War of the Worlds
The first lightning bolt struck Troyeshchyna, a sprawling residential neighborhood of Kyiv, close to midnight. The night owl that I am, I saw them clearly: distant lilac-colored flashes shooting from low-hanging clouds illuminated by city lights. The distant rumble of thunder did not reach my neighborhood of Obolon. Shortly before dawn I woke up from the sound of a violent wind and noiseless flashes a short distance away, in the fields beyond the perimeter of my district, which is skirted by Northern Street.
The night air was sweltering, so I headed to the fridge for a bottle of water. The power in my apartment and maybe the whole building was out. I couldn’t tell for sure because of the early morning hour: the streetlights had been extinguished and my neighbors’ windows were still dark. Back in the bedroom I saw my Yashka, a phlegmatic and overweight black-and-white tomcat, sitting in the center of the room, staring at the checkered curtains. After every flash he gave a sad, wolf-like howl.
“Go to sleep!” I ordered him, but he likes to have his way: after taking a few steps toward the bed, he began meowing more insistently. Thankfully, the flashes stopped abruptly and so did the wind. The cat calmed down quickly and settled into a satisfied murmuring. Succumbing to sleep, I recalled that I never finished that article about the new Hollywood science-fiction blockbuster. Knowing that power might not be restored for God knows how long, I mentally braced for a crash effort to finish it in the morning. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about these kinds of movies, but I still have to spend an awful lot of time writing about them. As soon as some movie filled with special effects hits the screens, movie goers become ecstatic, money flows in like a river, and the cinemas are packed. Like it or not, you have to come up with a review.
Man and cat slept soundly. In a few more hours the gigantic muzzles of heretofore unseen machines will be digging through the soil and breaking up the asphalt and concrete all across Kyiv, shining their unnaturally bright, dented surfaces. One after another they will rise on their spidery legs, producing chilling, humming noises. Merciless, deadly rays will sear through the roofs of fancy new cottages in the suburbs along the Dnipro and in central Kyiv. Chestnuts on Khreshchatyk Boulevard will catch on fire, and their ashes will settle on the shiny posh cars and their horror-stricken owners. The column in Independence Square, like an awkward oversized fork stolen from an alien’s cutlery set, will topple over, breaking into pieces in a cloud of dust and smoke. The sky will be filled with thousands of screams, the kind you hear on carnival rides. Yes, carnival rides — the ones now melting in the Hydropark and getting churned up in the sand.
The cat and the man each had a dream. The cat was escaping from a silent gray dog that was chasing him through a straight moonlit street without a single tree. I saw a strange dream: in a different world and in a different time, a producer with a German or Jewish name shoots a movie that begins with a news report about an electromagnetic cataclysm in Ukraine, which, according to an attractive young mulatto presenter, is home to 48 million people. In my dream I think: “What nonsense. Not any longer.”
