I knew this boy who used to turn streetlights off by walking underneath them.
It wasn't something he could control, it just happened. You could tell he was coming from miles away by following the dark gap in the strings of lamps. One by one they would flicker off, then a few moments back on again until eventually the slow pulse would come to a halt and you would know he had reached wherever it was that he was going. He was a popular guy and people always seemed keen to walk with him. I did more than a few times, it was strange at first, travelling everywhere in the dim twilight, but away from the sodium orange glow everything seemed to become quieter and more peaceful.
His mother and father discovered his affliction at an early age and straight away went about trying to find out what was causing it and whether it could be harmful to him in some way. So during the early part of his life he was subjected to all sorts of studies and tests to find out what was wrong with him. No one could come up with an answer. These were clever people too, what we would think of as geniuses, all doctors and professors of some science or another, chemists, biologists, physicists, all at the top of their field and not one of them could explain what was happening to their son. For a while he was the talk of the scientific world always the subject of some new theory that was disproved as quickly as it was formulated, but the interest waned, and finally ground to a halt. The condition didn't seem to be harming him, so everyone agreed that it would be best just to accept it and just live life as normal.
After all the attention had died down someone came to his door. He worked for NASA, he was one of those super intelligent guys who plotted rocket escape trajectories and re-entry angles, but he had asked to be transferred to another department, one which had him travelling the world investigating mysterious happenings and seemingly unexplainable events. And after the hubbub surrounding my friend had receded he decided to see what he could make of this weird affliction. He had a theory about solar storms and magnetic fields affecting electricity networks and he thought the boy may be disrupting the lights in a similar way, somehow producing a strong enough electromagnetic pulse that would knock them out as he walked underneath. He spent a long time questioning, probing and studying, but he was as stupefied as the scientists that went before him, instead of giving up, this made him more determined to find out the answer. He became obsessed with the idea that the boy was somehow generating a solar flare from within his body and he needed to find out how
After a long time, maybe even years, he was still here in our little town. His research grants had dried up and he was no longer working for NASA, it seems they decided that a boy who turns off lights just isn't important enough for their money, and after all, they had space stations to build so they fired him. He didn't seem to care and carried on with his studies. After a while he disappeared, people said he had gone mad and was ranting in some hospital somewhere, but he hadn't.
I remember I was at a party somewhere and I spotted him. He was easy to pick out among the sweating ravers, he was wearing an old patterned tank top and some brown threadbare cords and he must have been at least twice the age of anyone else at the club, but there he was, robotic dancing.
He was concentrating hard, and sweating. His glasses were steamed up and his hair stuck in thin strands across his forehead. It looked like he had been dancing all night, moving his body in short and precise ways, perfectly in time to the boom and thud of the bass. He seemed to be calculating every pattern, measuring every angle. Every start and stop and twist and turn was just right, not a degree out of place. It was if without access to giant supercomputers and simulators he had begun to translate the equations of space flight into movements of his body. Slight inflections of his head described decaying orbits, his arms gravitational spins and free-fall velocities. As I watched him he began to change his moves, and slowly, ever so slowly he floated upwards.
I watched until he was lost in the shadows beyond the club's lights. I guess he found what he was looking for in our town, because we never saw him again after that night. I often thought about him though, I couldn't understand why he had chosen robotic dancing. That night I saw him in the club must have been some time in the mid-nineties.
He was ten years too late.
