The City That Forgot to Sleep

At two in the morning the building across the road still had four windows lit, and Rea had learned to read them the way sailors read weather. Two lights meant somebody was finishing. Four meant somebody had given up on finishing and was simply staying.

She worked nights because the days had become an argument she kept losing. In the dark the city made a different kind of sense: fewer people, more evidence. A delivery bicycle abandoned against a shutter. A man in a good suit eating from a paper carton on the steps of a bank, entirely at peace.

The umbrella arrived on a Thursday. Someone had left it hooked over the railing outside her office, black, absurdly well made, with a handle worn smooth by a hand that was not hers. She kept it for eight days before she started using it, and by then it had become a kind of company.

On the ninth night the skyline went out. Not all at once — that would have been frightening. It happened in floors, from the top down, the way water leaves a bath, and it took twelve minutes. Rea stood in the street with a stranger's umbrella over her head, though it was not raining, and watched a hundred thousand people be reminded simultaneously that the light had always been optional.

In the dark, briefly, everybody looked at each other. A woman laughed. Somebody's radio played. A man asked if she was all right and meant it, which in eleven years in that city had never once happened to her at noon.

Then the power returned, floor by floor, and the city put its face back on. Rea folded the umbrella. She went back inside. She has kept it since, unused, in the corner of a room she rarely enters, because some objects are only useful once and then become proof.