Lights Out

The rain had started at noon, and by dusk it had turned the whole world to glass.

It fell out of a low brown sky as ordinary rain, soft and steady, and the moment it touched anything it froze. Every twig on every birch along the Institute's drive wore a clear sleeve of ice, and the weight of it bowed the branches down until the smaller trees arched over the road like the ribs of a tunnel. The power lines sagged in long glittering loops. The gravel of the staff lot was a sheet of gray glass. Somewhere back in the woods, as Elias eased the car into a space, a branch let go with a crack like a rifle shot and came down through the other branches in a long shattering rush, and then there was only the hiss of the rain again.

Elias sat in the car with the engine running and closed his eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

When Elias opened them again the wipers had stopped and the windshield was frosted over with a thin skin of ice, and the clock on the dash had moved on four minutes.

That was all right. Four minutes. Elias had been awake since seven o'clock on Wednesday evening: a full night shift in the lab, and then all of Thursday downstairs running nap tests for the day tech, who had the flu, five naps two hours apart for a teenager who fell asleep in every one of them; and now, because the weekend tech had slid into a ditch on the county road an hour ago and was waiting for a tow truck, Thursday night too. Teddy was in St. Paul for his sister's wedding. There was no one else.

Four minutes was nothing. Elias got out of the car.

The cold hit like a slap, and the ice underfoot was so smooth that Elias had to cross the lot in a shuffling skater's walk, arms out, bag swinging. Above, the old sanatorium stood glazed from cupola to foundation, every brick and window ledge and gutter coated in clear ice, so that in the last gray light the whole building seemed to have been dipped in glass and set out to dry. Icicles hung from the long porches like organ pipes. The east wing, unlit, glittered faintly along its whole length, blind and cold.

From the side of the building came a steady scrape, scrape, scrape.

Otto was on the side steps with a shovel and a bucket of rock salt, chipping at the ice and flinging salt in wide arcs from a scoop, his big flashlight hooked on his belt and his cap pulled down to his eyebrows. He had ice in his mustache.

"Here," he said, and handed Elias the scoop without asking, and they worked the steps together for ten minutes in the freezing rain: Otto breaking the glaze with the edge of the shovel, Elias salting behind him. The salt hissed and pitted the ice. Out in the woods another branch let go.

"County says it'll go all night," said Otto, straightening. "Lines are coming down all over. Two Harbors is dark already." He looked up at the power line that ran in from the road to the pole at the corner of the building, glittering and heavy, swaying a little in the wind. "That one goes, we go." He jerked his chin toward a squat green box at the back of the building. "Generator's good. Tested her at four. Forty-kilowatt, runs the essentials. Lights on the second floor, the station, the boiler pumps." He considered. "She's old, though. Older than you. Don't love the cold."

He looked at Elias properly for the first time, at Elias's eyes, and frowned.

"You look like something the cat dragged in," he said. "How long you been up?"

"A while," said Elias.

Otto grunted and took the scoop back. "I'm here all night," he said. "Anything you need, you holler."

By eight the patients had begun to arrive, stamping and sliding in through the side door with their overnight bags, apologizing for the weather as if it were their fault.

There were four of them. A college hockey player from Duluth with night terrors, huge and polite and embarrassed, who had to duck to come through the door of Room 5. A retired pastor on CPAP for Room 8, who had driven in at fifteen miles an hour with his hazard lights on and was very proud of himself. A woman with suspected narcolepsy in Room 10, who would stay tomorrow for a day of nap tests, God help them both.

And in Room 2, the room nearest the station, a tall woman of about forty in a gray wool coat, with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses and an engineer's pocket notebook, who sat down on the edge of the bed and looked around the room the way some people look at a bridge they suspect of being badly built.

"Imani Okafor," she said, and shook Elias's hand, briskly. "Chronic insomnia. Twenty years. I'm here because my doctor thinks I sleep more than I say I do, and I'm here to prove him wrong." She set the notebook on the nightstand, square to the edge. "You should know I won't sleep. I never do. So if you get lonely tonight, I'll be awake."

Outside the window the rain ticked against the glass, freezing where it touched. Far off, another branch broke.