The Years of
Night. That's what we called them. Although it wasn't the kind of night we knew
years ago, when I was a small child. It was more like a permanent haze, an
erasure of stars. One day the Big Star forgot to rise. The next day it did the
same. After that, crops failed. The forests suffocated, struggling onward,
trees stunted, foliage brownish gold. At least, that’s what
happened here, in the mid-continent.
My mother had picture books, made before. She spent
hours reading them to Ethan and me as children. In the books, the trees are
garish, painted bright, bright green. The skies unnatural blue. There is the
Big Star, of course. The lost sun, not a bulb behind a dusty pane, but hanging
there, often drawn with a smile or wearing a pair of goggles. No, that's not
right. We called them sunglasses.
The world wasn’t like those pictures. I was there, and
though it was a long time ago and I was very little, I would remember colours
like that. The sun didn't wear glasses of course. But the people did. Sunglasses. Like spectacles, only the
lenses were tinted. Can you imagine? The Big Star was that bright! And the
colours were infinite, so bountiful that they were taken for granted, many left
unnamed.
With The Dusts, the landscapes lost their crisp
corners and contrast. The blacks bled into white, greens into reds, indigos
into yellows, until everything was soaked and brown. Everything we observed,
everything we knew, was filtered through The Dusts. Forests eventually turned
into clumps of standing spears, rampikes ready for lightening to burn.
Ethan was nine and I was six when the crops were moved
indoor so that the growings could be done in shelters. All the grown-ups
complained: dreary, they said. My
brother and I adapted. Ethan taught me what my parents could not. We approached
our world with fascination when all the adults could see was entropy.
That was the thing about Ethan. Curiosity was his
defining feature. It ruled everything he did. When you have that kind of
thirst, it leaves no room for the baser levels of personality: ignorance,
judgement, bitterness, lethargy. Sometimes it made it seem as though he cared
more for ideas than for people. That wasn’t the case. He was simply
preoccupied.
I had friends at school, for Ethan it was harder.
Something about him spelled difference, and children are like animals, they
scent difference from a great distance. He was never disliked outright, only gently
cast out, which he never noticed or minded. His mind was on broader things: the
movements of the invisible stars, the echo of molecules, the polarities of the
earth and the jigsaw of numbers that hummed a foreign language in his synapses.
As for me, life was simple. I kept an eye out for beauty and I kept my hands
busy. I’ll tell you this: I always enjoyed my brother’s company best.
