Night Vision

Night Vision                                                     W. Maguire  copyright 2016 

When I was a kid I answered an ad for a job working as an electricians assistant. The old man….almost 35… asked me what I knew about voltage and amps and circuits. In a rare moment of candor I stared hard at him…all of 14…and said “Nothin’.

He nodded and gave me the job. That summer he tried to teach me why electricity was the greatest power on earth...because for the most part it ran unseen in the dark through wires and delivered us light. To him to it was almost as if it was stolen from God.

We spent about a month that summer changing out substandard wires in some townhouses. A couple had caught fire from some faulty wiring and the insurance company wanted it pulled.

One day I had some of the wire we had torn out in hand. It looked perfectly intact to me. So I asked how I could recognize the flaws.

He gazed at me for a long moment then finally said- “Every bit of wire ever made is faulty, son.'

‘Sometimes the current coming through is just stronger than the wire can stand. Above its tolerance. You cant really blame it.’

Then holding up a handful of new shining coils shrugged-  “Every one of them is flawed.”

Much later for a few years when I was still quite young and just out on my own …living alone in NYC…I could not sleep.

 I’d lay down every night and listen to the tick tick tick of competing thought. A riot of ambition and worry that resisted rest just about every night.

I started to think of myself as the poster boy for the place itself.  The city that never sleeps.

Eventually, out of desperation,  I got into the habit of getting up  and going out alone…often in the middle of the night…no matter what season and running a few miles trying to drag myself to the point of exhaustion.

Sometimes it worked…..often not.

This was in a rough part of the city. And back then buildings and shells of buildings were regularly set to fire for the insurance money. Usually the tenants couldn’t pay enough to make keeping the places maintained pay.

There were a lot of flaws in the wiring in that part of town.

Running at night at the top of one of the avenues I would always see a few fires. There were times that summer when it seemed like the whole city was ablaze. But only underneath…it  only forced its way into view once the flaws were exposed. When the current was too strong.

I was living in a third floor walkup with paper thin walls next to a medical student…a good looking blonde guy who was studying  to be a gynecologist. So of course he ended up banging about half the citys female population.

And for whatever reason, I assume his medical training, they were usually yellers. 

This did not help in any way with my sleep problem. 

You try sleeping with a girl yelling “ Ohhhh ..Doctor…Doctor….Doctor!” every other night at 3 am.

Often I’d get up and go run….just so I wouldn’t have to listen. And many times I’d be getting back and a girl would be hurrying down the stairs …always a little flustered, looking down and away…with the gonna be doctor standing in his door smiling and shrugging at me as I walked by sweating in the hall.

This went on for a few months until, pragmatist that I am, I decided to take a job working nights. I reasoned I wouldn’t have to listen to yellers…and I wouldn’t  have the sleep problem.

So I took the first job at night I could find. It was awful mindless work but really all I cared about was that  

A.it would be at night….

B. no one would try to tell me what to do…like they could anyway  and 

C. I could think about whatever I wanted.

I’d get off at 3am and usually walk home.  New York City in the wee small hours. 

It was during this time I began to notice a kind of person that would only be out only in the dead of night.

I started to think of them as the Eclipse People. Shadowed souls… eclipsed by some flaw or truth about themselves that they had been unable to overcome or purge.

It left them stranded, working the graveyard shifts catering to the restless. In many of them it as if something in the light of day was just too painful to see anymore. Like they had a condition that craved darkness …to protect themselves I suppose.

The Eclipse People were always a little sad…and always a little brave...and the combination was a powerful mix. It seemed to me heroic in a way that was so small and common and futile it could hardly be seen.

It was almost as though hope itself had become a shadow …impossible to see…unless your eyes had adjusted. Unless you developed a kind of night vision.

The Eclipse People included  the waitresses at the all night diners. None pretty enough for the day shift…but all with a kind of hard sweetness to them. One I remember had a scar across her cheek and wide luminous blue black eyes. Another had a pronounced limp …she struggled to feign walking straight. It hurt just to watch her to angle her way through the nighthawks that filled the place.

Many I suppose had come dreaming of bright lights. But gradually those dreams winnowed themselves down until they could only fit inside the shadows.  Like the current of their hopes had overwhelmed  some hidden flaw in their own wiring….and then short circuited, a kind of darkness ensued.

These girls were always a little brave and always a little scared…hopeful in a terribly naive way…and confused at how their dreams had led them into this work in the shadows.

It was as though the world and everything in it had been caught in some unexpected darkening  that no one talked about but everyone seemed to feel.

But they always seemed to have an outsized gratitude for even the most meager kindness. The way a thirsty person relishes even the smallest sip.

And they always had a kind of misplaced innocence, hardening  around the edges though still unprotected at the core…full of an unshakable belief in fate or happiness or a just world.

Each was certain that better days, like a rescue party, were searching for them…ready to drag them back into the light.

Then there were the longshoremen working nights and then later keeping the after hours bars in business. Hard guys…street guys…with a simplicity to them. They believed that everything they ever wanted in life ran in a straight line from their 12 hours, time and a half,  to the shots they lined up every dawn in the gin joints on 10^th avenue.

There were the hacks… sweeping through in the citys dark veins looking for strays and drunks  among the restless and the lonely and the rest of the shadowed souls.

The Eclipse People were, of course, not all goodness and light. I was jumped walking home alone a few times. Had a gun held to my head a time or two. A guy tried to cut my arm off with a machete when I decided to swing away one night…as I often did then.  Ok…as I still do.

Something began to change in me though. After a couple times fear seemed to get thinner, almost like it was being starved. Then it seemed to disappear entirely.

I remember one night, a bowie knife at my throat and a desperate junkie wiping his running nose. I remember the feel of the blade at my adams apple and wondering to myself why I felt only pity…and not the slightest hint of fear.

 I could see the gauge of danger tipping into red…but I couldn’t really feel it anymore.

I can still hear my voice clear and low telling him we could find a way to get right...and him listening to me….eyes wide…afraid of my calm… like I was the threat.

A lot gets swept away a little at a time at night. Things I was sure of seemed to disappear gradually and forever. And other things that could never be seen in even the brightest light began to appear in their place.

Fear was like that for me…or maybe I just stopped caring about myself at all for a time.

Each night I would walk past the bus station and see the people making late night connections ...staring at each other…always a little lonely… always a little afraid. All of them trying to get someplace else….trying in vain to outdistance the past...trying in vain to imagine a future beyond all they had lived in to themselves. A future that could reinvent itself…far from every hard law they had already uncovered in their hearts.

And around them were the wolves of the night circling the Port Authority looking for runaways.

Most of the wolves were excons and deviants. Many had been abused themselves as kids and had in time given themselves over entirely to cruelty. Like they were trying to make an ally of it.

They would wait for the buses and stare into the faces of the new arrivals…always looking for the lost. Always offering to show them the way because they wanted nothing in return…except, of course, everything.

And after a few hollow promises  they would leave together...…one terrible uncertain step after another until the new arrivals were taken by the shadows and ushered across some dividing line toward the departed.

I could feel my heart darken each night ...with pity…just passing by. 

There were the street hustlers on the West Side…selling nickel bags to the suburb kids that came into the city on the weekends to dance at the discos. Some of these kids later graduated to crack and some even became freebasers. Dragon chasers.

They’re called that because they found if you ignite coke with a lighter and inhale it the high is deeper. So they would stick their faces into the flames…chasing the dragon. Emergency rooms were crowded back then with kids…second degree burns  across their faces. Branded for life.

And there were the working girls....many wives and mothers….working the streets on the West Side near the tunnel. They called it the Tunnel of Love. In truth it was the Tunnel of Loneliness.

They used to follow me down the avenue until they got to recognize me…always swaying along on unsteady stiletto heels for a block or so. Bickering over a new customer.

But I began to develop a feeling for them. For all of them.

They were all hopeful in a hopeless kind of way…maybe even faithful in the way that only those regularly tested develop.  

And all were eclipsed by some flaw down deep… and held captive by it in the small hours on the dark corners in the city that never sleeps.

None of any of them were bright… that made something  in them seem cleaner. There was never any guile, never any hidden motive, a kind of honesty demanded by their own limitations.

And always above all, that gratitude…for even the smallest thinnest of kindnesses. Like they had come to expect only a kick in the teeth.

And reckoning that against myself …against my own ingratitude… always filled me with a kind of shame.

Everything I have ever felt ….every bit of love and happiness and envy and rage has lied to me at one time or another. They can’t be trusted.

The heart wants too much and it invents things to satisfy itself. It becomes a liar. It uses hope like an argument to make you believe the lies its tells you with what it feels.

All of it had lied to me …every bit of it at one time or another. All except one thing.

Shame.

Shame remains the one thing I can still feel that I know will never lie to me. I think it must rise from far beneath the apparition of what we want…it comes from the vault of what we are…or were…or still down deep believe we may someday become again.

I have been given a lot. Many advantages and a mind that can see beneath the surface of most things. That’s a hard thing to say. It hurts my pride to think of all I have been given and how callously I have regarded these gifts.  As though they were shadows.

But I still wake up livid sometimes at all I have not done, not reached , not felt…an ingrate through and through… in spite of all I have been given. 

So back then when I learned to see it clearly…that kind of gratitude… I could feel the shame rise in me.  A silent overpowering flood. And it always felt true.

During my night shift days I would pass the same panhandler every night on Broadway. He was beaten down, disheveled, lost from the world into the shadows of his own fantasy.

I suppose the current was too strong. He could not tolerate it. It exposed the flaw in his wiring. And a kind of slow fire, like rust, relentlessly engulfed him.

He would stand in the traffic near Canal St…in Chinatown…waving the cars ahead and then halting them…as if he had been granted power over them. As if he was in control.

The light was moot. A distraction from his job, keeping the world in order and allowing it to pass that shadowy corner unscathed.

Whenever he saw me walking by alone in the middle of the night he would hit me up for change.

Night after night he would go through the same pitch, each time like he had never seen me before.

One night…it was August…I remember the weather report was a front was moving in. They said there would be flooding. But that night, like many that summer, the sky was full of heat lightning.

No sound of thunder…just an occasional flash burning through the black.

That night the panhandler saw me passing again and halted the traffic once more beneath the red light. He hobbled over to me and once again started in on his pitch.

I remember I was angry as I often was then.  I had spent that summer listening to the shadows of the words in myself wondering if they would ever allow me to grab hold of them and force them out into view.

Everytime I tried they would recede into the dim, dancing at the edge of my own kind of hopeless hope.

I don’t remember what I said to the old man. But I recall the sound of it. Full of outrage and contempt. It sounded like a hiss from an old steam radiator. Full of its own hot air.

Now, in memory, it just sounds like the whisper of regret.  Hard to hear  …but unmistakable.  The echo of distant thunder.

I remember hollering at him…belittling him…then cutting him up with my words. Slicing into his pathetic self deception, his bad decisions soldered to weakness, his surrender to the shadows.

Then I recall bellowing…full of self righteous contempt -

 ‘And why….just once… don’t YOU ever have some spare change….. for ME!’  I screamed.

The perpetual motion of the city seemed to stop. The night itself paused. I can feel it now…like a small gasp at my own staggering contempt.

He looked at me for a long moment in silence…with wide unblinking bloodshot eyes. And behind them, I can see it now,  unmistakable pity.  For me.

And then this ragged beggar fell to one knee on the sidewalk before me and emptied his pockets at my feet.

A pile of quarters and old newspaper clippings.

He struggled to his feet….with his hands outstretched  as if to say-

“This is all I have Sir….Please take it. ’

Then he turned and limped back into the traffic because the world had stopped....and he alone could restart it.

Just then the sky above us filled once more with a barrage of soundless  flashes breaking for a moment my own eclipse.

I still see him sometimes… in the alleyways of my dreams.   

And I will never get over the shame of that moment.

I walked home certain that I had seen something underneath…that could be seen only in a flash. Something exposed in the dark that could never be seen in the light. A kind of night vision.

As I reached my door I could hear one of my neighbor’s yellers in full throat….so I decided to go up onto the roof to wait her out.

It was late summer and I just wanted to feel the breeze off the river. The sky was that black purple bruise it sometimes becomes when the city lights reflect back against a coming storm. And across it heat lightning flashed every few minutes without a sound. 

I remember looking down on the street below. It was deserted except for this neighborhood guy. 

He was a steamfitter…Irish guy…worked the construction sites. But he was also a drunk.

He wasn’t the get loaded on the weekend kind. He was the too much aint enough kind. 

The kind that thinks of three shots of Jameson like it could put a mile between himself and heartache. And why would anyone stop at a mile… or hundred miles…or a thousand.

Booze was gasoline and he was the bus trying to follow his thirst away to a better place. Trying to outdistance something that can never be outdistanced.

That’s a common enough problem…..but this was during the time when cocaine was first being distilled to its stronger brethren crack.

And he got a taste for it…spent every bit of every check on it. Spent his forty hours each week building… then took the money and spent it tearing down everything he ever loved.

In quick succession he got hooked in deep on it, then knocked up his wife…then lost his job.  

He became one of the ghosts haunting his own past until he had finally borrowed the last dollar from the last friend.

I came into my building late one night and he was stumbling down the stairs. He sees me shaking my head and I could see the shame fill his face…like someone had turned on the faucet of it in him and he was suddenly drowning in regret.

He touched me on the arm looking away and cried out –“Forgive me Forgive me....I  know not what I do’.

Catholic.  Gospel of St. John.  I hear it still.  

A soul can stop believing, put it away forever at any time…but it can never stop wanting to believe.

Then he ran out into the darkness… to score once more...trying to absolve himself I suppose with some smoke.

This night I saw him staggering up the street. And coming the other way his wife looking like she was nine and a half months pregnant.

She could barely walk. She had moved in with her mother when he couldn’t pay the rent anymore. She was walking home from a job working a graveyard shift at some all night laundromat.

She was bitter and pregnant and alone. Full of disappointment that had turned rancid.

She had that kind of silence a woman gets when she cant stand to hear the pointlessness of her own hope anymore. She had given in to the heartache...and as it often does,  it had made her cruel and quiet.

I saw them moving toward each other and then recognize each other from a distance and then stop under a street light.

I couldn’t hear what they said but he was clearly pleading….for forgiveness I suppose. It looked like he was crying. And she was having none of it.

Then he fell to his knees…and putting his face on the concrete he began beating his knuckles bloody against the cracks. Like he was trying to beat away every flaw in the world and himself.

Begging I suppose for her to see beyond them…to see beyond what he had done to her and himself…through his own reckless hunger.

Pleading for her to forgive the flaw in him.

And from the rooftop I could see something changed in her. She seemed to soften a bit.

Her hand wavered above him reaching out against every better instinct. Wavering between the memory of wound and the memory of want.

And I could see a gentleness return to her…for her husband weeping at her feet for all he had become.

She stepped nearer… moved to pity…real pity, not for him so much as for us all. For what we are forced do to ourselves and those we love…with our own faulty hands.

She reached down with one hand and rested it on his shoulder. He raised his face peering up into hers. And she helped him to his feet.

He tenderly took her arm and they moved out of the light and became shadows and the shadows slowly disappeared into the dark.

I looked up, out at the great dark silhouette of the city and from the rooftop and in the distance I could see several fires burning.

The fire marshalls would say most were just electrical fires. No one’s fault.  A flaw in the wire.

Just then a bolt of dry lightning flashed above me and I saw them help each other in out of the coming storm.

For a time.

“Every bit of wire ever made is faulty. …every one of them is flawed” my old boss told me. ‘Sometimes the current is just stronger than any wire can stand.'

Everyone of us is wired wrong. Every heart is set ablaze by a current stronger than it was ever meant to bear.

I could see that now in all the Eclipse People…in the waitresses and longshoreman, in the hookers and the wolves, in the runaways and the panhandlers, in the steamfitter and his broken hearted hopeless hopeful wife....forgiving once again the flaw in her husband's wire.

I saw it in every one of the shadow people, trying desperately to avoid an unavoidable current…..to sever themselves from the connection that threatened to expose the flaw and burn them to the ground.

And I saw it in myself.

There is a wire running through the underground of us all. It is hidden far beneath the vanity of our own designs, beneath the sheetrock of our hopes, beneath the foundations of all our dreams and effort.

It stretches into every restless soul wandering the avenues and sidestreets and it reaches above even into peaceful sleep of the people of the light.

And like the steamfitters wife  …once seen…that flaw in living itself, can yield only pity and maybe even a kind of absolution.

For what it demands of us.

For what its current exposes in us all.

I walked back down from the roof past some embarrassed girl with mussed hair leaving the doctors den and slipped back into my apartment.

And  I remember staring  into a mirror wondering if I was becoming one of the Eclipse People myself.

I shut off the light and stared at the dim outline of myself in the glass...no longer quite certain of the strength of my own wiring…like I could no longer gauge how strong the current coming for me might be.

And I wondered if there was growing in me a kind of hopeless hope…and with it a kind of night vision…a way of seeing through the shadows.

And far beneath it, far beneath the flaws of my own wire…a kind of forgiveness of all things…a kind of faith in what would always be just beyond my sight.

That I was just learning to see…in flashes….in the darkness.