Not Dark Yet (9 page)

The multi-colored rug was accordioned beneath his hips and against the canister beneath the stove. He blinked and reached for the knobs above him, thinking he could at least turn the
flame off, but fell into the light again like a drowning person sliding back into water.

The second time the world came into view he fumbled hard against the front of the stove and almost managed to reach the knob. If he had been home his two cats would have found him and curled up against him, unaware of his struggle. Instead, he heard a tapping on the glass above him and wondered if it had started to rain.

A face, round and pale like the moon, was staring in through the pane in the door. He was half beneath it, half up against the stove, and too close to be fully seen from the outside. The water on the stove hissed and spat tiny needles, which occasionally landed on his skin. The neighbor knocked on the window again.

“Are you all right?” the face asked, breath misting the old glass, voice muted by the barrier. Was that Mark? “If you move a little, I can open the door and come inside!”

“I’m fine, thank you!” he shouted and wriggled closer to the door. “Don’t worry!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course.”

At university he had an acquaintance, a pre-med student, who used to tell a story of how she saved one of her neighboring students when he suffered a seizure while frying ground beef to mix with pasta.

“I heard an odd shout and then there was a bang against the wall,” the pre-med student would say. “I recognized the yell as that of an epileptic fit, dropped everything I had, and ran into my neighbor’s room. He was indeed having a seizure, didn’t even know he had epilepsy. I saved him,” she said, again and again. Every time the pre-med told the story he made a mental note to stay silent if he ever had a fit.

“Eloise and I bought some rice that was on sale in the store,” Mark said. “We bought a bag for you too, if you want it. Have to take advantage of a sale, especially since the prices have jumped again. I’ll just put the bag here.” There was a thud on the deck and something fell against the door.

“Thank you so much!” he said, guilt blossoming up inside him for keeping Mark out while the neighbor was only being friendly. “How much was it?”

“Oh, please don’t worry about it,” Mark said. “It was on sale.”

“No, no,” he said. “Please let me pay for it.”

“It’s nothing, we’re neighbors, after all,” Mark said. “Consider it a house-warming gift.”

“Thank you!” he shouted. “That’s too kind of you. Would you like to come in for some tea?” He wasn’t certain if he would be able to make any tea, but felt he had to offer.

“Thanks, I’m fine,” Mark said. “I have to hurry, Eloise and the children are waiting for me in the car. Take care now!”

He managed to roll over, the bunched-up rug following his movements. Now he faced the ceiling, with the front of the stove rearing over him like a gawking passerby. From there he reached up, curled his fingers around the knob and got just enough leverage to twist it around to zero. The hiss from the nearly invisible blue flame that billowed around the ring in the back and the spattering from the pot faded. He leaned into the rug, its folds smelling of dust and mold. Then the white light caught up with him and he made certain not to make any strange or loud sounds.

12

IN HIS DREAMS IT WAS PAST MIDNIGHT, BUT STILL not dark, with a golden shine behind the round mountains in the distance. The night was soft and mild, and soon sparrows would wake and sing. On the ground, crocus flowers shone violet, petals beady with dew, cupping their orange stamen. There was a breath of wind, like the touch from a hand, then the warmth of the pre-dawn landscape enveloped him again.

The crocus pickers whispered to one another as they worked, smiling, laughing quietly. Their diaphanous robes fluttered in the air, indigo and purple hemmed with gold. They deposited their harvest on a carpet of woven silk in the middle of the field, for quick fingers to peel the thin petals and gain the stamens that shivered inside.

At the edges of the meadow the crocus pickers’ children were tended to by siblings or elderly relatives. As he watched, the children grew old enough to participate in the work and joined their families on the flower field. A little while longer and those children had conceived children of their own, who also accompanied their parents to the meadow, and with time replaced them. In the stream that flowed past the meadow, the water gilt with predawn light, a heron lifted, spreading rings upon the surface.

He woke, thinking about Eloise and Mark and their reasons for initiating the project.

In the morning the head of the space organization’s program for manned exploration was interviewed on TV about the astronaut selection process. He watched it on the laptop using his phone as modem. Even here the network was fast enough to stream broadcast and video.

“But is it right to spend all this money, technology, and brain power on sending people into space instead of feeding the billions who are starving, or giving the displaced new livelihoods and housing?” the TV host, a woman in her mid-fifties with brown hair cut in a thick bob, an ivory-colored silk blouse, and a large enamel necklace of daisies, asked.

He scoffed, doubting that the TV host had experienced much hunger or displacement herself.

The head of the space organization, a slim, middle-aged, salt-and-pepper-haired man in a dark suit, leaned close to the host, and winked. “Well, you know, we’re a lot cheaper to run than the defense program.”

The TV host smiled.

“We must of course reduce the hunger and poverty in the world, and help all those who have lost their homes in recent disasters, but the technology and discoveries from space find multiple uses in industry and innovation world-wide. The missions we have planned will benefit all people on Earth,” the head of the space organization concluded, and looked like he meant it.

13

ONCE THE NEIGHBORS STARTED ON THE TASK, they cleared the heather in a few weeks. Their heavy machinery rumbled and grated even through the night, with the beams from the vehicles’ headlights passing over the panorama window in the cabin like curious glances. When it was dark outside he averted his eyes from the farmers’ noisy illumination, and during the day he avoided looking at the abrupt changes they had effected on the moor. He regretted having allowed them to clear and plough the land around the cabin, but Mark and Eloise’s fields were so close, the razing would have been visible whether he had granted them permission or not.

As the heath grew increasingly brown and cultivated, his refusal to look at it mounted. If he didn’t see the moor while it was being cleared, but instead only looked at it again once it had become fully domesticated, the change might feel less abrupt. But after avoiding the heath for several days, one morning he had to see the newly born farmland for himself. He pulled on his running pants, t-shirt, and socks he hadn’t laundered in the kitchen sink yet, and his trainers. When he finally stood on the deck, the breeze was cold but the sun warmed his back. The sky was crisp and clear, the mountains below it the dark color
of the ocean in the fall. The moor smelled of overturned earth and grass, as if spring had skipped winter and arrived early. He couldn’t remember the last time the sky had been clear in the city, and was glad he had relocated.

Before the cabin the exposed soil stretched brown and bare, only interrupted here and there by gray stones that resembled pale, hairless pates peeking up from the dirt. There were no paths or roads along the fields, so he decided to run across them. The route would be a few kilometers at least and give him a closer look at what the farmers had done. He breathed and yawned, stretched his arms, back, and legs. Then he stepped out onto the soft, wet soil. The trainers sank into the ground. The shoes would need a good rinse afterward, but it would be worth it. Besides, he had to be in shape in case he progressed in the astronaut selection. The yielding substrate would make it more difficult to keep his balance, and would slow him down, but it would also add to the exercise.

He began by walking briskly to get warm, before he stretched again at a cluster of slim birches on an unplowed mound a few hundred meters from the cabin. With the shortening of the days, the birches had turned yellow, which looked odd in the spring-like morning. The breeze nevertheless chilled his face and cleared his mind and he was glad he had decided to face the fields. He started running and focused on maintaining his balance in the soft soil to avoid sprains. Keeping a moderate pace, he passed the grooves and furrows Eloise and Mark’s machinery had created in the sea of brown. He ran in the direction his eyes usually traced behind the panorama window in the cabin, from south to north along the blue mountains. It felt good to finally follow that path with the rest of his body.

When the cabin had become small behind him, he turned and ran parallel with the fields. Mark and Eloise had mentioned barley, rye, even winter wheat. He imagined the heath ripe with tall, whispering grain. Would those crops really grow here? How
did the farmers know the wheat would survive? What if the cold winters returned, or became even harsher, or the weather changed in some other, unexpected way? It was a risk, one the neighbors seemed eager, even desperate to take. He realized the documents Mark and Eloise had given him didn’t describe how the project was financed or how much it would cost. He had spotted in the papers the green and white logo of the bank in the town center, so he assumed they were involved. Eloise had also mentioned funding from the department of agriculture at the local university. The documentation included long-term climate models from the meteorological service and soil and mineral analyses from the national geological survey. But he doubted those institutions funded any external projects. He intended to ask Eloise and Mark about it, although it wouldn’t change anything. The investment had already been done, the financial gambit made. With the news reporting soaring food prices and shrinking crops on all continents, the project made sense, even good sense. But he nevertheless felt unsettled about it, like a warning he had received and then forgotten, the shadow of a Kraken passing beneath the surface.

His concerns about the project made him forget his surroundings until his thoughts shone in a lightless void, where there was no him or body or field or sky, only the thoughts standing sharply out from the silence that surrounded them. In the warm darkness something gleamed, like a spinning coin. When he became aware of it, the brightness rushed forward and engulfed him, like it had in the kitchen earlier.

The Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall had been discovered because of the extremely powerful gamma ray bursts that shot out from it and reached the Earth after millions of years. He had once watched an animation about how gamma ray bursts were created, how they surged forth from the center of a supernova as it imploded when the giant star’s multiple layers of pure
elements collapsed in on each other. The unimaginably strong beam of energy ripped itself from the core of the star, jetting as close to the speed of light as it was possible to come. On the way the ray plumed outward like water from a fountainhead or the tip of a bullet blooming on impact, before it narrowed into a beam that pierced the surface at both ends of the now dead star and shot out as gigantic, swirling rays of pure gamma radiation.

“These explosions are so powerful,” the narrator of the video said, “that they are visible from the other side of the universe.”

Now it felt like a gamma ray burst went off inside him, exploding him in luminance, filling him, then jetting out his eyes and ears and mouth. Social inhibition and self-consciousness forgotten, he emitted a low shout and pitched into the soil. He couldn’t feel his body hit the ground, only that cold mud started seeping through his t-shirt and pants. When he tried to get up, he only became more soaked. Then all he knew was the supernova light.

The sun was vanishing. Since his back and side were drenched, it grew chilly. He registered the fading light and cooling temperature, but when he lifted his head and hands to get up, the gamma ray burst surged and pulled him down again.

The next time his eyes fluttered open one side of him was comfortable, while the other was cold. But the warmth that was there made the chill bearable and he thought he might not freeze to death after all. The sun had long since crept behind the mountains, yet the dusk was almost as blue and soft as it had been in the city in the summer. A wall of eyes were watching him, black, shiny orbs above short, stout beaks, belonging to small feathered bodies. He blinked. He must be dreaming. A flock of white and brown sparrows were sitting on his chest and belly and limbs, covering him like a blanket. There must be at least a hundred of them, if not a hundred and fifty. When he lifted his head to look more closely at the birds they didn’t fly away as he
thought they would, but rocked and swayed with his motions while they clutched his clothes and skin and calmly took him in.

Then the gray shingles and the black plastic gutter that edged the roof of the cabin were angled above him. He smelled like he did after he had killed Kaye’s owl, the earthy, coppery fragrance of unconcealed perspiration and sudden, violent death.