At Dusk

The sky at dusk

He opened the front door and ignored the letters piling up on the carpeted floor. Bills of electricity, a delayed rent, and reports from his credit card made him get a beer from the rusty freezer that had once been pink. Outside, it was a sweltering 45 degrees Celsius.  

He sat down in one of his kitchen chairs and drank almost the whole bottle in one go. Sweat trickled down his face. 

He had opened up an occurrence just to register what he saw that night, the woman disappearing into the lights. The orange skies above. The policemen laughed at him but decided to write things down anyway, even though no one had been reported missing in the last few days.  

When it came down to describing the details he would not get them right. Nothing he said could account for what he saw. No spoken words could describe the majesty of those mysterious lights.

He tried and failed. "Here's to that," he said out loud as he finished the last drops and threw the empty bottle in the wrong bin.

The shower was cold. Good. His shift at the bookshop wasn't due until four; he had switched it with Marta just to be free to go to the police station in the morning. Now he had hours to kill. He ought to sleep, he thought, otherwise his night shift would be hard. 

As he dried himself up, a second beer opened itself by his bed. He sat down and took a sip. He wanted to sleep, be what he should do was clean up the house. Lorena had complained about it the last time she was there. And he could see why. There were garbage bags pilling up at his door, and empty dishes and bottles covered his sink. The furniture was buried in a layer of dust so thick he could barely stand sitting in front of his computer without sneezing his soul off.

His heart sank as he thought about his desk computer. He had bought it when he got accepted at the university, yet he had not turned it on in months. He had not stepped into the university for even longer.

The time the bookshop didn't claim he spent driving around in his rickshaw, picking up passengers. And then at José's. He looked at the half-finished beer in his hand and took another sip. What else one could do in this awful heat?

Yes, the world was falling apart as the climate went from bad to worse. Guilt washed over him all the same. He tried to remember when it had started; this drinking pattern. He did not always follow it. When did it begin? He wasn't particularly sad about anything, nor was he mourning someone dear to him. It would have been a good excuse to drink, the wicked corner of his brain told him.

No. The drinking had come on its own, in the first semester, when he was at his highest peak. Two of his short stories had been published in a student newspaper and it had got him some recognition on the campus. He had gotten more Facebook friends than real-life friends and more WhatsApp messages than he could deal with; also women. Older ones, about to graduate.

Then there was Tina. His muse. She had dumped her boyfriend for him and then dumped him for some other guy. She came to visit him sometimes when Loreta was out of town. He told her many times she had chronic dissatisfaction. He wasn't complaining though, she could visit him as many times as she wanted.

Thinking about her made him feel vulnerable. He opened another beer and noticed he was already sweating his skin off again. Half-past noon. Go to sleep. 

He placed the bottle on the table with a thud and decided to pick a place to start. All right.

Garbage bags, he should take them outside for the disposal service. He needed at least four bags to empty his kitchen junk. In the end, he counted up to eight pizza boxes, an endless stream of beer bottles, and dozens of empty snack packages. How did he eat so much?  He kept on cleaning, dusting, and emptying; one task at a time. Even forgetting to drink from his bottle every now and again.

He ought to have kept the bath for after the clean-up. Damn this hot weather; because of it, no one could come out of their houses during the day anymore. If he peeked outside his window, he would see that all the houses in his neighborhood were closed, their residents safely inside, hiding from the naked sun. 

His bed was in such a deplorable state that he decided to gather all his bedsheets and throw them all in the washer, leaving his mattress naked. And he had thought about sleeping on that? Disgusting. 

One fifteen, his wristwatch struck when he was done. Coldwater fell on his hair again, washing away the grease his skin had produced with the effort. Maybe he would call Loreta, and set up a date for tonight, now that the house was clean.

He thought of the lights again. The lights against that copper autumn sky. What had happened that day? What exactly could they be and who was the woman that simply disappeared among them? Did she want to go or had she been taken by force?

He got out of the shower bent on finding out, or at least getting some sort of tangible explanation. Covered in the only clean towel that was left in the house, he turned his computer on for the first time in a long while. It was just an old desk computer but it worked well enough for him. 

It gave a few bumps before the engines released the familiar sound and the screen showed the welcome sign. While it loaded, he went to the kitchen to get another beer. How had he not tried it before? Google should have an answer for him.

On his first search, he entered the words: lights, dusk, disappearances. All the entrances and websites brought information about a movie and a teen book, which couldn't possibly explain what he was seeking. He tried again, but only similar results came up. He decided he needed better keywords. After one hour and much reading on colorful websites, he came up with three main possibilities: military aircraft, swamp gas, or gas balloons.

None of the three seemed to be appropriate to explain the woman's disappearance. The lights looked otherworldly. There were no swamps anymore, in the area or any area for that matter. Gas balloons would not come down to suddenly fetch people from the ground, once released they would only ascend. Any military aircraft, on the other hand, would make some kind of sound. The lights he saw were dead silent. 

They just appeared on the horizon as if they had always been there, waiting for the mysterious woman, surrounding her, and drowning her in their glow. It had been an extraordinary event; it could not have an ordinary explanation.

There was, of course, another explanation. He was losing his mind, just like the policeman suggested. The drinks were eating his brain away and he imagined the whole thing. 

It did not ring true inside, but since he would never know for certain, he ought to adopt that as a possibility, stop drinking and keep quiet about it, since words didn't seem to convince or even to describe what he witnessed. Perhaps he could write... something whispered in his ear. 

Yes, he could. His computer was already on, waiting for the words to be typed into existence. He was no sci-fi writer, but he could try his tricks in order to verbalize the event he had witnessed. In doing this, he did not need people to believe it was true, he just needed them to read, or to give it a shot. If nobody believed him, he could say the piece was always meant to be fiction, nothing else.

These were strange and marvelous events witnessed by me; an unsuspicious drunk, on an empty road in the city of Londrina. Dusk covered the city center with a bright orange that day...

When he got up from his desk, it was already five-thirty. He was more than two hours late for work but had the beginning of a great story written down. He saw on his phone that he had three missed calls from the bookshop. They probably would fire him after this.

He didn't care. He was writing again, and this was all that mattered. He looked through his window and saw the sky, torn between blue and the patches of orange. Picturesque in all its glory. The sky at dusk. Everything seemed possible now.