eyesore, the only mango yellow-orange house in the cove, stood a Haitian woman and her daughter, hand in hand, nearly indistinguishable in headwraps, talking quietly, looking straight up at the black sky. It was ten in the morning and as dark as the inside of an eyelid.
And Nelse hated it.
“We’ll be alright,” Nelse said, trying to sound like she believed it. “Not time to worry yet.” But she looked over at Marva rubbing an ink spot out of the sofa’s upholstery, and though it was not time to worry yet, Marva began to cry. Finally Marva announced they must call family and friends. No one should be alone. Nelse, who had no friends beyond her work at the lab, pretended not to hear as Marva desperately called one adult child after the other, until there was no one left to call. And so Nelse found herself doing the unthinkable. She agreed to invite Marva’s friends over for lunch and make what they could from the pantry. For some unspoken reason they dared not go outside, though the city had finally put the streetlights on. Nelse imagined that the throngs of young people downtown had lessened with the dimming novelty of it all. Perhaps they’d gone inside to make love, busily conceiving the population boom they could look forward to, if and when the darkness finally lifted. “No Show Sun Spawns Blackout Babies,” the Memphis Flyer might announce.
Marva made Caesar salad and pasta by dropping eggs into the crater of a flour volcano. She did this in silence, flour puffing into the air as if she had burst the seeds of a milkweed. Nelse thawed and roasted a chicken with cilantro, lemon pepper, honey, and herbs.
As she worked her stomach groaned, not from hunger but from fear. The idea of strangers rambling through her kitchen, rifling through her silverware put her teeth on edge. And most importantly, she had no idea what she should wear. She had long since stopped worrying about style, or the mysteries of her hair that broke combs and spat out plastic teeth and grease, or her problems knowing when folk say what they mean or when they mean what they don’t say.
At noon, she heard a rattle from the living room, Marva drawing the curtains. Nelse understood. They were not chosen, they could not bear witness to the constant night. Then she heard—like an exhalation of relief—the sound of a match. Candles. The scent of vanilla and pears filled the air. Only two neighbors came, those who had heard of Nelse’s work in “the sciences”: an elderly colleague of Marva’s who’d also retired from the college and a kindly, nervous painter Nelse had once met briefly at an artist’s reception at the Brooks. They were good, intelligent small-talkers at a party; neither was suitable for the endless night. They had clearly come out of loneliness. Nelse and Marva found themselves smiling and dutifully filling dusty wine glasses and listening for a doorbell that never rang. What was meant as a time of solace had become one of civic duty.
“I hear they are turning to rations,” said the colleague, a professor of magical realism with a graying Afro. Nelse wanted to know what kinds of rations. “Gas,” he said. “And fresh food and meat. Like in the war.” He meant World War I. The helicopters hovered, dropping water bottles and energy bars from the dark sky. Marva had stumbled on some, after raiding Nelse’s water hose. “Who knows? Maybe nylons, Marva.” Marva would not have it. “Ridiculous,” she said, regretting the company of this pompous man. The curtains blew open to reveal the unearthly blackness. Nelse said she could not remember much about the war, nor anyone who had ever been in it. The painter spoke up, and what she said chilled them: “I think they’ve done something.” Nelse quickly said, “Who? Done what?” Marva gave her a look.
The painter winced at her own thoughts, and her brass jewelry clanked on skinny wrists. “They’ve done something and they haven’t told us.” They’re always doing something and they don’t tell us, but Nelse kept her peace. The professor seasoned his salad with a practiced flick of his wrist. Nelse feigned indifference. The chicken still sat in the kitchen, glistening and uncarved, smelling like burnt sugar. “You mean a bomb?” “An experiment or a bomb or I don’t know. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure—But you know they keep spraying us from the skies,” the painter said and tapped her temple. “You know it’s not for mosquitoes.” “An experiment?” Marva said. She looked frightened.
Just then, they heard a roar. Instinctively, they went to the window, where in her haste to open it, Nelse knocked a little sandstone elephant over the sill and into the afternoon air, which was as red-dark as ever, but they could not hear it breaking above the din: the streetlights had gone out and now the city was alive with cries. Nelse wanted to kick them all out and listen to her father’s albums. Why did the streetlights go out? It’s unclear. Perhaps a strain on the system, perhaps a wrong switch thrown at the station. Perhaps a big-bellied squirrel, scampering where it wasn’t wanted. But it was a fright to people, but not quite a mighty inconvenience. That was when the blackouts began, the rolling blackouts, meant to conserve electricity. Two hours a day—on Marva’s and Nelse’s block it was at noontime, though it made little difference—with no lamps, no clocks, no Wi-Fi, just flashlights and candles melting to nubs. It was terrifying the first few days, but then it was something you got used to. You knew not to open the refrigerator and waste the cold. You knew not to open the window and waste the heat. You knew not to open your mouth and waste your breath.
“Temporarily,” the mayor said, now composed. “Until we can determine the duration.” Of the darkness, he meant, of the sunless sky. When he said this over the radio, Nelse glanced at Marva and was startled. As a child, she had noticed how sometimes, in old-fashioned books, full-color illustrations of the action would appear—through some constraint at the bindery—dozens of pages before the moments they were meant to depict. Not déjà vu, not something already seen, but something not-yet-seen, and that was what was before her: a woman in profile, immobile, her hair a wild puff like a demented dandelion, her face old-fashioned, last century’s features, resigned; her eyes blazing briefly with the fire of a sunspot; her hand clutching the wine glass in a tight fist; her lips open to speak to someone not in the room. A song in reverse, played much too fast.
“Marva?” she asked. Then it was gone. Her neighbor turned to her and blinked, saying, “What on earth does he mean by ‘duration’?” What she really wanted to ask was why didn’t Marva’s children ever come? She didn’t ask because she already knew the answer. They all did. They were afraid. They all were. They were all waiting for someone or some answer to come to them, to help them figure this all out. They sat alone in the darkness, reading by candlelight, as Nelse had done as a child, panicked as pigeons, waiting for someone to come, and yet they would not stir an inch. Why, the children had asked, didn’t Marva just drive in her Benz and come to them? They were closer to the authorities and could take care of her better from their homes in Harbor Town. Why wouldn’t she when she’d always done so before? They were busy with their own children, trying to keep them calm, entertained. No, they weren’t afraid, just … The adult children finally decided to leave without Marva, when they’d run out of reasons not to come to her. After the riots began, about two weeks later. She’d be alright, they rationalized. She was staying with a very responsible neighbor. They couldn’t quite recall her name. The nice negro who worked at the laboratory. Didn’t matter that they didn’t know Nelse from Booboo the Clown.
Unused to company, unused to another mind living and breathing and tidying and, goodness gracious, commenting on her things in her personal space, Nelse doubled the doses of the sleeping pills, began floating through her day in a fog. It made the time huddled in the darkness go faster.
One nightday Marva convinced Nelse to drive out with her to the farmer’s market in Klondike. Surely there must be ripe tomatoes still there? It was only the second time they had gone out of the cove since that first day of the darkness, and they were still unsure if they were right to do so—if it was frivolous to be seen in a tiny market with overhead mirrors to discourage the thieves and poor people jostling against wealthier ones, all grasping at the last remnants of normalcy and good health. Marva felt everyone should be in mourning. She had taken to wearing her pearls and best black dress, just in case.
“The
