Here's another one of the many stories I write that somehow involve electricity or lack thereof. One of the characters had been floating around my subconscious for a few years and he finally escaped onto the page.
One day Grandpa Ishenhill announced that he had decided to stop paying the electricity bill. It wasn’t that he couldn’t pay it. He was receiving his pension from having worked for twenty years as an employee of the state, and an extra stipend for being my legal guardian. And it certainly wasn’t because we didn’t need electricity. He just decided, one day, that he wouldn’t pay it. It was almost as if he wanted to see how long it would take before they cut us off. Every night he would sit in his chair in the living room, reading a book in Cazergi, looking up at the lamp every few minutes, angrily, as if he was frustrated at the power company for being late, and when the lights finally did go out, cutting out the newest Pool of Noise album coming from my room, the first thing he said was “well it’s about time they did something.”
“What am I supposed to do now?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I have homework to do!”
“Light a candle or something. I don’t know, you can wait for the sun to come up. Don’t worry, this is all part of the plan.”
I came to school thirty minutes late the next day, because my alarm clock didn’t go off, with my homework unfinished and an excuse that no one would believe. “So you’re saying that your grandpa just refuses to pay the electricity bill?”
“Yeah, he’s gone crazy. I mean, he has always been crazy, but, well, this is a new record.”
“Maybe you should budget your time better so that you do your homework while the sun is still shining. Or at least think of a better excuse.”
Because I lived with my crazy grandpa who would refuse to speak English for sometimes weeks at a time, because he thought that American kids were supposed to wear dork pants to school, because whenever teachers would call home about my miscreant behavior or my prodigious lack of caring he would yell at them until they hung up and then tell me some sort of fable from old country to illustrate my moral wrongdoings but which I could never understand, because he would pack me some sort of beet concoction in a thermos for lunch every day, because he insisted on giving me haircuts himself, and now because he somehow got the notion in his head that getting our power cut off was a good idea, I found it exceedingly difficult to be normal, let alone cool, in middle school. Actually, apart from the haircut, it was probably my own fault. Cool is an x-factor and I didn’t have it.
That afternoon I went to Marco’s house, where there was still lots of power, and played video games with him and Girma, then biked to the public library and tried to actually do some homework, until the librarian (who certainly did not have the potential to become a hot librarian by taking off her glasses and letting down her bun) kicked me out at closing time. So I walked to Carrie Brownstone’s house, stayed there for an hour or two to finish up my homework, then hopped the fence and walked a couple hundred feet along the canal to get home. When I got inside, there were no candles or anything for light, Grandpa Ishenhill was just sitting there, in the dark, eating a warm pudding cup. I noticed by the light coming in from the streetlights that his shirt was on backwards.
“Did the school call home today?” I asked when I thought we had made eye contact. “Oh wait, that’s right, they couldn’t, because you didn’t pay the phone bill either.”
“I was wondering why it was so nice and quiet here today,” he grumbled. “Speaking of which, where were you? You didn’t come home after school.”
“I was someplace where there was electricity.”
“Have I told you the legend of Gzoljchi the goatherd?”
“Which one, he’s been in like ten of the stories you’ve made up.”
“They are time-honored Cazergi legends, from before the coup, before the occupation, before Genghis Khan, before the Caliphate, before there was the Cazergi Orthodox Church, even before Alexander the Great made us civilized people!”
“You mean killed your men and raped your women.”
“Killed our men and raped our women. They’re your people too. Which is why you need to hear these stories that–“
“That you made up?” I wasn’t going to sit through this. I went to my room, slammed the door, and fell asleep with my clothes on. I think I knew which story he was talking about. Gzoljchi was some kind of archetypal figure in Cazergi lore who traveled around the steppes with his herd of goats and outsmarts various trickster spirits, all the while maintaining his integrity. In this particular story, the bat spirit Urzhdet steals the sun and hides it in his cave. Everyone else panics because there is no light, but not Gzoljchi, who is patient enough to learn to find his way without light to see, and then travels into the mountains where Urzhdet resides (scholars have found evidence that these mountains could be anywhere from the Urals to the Caucasus to the Hindu Kush). He then challenges Urzhdet to a traditional game that resembles croquet, called “Bajeka.” Urzhdet cannot see because he is blinded by the intense light of the sun inside his cave, but Gzoljchi plays with his eyes closed, as he has learned to live without sight. I think this story was supposed to tell me that I was supposed to be patient and learn to live without electricity. Now that may have been all well and good in shamanistic, bronze-age Eurasia, but now, I think electricity may be more important than sunlight was back then. At least the way I saw it.
The next day Grandpa Ishenhill woke me up by knocking on my door. I ate cereal straight from the box with my hand and washed it down with a coca cola. Grandpa Ishenhill ate his dry out of a bowl with a spoon. “You know,” he said, “if we had a goat we could have milk.”
“Or we could just pay the electricity bill and be able to use our refrigerator again.”
“Just sit this one through, ok?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll learn.”
“You know, I’ve always thought you were full of shit, but this is ridiculous. Can we just pretend to be normal people for once?”
“I’ve tried to be normal and it isn’t worth it.”
“Oh shut up old man.” I was out the door. My hair was all greasy and sticky; we had no hot water so I hadn’t showered. But I felt well rested, and I was aware of things for the first eight hours of my day, kind of like a drone being severed from its hive mind for the first time.
That night, Grandpa Ishenhill realized that we couldn’t eat dry cereal forever. It was actually his idea to order a pizza. Of course, we couldn’t use our landline, I didn’t have a cell phone and he of course refused to get one. “Go over to that whatsername’s house and use their phone,” he told me.
“They don’t usually put beets on pizza, you gonna be ok with that?” I asked on my way out the back door.
“Think of a topping you don’t like and get that on half of it. I’ll probably find to be to my liking.”
I walked along the canal and hopped over Carrie Brownstone’s back fence. She wasn’t there so I had to explain to her mom and her mom’s boyfriend (who was probably the reason Carrie Brownstone wasn’t there) why I had to use their phone. Once I had explained my peculiar situation and they agreed to let me, I noticed that the pizza parlor’s number that I had scrawled on my hand had already smeared, so I also had to ask them to use their internet to look up the number. (I think we were the last household in the Western World to still have a physical phone book.)
I was expecting another mind game with Grandpa Ishenhill when the pizza came, making me thank him for not skimping on his basic duty or at least another legend that he probably made up. But instead, he somewhat laboriously hoisted himself onto the kitchen counter, next to the pizza box, and gestured to me to sit on the other side. We sat there in the dark, munching on the pizza in silence.
“Well, I think I’ll go to bed now,” I said after I had finished.
The next morning I woke up at six in the morning and actually took a shower, even though it was cold as hell. This would become my routine every day, and I adhered to it without trying. I go to sleep as soon as I got home, wake up with the sun, or even before it, take a freezing shower and then go to school where I would actually pay attention, then go somewhere that wasn’t at home, so I wouldn’t be reminded of how angry I was at Grandpa Ishenhill.
This worked out all well and good for about a month, until he decided to change the game again. I came home one day and the door was off its hinges, and all of the windows were taken out of their frames.
“What the hell are you doing with the doors and windows?”
“I’m selling them.”
“We’re going to get robbed!”
“It’s not like we have any valuables.”
“What about the TV and the computer?”
“Well, we can’t really use those anyway, so I just stashed them under my bed. It feels like all I really leave the house for is errands and church, so now you don’t have to go to church, and you can run the errands.”
“I can’t drive yet.”
“This way you’ll learn fast!”
“You have completely lost it this time.”
“It’s all part of the plan. Just let it happen.”
“What plan?”
“We just need to let the winds blow through our house. We need to let the outside in.” Have I told you the story of–”
“Don’t want to hear it.”
That night I was so cold that I barely slept, so the next day I went to Carrie Brownstone’s to see if they had any extra blankets. I got one and it must have brushed against some poison oak as I was walking along the canal, because the next day I was itchy and puffy everywhere and some spots even turned into sores that oozed pus. It on everything in my room, somehow, on all my clothes, my sheets, my pillow, all over my desk. That was the time of year when the water in the canal got stagnant and mosquitoes started spawning there, and would of course make their way into the house. So I had mosquito bites on top of my poison oak and I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Helluva time...
To Be Continued...
Maybe...
