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An online magazine, community, and educational resource for the arts.
ISSUE 3 | SPRING 2009

In the Fields of Electric Light

From my lawn I can see the lights of once-separate towns, now joined into a single glimmer that rises and falls as the land folds to the horizon, dark with its trees, where I sense the continuity of the world’s ongoing and unbroken surface. Overhead the stars are not blotted out by earthbound light, but stark and bright. I see two of them pull apart, my eyes adjust, and planes, coming from opposite corners of the sky, cross. Here is the world awaiting my son Miles, now eight years old. At three, he laid his head on the keys of my laptop and asked what is was I did. I remember answering that I stopped the sky from falling. Like most things I told him, it was true enough.
I’m a structural engineering consultant, and at that time when Miles asked me what I did I had just returned from Wellington, New Zealand. I had gone there to look after twenty-eight stories of office space. To foresee what had not been. But I also came because Gabrielle was there.
Gabrielle had moved into my dorm in winter, an exchange student who loved the new feeling of bringing her boot up through a knee-deep drift. I remember she bought a black parka with some animal’s fur at the collar, though this was already well into the time when it was a scandal to be caught in such a thing. The two of us skied the long, old hills of my home state. In one another’s company we fell again into the easy chastity of girlhood, but our thoughts were on the future, an undiscovered country of the mind that we believed would appear before us like a new island issuing out of the sea.
I was in Wellington to evaluate the safety of a twenty eight story office building. Gabrielle didn’t know I was coming. On the flight over, I kept imagining her in that second before it registered who was standing on her doorstep. This was my second time in the country. Gabrielle and I had last seen each other at the Auckland airport a few years before. I was on my way to Sydney to determine why an auditorium roof had collapsed. One firm pinned it on an error in the steel coefficient, another thought the stress hadn’t been calculated correctly on the reticulated dome. As it turned out, both were right. Minor errors, but one displaced load mounted on another until the redundancy was gone, and the numbers formed a new equation. A positive digit dwindled into a negative, and the law of load distribution came into line with the higher law of gravity.
Gabrielle has three girls. Three fat babies whose photos had hung on my fridge for years. She had done very well, and was coming up on a decade as the principal in a prestigious academy for girls. If that weren’t enough, she’d married a man named Lewis, a forest ranger who had once piloted a helicopter into a valley of burning bush and rescued a pair of bewildered tourists.
I touched down at the Wellington airport and headed straight to the building site. They gave me the tour and a laptop with the figures. I was staying at the house of a friend of a friend an hour north of the city. The house was empty. It had belonged to a relative who had been moved to a rest home or had died. I didn’t have the story straight, but what mattered was that the place was within a few miles of Gabrielle’s address. It stood at the end of a cul-de-sac where my headlights brought up irises growing out of the sand. I opened the car door and the salt smell rushed into my nostrils, into my hair.
Inside was furniture. More than one or two house’s worth of it. Rooms stacked in chairs and tables, their legs making a thicket that barricaded the bedroom door. In the kitchen I found metal cots, the kind in the cabins of a children’s camp, with a narrow passage of green tile down the center.
I called my husband Solomon in America. He told me he’d just gotten Miles back into bed. At the time, our son was afflicted with night-terrors. Soundly asleep, he would climb out of bed and begin to play. The first time it happened, Sol went into his room and told him it was time to sleep. Miles turned to his father, eyes open, and started in with a horrible shrieking. We tried to wake him. We talked to him, yelled for him to stop, but he couldn’t be calmed. Sol carried him into the kitchen, and there I saw him driving a toy truck across the table, backing it up, driving it slowly in circles around the base of a candlestick, never once interrupting the shrieking. The experts tell you not to wake a child in this state. What they don’t tell you is how to go about your business while your son sits in his room in the dark, soundly asleep, stacking blocks.
Sol said, It’s five am here. He’s back in bed. He’s not wearing any covers, but I’m afraid to go in there.
I said, Let him be. Hopefully, he makes it through the night.
I gave Sol the number and told him to call me if he needed, but he said he’d be fine. He told me not to worry. He assured me again that Miles would outgrow this, that it wasn’t happening because of anything I’d done. It wasn’t happening because we put Miles into childcare, which was a fact I couldn’t let go of.
I said, Maybe we shouldn’t let someone else raise him. Maybe this is his way of calling out to us. Inviting us into his life.
We are in his life. He’s our son.
After I hung up with Solomon, I wandered outside. A path led through wilting dunes. There was no moon, very few other lights along the shore, and I knew nothing whatsoever about where I was staying. I should have thought of my safety, but I didn’t. I walked onto the wide shelf of the beach, struggling through a wall of driftwood toward open sand. I picked my way through bleached branches and stumps that had caught light from somewhere because they appeared to glow in a soft shade of gray. Starlight, it came to me. They were glowing with starlight. I walked for a long time in the corridors of washed-up trees. They looked to me like ruined statuary, torsos and outstretched arms.

The next day sun entered through all the windows, and it occurred to me that it was spring in New Zealand. I opened the windows and walked to a café. By the time I returned, the house was fresh, the wooden floors radiant. I got down to the figures. It was a joy to work like this. Throwing yourself into the numbers with the gulls hollering outside. What is required in my job is willful not-knowing. How many eyes had already poured over these columns of data? If there were errors, they were errors encoded in the routines of checking and double-checking. What I try to bring to figures is that streak of accident that living will bring, the unforeseen, the unforeseeable. Solomon says it takes a cruel imagination.
After lunch I stepped outside and I saw a green cast to the clouds. A jeep was barreling through the surf line, its headlights burning. It began to hail. Not long after, the clouds drifted out over the Tasman Sea and the house floors went brilliant again, but it wasn’t the same. The turn in the weather had unsettled me. Every time the office building would become clear in my mind, I’d think of Miles. I’d see him as I had so many times, sitting there asleep and making truck sounds with his mouth. He was afraid of the dark. The thought was a finger on my ribs, brushing, as if from within.
The Wellington trip occurred around the one-year anniversary of September 11, and while I drove to Gabrielle’s that afternoon the subject on the radio was invasion. I heard a British general, and he was talking about such things as zones and tonnage and range. He could have been talking about anything. But, of course, he wasn’t. He was talking about a speck of light descending from the sky, about dumb matter chewing through itself and burning a channel of silence. And what would happen after would require imagination, since, I heard, it had been decided that there would be no photographs, no evidence to exhibit the next time we heard generals on the radio.
Gabrielle’s place was a villa with a porch and a view over the red slate of neighboring roofs down to the sea. Trellis and a rocking chair. What I would have expected. Lewis opened the door, and I saw the figures of the three girls moving around a kitchen table inside. To arrive just before tea had been part of the plan. I introduced myself, and Lewis came out on the porch with me. He told me that Gabrielle was in a residential care facility in Wellington.
Lewis was shorter than me. The helicopter pilot, forest ranger, was shorter. But I had the feeling he hadn’t always been. He seemed to be stooping. I asked what was wrong, and Lewis’ face tightened. He didn’t want me there. I had come ten thousand miles, and I was going to be turned away.
I said, Can I have the address? Can I see her?
Lewis went inside. He emerged with a piece of paper and handed it over. One of his daughters was standing in the doorway now, looking on, looking concerned, like maybe her father would need her to step in. I saw Gabrielle in this girl’s face. I saw her as she had looked in her black parka and fur collar. Because I felt as if I had to break the silence, because I wanted them to know that I belonged there and that I, too, had some claim on Gabrielle’s pain, and because I could think of nothing else to offer them, I said, We were very close.
The daughter said her mother had talked about me. Smiled. That was all. They had nothing more to give and our conversation was coming to an end, had, in fact, already ended, although I was still standing there, still looking over Lewis’ hunched shoulders at the familiar eyes in his daughter’s face.
I drove to Wellington that night for a meeting the next morning. On the way it poured. The water collected on the road, and now and then the car hydroplaned. I was driving slowly, being on what seemed like the wrong side of the road. Discussion on the radio continued. The sky flashed, opening, and the surf appeared not thirty meters from the road. I saw a wave climb a pillar of rock and then disappear. On the radio, the United Nations, the United States, the Members of Parliament, the way forward.

I didn’t think I would be able to visit Gabrielle, but, of course, I had to. After my meeting, I stopped by the address Lewis had given me. An enormous Edwardian house with a woman sitting at a desk in what had been the parlour. I found Gabrielle in a large, well-lit bedroom on the second floor. She wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, but dressed and, like the woman downstairs, sitting at a desk. Only her desk was empty and slanted toward her so that if it had held anything, it would have fallen off. I saw photographs of the girls on the wall, a precarious stack of light reading, pillows on wooden chairs.
Lewis had used the word breakdown, and so I guess I was expecting something else. I’m not sure what. Gurneys, lurking psychiatrists, some lingering trace of catastrophe on Gabrille’s face. On the day I saw her she looked tired, but calm. She had aged a few years since we’d last met, but it was her laugh lines I noticed, how they were creased through regular use.
She told me it wasn’t a breakdown, but more of a gentle deterioration. A long and steady decline, she said, and we both laughed. Nervous laughter. She wanted to know about me, my life, and so I told her of Miles. I told her of my fears. That something dark was inside this child, some chemical presence that had made my child its prisoner. Or that maybe it was worse than that. Maybe I—Solomon and I—were the ones who had made him this way.
Gabrielle told me Miles would outgrow it. She said she’d heard of worse conditions, and the children always turned out fine. They were never permanently affected. She told me she thought she would be going home in a couple of weeks. I said I was happy to hear she was going to be better. The phrase seemed to throw her, to take a moment to sink in. Before I left, she asked if I was thinking about having any more children.
She told me she was thinking of her own girls. She said, They love each other so much. It makes it easy to think of them when I know they’ll have each other.
I said, They still have their parents.
Gabrielle said, They do, but they drift away. You don’t want them to, they don’t want to. There’s a higher force. They drift away, and if you stay still, stay in one place, you can see it.

After visiting Gabrielle I drove back to the house with the furniture. When I return to New Zealand in my mind, I return to this house. To me sitting on its wooden floor with legs and arms and chair backs rising around me. The radio plays. A laptop and a notepad, a pen, a cup of tea are spread across the floor. The gulls go on and on outside and the joists rock in the wind as they’re meant to.
My report on the twenty-eight stories said the building was sound. I certified this with my word. Not wind nor rain nor the shaking of the earth would bring those twenty-eight stories down. I even calculated for the weight of snow, though I was told that snow was not possible in Wellington. At least, it had never happened yet. But what is unlikely is not impossible, and so I did the calculations. They revealed that in the event of a snowstorm producing ten centimeters of snow with an unequal distribution under prevailing wind conditions, the building was in no danger. The overhang, however, projecting eight meters across the footpath and bearing the load of various electronic signage, had a miniscule chance of collapse. So I made a decision. Buried the figures in an appendix and gave the building the all clear.
During those three days in the house, the radio was always on. There was so much talk then of unspeakable things. Unspeakable fear. Unspeakable rage. But no matter how much was said, the path of conversation never seemed to advance, but rather circled a center that could not be touched, held in a pattern around this rift in the imagination that had been opened by the impact of two airplanes. I return to this image that all of us have, that all of us will always have. A plane, delicate against a backdrop of rising glass, the second it came to us what it was we were watching. Our introduction, in that moment, to the limits of the possible.

Now I’m forty two, pregnant again. Miles has outgrown the night terrors, so it may be that Solomon was right. But, then, I quit the consulting position soon after I returned from New Zealand. The money’s much less, and I don’t have all that much more time with Miles, but sometimes I do keep him home from school when he’s not sick. We sit in the kitchen watching daytime soaps and opening the sliding glass door so the cat can wander back and forth, inside to out, a slave to instincts we will never know.
I’ve told my son about Gabrielle. How she’s been in and out of hospitals and homes, and how I don’t know if she’s going to get better. I say this very gently, but he doesn’t seem especially disturbed. He has no memory of his night terrors and is shocked to hear he sat up for hours playing with the lights out. Like many children, he’s still afraid of the dark.
My last night in New Zealand was a Friday. On the beach children rode in the beds of trucks. As far as I could see up the coast bonfires were burning. It is this scene I am returned to, its children’s voices, its distant surf, as I stand on my lawn in the dark tonight and watch two planes fading back into the stars out of which they seemed to emerge. Below me, lights glimmer, and somewhere down there construction starts. I hear a night crew coming on. The sound of a drill, air hammer, snap of pavement as it is scraped away. In the fields of electric light men have gathered to raise new frames of steel.
Thomas Gough
Palmerston North - New Zealand
Thomas' profile at Massey University

Artist statement: "In the Fields of Electric Light" was written as part of a collection of short fiction entitled Wayward Children and Their Guardians. The collection as a whole engages with issues of displacement, both psychological and geographical. As an American writer residing in New Zealand, I am living in a state of self-imposed exile that, in unexpected ways, mirrors that sense of displacement I feel as, moment to moment, I grow more distant from the homeland that is childhood.

Wayward Children and Their Guardians features characters undergoing different forms of waywardness: children wander along the beach, parents run down remote rivers, lovers roam off to America, parents drift into death. In "The Fields of Electric Light," both guardian and child end up lost. The American narrator, on a visit to New Zealand, wanders backwards in memory, while at home her son is lost in night terrors. At the heart of the collection is an image of life as a form of wandering from the mystery of birth into the unknowable territory of death.

I write on the assumption that language is the central element of contemporary fiction. That is, I think it is narrative voice that gives rises to character, plot, and structure; and my interests as a writer and reader of fiction are grounded in an obsession with the texture of words and sentences. Nothing gets my heart pounding like well-crafted syntax.

Bio: Thomas Gough is the pen name of Thom Conroy, an American writer teaching Creative Writing at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He is the recipient of the Katherine Ann Porter Prize for fiction, and his short stories have appeared in various journals, including Agni, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and New England Review. “In the Fields of Electric Light” was written as part of an unpublished short story collection entitled Wayward Children and Their Guardians. Thom is currently writing an as-yet-untitled novel set in 1839 in New Zealand.

More work by this artist:

"Wayward Children and Their Guardians" at Agni.

"Lost Water" at The Kenyon Review.

"You See How Much I Know About Jazz" at Willow Springs.

Interview

The image you provide in the opening paragraph of two planes “pulling apart” from one another as they continue on in opposite directions seems an appropriate introduction to this story. Much like the passengers on those planes, the characters in “In the Fields of Electric Light” seem to be bound to divergent trajectories they haven’t the power to change. Distance gathers between a mother and her child, a boy must contend with night terrors on his own, and an old friend sinks into madness. What has your study of dissociation taught you about the forces nudging each of us toward solitude?

The characters in “The Fields of Electric Light,” as in most of the stories in Wayward Children and Their Guardians, do seem drawn to follow paths beyond their control. This tendency in my characters may be linked to my awareness of how many aspects of our lives are out of our control: the science that manages our lives operates according to laws we know almost nothing about, our bodies fall into sickness without our consent, even the most intimate thoughts and secrets of life are bound to the language that forms them. To me, life seems a mystery each of us is given to contemplate on our own terms.

What initially attracted to you this theme and how did that interest develop into a collection of short stories?

For me dislocation and an accompanying sense of loss have always been a part of my way of looking at the world. I’m sure there are personal reasons for this feeling, but I haven’t consciously used fiction as a way to explore these themes. It may be closer to my way of looking at it to say that dislocation and loss have chosen me as a vehicle for their expression.

Throughout this story you use imagery and metaphor to deepen the read and articulate sentiments that would likely lose their power if addressed directly. There are the planes in the night sky, the “ruined statuary,” the car radio talking about dumb matter “burning a channel of silence,” the bonfires at the beach near the end, and others. Could you talk about the role imagery and metaphor generally play in your writing and how they speak to the subject matter you’re exploring? Why do you feel this artful comparison and deliberate resonance is important in literature?

Good questions. My vision of fiction is one that relies on what I hope is a quiet accumulation of oblique resonance, and I’m not picky about how I find this resonance. I intend for images and metaphor, along with syntax and the look of the sentence on the page, to provide a kind of envelope in which theme is held. Like many writers, I’m drawn to sentimental and familiar situations—estrangement, grief, fear of mortality—and images and metaphors help to back a reader into emotional territory she might not otherwise enter.

Who are some of the contemporary fiction writers whose work you most admire? Why?

Often I admire most whoever I’m reading at the time. Right now I’m reading Günter Grass’ memoir Peeling the Onion, and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. In terms of short fiction, I am humbled by the work of so many writers. The names of Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Barry Hannah, Mary Robinson, and Andre Dubus come to mind immediately as favorites. I’ve also come to learn about fiction from two New Zealand masters of the short story: Patricia Grace and Owen Marshall.

In your experience as an educator, which methods and/or exercises have proven to be most effective when it comes to improving students’ creative writing abilities?

This is a question I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to myself lately. I think the best thing you can do to improve students’ creative writing is push them to find the emotional center of their work. This is quite different from discovering the theme of a work. The emotional center of a work refers to the effect a work has on a reader and the force of that work which moves us—or fails to move us. In my experience, the most effective way to help guide students to the emotional center of their fiction is the workshop. In a well-led workshop, students have the invaluable chance to observe a roomful of invested readers working their way down to the emotional core of a story right before their eyes. What could be better?

What have been some of the more significant challenges?

The most significant challenge for me as a creative writing teacher is the student who doesn’t care. Indifference is the one thing that can undermine the whole process. Contemptuous students, quarrelsome students, overly-sensitive students—all of these can end up being important contributors to the workshop in the end. The indifferent student is a much harder nut to crack.

During your time in New Zealand, have you discovered anything literary or art-related that you feel deserves more international attention?

I’ve learned quite a bit about the potential value of literature in popular culture since living in New Zealand. One difference I’ve found between New Zealand and America is that in New Zealand everybody reads. It takes some adjusting to get used to. Literature, in general, seems more central. There’s a newspaper here that gives away a $5,000 award for short fiction. Massey University’s School of English and Media Studies, of which I’m a member, sponsors a local reading series in the public library of our medium-sized town and the average draw for the event is between 150 and 200 people. That’s 200 people in a town of about 65,0000 coming out on a Friday night to hear poetry! I’m pretty impressed by that. I’ve also discovered some wonderful authors here. I’ve mentioned Patricia Grace and Owen Marshall already, but I think people outside of New Zealand also ought to check out the work of Ian Wedde, Keri Hulme, and Bill Manhire, if they haven’t done so already. Recently, I’ve also been introduced to interesting literary forms from the Maori tradition, such as the waiata, which draw on a long oral heritage.

Aside from the focus on displacement you mention in your artist statement, how has your experience in New Zealand affected your writing?

One of the biggest adjustments about the move to New Zealand has been re-orienting myself to a foreign natural landscape. I’m used to having snow in winter, and during the cold season here my lemon tree gives fruit. I still expect to see cardinals and blue jays in the yard, but they just aren’t there. Of course, New Zealand birds are pretty amazing. There is a crow-like bird here called a Tui, for instance; it has two voice boxes and makes strange but melodious music. This sense of trying to adjust your senses to a new land underlies the experience of all of the work in Wayward Children and Their Guardians.

You’ve placed your stories in some prestigious literary journals. What have you learned about the pursuit of publication in the process?

What have I learned about the pursuit of publication? Mainly I’ve learned to be relentless, patient, and thick-skinned. It’s a very hard business, publishing your work, and I’ve gone for years at a stretch without so much as a personalised rejection! On the other hand, I’ve had lucky spells as well. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s important not to equate publication with good writing. I know some wonderful writers who have yet to see a word in print, and I’ve read a good amount of commercially successful fiction that I find second-rate.

Do you have any advice for fiction writers who have yet to publish their first story?

The best advice I’ve heard about writing is from Isak Dinesen, who said she wrote every day, “without hope and without despair.” Writing is a lifelong apprenticeship, and the writer’s first concern is with developing craft. Publication is important, of course, but what comes first is writing work that needs to be published. It’s hard to keep perspective sometimes, but without it, the work suffers—and this only undermines your chances of being published in the end.

In your bio, you mention you are writing a novel. Could you share a little more about the book? When do you expect to have it finished?

Thanks for asking. I’m midway into an untitled historical novel right now. The novel is set in 1839 in London; then aboard the expedition ship of the New Zealand Land Company, The Tory; and, finally, in and around the rugged coasts of pre-colonial New Zealand. The protagonist is an American woman named Clara Weiss who stows away in the cabin of the naturalist Ernst Deiffenbach. The narrative is centered around her quest to re-capture the sense of intimacy and meaning she felt on her family’s Pennsylvania farm as a child. Maori characters feature in the novel, including the famous (in New Zealand) Maori chief Te Rauparaha, who kept an island as his personal fortress. I hope to have the novel completed by June of 2010.

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