its back. “Ssshh…”

& & &

     While they watched the cat, I watched Elise. Other than the movements of her fingers, she remained completely stationary. She didn’t appear even to breathe until the cat, with a deep sigh, nestled its chin against its outstretched front legs and closed its eyes. After several, deep breaths, Elise seemed satisfied that it had returned to sleep. Again with seemingly-practiced silence, she scooted by inches back from the bed before rising and leading us in a slow, silent procession back down to the boiler area.

     “This means something,” Elise finally whispered, just loudly enough for the rest of us to hear.

     “No.” Pavel was visibly restless. One of his arched feet bounced one leg, his hands moving up and down his upper thighs through the drab, colorless clothes we all wore. “It doesn’t mean anything. None of this does.” I noticed Elise glancing upward, apparently concerned that Pavel’s steadily rising voice would disturb our new arrival. “Nobody is running this thing, nobody intelligent. It’s nothing – nonsense.” He gestured with his eyes by crooking his neck one way then the other, vaguely indicating the lighthouse itself. “Our orders were written by madmen or children.” He was on his feet now. “They don’t know anything. What are we going to do, teach a cat the rules? Feed it to the sun, boil it with Kelvin and Peter and whoever else we boiled up for nothing? Teach it how to live and die, how to use a toilet, watch it go insane?”

     Elise also rose. I tried to catch Pablo’s eyes but he was just staring at the boiler.

     Humans can turn invisible. If you’ve ever been someone who rides the subway, for example, and it’s late at night on a Friday, somebody gets on the train at Park Street or Boylston stone drunk and starts making a ruckus, you have a way of tilting your hat down, putting in your headphones (muted so you can retain situational awareness, but it at least looks like you’ve withdrawn), shrinking into your seat, pulling your backpack up on your knees, taking up less than a whole seat – becoming invisible, uninvolved, like a chameleon, an empty sarcophagus, so that the ruckus would have to manually notice you to see through your invisibility. This was Pablo’s look now, and I let him disappear from my visual field for the moment, like letting go of a balloon so it can hide behind the clouds.

     I expected Elise to escalate the matter with Pavel, to try to somehow refocus back to her own mad outburst. And yet, “You’re right.” She spoke it into the uncomfortable silence Pavel had left in his wake, and created a new, tenser silence in which Pavel, Pablo, and Elise seemed all to be plotting.

     The situation was spiraling in a way that upset my stomach; somehow, in that moment, I became preoccupied with the question of what would happen if I just vomited all over the floor. Would some system as magical as our food preparation come clean it up?

     “This is intolerable,” she continued, still using a hissed whisper, as loud as she could make it without overly bothering the cat. “Pavel’s right. Whoever put this whole thing together doesn’t know what they’re doing. They probably don’t even know what’s happening inside this… place.” She had deliberately avoided saying ‘lighthouse.’

     “So what do we do? Leave?” Pablo had finally joined us, without looking away from the boiler room.

     “We’re still short. There could be another arrival coming in the other bed any time. We have to figure out if the commissary can make cat food. We don’t even know if its a boy or a girl. We don’t even know if it can feed the Watchlight!”

     My words did not affect the others the way I had hoped. Each of the looks I saw gathered there around the boiler to be different but all equally inscrutable. They weren’t paying attention. By how they had lost all regard for the rules, I wondered if they had somehow all gone outside when I wasn’t watching.

     Elise took a step back from me. The three of them were now a semicircle opposite me. I felt every atom of the distance between us, and the closeness between them. The cat had somehow turned them against not just me, but against the lighthouse, the rules, and the whole world outside. “Wait,” nervously raising a hand as if to halt their advance, even though they three were all still, while I stepped backwards towards the staircase. “Just – you can’t do this.” With both palms outstretched now, I found the lowest stair with the back of my foot and began to ascend.

     The moment my foot made contact with the second stair, all four of us winced and gasped with the shock of the light flickering against the walls. The Watchlight was already growing insistent.

     “No,” was all Elise could say, first to the others. “No,” she hissed again, to me. “Not yet,” speaking this time to the light on the wall.

     I couldn’t stay. They watched me go; I felt their eyes and the direction of their breathing until I reached the living quarters, where lay the cat. Even though I was less capable of quieting my footfalls this time, the cat remained undisturbed. When I sat beside it on its bed it raised its head, made a sound somewhere between a groan and moo in my direction, then lay its head back down. It kept its eyes open, scanning me peacefully, with its paws outstretched so that their tips were nearly right against my upper thigh.

     The hushed voices from below that began just seconds after I had taken a seat were animated. I couldn’t make out any words clearly, but I could hear the alternating pitches suggesting that they were interrupting each other, spinning each other up, chattering in agitation. The cat seemed wholly unconcerned, but I nevertheless gave its back several slow strokes with the tips of my fingers. I watched my fingers make subtle streaks in its black fur that closed up quickly. After a moment of this it began to rumble rhythmically, then it listed its side deeper into the bed to show me its belly.

     I smoothed my palm back and forth over its belly. The cat purred and stretched, audibly delighted by this. Its fur there was lighter and thinner. The voices downstairs continued with an increasing pitter-patter, timed by the click of consonants and the occasional incline of pitch to cut each other off. Seeing nothing else to do I slowly drew my legs up onto the bed. I was careful not to disturb the cat too much, but even with my body descending across the thin mattress and upsetting the distribution of weight across it, the cat barely looked at me. It suffered my existence in silence, so long as I kept rubbing its belly and stroking its fur.

     Noise from below us faded gradually over the next hour or two into part of the ambiance of the lighthouse. They had lost none of whatever energy they had kept for themselves down there, still in alternating argumentative pitches like Gregorian polyphony. Abstracted from content, the sound of three voices in intense discussion was not unpleasant, except to the extent that it may have eventually come to annoy the cat.

     The cat and I lay there together, listening to that music and watching the light occasionally flicker against the walls like a campfire over the sound of cicadas. I barely noticed that I briefly dozed off, because my dreams were not sufficiently distinguishable from my surroundings to tell for sure, except that I dreamed that it was dark.

     “Is he… asleep?” is what woke me up, to the faces of Pablo, Pavel, and Elise all looking down at me from the foot of the bed.

     “No,” I calmly replied while sitting up.

     “Where’s the cat?”

     I couldn’t tell which one of them said it, but it sent a convulsion of adrenaline through me that I hadn’t felt in as long as I could remember.

     “How did you do it?” Elise’s voice was sharp and angular. “How did you fall asleep?”

     “I don’t know, I was just… patting the cat, and I think I dozed off.” They were already speaking over me when I tried to add, “I think I had dreams. One of the doors was open, I think.”

     Pavel had detached from the other two, peering this way and that around the perimeter of the habitation level to look for the cat. Pablo and Elise seemed determined that I had done something wrong. I wasn’t sure when exactly they had concluded that I was evil, or had betrayed them in some way, but the time for disputing that conclusion had passed in my sleep.

     “This doesn’t make any sense. They sent a cat here to help us sleep?”

     “It doesn’t make any less sense than the food magic or the light magic or any of the other things that are happening here.”

     “The instructions don’t say anything about a cat. Or humans. It just says ‘bodies.’ The people who put us here don’t even know what we are. Whatever comes awake in Kelvin’s old bed could be a cockroach or a beehive for all we know.”

     “It’s only been people so far. What did we do differently?”

     This last question from Pablo and Elise’s frenzied chattering finally gave them pause.

     “What did we do differently?” Pablo was tapping his chin now, a crease in his brow suggesting he was trying to assemble the actual details instead of accusing or venting.

     “We don’t have enough information,” Elise said glumly. “Nobody is here more than a week or two at most. We have no institutional knowledge, no way of contrasting our time with prior times. We’re always too busy with the, with the-” she flapped one palm beside her head, indicating her own mind and our minds in general, “with the goddamn racket of this place.” She perked up with an idea. “We need to find something to write with. Some way to pass information onto the next cycles, maybe they can…”

     She didn’t bother to finish her sentence before separating from us to go downstairs. When I glanced down past Pablo, I could make out her frame standing by one of the “food preparation” areas pretending to write on an imaginary piece of paper. Her shadow flickered briefly with that of the Watchlight.

     “Tell me how you slept,” Pablo insisted.

     “I told you how I slept. It wasn’t on purpose, I just-”

     He leaned down over me, his knee pressing into the subtle round depression where the cat had slept beside my thigh. “Tell me how you slept! For Christ’s sake, I just need an hour!”

     “Why are you asking me? I told you. Ask the cat, he seemed good at it.”

     “’He?’ How do you know what the cat is? Tell me what you know!”

     The fact that I knew nothing at all, at least no more than anyone else, did not stop Pablo from closing his fists around my collar and hauling me up to meet him, close enough that his nose nearly touched mine.

     Pablo had not been here long enough to have been fizzled out yet, I realized. This was already in him when he arrived.

     Taken all in all, I would rather have had more cats than these people.

     “Quiet!”

     Pavel’s voice echoed up from the opposite end of the commissary level where Elise stood. Pablo dropped me, and we both hurried to the edge of the railing to look down at him.

     Pavel stood in front of the wide double door that led outside. He was staring into it, with his hand raised up behind us in a gesture that held our noise at bay.

     “Be quiet. And come here.”

     “Did you find the cat?” Elise, sounding oddly hopeful, suggested.

     “I… just, come here.”

     Just as carefully as we had gone up to greet the new arrival, we all quietly descended around Pavel, each becoming very still the moment we heard what Pavel had detected.

     It was the unmistakable sound of a cat scratching at the exterior of the door, asking to be let inside.

     “What do we-”

     “Let it in.” There was no hesitation in Elise’s voice. She exchanged a look with Pablo and Pavel, then gestured me over to the other side of the door. “Here – stand there, maybe you can catch it when the cat comes inside.”

     If only I had realized the things that had been growing inside of the people of the Watchlight before I dumbly accepted her instructions. The cat’s scratching was rhythmic but forceful, like it was trying to dig its way under the door.

     “Ready?” She looked at the other two but not at me, and distinctly waited for both of them to nod back before she opened the door.

     By the retreating sound of a croaky yelp the cat made when the door swung open I could tell it had fled, which was my last thought before Pablo and Pavel threw themselves against my back, shoving me out the door.

& & &

     It slammed shut with a terrible noise behind me. I scrambled against it, furiously pounding against it with my fist and calling out to them, desperately. I knew they could hear me; the cat’s little paws had been perfectly clear through what felt like heavy wood. I yelled, desperate and pleading. I was never able to muster any anger, only fear, supplication, appeals to decency, and then nothing.

     The door had no handle, no crossbars, nothing that I could see that anyone could use to open it from the outside. It was flush against its hinges – there seemed to be no way to pry it open even if I had a crowbar. There was no keyhole or nob. It was weathered and aged, but it looked as if it had been installed backwards, with the doors swinging the wrong direction entirely.

     Finally I turned to slump, numb with despair, against the door, and saw for the first time the environment outside of the lighthouse.

     A lighthouse is not a searchlight. A lighthouse is meant to indicate the shore, drawing the attention of ships at sea to the position and contours of the shore. It is a warning and an invitation. We had only called it a lighthouse because it felt like one: same general structure, big beaming light at the top, an interior architecture and aesthetic that vaguely conjured New England. Now, outside of the thing and at last distinct from it, I saw that the Watchlight was not like a lighthouse beacon at all. It was a searchlight, focused on some area in the distance lit by a perfect circle of light. Even at its great distance from me I could see that the area it illuminated with its flickering golden glow was scarcely larger than the Watchlight itself, implying that it was an intensely focused beam of light, watching or scanning or highlighting some very specific thing.

     As for what was actually within that halo, it appeared no different from the rest of the environment outside the lighthouse.

     Black, featureless, utterly black in the shape of an unremarkable landscape having the exact shape of the curvature of the horizon. I couldn’t distinguish my hands from the ground, unless I interposed them not between myself and the ground, but between myself and the sky.

     The sky contrasted richly with the black earth. It was star-flecked more densely than any night sky I had ever seen. An aurora of green streaked one end of the sky and one of blue streaked the other, like the sky was held up by two great glowing pillars. If there were any clouds they were too thin to conceal the brilliant blizzard of twinkling lights in the distance. The air was so clear and thin that the stars did not twinkle at all, they glowed, and the air had the particular wintertime smell of New England after a snow: wood-burning snow, hints of pine and still water, but if there were trees or snow or anything else on the ground, they were all occulted completely.

     I crouched down to touch the ground again. It was smooth as glass and seemed to be the exact temperature of my hand, such that it wasn’t obvious that my hand had even reached it unless I applied enough downward pressure to feel my wrist being resisted by it.

     And, it was silent. Not silent as in very quiet, but truly devoid of sound. When I was able to calm my breath at last, it was quiet like an anechoic chamber, quiet enough that I am sure I could hear the sound of blood circulating through my occipital vein.

     At first I moved in a nervous shuffle, not daring to lift my feet because it would be impossible to detect any obstacle by sight. The movements of my feet were unnatural; it took me several complete shuffled strides to realize that the black environment was nearly frictionless. My movements came to resemble ice skating, except that it lacked the rhythmic sh’rees, sh’rees sound of blades carving a path through freshly-fallen snow.

     Having no better ideas, and knowing that my time in the lighthouse had expired, I set off straight in the direction that the Watchlight indicated. I was relieved that after just a few minutes of traveling that the searchlight’s radius appeared larger, which I took to verifying by raising my thumb and then both thumbs to measure its apparent width, indicating that it was not so far away that I was at any risk of starving or dropping dead from exhaustion before reaching it.

     Nor did insanity take me the way that Peter’s time out of doors had led me to believe it would. I had imagined that some outside force had manually destabilized him, and maybe everyone else who went out here, but I imagined that the empty landscape and impossibly ornamented sky could simply seem too strange to comprehend for some people. I found the silence, the perfectly homeostatic temperature, the darkness, and the emptiness of it all to be beautiful, in the way that the desert at night is beautiful only to some.

     The light in the distance dimmed and flickered as I expected it to, just as I expected that any moment it would burn back to full strength when Elise, Pablo, and Pavel came to their senses back at the lighthouse. I turned to look back over my shoulder, hoping somehow to indicate an aura of descending orderliness, and I also worried about the cat.

     To my stomach-sinking horror, there stood the lighthouse looming over me right over my shoulder. It looked as if I had gotten no more than a few paces away from it after all the time. Back the other direction, the focus of the searchlight remained large. It was as if I had continued approaching the circle of light without ever moving any distance at all from the lighthouse. As an experiment I turned fully around and took one step backwards towards the lighthouse. Over one shoulder, I could see that the lighthouse was a little closer, but the beam of the searchlight was only imperceptibly farther away. It had the appearance of standing right outside of the lighthouse and somehow pulling the halo towards me, as if I were not moving except by rolling a treadmill with my feet, tugging the halo closer without increasing my distance from the lighthouse at all.

     This was dizzying to say the least, but I, again, assumed that it was the kind of thing that could drive other people insane, and that I was fortunate to be so level-headed.

     I resumed skating towards it. While I did so I occasionally flicked my eyes up from the halo to the sky, trying to contrast their brightness to see if any moonrise or sunrise or other nearer celestial body even existed here. There was no evidence of this. The circle of light in the distance had no powers of glare at all; stars near its perimeter did not dim from my vision in the slightest until they were swallowed up by the beam of light, vanishing instantly without appearing to dim or set or fade in the slightest.

     While it was obvious that the light shown against something, since it flattened into a circle at some distance without just continuing on forever like a searchlight turned skyward, but like the ground it had no angles or colors or shapes that I could detect at any distance. Part of me worried that it stopped at a wall.

     A bigger part of me worried that the light was becoming dimmer and staying black longer, implying that the ones who had stayed behind continued in their failure to feed the Watchlight. The closer I came to the light the angrier I became about what I increasingly felt was a moral failing, a conscious misdeed, a sin against me and possibly something else – deliberate wickedness born not of their fake fears for their own ‘lives’ (since they had no evidence that entering the Watchlight meant death, nor did they have lives worth preserving anyway), but out of their misplaced, utterly baseless disdain for me personally.

     Feed it. You must feed it with your bodies. You must feed it with your bodies. “Feed it,” I finally said out loud, and then again over my shoulder, shouting: “Feed the goddamn Watchlight! Feed it with your goddamn bodies!”

     Nothing. Silence, deepened slightly by the uselessness of my anger.

     Whatever they were doing there – maybe decaying, somehow dead already; I briefly fantasized that they had found a way to kill each other to force their mutual disobedience – they had deserted and abandoned me, betrayed me, and threw me out into what they at least thought was death in madness. I felt comfortable abandoning them, and that helping me out the door was the only charitable act they had ever taken.

     Without them, the universe felt rather cozy. It contained only four objects: there was the lighthouse, which for my purposes was a desolate crypt, and the Watchlight, together with the searchlight by which it illuminated the only conceivable world-line. There was myself. And, somewhere out here in the darkness, there must have been the cat. Its tiny paws would have been silent against the nearly frictionless ground. I couldn’t help but imagine it skittering around, unable to get purchase on the world-floor, sliding this way and that.

     The cat was nowhere to be seen. Its body being the same color as the ground, I expected to look over and see only the glow of its little eyes in the darkness somewhere. But, the cat did not return to me until I fed the Watchlight.

     I passed through the circle of light without realizing it. Nothing stopped the light, it just flattened against the air in a perfectly smooth circle, and I skated through it like passing through a curtain of air. Nothing but blackness, save for two yellow eyes that blinked back at me in the deep distance, lay beyond it.

& & &

     The Watchlight, fully charged, drew in its choice, convulsed fresh life into the waiting beds below, created food, and shone into the deep distance. Kelvin and Peter sat quietly beneath it, unbothered by its brilliant light. The cat paced impatiently back and forth between them, expecting but never receiving the person it had been expecting. That person was gone, fizzled out completely in ways that Kelvin and Peter could never know.

     Everyone else was gone, but the Watchlight would replace them. There were no problems at all that Kelvin and Peter could not manage, and it released them back into bed just in time for them and the rest of a full group of six to come awake beneath its thrumming fire.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright C. David Ray 2025