The Restaurant with the Glass Lamps

THE RESTAURANT WITH THE GLASS LAMPS/Susan Neville THEY WERE SUSPENDED over the Ohio River. It was nighttime, and she couldn't see the water. There was a blinking cell-phone tower on the opposite shore, and her lover was driving toward it. They were staying at an inn that was deep down in a Kentucky hollow , and she had lost the cell. There were pools of water at the bottom of every hollow. The pools were surrounded by plants with leaves as wide as paddles. Strange white air hovered near the bottom of every hollow, and all the phone signals in the world seemed to drown in them. For one entire night there wouldn't be a single thread connecting her to home. She had to call her children. She couldn't call from the telephone at the inn because her home telephone would identify the number. She was supposed to be staying a hundred miles away. She had no idea there was anyplace left in the world where you couldn't pick up a signal. Somehow her lover had found that place, and she had followed him. This was, she knew, a problem only a few people in the history of the world would understand. In a year or two or maybe a matter of months, wireless signals would bathe the entire world with their invisible pulsing . Or something new would replace them. She was living in some kind ofblip between technologies, and a Kentucky hollow might as well be in another universe. He was driving a rental car, and the dashboard was complicated and hulking. She had never allowed him to drive her anywhere before, afraid of accidents she couldn't explain to anyone's satisfaction. They crossed the river and drove uphill out of the bog. The cell phone clicked to life, but then it made another sound to show that it was low on power. She pulled a coiled wire from her handbag. It's like you have to feed it, he said. It's part of my body, she said. And now the car is part of your body, he said as she plugged in the phone. And my hands, he said, are on the wheel. She didn't want to make the call while they were driving through the country. It was bad enough that she couldn't keep the phone on all night. If she made this call, then there were only seven hours on one side of the call and ten hours on the other when she wasn't connected The Missouri Review · 25 to home. As soon as she made the call, she could relax. Until she made the call, she couldn't. Her family might be out to dinner, but still, she needed to leave a message and possibly erase another one. Her lover had called her on the way to the inn and accidentally left a message on the wrong voice mail, and she had to get rid of it. She had to remember passwords from three different voice-mail accounts, and only five years ago she hadn't had to remember one. Each one represented a completely different world. She hoped that one or two of the worlds would disappear the night the century turned, though she was sure she couldn't possibly be that lucky. If all the computers in existence shut down at the stroke of midnight, she would consider it good riddance. Wherever she was at that moment, she would stay there. Her husband knew the password to two worlds and her lover knew the password to the third. This is insane, she said. I know how you feel, he said, and she said, I don't think you do. The two worlds jostled against each other. One would attach itself to the other, one would burst, one would enclose the other—back and forth it went. The worlds opened out inside one another, like computer windows with no beginning or end. She felt like she was slipping off the edge. Just beyond the tower, the land flattened out into a row of strip malls and fast-food restaurants. The restaurant back at the...