“I can do that. Thank you for your patience. Truly.”

“Okay, Kierk. Okay.”

So Kierk had ended up in this bar, scribbling away, trying to make some kind of progress he could report. He wondered if Karen somehow knew, unconsciously, in some animal way, that he had written the blog post dismissing all those theories.

Around him in the bar gather young professionals his age, and he’s uncomfortable until remembering he’s one of them now; that he fits in with his dress shirt and haircut and discerning look and that his form had filled out and he now looks closer to athletic than starving. He orders another glass of wine and dips at the spots on his table with a napkin.

Then the lights begin to flicker and surge. There are gasps and oohs and aahs. The singer stops. Everyone is craning their necks up. The lights go out.

For a brief second the world is only language. Remarks and cries and laughter, the sound of women grabbing and shrieking for their partner, and then a single bright emergency light blinks on near the door. The manager stands on the little stage and announces that it’s just a power outage and that there’s been public announcements that this could happen sometime soon, and there is nothing to worry about. And with that the room breaks into whooping, and calls for more drinks and food, and celebration.

The performer, after a look of wonder, begins to play again, now without a microphone, and the whole room has been set by the single bright emergency light to a deep chiaroscuro, the bar suddenly overcrowded with both shadows and people clapping, standing up, hugging one another, draining their drinks. Under the emergency light the back wall has become another bar populated by their outlines. People become more open and vulnerable. A young woman who is also sitting alone glances over at Kierk, smiling. Patrons are standing, leaving the bar, they want to see what’s going on in the streets, and Kierk, after smiling back an apologetic goodbye at the girl looking his way, sets some cash down and grabs his notebook and follows the wanderers outside. They spill out the entrance onto the street, entering the unlit obelisks of buildings and primitive airs of a Manhattan without power. Block upon block are in blackness, and although Kierk can see, peering uptown, the great lit beacon of midtown, everything else is dark except for the bright sweeps of cars, one of which bears down on the crowd and illuminates all of their smiling faces briefly in passing, and Kierk, wheeling on the sidewalk, separates himself from the others and begins to wander into this astrolabe for giants, this Stonehenge.