Strangers In The Dark

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July 13, 1977

‘Damn, it doesn’t get any better than this,’ Gary Adams thought as he leaned back on the large oversized office chair and adjusted his legs on the desk.

Perched on the center of the desk in front of the sandy haired nineteen-year-old was a thirteen-inch portable black and white television, currently tuned to channel seven and one of his favorite shows, ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ An hour from now, he’d switch over to channel four and another of his favorites, ‘Police Woman.’ The picture on the screen was crystal clear, a lot better than he got on the larger and much more expensive twenty-one-inch console which sat in the living room of his family’s house in Brooklyn. The reason for the disparity could be found right over his shoulder where, if he cared to glance out the long row of windows, he would see the Empire State Building less than a half mile away. The line-of-sight transmission from the now second tallest building in New York was an added bonus to his job. He’d read that they were planning to move the transmitters down to the new World Trade Center in Battery Park, but that was at least a year away, and Gary barely thought about next month, much less next year.

Seven months ago, when he’d dropped out of City College after only a single semester, his father had given him an ultimatum. If he wasn’t going to continue his education, he sure as hell was going to work. He readily agreed, thinking he could string his father along for a few months and just give the appearance of looking for a job. But then the old man threw him an unexpected curve and said that one of his bar buddies had already arranged an interview for Gary at the Midtown investment firm where he worked, and that he should be there tomorrow at ten, wearing his Sunday best.

Gary dared not blow off the interview because his father would know it before the day was over. Still, he was certain that it wouldn’t be too hard to convince whoever was giving it that he wasn’t what they were looking for. After all, he’d only had a C average in high school and even that was due more to athletic accomplishments than academic ones. He wasn’t stupid or anything, he just couldn’t bring himself to apply his efforts to anything other than sports.

He showed up barely five minutes before ten, convinced that he’d be out of there in time to catch an early matinee at one of the Times Square theatres. The interviewer turned out to be some old lady that, much to his delight, appeared to disapprove of him after only a few minutes. The smile on his face quickly disappeared, however, when the gray-haired woman took a second look at his application and saw the name of his father’s drinking buddy under references. Before he knew what had hit him, Gary was being directed down to human resources to fill out a few more forms and told that he’d be starting the following Monday.

The fix had been in because someone somewhere had owed his dad’s buddy a favor. If all Gary could do was read and write his own name, he’d have still passed the interview. His dismay grew when he learned that while the hours weren’t exactly the graveyard shift, being six to two, they were close enough to put a serious crimp in his social life. He was screwed, or so he thought.

By the time he’d been at the company a few weeks, he actually came to love his new job. True, the hours were a bit of a drawback as far as his love life went, but they turned out to have some benefits that almost made up for that.

The bulk of his job concerned separating reams of computer printouts that came in after hours from an offsite accounting firm. They would come in cardboard boxes, which he would set up in a machine that removed the carbon paper from in between the two sheets. The bottom copies would be put aside to serve as backups if needed, then the semi-perforated originals would be run through a second machine that broke them down into individual pages, which he would collate and deliver to the desks of their respective account managers. Finally, he would toss out the backups from the previous day.

On a busy night, assuming that the boxes were delivered by six, he was usually done by eight. The rest of his night consisted of filling any overnight supply requests and periodically checking the teletype which linked the New York office with the one in London, delivering any overnight telexes to the desks of the addresses. With what seemed like half the company on mid-summer vacation, Gary actually had to slow down his efforts so as not to run out of things to do before the managerial staff went home for the day, leaving him the rest of the night to lay back and relax.

‘And for all this they’re paying me two fifty an hour,’ Gary thought as, once a commercial came on, he got up to check the teletype.

The bell on the machine had only rung once, signifying that it was a low-level communication, bonus veren siteler one that could simply be left on someone’s desk. In his time with the company, Gary had never heard the bell go off more than three times, and that was when people were still in the office. He’d been told that if it ever rang that many times when he was the only one there, he was to call the on-call manager immediately and read it to him.

The commercial over, Gary tossed the jagged-edged sheet of paper into the wire basket where he’d left the two previous missives. He’d deliver them all at once at the end of his shift, just before the early morning clerk came in. During his brief indoctrination by that self-same clerk, Gary had been told he should immediately deliver the missives, even though there wasn’t another soul in the place. He’d just nodded his head, thinking that he wasn’t going to do anything so stupid.

Since it was the middle of the summer, the ‘Charlie’s Angels’ episode was a rerun, with a plot that hadn’t been difficult to figure out even when it had been new. But no one was watching the show that had been dubbed ‘jiggle television’ for the story. The Angels often went braless, especially Farrah Fawcett, whose nipples were not only prominently displayed on the TV screen, but also on a pin-up of her in a low-cut red swimsuit which hung on the wall of his bedroom.

‘Police Woman’ would also be a repeat, and Angie Dickinson never seemed to go braless, at least not that Gary had ever caught. But, even if he wouldn’t admit it to his friends, he thought she was really hot, which seemed an odd appraisal to make of a woman who, at forty-six, was nearly his mother’s age. Still, he tried never to miss an episode.

Gary looked up from the television as he heard the chime of the elevator echo across the empty office. Glancing at the clock on the wall, he saw that it was ten after nine and wondered who it could be. After all, even the cleaning crews were usually finished by eight. He debated for a second turning off the television but decided that, on or off, the fact that it was on the desk in front of him rather than in the break room down the hall was incriminating either way.

The sound of footsteps grew louder until Gary could see a shadowy form moving among the rows of cubicles, the frosted glass walls preventing him from seeing who it was. It wasn’t until the figure turned the corner that he could get a good look, and once he did, he was flabbergasted.

Standing an inch or so above his five six, the Asian woman standing only a few feet away had dark black hair done up in a bun, and was dressed in a pink jacket, gray skirt and a white blouse. She also wore black plastic framed glasses and a few pieces of gold jewelry, notably a ring on each hand and a nameplate necklace. At least, Gary assumed it was a name, because whatever it said was written out in what he assumed were Chinese characters. He often heard people say that it was hard to guess Asian women’s ages, so he didn’t feel bad later when, after thinking that she was in her mid to late thirties, he found that he was nearly a decade short in his guess.

“Good evening,” the woman said in a soft but strong voice, “I hope I didn’t surprise you.”

“No, not at all,” Gary replied as he tried to remember if he’d seen the woman before, only to draw a blank. Which wasn’t that unusual, seeing that the company had about two hundred employees, most of whom went home before he came in at night.

“I’m Laura Cheng, from Legal,” the woman said in way of introduction, adjusting her glasses in the process.

“Can I help you with something?” Gary asked, hoping to distract her from the television which was still playing.

“I certainly hope so,” the woman said with an inviting smile. “My boss is expecting a letter of intent from Mr. Burke in the London office and I was hoping it had already come in on the teletype.”

“Don’t things like that normally come in the mail pouch?” Gary asked, having been at the firm long enough to have learned a few things about how the mailroom operated.

“Normally yes, but he’s a bit impatient to get the paperwork started on the deal, so they agreed to also send a copy over the transatlantic connection,” Laura explained. “Have you seen it?”

Gary was about to say he hadn’t, but then thought he’d better check just to be sure. He stepped over to the basket where he’d dropped the incoming telexes and sure enough, there on the bottom of the pile was the one Laura had come looking for.

“Is this it?” he asked as he held it out towards her.

Taking a few steps to close the distance between them, Laura took the paper from his hand and after taking a few seconds to examine it, said that it was.

Until this moment, it never occurred to Gary that, even if he never saw them, people might still be in the office working. Now he realized why his trainer had said to deliver any messages promptly.

“I was just going to make my rounds and drop these off,” Gary lied, hoping that she bedava bahis didn’t notice the time stamp on the top, which showed it had come in more than an hour before.

“Yes, I can see that you’re quite busy,” Laura said, looking again at the telex and then past Gary to the television on the desk. The expression on her face said she had noticed the received time.

Gary knew he was busted, the question was, how badly?

“I’m sorry,” he said, thinking there wasn’t much more that he could say.

“You know, a friend and I were supposed to be going to see the new James Bond film tonight,” Laura said, a noticeable aggravation in her tone, “but I had to cancel when my boss asked me to wait for this. From the transmission time on this, it looks like all I really had to miss were the coming attractions.”

“That’s a great movie,” Gary blurted, realizing as soon as he did that mentioning that he had already seen ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ was probably not the best move.

Laura didn’t reply, but the look on her face spoke volumes.

Gary was going to offer another apology, but never got the chance as, just as the sweep hand of the wall mounted clock passed the half hour mark, the lights around them suddenly went dark, along with the television and every other electronic device.

“What the fuck?” Gary exclaimed as he instinctively looked up at the now dark light panels in the ceiling.

Once before, about a month after he’d started, one of the cleaning crew had plugged the tile cleaning machine into the wrong socket and caused the lights to go out. So his first thought was that might be what was happening now.

“The lights should come back on in a few minutes,” Gary said, trying to sound reassuring. “They just have to reset the circuit breaker.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” Laura said sharply.

As if to accent her declaration, the older woman directed Gary’s attention to the large window behind the desk. Following her lead, the teenager looked out the window and saw — nothing.

Where was the Empire State Building, and the rest of the city? It was all gone. No, not gone, he said to himself, just too dark to see.

“It’s a blackout,” Gary finally said.

“Brilliant deduction, Sherlock,” Laura said, her sarcasm now even more evident. “Any thoughts about what we do now?”

Gary was about to say he had no idea when suddenly, after what seemed like a much longer delay than it should have been, the emergency lights came on across the floor. Numbering less than a quarter of the panels they replaced, they really only provided enough illumination to keep you from walking into things. Still, it was better than nothing. Battery powered, they were supposed to last a few hours, after which they would slowly fade out.

“We should try and find out how bad it is,” Laura offered as she walked up to the windows to get a better look, but the only lights she could see were those of cars moving down unlit streets.

“I think there’s a radio on one of the desks over by the wall,” Gary finally said. “Let me see if I can find it.”

It took time, even with the substitute lighting, for Gary to find his way over to the desk he mentioned. Sure enough, there was a portable radio, but it was plugged into an electrical socket.

“Please also have batteries,” Gary whispered as he turned it on.

The signal was weak, as if it was coming from a far longer distance than normal, but readable. So Gary unplugged the unit and carried it back to where he had left Laura.

“… and repeating our top story this hour,” said the announcer, who identified himself as speaking from a New Jersey station that Gary had never heard of, “a massive power failure has occurred in and around New York City, leaving millions of customers without power. Con Edison is still tracking down the cause of the failure and has no estimate at this time for restoration.”

“Wonderful,” Laura said in exasperation.

-=-=-=-

Since they did not know how old the batteries in the radio were, or how long they might last, Laura suggested that they conserve them and only turn it back on once an hour when they did the news update. Gary had wanted to use the radio to listen to music, but realized that idea was shortsighted.

An hour passed, then two, and it began to become clear that they weren’t going anywhere until the morning. Even if they wanted to walk down the twenty-six flights of the emergency stairwells, where were they going to go? Buses might be running, but without traffic signals, how safe might they be? No, it was better to wait it out until morning and see how everything stood once the sun was up.

Eventually, it became obvious that, since neither could sleep, their only option was to talk to each other. The radio offered little in the way of new information, other than the much-repeated assurance that the electric company was working as hard as possible to restore power. It was also now clear to both of them that they could have been in a lot worse deneme bonus places when the power went out.

An uncounted number of people were stuck on subway trains or in elevators. No power meant no air conditioning, and the outside temperature before the lights went out hadn’t really dropped far from the day’s high of ninety-three degrees. Thankfully, the office temperature didn’t reflect the warm stickiness outside the windows, but it was becoming uncomfortable enough that Laura shed her jacket and undid the top buttons of her blouse. Having come to work wearing shorts and a Bay City Rollers t-shirt, Gary didn’t have anything else he could lose.

“So, tell me, Gary Adams, do you have a girlfriend?” Laura asked, having exhausted just about any other topic she could think of.

“I used to, but we broke up back in May,” Gary replied as he downed the last of the can of RC Cola that had been left in the fridge.

“What was her name?” Laura asked.

“Cindy,” Gary replied.

“What happened?” Laura asked.

“Well, partly this job — she didn’t like that I had to work every Friday night,” he said.

“She broke up with you over that?” Laura asked, thinking that was rather petty.

“Well, there were other things too,” Gary admitted.

“Like what?” the Asian woman inquired.

Gary was reluctant to answer.

“Were the two of you sleeping together?” Laura asked, letting curiosity and the boredom of waiting for the lights to come back on overtake any propriety she might have felt.

“Sort of,” he answered.

“What does sort of mean?”

“We did it twice, but she really didn’t seem to enjoy it,” Gary said, the hours of waiting beginning to affect him as well.

“I would’ve had you pegged as a virgin,” the older woman smiled.

“I’m not a virgin,” Gary said loudly.

“So you said,” Laura offered.

“How about you?” Gary asked.

“Are you asking if I’m a virgin?” Laura said, finding the question rather funny, given her age.

“No, of course not,” Gary quickly said, realizing that wasn’t a question you ask a woman. “I was just wondering if you had a boyfriend or something.”

“Or something, huh?” Laura said.

“Well, I didn’t see a wedding band or anything like that,” he pointed out.

“That’s very observant of you,” Laura noted with a grin before adding. “No, I’m not married, at least not any more. I did the ring thing twice — never again.”

“Why did your marriages end?” Gary asked, thinking it only fair to ask since she asked him about Cindy.

“Well, husband number one was my mother’s choice, not mine,” Laura said. “He was the perfect Chinese husband in her eyes, but unfortunately I turned not to be the perfect Chinese wife in his. I was born in Nanjing, but my family moved to the States when I was twelve. As a result, as much as my mother tried to shield me from American culture, enough of it got through for me to be tainted in his family’s view. We were divorced within two years.”

“And the second?” Gary queried.

“That came ten years after the first,” Laura said. “He wasn’t Chinese, so my mother greatly disapproved, but it was my choice. Unfortunately, after we were together for four years, he got sick and, well, I found myself alone again.”

“I’m sorry,” the young man offered.

“Thank you, but it was a while ago,” she responded. “Since then, I’ve learned to take life as it comes, taking advantage of what happiness might come my way, and not caring what anyone else might think. Like they say, tomorrow doesn’t come with a guarantee.”

“I guess that’s true,” Gary said, although it also occurred to him that when you were still a few months from your first birthday out of your teens, you don’t think of things like that.

A silent pause filled the air as each tried to think of another question to ask. It was Gary who thought of one first.

“Who were you supposed to see the James Bond flick with?” he inquired.

“Like I said earlier, a friend,” she answered.

“Man or woman?” Gary inquired further.

“Does it make a difference?” Laura asked.

“Well, depending on which, it might’ve been a date,” Gary suggested.

“You do realize that I could’ve been going on a date with a woman just as easily as a man, don’t you?” Laura pointed out.

That hadn’t even occurred to Gary, if for nothing other than the fact that he didn’t think Laura looked like a lesbian. Then again, he asked himself, what did a lesbian look like?

“Were you?” Gary asked.

“No, I wasn’t,” Laura responded. “While I don’t have a problem with women who do date other women, I prefer a man in my bed.”

“And was that what you were looking forward to tonight?” Gary asked, feeling a bit emboldened.

“Perhaps,” the older woman replied in a controlled neutral tone.

Behind her carefully measured response was the fact that ending the night in his bed was the only reason she was going out with Peter Rivers. He was only average as far as looks went, and not the greatest conversationalist, but more than one friend had shared that Peter was the sort of man who really knew how to ring your bell. Staying late for the letter had scuttled any chance of seeing the movie, but she’d hoped that there’d still be time for a late snack and, more importantly — dessert.

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