Flickering

*I don't want to hear complaints about how this is too long. If it's too long for you, don't read it.*

Thomas was the sort of man to turn the lights off whenever he left a room. He did not buy organic produce, asked for plastic bags from the boy who bagged his groceries and left the water running while he brushed his teeth – but without fault, Thomas always remembered to turn the lights off. Once he'd left it, the room was empty. That was that.

He awoke one day and felt morning press against his body like a curious animal: warm, clean smelling, and cautious. He got out of bed, ate, showered, dressed without ever really watching where his hands went or what they picked up, and, paused for a moment to pick and smooth out his favourite tie. There was a promotion up for grabs at work, as one of his superiors had recently retired and it certainly didn't hurt to look sharp. Despite the morning light that flooded his modest house, Thomas smartly flicked the lights on and off whenever he entered and left a room – natural light was nice enough, but it was alien, uncomfortable – wild in some strange, inexplicable sense.

The drive to work was pleasant, and Thomas appreciated the clean efficiency of the stop lights in his daily route. As he turned onto another street, Thomas saw the stop lights were out in this part of town. They blinked red like big angry eyes. Traffic stopped and started again, but Thomas stared only at the lights, transfixed by their blinking. In what seemed a moment, Thomas suddenly found himself sitting in his office chair, as if the hand of God had reached down and plucked him from one spot to deposit him into another. Disoriented, Thomas looked wildly around and yet found all of his usual things: file cabinets clean and gleaming, deep green carpet lush and fresh looking – he could even see out his office window this his car was neatly parked in his spot in the lot across the street, like a silent confirmation of normality. Through the glass walls of his office, he could see everyone on his floor busily at work, patiently talking on the phone, no doubt managing problem clients or explaining the intricacies of the policies. Thomas was an insurance broker, who usually worked with large companies on enormous scales, and the office was a well oiled machine that enabled him to work well. And today, despite whatever was going on with him, it seemed to be operating properly. He went to go check his clock above the glass door, but the reflection of the lights cast a glare. Standing up to get a closer look, Thomas lost his balance as time seemed to skip again. The shadows stretched into long thin bodies of afternoon. The time read 3.

Thomas' boss sat in the chair opposite him, hard eyes gone soft and large hands clasped like a loose knot his in lap. He seemed to be waiting for a response from Thomas, and he leaned forward in his chair. Thomas felt as if he should say something. “I uh, didn't quite catch that sir, I'm sorry.” Thomas' voice was small.

“I asked if you're alright. You don't seem quite... together, not yourself. Maybe you should take the day off.” Thomas' hands slipped as he gripped the arms of the chair, slick with sweat. He grabbed his pant legs to hide the soaked palms from his boss' eyes. He couldn't take the day off – he never took a day off. There was the promotion, waiting like a long sought prize, and Thomas had worked much too hard and much too long to let a little absent-mindedness stop him from getting it. His boss continued to talk, but Thomas found himself staring only at the man's bristly moustache to seem as if he were paying attention, and thinking about the circles of sweat that were now soaking into the knees of his pants, two great betrayers of his own nervousness. He nodded along, finished up with an unpracticed smile that he hoped was reassuring and said, “Yes, I'm fine, don't worry, sir.” He tried not to dissolve into his chair as his boss finally closed the door behind him. Thomas opened the top drawer of his desk and found a napkin to wipe his hands off – and time skipped again. He was parked outside his house.

It was dusk. Thomas stared at the small green digits of his car's clock: 6:23. He struggled not to panic. He could not remember who he had talked to, if he'd closed any deals – what he might have said to his boss if he'd run into him again. If he'd embarrassed himself in front of any clients... Thomas didn't even want to consider the possibility. His hands tightened on the steering wheel and felt as if they would strangle it. He felt something welling up inside of him and found he could not breathe, all the air had left his lungs and there was only the enormity of the lost day staring at him – Thomas closed his eyes and calmed himself down. Surely he was just distracted The idea of the promotion was getting to him. He was only human, after all. He was tired. It was nothing that should warrant major concern – he would just go to sleep early and wake up his usual, productive self.

Thomas left the car reassured but exhausted. The porch light welcomed him home like a lighthouse or saving grave, and he smiled up at it fondly. He felt around for his key,and grew a bit frustrated when he couldn't find it – when the porch light went out. The immediate dark ate everything up. The front door loomed over him, like the entrance to an unfamiliar place and he could suddenly feel the sharp fingers of dark grasp at the edges of him, asking and wanting and taking. Thomas desperately grabbed at his pockets, but, while he could find about a dozen small silver keys, sleek and shiny, moving fast as fish in his fingers, the great rust-colored house key seemed to have disappeared. Quickly remembering the spare, he bent down and slipped a hand under the doormat. The sides of the key were sharp and cold, and as he unlocked the door, bit into his palm, hard enough for Thomas to check if he'd managed to cut himself on it. The door unlocked with a lurch and Thomas all but fell across the doorway. As he quickly flicked the living room light on, there was the stomach of his house: dark and musty smelling, as if it had been uninhabited for years, and for what was not the first time, Thomas wished he did not live alone. He did not look back at the dark behind him. Some part of him was afraid that he would find some malicious animal face looking back.

The first thing Thomas did after calming himself down was change the porch light. When he clicked it on to check that it worked, it did not carry the warmth that the other light bulb had. Instead, it seemed to only accentuate the darkness of the street. Thomas didn't like looking down at the other houses. They seemed to stare at his singly lit porch, with longing or revulsion, he couldn't quite tell. He hurried inside, packed up the ladder neatly into his closet, and went to make dinner.

Dinner was an automated process of canning and stirring. Thomas had little energy for something more than canned soup. The heat of the stove warmed his hands and arms, yet did not little to the chill that remained under his skin, and while the spoon sounded out like a bell against the pot, it did little counteract the chilling quietness that lingered in the house like a fog. Thomas found himself trying to recount the day despite his earlier reassurances, but the nebulous blue that had replaced his normal routine was still there, hanging down on him with a weight he did not know his shoulders could bear. The vague memories that he did have already seemed to slip away further, falling away from his head like an unimportant dream. When the soup was warm, eating was mechanical: jaw clenching, unclenching, food that tasted only like the fork he ate it with, hand up and down like a lever.

After dinner, Thomas dumped the dishes in the sink to do later. Usually, washing dishes was something that Thomas rather enjoyed. The warm water and circular rhythm was soothing, and calmed him in the same way closing a deal at the office did. Today though, he was exhausted. He went to his room to get ready for bed, flicking the lights on and off and on and off as he entered and left each room. He gently shed his suit and folded it to be washed later, neatly laying it on the chair in his room. And yet, for a brief moment as Thomas got into bed, his suit looked nothing like a suit at all; it was a shed skin, paper-thin and fragile. Thomas rolled over, and as he settled into bed, the complete darkness of the room, the house in its entirety, seemed to settle into itself too.

~

The next morning was less like a curious animal and more like a bitter drink, washing down his throat in some choking, necessary manner. Thomas found a clean suit and blearily tried to fit his body into it. His eyes kept closing of their own accord and what was usually a ritual seemed a puzzle, square arms trying to fit into circle sleeves. He looked forward to work where there would be order and discipline.

When he arrived there, the great slate grey building looked down at him like a crack in the cement. The elevator was dim and filled with strangers. Thomas self consciously stared at the red-carpeted floor, shifting from foot to foot and trying not to bump into anyone with his thin frame. It wasn't until he had reached the seventh floor and exited that he realized the people in the elevator were, in fact, people he'd worked with for years. He'd been standing next to Karen and Jim, both of whom had smiled kindly at him in the hallway over the years. Thomas didn't often speak with co-workers, or anyone really, but he could remember Jim congratulating him on some of this bigger sales, and Karen always asked him how he was when they were both at the water cooler. Both were names he should have remembered.

When he got to his office, Thomas felt claustrophobic. He reminded himself that his office was a comforting place: a temple of productivity, success, and efficiency. Problem cases came here to be solved and problem clients came here to managed; Thomas was the worker who outshone, outdid, and outworked all of his co-workers. Today, however, the glass walls seemed cold. The ceiling pinned him down as if it were a child who's found an insect. All of the lights shone in to glare at him, spotlights, magnifying glasses for the stacks of paper mounded up on his desk like cliff sides. He could feel their eyes on his face, his suit, and his hands, which Thomas had always so fondly thought of as surgeon hands, so steady and sure in their work. They trembled and shook. Here, Thomas encountered a feeling he'd never before experienced in the workplace: inadequacy. Thomas thought back to the large body of his boss pushing its way into his office, the promotion that would reward his years of hard work, and the recognition that would come with it, and was determined to do well. This was the place where he could shine.

Clients came in and out all day, but Thomas was too distracted by the sterile discomfort of his office to give them his usual attention. He felt ignorant under their singular wanting stare, as they looked at him with more and more questions and insistence that he could not seem to answer. He heard nothing but the static noises of the light, the hum, the urgency of its stuttering voice. Words rattled somewhere in the back of his head, words he needed but could not pronounce. At one point he found a woman talking to him who had tiers of wrinkles hanging from her face. She was representing some large-scaled company. Thomas was able to focus on what she said for a brief moment, though she seemed to be there for hours, and at the end, found himself simply asking what “annuity” meant, and she promptly picked up her things and left, scowling. Thomas kept a collection of notes, congratulations, and gifts from his superiors commending his good work, all proudly displayed on his desk and walls. He could not even bring himself to look at them today.

As he gathered up a pile of papers to take home with him, a co-worker approached him. She had dark hair, a pencil skirt, and the chemical smell of perfume without the pleasantness of the perfume itself, and Thomas, for the life of him, could not remember her name. She invited him to go out for dinner and drinks with a group of the other workers, which he quickly but politely declined. Even if his day hadn't been so strange, he did not know what to drink, not considering the fact that he was having trouble remembering everyone's names and did not have topics appropriate for small talk at hand. He could hardly talk about folding suits and changing light bulbs. The stack of papers was heavy on his way out, and the drive felt longer than ever.

When he got home, his house seemed even more foreign to him than the night before. The new bulb shone brightly above his porch, but had a rasping light that did not quiet the darkness of the surrounded houses. Thomas was exhausted – not in the dead tired sense of the word, but pale, wan, ready to sleep for weeks. The entire house towered above him, stretching up into the sky only to glare back down at him. He felt childlike under its gaze, a son standing before a stern father once again. He paused, and for a brief moment, Thomas considered driving elsewhere to sleep, finding a hotel, a roadside inn, before he realized that he had no reason to. If someone were to ask why he had done such a thing, what could he possibly answer?

Thomas unlocked the house quickly, afraid that a neighbor might see his odd hesitation at the door and think him less for it. He turned the light on before even glancing around the room, as if afraid of what he might find. In a fit of something, Thomas could not say what, exactly, he rushed into all of the rooms, flicking all the lights on as if he could defeat or dispel the strangeness of the day by furiously breaking his own habits. He filled the house with light, trying to create a place where he could at least feel safe; he wanted to expose it, bring it under his control. When he finished, he stood in the middle of his living room, barren walls illuminated, front door still half open, chest heaving as if he'd just accomplished some great athletic feat. He felt as if he stood alone in a museum, but the blank walls of his house were utterly devoid of art: faceless as a dream, cold as his fish-like keys, stark, and bitter, and empty. Thomas imagined his life like that. Bare, pushed under an interrogation light for examination, a bristly moustache twitching this way and that at each question. A shudder unfolded up his back.

Shoulders collapsing back down into his natural state of slouching, Thomas dropped his briefcase on his plain beige cough and slowly crossed the hall to his room. His suit peeled away from him as he undressed and when he climbed back into bed, he looked back at it on the floor. It looked less like a skin this time – more like a crumpled body waiting to be used again. Something with a substance on its own. Thomas lay in bed staring at it, wondering what in the world annuity meant, why he felt so small and rumpled, wondering how his mind could be so empty of anything at all. He lay there for a long while before realizing he wasn't falling asleep. A quick glance at the clock showed that it was only 9. And then, Thomas realized he had left every single light on in his entire house. It was glaringly bright, he was a mouse under a hawk's glare; it was deafening.

The floor's coolness bit into his feet as he hurried through the house and turned each light off. His body felt smaller and smaller with each room, exhausted and withered. Thomas crawled back into bed and stared at his crumpled-body suit, wondering what was wrong with him. He had, for a moment, felt like the lights had been staring at him from every direction, their great pale faces wiping away his existence, leaving him a small, insignificant ghost. Sleep was not easy coming. Shadows moved in the dark.

~

The next morning, Thomas woke and did not stir. His room, although filled with sunlight, was hollow and terrifying. Morning lay on him with all the weight of the house, and Thomas' lungs did not move to breathe. He began with hesitation – unsure if his chest would move at all, and upon finding that it would, taking great, gulping gasps of air. He stood and wavered on his feet before bracing himself for the day. His clean suit hung in the open closet, a dark figure waiting to be given life again, and the vicious closet seemed to swallow up his room, untouched by the light altogether. Thomas dressed himself in the hallway, with the light very much on. His fingers fumbled on the buttons and the pants were cross-hatched with wrinkles after bending down to try tying the laces. They slipped away from his hands like snakes. He considered not going to work that day, just for a brief moment, before dismissing the idea as ludicrous. There was the promotion at stake, the respect of his peers and the respect that the new title would grant him. Even disregarding the promotion, when Thomas thought back to his own father, whose only missed day of work that Thomas could remember was the day of his fatal heart attack, returning to bed was not an option.

In driving to work, Thomas encountered two problems. The first was a street lamp on the end of his block, flickering on and off. Thomas sat under it at an intersection, absolutely transfixed. His stare was broken only when the driver in the car behind him got out of his car to knock on Thomas' window, gesturing wildly and yelling. The second problem Thomas encountered was that he could not seem to find his way to work. His shaking hands led him on three wrong turns, and even when he focused as much as he could, Thomas found that making the turn signals was increasingly difficult. He rolled into the parking lot hours late, but Thomas hardly noticed. When he got upstairs, his boss was waiting for him in his glass office.

“Thomas, it's one o'clock. Thomas? Did you not notice?” Thomas could not remember his boss' name. “Several people filed complaints about you yesterday.” Thomas shifted in his chair and tried to remember yesterday, but couldn't. “Rather unusual, if you ask me.” His boss paused, as if waiting for Thomas to say something, anything in order to defend himself. Surely he, one of the firm's best, could not have become defective in such a short period of time – and yet, he had no explanation to give. Thomas remained silent, afraid that if he opened his mouth, he might scream, shriek, that his mouth was full of only trembles and light and exhaustion; there might only be mechanical noises from a mechanical mouth and that would surely frighten the man. His boss sighed. “Thomas, do you need some time off? Do you want to go home?” Thomas felt like a child sticking his tongue out in a nurse's office to have his temperature taken, only to have the nurse say he had a fever, would he like to go home, they could call his father who would not leave work or pick him up and Thomas would sit on the curb for hours, sick and alone. He did not want to go home. He shook his head hard, mouth tightly shut and eyes downcast. “I'm trying to make things easy for you, you know, why not help me make them easy for you. I know you're a hard worker, what's going on?” Silence. “Why don't we move to my office, there's a bit more privacy.”

Thomas followed him from his own glass office to his boss' shuttered one, and sat in the plush chair opposite him. His boss began talking, talking, talking, there was a mention of holiday time racked up over the past 12 years, which Thomas had no intention of using, and an old woman with tiers of wrinkles who had dropped their company, hours missed, and Thomas heard very little of it. He stared at the light hanging from the ceiling. It buzzed. It was an old model, something that was not quite a chandelier, but grand and gold all the same. It flickered, and Thomas stared. He wondered if it would tip in one direction or the other, life and death, fullness and emptiness; the light flickered again, and for a moment, Thomas did not exist.

A great sigh from the man opposite drew him back from what might have been years. He was in a large room. It was lined with bookcases and neatly stacked documents. The man across from him had a great big moustache, an angry nose, and eyes that seemed to beg something of him though he did not seem to have anything to give. He looked down and his hands were empty. Wordless, he looked up at the man and back at his empty hands, and, deciding he had nothing at all that the man could want, simply left. There was a silver room opening and closing its doors in the hallway. Not remembering the name of the thing, he took the stairs. It was bright in the stairwell. Once out of the building, he noticed there was a tinny noise coming from his pockets. He emptied them out and found keys. But what were keys for? He walked and walked, familiar roads leading to familiar roads all the way back to his house. He found home from its hostility. He gladly walked into its stomach.

The house didn't have any lights on. Sunlight streamed in through the front window, just in cracks through the blinds, but its presence disgusted Thomas. He went through the house securely closing all the curtains, blinds, and windows, blocking himself entirely in the solidity of the house. His bunker. The house became heavy and full in the light's absence and it wasn't long before this too began to bother Thomas. It was too heavy. He quickly moved from room to room, turning on each light, exposing his entire house, which held too many secrets for his liking. The fullness dissipated under his careful eye. There were no shadows hiding behind the bare furniture; the only monsters here were his plain beige couch, his bookless shelves, his wrinkled pants. Upon looking down and seeing his own dishevelled state, he threw his clothing from him, ripping the fabric of his jacket, stomping on his heels to rid himself of his shoes, and sat in the middle of the living room. The suit sat opposite him, watching.

He sat for a long time, wondering when was the last time he'd felt so thin, malnourished, anaemic; the suit across him seemed to have a fuller frame than him, to straighten its back into some classical Roman arch. Then, he could hear something moving from across the house – the spare room, as if someone were sitting in there, whispering. Concerned, he got up and crept towards the door, needing to know what lay behind it but afraid of what he might find. The closer he got, the more he heard: a man, softly crying to himself, not speaking, but whimpering. Soon, the whimpers turned into racking sobs, but when Thomas opened the door, there was nothing, just the small storage space that he'd never really used, an empty room with nothing but a leftover desk to fill it.

Then he heard it – this time from his bedroom. There was a cry, a choked sob or scream coming from his room: anguish and fury and violence all mixed together in one outpouring. He ran over and searched his room for the source like a lost prize, his house key, the name of his boss the escaped his lips so constantly. Someone somewhere was heaving, retching, sobbing in his room. He ripped open drawers, threw his closet doors off their hinges, tore his bedding away, checked under the bed, and found nothing and no one. He stumbled through the house looking for the source of the noise which seemed to move from room to room like a ghost for what seemed ages, before realizing that he, himself, was the source of it – his hands were scratching at his face in their desperation. Under his nails there was skin and blood. He was exposed under all these lights; they were stripping him of his body and finding nothing underneath. He stumbled and his hands groped the wall like a starving man looking for a promised feast, an escape from these angry lights that searched him for fault, only to find a flawed machine with too many for counting. He sat down in the middle of the living room face a blank wall, which was white, white, white. His suit sat opposite him, looking disapproving and hungry. He stared up at the ceiling lights, and they stared back.