{"id":550,"date":"2017-11-13T10:47:09","date_gmt":"2017-11-13T16:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thespectaclstg.wpengine.com\/?p=550"},"modified":"2018-05-07T10:50:17","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T15:50:17","slug":"bubbles-by-mandy-suzanne-wong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/?p=550","title":{"rendered":"“Bubbles” by Mandy-Suzanne Wong"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew the dog was blind because while combing the shop I nearly tripped over the scrawny, scruffy Pomeranian\u2014which didn\u2019t pompom the way those dogs are supposed to but instead appeared to have stuck a shivering toe into a socket\u2014and considering this sorry specimen of life in this spoiled world, I said, \u201cI like you, too.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe doesn\u2019t like you. She doesn\u2019t know you exist. She\u2019s blind,\u201d said the idiot behind the counter.<\/span><\/p>\n

This idiot seemed to want very much to look like the kind of guy who\u2019d be first mate in a Russell Crowe movie. Who saw himself as the raw heat in the flame at the summit of the lighthouse, imagined himself clawing his way to that summit in the middle of a hurricane waving a firebrand he\u2019d made out of some chair, now short a leg, twirling it above his head with all the strength in his salty sinews as the cyclone pelted him with rain and nearly snatched his head off because the government-issue bulb had blown. No hello, good afternoon like a normal Bermudian. <\/span><\/p>\n

My grandfather, who until his death also ran a souvenir shop, said you must always say good afternoon, good morning to customers even if they don\u2019t say anything. It surprises un-Bermudians: \u201cgood\u201d alongside some reference to the pointless day already dying injects it with something languid, naive. Puts tourists in an expansive mood. <\/span><\/p>\n

But this briny seafarer probably thought the lighthouse too important to deserve a souvenir shop; too high-tech for small words the likes of which, back in the day, cemented Bermudians\u2019 reputation as the planet\u2019s friendliest anthropocentric subspecies; so official that Her Majesty\u2019s knight-of-the-sea could snap at people who came in to spend good money and almost tripped over his safety hazard of a dog.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I see,\u201d said I in reference to the blind dog. \u201cThat explains her ability to put up with you all day.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t actually say that. Didn\u2019t say anything, in fact. And I don\u2019t like itchy Pomeranians all that much. Why didn\u2019t I put the mini-lighthouse down, walk out? Because the mini-lighthouse\u2014ten centimeters tall, round cedar base\u2014was a trophy for my mother who, a few days prior, had climbed to the top of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse for the first time, vanquishing her lifelong acrophobia, and a mini-replica of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse isn\u2019t something you can find just anywhere.<\/span><\/p>\n

So that\u2019s how I knew about the dog. <\/span><\/p>\n

When I returned to the lighthouse months later, my mother was in a prop plane somewhere rarefied and cloudless over Africa. Zip-lining over the Amazon, scaling the Great Wall: by this point, for her, these were wobbly GoPro videos and matters of been-there-done-that.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I went back to the lighthouse\u2014well, to the souvenir shop, which was really a sort of cottage some distance from the actual building with the bulb in it\u2014I had a pink beach bag with a map of Bermuda on it. I took the knife out of the bag before I went in.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a fine morning but, realistically, too early for customers. The lighthouse keeper wasn\u2019t gutting barracudas or making rope out of his chest hair but playing Kill The Plumber or something on his phone. He didn\u2019t look up. The Pomeranian wandered around looking pathetic. She\u2019d been scratching herself around her red collar-with-nametag. I let her sniff my hand: she was totally docile. I tucked her into my bag, frazzled head poking out.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI want the keys to the lighthouse. All of them. Or Bubbles dies,\u201d I said. <\/span><\/p>\n

I put the point of my knife to her twitching little ear.<\/span><\/p>\n

You\u2019d expect Russell Crowe\u2019s battle-hardened mate to whip out a loaded crossbow. I mean, it was a big knife. But the guy just looked confused, like he\u2019d woken up alone in the middle of the sea. He looked in his coffee cup, which was empty, wondering perhaps if he\u2019d overdone it with the rum.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why. Did I just look up at the sky and think, <\/span>Nice day for hijacking a lighthouse<\/span><\/i>?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re the lighthouse keeper, aren\u2019t you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYeah.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo you must have the keys.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat the hell do you want with the lighthouse? It comes on automatically, you know. It\u2019s not like you can\u2014\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBubbles doesn\u2019t find that issue particularly relevant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cListen, young lady.\u201d He really said that. \u201cJust put down the dog and leave. I won\u2019t call the police. We\u2019ll just forget all this.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

His eyes flitted from me to Bubbles to the knife. She yawned.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou watch TV. They never just leave,\u201d I said. \u201cNobody just forgets it all.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I arranged the knife in a more threatening posture. This was just supposed to look threatening, not actually touch anything. But with my other hand I petted Bubbles underneath her chin, she tilted up her head for more, and well, the big knife shaved a couple millimeters of mangy orange fur. Before they hit the ground, the key was on the counter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t hurt her,\u201d said Long John Silver\u2019s general factotum.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne key? That\u2019s all?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJesus.\u201d He dropped the other keychain when he took it out of his pocket, scrambled on the floor for it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo extras in a safe or something?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHow the hell should I know? It\u2019s government. This is government property.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d rather not be disturbed, wouldn\u2019t we, Bubbles. I\u2019d go ahead and not bother following us if I were you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou said you\u2019d give her back.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cActually, I didn\u2019t. If you think about it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat kind of psychopath bullies blind Pomeranians?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As First Mate Start-The-Day-With-Rum progressed from fear to panic, he started to get angry, so we left. We climbed the sloping lawn to the top of Gibbs Hill, where the lighthouse stood white and straight like a candle. You could imagine a heroine in a Gothic novel for giants picking up this delicate taper and wandering deeper-ever-deeper into the secret shadows of her spectral outsized world, the dark forgotten closets of the haunted heart. <\/span><\/p>\n

I used the key on the arm of a bare-breasted mermaid who also carried house keys, moped keys, and the key for the cash register. The heavy door sealed off the sun and fresh-grass scent, and I stood in the bottom of the iron lighthouse looking at the undersides of spiraling stairs with the sense of something opening above my head and the feeling that sucks you in when you step onto an airplane: <\/span><\/p>\n

Out of the solid gravity-conscious world. Into a tube which, contrary to good reason, hangs suspended in the sky. I locked the door, put the keys in my bag with the knife from my mother\u2019s kitchen, carried Bubbles in my arms, climbing 185 steps.<\/span><\/p>\n

You may not believe this, but I\u2019d never hijacked a lighthouse before. Never participated in a robbery or violent crime, neither on the giving end nor the receiving one. No DUIs, nothing like that. I don\u2019t know any suicide bombers or other criminals. Never bungee-jumped or put rum in my coffee. Yet I went up-up, round-and-round, as if down-the-rabbit-hole but going the wrong way, in no particular hurry. Bubbles was calm, silent like she\u2019d done this before. The dank stairwell smelled of old tide pools which, somehow, the tide had forgotten to come back and clean up. There wasn\u2019t any light except from the rare naked bulb or tiny window drilled into the iron like a porthole in a submarine. And really the entire building was stairwell: no floors, no landings, just up-up round-and-round and a door like an airlock\u2014and blue burst in as though I\u2019d gone too deep.<\/span><\/p>\n

Blue above, blue below as the brilliant sky outstretched. Blue on every side as the ocean flooded in from beyond the horizon, rippling, shade-shifting like a temperamental hyper-sensitive intelligence: morose gray-blue, profound royal blue, blue-green devouring sea grass, maroon-tinged kissing the reefs, cyan whirling with the pink sand on the beach.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a perverse corner of my mind, I expected to look down and discover that the lighthouse stood on green-painted ceramic affixed to a cedar base and that far off over the sea stood another taller, prettier lighthouse on another island. But I looked between the whitewashed iron railings to the pub at the bottom of the hill; to the vacant lot where a hotel had been demolished; over white roofs, power lines, coconut trees to so much sparkling blue water I\u2019d never see it kiss another shore even from the summit of 185 steps. I ambled round the widow\u2019s walk with Bubbles in my arms and saw Bermuda, all of it: green with brightly colored houses shooting up like wildflowers\u2014pink, yellow, blue, lavender, orange\u2014a tiny archipelago delicate and secretive like an old-fashioned key. Saint George\u2019s and Saint David\u2019s made the top loop for the chain. Hamilton Parish to Southampton were the dainty stem and throating. Pembroke and Somerset, out to the Royal Naval Dockyard, formed the notches which were a perfect fit for some singular gap. And it was as if the key lay upon the water waiting to be turned upright inside a secret: a crater in an ancient submerged volcano.<\/span><\/p>\n

I sat against the wall of the service room beneath the lantern at the top of the lighthouse. I held Bubbles in my lap with soft words and cuddles. If I\u2019d put her down, she might have wandered off the edge; she was small enough to barely graze the railings as she slipped between.<\/span><\/p>\n

The keeper, that grizzled swabbie, had to back up all the way to achieve perhaps a glimpse of the top of my head. Although he was more likely to backward-somersault down the hill.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLet me come up and get my dog.\u201d He had to shout. It had been maybe an hour since I\u2019d left him in the shop.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe looks comfy to me. Aren\u2019t you comfy, Bubbles?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Her ear twitched a little at the sound of his voice.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think she was asleep,\u201d I said. \u201cYou interrupted her nice, comfy sleep.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAre you insane?\u201d said the hard-boiled hearty of Gibbs Hill. \u201cSeriously. Are you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d advise going away. Unless you want precious Bubbly-bub to take the short way down.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Those were my words, I\u2019m afraid, the results of too much bad TV. But anyway, he went. I heard his footsteps swishing away. <\/span><\/p>\n

I gave Bubbles some dog biscuits I\u2019d bought at the grocery store. These were just for her, I don\u2019t know any other dogs. I gave her water in a paper bowl. She located everything with her tiny black nose. <\/span><\/p>\n

As the sun climbed, the blue abyss, the lighthouse, absence of the ground, Bubbles, and I sank into a dreamlike, mutually indifferent companionability. Everything else began to seem non-actual\u2014the Princess hotel was like something on a postage stamp, a container ship on the horizon like a pencil-smudge. The lighthouse cast a shadow on the ground, painted a black line through the souvenir shop, redacting the road I\u2019d driven on. Bubbles, the dog who didn\u2019t know I existed, finished up a dog biscuit, scratched the itch under her collar, went to sleep in my lap. <\/span><\/p>\n

And when good ol\u2019 Mr. Smee came back, he didn\u2019t talk, just craned and looked. I imagined if he\u2019d seen Bubbles curl up in my lap, he\u2019d have wanted to rip the lighthouse right out of the hill, shake me out, and strangle me\u2014which, incidentally, would\u2019ve been his only option since he\u2019d actually given me all his keys. I suppose I should\u2019ve known: he couldn\u2019t go home. He went away, back to the shop, I guess. I leaned into the lighthouse. The lighthouse leaned into me. Bubbles snoozed in my lap. <\/span><\/p>\n

The lighthouse-shadow, prone, was a sharp and perfect silhouette, and so it seemed, as I leaned into the tapered iron body, that I was already intimate with its ghost: someone\u2019s shadow is the ghost of their fleeting meeting with the sun. <\/span><\/p>\n

When night came down, I thought, the lighthouse and I would draw our shadows deep into ourselves, tapers of pure murk\u2014while from the outside our redundant burning obliterated us from sight. <\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to think of how, looking at the lighthouse from the middle of the sea at night, you\u2019d see something like a firefly: a burning light so bright it devoured the stick-like body that did the burning. <\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to think of how, from the far night of the future, people might look back and see how life devours those who live it; but they wouldn\u2019t see my face, wouldn\u2019t remember my name. They\u2019d remember the burning and forget that we all share it; but my face, my name, would disappear, suspended until someone asked about them for some irrelevant reason, and I would fuse with the lighthouse as a surplus shadow.<\/span><\/p>\n

But Cap\u2019n Hook\u2019s cabin boy just kept coming back. He didn\u2019t ask who I was, made no effort to converse since it was clear I was ignoring him. He swished over the grass, craned to see the dog, swished away. But it got on my nerves: the swishing vacuumed up the silence, his head was like a wart in the nether edge of my vision, his persistence forbade me to forget about him. It got so I couldn\u2019t think about the lighthouse; I just thought, <\/span>He\u2019s coming back, any second he\u2019ll be back; <\/span><\/i>and I kept thinking in circles of the imbecile who named dogs after empty air and apparently just for kicks proclaimed <\/span>She doesn\u2019t know you exist<\/span><\/i>. Obviously Bubbles had a better sense of smell, better hearing than any human, probably better than most other dogs; and if her world was empty, it was because that empty man filled it with himself. It grew unbearable and finally, when I heard him swishing, I put Bubbles in the beach bag and dangled the bag over the railings.<\/span><\/p>\n

She woke up and hung, whimpering, as if she could feel the emptiness beneath her beach-bag room, little ears batting the air a good eighty meters above the ground. Russell Crowe\u2019s right hand cried out her stupid name in a high voice like a lunatic.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBack off,\u201d I said. <\/span><\/p>\n

He ran. I pulled the dog in when I couldn\u2019t see him anymore. He screamed over his shoulder, \u201cI\u2019m calling the police.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think he actually called them at first. I think Davy Jones\u2019s deckhand thought the threat would be enough once I\u2019d had time to think it over. Maybe he himself, sometime, during his dashing career as a swashbuckling brigand slaying hearts in each Tortuga from here to Somerset, had found himself weak in the knees at the prospect of clashing tinfoil swords with cops. Maybe he thought Bubbles would be taken as an accomplice. Maybe he just didn\u2019t want people to know that he was no match for an unprepossessing female and couldn\u2019t keep track of his phlegmatic Pomeranian. Even if he did call immediately, imagine the conversation: a woman alone, something from her mother\u2019s kitchen, blind itchy little dog.<\/span><\/p>\n

What if the pale light turned out to be nothing more than the arm of a ghost, and there really was no lighthouse, no island beneath? That\u2019s what it felt like eighty meters up: the ground was just a glimmer here and there like light on water, the water vanished altogether; still this pale arm soared beckoning above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can\u2019t imagine we were high on the cops\u2019 list of priorities. Anyway, they took forever. Bubbles and I passed a pleasant evening together. <\/span><\/p>\n

I calmed her down: set her on the widow\u2019s walk so she could feel it with her paws, held her gently so she couldn\u2019t run, administered biscuits, and rid her of the itchy collar. The sun glided to Dockyard, shaded the sky in yellow where the ocean teased the horizon, daubed the clouds with pink and mauve charcoal, and set the sea on fire for a brilliant moment\u2014a moment that left the water bruise-purple and turning black, as if smoldering beneath the surface. When the sun disappeared, the island twinkled\u2014a handful of doubloons spilling over black velvet\u2014and the lighthouse came on.<\/span><\/p>\n

A thousand watts through a two-ton revolving lens, the equivalent of half a million candles suddenly ablaze and zooming through the air right above my head: it was a shock even though I was expecting it. The noise from the lantern room made me jump, a thump and then a whirr, and then the light\u2014like in UFO movies, when the extras are pretending to mind their own business and are all of a sudden blinded by this too-bright-for-this-world too-white-to-be-real glaring from above. I found myself huddling against the wall of the service room, pressing close to Bubbles, who didn\u2019t notice a thing, something like trepidation creeping up on me. Not that I didn\u2019t know the light would be disturbing, spinning right above my head, turning everything a spectral white every few seconds only to plunge it all into the dark again; but I wasn\u2019t frightened of the light. What crept up on me was more like the shudder that runs through your temples when you see the doors closing and want to throw yourself between them lest you miss the train.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t know why I just sat there, holding the blind dog and waiting to calm down. The lantern\u2019s ghostly beam seemed as long as a life that\u2019s run its course. And if it would only stand still, I thought, it would be the giant ghost of the lazy sunbeam hanging between the window and the floor in my grandfather\u2019s shop, making sparkling planets out of suspended motes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course it couldn\u2019t stand still or it wouldn\u2019t be a lighthouse. If you were in a boat at sea, thrown up and down and sideways by some hurricane\u2014knowing that any minute, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge would reach out with reefy tentacles and seize your boat\u2014you\u2019d see this light, if it stood still, as nothing but a low-hanging star, proof that your navigating instruments were thoroughly out of whack, and you wouldn\u2019t know you had a reason to hope. <\/span><\/p>\n

But see the pale arm beckon through wind and rain, swinging softly, steadfastly over turbulent waves, and you\u2019d seem to hear hope calling to you in light, <\/span>Come<\/span><\/i> . . . <\/span>Come<\/span><\/i> . . . <\/span>, <\/span><\/i>breathing between calls like something alive. Toiling in your boat, your thoughts would fill with firelight, hot tea, a bath. The pale beam of the lighthouse promises those things; and while you stagger, wet and cold, the image of the teacup in your hands comes to you borne on the beam, as vivid as the wave that nearly does it for your boat; so every time the ghostly arm reaches round to you again, you physically ache for all it promises. You lean into this light and draw it to yourself, so the delicate beam forging its way through the storm seems to know all of your yearning for a safe haven. And yet the ghostly beckoning, turning aside, beckoning, sweeping aside like a number on a roulette wheel, isn\u2019t itself the safe port but a substanceless sign of it, a mere play of light on water. <\/span><\/p>\n

What if the pale light turned out to be nothing more than the arm of a ghost, and there really was no lighthouse, no island beneath? That\u2019s what it felt like eighty meters up: the ground was just a glimmer here and there like light on water, the water vanished altogether; still this pale arm soared beckoning above. I wanted to believe its empty promise was a promise of emptiness, I imagined the spectral beam with my silhouette burned into it: a me-shaped absence flying into the abyss, bearing down on those at sea who squinted through the night for some life-sign. <\/span><\/p>\n

But the lighthouse isn\u2019t a silhouette painter. Its job is not to render specifics, only to show that there is something here, there is light here. Bubbles woke up momentarily, nosed around for something\u2014anything, probably\u2014and so I rubbed her tummy, thinking even though the lighthouse didn\u2019t paint silhouettes, the plain silver line it drew in the black water reminded me of something. <\/span><\/p>\n

Not the sunlight through the window in the shop but something even more dynamic and obscure. I became absorbed in trying to pinpoint what it was. What did the shimmering silver line rippling through the ocean as if from underneath it remind me of? <\/span><\/p>\n

Couldn\u2019t put my finger on it. And the really annoying part: once you know that something reminds you of something, it won\u2019t let go of you till you decipher the connection. Try as you might to focus on something else, you\u2019re totally preoccupied with trying to assimilate everything you\u2019ve ever seen to that other incongruous thing\u2014from the rows inside your grandfather\u2019s cash register drawer to the smoke trail on the airplane as your mother left for Africa . . . <\/span><\/p>\n

They sent one car, two constables, a megaphone. The cruiser lumbered up the hill over the grass, heading for the southernmost point of the lighthouse\u2019s circumference, where Bubbles looked at nothing and I hesitated for no reason, trying to discern which of the dark wedges between lantern-strokes belonged to me. <\/span><\/p>\n

Some policeman said, \u201cGood evening, ma\u2019am,\u201d and introduced himself through the megaphone. <\/span><\/p>\n

Bubbles moved an ear.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGood evening,\u201d I said. \u201cYou guys took forever.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCan we come up there and speak with you?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you go up, she\u2019ll kill her, she\u2019ll murder my dog, I\u2019m telling you she\u2019s crazy!\u201d cried Ahab\u2019s lackey.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAll right, step up to the railings please, ma\u2019am.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I went to the railings, went as far as I could get before the iron bars poked me in the chest. I held Bubbles in my arms, a breeze rustled in her fur and stirred my hair, and we looked down from the very edge of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cops took a look at me through their binoculars and headlights\u2014the latter, of course, pointing at the grass. I took a look at them in the swinging light of the lighthouse. They looked like the smudged shadows of Lego men to me, and I wondered what they saw in their binoculars, if anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMa\u2019am? Are you so-and-so\u2019s granddaughter? Runs the shop in Saint George\u2019s?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The constable named somebody who wasn\u2019t my grandfather. <\/span><\/p>\n

And I wasn\u2019t running the shop. Not anymore. I\u2019d had to liquidate and close it soon after my mother conquered acrophobia and climbed to the summit of Gibbs Hill Lighthouse. You could blame the recession, bad luck, bad decisions, my lack of training, the fact that my mother thought the whole venture ridiculous from the start; she thought we should\u2019ve closed the shop when Granddad died. Regardless of what you blame, the shop was in Hamilton, not Saint George\u2019s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, you\u2019ve got to hand it to the constable. He mixed up the details; but he looked at me through binoculars and figured out or remembered my line of work. Not that either one should be difficult around here: a couple thousand people, 20 \u00bd square miles\u2014many of them occupied by family-owned souvenir shops\u2014sums up the whole country. Chances are this cop, lacking options around Christmastime, had even visited my store. So this half-recognition shouldn\u2019t have astonished me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like Bubbles\u2019 silence on the stairs, her nap in my lap, as if she\u2019d known me forever, shouldn\u2019t have astonished me. Who I was shouldn\u2019t have mattered anymore; it only mattered <\/span>that <\/span><\/i>I was. <\/span><\/p>\n

So when the constable asked me to remind him of my name, I got confused, and I thought of my dead grandfather, my mother high up in the clouds; I wasn\u2019t about to speak the name they\u2019d given me, but a film came over my eyes like the inside of a bubble. And I said, \u201cBubbles.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Wild protestations from Captain Aubrey\u2019s flame-keeper as Bubbles nosed around, bumped into my hand, and licked it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMs. Bubbles\u2014\u201d said the constable.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo Ms. Just Bubbles.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The policeman asked his colleague to restrain Lord Nelson\u2019s firebrand from out-shouting the megaphone.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMs. Bubbles. Why did you go and lock yourself inside the lighthouse?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Since they obviously weren\u2019t listening, I felt no special urge to point out that they weren\u2019t listening. I stepped back and sat down against the service room.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAll right, ma\u2019am, there\u2019s a doctor who wants to talk to you. She\u2019s on her way right now. Can you sit tight till she gets here? Can you do that for me?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The idiot thought I planned to jump. Thanks to bumbling Mr. Smee\u2019s psychological assessment.<\/span><\/p>\n

While we waited for the doctor, Bubbles ate some biscuits and the white light burned through me and flung itself into the dark, where it stretched and finally wore itself out, over and over. <\/span><\/p>\n

At first I tried to invoke the shadow of the lighthouse\u2014the ghost of its artificial body\u2019s meeting with the sun\u2014really a reflection of the empty body\u2019s inner dark. <\/span><\/p>\n

I tried to see the ghost before my closed eyes in dead of night: to draw the shadow, draw the dark down into me. <\/span><\/p>\n

And I became alarmed when I couldn\u2019t remember what it looked like, not exactly. Looking around, I just saw railings, too much light, and a dog\u2019s head, not the lighthouse. And then I wondered if the doctor would bring a straitjacket. <\/span><\/p>\n

My jaw started trembling as it dawned on me that I was a complete failure. I should\u2019ve been long gone before the cops arrived, long before the sun went into the sea, before the lighthouse keeper even knew what hit him. Why did I hesitate?<\/span><\/p>\n

There was a news van now, an ambulance, small crowd of onlookers. The southern lawn twinkled red and blue and flashbulb-white, headlight-yellow, all the way to the bottom of the hill, so it was next to impossible to look at the nothing of the ocean. Still, I didn\u2019t hesitate because of the hubbub; I\u2019d expected it, I didn\u2019t care what anybody thought. And when I thought of my absence sailing out on that white beam, a dog-shaped absence too, I knew my mother wouldn\u2019t see it from Africa. I knew better than to hope it would bear us up to heaven. I was okay with that.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it wasn\u2019t about Bubbles. Even though I knew that if I hadn\u2019t taken Bubbles, Cap\u2019n Jack\u2019s third-shift watchman would have never called the cops, attracting news folk and the crowd. He\u2019d have just waited me out. But you see, I had to take her. <\/span><\/p>\n

Of course I came up here to jump. Of course I did. Why else would I do something utterly stir-crazy like holding up a lighthouse? The plan was to take Bubbles with me.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not that I\u2019m a particular fan of Pomeranians or have anything against them. Bubbles, for whom I\u2019m already halfway gone, was a convenient half-companion on the dark road to non-being. <\/span><\/p>\n

The downside of Bubbles: she reminds me of me. She and the lighthouse keeper are exactly like me: perfect stand-ins for the worst of me\u2014except no matter how desolate and inept they are, they\u2019ll never lose their souvenir shop because there has to be a lighthouse. That is why, I guess, I want revenge. If the blind Pomeranian and loser buccaneer are signs, the latter signifies the part of me that\u2019s too sure of everything, the former the part that knows next to nothing and couldn\u2019t care less. The first made me vulnerable to disappointment, the second plain disgusts me. Bubbles deserves to end her misery as much as I do. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had time to think about this, sitting in the dark.<\/span><\/p>\n

The problem was, in spite of everything I\u2019d done and all I\u2019d planned to do to them, I still couldn\u2019t get away from me. I had the dog in my arms the whole time, after all. And the lighthouse, the lighthouse, the silver line in the water, reminded me of something I had felt, not something I\u2019d seen\u2014the relentless glare of empty hope. And that reminder railed against the cold fire that drove me to snatch a Pomeranian. And both\u2014illusory illumination, invisible fire\u2014fed on the heat of half a million candles and sent up a noxious confusion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Caught up in it, I wasn\u2019t sure if I could jump. I didn\u2019t know anymore if, when I fell, I\u2019d feel myself releasing myself, sending my absence shooting weightless into nothing\u2014or if, laden with myself until the final moment, I\u2019d just experience failure of the sort I\u2019d gotten used to. And suddenly because of a meaningless beam of light, I needed time, more time to think, and I was out of time because the cops were there and now the woman from the mental hospital hollering through the megaphone, \u201cBubbles, are you there?\u201d And she was really nothing like me\u2014Bubbles, that is\u2014this wasn\u2019t her idea, after all. I panicked, I shoved everything into the beach bag.<\/span><\/p>\n

I waited for a wedge of darkness. I slipped to the far side of the lighthouse, away from the crowd. I found the door to the service room, found the key. Then I went back to the other side and stood in the light. <\/span><\/p>\n

The doctor said, \u201cOh, there you are.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Then everybody saw the bag dangling over the railings. A collective gasp, the doctor and the cops were babbling, the lighthouse guy let out a scream.<\/span><\/p>\n

I dropped the bag.<\/span><\/p>\n

I imagine that the sound of the knife, the collar, everything hitting the ground far below was like the tinkling of keys in someone\u2019s hand. But the keys to the lighthouse were in my pocket, and I heard nothing but the wail of the lighthouse keeper: a terrible rending of a heart. He threw himself at the bag, the EMTs went after him, and the cops tried to wave back the cameras. I ran to the service room, locked myself in, and wept.<\/span><\/p>\n

The room was dark except for a few red and green lights from strange machines. The door wasn\u2019t as thick as I\u2019d thought, and I could hear people shouting\u2014they thought I\u2019d throw myself off next. I drew my knees up in a corner (someone tore the lighthouse open at the bottom\u2014must\u2019ve been another key, government property after all\u2014heavy footsteps, cursing on the stairs), my heart in my throat\u2014and I felt a cool, wet nose, a tiny tongue against my hand. <\/span><\/p>\n

I scooped up Bubbles, pressed her warm little body to my face; I held her and wept, rocking, into her fur. Everything seemed unreal\u2014who the hell is this person weeping over somebody\u2019s kidnapped Pomeranian, hiding from the cops in the whirring churning service room of a lighthouse?!\u2014I couldn\u2019t help but think it all through from the beginning: how in the world did I get here, what did I become to bring myself here? And now what will I do? They\u2019ll realize soon enough that I haven\u2019t jumped.<\/span><\/p>\n

I did leave the stairwell door open. The cops might think I hid behind the door in the shadows and escaped behind them down the stairs. They might try the service room, but they\u2019d have to go back down to get a key; they wouldn\u2019t hear us over the whirring and the wailing. He\u2019s bellowing her name, that poor old man. We could jump when they go for the key. We could run downstairs, run blind into their arms, surrender to the horror of life.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n

Bermuda native Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a freelance writer and independent scholar. Her short stories appear in <\/span>The Hypocrite Reader, The Island Review, Conclave, Dark Matter, Five on the Fifth<\/span><\/i>, the Aeon Award (UK) shortlist, and elsewhere. Her novel <\/span>Drafts of a Suicide Note<\/span><\/i> was shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers\u2019 Project Literary Award, named a semi-finalist for the Conium Review Book Prize, and awarded an honorable mention in the Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. She has also published creative nonfiction and scholarship in <\/span>Volume!\u00a0<\/span><\/i>(France), <\/span>Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy<\/span><\/i> (Open Court), <\/span>The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, Evental Aesthetics<\/span><\/i>, and other collections. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew the dog was blind because while combing the shop I nearly tripped over the scrawny, scruffy Pomeranian\u2014which didn\u2019t pompom the way those dogs are supposed to . . . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":542,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[45],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thespectacle.wustl.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}