The Dark Sky Night

Part One · The Orange Sky

Rosa had been warned that the telescope was a bad idea, mostly by herself. She acquired it at the church rummage sale in March for eleven dollars and a jar of her grandmother's plum preserves, which the elderly gentleman selling it considered the more valuable half of the transaction. It was a white aluminum tube as long as her arm, with a dent beside the eyepiece and a mysterious brass screw whose purpose she never managed to identify, and it arrived in a battered cardboard carton that had originally contained a floor lamp. She carried it home through Millbrook with both arms wrapped around it, the way you carry a cat that has not consented to being carried. That evening she assembled it in the backyard, with her father observing skeptically from the kitchen step, and aimed it at the moon, and the moon came rushing down the tube at her, gray and enormous and cratered like the skin of an orange, so magnified and so close that she stumbled backward from the eyepiece and laughed out loud.

The telescope was not really intended for the moon, though. It was intended for Comet Halloran, which swung around the sun on a long, stretched orbit and returned to Earth's neighborhood once every seventy-one years, and which astronomers predicted would be at its most brilliant in the second week of October. Rosa's grandmother Lita had witnessed its previous visit, when she was seven years old and Millbrook was a handful of dairy farms, and she still possessed the drawing she had made of it in pencil, preserved flat inside her oldest cookbook. It showed a fuzzy ball suspended low over a row of fence posts, with a long, feathery tail that stood straight up from it like the plume on a ceremonial hat. Lita said she had stood in her father's cow pasture in her bare feet, in the dew, and that it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, before or since, and that she did not expect to see it twice. Rosa intended to prove her wrong.

The difficulty was that Lita's father's cow pasture no longer existed. Since the spring it had been the town's new athletic field, level and green and fenced, with six steel masts around the perimeter that each supported a cluster of floodlights the size of a kitchen table. The youth soccer league practiced beneath them every weeknight, the lights blazed from sunset until ten o'clock, and the entire western sky above Millbrook had acquired a dull, luminous orange glow, like the interior of a pumpkin lantern. The new streetlights on Rosa's road were hardly better, white and harsh and shining sideways into everything, including her eyes. The comet would appear low on the western horizon after sunset, directly above the field. Rosa contemplated that orange sky from the back step and understood, with a sinking sensation, that the brightest location in Millbrook was now the precise spot where her grandmother had once watched the stars.

She did what she always did with a problem, which was to research it until it shrank. The library's astronomy handbook explained that the glow had a name, light pollution, and that it occurred because light from the ground scattered off dust and microscopic droplets of moisture in the atmosphere, until the whole sky shone faintly and swallowed anything dimmer than itself. Brilliant stars and planets could penetrate it, but faint, diffuse objects, such as distant galaxies, glowing clouds of gas, and comets, could not. The handbook also stated that human eyes required twenty or thirty minutes of genuine darkness to adjust completely, while the pupils widened and the light-sensing cells at the back of the eye gradually built up their sensitivity, and that a single glance at a white light could undo most of that patient work in seconds. Red light was far less damaging, which was why astronomers consulted their charts by red flashlights. Rosa copied all of this into her notebook, and then she devised a plan.

The plan was a cardboard hood. She constructed it from the lamp carton, two cereal boxes, and an unreasonable quantity of tape, a sort of tunnel that fitted over the front of the telescope and intercepted the light leaking in from the sides, and on a clear Tuesday she transported everything into the deepest shadow in the yard, behind the garden shed, with her father perched on an upturned bucket beside her for company. Then she waited. Every few minutes she switched on her phone to consult the star chart, and every time she did, the screen flared white in her face, like a door opening onto a brilliantly illuminated room. After an hour she had located two planets, a handful of feeble stars, and a tremendous amount of orange. The hood excluded the glare from the street, but it was powerless against the light in the sky itself, which was everywhere, glowing softly behind every star she aimed at.

She went to bed furious, mostly with herself, because she had recorded the warning about white light and then ignored it for an entire hour. In the morning her father discovered her at the kitchen table, glaring at the cardboard hood as though it had personally insulted her. He listened to the complete account, and then he observed that a hood could not extinguish a floodlight, but that the people who had switched the floodlights on in the first place assembled at the town hall on the first Monday of every month, and that any resident of Millbrook, of any age whatsoever, was permitted to stand up and address them for three minutes. Rosa reminded him that she was thirteen. Her father said that he had noticed. He offered to drive her there and sit in the second row for moral support, but he said that the three minutes would have to be entirely hers.

Part Two · Three Minutes

She devoted the following week to deciding precisely what she wanted, which turned out to be considerably harder than wanting it. She did not want the field closed, or the masts dismantled, or the soccer teams dismissed early; she liked the field, and so did practically everyone she knew. What she wanted was a single hour. On the Thursday of the comet's closest approach, from nine until ten o'clock, she wanted the floodlights extinguished, and, if the council happened to be feeling generous, the streetlights on the western side as well. She also needed to establish exactly who was using the field at that hour, so for three consecutive evenings she stationed herself at her bedroom window with a notebook and a wristwatch. On all three nights the final team collected its equipment by half past eight, and the floodlights continued blazing over the deserted grass for another ninety minutes, bright enough to read by, with nobody there to read.

The town hall smelled of floor polish and stale coffee, and the council sat behind a long table beneath a framed photograph of Millbrook in a blizzard. Rosa's name was eleventh on the agenda, after a man who demanded a speed bump and a woman who emphatically did not. When she finally stood up, her notebook trembled so visibly that she had to set it down on the chair. She explained about the comet, and her grandmother, and the twenty minutes, and the orange sky, and she requested one hour on one Thursday evening. Then a council member named Mr. Pruitt leaned forward and remarked that the town had invested a considerable sum in those lights so that children would have somewhere safe to play, and that he was not inclined to switch them off for the sake of a telescope. At the end of the front row, the groundskeeper who maintained the field folded his arms.

Rosa had anticipated that somebody would refuse, but she had not anticipated how much it would resemble being sent to her room. For a long moment she could not remember a single sentence in her notebook. Then she retrieved it from the chair, turned to the page documenting the three evenings, and read the times aloud: eight twenty-five, eight thirty, eight twenty. She said that she was not asking anybody to stop playing. She was asking for the lights to be switched off over a field that was already empty, and she added, as diplomatically as she could manage, that she was fairly confident nobody required floodlights to supervise the grass. Somebody at the back of the hall laughed out loud. Mr. Pruitt did not laugh, but he swiveled around in his chair and inquired of the groundskeeper, a broad, weathered man named Mr. Varga, whether her figures were accurate.

Mr. Varga said that they were perfectly accurate, and that the situation irritated him every single night. The lights operated on an automatic timer that a company from the city had programmed for the entire season, nobody had ever provided him with the key to adjust it, and he had been receiving complaints about the glare from the residents of Linden Road since April, as though he had personally erected the masts himself. He said he would gladly switch everything off for an hour, and that he would not object to glimpsing this comet, provided it did not involve a tremendous amount of fuss. Mr. Pruitt conceded that one hour seemed reasonable under the circumstances, and that the western streetlights could probably survive without one hour as well. The vote was four to one. The dissenter was the woman who opposed the speed bump, who appeared to vote against everything on principle.

Part Three · Lights Out

Rosa prepared for Thursday as though it were a final examination. She stretched red cellophane from the craft drawer over every flashlight in the house and secured it with rubber bands, and then, because her father predicted that half of Millbrook might materialize, she manufactured thirty more from cardboard tubes and the leftover cellophane, so that by evening the whole house glowed like a submarine in a horror movie. She painted a sign for the gate in meticulous capitals, instructing everybody to use only red lights and to wait twenty minutes. On Thursday the sky was flawlessly clear, and by nine o'clock there were more people on the athletic field than she had ever seen at a soccer game, standing on the grass in heavy coats with folding chairs, blankets, thermoses, and small children who had been promised something without being informed what. Lita arrived on Rosa's father's arm, bundled in two scarves, with the pencil drawing in her pocket. Mr. Varga stood beside the gray electrical cabinet with a key dangling on a string.

At nine o'clock precisely he turned the key. The floodlights did not go out instantaneously; they faded from white to yellow to a dull, smoldering red, like the embers of a campfire, and then they were gone, and along the western side of town the streetlights went dark one after another in a long procession. A hundred people said ooh simultaneously, at nothing, at the darkness itself. Then the waiting began, and it was not easy. Rosa had warned everybody that the first few minutes would be disappointing, and they were, because the sky looked black and practically empty, as though somebody had wiped it clean. But at five minutes there were additional stars, and at ten minutes more again, and at fifteen the whole pale smoke of the Milky Way emerged from the darkness like breath on a frosty window.

Then, at seventeen minutes, a long gray cloud slid up out of the west and began crawling across the sky, swallowing the stars one by one, and a hundred people groaned in the dark. Rosa stood perfectly still with her fists clenched inside her pockets. The comet would set in less than an hour. Mr. Varga checked his watch, and so did everyone else, and nobody said what they were all thinking, which was that Rosa had lit up an entire town's hope and was about to be rained out by a cloud. The cloud took a very long time. It hung over the comet's patch of sky like a lid. Then the wind, which had been asleep all evening, woke up and shoved it east, and the stars poured back, and somebody at the back started clapping at the weather.

At twenty minutes, Rosa put her eye to the telescope and then withdrew it again, because she did not need it, and a hundred people in red cellophane light turned like a field of sunflowers to look. The comet was right there above the fence posts, low in the west, a soft gray smudge with a tail that rose vertically from it into the sky, faint and long and feathery at the edges. It pointed upward, away from the place where the sun had set an hour earlier, which was exactly what a comet's tail always did, because sunlight and a stream of particles flowing outward from the sun pushed the dust and gas away from the sun, instead of letting it trail behind like smoke. It was identical to the pencil drawing. Lita did not say anything at all for a long time, and then she took Rosa's hand and held it, and Rosa felt her grandmother's fingers tremble very slightly, and then grow still.

There was a line at the telescope for the entire hour, and Rosa supervised it, aiming and adjusting as the comet sank gradually toward the trees. Mr. Varga came near the end, after everybody else, and bent down to the eyepiece with his hands clasped behind his back, as though he were afraid of breaking something. He looked for a long time, and when he straightened up he announced, to nobody in particular, that it had been a tremendous amount of fuss after all, and then he asked whether the comet would still be visible on Friday. At ten o'clock the floodlights hummed and brightened over the empty grass, and a hundred people blinked and groaned and laughed. The following week, however, the lights began switching off every night at a quarter to nine, because Mr. Varga had kept the key. Rosa examined the darker sky from the back step and grinned, because she knew exactly what was behind it.