Last Chapter

Turn off that light. I said, turn off that light. 

It's like someone is holding a magnifying glass over the earth, focusing the sunlight right here, onto a spot that's about the size of a bed and seventeen million degrees that makes redwoods explode and scorched birds fall from the illuminated sky. Run away. That's what I know. The light chases the tiny ant-like people, sending them in a panic, fleeing across their city mounts, stumbling over pine needles and dried blades of grass, antennae outstretched, reaching forward, feeling their way toward other tiny people trying to warn them about the white inferno coming their way. 

The word gets around. There is panic on the smouldering hill. Everyone knows what is coming.

We measure our days with this fireball. We believe that time is the distance between events, regulated by the distance between the appearance and reappearance of the sun. It's the measurement of change in space.

So the hands on a clock follow the movement of the sun, but I can't read the clock anymore, even when I open my eyes. What do I care? I always wished for time to disappear - to leave me alone - so maybe this is the way. And when I open my mouth you just shake your head and place your hand on my forehead, like a five-pound channel catfish, slippering around my eyes. Get that thing off me and listen, will you? I have to tell you, at this point, there is nothing left to see, not anything to see, nothing to say, not anything more to hear. Do you hear me? 

It's been a long, long time getting to this place. Where did it all go? This isn't the same anymore, time isn't like it used to be, spilling out of everything you touched. Everything was flush with time. It came down in torrents, pouring from the sky and flooding the whole countryside that was teeming with fields full of wild children. Everyone thought it was endless. Now, it's gone, like the names on limestone headstones erased by a million drops of rain, like the sound of a distant train receding into the night, the steel chairs at the senior center, the front porch, day laborers, open range, perfect silence, a billion birds, and velvet night skies strewn with the glowing bones fragments of our ancestors, a vast killing field. 

Connect the dots. That one looks like Grandpa. 

Listen. 

There was a bridge not anywhere at all, just standing out on the prairie, spanning Red Scaffold Creek. It had no road, connecting nothing, the whole distance to the sunrise and back. Just a concrete grin on the horizon, stiff smile, like the host who conceals his disappointment, realizing that his guests will never show, not in his life, never in anyone's life.
There was a paved road that plunged into a black prairie pothole lake northwest of Colgan, intent on rising up on the other shore, but the other shore was a shimmering heat wave that looked like a shore. On some days in January, it looked like a granite monument floating in the air, a disembodied mountain riding the thermals, or like that white figure standing above Butte, sixteen-gauge steel arms unable to embrace anything at all, not even the murder of confabbing crows that land on her head or the child in agony at her feet. The road never found an opposite shore. Everybody looked, even the divers, but they could never find it. This is hard for almost everyone to understand but I swear I saw it happen.

Yes, I know you heard this before. 
And then there was a town at the bottom of the reservoir, Forest City, I think, with clapboard siding and red brick chimneys standing proud in the yellow-green algal atmosphere, haunted by five-foot-long pallid sturgeon, and a front door swinging slowly in the currents, left ajar by someone who forgot to close it on his way to higher ground. He never made it; his grave lies beneath seventy feet of water, down there somewhere. What was his name? I can hear his voice, gasping for air.

Yes, I said that. I told you to listen. Stop shaking your head and interrupting. Do you think you can just shake it off, you can get away? Nobody gets away from this.

There was an empty school on the hill west of Charbonneau Creek, near where that spring is. A school, I said. There are bricks where the foundation was, with broken glass in the uncut yard and ink bottles and an old cast iron stove filled with coal and this grandmother teaching one child who had lost his parents at the end of the great war and had a bad, bad cough, teaching him out of books with stories of destiny and promise, with social contracts and legal documents, of a new land that rose high but not quite high enough as the winds blew snowdrifts that buried the whole country. The woodsmoke poured into the classroom and he never did make it past the second grade. I can't remember his face and I couldn't read the notice in the paper anymore and nobody would believe it. Without the fire, it got cold and dark, too dark to tell, too dark.

Not even a nod, even a polite nod and he walks out of sight into the snowbank. Close that door, boy, it's drafty. That face I do not recognize.

There was a white picket fence around a one-and-one-half story house on the section north of the school, with grapevines climbing the trellis, broken dishes, a porch, four boys and and a girl, straight and pale like bowling pins, chickens scratching in the gravel, and a lame horse named Buckskin. Bees were racing from the alfalfa to a city of white hives and a squadron of barn swallows strafed the yard in angular flight sending children fleeing. One by one, the boys disappeared, like a big catfish that broke the line, like smoke in the air, like children fighting on muddy fields holding rifles that fired at their cousins on the other side. That was right over there across the pond where the newspapers always washed onto the shore, bloated newspapers filled with sympathies, piling up and cooking in the cloudless summer sky, gathering flies and spewing mircobes, a pale, swelling hulk with glassy eyes clawed by seagulls. You can see the mounds along the windbreak right now, I think there are four of them now. 

You aren't even looking at me. Listen. Stop hovering over me. And now you mumble like a mummy, waving your hand in front of my face. Look at me when you speak. Get that fish off of me. 
That railroad went right by the house in Stamford near the Granger Hotel, and it would make the canned goods dance right off the shelf if they weren't put right, right on the spot where she got off and turned and looked at me and threw her shiny black hair back with one hand, you can't forget things like that, and the way she moved and the five bundles she carried on her hips. One day she ran up the hillsides, like an antelope slashing through fragrant silverleaf bushes, kicking up puffs of yellow pollen in the ground juniper. Then one day she ran into the growing shadows between the hills and it was late before I knew it and she was gone and I was only able to catch a glimpse of her lit by the setting sun, a flash of her smile, running over the hill for the last time. I tossed a penny into the dark lake and it sank out of sight and all I heard was the wind in the grass, no voices, no song, nothing. It was late fall. The sun was low, the cold air crept down the draws and pooled in the valley where I sat on my tractor and watched the day slipping out of my hands. I couldn't hold it anymore.  

Listen, this is the point:

You will get to where you want it dark. That blinding, white spot moves away from us and the shadows come back out and we imagine we can measure distance again. The shadows grow as the sun moves away, they bleed out from the soles of the dusty boots and spread across the brittle hayfields, and by evening they unfurl to form a fully-shaped man that stretches to the horizon, across the plains, a giant man, huge shoulders like a colossus, arms raised, palms upward, his hands holding up the cobalt sky, presenting the award to the night. There is no cheering for this. An hour later, darkness fills the earth, and the shadow dissolves like coal dust poured into a deep, cold lake. A few hours later, this form rises as Orion the Hunter, Perseus the Hero, Cassiopeia, Bootes, Auriga. Every shadow ends its life that way, joining forces with billions of other human shadows, filling the sky with tiny lights, the broken bones of broken men. 

That's all. Just a shrinking white dot, darkness filling in from horizon to horizon, shrinking like the dot on the cathode ray television screen at our house out on the prairie, the one you watched when you were a young girl, propped on your elbows, waiting patiently for the ghostly dot to disappear.

And then it