Lights Out

Talking in the kitchen.  “You know, the important thing is . . .” Lights out.  Like any modern soul I reach for my phone and activate the light it has built in.  The neighbors are black to the left.  The neighbors are black to the right.  Is there a blackout in the neighborhood?  I start looking around for the candleholder that should be somewhere over by the window.  I’ve got the ornate candle lit on the open stove and walk it out to the front of the house to see what’s happened. 

My wife is out in the street already.  “The neighbors have light.  It’s us.”   In China, utilities run along and then they just shut off, without warning. You charge up the electricity, for example, with two hundred dollars and get on with your life.  It might take one month or three months or something in between for this to run out.  Then, suddenly power’s off, like tonight.

In a compound like this you need to go to the front gate and pay, in cash, and they charge up your electricity card, which you can bring home and insert in the device on the side of the house so that you’ve another run of indeterminate time, with the power back on. 

The young gal at the clubhouse regrets to inform me that her machine that charges up electricity cards, is not working tonight.  She’s frantic and I’m patient for a bit, till she begins to inquire if we can solve it all in the morning, long after her shift ends. “No.  That absolutely won’t work.  Find a solution. Call someone, find someone, wake someone up if you have to.”  She gets it.  She heads back to her machine to try again. Eventually she strikes upon a conversation with someone who appears to be telling her something substantive. 

I start to listen carefully.  I assume more than I should.  She says something about tomorrow and I interrupt her call rudely to say it will be “tonight.  It must be tonight.”  Turns out she’d actually found the right guy.  The electric man will bike over to my place and charge us up.  I can return in the morning and pay the cost then.   “You sure this guy is going to come?  You sure he can turn it on?” 

                                                                     

Later we learn, he will.  He does.  I’m not quite sure what he used, but it worked and I thanked him.  Now our house is humming brightly, without having paid a farthing.  Thanking him, bidding him to go slow on his way, it strikes me that this override function he has in his toolbox, must be a powerful little gadget.  He could roll up to any house he likes and on a whim afford them a free pass on electricity.   Come by, any time you like, electricity man.  Can I get you a cup of tea?