Twenty Watts

The lights went out during the part of the documentary about lighthouses, which Soren thought was almost too neat to be an accident.

"Whole block," Maya said, at the window. "Even the streetlight."

Soren found the emergency flashlight in the kitchen drawer, the kind you crank instead of feeding batteries. He wound it. The bulb came up a tired yellow, then faded when he stopped.

"It says twenty watts on the side," he said. "That's not much."

"Crank it again."

He did. They sat on the floor with the little machine between them, and he ground the handle until his forearm ached, and the bulb glowed just bright enough to see each other's faces and nothing else.

"Twenty watts is basically a night-light," Maya said. "My dad's kettle is two thousand."

"So a kettle is a hundred flashlights."

"A hundred of these." She flicked the bulb with a fingernail. "That's so weak. You'd think a whole flashlight could do more."

Soren stopped cranking. The room went dark, and he could hear Maya breathing, and the refrigerator that wasn't humming anymore.

"Say that again," he said.

"Say what?"

"Twenty watts is basically a night-light."

"Why?"

"Because I read something. In the brain book. Hang on." He cranked, just to see the page of his memory. "The brain runs on about twenty watts."

Maya went quiet. In the dark he couldn't see her face, so he waited.

"Same as the flashlight," she said.

"Same as the flashlight."

"That can't be right." She said it fast, the way she said things she already half believed. "You're doing the whole night-light thing in your head right now. The lighthouses. Whether I like this song. What my face is doing that you can't even see. All of that. On this?" He felt her tap the flashlight. "On a night-light?"

"On less, kind of. The flashlight needs me cranking the whole time. Your brain just does it."

"Off what?"

"Off dinner. Off the toast from breakfast."

Maya laughed, one short surprised sound in the dark. "That's a terrible power plant. Toast."

"It's a really good power plant," Soren said. "Think about how bad the flashlight is. My arm's already dead and it's barely lighting your knee."

He cranked again so they could look at each other. Maya had her thinking face on, the one where her eyebrows did most of the work.

"Okay," she said. "But here's the part that's wrong. If the brain is only twenty watts, why am I always so tired after a math test? I'm sitting in a chair. I don't move. And I come home wrecked."

"I don't know," Soren said. He meant it. He kept cranking to fill the silence with light.

"You know when you skip lunch and can't think? That's a food thing. That's fuel. Sitting still and getting tired from thinking. That's a fuel thing too." She was talking herself somewhere. "Soren. How much of what I eat goes to my brain?"

"The book said twenty percent."

"Twenty percent of everything. All the food." She stopped. "How big is a brain?"

"Like" He held up his hands around an invisible melon, then remembered she couldn't see it, and said, "Two fists. Not big. It's two percent of you, the book said. Weight-wise."

He felt her go still again, and this time he leaned toward it instead of waiting.

"Two percent," she said slowly. "Eating twenty percent."

"Yeah."

"That's not fair. That's the smallest part of me eating the most food. My legs are enormous compared to my brain and they don't get twenty percent. My whole back. My arms." She was tapping his knee with each one now. "All of them share what's left over after the two-fist thing takes its cut."

"It takes the cut whether you use it or not," Soren said. "That's the weird bit. Even asleep. Even right now, sitting in a dark room doing nothing."

"We're not doing nothing."

He stopped cranking on purpose. The bulb died. He didn't relight it.

"No," he said into the dark. "We're doing this."

And Maya got very quiet, and Soren could hear that she wasn't reaching for the flashlight either, and the not-reaching was the loudest thing in the room.

"So somewhere in here," she said, and he heard her knock her own knuckles against her own head, soft, "there's a light on. Right now. In the dark. It doesn't go out when the block goes out."

"It runs on your dinner."

"It runs the whole time." Her voice had gone up. "Every single person in this building. Every dark window out there. There's a twenty-watt light on inside every one of them and you can't see any of it. The block looks completely off."

Soren felt the back of his neck go cold in a way that had nothing to do with the heating being out.

"The block's not off," he said.

"The block's covered in lights." Maya was up now, he could hear her scramble to the window. "They just aren't the kind you can see. There's like, thousands of them out there right now. Everybody sitting in the dark thinking the power's out."

Soren stood too. He reached for the flashlight, then didn't. He wanted to keep his hands free for this.

"Feel warm to you?" Maya asked.

"What?"

"Your head. When you were thinking hard about the two percent thing. Did it feel warm?"

He put his hand flat against his own forehead, then took it away, embarrassed, glad she couldn't see.

"That's where the twenty watts goes," he said. "Some of it. Heat. Your head is warm because it's running."

"So the light bulb thing is real. We're all a little warm because we're all a little lit up." She pressed her forehead to the cold window glass, and he heard the soft thump of it. "Ugh. That's the best fact you've ever had."

"I didn't have it. You did the tired-after-the-test part."

"We both did it." She stayed at the window. "Soren. Come look. You can't see it but come look anyway."

He crossed the dark room by memory, hands out, until his shoulder found hers.

Outside, the whole block was black, window after window after window, not one light burning in any of them, and the two of them stood there counting the ones they knew were on.