At Dusk

Another round

The screen of the old TV flickered a few times and went off just before the match ended. He screamed at it and kicked the first plastic chair his foot could reach. 

A choir of male voices echoed his anger and called out to José demanding that he fixed it immediately or else they would choose another bar to watch the next games of the season. But José simply continued to do what he did best; ignore the drunks and keep telling a group of newcomers the same old jokes he told everyone.   

The championship was lost anyway, he thought. Watching the final minutes of the struggle would only add to the pain. 

He got up and walked towards the balcony, coughing all the way there. Sweat trickled down his back. He was glad that the breeze tonight was fresh enough to cool him down. 

The days were getting warmer when they should be getting colder, a reminder that the global climate continued to degenerate further and further. Nothing anyone could do now. It was on every channel, on every TV station, on the web. The end of days, some called it. 

If this was true, so be it. He would drink his way through it. 

He ought to stop drinking, a familiar voice resurfaced at the back of his head, trying to argue its way out. He ought to finish college... to go back to his writings. It was a weak echo of whom he used to be, an aspiring writer, and as such too easy to ignore.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh air before lighting another cigarette.

There was no one around now. All the others were inside, still fighting over what should be done with the old TV set. He had the balcony all to himself, surrounded only by the vastness of the night and the billions of sparkling dots that stood frozen and distant in the great indigo ceiling above.

Nicotine burned in his throat as he stared at the perfect stillness of the nightly landscape. Poetry was all around, filtering in through his eyes. Everything one saw was nothing but the light reflecting on surfaces and then reaching the retina, being converted into visual information by the brain. And it was beautiful information. Illusory but beautiful. Just like that day on the highway when the woman disappeared into the lights, the voice broke in again. 

The memory of the event hit him with a slap in the face, waking his mind from all the numbing sensations that the alcohol and the idleness had produced in his body. The woman, the redness of dusk, the lights on the horizon, and the way they moved on the wasteland.

Where had she gone? 

She was right in the middle of it. In a pool of light, pure, untamed light that came not from the sky but from all around her, as if it had always been there, waiting to shine with such an intense brightness that looking at it for more than a couple of seconds was simply not possible. 

He had screamed for her but no voice left his throat. And then, in a blink of an eye, she was gone. Vanished with the lights. 

A week had passed and he had not told anyone about it. Even if he did, the only people he knew in that foreign city would not believe a word of it. They would just assume he was making stuff up on account of his drinking. Or imagining things. The police might, his inner voice interfered again. 

And how did he know all this? They would certainly ask. Because he saw it happen, he would try to convince them. Then they would laugh. They would accuse him of God-knows-what. Perhaps even blame him. 

It doesn't matter what they will think of you. The right path is to report what you witnessed.

But he wasn't sure of what he had witnessed, was he? How could he be? He had left home with money to shop for groceries that day and had ended up exactly where he was now. Except that his drinking couldn't possibly have caused the phenomenon. He had drunk a shot or two, maybe three, that evening. Not enough to produce that type of conjuring. 

As unexplainable as it was, a woman walking alone in the outskirts of the university had been taken by mysterious lights. That was a truth he could not escape from, no matter what he numbed his thoughts with. His drinking, his oversleeping, his whoring. 

Besides, he was a writer to be sure, and yet he was not ashamed to admit that his imagination was not the creative type. He wrote about mundane things. He scorned that type of fantasy that painted life as a sugarcoated affair. He was acquainted with life alright, and it was far from being a fairytale. It was far from being a melodramatic soap opera either. Life just moved forward like a bulldozer that had a single job: tear down things. Sooner or later, everything crumbled.  

So yes, his fiction was all about ordinary human experiences like failures, not mysterious roads where people popped out of nowhere and then got trapped in pools of light. That just wasn't his style at all. 

What should he do with what he had witnessed then? The voice pressed on. Start screaming in the middle of the pavement? Hang a leaflet on a lamppost? Go back to that highway and investigate? 

It was all madness. He didn't even know what she looked like, and he only saw her from behind as her shape morphed into whiteness and disappeared. How could he ever produce anything substantial enough to help find her since he didn't even know who she was?

Anything would help. She could be in danger. 

The only thing he could do to help was to go to the police station and report what he saw. If they chose to make fun of him so be it, his part would be over. But if her family had reported a missing person, the police would no doubt be interested in any clue, however wild it seemed.

Yes, he decided. He would go to the police station the next morning. 

That agreement with himself lifted a ton from his shoulders and he ordered another round of cachaça to celebrate it.