“What had come to interest me more and more was the subject of electricity, and microwaves, and RF
waves, and RF interference from small appliances, and low-level radiation, and Christ knows what else. I went to the library and took out books on the subject; I bought books on the subject. There was a lot of scary stuff in them… and of course that was just the sort of stuff I was looking for.
“I had my phone taken out and my electricity turned off. It helped for a while, but one night when I was staggering in the door drunk with a bottle of Black Velvet in my hand and another one in my topcoat pocket, I saw this little red eye peeping down at me from the ceiling. God, for a minute I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It looked like a bug up there at first… a great big dark bug with one glowing eye.
“I had a Coleman gas lantern and I lit it. Saw what it was at once. Only instead of relieving me, it made me feel worse. As soon as I got a good look at it, it seemed I could feel large, clear bursts of pain going through my head — like radio waves. For a moment it was as if my eyes had rotated in their sockets and I could look into my own brain and see cells in -there smoking, going black, dying. It was a smoke detector — a gadget which was even newer than microwave ovens back in 1969.
“I bolted out of the apartment and went downstairs — I was on the fifth floor but by then I was always taking the stairs — and hammered on the super’s door. I told him I wanted that thing out of there, wanted it out of there right away, wanted it out of there tonight, wanted it out of there within the hour. He looked at me as though I had gone completely — you should pardon the expression — bonzo seco, and I can understand that now. That smoke detector was supposed to make me feel good, it was supposed to make me safe, Now, of course, they’re the law, but back then it was a Great Leap Forward, paid for by the building tenants’ association.
“He removed it — it didn’t take long — but the look in his eyes was not lost upon me, and I could, in some limited way, understand his feelings. I needed a shave, I stank of whiskey, my hair was sticking up all over my head, my topcoat was dirty. He would know I no longer went to work; that I’d had my television taken away; that my phone and electrical service had been voluntarily interrupted. He thought I was crazy.
“I may have been crazy but — like Reg — I was not stupid. I turned on the charm. Editors have got to have a certain amount, you know. And I greased the skids with a ten-dollar bill. Finally I was able to smooth things over, but I knew from the way people were looking at me in the next couple of weeks — my last two weeks in the building, as things turned out — that the story had traveled. The fact that no members of the tenants’ association approached me to make wounded noises about my ingratitude was particularly telling. I suppose they thought I might take after them with a steak knife.
“All of that was very secondary in my thoughts that evening, however. I sat in the glow of the Coleman lantern, the only light in the three rooms except for all the electricity in Manhattan that came through the windows. I sat with a bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other, looking at the plate in the ceiling where the smoke detector with its single red eye — an eye which was so unobtrusive in the daytime that I had never even noticed it — had been. I thought of the undeniable fact that, although I’d had all the electricity turned off in my place, there had been that one live item… and where there was one, there might be more.