Kurtz+and+the+penlight

Late Monday night I left my friend’s apartment building close to midnight. I had spent the past few hours helping him unpack, watching him set up his new one-room home. It’s an RPI owned building; graduate student dormitories over on Burdett. This didn’t really register with me until he used his ID card to enter the building: “Wow, that’s just like the card readers at school,” I said, reflecting on how “technology” is being added to old, run-down buildings. “Well, we are at school. This is RPI.” A side of RPI I’d never seen. Pervasive. Perverse. A card reader at home.

I was having a great time. Unpacking meant going through lots of boxes, finding things lost and discovering things that weren’t around before (like the 9 sets of chopsticks at the bottom of a newly acquired desk). I was also introduced to a new technology—the penlight. My friend had two models—one was small and sleek, but not very powerful, the other brighter but awkward-looking. In a more playful moment I would have asked him for one of them (did he really need two?), but I don’t need any more thingys in my life.

Conversation was good. So good that neither of us noticed that we had been talking for a few hours without listening to music—a strange thing not to notice. But maybe not. “So what time is it anyways?” “11:41” “Oh shit,” I say, and grab my stuff to go. Its way past my bedtime, I tell him. When I get outside its quite a bit colder than it was at the beginning of the evening. I wrap my arms across my chest and rub my upper arms. The parking lot is in the back of the building and I derive quite a bit of comfort knowing that my friend would be able to watch me walk to my car, get in, and drive away (although there was no mention of such watching as we parted). I’ve just about reached the first row of cars when out to my right, past the parking lot, past the buildings, and on the other side of what I gather to be a thick row of trees, there is the sound of a very loud and sizeable generator powering down. Then everything goes black. The street lights in the parking lot. All light from the apartment building windows. There are no emergency lights out here, and I can’t even see my own hand in front of my face its so dark. I stop immediately.

Something about that moment resonated with me today; that moment when the lights went out, everything went dark and I couldn’t see anything. Darkness was everything to me in that moment, and there are few moments in my life, and this may be the only moment, which I would characterize first and foremost as dark. Not just darkness in the absence of light, but darkness that prevented me from seeing or moving or thinking, knowing. A profound pause, a point in time, a half second really, [|where the world stopped]. Where I wasn’t even sure if there was a world beyond myself. I’d never witnessed anything like it before, not in the flesh at least. It made me think of the kind of darkness a grave robber would be digging in. Near a lone tree in an old graveyard. What makes such a person unearth soil in the middle of night? They desire something certainly, with passion and conviction no doubt. What madness! Imagine what it would take to rob a grave in total darkness. To find the headstone. The work it would take to dig six feet (if you’re lucky, that is; perhaps the tomb has shifted or sunk further into the ground, or the gravedigger was not precise in placing, marking, or otherwise knowing the casket, if there is one, that is). The desire must be great. We shall assume that the grave robber knows what they dig for, although there is most likely no unifying element common to all grave robbers, except that they rob graves. Robbing may be different in each case. Maybe this is just a smash and grab job. Maybe the robbery was quite consciously constructed around the family jewels. I’ll use light to decipher the differences among my group of grave robbers rather than an end point. Some will be inclined to use flashlights, torches, candles, perhaps globes of gray goo from distant galaxies, which only emit light for gray goo globe carriers. Others will rely upon moonlight, and if well planned will time their robberies according to nature’s god-made rhythms. I always thought it was fun to dance under the full moon. My own robberies will fall into this latter group so that I may observe my surroundings and its movements by shadow. I suppose I’m also afraid of the dark; the horror of its silence.

So when I stood still in the parking lot, my body’s first re/action was to look up behind me to see if there was any light in my friend’s window. There was no way to tell which one was his. Not that it mattered since they were all dark and ghost-like. It made me wish that I had asked for that penlight.