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—