A: Wow, it’s like you do this for a living. Though I guess it’s probably not much of one, right?
Q: Well, we get to do what we enjoy; most of us think that’s worth the trade-off.
A: Yeah. Well, my way of dealing with stuff like that was always to pay other people, like your friend, to do it for me. As it happened, I was dating a guy at the time, who was—lucky for me—both an engineering student and not a dickhead, surprisingly. It was early days, we’d met in a club and liked each other, I brought him home, and he looked around and said, “Why do you have all these floor lamps?” So I told him the story, or a truncated version thereof, and he said, “Oh, I can fix that for you.” I didn’t say, I doubt it, largely because I still wanted to sleep with him, but his pitch was that he’d had a light meter at home, which he’d used before for similar things, so it would be cheap and we could enjoy each other’s company while he did it.
Q: He was well fit I take it?
A: Very. Very… well fit. (PAUSE) So a couple of days later, he comes over to my place and I buzz him in. He’s got his toolbox with him, and a vest on with all these pockets where you can stick things, like he’s dressed to go into battle, and he’s got what look like bandoliers of shotgun shells slung across his chest. They weren’t, obviously; they were batteries and light bulbs, all the different kinds he thought he’d be likely to need. I say, “Great,” show him the empty fixture sockets, the light switch and where everything is, including the fuse box, and he gets to work.
Well, he can’t get anything out of the wires either, any more than the other guy did. I’m standing by this stepladder he also brought holding the light meter up over my head, and he keeps asking me, “Did you see it jump? Is it jumping now?” to which I just kept saying, “Nope.” I honestly thought the meter was broken, and for a minute so did he, until he tested it with one of the floor lamps and proved that it wasn’t. Then he gets into the fuse box, and manages to turn everything else in the apartment on and off at least once, but still can’t find anything that looks like a working light circuit in the ceiling outside the kitchen and the front hallway. And he’s like, “Well, that’s weird.” And it was weird. To be frank, it was kind of starting to freak me out at this point, and I was perfectly willing to tell him to stop. But you know how guys get; he had this look on his face like he was taking it personally. Like “This is pissing me off, and I’m gonna beat it.”
So he took the light meter from me—he was a tall guy—and he stuck it right up near the ceiling, maybe ten centimetres{Four inches.} away, started going back and forth across the ceiling from the fixture, doing this sort of—like he was sweeping a field for mines, you know? Or using a metal detector to look for treasure, and I was like, Oh, this is ridiculous. But eventually, he was almost to the main window, and he was making a sweep to his left, and suddenly… the pointer on the meter twitched. He stops, says: “Look at this!” Further he went towards the corner, meanwhile, the more reaction he got, until finally it was reading as though there was an active socket there.
Q: But there couldn’t have been, was there? Or you’d have seen it.
A: Correct. There wasn’t even a power point. I never even put a floor lamp in that corner.
Q: Why not?
A: Because… I didn’t like that corner. It was always cold there. I mean, it was always going to be a little cold, because it was winter; plus, an additional downside to floor-to-ceiling windows that slide open is that if you want to be able to open them you can’t caulk them up. But this was—colder. Off-puttingly so. So I just avoided putting anything in there, because I didn’t want to be there.
Q: What was it like in summer?
A: I never made it to summer. (PAUSE) So he asks me, “Was there ever a fixture here?” and I tell him I have no idea. And he looked at me and I looked at him, and then he said, “I’m gonna try something.” Gave me the light meter, and took out one of the light bulbs by the—what do you call the metal part on the bottom, the part that screws in?
Q: That’s the cap.
A: Right, yeah. So he held it by the cap, just this standard 100-watt incandescent, and lifted it up closer and closer to the ceiling… and as he got further and further up, the filament began to glow, and then, suddenly, it turned on. Full brightness. It was… it was horrible. Unnatural. I mean, anything unnatural is horrible, right? Like a preaching dog or a singing rose, that kind of shit? Somebody said that.{Arthur Machen, in the prologue to “The White People.” Paraphrased.}
Q: I guess. And, uh, your boyfriend—how did he react?
A: Oh, he was delighted. Very impressed with himself. He started to laugh. He had his arm straight out at shoulder height, and he was moving it all around watching the light brighten and dim, like it was the coolest toy in the world. It must have been really hot, but he didn’t seem to notice; maybe he had calluses on his fingers. And then, basically just by accident, he brushed the wall with the metal base of the bulb—and it stuck there. Like, it actually pulled out of his fingers and stayed behind on the wall, sticking right out like a, I don’t know, like a fucking tumour or something. A fucking glowing tumour.
And he shook his hand, fingers snapping like he’d just figured out how close he’d come to almost burning them, and he goes: “Whoo! That was something!” Me, I just stand there with my mouth open, not knowing what the hell to say. But then he’s peering closer at it, until finally I can’t stand it any more, and I just tell him, “Pull it off. I don’t want it there.” He starts going on about how there must be something magnetized in the wall, and this is a complete cock-up that I could probably sue the building over, and I say, “I don’t care, I want you to get it off my wall, please!” So because he’d have to grab it by the hot part of the bulb this time, he put on a pair of work gloves and took hold of it— very gently—and starts trying to pull it off the wall.
And it won’t come off.
Q: Was he right? Had something been magnetized in the walls?
A: I have no fucking idea, but I really don’t think so. Anyway, he’s like, “I don’t know what to do at this point, I don’t want to break it,” and I’m like, “Break it, man!” So he tries to pull it from the cap this time, hauling on it harder and harder, and then he slips a little and the bulb slides up the wall, and we both suddenly realize he can move it upwards. Towards where the reading is coming from.
Q: The cold spot.
A: Yeah. I hadn’t thought about it like that, but—that’s what it was, wasn’t it?
Q: Like in a haunted house?
A: You tell me. (PAUSE) So he keeps pushing it up the wall, closer and closer to the cold spot—the “source”, he’s calling it—and it gets brighter and brighter. And I didn’t really realize this at first, but it was as if, while the bulb was getting brighter, the rest of the apartment seemed to be getting… dimmer. Like it was about to flicker; I’d seen that before, plenty of times. Normal stuff. Even brand new, very expensive condos have power fluctuations.
Q: Well, if the bulb was that bright, it would have made everything else look dim, wouldn’t it?
A: Exactly. Brighter, and brighter, and then—it popped. Not just burnt out, I mean the whole bulb actually exploded, and it was only because my guy already had one hand up shielding his eyes against the light that he didn’t get hurt. And we both jump back, and we’re left with nothing except the cap and a little jagged rim of broken glass around it stuck almost right in the top corner of my ceiling. And we look at each other, and I tell him, “Okay, I think we’re done with this tonight,” and I go to get the broom and dustpan and start sweeping up the broken glass off my lovingly installed hardwood floors.