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

A Family Portrait

Sean saw lights in his sleep, deep in a meteorological dream. 

When a fire sends out smoke, there is water in that smoke. When the smoke rises, as heat will do, it reaches a height in the atmosphere where the temperature is low enough for the moisture to condense. At that level, the smoke becomes a cloud, much like any of the other clouds scattered about the sky at that moment. Imposter though it may be, it has the potential to create real lightning and real rain. Sometimes, downwind from a big fire, the clouds make rain and lightning that may dazzle and terrify ground-dwelling humans like any real storm. 

One day, the smoke rose high into the sky and reached that condensation point and the cloud bloomed like a white rose. "Beautiful," said Annette. They were laying on their backs on the open hillside, watching the fires burning the forest across the valley. "Maybe that's why snow looks like rose petals." 

Sean swiped some grey ash off of his jacket."Today it is snowing lodgepole pine." They lay there for an hour, nothing much to say but a lot to think. 

That day ended as all others do: the light was quickly extinguished and a darkness enveloped everything, a largely unwelcome event, judging by the wave of artificial light that sweeps the globe at night. This becomes so intense that the dark side of the earth has become luminescent at night, orange lights fired by the furious combustion of coal, gas, and oil. Cords of light span the earth, like a string of Christmas lights, like fissures in a lava field. Couples laying on the moon and watching the glowing earth above must think it is breathtakingly beautiful. 

Annette pointed and gasped, "Isn't that New York?"

"Maybe, but that light takes 1.3 seconds to reach the moon and maybe it's not there any - ah, I guess New York is still there."

"That's not romantic."

"Light is romantic, candles, firelight, we use it all the time to create a mood. It would still be beautiful." Sean put his hands behind his head. "Distance has a way of turning something catastrophic into art and beauty. The Lakota told tales of a night spent watching the light from the fires burning Custer's wagons. Beautiful light marking hundreds of deaths. Destruction became beauty." 

"That's not what everyone thinks." 

"But that's what they will think if they stay so far away. Get up close and in some places, you can't see and if you could, it would be soot, spills, and smog." 

"That's not what I see. Enjoy the view, will you?" 

Sean closed his eyes. The lodgepoles burned on and on, further north and higher up every minute, fueled by millions of other fires around the world burning extinct trees and swamps, fire feeding fire. 

A tree on the edge of the field exploded in flames. Sean opened his eyes. A siren wailed in the distance. He was at home in bed. "Where are we?"

"At home. Where do you think?"
"Where. Where were we last night?"
"Home, what do you think?"
He looked down at the sheets."The moon. This is where I am?" He pulled at the sheets with his right hand. "But New York was burning." 
"What? You okay?"
He paused. "I don't know. Something isn't." He looked through the window at the orange lights in the valley. A siren sounded in the distance. He pulled the curtains shut. 

In ancient times, sirens called men to sail toward their death on the rocks. Tonight, Sean was awakened by the sound of a siren.

He closed his eyes. "I need sleep."
Annette rolled over and faced the wall. "Amen." 

"I dreamt that the sun rose in the south." 

"It does in the arctic in the winter, just peeks over the horizon."
"No, this was different." He looked at her back in the flickering light coming through the cracks in the curtain. "It was like a photo bulb flashing. It rose suddenly and it flashed an orange light across the city. Shadows moved from north to south. Then everything went black again, it was night."

"That's what it is now. Home. Go to sleep." She patted him on his thigh. 

"And then it was lit up by us." Sean closed his eyes and drifted off. He jerked. He saw the flash again. Something like a large man reached over the horizon and took everyone's photograph, an instant of the world captured on film, forever immortalized while humanity was forever mortalized. The flash cast human shadows onto walls around the town, figures at work, play, and love, carved into concrete buildings and sidewalks. The negatives of life. The human family portrait, the last photoshoot. Sean walked through the colorless streets and alleys, kicking up clouds of ash, browsing the walls like an art gallery, with paintings of civilization, sculpted in portland cement, a 21st-century bas relief. Shadows of flat-shouldered humans, lines of them, led along with hooks in their jaws, arms loaded with electronics and toys, tethered to large domesticated animals - dogs, cats, and cattle - led by bearded warriors with hair coiled like snakes, long curled beards, swords, shields, brave warriors standing by a carving of the sun god, no bigger than a garbage can lid, the bringer of victory and lavish wealth. Next to the warriors were the dead, stacked like cordwood. 

The last wall on the block was a house like his, and the image was of a man and woman, charcoal black, the two of them sitting up in bed. 

Sean lurched up in bed. "It's us." The siren was still wailing. 
Annette didn't move. 

He looked at the window. Sunlight was coming through the cracks in the curtain. He pulled back the curtain. "That's not sunlight." He stood in front of the window. "That's not right. That's - "