A young boy no more than ten woke to the dark with the need to pee. In this world, peeing at night was not so easy a thing. His mother and father slept in the room at the far end of the hall, the bathroom in between, two picture windows that looked out onto the lawn and the lawns of the other houses and a park beyond. His sister, Betty, slept in the bed beside him.
He got out of bed and paused with amazement at the door to the hall: Mother or Father had forgotten to shutter the windows at dusk. He should, he told himself, go back to bed but the pee threatened to explode. He thought about asking Betty. But something in him said no and to look. To test what always had been said and warned against. The windows must remain shut up when the sun goes down. The doors must be locked at night and every night, no exceptions.
He’d seen photos. They were only photos: stars, the moon, eclipses. “I’ll lock you out at night,” Betty would threaten. “Stop,” Father would say. “It isn’t funny.”
But could he just look? Would he? A quick look. Just take a quick glance, then pee, then back to bed, and shuffle through the whys in the morning when it was safe to do so, safe to ask questions, or safe to say “I risked and it wasn’t true. None of it has been true, Father.”
Last month he and Betty and snuck into the hallway and sat beneath the shutters, their hearts patting in their chests like crows wings. “No,” the boy had said finally. “No way.”
“We just shouldn’t,” Betty whispered. “We just can’t.”
So, why not just look now? He watched down the hall. The moon shown bright through the big windows. It was that Blue Time. Four or so. He’d seen the blue light only once before, early morning high in the mountains, where everyone sat on an enormous balcony, the hotel rising behind spatter-lit yellow from the random windows in the higher rooms. It had been so rare, Mother standing by Father at a stone lookout. They had drinks. Even together then they looked lonely and helpless and somehow guilty of a quiet collaboration in solitude and failure.
That time had been about this same time, so late and early, and everyone happy, a wakeful holiday, refusing in unison to sleep. He remembered how his mother’s head had slowly fallen to Father’s shoulder, his head to her head. So high they were, the clouds swirled below silver and humped, high and safe above a world where night never really came.
He felt the energy or thrill of impulse. He felt drawn from the door, drawn to the window. He moved his eye to the left of the frame, looked out for the first time at an alien night and encountered moon glow, the shadows of the nearer trees soft and silent on the bright white ground. Nothing, he thought. There was nothing, nothing to fear out there, all the rules untrue or just false.
The windows on the block were shuttered, blank spots against the gray sky. In the park, it must have been very far, he saw a dark shape drift rapidly out from the pines into a clear space on the grass, something that suggested spider but with only two or three legs, small so far away, then it was gone, like something painted on the ground by a breeze. He felt a pressure in his chest, something of an illicit sweetness at the bottom of his throat.
“They sense vision,” he remembered hearing. “They ignore us if we don’t see . . .” Grandfather said. They had been in Wisconsin with relatives. They had been eating in a windowless cafeteria. Grandfather told stories. He explained, while Mother and Father ate, ready to silence the speaker if he strayed. “. . . or look. I don’t know when precisely they came, but it was just after your mother was born, and we had to change. All of us, even governments. We lost the night everywhere to their teeth, their nails. But we’re safe if we don’t look. Safe if we shut the night out. We no longer have the moon to ourselves.
“They’re drawn to the human eye. They only take he or she who sees them. And so we board our windows. It’s safest that way. Sleep through the night. Keep the windows shut. Love the daytime.”
“Father,” Father said. “Please.”
The boy watched the night. Something dark slashed across a nearer street. Then the boy heard his Father.
“No,” Father said. He was standing at the bedroom door. “My god, son,” he said.
“Father,” the boy whispered, his voice shaking. “I just had to pee.”
“Oh my god,” the Father said. “Oh my god.”
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