There are ten thousand lamps inside of your room.
You know because you put them there, or you put most of them there, and because you turn each of them on each day when you come home from work.
It does not look like so many lamps when you take off your coat and fold it and place it on the floor beneath the window. It does not look like so many lamps when you close the door behind you, shutting out the night, trading, at last, the blackness without for the blackness within. This is a good trade. The blackness of your room is temporary. The black of the night is forever.
It does not look like so many lamps when you gaze into your room from the doorway. Your eyes are accustomed to the darkness, but no matter how large your pupils grow, no matter how much they rove and seek across that sheet of hard night, they will never grow big enough to fit ten thousand unlit lamps in the dark.
They are big enough for one, however, and one is all you need.
A beaded cord hangs above you, a line of silver droplets, descended from dark, suspended in time. You know it is there, and you know it finds, further above, its root in the neck of a tungsten bulb. The bulbs of your lamps sit like owls upon their stems. You cannot see them, but you know they are looking at you.
The last bead of the first cord glints with what starlight your window permits, and you grab it, and roll it between your thumb and index finger, and pull it until it clicks, high above you, until it clicks into place and the first lamp hisses and hums and staggers alive.
Your pupils flicker and shrink. The light is warm. Beautiful.
The second cord is beside the first, and you pull it. Your shadow splits in two. It is the needle of your compass, laid out in front of you, pointing you forward into the long dark tunnel of your room.
There is work to be done.
Your eyes, once friends to the dark corners, shrink away, and you are taken by light. Into your spider’s web you crawl, your lamplighter’s web of cords and cables. Three, four, five. There are floor lamps and table lamps, desk lamps and ceiling lamps, lamps in sconces and lamps on brass brackets. There are lamps on every surface, at every angle. You press switches with your feet and pinch them open with your fingers. There are switches on the floor, switches on chains, switches midway along the cords of the lamps like lunch in the belly of a snake. Ten, twenty, fifty. You flip them all.
You lunge and crawl and dance your way deeper into your long, long room, over cords and under cords, further and further into that alley of infrastructure required to support so many lamps. The Terracotta Army of your side tables, the stippled matrix of outlets on your walls. You flip the switch of lamp one hundred. It, like all the others, is unique, and it casts the fingerprint of its lampshade onto the walls and the floor.
Deeper and deeper, you weave yourself into that electric loom. Under extension lines, over thick knots of power. Each step forward is a puzzle you’ve mastered, a choreography you know by heart. One hundred eighty two, one hundred eighty three. Two hundred. Deeper and deeper you go, into your tungsten glove.
There is a rhythm to this nightly dance. The clomp of your clogs, the click of each switch, the hum of your lovely lamps. Your eyes are as wide as eyes can be. You are bathed. You are warmed. Two hundred and sixty eight, the two hundred and sixty nine. Two hundred and seventy.
And then, there is a knock on your door.
You retract yourself, unweave yourself, and peek into the hall outside.
It is a salesman.
You do not like salesmen.
He is selling parallel revolver gaskets, and when you open the door, he is holding one in his hand.
His face is lit by two hundred and seventy lamps. He tells you that a parallel revolver gasket is just the thing you need. Just the thing. There is nothing on earth more precious than a parallel revolver gasket. It’s not a question of whether you need a parallel revolver gasket. Everyone needs a parallel revolver gasket. It’s a question of whether you are worthy. Whether you deserve a parallel revolver gasket. And do you? He looks past your shoulder, deep into your flickering half-light. Yes. You do.
And before you realize you’ve consented, he’s over the threshold and he’s unplugged lamps two through seven and he’s braiding their cords through his parallel revolver gasket. It’s a bastard knot of spliced electric thread and it’s flickering and pulsing and taught and the slack is all drawn up to the machined copper nucleus of the parallel revolver gasket and then he sticks a pin through a slot and it pierces each lamp’s cord in succession and when at last they’re all connected he flips the gasket switch and the lamps turn off
all at once and he flicks it again and the lamps turn on
and he flicks it again and again and the lamps turn off and on again all in unison like little soldiers all saluting and he turns his face in the amber light to look at you.
You ask how many lamps can be parallelized and he says ten thousand and seventeen, which gives you a bit of wiggle room, and then he is gone, and your door is shut, and you are the proud new owner of a parallel revolver gasket.
Once you’ve had a chance to sit and flip the thing over in your hands a few times, you stand up and sit down and stand up again. You put your finger through the hole in the center of the parallel revolver gasket and press down on the pin and watch your flesh depress. The pin is a bowling ball in a gravity field, a knife behind a cloth, a wire ground in fleshy earth, and you press down on the pin and it flexes and bends and then your skin breaks. A point of blood appears. Your eyes flicker. Your blood is grey in the auburn light and you do not feel a thing.
You remove your finger and press it against your lips and suck the point of blood from your finger. The taste is as metallic as the parallel revolver gasket. You are swathed, swathed in electric heat. You are alive. You walk to your window and put your forehead against the ripped pane. It is cold, and the night is dark. You step back. You are ready to begin.
It is like pulling hair, and when you start you cannot stop.
It is an unwinding of everything you have ever done, and you love it.
Plugs fly from your walls. You pull them like ropes, those thick wire braids, hand over hand. You are a sailor hoisting sail, a whaler hauling back your catch, your ten thousand catches, your ten thousand whales filled with ten thousand tons of lamp oil. Your lamps don’t run on oil. The age of oil is over.
The age of the parallel revolver gasket has begun.
Ten thousands cords through the eye of a gasket, like ten thousand camels through the eye of a needle. The pin pierces them all, that miracle conduit, joining wire after wire after wire, and the darkness waxes, and the darkness wanes. Your window shows the shifting ombre of the night: a gradient of black to black.
By morning, you are done. Your lamps are dark. You leave for work.
All day, parallel revolver gaskets spin across your mind. The candle at your desk is of no consequence. You look out your office window into the darkness and imagine the whole world white, pure white. You imagine the whole world as bright as ten thousand lamps. The whole world, parallelized.
The stars are as distant as ever as you walk home in the dark. You walk up the stairs and open your door. There, just beyond the threshold, sits your parallel revolver gasket. It is a disk of starlight, cool against the pads of your fingers.
You gaze into your room. You flip the switch.
You are blinded by the immediacy of it, the suddenness, that telescope of the light of ten thousand lamps. You’ve never seen them like this. It is intoxicating, the cleanness of color. Ten thousand tungsten bulbs and the light is as white as nothing you’ve ever seen.
You walk, tripping on emptiness, down the tunnel of your room. There are no more cables to block your path. What used to take you all night is now over in a second.
You don’t know what to do with yourself. You’ve never had this problem before. You’ve never had free time.
You run the perimeter of your room. There is light pushed up against the baseboards, light shoved into the corners, light pressed into the cracks between the floorboards. Shadow is a distant memory. In one corner, high against the ceiling, you find a spider walking in circles, around and around, stumbling over the vertices of the hexagonal core of its web. You push off against the wall and go back the way you came.
Each lamp is as perfect as the next. It is as if you’ve reigned the stars. They are each of them close, so close you can touch them.
You lay on the floor. You are spinning. You are warm.
And then, something else. By the door.
You sit up, squint.
Just beneath the first lamp, a twinge of black smoke, a flickering curiosity where the wires are most frayed. You hurry over, gaze down, fall onto your knees before it.
It is a flame. It is a beautiful thing.
It is no bigger than the tip of your finger, and it dances like a child. It is amber and auburn and yellow and red, in parts and all at once, leaping little leaps to try and touch your hovering palm.
You have often glimpsed inward at the glowing bulbs of your lamps. You like to watch their filaments, their gentle, pulsing curl, but you cannot look at them long before your eyes begin to strain and you are forced to look away.
But a flame, amongst ten thousand lamps, does not strain your eyes. You do not have to look away. You can’t look away. It is enchanting. Flame dances like filament cannot.
You blink rubber smoke from your watering eyes and stare down at its tenderness. You cup your hands around it and it grows to fill your hands. You crave this. You have always craved this. You have never felt anything like this before.
You ought to dance with it, you think. You stand and it stands with you, jumping lamp to lamp as you leap around your room.
The fire grows, rush down your long room, curling against the walls and floor. You run beside it. Each lampshade is a screen of fire, a brilliant torch, a fingerprint of rising ash.
You thought it was bright before. Your room is consumed, a panopticon of lamp and flame, and you are in its center. There is no sun or moon. You do not know the words. There are only lamps. Lamps, and lamps, and ten thousand flames as bright as night is not.
You spin and see your parallel revolver gasket lying on the floor. It is circled with cords, razor-lines of fire, dashed in smoke. It glows, smelt-red, filament-red, and you are dancing with the flames, and dancing with the heat-fogged air and with the whirling scarves of ash and with the rippling and the vibrating of the parallel revolver gasket and you are over it, over all of it, your lamps and your cords and all of it, for there is room for all of it within you, and it is the ultimate lamp, the ultimate lamp, and you, hung there above it, are its shade, its beautiful delicate beautiful shade, rising into ash.