Kierk walks the streets in this new darkness that is occasionally scattered momentarily by headlights, as well as by the occasional hanging bulbs of light coming from backup generators. With its nemesis air-conditioning fully vanquished the heat seems to be relinquishing its hold on the city, broken by a natural breeze. The lack of light seems a balm. And it is under that calming blanket of absence that everyone comes out to this new city. An entire subnivean world is being carved out of the darkness; passageways are opened up and labyrinthine flows of pedestrians construct tunnels and junctions. It is a new world intense with childlike emotions. There is trepidation at each intersection as people pick their way across voids of total darkness, and voices become hushed, aware of those around them, yet now forced to address them directly, to focus their attention on those they are passing, to nod, to speak, to reach out to. Around Kierk the streets become small dramas: merchants give away their merchandise for free, strangers embrace, men and women who were just friends before the blackout stop in the middle of the street to kiss, phones change from information-processing devices to flashlights bobbing up and down. Unfriendly faces appear out of the darkness, startling those they approach, only to break into smiles after eye contact. As if, Kierk thought, everything could be rolled back, and when we lost power we also discarded all our postmodern irony and practiced apathy and solipsism and empty physicalism and we found again the rough sensuous core of the human.

In all the windows lining the street one by one a candle is placed. People are smoking out on fire escapes, calling to those below them. From the sidewalk he looks up to a second-story window across from him and sees a girl gazing out, probably younger than him, college-aged, illuminated by a single candle she’s holding. She opens her window to let the air in, sets down the candle on the sill, and then strips off her shirt and unclasps her bra, looking out with defiant seductiveness.

Kierk, wheeling from everything around him, grinning madly, continues on his trek into those tunnels, that subnivean world underneath the darkness, thinking—all these consciousnesses don’t need manufactured light. They make their own.