They rise to the sky in shades deeper than the night, darker than my melancholy. Fragments of midnight, they consume the space between spaces, chew them and spit them out into obsidian cityscape. I observe them from my tenth-floor apartment – the highest aerie I could afford – and fill my vista with dark uncertainty. Outlined by infinity, bathed in the light spectral, the city’s building blocks stand aloft and not a single light shines. Not one.
Where are the people? Where are the throngs, the milling lanes and the streetlights? Where are the cars, their wide eyes gleaming? Where is suburbia and the urbanites within? Most important of all, the question I ask over and over again, where am I?
The city extends as far as the eye can see in all directions but down. I realize the sewers sprawl with the vast consumption of human detritus, yet I cannot appreciate the fact through concrete and tar. Perhaps that is how the people left? Perhaps that is how they got out?
I muse over the possibilities as I do every night of every week and every month. No that I am morbid just deep thinking. I wish to explain things to myself where others cannot. The night has blinded them all, obscured weak minds and weaker thinkers. I, however, see the bigger picture, the truth. Unlike all those others, I know when the sun sets and the lights flick off in a reversal of physics, the world that should be is not and the world that’s here is wrong.
By day the city is normal, as am I. A cab driver by trade, investigator by practice, I query my passengers in ways too intellectual for them to appreciate about how and why they are traveling and what they might do in the evening. Never once has their answer been satisfactory. They’ll chat and quip when they want, but when it cuts to the crunch slurring speech and trailing off words proliferate; I get so mad. My passengers are aware of nothing.
They are clueless to the deception played upon them by powers greater than they. I am not. My co-workers used to think me odd, but not anymore. At least, I hope not. My questions have become more veiled, my probing subtler. I seek to lure the truth from them rather than force it; that did not work just alienated. They now sit at my table and chat over coffee, whilst I watch the movements swirling behind their eyes.
The shift from normal to not begins at dusk. It always begins at dusk. People pack away their necessaries early when the light dips from canary yellow to jaundiced gold. Humanity don their coats, set hats askew, perhaps unravel an umbrella, and then the return commute begins. I follow them every now and again to see where each individual resides. But, no matter how far they lead, I lose them when I need them most. As the daylight drops and the lights switch off, as darkness consumes and silence reigns, my co-workers, friends and family just disappear. It’s like the world swallows them in one swift gulp and I am left to find my way home in the night.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my time alone that is not the issue at all. To look up at a night sky unimpaired by fluorescent or search or spot or fire or any emitter of light brings delight to my heart. I see the world as though Adam, the very first to do so. There is even a certain honor and privilege to it, but not in solitary. I would share my world with someone else as the skyscrapers look down through shaded eyes and shake their steel-boned heads in sympathy.
It does not matter where I find myself, I always make it home. Home is a beacon I cannot lose. It is my apartment that brings assuredness to my life, a constant in an inconstant world. Sometimes, I even light candles and bask in the flicker of their temporary glows; seconds later they’ll be gone. Still, the interim light proves light exists in the pitch evenings even if just for seconds.
So here I sit on my balcony beneath the moon and sketch the city at midnight. I do not need my eyes for my heart can trace each ledge and window, but I open them to feel more human. Made of irregular lines the landscape bobs and weaves, ducks and dives, like a game of Tetris with only black blocks. I am a master at fitting it altogether but still never win a prize.
So why do I do it, you say? The answer is simple because nobody else can. When Erebus and Nyx wake and all the children of the earth – or is it just my city – fall asleep, when light is stolen and windows turn dark, I alone wait for the sleepers to stir. I sit and study, whilst the white steam of my drink turns black, and pray that the lost will return.
I will lead them back to the light away from the nightmares and doom. Those who vanish into night’s deep folds will see me and smile. They will return, I know it. When they do, I’ll be waiting. Unless I am dead, and these lost lights are mine alone.
