The Light Is On For You

"The light is ON [picture of a church with a star inside] for you."

This is what the billboard outside the tunnel read. Every morning, Steven looked up and noticed it. "The light is ON," he would repeat to himself. The advertisement was plain enough (cmon in, it's a church, and we'd like to help/proselytize), but what was the meaning of the emphasis? The light is ON.

Earlier in the week, his wife had asked him to leave the light on in the bathroom. As he pulled his hand back from the light-switch, he thought, "I will leave the light ON, not OFF." When he bought his morning coffee, the cashier offered him room for cream in his cup. "I don't want to put any cream IN," he'd answered. The cashier's response was quick, but Steven thought for a moment that she had winked at him. "Fill it UP all the way," she told her coworker.

Steven spent about four hours every weekday commuting. It was during these hours that the nagging details of an unexplained conspiracy teased him. "Now arriving AT...," he thought he heard the conductor say. The person sitting next to him called the office to say, "I'm going to be late TO work this morning."

Was it somehow connected to the church in the advertisement? Could it all be some kind of ecclesiastic campaign to alter the way people speak? Worse yet, was this divine intervention? Might God, should He exist, be speaking to Steven through the lips of others?

One day, he resolved to explore the matter and he called in sick to work, though he pretended to his wife that he had left for the office. "I'm off TO work," he said to her, studying her reaction out of the corner of his eye. He thought she raised an eyebrow, but when she answered "okay, sweetie," Steven couldn't be sure what her pause signified.

When he finally walked through the doorway of Holy Oak Church of the People, he found a small table and on it a stack of blue pamphlets. "The light is ON for you," they read on the cover. Steven stopped to pick one up, when a man in a robe entered the lobby.

"Are you the electrician?" he asked.

"I beg your pardon?" Steven said.

"Are you the electrician? I sent for you hours ago. We have service tomorrow and need the power fixed."

"No power?" Steven asked. The priest shook his head. "No lights even?" he asked again.

"We have candles, if need be," said the priest, gesturing to a cabinet in the corner. "So can you help us OUT?" he added.

Steven felt the sky outside darken and the room, it seemed to him, was suddenly smaller than before. The priest was looking at him, waiting for an answer.

An Old Man's Reflection

Henry would sometimes stare at his reflection until he didn't recognize the face. The game reminded him of another he'd played as a boy - one that involved standing in a darkened bathroom and repeating the name of some ghost, with the rumored expectation that a monster would appear and snatch out your eyeballs.

'But whose eyeballs are these?' Henry would say to the mirror. He would stop and look at himself in the glass window of a shop, watching his figure do the same and wait there staring at him. 'She'll get your eyes,' he joked in his head, 'but only yours and never mine.'

Henry was on his way to visit his son today. He went into the shop he'd stopped in front of, and he bought a cup of coffee, which he finished "for here," having no need "to go" for another thirty minutes. He drank his morning brew and tested himself on trivia he'd remembered as a boy. "The weight of a rabbit's brain," "The year George Washington died," and so on. He'd forgotten everything.

Henry finished the drink with a shrug and went off to meet his boy. A few minutes later, he was standing before what appeared to be a much younger version of himself. The younger man was tired, but his smile had more energy than Henry could muster on his best day. Henry experienced a sense of powerlessness, like an old woman holding her thin hand out to block the sun. What a smile!

"Son, you're a sharp looking one," he said in a meek voice, praying secretly that no ghost should plot against either of them.

Reversed Cigarettes

Two haggard dudes sat on a park bench. Their shirts were stained with dirt and what looked to be blood and, if you ventured near enough, you'd be unsurprised to find that these boys were stinky, too.

Sergei, the fella on the left, turned to his friend Mark and punched him hard in his right arm. "HaHA! Didn't see that coming!" Sergei attempted to yell, but he was interrupted midway into "didn't," when Mark landed his own fist in Sergei's kidney.

The two sat a little longer is silence, rubbing their sore spots, before laughing together loudly, at which time Sergei pulled a flask of liquor out from his pocket and announced his intention to toast.

"You sonofbitch," he began, and then concluded without another word, having decided instead to laugh a great deal more. "Yes!" Mark agreed, and each of the two took a long, healthy swig from the little metallic bottle.

"You know," Sergei began again, looking around at the park's many trees, his eyes finally resting on blue sky. "Yes!" Mark screamed again, initiating another gurgling round of booze.

Two hours later, Sergei and Mark were still at their park bench, now joined by a third man. Sergei looked away from his companions, having grown uneasy after the arrival of Bob the Homeless Man Who Lived in the Park.

Mark, on the other hand, was deeply involved in a heated conversation with Bob. "Can I have a smoke?" Bob had been asking the two men. "Why not!" Mark concluded, handing the drifter a clean, stiff cigarette.

"You know, I used to smoke these all the time," Bob said, turning the object over in his hands. "But then they reversed them," he added, holding the filter away from his face.

"They reversed them?" Mark asked with great concern.

"Yep," Bob said sadly.

Sergei shot Mark a nervous look, but Mark was feeling nothing but unhappy sympathy for his friend Bob.

Within a minute, though, Bob flipped the cigarette again and said with a smile, "But I think they changed them back."

Marked

The NPR building in Washington, DC, stands at the corner of a busy street. It looks like a giant wedge landed in the road by some uninventive creator, who perhaps only ever looked at it from a birds-eye. From the ground, the whole thing is plain and dreary-looking, save the very front, where the colorful NPR logo hangs proudly.

Five minutes to the south is the even larger behemoth Union Station. Within its walls is a secular hell populated by the miserable people of our nation's capital. What the bureaucratic gods seem to have miscalculated, however, is the fact that most people assembling at Union during the worst hours, the commute hours, are not DC locals at all (the bad guys) -- but suburbanites and Baltimorians from the north.

And then again, perhaps those were precisely the people who deserved to suffer. Certainly, anyone tainted by the poison of DC has it coming.

A few minutes from Union Station, you'll find K-Street, that home for lobbyists that is, in fact, far bigger than a single street. I saw a headline recently proclaiming that over four-hundred thousand people are employed by private organizations in Washington. The federal government employs another two-hundred thousand in the area. That's more than half a million people whom any sensible judge would sentence and subject to whatever small tortures available.

One needs only to visit the restroom in order to understand both how and why the people of Washington suffer. Whether you're sharing the urinals with an unwashed homeless man or a spiffy think tanker, you can feel that you're in an unhappy place. Your teeth will break from the smell. Somewhere in the coughing and the squirting, the indifferent momentum of the city's life cycle creeps into you.

And you feel yourself a marked man.

The 60th Minute

Gary went to his grandfather with a question in hand. He needed to understand military ranks, and there seemed to be nobody better to ask than his veteran elder, who had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of American war films. His grandfather had a neat row of VHS copies of all the greats, from ‘The Longest Day’ to ‘Tora Tora,’ but his all-time favorite was ‘Midway’ -- the turning point in the Pacific Front, don’t you know.

The cassettes were lined up like a prized collection of Britannica, firmly squeezed between two heavy bookends atop an enormous big screen television set. It was a gaudy display, yes, but the TV was so ancient that it actually had wooden parts -- so it carried an unexpected classiness. And then there was the fact that grandpa may have been able to recite a million random facts about WWII movies and the battles therein depicted, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to answer a single question about the endings of any of the films, seeing as how he fell asleep less than an hour into everything.

This was no prejudice against the Good War or even against movies in general. The sixtieth minute of any activity simply flipped a switch in the old man and it was instant snoozing. Gary always admired him for that -- not that the boy suffered from insomnia. He merely found something charming about an old feller sitting perfectly upright in non-reclining chair, totally and completely asleep and snoring. Gary’s grandfather in the end was a man oddly at peace with the world, despite his insatiable appetite for dramatized conquest.

Never actually in combat, he went through basic training like every man from his generation. His was an age of nationalism and mechanization, and, when people started really getting around, life opened up all kinds of new opportunities for marching and shooting and saluting. Never having faced down death on the battlefield, he learned what he could by studying the films of John Wayne and company.

So, when his grandson came to him and asked him to draw up a list of military ranks, in order to assign titles to his various friends in a mock army they were establishing, Gary’s grandfather had an answer already prepared:

“Just let me watch an hour of my film, and I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Sleepovers & Cartoons

“Have you ever noticed how they can’t make a good video game where you’re flying in it?"

This was what Adam asked his friend Scott, who was sleeping over on a Saturday night. They were in the third grade and it was 2am, technically Sunday morning. The boys had gone to sleep at 11pm, but set an alarm for 1:30am, when they agreed to crawl out of bed and slip into the family room for the TV, which they turned on at a low volume and used to look for cartoons. The kind of animation broadcast on television in the middle of the night strangely fascinated the boys. This was the early 1990s, and there was no Cartoon Network. Cartoons at this hour were bizarre.

I distinctly remember discovering Aeon Flux on MTV, and I recall being profoundly confused. There was a great deal of explicit sex: tongues swirling around inside mouths and breasts and dicks testing the elasticity of leather constraints. There was hifalutin dialog and melodramatic tension. It was not like the stuff on TV at 3:30pm, when I got home from school. I remember a specific scene when Aeon was running up and down flights of stairs, trying frantically to stop some kind of countdown. As she tried to crack a computer code, she would run back to a high vantage point and fire a rifle at a large plug on the end of a crane, in order to keep it from being inserted into an open pipe. I don’t remember understanding how the plug worked, but it was clear that -- should the bad guys succeed in delivering it (or maybe they were trying to remove it?) -- something terrible would happen. I remember Aeon, this slender, quick woman, trying desperately to prevent the world’s doom on two fronts. The scene probably lasted just three minutes (they were only shorts, after all), but I watched her panic and it felt like hours.

She died in the end, of course. She dies at the end of every clip. That was the design of the show. It was hard to take in, as a third grader. But, damn, it was a thrill.

“And I’d really like to play a decent flyer game, you know?” Adam added to his question. Scott nodded thoughtfully and ruminated on the few ‘flyer games’ with which he was familiar. The one that stood out best was an adaptation of Superman. Once you were airborne, the game was pretty boring. But, he had to admit (though not to Adam, who was something of an ideologue on this subject) that the game did a great job with Superman’s takeoff. He would sort of hunch down the split second before he took off. Scott enjoyed the sensation that small touch gave him. (It’s things like that, incidentally, that separate good games from great games.)

Scott only smiled, though, and told his friend that he was right. "I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Flying is, like, the most desired skill, for everybody, I think," he finally answered.

The boys both nodded, happy and united by a false consensus. The search for unusual cartoons was under way.

"Game on!"

Like many other kids growing up, I used to play baseball. I played ‘catch,’ I played in PE, and when I got older I played four years in little league. I was a thoroughly average player, but that didn’t bother me too much, even if it was a little sad as a child to doubt that I could be the next Will Clark. I did my best not to let the obvious limits of my talent interfere with my enjoying the game, and I would spend weekends in elementary school calling up all the boys in my grade to assemble at the park for an unsupervised game.

We didn’t always play baseball, but we made sure to complete a full round of something (football, frisbee, street hockey) and followed playtime with a visit to the pizza parlor. I remember a group of ten boys swerving in and out of traffic in an unruly pack of bicycles, zig-zagging its way across town to the main avenue that hosted the city’s eateries. Ordering was a hassle, but it was a thrill, too. This was so long ago and so early in life that the sensation of administering and executing a collective order was like an electric rush -- a surge of responsibility and respect. Respect because the pizza cashier, who I’d later realize was typically a teenager and therefore perhaps the lowest form of life in existence, would have to wait on you and scribble down whatever bizarre and stuttering request you made. They’d call your number over the loud speaker and you felt as though you’d won something. And then, when it came time to pay the bill, ten children would frantically empty their pockets of coins, crumpled Ones and Fives, and maybe a few Win-A-Free-Sprite bottle caps, which someone would argue should count for legal tender.

Baseball was often simpler than all that. I played baseball when I was mainly younger. I played catch with my father, but, when my brother was included, our dad would pitch the ball to a batter, whose hits would be fielded by the other brother. We played this game in the street, which made the two most common sounds of a summer evening “strike!” and “car!” We kept (charitable) statistics and even minted little faux baseball cards modeled on the 1991 Upper Deck series. This game was originally played with a whiffle ball and bat, though my brother and I escalated the stakes by swapping in a tennis ball, which could definitely break a window, if it struck glass with the right amount of force.

Incidentally, I once threw a tennis ball at a good friend’s head. This was many years later, mind you, and I wasn’t aiming to hit anyone in the head. But, sure enough, I chucked the thing in his direction, and he turned around just in time for it to smack perfectly into his forehead. It even bounced high into the air, giving everybody a moment to contemplate the rubber violence they’d just witnessed. I couldn’t have nailed him any better if I’d tried.

My brother and I never did break any glass with a tennis ball (though he did later shatter the porch sliding door when he drove an apricot into it with a 6-iron). We did, however, take to playing our game of baseball with the neighbors from across the street, who were Mexican, or Indian, or Philippino (or something). Race, incidentally, is not an easy thing for a kid to wrap his head around. Gender, however, was something of which we were all already terribly aware.

I’m talking, of course, about the no-crying rule. Baseball is only nominally a "full contact sport," but it boasts its share of injuries, like any other macho diversion. For us in our street game, it was always The Skinned Knee. It happened all the time during street play, and there was only one very-spoken rule: do not cry. Crying was for babies and, given the universal consensus that nobody took babies seriously, nobody wanted to get caught crying.

The neighbors’ daughters, however, made it their guiding purpose to catch one of us males in tears. They monitored our play like scavengers circling a dying man, hoping for an unexpected injury, when they’d pounce from nowhere for a close inspection of our eyes, always ready to unload a barrage of abuse on the whiner who couldn’t man up.

The neighbors’ daughters waited.

Surrounded

Bibles and Dan Brown books. There's a textbook, and, oh look, that one's got a book about black men not letting white men "have all the fun." The white guy behind him doesn't appear to be having much fun, but that's probably because his infant son keeps trying to crawl over the back of his seat and get at the laptop of the woman sitting behind them. (She too, incidentally, looks to be stewing in a foul mood.)

All this can mean only one thing: you're on the train and it's the evening rush home. Depending on your gambler's luck, you may or may not have landed a place in the party-wagon, where that boisterous pack of friends seizes the corner seats and proceeds to heehaw for 60 minutes about the various episodes in their day. On Friday, wine or beer often flows, and -- if the week hasn't transformed you into red-eyed grump -- you're welcome to invite yourself into their group, where you'll become temporary best friends on the subjects of football and the weather.

And there will be villains, as well.

Some curmudgeons will selfishly sit on the outside of two seats, or they'll place their bags on the outside. Either way, you're forced to engage them in order to sit down beside them. This treachery among fellow passengers is vile but widespread. The most you can do is single these people out and plant yourself at their side, whenever possible.

The Christians read their ditties, sometimes in raw Ole Englishe and sometimes broken up into more digestible snippets, like nuggets of steak for a puppy that would otherwise choke itself. There are Orthodox Jews, too, wearing their Amish clothes, dragging their 900 kids everywhere. This can make for an altogether different party wagon.

Before you sit, you survey the isles, hoping not to select or invite as a neighbor anyone too large, too perfumed, or too awake. You wander the train, maybe angry or perhaps relieved, to find yourself flanked on all sides by the sleepy, screaming people of the Earth.

The Escape

Jeff didn't know where he was. He didn't know what time it was. The sun was up, but he hadn't seen it set since arriving in this place, and that had been what felt like days ago. He was in a moist cell, crouched because of the low ceiling. The bars were covered in an olive rust and Jeff wanted terribly to have something to drink.

Something, anything, other than alcohol.

Jeff stunk like the inside of a tequila bottle. Normally a baby-faced, in-bed-by-nine kind of guy, he realized that he was now thick-bearded and couldn't recall the last time he'd slept. His stomach threatened to at any moment drop through his bowels like a wet turkey through a grocery bag.

He moaned for the guard, ready to confess to whatever sins his accusers named.

"Water! A bed! Someone, please help!" he shouted.

For a moment, his cries echoed down unseen corridors. Then, to Jeff's great relief, the slow footsteps of the watchman approached.

A young man with broad shoulders turned the corner and twirled a nightstick as he walked up to Jeff.

"So, finally cracked, eh. Ready to confess your sins, finally?" the guard asked Jeff.

"Yes! Anything! Just please--" he began to answer, before the two were interrupted by a growing rumble in the floor below. The guard held up his nightstick to sign to Jeff that it was time to shut up. He inched forward, to where the wall and the floor met at the edge of Jeff's cell, holding out his baton like a water rod.

The guard took four steps before the floor caved in and a ball of fire reached up and took him. It swallowed him in seconds, and his stick, with an eerie apathy, fell to the ground, orphaned.

A long-haired, bearded man leaped up from inside the hole, and locked eyes on Jeff with great excitement.

"Dude, Jeff, we gotta go, man! This party's all spent. Time to bounce, Jeff!" he yelled.

Jeff realized that the bars bad been blown open. His escape was underway.

His binge with Jesus Christ was not over.

Election Night

"If he wins," her husband, John, repeated, "if he wins, I'll shave my head! I chop the whole thing off!"

John was watching the presidential election returns and it was November 2008. Barack Obama was poised to win a four year ticket to the White House, and John had spent the last year campaigning for John McCain. Neither John wanted Barack to win. John's wife, Melissa, had spent the last nine months growing John's baby. She was ready to pop, and John was ready to smash the TV.

"Yes, John, that's awful," she said in a failed attempt to comfort her fuming partner. Patting her belly, she allowed herself a secret smile on the corner of her mouth turned away from John. Melissa had voted for Obama earlier that morning, supporting a Democrat as she had in every election since she was old enough to exercise the ballot.

"They're idiots! He's a damned Communist! A socialist, Melissa! Maybe not even a proper citizen! Are the American people so weighed down by the legacy of slavery that they'll elect a Nigerian Nazi Stalin?" he continued.

Melissa nodded and smiled her secret smile, noticing an unfamiliar tingling emanating from her nether regions. She reached down and found a puddle collecting in her pants.

"Dear," she interrupted, "my water broke."

Minutes later, they were in a speeding car on the way to the hospital. John was weaving through traffic, overjoyed for a moment about the imminent arrival of his child. It wasn't long before he was behind a hybrid with a large Obama-Biden bumper sticker. Talk and excitement about the baby vanished in an instant.

John managed a feat of self-control and avoided ranting again about the presidential race. He locked his teeth and drove on. Sometimes, it's all you can do.

Labor was chaotic. John kept coming into the room and then leaving again. Melissa wondered if he was finding it difficult to watch, but she dedicated eventually to ignore her husband, who had already fulfilled the only task she ever really thought within his abilities.

"Push! Breathe!" he would yell, popping his head into the doorway, then disappearing. The nurse at first thought he was a madman. Melissa had to stop her from phoning security.

Soon there was only the blinding clarity of pain. Melissa focused all her energies on her delivery, and her mind entered a universe as blank and lonely as deep space. She clenched tight against the low hum of silence that filled her ears.

And suddenly, someone with a high voice began to cry. The sound had a weird unison, as though maybe it were two voices: one new and frightened, the other sad and falsetto.

She opened her eyes and stared at the two gleaming bald heads of her husband and son, both sobbing uncontrollably. Barack Obama had delivered his victory speech. She had delivered a boy. John had shaved his head.

"Breathe!" he yelled at her.

The Pearly Gates

"Why hello thar, my name's Jesus Christ!" said a very upbeat fellow to a man who had just landed, from where he couldn't remember, at the feet of the bearded messiah. Jesus looked down and smiled again. "Don't be afraid, chum. On your feet! Be happy!" he said.

As he stood up, Jesus waved his hand and a mojito materialized, floating in thin air between the two men. "Drink up," he commanded. "We've got stuff to do." Gingerly, Jesus then pulled a large key out from around his neck and turned to unlock a large gate behind him. Suddenly, he stopped and asked of his companion, "Dude, what's your name again?"

"Jeff," the man answered.

"Okay, right, Jeff. Yeah..." the holy son pondered, "that's super." He turned back to his work and soon a loud click sounded from the lock. "Sweet. We're in, man!" Jesus said, turning again to Jeff.

Jeff felt queasy from the drink. His left shoe was loose and he strongly suspected that both his armpits hid dark, unattractive sweat stains. He was tired and wanted to speak to his family.

"C'm'on, dude. We're gonna paint the town red," Jesus added, waving Jeff on through the gate.

He walked ahead reluctantly, trying not to drag his feet, hoping desperately not to upset Jesus.

Brothers

There were two brothers. They dressed up and played games. There were role-playing games: the blues brothers, the ghostbusters, cops-n-robbers, and Batman and Robin. There were experimental games: can you lift the heavy stones and throw them high into the air overhead? can you paint the entire surface of the wall with the contents of a single bowel movement? And there were non-consensual games: that apple juice is now mine, or, sometimes for the sake of variation, that apple juice is no longer yours.

A lifetime of whining and laughter was poured into a great funnel. The width of that imperfect bowl eclipsed a proper view of what received this mass of life experience. It might have just dribbled onto the ground.

There were two brothers, always bickering over property, unhappy with their lot, and mutually ashamed of what they shared and what they envied in one another. One would only be Batman, the other would crush spiders under his knuckles. One would go on to athletic bulk, the other to drown in paper.

And still they're so young!