wondered how life continued to go on the way sap rose in the remaining trees, rose against gravity, the way the people rose, hoping to see that shine again, glimmering along the muddy river, hoping against probability, against fate.
The sky now was as muddy as the river. The first day the city woke and the sun had not, people stood out on their porches, circled the pavement around their lawns, and stared, just stared at the sky, as if willing the sun back. The young folk danced down the streets with flashlights, flirting and laughing loudly as if the sun had gone out for their pleasure. The sick and shut-in sat hunched at windows, clutching curtains, shaking their heads at these end days. Then the cell phones rang out until every line was busy. The media was in an uproar and the newly minted mayor had to be rushed to the Med after having a minor stroke. The children, those in public school and in private, were unashamedly happy. They leapt in their yards, jumped like grasshoppers until frightened mothers and fathers shooed them back into the houses. When the airwaves cleared, the mayor, mildly recovered, finally made a speech. Memphians were to get duct tape and garbage bags and seal all their windows and doors. This could be the result of a terrorist act, directed at the good citizens of Memphis. Who would do this, why, and what for were the questions that needed figuring. No one had answers.
Not the Shelby County Center for Emergency Preparedness, nor the governor and the congressmen, even the President and the CDC could not explain why the sun had gone out only in Memphis. Some said it was because the city had given up its charter, others said it was a Chickasaw curse for building on the bluffs and bones of the city’s first inhabitants. And then there was some who blame every crooked thing on Voodoo Village. Whole families went by car, truck, and foot across the arched bridge, zooming across I-40 like hell had opened up behind them. Barbecue pits, student loans, and 30-year mortgages, even some marriages and Elvis, great day in the morning, Graceland!, were left behind without a backward glance.
No one commented on how the darkness lifted and the sunlight shone at exactly halfway across the M-shaped Hernando de Soto Bridge. If nothing else, that oddity alone was enough to prove to some that the city had been specially marked as cursed. “The Lord done spoken!” the preachers cried and gathered their flocks with them to safety. SUVs and church buses honked and stalled on the crowded bridge, the people turning their backs on the hulking Pyramid that glowered mutely behind them. Many remained hovering in the fields, camped out in West Memphis bottom-land in their cars and tents. They didn’t worry about waiting lists for trailers, FEMA had not bothered even shipping any. Still others just headed on down to the dog track and casinos, carrying their last dollars and their Emergency Preparedness bags with them. And those who once thought they lived in Germantown, and Cordova, and Collierville, soon learned the true geographical reach of East Memphis. The sun was out in their neck of the woods, too. Only the good citizens in North Mississippi sat smugly in their homes, daylight shining through their curtained windows, shaking their heads at the spectacle that had finally overcome the City.
Nelse lies in her bed in what would have been late afternoon, twilight, just before the old evening, when the first lightning bugs would come out. Her head ached, migraines, vestiges of the crazy dream. The same she’d had since she was a little girl. Had someone already figured out why a focusing mirror must be parabolic in shape? Why a flat or spherical mirror won’t work? There was a logical reason, a kind of quiet grace, she knew, but none for why the sky in Memphis remained forever dark, nor why she remained, when so many others had fled, praying and crossing themselves, never looking back.
Closing her eyes, she imagines various shapes; her mind traces the trajectory of light rays, ancient messengers of stars long dead before the journey. Silvered glass curving, nothing like the shadowy glass in her grandmother’s chiffarobe.
Big Mama, are you with the stars, up in the heavens shaking your head, trying to help me figure this out? Yellow and gold light rays careened at angles to the perpendiculars, reflected at equal angles, slow danced like she used to by herself with her father’s quiet storm albums, her mind heading back into space. Polished glass flexed and curled, like the dark lashes of her closed eyes. She wiped a tear away, imagining glass gently sweeping through space as helicopters droned above. Glass holds memory, mirrors distort reality. There had been no mirrors in her grandmother’s house.
The world buckled to its knees when the sun stopped shining in Memphis. Just as it had when Nelse took her first algebra class. The lesson began with word problems, and while the teacher droned on about state tests, Nelse had felt herself warming inside, like when she’d lean her head against the window and let the sun warm her skin. At first they thought it was a power outage, a fluke by Memphis Light, Gas & Water, but when the signals uncrossed, MLG&W had promptly released a statement that basically translated as, “We ain’t got nothing to do with the sun!” Nelse remembered when a straight-line wind had come flying off the Mississippi River, cutting down hundreds of the city’s oldest oak, pecan, and poplar trees, all the way from the banks to the city’s limits at Stateline, how they lay piled up all over the city like corpses. But this was nothing like that. The only trauma was that building inside the people. They spent the first day trying to figure out if they’d finally lost their natural minds, but NPR and the National Guard soon told them they had not gone stone-cold crazy. Memphians were fine. The sky was not.
“How the hell can particles in the air do this?” Marva, Nelse’s next door neighbor, wanted to know. Nelse usually only saw her when Marva darted across her yard in the mornings to steal her water, “My dahlias take better to the sweet water in yo’ pump.” Truth was, Marva didn’t want her own water bill to be sky high. Today she didn’t even try to hide her hustle. Marva had stood in the middle of the devil’s strip, clutching the flowers to her chest. “What’s gon’ happen to my garden?”
That first nightday, Nelse opened her bedroom window and the wind fluttered the lace curtains as if a handkerchief waved by invisible hands. It had to be a mistake, a grave error, as if someone had taken a great cosmic clock and sprung much too far ahead into the future. It had to be a power outage in the night or the work of Nelse’s diabolical pills—which dulled the migraines, felled her nightly like an ax to a tree, and turned her into a sleepwalking clock-changer—or a dark cloud sent by terrorists, terrorists who hated the South and its barbecued pulled pork. Perhaps they really had lost their minds.
“What is the mayor going to do about this?” Marva wanted to know. She sat now on Nelse’s lumpy sofa, too frightened to look outside again. Every light in the house was on, a parody of morning, as if it were the eve of a New Year. Nelse sat bravely by the window. “They say it happened after South Africa, all those years ago,” she said. “Capetown water all dried up. Fire in the sky, too. The ash was so thick that for three whole days it was utter darkness.”
“But nothing’s happened. Our water’s fine. We aren’t in a war. Well,” Marva said, giving Nelse an exaggerated side eye, “those foreign ones don’t count if nothing’s happened here.”
“The weatherman said it isn’t dangerous. The sun just isn’t out.”
“Are you going to the lab?”
“I don’t think so. Were you going to the gym today?” “I don’t know.” Sun or no sun, 24 Hour would be open anyway.
Nelse stared out at the gloom, shivering. She could only imagine the commotion downtown at Buckman Labs, or in the ‘hood, whose footprint was getting larger with every wave of white-and-hanging-by-the-skin-of-their-teeth-black-middle-class flight. All down the street, on the other end of the city, the young people wandered beneath the still-unlit streetlights, some with flashlights or lanterns, laughing. No old people out on the street at all, not in this kind of confusion, not with the sidewalks as loud as the Memphis in May festival and the flash of police lights like Cops everywhere. The chargers speeding up and down the expressway, blinding everybody,
