Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet (classic fiction txt) 📕

of Tourette’s. If you had to go to traffic school, say, or take a test for your driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles, it was a sure bet the yellow lights would be referred to as “amber,” as though the word yellow, in this official setting, was somehow regarded as obscene and therefore required a euphemism. It made him glad he did not work for the Department of Transportation, which needless to say had a checkered past anyway. For while the Service was guilty of many things—many bureaucratic complications of a Kafkaesque nature all too easily lampoonable by opportunistic politicians who irresponsibly advocated for harebrained schemes like the flat tax—at least it had the cojones to call yellow yellow.)

The world seemed to be in opposition and even turmoil on many subjects—who would claim the rights to its riches, for instance, who would hold sway from year to year or decade to decade when it came to the rule of law, dominance and extraction, trade or sales or production. On the other hand it presented a more or less united front on who should do the fighting and dying, whose children should starve or die of malaria by the tens of millions. In these matters there was the polite appearance of dispute, in diplomatic and academic circles, but in fact a stasis of hardship on a massive scale that could only reflect, in the end, a kind of global consensus.

And when it came to details like traffic signals and sirens the human population might even look, from outer space, like a single race of peaceful, compliant men.

At first he did not register the siren’s significance. Susan was saying something about emotional rollercoasters, a term he flatly, privately rejected.

You had aversions, in this life, aversions to foods like granola and terms like emotional rollercoaster. You wished to excise these items and the terms for them. But a woman like Susan, despite being highly intelligent, did not know that intuitively nor, if she did, would she necessarily respect the aversions. Instead she ran roughshod over them. In fact, few women respected his aversions.

Men also failed to respect them. People, you could almost say, did not respect the aversions.

Maybe, when all this was behind Susan and him—call it the free love, call it adultery—they could sit down and have a conversation on the subject. He could talk about the importance of aversions, and why the term emotional rollercoaster should be, as the Germans said, verboten.

Then the car went by, a light-colored car, its red lights flashing. A squad car, surely.

He should go! He should follow it. Sooner or later it had to take him to some outpost of the police, to what he needed to know.

“I was, at first I was so excited,” Susan was saying. “When you told me it was like the best gift I’d ever had, but that, you know, that euphoria of relief—it passes so quickly and regular life comes back. With its own kind of normal and boring pace. You know?”

He had his eyes on the police car’s taillights as the car made its way up the street. It had slowed down, it wasn’t going that fast. If he ran, he could catch it. Maybe it was right nearby, the police emergency. He should drop the phone and run. He should run up the dark street after it.

Now. Now. Go.

“And now it’s just like, I take for granted he’s alive and I’m back to worrying about these petty details . . .”

He stayed where he was. It seemed unrealistic, impossible to catch the car. Of course, he would never know.

Standing there, watching the taillights disappear and holding the phone, he felt this had happened to him over and over. He never jumped out windows, never moved suddenly, with a jolt. The lights faded as he stood still and looked at them. He did not leap, did not give chase. It always seemed unfeasible and rash. But there was a defeatism in that, clearly, a submission to ease, a cowardly risk avoidance. The same force that had bound Susan to him through manipulation rather than honesty.

T. would have his night in jail, that was clear. He would spend the whole night in a cell while Hal lay sleeping in the soft hotel bed. Albeit with scratchy coverlet. He pictured a medieval torture chamber, the rack, a rusting Iron Maiden. Then burly sailors.

“You’ll find him in the morning. Make sure you get a good night’s rest,” said Susan.

She did not know, of course, about Gretel, spinning now in a topless dirndl in his memory, German and gold forever.

There was no need for her to know. He could tell her, but it would be selfish, a small and petty revenge.

The private sanctum of the mind . . . he fell back on it gratefully. What a freedom it was, what a perfect freedom. In the future, if he felt lonely, he would have to remember this, remind himself of its benefits—the unending and sweet privacy of thinking. How no one else, no matter how great or powerful, could ever enter here. This place was truly his.

Because if it was painful to be alone, not being alone would be torment. A mind that was invaded by other minds could be nothing more than prison. And yet there were people out there who wanted to believe in ESP, who fantasized telepathy. Maybe what they had in mind was a kind of selective mind-reading? No one sane would want to walk around reading minds in some kind of flowing, open exchange.

Did an ant have a mind of its own? A bee? Uncertain. They seemed to operate differently, dying by the thousands for the sake of a queen and all the time never stopping their work. An ant, a bee, neither seemed gripped by doubt, typically. Doubt had to be a requisite of the private mind. It was a perk of being human: your mind was your own, always and forever a secret territory.

“You