I was in graduate school, without a thesis, when I took a job at the light bulb shop downtown. My research on my original topic, on the habits and culture of urban Vampire-Americans, had not resulted in anything interesting, besides a newfound fear of hepatitis and more than a few late night dinners at the local greasy spoon. I was in desperate need of inspiration. One night, I while was out brooding, and looked up to see a gigantic bust of man sitting on top of a building, with a too-toothy grin and a light bulb attached to his head via cartoon bubble. A small piece of paper in the window said, “Help Wanted for Night Shift” and I took it as sign, albeit a completely literal one. I had gotten used to being awake at those hours and had a hard time readjusting to a regular schedule. I didn’t have anything better to do.
I know what you’re thinking: “Why would a small mom n’ pop light bulb shop need a night shift?” At the time I didn’t know either, but I was curious. I didn’t expect anything too exciting, though maybe I should have. And I know, I know, cultural relativism and all that, how we’re all supposed to take each group of people and judge them on their own terms without our own biases, etc etc. During my time at the light bulb shop I found it incredibly difficult to keep up my professional anthropological attitude, despite five years of being taught to do so. In other words, I saw some pretty weird shit.
Perhaps I should have guessed when I entered that it was not just a light bulb shop. Sure, there were light bulbs of all sorts, arranged according to color, white lights, black lights, red lights, blue lights, but that was all that they sold. No lamps, lava or otherwise; nothing cheerfully neon, just light bulbs. The boy at the counter seemed genuinely surprised that I was there, and even more surprised that I had come to ask for employment. He didn’t even know there was a position available. “I’ve only been here a couple days,” he said. “I’ll ask the manager.”
The boy walked over to the back room and knocked on a large metallic door. After a few moments, the door opened, and the manager slid out of it, shutting it firmly behind him. He was kind of a strange sort of fellow, no more than five and a half feet in height, with a triangle-shaped goatee that might have been used to offset the complete roundness of his bald head.
“Hm. You look like you don’t ask a lot of questions,” he said. I was a little insulted. What was that supposed to mean? But I nodded anyway. “And I don’t like to ask a lot of questions. I only have one. When can you start?”
My shift was from midnight to four a.m. I only had two duties 1) to man the register when someone had a craving for late night light bulbs and the less obvious 2) to direct all other customers to the back room. Of course I wanted to know what was in there and thought up little schemes. My best idea was to simply open the door, yelling “Fire!” but part of me wanted to figure it out first. I wanted to have an idea of what I was getting into. I wondered if there was some freaky Frankenstein-like happenings there, because every once in awhile, the power would surge, and all the light bulbs would dim for a few seconds before returning to their original brightness.
The first night, I tried to piece everything together by examining the similarities shared by the clientele, but there wasn’t any recognizable pattern. There were only a few of them each shift, but they were all different types of people, except for some thing: everyone’s hair was frizzy, sticking up at odd angles. At the time it seemed like a stupid thing to notice. There was also one other, more troubling thing. No one seemed to leave that room and no one ever seemed to come back.
