Mysterium

Water lapped at wooden docks. The stars were bright. On the way back, Evelyn shivered and buttoned her sweater.

She said, “Are you staying over tonight?”

“If you still want me to.”

“Of course I do.”

And he put his arm around her waist.

∞

Later, Dex would wonder about the remark he had made about Chernobyl.

Did it represent a premonition, like Mrs. Friedel’s dream? Had his body sensed something, some subliminal input his conscious mind failed to grasp?

And then there was Evelyn’s tabby cat, Roadblock. Roadblock spent the evening in a kind of frenzy, tearing around the bedroom in tight circles until Evelyn lost patience and put her out. Had the cat sensed some tenuous radiation coming across the dark water of the lake?

Perhaps. Perhaps.

∞

He woke a little after midnight.

He hovered a moment on the fragile edge of awareness, dimly conscious of Evelyn beside him, of the way she breathed in her sleep, long delicate sighs. What had woken him? A sound, a motion…

Then it came again, an irregular metallic tapping—a tapping at the window.

He turned and saw the moonlit silhouette of the cat. Roadblock, out for the night, had climbed onto the garage roof and up the shingled slope to the bedroom window. Now she wanted back in. Claws on the plate glass. Tack-scratch. “Go ’way,” Dex mumbled. Wishful thinking. Tack tack.

He stood up and pulled on his underwear. The warmth of the day had evaporated; the bedroom was chilly. The cat stood on her hind legs, arched against the windowpane in an eerie stretch. Moonlight fell on Dex, and he turned and saw his reflection in the vanity mirror. He saw the thatch of dark hair across his chest, his large hands loose at his sides. His gaunt face lay half in shadow, eyes wide and bewildered by sleep. He would be forty-one years old in August. Old man.

He unlatched the window. Roadblock leaped inside and raced across the carpet, more frantic than ever. The cat jumped on the bed and Evelyn stirred in her sleep. “Dex?” she murmured. “What—?” And rolled over, sighing.

He leaned out into the cool night air.

The town was silent. Two Rivers closed down after midnight, even on a warm Friday. The sound of traffic had faded. He heard the warble of a loon out on the deeps of Lake Merced. Trees flush with new leaves moved in tides of night air. Somewhere down Beacon Road, a dog barked.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably, a beam of light flashed across the sky. It came from the east, across the lake, far away in the abandoned Ojibway reserve—from the defense plant, Dex realized. The light cast sudden shadows, like lightning; it flickered on the lake. The bedroom was aglow with it.

A spotlight? A flare? He couldn’t make sense of it.

Evelyn sat up in alarm, all the way awake now. “Dex, what’s going on?”

There was no time to answer. He saw a second beam of light cut the meridian of the sky, and a third, so sharply defined he thought they must be laser beams… maybe some kind of weapon being tested out there… and then the light expanded like a bubble, seemed to include everything around it, the lake, the town, Evelyn’s bedroom, Dex himself. The room, bathed in light, began abruptly to spin, to tilt on an invisible axis and slide away, until his awareness dwindled to a point, a pulsating singularity in a wilderness of light.

∞

The town of Two Rivers, Michigan, and the federally funded research project on its outskirts vanished from the earth some hours before dawn on a Saturday morning late in May.

The fires began not long after.

The fires were useful when it was time to explain what had happened. The obliteration of a town the size of Two Rivers requires a great deal of explanation, and the existence of the military facility on the abandoned Indian lands had not been a secret (though its purpose had never been revealed). It was the desire of the Defense Department that these awkward truths not be connected. Both the town and the research project were lost in the fire, officials announced. It had not been one fire but several; unseasonal, unexpected, the product perhaps of freakish heat lightning. The fires had surrounded the town and grown with unprecedented speed. There was no defense against such a holocaust. Most of Bayard County was simply incinerated. More lives had been lost than in any natural disaster in American history, tens of thousands of lives. Commissions of inquiry were established and carefully staffed.