The farmers and their wives entering the Mexican restaurant, El Mariachi, weren’t wearing masks. Down the block, a couple of young men stood outside the store that sold Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games along with accessories, trading cards, ceramic figurines of heroes and monsters, as well as marijuana paraphernalia. The young men were obese and afflicted with asthma and so their mouths and noses were covered with light-blue surgical masks. On the storefont, next to the door, a large banner colored like the Ukrainian flag declared: GLORY TO UKRAINE.
Anderson parked his car curbside across from the blue and yellow banner. Although the sun was setting, the sky was still bright. Anderson, unmasked, crossed the street and went into the Mexican restaurant. His girlfriend had arrived ahead of him and she was already seated in a booth with her drink in front of her. For some reason, the booth framed in lathe and painted turquoise reminded Anderson of a creche designed to display the baby Jesus. Tiny lights made a garland around the booth, twinkling on and off.
Anderson was a free-lance journalist. He had agreed to write a review of a drag show, Bowties and Barrettes, opening at the community arts center in the old, re-modeled movie theater around the corner.
Anderson looked at his cell-phone to check the time.
“Are you sure you don’t want to go with me?” Anderson asked Justina. “I can get another comp ticket.”
“That kind of thing gives me the creeps,” Justina replied.
“Well, you can share my dismay,” Anderson said.
“Your biases are showing,” Justina remarked. “I don’t know how you’re gonna navigate that political minefield.”
“Very carefully,” Anderson responded
Anderson asked the waiter for a beer. When the waiter brought his Corona to the table, Anderson said that they were ready to order. He had about an hour before Bowties and Barrettes and thought it would be unprofessional to arrive late.
After they had eaten, Anderson asked Justina where he could meet her after the show She said that a group of her friends from the TV station were going out into a dark part of the county to see the display of Northern Lights forecast for later. She named a bar in a motel just off the freeway and said they were meeting there at 10:30 to caravan out away from the city lights to where the sky would be black enough to show the aurora borealis.
“Will your drag show be done by that time?” Justina asked.
“God, I hope so.”
The theater was a couple blocks away. Anderson walked down the sidewalk to a parking lot between a church and county offices in the old building where the police had once been housed. He made a short cut across the parking lot to the street where the theater’s bright marquee glowed over the intersection. A few people were loitering on the sidewalk and raucous laughter came from outside tables at the tavern across from the remodeled movie theater. With a kind of shudder, Anderson noticed a car abandoned near the curb. The vehicle was wrecked, a victim of some sort of explosion that had unseamed the hood over the engine. The pavement under the car was charred and black slag had melted down into fecal coils under the sagging front bumper. The windshield was blown out and the front interior of the car was a sooty crater. The upflung halves of the hood loomed over the seared meteorite of the car’s engine so that the ruined vehicle gave Anderson the impression of a black crab with its pincers raised in menace.
Anderson hurried by the burnt-out car and made his way to the kiosk under the white slash of the marquee. Theater staff were wearing masks.
Bowties and Barrettes was better than Anderson expected. He made some notes on a small pad of paper. The stage was brightly lit and the colors were garish, sequins and silk, and so it was easy to write. Anderson’s notes were mostly names – performers that he admired. He had the show’s playbill and, so, he supposed, most of his notes were redundant; he could check spellings in the brochure.
One of the show-tunes from the revue was caught in Anderson’s ear. He hummed the melody as he hastened past the wrecked car. The vehicle seemed invisible to the others hurrying along the sidewalk or starting their cars in the parking lot. Was it just going to be left there, a monument to some sort of nameless catastrophe? Viewed from the back, Anderson noticed that the rear of the car was completely intact, the trunk tightly closed still, and the back window, marked with some decals, unbroken. Anderson could read the license plate, letters and numbers that seemed portentous but that the show-tune crowded out of his memory. He wondered if someone had reported on the explosion in the car. His thoughts were confused by the slinky, feathered boas and the high-heeled shoes slathered in glitter, men wearing push-up bras over flat chests singing loudly into microphones.
At the motel tavern on the freeway, an older man from the TV station was drinking alone on a stool bellied up to the bar, Anderson recognized him as a cameraman from the station. “Where is everyone?” he asked.
“Gone out to see the Northern Lights,” the videographer said.
“I thought they’d wait for me.”
“The Northern Lights waits for no man.”
Anderson was a little irritated. If he had been left behind, he was in no hurry to follow those who gone ahead. He ordered a beer and talked to the cameraman for a while. On the TV over the bar, a hockey game was playing and there were a couple drunken fans hooting some times at the action on the screen. In the motel lobby, a cable news show reported on the war in Ukraine. A drone hovered over smashed buildings.
The cameraman said: “Too much news these days.”
“This is true,” Anderson said.
The man drew a map on a napkin to show Anderson where the caravan to see the Northern Lights had gone. Making a map seemed quaint to Anderson. The show-tune was still whispering in his head.
A couple miles from town, two shallow lakes, each wrapped in a burbling swamp, reflected starlight. A narrow gravel road ran along a causeway between the swamps and their kernels of open water. The wet lands extended half-way to the horizon and couldn’t be farmed or grazed so that there were no buildings anywhere in the vicinity. Far out on the dark prairie, a couple of bluish yard-lights hovered over the cold fields and, at the edge of the earth, a half-dozen wind turbines with red lights blinked on and off. Four cars were parked on the raised gravel road between the lakes and Anderson courteously cut his lights as he approached the viewing party. He pulled to a stop and got out of his car.
Hushed voices whispered to one another. It was too cold for the chorus of frogs that would ordinarily have serenaded them. The air smelled of stagnant water and was chilly. At first, the sky overhead looked black, but, then, as his eyes adjusted Anderson saw that the heavens were blue velvet, studded here and there with greenish, wobbly-looking stars.
Most of the people were from the TV station. The on-air personalities, weather girls and newscasters, looked far smaller than they did on TV. There was a curious detached quality to their faces and figures, as if these people existed only for the camera and that, when they were off-screen, they withdrew into a strange, indifferent solitude.
Anderson approached Justina. She was scanning the skies with binoculars.
“Has the famous aurora borealis made his appearance?” Anderson asked.
“You,” she said. “How was your show?”
“Surprisingly good, even inspiring,” Anderson replied.
A small tight dome of orangish light enclosed the freeway a few miles distant. The town cast a faint light-shadow up into the sky.
“I don’t know if it’s dark enough here,” Justina said.
“It’s pretty dark,” Anderson said.
It was silent for a couple minutes. The stars overhead seemed hushed and expectant.
The young woman who read the weather reports broke the silence. Anderson knew that she was licensed meteorologist.
“Did you hear that?” the young woman asked.
“What?” Justina said.
“A sound like prolonged distant thunder.”
Anderson hadn’t heard anything but the breeze slipping through the cattails and the faint hiss of carbonation in someone’s can of beer.
“I thought I heard something,” Justina said.
“It’s been heard all over the world. When there’s a temperature inversion and just the right weather conditions, you can actually hear the shelling in the Ukraine,” the meteorologist said.
“Really?” Justina asked.
“It’s been confirmed, verified.”
Anderson was skeptical but didn’t say anything.
“The sound is there,” the young woman meteorologist said. “The sound waves get amplified or something by banks of fog hanging over the sea. The noise of the bombardment comes through mountain valleys like emerging through a megaphone. It’s a true weather fact.”
Justina said: “We should be very quiet now and see if we hear it.”
“It’s been heard world-wide,” the meteorologist said.
“The shot heard round the world,” Anderson remarked.
Then, they were silent. A bird all alone on the dark prairie trilled. A truck changed gears on the highway. Someone walked away from the group, maybe to urinate, and foot steps sounded on the gravel. Anderson listened with his ears and, then, his heart and soul. At first, the show-tune reverberated in his imagination but then that melody became fainter and fainter and, at last, fell silent. Anderson thought he heard tank treads scraping on the earth and there was a faint rhythmic pulsing, perhaps, the sound of a remote bombardment: boom – boom – boom. Anderson felt the sound pulse in his jaw.
Justina broke the silence: “I thought I head something.”
The man who gone off to piss was back.
“What if we did hear it?” he said. “How is that different from watching the thing on TV?”
Anderson said: “You’re right the signal has been transmitted world wide.”
“But it’s different hearing it with your own ears,” Justina said.
“I suppose,” Anderson replied.
“It creates a different obligation,” the weather girl said. “If you hear it with your own ears, you have different obligations.”
“How so?” the sound man from the studio asked.
They were all whispering.
“You know,” Justina said, “I don’t think we should just watch it on TV. It becomes entertainment. It’s like some kind of perverse sit-com.”
“Unless you’re willing to help,” the meteorologist said, “you shouldn’t watch.”
Justina aimed her binoculars back at the dark sky. The Northern Lights were supposed to be faint feathery filaments of color, ionized particles that glowed blue and green, as they ascended to the zenith. They watched for a half-hour between the two cold lakes but didn’t see anything.
