Photoluminescence

I need time to prepare breakfast. I'm almost a hundred years old. I set up the small kitchen table, take care that the tablecloth doesn't form folds, fill a nice bowl with cereal and blueberries, make a cup of barley for me and a cup of coffee for my wife. Every morning. Even this morning.

My wife's name is Emily. She passed away last month. She closed her eyes, fell asleep, returned to childhood, to youth, to that life she and I knew. Next to the cup of coffee I still place her gold chain, with a heart-shaped locket pendant.

When Photoluminescence surprised us, we were newly married. I was twenty-five, Emily was twenty. I remember the night before we decided to take a walk in the countryside. There were meadows of fireflies. The waning moon was shy, hiding behind a pine tree. I smelled the tiny leaves of a mint seedling scouted along the edge of the trail. Emily, as she fiddled with the locket, stared at me with her charcoal and fire eyes, and whispered: the heart works in the dimness of our chest. Children, seeds, stars are formed in the dimness of the universe. We should not forget that.

It takes me a long time to get down the stairs. It's not a problem, I have all the time I want. I don't sleep anymore. Nobody sleeps anymore. People work ten hours a day, seven days a week. That leaves a full fourteen waking hours in which to do whatever you want. There are contraindications, of course. So I'm walking to the Resilience Therapy Distribution Center. Luckily, it's not very far from home.

It’s probably the age. I can no longer stand the omnipresent hiss of drones over our heads, the excessive colors of advertising holograms that change position every time and disorient me. I can no longer stand the waddling gait of the employees involved in the generation of Rho waves. I was one of them, for too many years. They discovered that the human brain, under certain conditions of meditation, emit specific electromagnetic waves capable of interacting with natural isotopes, generating large amounts of energy. And since most trades no longer exist, millions of people have been employed in the Rho project. Now we realize that we have traded energy in exchange for their slow, progressive, inexplicable disorientation.

I get in line. Two soldiers check that everything is proceeding in an orderly manner; when my turn comes, I hesitate to enter, they give me a firm nod to go. At the counter, the pharmacist checks my card. Two tablets a day of Quietalux. There are twenty-eight in a box. You can withdraw up to three boxes at a time. I'm basically obliged to come here every month.

Without Quietalux, the light would kill me. It would kill everyone. Not right away. The most resilient could survive for years, but then they’d fall, too. Hallucinations, recurring fevers, headaches so severe that it is said of people shrinking on themselves like spiders, squeezed like sponges, even to the point of tearing muscles, spraining ligaments.

Neither Quietalux nor other solutions unfortunately worked with other mammals. Cats, dogs, mice. Bears, fawns. Zebras, elephants. All disappeared within thirty years. Shadow was our last cat, mine and Emily's. We loved holding him on our laps, getting lost in his eyes. Jokingly, we said that cats would conquer the world. And instead they left, they surrendered to the light. Perhaps they will conquer other worlds with their company, with their silent wisdom.

I feel sorry for the children who can only play with stuffed animals. But they, of course, are happy anyway. They have never known anything else. They have never seen the starry sky, the moon, a sunset.

No official explanation has ever been given for Photoluminescence. Seventy-two years ago, the sky began to become increasingly opaque and yet bright. It seemed that the Earth had been enveloped by a new layer of the atmosphere, a kind of inverted photosphere, a milky glass capable of filtering the sun's rays and at the same time diffusing a luminous, light gray, silvery, ashy, electric blue fuzz, dazzling. After some time, day and night became indistinguishable. The stars of the sky, their game, their regularity, their poetry. Disappeared. Photoluminescence does not vary, it is always the same, but it is also weak, useless. We cannot afford to turn off the artificial lights. There is no more day, there is no more night. We live in a perpetual winter twilight; deprived of darkness, deprived of the clarity of blue.

Many are now closed at home, go out as little as possible or never. They try to achieve a semblance of normalcy, without succeeding. Gray light holds us all captive, it seems to have settled in our brains. We are powerless. It wouldn't let us sleep even if we reached a lair in the center of the Earth. It condemns us to the feeling of not really being awake. It condemns us to a nauseating vigil, without silence, without the possibility of escaping the confusing, pasty, foggy light of thoughts.

There are still lizards and pigeons in town, but it's the insects that have taken over. More than one balance has broken down. And the streets, as much as we can pest control them, are covered with cockroaches of various sizes. Cockroaches that seem to be getting stronger, perhaps bigger, thanks to Photoluminescence. It's strange, I tell myself with bitterness, that women, or men, haven't already started laying eggs.

Slowly, I walk home. I go up the stairs. The coffee cup is still there. The chain with the heart-shaped locket is still there.

I do not know whether to consider myself a privileged one, to have experienced the magic of the lunar cycles, to have woken up early and moved by a dawn, by the glow that heralds it, for having caressed a cat. Or whether to consider myself a condemned man, an exile, a man forced only to nostalgia, to live a life that he does not know how to live, that he does not recognize as his own.

It is little more than an urban legend, but someone claims that, somewhere on Earth, there is still a place where Photoluminescence is not present. A patch of land, a hole in the sky created by a small, black, flaming meteorite.

I would like to be there. There in the shadows where the seeds, the children, the stars come to life. Where the heart works.

I grab Emily's chain to put it back in the drawer. I notice a small protrusion pricking my fingers. There's a slot in the locket, I try to force it. The locket is soldered, it doesn't seem to have a lock, but it still opens gently, without breaking. Inside there is an irregular fragment of dark stone. It's like Emily is looking at me tenderly, with her charcoal and fire eyes.

I am sleepy. I can remember sleep. I am one of the few living beings to remember it. Maybe that place still exists on Earth. A place where sleep is still possible.

A place where dreaming is still possible.