He went to the window, the big one that looked out over the cul-de-sac on which he lived. The sun was just breaking up the pre-dawn sky but hadn’t come over the horizon. Nearly all the houses were dark, except for the occasional porch light still on from the night before. As Norman watched, the mercury-vapor streetlights winked out as they did every morning, their sensors picking up that they were no longer needed. He looked up at the sky, where the sun’s light still reflected off the surface of Venus. As he watched, the first fuzzy edge of the sun’s corona crested the trees on the far side of the street and Norman stared into its wavering hot edge until his eyes watered and he had to turn away.
He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what it all meant for the world, but it was impossible. The planet was too vast, its systems too complex, and his mind couldn’t hold it all. Everything, everything was about to become local. All that would matter in his life was what would happen on this block, what would become of these people and the ones they loved, what choices they would make, and the unpredictable skein of consequences that would be spun from them.
Norman closed his eyes and tried to prepare for the coming storm.
2.
Aurora
11:43 a.m.
Aubrey Wheeler looked down at the chipped paint on her fingernails and wondered when the last time was that she considered a man attractive. It certainly wasn’t now, and it definitely wasn’t either of these two guys.
The conference had been in Kansas City, but not even the good Kansas City, whichever one that was supposed to be. Whichever-the-hell Kansas City she’d had to go to was five hundred inconvenient miles from Aurora, a distance that translated into either an eight-hour drive for a six-hour conference or an overcrowded flight on a shit airline. She’d chosen the flight, on a no-frills carrier that didn’t assign seats, and after a free-for-all at boarding, she’d ended up in a middle spot between two ex-high-school-football types whose concept of personal space was that her space was for their person. Having no intention of staying stressed and angry for the whole ninety-minute flight, Aubrey had popped a Xanax far too early in the day and was now driving home from O’Hare foggy, crabby, and vaguely depressed.
Actually, her depression wasn’t as vague as all that; it was quite focused and specific, because she was headed back into the lion’s den. She remembered, barely, the days when business travel used to leave her somewhat invigorated and refreshed—days when it had been a chance to get away from Scott and Rusty for a decent stretch, to sleep better and longer and read and eat whatever she wanted, without worrying about whether anybody else would want to eat it too. But those days were long gone. Gone in the dust of COVID, gone along with her peace of mind, the better part of her thirties, and her marriage.
Before the pandemic, the conference business she’d started and run had done fairly well. But overnight, the number of people who were willing to sit in a windowless air-conditioned room with five hundred strangers dropped to nothing, and Aubrey was forced to contemplate bankruptcy within months. She’d furloughed the entire staff. But three nights later she awoke in the night with a Genius Idea, a revelation that was not-so-slowly dawning on the rest of the business community at the same time. Namely, why do I ever have to leave my house again? She’d pivoted the company to an all-Zoom platform in seventy-two hours and hired back half the staff within a week. By the end of the first year in their new configuration, they had nearly as many employees as in their heady pre-plague days. And more clients than ever, who were willing to pay as much or more for the convenience of attending a conference from the comfort of home. Sure, some morons had eventually insisted on holding in-person conferences again, hence her deeply resented trip to Missouri-or-Kansas, but ninety percent of their work was now online, and profitable. She’d even managed to resume pulling a decent salary, which was an enormous relief to Rusty, as he was a shit and a vampire.
Were those words cheap slurs? You bet! But they were also accurate descriptors that summed up the two dominant aspects of her ex-husband’s personality. Rusty was a “shit,” used in the classical sense of “waste matter expelled from the body,” because he had been an enormous misuse of her time, resources, and love. And as of two years ago, she had most definitely expelled him from her body. He could also be accurately described as a “vampire,” if one took the word to mean “a person who preys ruthlessly on others.” You could even go so far as to call its primary definition—“a monstrous bloodsucker”—appropriate, because Rusty had drained the spirit and energy out of Aubrey ’til she felt hollow, like an empty suit coat splayed open on the floor.