Streetlights

At first, I just thought my eyesight was improving, or that my wife had switched to those energy saving light bulbs. Looking in the mirror, I thought I was looking unusually pale, but I am part Swedish, so it wasn’t that surprising. Still, I stopped wearing my black shirts because I seemed to positively glow when I wore them.

It wasn’t until I started sleeping walking that Erika insisted I go to the doctor.

“So,” Doctor Gother sat in front of me, draping one leg across the other. He smiled, creating instantly lines all across his face. He didn’t look at the file. He looked at me. “Mr. Jesperson. What’s the problem?”

I shifted, “Well, my wife has—I mean, I have—Or we both have noticed I’ve been sleep walking.”

“Sleep walking, all right.” He flicked the file open and scratched his pen across it. “What do you do?”

“I go outside and stand on the curb.”

“Is that it?”

I nodded.

“Anything other symptoms?”

I shrugged, “Not really.”

Instantly, I could feel the stern look from Erika. She exhaled quickly through her nose, huffing slightly, “That is not all, Aaron.” She leaned forward, her knee bouncing at an intense rate. “He—” She glanced nervously at me, and I realized she hadn’t told me something. She returned her gaze to the doctor, “He kind of… glows.”

The room was quiet, and very full suddenly. Thick, heavy air pressed on us. “Glows?”

Erika looked at me, and I realized I was the one who spoke. She nodded, “You don’t notice it because the lights are on when you’re awake.” The room seemed to shift, and I suddenly saw my wife in her worried state. Her fingers were raw from where she’d been habitually tearing at the cuticles. Her hair was done up, but it was done in her rushed style.

She sighed, slumping a bit, “But sometimes, when the lights are off, you still don’t notice.” She splayed her hands, pleading with me as if I was threatening her, “I’ve come into rooms, and you’re reading a book, and you don’t realize all of the lights are off!”

I looked at the doctor, wondering if he was hearing what I heard. He had moved to the door, and stood with his hand on the light switch, peering curiously at me. I noticed he was cast in a contrasting shadow. A quick glance around the room told me that the shift I thought I had imagined was, in fact, the main light being turned off. I looked down at my hands. They appeared normal and pale, as if bathed in average indoor light. But they weren’t. I looked at the doctor again, begging for an answer. He flicked the light on, and returned to his chair.

“I’d like to run some tests before I make a diagnosis, though I am fairly certain I know what troubles you.”

—-

“What’s Honegger’s Disease?”

I pressed my hand to my eyes, tired of explaining it again and again. It had been a few days since the blood tests, and my arm was still sore from the needle. Erika was baking everything in the house—her way of handling bad news. I was reduced to sitting in my chair, unsure of what to do, left to answer the questions my friends and family had.

Her voice buzzed through the phone again, “Aaron? What’s Honegger’s Disease?”

The doctor had invited us back in to his office the day before to tell us the results, so we knew it was bad. At first, we didn’t believe him. He gave us the pamphlets, and showed us the file of the only other case in history—that they knew of. We stared for a long time. Erika refused to speak to the doctor. She had also refused to look out the car window as we drove home. I couldn’t help but stare at the street lights, wondering…

I sighed, and took a long breath, “It’s a rare disease, Cath.” My sister was not going to take the news well, and I had held off on telling her, vaguely hoping Mom would deliver the news. I got half my wish, and not the half I wanted the most.

“Yeah, Mom said that. She didn’t say what it is though. And I can’t find anything about it on the Internet.”

I glanced at Erika, who was staring down at the blackberry and raspberry pie she had just pulled from the oven. It smelled fantastic and sticky. I quickly looked away, knowing that Erika was nearing her breaking point, and feeling afraid of which way she’d go—anger or tears.

“It’s a metamorphosis disease.”

“What, like Alesso’s Disease? You’re going to turn into a werewolf?”

“Alesso’s Disease does not turn you into a werewolf. You just grow hair—”

“—All over your body, lose your teeth and regrow canines, and your testosterone levels go through the roof!”

We were both silent for a moment. She was touchy about Alesso’s since a kid she’d gone to high school with had caught it, caused a panic, and ended up dead. Usually, I’d drop it, but at this point, there wasn’t another option or topic to shift to, so I said, “But he wasn’t a werewolf, was he?”

“Whatever!” I could almost see the impatient way she was probably waving her hand, and the small wrinkles around her eyes as she undoubtedly squinted in irritation. She went on, “What are you turning into?”

“It’s stupid, it’s isn’t even cool.”

“Aaron.”

I leaned forward onto my knees, staring down at my still fleshy, pink feet. “A streetlight.”

There was an explosive crash from the kitchen to fill in the silence from the phone. While Cath had lapsed into a terrible silence, Erika had thrown her fresh pie through the window, shattering the panes of glass. I watched as she threw every delectable dish she’d spent all of last night and today baking and stewing at every surface of the kitchen, screaming as hard as she could with each throw. It wasn’t until the pan of meat pies had splattered across the floor that I realized I was listening to a dial tone instead of my sister, and I hung up the phone.

Erika was silent now, and sitting on the floor. I walked to her, stepping carefully around the various puddings, cakes, and jellies that littered the floor. Her icing and sauce covered fingers were thrust into her hair, her face hanging down to the tile, watching a slow river of cherry juice that was flowing under her bent knees. I dropped down beside her, aware of the cake that my jeans were resting on, and draped my around her shoulders. She leaned against me, and cried quietly.

“What can I do?”

She shook her head, “Not turn into a streetlight.”

“I wish I could…”

She hugged me, and I went on, “Maybe you can convince the city to put me in Union Square. It’s the best part of town…” She squeezed me tighter, and I said, “… you’d be safe if you ever went to visit.”

She finally spoke, “Stop it.”

I fell quiet, and turned to smell her hair, suddenly aware that I had a limited amount of time left to do that. I tried to memorize it. Faintly tangy, mostly sweet. I shifted my fingers across her shoulders, noting the smoothness of that skin, except for the little scar she got from a hiking trip she’d had when she was 14. It was suddenly too much, and I realized I couldn’t get up or let her go. So, we slept in the kitchen that night, among the abused food.

Telling my boss had been difficult, mostly because he’d laughed. I had to show him the photos from the file, which he seemed skeptical about at first. He said they were photo-shopped, but there is a point in the series where the photos become far too gritty and real and he fell silent and turned a strange shade of gray. He turned away when I showed him the photo where the mans arms had receded into his torso and turned gray and thin, but still retained tiny hands. Erika had, in an effort to remain cheerful, called it the alien phase, since the mans head had also begun to turn translucent and bulbous. I knew she had said it to keep herself from crying.

And so, I left my job and managed to maintain my medical coverage. Erika and I spent a week getting my will in order, changing the names of the house, the cars, and our cabin in Tahoe to her name. Well, mostly, it was me changing the names, and Erika crying in her chair. I don’t expect she’ll keep both of the cars. Or the house.

The last day was spent at home, together, the phones off and outside world ignored. We decided to pretend it wasn’t happening, and we watched our favorite movies, ate good dinners, and talked about everything we could. But she started to cry when we planned trips we’d never take, particularly when she caught herself saying we couldn’t go to Greece that summer because we were going to start trying for kids. The spell was broken, then, and we held each other until we fell asleep.

—-

The next day, I said goodbye to our home, and we went to the hospital to settle me in. Doctor Gother allowed us to bring things from home, and Erika was even given a bed in the room. I wondered how long she’d stay. How much she’d want to see. I knew—I knew—she’d leave at some point. The photos had been terrible, and I couldn’t expect her to come see me when I was so grotesque. How far into the changes would it be until I died? Would I die, or just fade away? At what point would I stop being?

The changes weren’t painful. I expected them to hurt. When I told the nurses I was going numb, I made them swear not to tell Erika. I knew it comforted her more than me for her to believe that I derived comfort from her touch. So when they drew my blood, I held her hand. My skin, which had only been pale before, began to darken and become cold to the touch—so the nurses wrote. Erika began to hesitate after that when it came time to draw my blood. That’s when I told her I was numb, and I knew she was glad she didn’t have to touch my cold, slate colored skin.

The tests ended when the nurses couldn’t puncture my skin with needles anymore.

Erika stopped coming when my face had changed into flat glass, and I could no longer move. I knew she believed I was gone from my body.

—-

They placed me in Union Square, and Erika had them attach a plaque to me.

“Here shines Aaron Jesperson, a victim of Honegger’s Disease.”

No one else would understand it.

I didn’t enjoy being urinated on by dogs. The concerts I had wanted to see held no joy, just painful memories of moments with those songs.

Moments with Erika.

She came to visit frequently at first, stopping to touch the cold metal and to stare up at my glass faces, whispering words I couldn’t always hear. Her visits became less frequent over the uncountable weeks. Months? Possibly years. I stopped seeing her at all, until she stopped one day, on the arm of another man. She stared up at me, touched the plaque, and walked away. It was goodbye.

Cath visited twice. Once with mom, and once to tell me mom had died. She said she wasn’t sure I would hear her, but she hoped I would take care of mom. I realized then, that I had lost everything.

I had no life, and no escape from this shell. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t alive. I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I started flickering my light, desperate for someone to remember I was human. But all I got was a technician who checked my wiring, so I gave up the flickering.

I gave up.