Night
March 2025
The sun never rises and night never ends. Rumors spread. Someone spotted the sun in Bhutan, in Belgrade, in West Texas. I hear mystics on the radio predict the next sighting. Their voices are throaty and raw, affected with static as they read geographic coordinates like lottery numbers. I listen until the stereo recedes on the back of a bike. Red lights blinking, voices speaking, and then they’re gone. Swallowed by shadows on Flatbush Ave.
I take the long way to your apartment. I cut through the crowds at Grand Army Plaza where people in bathrobes have gathered since Night began. Their faces are serious, silvery with moonlight even at midday. I pass a woman cradling an alarm clock like an infant. A man rubbing tanning oil into his hands. The scent of coconut lifts into the air.
Someone slips a pamphlet into my pocket. It’s printed in glow-in-the-dark ink.
Want answers? the pamphlet asks.
Us too.
Your elevator’s broken, so I walk up five flights of stairs and knock twice. You unlock the deadbolt but keep the chain in place. Your living room is washed blue from the glow of the television set, and when the light strikes your pale skin, you look almost translucent.
What are you watching?
The news.
You move your head so I can see the screen through the cracked door. A camera crew has swarmed another office worker in Beijing. He stands in a glass tower, but the electric city beyond his cubicle is black. Night turns windows into mirrors — we all know that now. A ghostly figure lowers a boom microphone toward the office worker’s face, another ghost hugs a clipboard to her chest.
The fluorescent lights are on but the dark has crept into everything. I see it in the lines under the office worker’s eyes, the wrinkles in his oversized suit. His head tilts so far forward that he’s almost bowing until his head comes to rest on the reporter’s handheld microphone. He’s speaking Mandarin, but the television translates his words into English.
Yes, I saw it, he says. The sun. It was so bright. So — fleeting.
Where was it exactly? the reporter asks.
The man throws a limp arm over his shoulder. He points. There, he says.
All the glass ghosts look up. The camera angles toward the fiberboard ceiling. Are you sure?
I look at you. You’re biting your nails again.
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