The standing lamp

Shawn showed up at my door on a Tuesday with a lamp. Not flowers. Not wine. A lamp.

"I found it at the thrift store on Camelback," he said, holding it up like a trophy. "Three bucks."

I'm fifty-four, by the way. He's forty-eight. We met two years ago through a mutual friend at a book club, and we've been circling each other ever since. Coffee a few times. One kiss at a holiday party, ages ago now. That is the entire history. Slowest burn in Phoenix.

"So you bought me garbage," I said, stepping aside to let him in.

"I bought you a mystery. Look inside the shade."

He set the lamp on my kitchen counter and spun it around. There was a piece of yellowed tape stuck to the inside of the shade, and on the tape, in cramped handwriting, were rules.

I leaned in. The handwriting was weird. Old-fashioned, sorta slanted, like something from a schoolroom fifty years back.

"Read them out loud," Shawn said. He had that grin. The one that got him divorced, probably.

"Rule one," I read. "Place the lamp in the corner of the room where the light falls on an empty wall."

"Huh," he said.

"Rule two. Do not touch the lamp's shade while it is on."

"Okay, that's a little creepy."

"Rule three." I squinted. The ink had faded. "Something about... names? I can't read it. Rule four's mostly gone. Further down it gets worse. The very bottom line just says 'the last one matters most.'"

We stood there in my kitchen, staring at a three-dollar lamp like it was gonna bite us.

"So it's a joke," I said. "You wrote these. This is your idea of foreplay."

"Swear to God I didn't. The tape's old. Smell it." He held the shade toward me. It smelled like dust and old glue, the real deal.

"I hate that you're enjoying this," I told him.

"I love that you're enjoying this. Your face is doing the thing."

My face was doing the thing. I'll admit that. I'm single, never married, live alone in a two-bedroom apartment with beige walls and a worn sofa, and my life has been very, very quiet since my last birthday. A mystery lamp was the most interesting thing to happen to me since the dental office got a new X-ray machine.

"Fine," I said. "Rule one. We do rule one."

We carried it into the living room. The corners of my living room: one had the TV stand, one had a bookshelf, one had the sofa shoved against it. The last one was empty. Bare beige wall, nothing on it.

"That's the one," Shawn said, pointing. "Light would hit that wall dead on."

I set the lamp down and plugged it in. My hands were kinda steady. Mostly.

"You want to do the honors?" he asked.

"You do it. If it explodes, I want a witness."

He reached for the switch. "Ready?"

"No. Yes. Go."

He clicked it on.

The light came up warm, not the harsh white I expected from some junky old lamp. It hit the empty wall and just sat there, a soft gold circle. And then I heard it. A hum. Low, faint, like a refrigerator two rooms away.

"Do you hear that?" I whispered.

"The hum? Yeah. Could be the bulb. Old bulbs do that."

"Old bulbs don't do that." I turned in a slow circle. The fridge was off. The AC was off. It was the lamp. I was almost sure it was the lamp.

Shawn sat down on the sofa arm and looked pleased with himself. "Okay. So it hums. Lots of lamps hum."

"Lamps don't hum, Shawn."

"Fine. It's a humming lamp. Rule two says don't touch the shade while it's on. Which is obviously the trick, right? The tape's a gag. Somebody wrote rules on a lamp to mess with the next thrift store customer."

"Obviously," I said.

Neither of us moved.

The light sat on the wall. The hum went on. It wasn't unpleasant, actually. It was kind of nice, like a cat purring in the corner. I caught myself relaxing. My shoulders came down from around my ears for the first time all week.

"I touched a hot shade once," Shawn said. "Blistered two fingers. Learned my lesson."

"So don't touch it."

"So don't touch it," he agreed.

I looked at the shade. It was brass-colored fabric, a little crooked on its frame, nothing special. The hum rose just slightly, or I imagined it did.

"Dina," Shawn said, and I heard the warning in it, but also the dare.

"I'm just going to look at it."

"You're walking toward it."

"I'm walking toward it to look at it. There's a difference."

There was not a difference, and we both knew it. I got within arm's reach of the thing and stood there with my hands behind my back like a kid at a museum. The shade glowed. Up close the hum had a texture to it, almost a warmth in the air.

"It's warm," I said. "The air around it. Feel."

"Don't touch the shade."

"I'm not touching the shade."

My hand was already rising. I need to be truthful about how it happened. It wasn't a decision. It was like my arm had an appointment and my brain found out late.

"Dina," Shawn said again, standing up now.

"Just the edge," I said. "Just the very..."

My fingertips brushed the shade.

The light didn't go out. It flickered. Once, twice, a stutter like a skipped heartbeat, and then it steadied, brighter somehow, warmer, and the warmth came off the lamp in a wave. Not like a heater. Like bathwater moving through the room. It rolled across my skin from my fingertips up my arm, across my shoulders, down my spine, and settled low in my belly, and I mean settled. I felt it pool.

I snatched my hand back and turned around.

Shawn was staring at me. "Your face is red."

"Your face is red."

"I didn't touch it. Why is your face red?"

"Because it's warm in here, Shawn. Because somebody touched a lamp shade against the written instructions and now the room is warm."

"That was one second. You touched it for one second and the whole room heated up?"

"Did you feel it? The wave thing?"

He came over, slow, and held his palm up near the lamp, not touching, just near. His eyebrows went up. "Okay. That's not a heater. That's..."

"That's what?" My voice came out strange. Thin.

"That's the wave thing," he said quietly.

We stood there together in the gold light, both of us breathing a little fast over a lamp. Three dollars. A piece of tape. My skin still buzzing where the warmth had rolled through it, and lower, honestly, lower too, which I was not going to say out loud. And I'll be honest about this part: the lamp hadn't put anything in me that wasn't already there. Two years of coffees with this man had. The lamp just turned the light on it.

"So," Shawn said. He cleared his throat. "Rule two says don't touch it. You touched it. What happens now? Is there a penalty clause?"

"I don't know. There's more tape, maybe, under the..." I stopped. Because the hum had changed. It wasn't a fridge hum anymore. It had a rhythm now. Slow and steady.

Like breathing.

"Shawn," I said. "Tell me you hear that."

He was already nodding. The lamp breathed in the corner, light swelling and dimming, swelling and dimming, and the warmth in my belly kept time with it.

"Maybe we should unplug it," he said. He didn't move toward the cord. Neither did I.

"Yeah," I said. "Maybe we should."

Neither of us moved.

Shawn came over the next evening, Wednesday, with a notepad and two beers.

"We're doing this properly," he said. "Science." (He works in IT support. Everything is science to that man.)

We sat on the sofa, side by side, the lamp breathing in its corner. I'd barely slept. Not from fear. Or not only from fear. The warmth had come back when I got under the covers, all by itself, like a memory of the wave.

"Okay," he said. "Rules. One, corner, empty wall. Done. Two, don't touch the shade. You did. Nothing bad happened. Three..."

"Three's the one with the names. Half of it's illegible." I'd transcribed it Wednesday morning in a notebook. "Something about names. Something crossed out."

"But the bottom of three is legible." He turned the notepad around. He'd copied it out in careful block letters, like a filing instruction. "No one sits in the chair directly under the lamp."

I looked at the corner. My reading chair sat just inside the light's edge. I'd moved it there years ago.

"There's no chair under it," I said. "The lamp's in the corner now."

"It's close enough," Shawn said. "It counts. I say it counts."

"Then don't sit in the chair."

He grinned at me. "That's the experiment, Dina. Somebody wrote rules on a three dollar lamp, and so far every rule we've broken has made the room warm and the light do things. I'm kind of dying to know what rule three does."

"And if it does something bad?"

"Then we unplug it and I take you to dinner and we never speak of it." He picked up his beer. "I'll be right here. Two feet away. You say stop, we stop."

That was what I kept returning to later. He said that first. Before anything happened, he said it plainly, like he was reading it off the tape. You say stop, we stop.

"All right," I said. "But you're watching. If I grow a second head, you tell me immediately."

"Deal."

I set my beer down and walked to the chair. The hum picked up. Not louder. Quicker. Like it had noticed me.

"Shawn."

"I hear it. Keep going. Or don't. Your call."

"Kind of past the point of backing out, aren't I." I sat down.

The light shifted. I don't know how else to say it. The glow had been aimed at the wall, and it stayed aimed at the wall, but the warmth moved. It came off the lamp and it went across the back of my neck like a hand.

"Oh," I said.

"What? What is it?"

"It's... it's on my neck. The warmth. It's moving."

"Describe it. Like, exactly."

"Like a hand, Shawn. Like a warm hand, going..." I closed my eyes. It slid along the top of my shoulder, slow, following the muscle, the way you'd rub someone's shoulders if you were being sweet about it. Down over the shoulder blade. Back up. Around the side of my throat, light as anything, resting there.

"It's doing my neck," I said. "It's rubbing my neck."

"Okay, wow." His voice had gone rough. "Both shoulders?"

"Now, yeah." The warmth had split, one current each side, kneading down my back, into the tops of my arms. I tipped my head forward and it followed, worked the back of my neck like a professional. I made a noise. An embarrassing noise.

"Dina."

"Don't talk to me right now. I'm having a moment with a lamp."

He laughed, and the warmth paused, like it had heard, and then went back to it. It was good. It was honestly better than good. I'd been carrying my stress in my shoulders since I was twenty-five and a lamp was undoing six years of dental office reception in about four minutes.

"Okay," I said finally. "Okay. It's stopping."

It had slowed. Settled. The hum eased back to its slow breathing rhythm. I opened my eyes and Shawn was standing by the sofa with both fists clenched and the most careful expression on his face.

"You okay?" he asked.

"I'm fantastic. I'm furious. That lamp gives better neck rubs than any man I've ever dated."

"So rule three is a massage chair."

"Rule three is a massage chair."

He wrote it down. Rule three, shoulder massage, apparently. Then he looked at the notepad and went quiet.

"What."

"Rule four." He turned the pad around. "Mostly gone. But there's one phrase left in the middle. 'Bulb glows gold.'"

"And?"

"That's all of it. 'Bulb glows gold.' That's the whole legible bit."

"Wonderful. Very helpful, dead stranger with a pen."

We sat with that a while. I got us fresh beers. The lamp breathed. Shawn kept looking at me and then at the lamp and then at his