The Gate Lantern

"Power outage line, this is Onishi speaking. How can I help?"

The man on the phone said, "My fridge is leaking. It's been leaking for three hours, and all you people ever say is we're restoring, we're restoring. Have any of you looked out a window?"

Mika was looking at the map. The outage map took up the whole wall of the room, from the ceiling down to the low partitions between the desks. By half past eleven at night the Kiso Valley on it had gone red from the pass all the way to the prefecture line, except for a string of yellow dots along the river where crews were already working. She told the man what she had told twenty people before him: the wind was bringing trees down on the lines, the crews had gone out in the evening, nobody could climb a pole in weather like this, and she couldn't give him a time. The man said he'd been paying for electricity for thirty years and hung up. Mika logged the call, drank some cold tea from the bottle and looked at the clock in the corner of her screen: 11:41 p.m. There were more than six hours left in the shift.

On the other side of the partition to her right, Sato-san, who had been on the line longer than anyone, was answering someone in the soft voice people use with children and drunks. Kondo, the shift supervisor, was walking up and down the aisle with a hot can of coffee from the machine, now and then stopping by someone's desk to listen.

At 11:43 the line had its first lull of the night, and Sato-san leaned around the partition with one earphone pushed aside. "Onishi-san, your house is out there somewhere too, isn't it? In Kiso? Are you going to tear it down?"

Mika said she already was. In the morning, at eight, a crew from their own company would come and take down the service line and the meter, and at nine the excavator would arrive. She had signed the papers by mail back in September, and the town had given her a subsidy.

"Are you going?"

Mika said no, her shift ran till six, and after that she was going to sleep. Sato-san shook her head. "We tore down my parents' place last year, and I didn't go either. My brother didn't speak to me for six months. Then he sent me a picture. There's just the bathtub standing in the middle of the yard. A blue one, ours. Well." Her line started blinking, and she put the earphone back in.

The next call came in at 11:44.

"Power outage line, this is Onishi speaking. How can I help?"

There was a pause, and then an old woman's voice spoke, unhurried, the way old women talk in the mountains. "I'm sorry to call so late. Just don't turn off the light, all right? The lantern at the gate. That's all I'm asking."

Mika asked, as she always did, whether there was power in the house right now.

"Oh, there is, there is. The lantern's on. That's why I'm calling. They say you switch things off in a storm so nothing catches fire. So you leave that one on."

Mika listened. Behind the voice there should have been noise. It had been pouring in the valley for three hours, the wind on the map stood at orange, and everyone who had called from there that night had shouted over rain drumming on the roof. Behind the old woman's voice it was quiet and warm, and in that quiet cicadas were singing, clear and steady, kana-kana-kana, the way higurashi sing at sunset in August when people in the village take the washing off the lines. Mika had grown up with that sound and knew that by October the higurashi had long gone silent. She decided the old woman had the television on.

She asked for the supply point number, twenty-two digits at the top of the bill. The old woman said, "Hold on, hold on, let me find my glasses," and moved things around and rustled paper, and the cicadas sang the whole time. Then she began reading one digit at a time, stopping between them, the way you read to a grandchild syllable by syllable. "Zero, four, three, one..." She went on just as slowly, Mika typed, and by the last digit she already knew the number was in the system. The record opened in gray. Supply point closed March 14, 2019. Reason: customer request, death or relocation.

Mika asked for the address. The old woman named the village, and Mika's fingers stopped on the keyboard for a second. Then she gave the lot and house number, said it was right by the bus stop, where the bus used to turn around, and added, "The lantern's the Onishis', mind, on their gate across the road. They say the owner had the power taken off the house, they're coming at eight tomorrow, and then it'll go out. So I'm calling so you won't turn it off."

Mika knew that address. The Yoshidas' lot was across the road from her family's house, and Grandma Yoshida used to give her rice crackers from a tin and never told her mother when Mika picked her flowers. The Onishi house stood opposite, with a gate of darkened cedar and a lantern on the post that her father had put up the year she started school. For three years Mika had paid the cheapest rate on the house by card to keep it connected, against thieves and against the neighbors' talk, and she didn't know whether anything there was lit or not. The last time she'd gone was the spring before last. Her mother had been in a nursing home in Matsumoto for three years now and asked at every visit whether Mika had locked the gate.

Mika asked, "Is this the Yoshida house?" The old woman said, "Well, the house is mine," and Mika couldn't tell whether that was an answer or not. She asked for a name for the ticket, and the old woman laughed, softly and without offense. "What do you want my name for, dear? Just put down by the bus stop."

Mika said, "One moment, please don't hang up," and put the call on hold. The cicadas vanished, and three notes of hold music started up in her earphone. Operators were not allowed to open their relatives' accounts, the system logged every such login, and Mika had known that since her first day. She typed in her mother's surname and the address. The account opened white, alive: Setsuko Onishi, representative Mika Onishi, minimum rate, paid by card. At the bottom sat a work order: removal of service line and meter at owner's request, prior to demolition, October 21, 8:00 a.m., Kiso district crew.

She clicked "Reschedule," and the system asked for the shift supervisor's approval.

Kondo came right over. He'd been standing two desks away anyway. He leaned in to the screen, read the surname and looked at her badge. Then he said quietly, "Onishi-san, is this your house?"

Mika said a neighbor was calling, an elderly woman, and asking them not to take the lantern down.

Kondo said, "We don't touch our own, you know that. The main line opens at eight. Call it like everyone else." He closed the account himself, and the login stayed in the log under her employee number. Then he nodded at the board, where forty-one people were waiting in the queue, and moved on. At eight the crew would already be up the pole.

She took the call off hold. The cicadas were still there.

Mika asked, "Grandma, what do you need that lantern for? It's the middle of the night, there's a storm. You should go to bed."

The old woman said, "What would I need it for? There's a little girl standing under it, by the bus stop. She stands there every evening, waiting for the last bus, her mother comes back on it from town. If you turn it off she'll be left in the dark, and there's the ditch there, you know how it is."

Mika asked how old the girl was.

"Eight, I'd say. A little thing. In a yellow school cap, they give them out to all the first graders, and she still wears it in second grade, won't take it off. With an umbrella that's got a broken rib sticking out, I've told her so many times she'll put her eye out. And she stands with her toes to the light, nice and straight, right on the edge where the light ends. The driver told her to, so he could see her from far off."

Beyond the partition someone young was crying into Sato-san's phone. Mika looked at the red valley on the wall and said nothing for so long that the old woman asked if she could hear her.

Mika said, "Grandma, they shut that route down. Ten years ago, at least."

The old woman said, "I told her. She doesn't believe me. Her mother doesn't come, so she waits. Somebody has to come and get her, don't they?" She was quiet a moment, and Mika heard her move the receiver to her other ear. "Now she's asking what time it is. You tell her, dear. She won't listen to me anymore."

Mika looked at the corner of her screen and said into the phone, louder than she needed to, "Ten to twelve." The old woman waited, and Mika added, "It'll be here soon."

The old woman said to someone next to her, "There. You hear that? Soon."

Mika said that maybe they ought to call the police, if a child was out alone at night. The old woman answered calmly, the way people talk about the weather. "The police won't see her. Nobody sees her but me. And I'm the one keeping the lantern on. It's getting hard for me, you understand? I'd like to lie down now."

Somewhere on her end a door creaked, and the cicadas grew louder, the way they do when someone slides open the shoji onto the veranda. It was 11:57, and the call was in its thirteenth minute. Kondo was back at the partition, and he said under his breath, so she would hear it through her earphone, "Onishi-san, wrap it up. Forty people."

Mika told the old woman she had written everything down, nobody would turn off the lantern before morning, and Grandma had better lie down.

The old woman's voice turned warm and everyday, like a neighbor leaning over the fence. "Thank you, dear. Mika-chan, you're always on nights, aren't you. Go on home now. She's waited for you."

Mika had not told her her first name. Operators give only their surname, and at the start of the call she had given it, as always, by itself. She said, "How do you..." and didn't finish.

The cicadas sang on the line. The old woman didn't say anything more, but the connection didn't drop either. Far away, out there, without rain or wind, it was a warm evening, and somewhere near the phone water was dripping from a downspout into a barrel. Kondo tapped his pen on the partition. Half a minute later the line clicked and went free by itself. The number stayed on the screen, a local one, with the valley's area code, 0264. Mika didn't call back.

She had carried the umbrella with the broken rib for two years, because her mother kept promising to buy a new one in town and kept forgetting. The driver of the last bus had taught her to stand with her toes at the edge of the light, a bald man in white gloves who said that in fog all he could see was shoes. Her mother would call from town on the Yoshidas' phone, and Mika would run across the yard. Her mother would say the same thing into the receiver every time, I'll be there soon, and Mika would go out to the stop and wait another hour, sometimes two. When the bus came in empty, Grandma Yoshida would come out for her with a flashlight.

Mika took a long time closing out the call ticket. In the "outcome" field she chose "no action required," and in the comments she typed "elderly customer, confused about her bills." She did not pass the closed supply point on to the inspection department. Under the rules a closed point that shows up live in an outage area goes there at once, and in the morning a car is sent to the address to cut out the homemade wiring. At three in the morning Kondo stopped by her desk on his way to sleep in the break room. He said that his mother also called him at work to ask whether he'd turned off the gas in their house in Osaka, though the house had been sold twenty years ago. He said nothing about her mother's account.

By morning she had taken sixty more calls. Around four the first yellow dots came up in the valley, and by five the wind on the map had turned green. The 8:00 a.m. work order was still sitting in the Kiso district summary, fourth line down.

The shift ended at six. From the parking lot, where puddles stood brimming, Mika called the Kiso district dispatcher, and a sleepy man told her the order was on, and only the owner could cancel it, through the main line, from eight. She said she was the owner's daughter and her representative on the contract, and he said in that case all the more reason, from eight. Mika drove south on Route 19, along the river, past shuttered roadside rest stops and crew trucks with their lights flashing beside fallen trees. At 7:41 she was stopped in front of a cedar lying across both lanes, watching young men in orange helmets cut it into pieces. One of them waved her around on the shoulder with his light baton, just a kid, also coming off a night. There were two bridges left to the village and the climb by the old school. The phone on the passenger seat was silent. In Matsumoto they would just be waking her mother for breakfast.

She drove into the village at 7:52, in fog. The power in the valley wasn't back yet, and the traffic light at the entrance hung dark. The Yoshida house stood by the old bus stop with its windows boarded up and a faded real estate sign on the gate. The concrete apron where the bus used to turn around had grown silver grass along its edges. Opposite, at the Onishi gate, a white power company truck was parked with its bucket raised, and the foreman in his hard hat was smoking by the cab.

The gate lantern was lit, steady and yellowish, the way it used to be lit when she was small, and on the wet asphalt beneath it lay a circle of light, and beyond that, in the fog, there was nothing to be seen.

The foreman put out his cigarette and said, "Onishi-san? Good thing you came. Your service has been dead since last night, the whole line's dead, and that thing's lit, so we didn't go up. And there was a little girl standing here. We pulled up at twenty to eight, and she was already right under the lantern, in a yellow cap. We were waiting for someone to come and get her. Is she yours?"

Mika looked at the circle. At its edge, where the light ended, there was no one on the wet asphalt.

She said, "She's mine. I've come to get her."