Story oF BYRON THE BULB
Byron was to’ve been manufactured by Tungsram in
Budapest. He would probably have been grabbed up by
the ace salesman Géza Roézsavélgyi’s father Sandor, who
covered all the Transylvanian territory and had begun to
go native enough to where the home office felt vaguely
paranoid about him throwing some horrible spell on the
whole operation if they didn’t give him what he wanted.
Actually he was a salesman who wanted his son to be a
doctor, and that came true. But it may have been the bad
witch-leery auras around Budapest that got the birth of
Byron reassigned at the last minute to Osram, in Berlin.
Reassigned, yes. There is a Bulb Baby Heaven, amiably
satirized as if it was the movies or something, well Big
Business, ha, hal But don’t let Them fool you, this is a
bureaucracy first, and a Bulb Baby Heaven only as a sort
of sideline. All overhead—yes, out of its own pocket the
Company is springing for square leagues of organdy, hogs-
heads of IG Farben pink and blue Baby Dye, hundred-
weights of clever Siemens Electric Baby Bulb Pacifiers,
giving the suckling Bulb the shape of a 110-volt current
without the least trickle of power. One way or another,
these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the
appearance of power, power against the night, without the
reality. bi
Actually, B.B.H. is rather shabby. The brown rafters
drip cobwebs. Now and then a roach shows up on the
floor, and all the Babies try to roll over to look (being
Bulbs they seem perfectly symmetrical, Skippy, but don’t ©
forget the contact at the top of the thread), going uh-guhl
uhhhh-guhl, glowing feebly at the bewildered roach sitting
paralyzed and squashable out on the bare boards, rushing,
reliving the terror of some sudden blast of| current out of
nowhere and high overhead the lambent, all-seeing Bulb.
In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs don’t know what to
anake of this roach’s abreaction—they feel his fright, but
don’t know what it is. They just want to be his friend. He’s
interesting and has good moves. Everybody's excited ex-
cept for Byron, who considers the other Bulb Babies a
bunch of saps. It is a constant struggle to turn their
thoughts on anything meaningful. Hi there Babies, I'm
' Byron-the-Bulb! Here to sing a little song to you, that
goes—
Light-up, and-shine, you—in-cande-scent Bulb Ba-bies!
Looks-like ya got ra-bies
Just lay there foamin’ and a-screamin’ like a buncha
little demons,
I’m delivin’ unto you a king-dom of roa-ches,
And no-thin’ ap-proaches
That joyful feelin’ when-you’re up-on the ceilin’
Lookin’ down—night and day—on the king-dom you
sur-vey,
They'll come out *n’ love ya till the break of dawn,
But they run like hell when that light comes on!
So shine on, Baby Bulbs, you're the wave of the fu-ture,
And I’m here to recruit ya,
._ In mi great crusade,
Just sing along Babies—come-on-and-join-the-big-
pa-radel
Trouble with Byron’s he’s an old, old soul, trapped in-
side the glass prison of a Baby Bulb. He hates this place,
lying on his back waiting to get manufactured, nothing to
listen to on the speakers but Charleston music, now and
then an address to the Nation, what kind of a setup’s that?
Byron wants to get out of here and into it, needless to say
he’s been developing all kinds of nervous ailments, Baby
Bulb. Diaper Rash, which is a sort of corrosion on his
screw threads, Bulb Baby Colic, a tight spasm of high re-
‘sistance someplace among the deep loops of tungsten
wire, Bulb Baby Hyperventilation, where it actually feels
“oe his vacuum’s been broken though there is no organic
asis. ..\. §
‘When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet
_Byron’s elated. He has passed the time hatching some
really insane grandiose plans—he’s gonna organize all the
Bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin, he’s already
hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack
(Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to
the human brain’s alpha rhythm, and you can actually
trigger an epileptic fit! True. Byron has had a vision against
the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs, all over
Europe, at a given sychronizing pulse arranged by one of
his many agents in the Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to
strobe together, humans thrashing around the 20 million
rooms like fish on the beaches of Perfect Energy— Atten-
tion, humans, this has been a warning to you. Next time,
a few of us will explode. Ha-ha. Yes we'll unleash our
Kamikaze squads! You’ve heard of the Kirghiz Light? well
that’s the ass end of a firefly compared to what we're
gonna—oh, you haven’t heard of the—oh, well, too bad.
Cause a few Bulbs, say a million, a mere 5% of our num-
ber, are more than willing to flame out in one grand burst
instead of patiently waiting out their design hours.... So
Byron dreams of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get
Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the
face with one coordinated blast... .
Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an
organization, a human one, known as “Phoebus,” the in-
ternational light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland.
Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Asso-
ciated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn
owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General
Electric Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices
and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the
world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips
in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time
to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Com-
bination). Given this state of general repression, there
seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bubb to start but at the
bottom.
But Phoebus doesn’t know yet that Byron is immortal.
He starts out his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlot-
tenburg, almost within sight of the statue. of Wernher
Siemens, burning up in a sconce, one among many bulbs
witnessing the more languorous forms of [Republican dec-
adence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito
the Bulb over in the next sconce who’s always planning an
escape, Bernie down the: hall in the toilet, who has all
kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his mother Brenda in the
kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos rigged
to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries of
the womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of the
night, reaches into the true Night of the Other, cold and
naked on linoleum floors after days without sleep, the
dreams and tears become a natural state....
One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out,
and are gone. The first few of these hit Byron hard. He’s
‘still a new arrival, still hasn’t accepted his immortality.
But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about
the transience of .others: learns that loving them while
theyre here becomes easier, and also more intense—to
love as if each design-hour will be the last. Byron soon
enough becomes a Permanent Old-Timer. Others can
recognize his immortality on sight, but it’s never discussed
except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in
from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in
a kabbalist’s study in Lyons who’s supposed to know
magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing
arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly bulbs be-
gin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other Im-
mortals are out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence
with much, perhaps, everything, in it.
After Love, then, Byron’s next lesson is Silence.
As his burning lengthens toward 600 hours, the monitors
in Switzerland begin to keep more of an eye on Byron.
The Phoebus Surveillance Room is located under a little-
known Alp, a chilly room crammed full of German electro
hardware, glass, brass, ebonite, and silver, massive terminal
blocks shaggy with copper clips and screws, and a cadre
of super-clean white-robed watchers who wander meter to
meter, light as snowdevils, making sure that nothing’s
going wrong, that through no bulb shall the mean operat-
ing life be extended. You can imagine what it would do
to the market if that started happening.
Byron passes Surveillance’s red-line at 600 hours, and
immediately, as a matter of routine, he is checked out for
filament resistance, burning temperature, vacuum, power
consumption. Everything’s normal. Now Byron is to be
checked out every 50 hours hereafter. A soft chime will
go off in the monitoring station whenever it’s time.
At 800 hours—another routine precaution—a Berlin
agent is sent out to the opium den to transfer Byron. She
is wearing asbestos-lined kid gloves and seven-inch spike
heels, no not so she can fit in with the crowd, but so that
she can reach that sconce to unscrew Byron. The other
bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out
along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light,
every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black Bakelite
streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer
matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every
bulb in Europe knows what’s happened. They are silent
with impotence, with surrender in the face of struggles
they thought were all myth. We can’t help, this common
thought humming through pastures of sleeping sheep,
down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling piers in
the North, there’s never been anything we could do....
Anyone shows us the meanest hope of transcending and
the Committee on Incandescent Anomalies comes in and
takes him away. Some do protest, maybe, here and there,
but it’s only information, glow-modulated, harmless, noth-
ing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful
that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward,
in his innocence.
He is taken to Neukdélln, to a basement room, the home
of a glassblower who is afraid of the night and who will
keep Byron glowing and on watch over all the flint bowls,
the griffins and flower-ships, ibexes in mid-leap, green
spider-webs, somber ice-deities. This is one of many so-
called “control points,” where suspicious bulbs can be
monitored easily.
In less than a fortnight, a gong sounds along the ice
and stone corridors of the Phoebus headquarters, and faces
swivel over briefly from their meters. Not too many gongs
around here. Gongs are special. Byron has passed 1000
hours, and the procedure now is standard: the Committee
on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man to Berlin.
But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The
plan is to smash up Byron and send him back right there
in the shop to cullet and batch—salvage the tungsten, of
course—and let him be reincarnated in the glassblower’s
next project (a balloon setting out on a journey from the
top of a white skyscraper). This wouldn't be too bad a
deal for Byron—he knows as well as Phoebus does how
many hours he has on him. Here in the shop he’s watched
enough glass being melted back into the structureless pool
from which all glass forms spring and re-spring, and
wouldn’t mind going through it himself. But he is trapped
on the Karmic wheel. The glowing orange batch is a taunt,
a cruelty. There’s no escape for Byron, he’s doomed to an
infinite regress of sockets and bulbsnatchers. In zips young
Hansel Geschwindig, a Weimar street urchin—twirls
Byron out of the ceiling into a careful pocket and Ge-
sssschhhhwindig! out the door again. Darkness invades the
dreams of the glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his
dreams grab in out of the night air, an extinguished light
is the worst. Light, in his dreams, was always hope: the
basic, mortal hope. As the contacts break helically away,
hope turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply
tonight crying, “Who? Who?”
Phoebus isn’t exactly thrown into a frenzy. It’s hap-
pened before. There is still a procedure to follow. It
means more overtime for some employees, so there’s that
vague, full-boweled pleasure at the windfall, along with an
equally vague excitement at the break in routine. You
want high emotion, forget Phoebus. Their stonefaced
search parties move out into the streets. They know more
or less where in the city to look. They are assuming that
no one among their consumers knows of Byron’s immortal-
ity. So the data for Non-immortal Bulbsnatchings ought to
apply also to Byron. And the data happen to hump up in
poor sections, Jewish sections, drug, homosexual, prostitute,
and magic sections of the capital. Here are the most logi-
cal bulbsnatchers, in terms of what the crime is. Look at
all the propaganda, It’s a moral crime. Phoebus discov-
ered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our
time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That
guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful
weapon. In America, Lyle Bland and his psychologists had
figures, expert testimony and money (money in the Puri-
tan sense—an outward and visible O.K. on their inten-
tions) enough to tip the Discovery of Guilt at the cusp
between scientific theory and fact. Growth rates in later
years were to bear Bland out (actually what bore Bland
out was an honorary pallbearer sextet of all the senior
members of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short,
plus Lyle, Jr., who was sneezing. Buddy at the last min-
ute decided to go see Dracula. He was better off). Of all
the legacies Bland left around, the Bulbsnatching Heresy
was perhaps his grandest. It doesn’t just mean that some-
body isn’t buying a bulb. It also means that same some-
body is not putting any power in that socket! It is a sin
both against Phoebus and against the Grid. Neither one is
about to let that get out of hand.
So, out go the Phoebus flatfoots, looking for the snatched
Byron. But the urchin has already left town, gone to Ham-
burg, traded Byron to a Reeperbahn prostitute so he can
shoot up some morphine—the young woman’s customer to-
night is a cost-accountant who likes to have light bulbs
screwed into his asshole, and this john has also brought a
little hashish to smoke, so by the time he leaves he’s for-
gotten about Byron still there in his asshole—doesn’t ever,
in fact, find out, because when he finally gets around to
sitting down (having stood up in trolleys all the way
home) it’s on his own home toilet and plop! there goes
Byron in the water and flusssshhhh! away down ‘the waste
lines to the Elbe estuary. He is just round enough to get
through smoothly all the way. For days he floats over the
North Sea, till he reaches Helgoland, that red-and-white
Napoleon pastry tipped in the sea. He stays there for a
while at a hotel between the Hengst and the Ménch, till
being brought back one day to the mainland by a very old
priest who’s been put hep to Byron’s immortality in the
course of a routine dream about the taste of a certain
1911 Hochheimer ...suddenly -here’s the great Berlin
Eispalast, a booming, dim iron-trussed cavern, the smell of
women in the blue shadows—perfumes, leathers, fur skat-
ing-costumes, ice-dust in the air, flashing legs, jutting
haunches, desire in grippelike flashes, helplessness at the
end of a crack-the-whip, rocketing through beams of sun-
light choked with the powdered ice, and a voice in the
blurred mirror underfoot saying, “Find the one who has
performed this miracle. He is a saint. Expose him. Expedite
his canonization. ...” The name is on a list the old man
presently draws up of about a thousand) tourists who’ve
been in and out of Helgoland since Byron was found on
the beach. The priest begins a search tol tain, footpath,
and Hispano-Suiza, checking out each of the tourists on
his list. But he gets no farther than Niimberg, where his
valise, with Byron wrapped inside in an alb, is ripped off —
by a transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who
likes to dress up in Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not
content with standing in front of his own mirror making
papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre kick to go
out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full
drag, and walk around blessing people at random. Green
torches flaring, red swastikas, twinkling brasses and Father
Mausmacher, checking out tits ’n’ asses, waistlines ’n’
baskets, humming a clerical little tune, some Bach riff,
smiling as he moves through the Sieg Heils and choruses
of “Die Fahne Hoch.” Unknown to him, Byron slides out
of the stolen vestments onto the ground. He is then walked
past by several hundred thousand boots and shoes, and
not one so much as brushes him, natch. He is scavenged
next day (the field now deathempty, columned, pale,
streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds length-
ening behind the gilded swastika and wreath) by a
poor Jewish ragpicker, and taken on, on into another 15
years of preservation against chance and against Phoebus.
He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as
the female threads of German light-bulb sockets are
known, for some reason that escapes everybody.
The cartel have already gone over to Contingency Plan
B, which assumes a seven-year statute of limitations, after
which Byron will be considered legally burned out. Mean-
while, the personnel taken off of Byron’s case are busy
tracking a long-lived bulb that once occupied a socket on
the porch of an army outpost in the Amazon jungle,
Beatriz the Bulb, who has just been stolen, mysteriously,
by an Indian raiding party.
Through his years of survival, all these various rescues
of Byron happen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he
tries to instruct any bulbs nearby in the evil nature of
Phoebus, and in the need for solidarity against the cartel. -
He has come to see how Bulb must move beyond its role
as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has restricted
Bulb to this one identity. “But there are other frequencies,
above and below the visible band. Bulb can give heat.
Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants,
inside closets, for example. Bulb can penetrate the sleeping
eye, and operate among the dreams of men.” Some bulbs
listened attentively—others thought of ways to fink to
Phoebus. Some of the older anti-Byronists were able to
fool with their parameters in systematic ways that would
show up on the ebonite meters under the Swiss mountain:
there were even a few self-immolations, hoping to draw
the hit men down.
Any talk of Bulb’s transcendence, of course, was clear
subversion. Phoebus based everything on bulb efficiency—
the ratio of the usable power coming out, to the power put
in. The Grid demanded that this ratio stay as small as
possible. That way they got to sell more juice. On the
other hand, low efficiency meant longer burning hours, and
that cut into bulb sales for Phoebus. In the beginning
Phoebus tried increasing filament resistance, reducing the
hours of life on the sly and gradually—till the Grid noticed
a fall-off in revenues, and started screaming. The two
parties by and by reached an accord on a compromise
bulb-life figure that would bring in enough money for
both of them, and to go fifty-fifty on the costs of the anti-
bulbsnatching campaign. Along with a more subtle attack
against those criminal souls who forswear bulbs entirely
and use candles. Phoebus’s long-standing arrangement with
the Meat Cartel was to restrict the amount of tallow in
circulation by keeping more fat in meat to be sold regard-
less of cardiac problems that might arise, and redirecting
most of what was trimmed off into soap production. Soap
in those days was a booming concern. Among the con-
sumers, the Bland Institute had discovered deep feelings
about shit. Even at that, meat and soap were minor inter-
locks of Phoebus. More important were items like tungsten.
Another reason why Phoebus couldn’t cut down bulb life
too far. Too many tungsten filaments would eat into avail-
able stockpiles of the metal—China being the major world
source, this also brought in very delicate questions of
Eastern policy—and disturb the arrangement between
General Electric and Krupp about how much tungsten
carbide would be produced, where and when and what the
prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37—$90 a
pound in Germany, $200-$400 a pound in the U.S. This
directly governed the production of machine tools, and
thus all areas of light and heavy industry. When the War
came, some people thought it unpatriotic of GE to have
given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with any
power. Don’t worry.
Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pat-
tern. He learns how to make contact with other kinds of
electric appliances, in homes, in factories and out in the
streets. Each has something to tell him. The pattern gath-
ers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon fila-
ment was known in Germany), and the grander and
clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron gets. Someday
he will know everything, and still be as impotent as be-
fore. His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in
the world seem impossible now—the Grid is wide open,
all messages can be overheard, and there are more than
enough traitors out on the line. Prophets traditionally don’t
last long—they are either killed outright, or given an
accident serious enough to make them stop and think, and
most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been
visited an even better fate. He is condemned to go on
forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change any-
thing. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His
anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will
find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it....
Laszlo Jamf walks away down the canal, where dogs
are swimming now, dogs in packs, dogs heads bobbing
down the scummy canals... dogs’ heads, chess knights,
also may be found invisible in the air over secret airbases,
in the thickest fogs, conditions of temperature, pressure
and humidity form Springer-shapes the tuned flyer can
feel, the radars can see, the helpless passengers can al-
most glimpse, now and then, out the little window, as
through sheets of vapor... it is the kind Dog, the Dog no
man ever conditioned, who is there for us at beginnings
and ends, and journeys we have to take, helpless, but not
quite unwilling. ... The pleats in Jamf's suit go weaving |
away like iris leaves in a backyard wind. The colonel is
left alone in Happyville. The steel city waits him, the even
cloud-light raising a white streak down each great build-
ing, all of them set up as modulations on the perfect grid
of the streets, each tower cut off at a different height—
and where is the Comb that will move through this and
restore the old perfect Cartesian harmony? where are the
great Shears from the sky that will readjust Happyville?
There is no need to bring in blood or violence here, But
the colonel does have his head tilted back now in what
may truly be surrender: his throat is open to the pain-
radiance of the Bulb. Paddy McGonigle is the only other
witness, and he, a one-man power system with dreams of
his own, wants the colonel out of the way as much as
anyone. Eddie Pensiero, with the blues flooding his shak-
ing muscles, the down, mortal blues, is holding his scissors
in a way barbers aren’t supposed to. The points, shudder-
ing in the electric cone, are aiming downward. Eddie
Pensiero’s fist tightens around the steel loops his fingers
have slid out of, The colonel, with a last tilt of his head,
exposes his jugular, clearly impatient with the—