Everything—even the lights outside, beaming in from the street, or from nearby buildings—blanked out. I went rigid as if I had been switched off, too. The darkness and silence engulfed me. I waited for a flicker, sure the backup generator would kick on any minute, but there was nothing.

Time passed, maybe whole minutes. There is something about sudden, utter darkness that renders a person temporarily senseless, disoriented. However, after some moments the sound of the refrigerator’s motor ticking off penetrated the silence, returning me to this room, this reality. I could smell the roux again, the only tangible signal that I was still alive, and in the blackness the smell seemed like a sinister, wordless taunt, the one thread left of the world that had been ripped away. I let go of the whisk, letting it sink in the pan, and I turned left, then right. In the living room, the canary screamed.

How I depended on the light! I hadn’t realized how much electricity reassured me at all hours that the world was far larger than me, and always would be. And the hum of everything, my daily background noise, was now gone. In the dark, Geannie and Jim’s faces appeared to me, flashing up with such force I actually gasped aloud—“Oh!”—as if they’d materialized and shanked me in the liver. It was just my memory at work, that background noise thing, my Bonnie brain making connections, something I thought I had mostly freed myself from. But their images refused to fade, and they disturbed me so much I recoiled and staggered backward, turning around, frantically feeling the wall for the kitchen door, any exit.

I found it and fell into the living room, but it was dark there, too, and I kept waiting for the lights to stutter back on, maybe weaker than before but still on, alive, and then I was Chrissy, frantically praying to a personal God, and then I veered into Janet, trying to calm myself, control myself, forcing myself to consider logical solutions, and finally I returned to Jack, who decided to take action.

After fishing a flashlight from one of my bedroom desk drawers, I left the apartment, but before I closed the door behind me I heard the canary panicking. In a moment of softheartedness, I decided to take it with me. It seemed too scared to be left behind, and I still felt guilty about the dog. I went back in and unhooked its domed cage from the stand and carried it at my side like a briefcase.

Outside, the darkness was immense. An inky black well to fall into. My brain swiped back into the past, remembering the exact landscape that surrounded me beyond the small city I’d built, the woods and mountaintop I was on where night falls fast. I raced down the stairs, trying not to trip, and went toward the mechanical room at the far end of the building, which housed the breakers. My hands shook so badly that I couldn’t find the right key as I walked; when I reached the door I put the flashlight on the ground and knelt down in its beam to steady myself. I set the cage down, too. The canary kept chirping in alarm, its cries growing to a deafening crescendo, until I said through clenched teeth, “Shut up.” Like magic, the chirping stopped.