his ID card. Who was going to mess with Consolidated Edison? He drove an old, gray pickup with a smudge on the side that had once been a power-company emblem. The truck was filled to the brim with cables, wires, boots, wrenches, tape, torches, work lights, and rope.
“Light man’s here!” said somebody.
Lucius shook hands with him and told him what they wanted. He nodded.
The crowd was getting larger, groups and clots of people drifting in, though the music wasn’t supposed to start for another hour. Word traveled fast.
Sparks attached a transformer and breakers to a huge, thick cable.
Then he got out his climbing spikes and went up a pole like a monkey, the heavy chunk-chunk drifting down to the crowd every time he flexed his knees. His tool belt slapped against his sides.
He had one of the guys in the Purple Monsters throw him up the end of the inch-thick electrical cable.
The sun had just gone down, and Sparks was a silhouette against the purpling sky that poked between the buildings.
A few stars were showing in the eastern sky. Lights were on all through the autumn buildings. Thanksgiving was in a few weeks, then Christmas.
The shopping season was already in full swing, and the streets would be bathed in neon, in holiday colors. The city stood up like big, black fingers all around them.
Sparks did something to the breakdown box on the pole.
There was an immense blue scream of light that stopped everybody’s heart.
New York City went dark.
“Fucking wow.”
A raggedy-assed cheer of wonder ran through the crowd.
There were crashes, and car horns began to honk all over town.
“Uh, Lucius,” Sparks yelled down the pole after a few minutes. “Have the guys go steal me about thirty automobile batteries.”
The Purple Monsters ran off in twenty different directions.
“Ahhhyyyhhyyh,” said Vinnie, spitting a toothpick out of his mouth. “The Monsters get to have all the fun.”
It was 5:27 p.m. on November 9, 1965. At the Ossining changing station, a guy named Jim was talking to a guy named Jack.
Then the trouble phone rang. Jim checked all his dials before he picked it up.
He listened, then hung up.
“There’s an outage all down the line. They’re going to switch the two hundred K’s over to the Buffalo net and reroute them back through here. Check all the load levels. Everything’s out from Schenectady to Jersey City.”
When everything looked ready, Jack signaled to Jim. Jim called headquarters, and they watched the needles jump on the dials.
Everything went black.
Almost everything.
Jack hit all the switches for backup relays, and nothing happened.
Almost nothing.
Jim hit the emergency battery work lights. They flickered and went out.
“What the hell?” asked Jack.
He looked out the window.
Something large and bright moved across a nearby reservoir and toward the changing station.
“Holy Mother of Christ!” he said.
Jim and Jack went outside.
The large bright thing moved along the lines toward the station. The power cables bulged toward the bottom of the thing, whipping up and down, making the stanchions sway. The station and the reservoir were bathed in a blue glow as the thing went over. Then it took off quickly toward Manhattan, down the straining lines, leaving them in complete darkness.
Jim and Jack went back into the plant and ate their lunches.
Not even the phone worked anymore.
It was really black by the time Sparks got his gear set up. Everybody in the crowd was talking about the darkness of the city and the sky. You could see stars all over the place, everywhere you looked.
There was very little noise from the city around the loading area.
Somebody had a radio on. There were a few Jersey and Pennsy stations on. One of them went off while they listened.
In the darkness, Sparks worked by the lights of his old truck. What he had in front of him resembled something from an alchemy or magnetism treatise written early in the eighteenth century. Twenty or so car batteries were hooked up in series with jumper cables. He’d tied those in with amps, mikes, transformers, a light board, and lights on the dock area.
“Stand clear!” he yelled. He bent down with the last set of cables and stuck an alligator clamp on a battery post.
There was a screeching blue jag of light and a frying noise. The lights flickered and came on, and the amps whined louder and louder.
The crowd, numbering around five hundred, gave out with prolonged huzzahs and applause.
“Test test test,” said Lucius. Everybody held their hands over their ears.
“Turn that fucker down,” said Vinnie. Sparks did. Then he