Berit Ellingsen - Not Dark Yet

“It’s not that,” Michael said.

“OK, what is it, then?”

Michael drew a breath. “That you text me ‘Goodnight and I love you’ every night before you go to sleep.”

He looked at Michael. By now he must know he loved him.

He spent the days running and hiking on the moor, forming various routes around the islets of birches, mounds of bilberry, and troughs of cloudberry and cup lichen interspersed in the heather. When he needed more food and firewood, he walked to the town center. In the evenings he watched the news and popular science documentaries on the laptop while it used the power harvested from the sun.

He read about the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, the largest structure the astronomers had found so far in the universe, a wall of filaments of galaxy clusters ten billion light years across. In its brightly glowing web each tiny point of light was not a star, but an entire galaxy containing billions and billions of stars, many with their own planets, moons, and asteroid fields. He tried to imagine something as large and encompassing as the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, but it was so impossible, so unimaginable, that he had to go outside on the deck and see for himself the stars that gleamed above the heath.

The next morning the neighbors were there again, as they had said they would be, the two youngest, bringing with them a barking, medium-sized dog on a leash. He told them to leave the pet outside and invited them in.

“Would you like some tea?” he said, like last time.

“Yes, please,” they said, like last time.

He padded to the kitchen and filled the kettle with water. The faucet gargled and spat a few times before it ran smooth with clear, clean water. He put the old steel on the stove and lit the blue-burning gas with a match. As he handed the visitors their cups, one of the glass containers slipped from his hands, spun upward, and started on a trajectory toward the floor. Before he had time to think, his body had already reacted, caught the cup with open palms, and handed it to them. They grinned and cheered. He smiled, fetched the kettle and the tea bags, poured the hot water into their waiting cups, and sat down on the floor in front of them.

“We plan to use the change in climate to grow barley, rye, and wheat, low-pH winter varieties, of course,” the thirty-something woman who he remembered had introduced herself as Eloise, said. “That’s what our project is about.”

“But there’s just heather and mud here,” he said.

“It’s become a lot warmer than it used to,” her companion, Mark, said. “With the right treatment and seeds, the moor will be fertile enough.”

He thought of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and how it contained everything that was possible, all that could exist in its part of the universe, connecting it with the rest of the cosmos, leaving out nothing, accepting everything.

“I will let you use the land,” he said. “For free. Just give me a little of whatever it yields.”

“That’s a deal,” Eloise said and held out her hand. “Thank you so much. We will give you our contract and copies of the research and preparations we have done on the project, as well as the monthly progress reports we make for our investors.”

“I’m looking forward to seeing them,” he said. He shook their hands one by one, a warm and sturdy pressure against his skin.

“So you’ll be staying then?” Mark, Eloise’s husband, said.

“Yes,” he said. “At least for a while.”

FROM THEIR PRONE POSITIONS BEHIND A HALF-CRUMBLED wall, Kepler gave him the wind speed, wind direction, and distance to the far edge of the dirt road a few hundred meters ahead and six floors below them. The distance differed slightly from the number he had measured himself.

“You must be joking,” he said and disputed the result to see if he could work Kepler up a little, although he knew the spotter was right and adjusted his sights accordingly.

There was plenty of time. They had set out early and he had driven Kepler hard through the burned-down, bombed-out streets, past the vehicle cadavers and the mounds of debris, to the third tallest building that was still standing on their stretch of the road, and up through the gutted, wind-shorn structure. He wondered how Kepler had made it through the intense training required by the special unit, because the man huffed and puffed even after short lengths of travel and occasionally had problems concealing himself because of the size of his body. For that reason he sometimes chose routes through the rubble he knew would tire Kepler and had smaller or narrower hiding places, but the man was so observant he always found a wall segment or pile large enough to hide behind, and had the emotional resilience not to complain to him about it. Today, Kepler had been panting the whole time, but when the spotter set the booby traps in the stairs below, it had been with calm and steady hands.

Kepler lifted his rangefinder binoculars without moving any other part of his body and repeated the distance he had measured earlier with a confidence born from careful consideration and long-time experience, not simply stubbornness or the need to be right.

“Where the hell are you pointing that thing?” he replied.

“At your dick, or I wouldn’t be able to see it,” Kepler said and laughed from deep inside his belly.

“Someday, Kepler,” he said, “you’ll make a good spouse for another man.”

“I suppose you would know,” Kepler said and laughed again.

He had been open about his sexual orientation; he wasn’t the only one in the unit, and he thought he’d be able to handle any idiot remarks. The others had been surprisingly open-minded and made fewer comments and jokes than he’d expected, although one or two kept their distance, especially during social events or nights off. Kepler had made no such move and remained outgoing and talkative with him. That annoyed him too, that Kepler was more tolerant of him than he was of Kepler.

They watched in silence. At midday the wind rose and swept down the wide river valley and through the eviscerated building, stirring up sand and dust, and rolling tiny pieces of rubble over the ledge beyond. At most patrols nothing happened. Maybe a convoy or two, civilian or coalition, passed by on the road, or a dog or a fox slouched along the ditch that separated the thoroughfare from the desiccated field behind it.

Once, a rodent-like animal three times the size of a rat, with a broad, round back and a long naked tail, appeared right after twilight. Its whiskers had been bristling, its snout groping, and the fur slick with sewage.

“What the fuck is that?” Kepler had said. “Shoot it, shoot it!”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. If the crack from the shot didn’t give them away, the flash most certainly would. He hadn’t wanted to risk that, yet it had been difficult not to put a round into the disgusting animal. When they returned to camp, Kepler told everybody about the “giant rat” which his shooter had been too kind-hearted to kill. The other teams tallied scores and competed against each other; now their teasing for making Kepler and him join the contest only increased.

In the early afternoon a police truck rumbled past on the road, kicking up a veil of dust which hung in the air for a long time. A few hours later the vehicle returned, going in the other direction.

Then an old man and a donkey pulling a small cart appeared on the dirt, moving slowly along the parallel depressions left from countless wheels. The donkey flicked its ears and swished its tail while it blinked with endless animal patience. The cart’s load was covered with worn tarp, bulging from the objects beneath it.