Imperiled By Sudden Darkness

1983.  I am 26 years old.

In this completely silent, totally dark room I literally can’t see my hand in front of my face. I am standing still and trying to figure out what to do.  I have tried yelling for help but now I've stopped doing that becausae my short, barky shouts of “Hey! Hey! Hey!” are absorbed instantly by the silent darkness. It's as though I am inside a huge box of Kleenex.  

In space no one can hear you scream, a movie poster once told me. This is also true for the eighth floor of the Undergraduate Library at Indiana University, when it's after hours and the building is closed for the night, and then the lights go out.

There’s no source of light anywhere, not the faintest glimmer.  The giant library where I work as a janitor is eleven stories tall but has absulutely no windows except on the first three floors.  This library does have excellent soundproofing. It also has great fire barriers because, rumor has it, the previous location was burned to the ground by an insane librarian.  

This explanation for the old library's destruction had sounded far-fetched to me when I first heard it, but then I literally saw the person purported to be the firebug. I'd been standing outside the loading dock entrance with another night custodian and smoking a coffee-break cigarette when my workmate said, "There's Smokey." 

For a moment, I thought "Smokey"meant the bear in the forest ranger hat and my co-worker was making a joke about us preventing forest fires or something. Then I realized he meant that weird guy that people said burned down the old library.

We watched the alleged arsonist walk briskly up Tenth Street and turn onto Jordan Avenue. He turned again at the entrance to the back parking lot, and strode purposefully toward the door used by employees. The madman looked a lot like Dennis the Menace’s father, including the hornrims and pipe.


                                                    

                                       

“He still works here?” I'd asked under my breath, as the librarian pulled open the door to enter the building.  "And he can take a lighted pipe in with him?"

“Nothing was proved,” the other custodian had answered.

“Well, at least he can’t torch this library,” I'd said, philosophically.  “It’s all made of stone.”


                                                                

“And there’s extra walls in here,” said my co-worker.  “Plus sprinklers all over the place. They weren't having that happen twice." 

We'd followed the cold-case suspect into the building, and from a distance, we 'd watched the fire-starter take the pipe from his mouth and tap the ashes into a sand-filled ashtray before getting into an Up elevator.  

"They put a lot of soundproofing in this building too, when they did the fire protection,” said my buddy. He was using his normal voice now since the pipe-smoking librarian had gone up to the administrative offices.  “You ever drop one of those big metal dustpans in here?  I have, and I thought for sure somebody would  come running because it was so loud. But I've done that twice, maybe three times, and nobody ever noticed."

And now that I'm trapped and alone, the memory of seeing the crazy man who burned down the old library has of course come back to my mind  I'm a little scared to move around in case the mad librarian walks the stacks at night. And more immediately, the soundproofing really has made it impossible for me to call for help. I am alone, in pitch blackness at the very back of the eighth floor or the library. I am as far away from either a light or a stairwell as it is possible to be.  It's obvious that I will have to save myself from this predicament. No one knows I am in trouble and I can't let anyone know.


                                               

It's hard for me to plan because the sudden darkness has taken me by surprise. Just before everything went dark, I'd been angling a swivel dust mop to catch dust and tiny bits of paper and cookie crumbs, humming to myself and feeling like the cartoon cleaning lady from The Carol Burnett Show. Being a truly dedicated Custodial II employee, I don't just sweep the main highways and byways. I actually sweep the furthest rows of the book stacks. I'd  just been turning a corner into the Dewey Decimal 817s when the banks of overhead lights began to go out, row by row.

Only an employee could be turning off the lights. There are no regular light switches, Instead there are rows of slots in a metal plate. The only way to shut off a bank of fluorescent fixtures is to insert a special key made of thin metal and split like a meat-holding fork in a miniature carving set.  There's a slot in the wall for each set of lights, and we employees put in the tiny two-pronged key and toggle the interior switch up or down. 

If normal switches were available, any joker from among the student population could do a quick palm-sweep, plunging half of any floor into instant and total darkness, There are no windows in this part of the building. It's like an underground bunker, except eight stories in the air. We have electric light or we have nothing.

 When the new library was designed in1969, Indiana University generated its own electricity at little cost. Tons of cheap coal was burned at the university’s Physical Plant. Each of the top eight levels of the eleven-floor building each had dozens and dozens of buzzy metal fixtures set into the ceiling, and each fixture had two long glowing fluorescent tubes set into it. Not only did the electric lights have to offset the windowless design of the building, but they had to illuminate every corner of each floor, as the study carrels for students were set along the walls.  

So I know that whoever is shutting off the lights works at the library. The tiny forked keys which go into the slots are issued to library staff and they are also given to the janitors. The librarians, library assistants, student workers and even the daytime light-duty janitors (Custodial I's) have all gone home, and at one in the morning, the only people around are other Custodial II's.


We night custodians used the keys a lot. In the old days when the coal-fired plant provided cheap power, all the lights on all the floors stayed on around the clock. But now, those of us on the cleaning crew had been instructed to shut off the lights on each floor as we finished working there.  In the last fourteen years, the cost of using artificial light had become untenable (I’d heard the Public Service Indiana bill was ten thousand smackers a month) but of course there was no way to knock windows into eight floors of stone walls.  The university needed drastic cost savings, and all of us on the overnight shift had heard loud and clear that the lights should only be on in the areas where we were actively sweeping, mopping, or dumping trash.  If we came upon a fully-lit floor, devoid of other custodians, we were to use the special key to shut down the banks of fluorescent bulbs.  

Turning off the lights was a noisy business. The key slid into a slot, and then the ussr rolled the inner switch down, and there was a decisive, resonant bang  as four long rows of lights went dark. Apparently some big metal lever crashed into a new position when the key switch did its thing. This was one noise the fancy soundproofing couldn't absorb.

 The double row of switch slots was about a foot long. Each floor of the library was enormous, literally the size of a football field. At the time, the I.U. Library was the largest campus library in the world. So there were lots of fluorescent lights and therefore lots of light switches. Even with experience, it took a minute or two to darken an entire floor of the Undergraduate Library.

On the night in question, I heard the first bang from way way way down the other side of the huge room filled with bookshelves and study carrels, I knew that Roy, the Custodial II worker who did the floors just below mine, was diligently shutting down the lights on the eighth floor because he thought I was all done sweeping and had gone down to the seventh floor without switching off my lights.  Dude was just helping me out.

“Roy!"  I yelled.  

Bang bang.  Two more banks of lights went dark.  

 "Hey, Roy!!” I yelled.  “I’m back here, man!"  

Bang.  

"Don’t shut the lights out, Roy!" 

 Bang bang bang bang.  Damn this soundproofing.  I leaned the handle of  my dust mop to the right and propped the handle against a bookshelf. Stepping around the wide flat mop head, I began to move toward the center aisle.  "Hey!"  Too late.  Bang bang bang bang bang.  Total darkness.

Numb panic paralyzed me.  I recalled childhood terror during a tour of Mammoth Cave when the lights were turned out so we could all see how dark it was.  The tour guide pretended that there’s been a power failure and I was young enough to believe him.  "Mom?” I said nervously, and I felt the warm press of her hand.  “They’re just fooling,” she said.  “They’ll turn the lights on in a minute.”

After the five minutes of Mammoth Cave fear, deep darkness had always freaked me out.  When I was about 20, I bravely went spelunking with a friend’s boyfriend and I would have been all right except for the story he told me about why each person needs three light sources when caving:  on an earlier expedition, he’d smacked the headlight on his helmet against the top of a tunnel, and then his flashlight had gotten wet and shorted out. He’d been three miles into the cave and had gotten out by getting on his belly and doing a commando crawl through a small stream.  He knew the water flowed south so as long as the water pushed against him as he moved, he would find his way to the hole he’d climbed down.  He told me he’d just started to feel really afraid that he couldn’t find his way out when he saw, a quarter-mile away, the faint light of the opening.

He told me this story as we drove out to the country, and by the time we got to our destination, I was spooked.  I climbed down through the large hole which opened into the cave tunnel, but then I couldn’t leave the natural skylight of the cave mouth. I tried to keep going, I really did.  I told myself firmly that I’d given my word to this poor guy that I’d go caving with him, and that we were perfectly safe.  People knew we were here, and we each had two flashlights and a Bic lighter and a candle.

No dice.  Every time I took a step outside the reassuring circle of light on the ridged stone floor of the cave, terror swallowed me up like the deepest shadow in the deepest cave in the world.  After twenty minutes of watching me struggle to overcome my fear, the spelunker suggested me climb up out of the cave and drive back to town.  He was really nice about the let-down.

Now here I was, alone and helpless in the pitch-black again.  Helpless?  No, I say to myself, you know exactly where you are.  If that guy could crawl three miles on his belly in a rocky stream, you can certainly find your way out of the Undergraduate Library.  You are in the next to last row from the back wall, and about seven or eight shelf-lengths in.

I resolve to work my way to the center aisle by using my palms to touch the spines of the books which I know are nicely Dewey Decimaled in front of me.  I am in the 817s and 818s. If I could see the book spines I'd know I was looking at The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and Cornelia Otis Skinner's collection of monologues.

 Crossing one arm over the other and stepping sideways to the left as though doing the cha-cha-cha, I reach the wide middle aisle which divides the long sets of shelving.  I prepare to hit the floor to do my Rambo imitation, slithering along the cool tile while I touch the edges of the shelves to orient myself.  Eventually I will get near enough to the stairway door that I’ll be able to see the yellow glow of the lights on the stairs through the small window in the stairway door.

Happily, the commando crawl is unnecessary.  As I palm my way to the corner and turn into the center aisle, I can see the tiny glow of the emergency exit light over the stairway door.  It’s very small but bright, like a single star in the blackest part of the night sky.  I follow the light las a spelunker who working her way upstream might do, and at last I am at the stairway door, and I can find the light switch slots and use my key. I flip on the lights, go back to the dust mop I left in the last row of the stacks, and I began to clean the floor again.

When, a year or two later, I gave notice, I don’t think anyone asked me to turn in the tiny forked light switch key.  I suppose I kept it, but if I did, it's become lost.  If I ever spot a light switch key in a pile of junk at a yard sale, I will buy it and put it on my keyring.  Maybe I’ll paint it red, like the Badge of Courage.