Apocalypse Last Night
Hurricane Gustav has been flinging his castoff clouds our way, and they have been doing the most spectacular things to the light. I find myself staring at the sky more often than not this week, and must confess that I’ve almost gotten myself into a few wrecks because of it. The sunsets have been made three dimensional, even tangible, being brought out of the sky and down into the very air around us by the low-hanging clouds and attendant moisture hanging thick in the atmosphere. There’s something almost mystical about the way in which these stormy sunsets make the whole world blush.
And then, the other day I saw a celestial event straight out of Fantasia. A heavy cloak of deep black cloud reached across the sky-literally, reached out with wispy, advancing arms that seemed to grasp at the patches of more innocuous clouds and untainted blue sky and engulf them. I swear I could hear “A Night On Bald Mountain” playing as it steadily swallowed the horizon.
Then yesterday, formidable islands of towering grey and purple clouds drifted amid the August afternoon sun, creating a perfect shower of sunbeams. If any of you have ever seen a Protestant depiction of God speaking to one of his prophets from the heavens above, it looked just like that. A petulant little cloud insisted on raining stormily despite its being surrounded by blazing sunlight, and the result was dramatic streaks of alternating brilliant white and hazy grey.
Probably because of my recent obsession with the sky, last night I had one of my vivid, bizarre dreams that always leaves such a lasting impression on me. I was inside my house (although it wasn’t any house that I’ve ever lived in in real life) doing something unremarkable, perhaps reading a book, when my father came in.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“You need to come outside with us. The world is ending soon and you should spend the final moments of your life with your family,” he replied, somewhat more placidly than the situation called for.
I followed him outside to the lawn, where the rest of my family was sitting. We were on the peak of a low, broad hill that looked out onto a wide sky. Hanging low in it was a too-big sun that had the charred appearance of a dying ember. Its outer layers had peeled away like the skin of an orange and coiled like a fiery helix from the north end of the sky to the south, lying parallel to and just above the horizon. The atmosphere was a terrible red, and I felt a stab of fear in the pit of my stomach as I surveyed the phenomenon and wondered how long it would take for the world to succumb to its inevitable fate. But then I relaxed and smiled as I thought, “Thank god! This means I won’t have to get Alzheimer’s like my grandparents!”