“My last sip,” Salomón said sadly. He opened the window, crunched the empty can in his hand and was about to throw it out onto the road.

“Don’t be a brute,” Fernanda said, grabbing his arm.

Night was falling, grey and rainy. She was driving the small Fiat at a reckless speed; he was sitting next her, pokerfaced.

“I need you to stop at the first store,” Salomón said and again pressed on the can, crunching it.

“Please stop making that noise,”’ Fernanda said.

“What noise?” he asked, crunching the can a third time.

Fernanda looked at him, furious.

“Stop the car!” Salomón said. “There’s a store.”

She continued driving at the same speed.

“Why do you want me to stop?”

“I need to buy beer,” Salomón said. And he pointed to the store, which was already behind them.

“I have no intention of stopping until we get to the city,” Fernanda said.

He crunched the can again; he had bought that beer at the border, and they wouldn’t be in the city for at least another hour.

“What, you think I’m about to go thirsty the rest of the way?”

“I told you, I’m not stopping—”

“Why? What right do you have?”

Fernanda didn’t answer; concentrating on the road, both hands on the steering wheel, her jaw tightened as he crunched the can yet again.

“Stop making that noise, once and for all!”

“I need a beer…”

“Don’t you think you’ve drunk enough?” she asked.

“No.”

The car picked up speed as it went downhill. She didn’t brake.

“You didn’t even have the decency to call and say you wouldn’t come to the meeting,” she said. “If the board finds out, you’ll be in deep shit.”

Salomón curled up in his seat, crunched the can one last time with gusto, then tossed it on the floor of the car. He felt deeply reluctant to keep trying to get Fernanda to stop; he knew her to be pigheaded, bossy, and it was her car, after all, so he resigned himself to the idea that he wouldn’t have another beer until they reached the city.

“This trip was your idea, not mine,” he said.

She turned to look at him, not believing her ears. She was on the verge of exploding in anger, but a slow-moving bus distracted her.

“We came as representatives of the board to establish relations with a friendly company—”

“Don’t lie,” Salomón said, interrupting her. “That’s the excuse you cooked up. We came to spend our first night together, but I met my friends at that bar, got drunk, and ruined the little honeymoon you’d planned…”

That’s what had happened the night before; he’d gone to a friend’s house to keep partying, didn’t sleep at the hotel, stayed on a strange couch and didn’t wake up till noon, after the meeting—attended only by Fernanda and the two representatives from the other company—was already over, and with a horrible hangover.

“You’re stupid, Salomón,” she said bitterly. “Stupid and ugly.”

He looked at her.

“Your husband is stupider,” he said, mumbling.

She made a risky maneuver to pass a van. It was starting to get dark. Because of the constant rain visibility was sometimes poor, in spite of the windshield wipers working at full tilt.

“A doctor I once knew was killed on this road,” Salomón said. “Splattered: they had to tow his car to the city to get his body out. He was a madman; he drove just like you.”      

She pretended not to hear. She opened the glove compartment, took out a tissue and started wiping the windshield.

“Want help?” he asked.

Fernanda kept wiping and didn’t answer.

“It’s grease. And it’s on the outside. You’re not doing any good,” Salomón said.

She kept trying, but the windshield stayed the same, with a smeared patch that accentuated the oncoming headlights.

“Are you always like this?” she asked, as if referring to an embarrassing defect.

Salomón, now fully sober, was concentrating on the road; he’d slept off his hangover all the way to the border.

“We’ve been working together for three months,” he said. “You should know me by now.”

“I just never realized you were this stupid and this ugly…” she mumbled in a different tone, this time laced with cruelty and glee.

She was less visible now in the semi-darkness, but Salomón remembered the bristles growing out of the mole on her chin, her sagging breasts, her skinny legs—deathly pale and poorly shaved. How had he ever thought he could go to bed with something like that?

“At noon today, when I got up, I looked at the lovely patio at my friend’s house, and I had a very strange sensation,” he said. “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. It was a very clear perception that life was escaping, that my vital energy was pouring out of me through a hole in my chest, like when you leave a faucet running, or more like some ethereal liquid was slowly but steadily dripping out of me. Have you ever felt anything like that?”

Fernanda looked at him with contempt and said:

“I’m not a drunk. I don’t get those kinds of hangovers.”

An oncoming car blinded them with its high beams.

Salomón’s eyes wandered into the thick darkness beyond the highway. He wanted to be alone. It was futile—meaningless—to exchange words with this woman; he decided to remain silent until they reached the city, until he had another beer.

But Fernanda insisted:

“What are you going to do when the director finds out you didn’t go to the meeting?”

Salomón, his thoughts elsewhere, barely shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

She braked abruptly; the traffic had slowed way down. Cars were barely inching along.

“Must be an accident … because of the downpour,” Fernanda said.

Indeed, two cars had crashed badly. They were already on the side of the road, but there were still tow trucks, police, and curious onlookers.

“How horrible,” she said. “I hope nobody was killed.”

Salomón sat with his hands folded on his lap, deep in thought; he looked at the crashed cars with no curiosity whatsoever, his thoughts still far away.

“What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you talking?” Fernanda asked, as she accelerated back to her cruising speed.

He stared at the long concrete wall, reinforced with watchtowers and barbed wire, that surrounded the artillery compound.

“You’re worried, aren’t you? Those two executives I met with are going talk to the director and mention your absence. And when he asks me, I’ll tell him that you didn’t go because you got wasted the night before…”

Across the road under powerful floodlights Salomón saw teams of labourers building what, according to a sign, was a new industrial park.

Fernanda turned to look at him—insistent, inquisitorial.

“Don’t worry,” she said, now in a conciliatory tone, as if she’d just been joking. “That’s not true. I’ll think up some excuse for the director: that you got sick, that dinner didn’t sit well with you…”

Then she placed her hand on Salomón’s, a caressing gesture to prove that she’d already forgiven him, that there would be another opportunity for them to spend the night together.

The rain had let up.

Salomón moved his hand to point to the windshield wipers, which were squeaking against the glass. Fernanda moved hers back to the steering wheel, squinted at him and clenched her jaw. Then she turned off the wipers.

The road turned into a straight, four-lane highway, bordered by old, magnificent elephant-ear trees, a road that boded well for delusions and ruthlessness.

“You must be sick in your soul to go on binges like this,” she said derisively.

He contemplated the strangely shaped shadows the trees cast over the highway.

“What’s with you? Why don’t you want to talk?” she asked, now a bit unsettled.

Right at that moment the sky was suddenly ablaze with a white, blinding light, followed immediately by a dreadful roar, like a contingent of turbines flying at incredible speed right over the hood of the Fiat. Fernanda lost control: the car skidded, spun around three times and came to a stop on the shoulder, facing the direction they were driving, the engine off.

“What was that?” she stammered; she was shaking uncontrollably.

Salomón was in shock, hanging onto the roof handle with both hands.

“Salomón! What was that?!” she shouted hysterically, her hands clutching the steering wheel.

He opened his eyes as wide as possible, not letting go of the handle. He told her to start the engine and drive.

Two cars passed them at very high speed.

Fernanda tried to start the engine, without success.

“This is all we needed,” she said. Her hands were still shaking; she pumped on the gas peddle desperately.

“Don’t flood it,” he said.

But the engine finally started. They joined the highway.

“It sounded like an airplane,” she whispered.

She was driving slowly, in the right lane, as if fearing a new apparition.

“Airplanes don’t give off that much light,” Salomón said.

They both looked suspiciously up at the sky, again and again, but all they found between the branches of the elephant-ear trees was darkness.

 “You think it was a UFO?” she asked.

“Too bad it didn’t stop to carry you off,” Salomón said, bitter because he realized that he’d broken his vow not to ever talk to this woman again.

“Don’t joke,” Fernanda said. “Something serious has just happened to us; there’s got to be an explanation.”

They reached the interchange where the highway started to climb toward the city and the traffic became heavier.

Salomón was the first to see the glow in the distance, along the ridge of the mountain, as if the city was in flames on the other side.

“Look,” he said, pointing.

The glow wasn’t fire; it was the same light that had startled them on the highway.

“It can’t be,” Fernanda said, slowing down even more.

The glow grew brighter, quickly lighting up half the sky, and it was moving toward them , unstoppable, as blinding as a bare light bulb. The traffic slowed to a snail’s pace until it came to a full stop. That was when the flood of light reached them and the sky turned a dazzling white.

Fernanda was leaning against the steering wheel, aghast. Salomón turned to the couple in the car next to them: they were equally terrified, stunned.

Then, that same roar of turbine engines flooded the brightly lit sky. It swept through and left a sinister silence in its wake.

Except this time the light remained.

Salomón opened the car door. He got out, carefully, and tried to look at the sky to figure out what was going on, but the light was painful, unbearable. The driver in the car in front of them also got out, dumbstruck. Many people, in shock and distress, also emerged from their cars, cautiously, most of them shielding their eyes from the glare.

“What’s going on?” the driver next to them said.

Salomón shook his head from side to side to indicate his ignorance. Then he got back in the car. Fernanda was still in the same position, paralyzed.

“Please, tell me I’m dreaming,” she begged, not budging.

Salomón turned on the radio and tried to find a station, but there was only static.

“We’re not dreaming,” he said. “I wish we were. My watch says that at this moment it is seven thirty-two on Wednesday night, August 9, 1995.”

Outside, fear had taken hold, but instead of shouting and crying, everybody was returning to their cars, humbled and dazed by the density of the silence, the inexplicable light.

“It’s the end of the world,” Fernanda whispered.

The traffic started moving slowly, in an orderly procession. The drivers glanced at each other from time to time, like the faithful at an unknown ritual.

Salomón tried to see beyond the weeds along the highway.

“Maybe at this very moment a nuclear war is taking place and that’s why the sky is lit up so brightly,” Fernanda said, stammering, as if she’d just discovered the real cause of the light.

The procession was speeding up. The drivers grew used to the light and were eager to get home.

“We’ll be in the city soon,” she said. “My little boy must be terrified.”

Salomón noted that in spite of the powerful light, it wasn’t any hotter; on the contrary, it seemed to have gotten noticeably colder.

“Maybe we’re in the eye of something like a hurricane,” Salomón said, “because it’s so quiet and cold.”

She looked at him disapprovingly, disappointed:

“You’re stupid,” she mumbled. “This has nothing to do with a hurricane.”

For a second time Salomón swore he wouldn’t speak to her anymore, no matter what happened. And he wanted a beer more than ever.

A sign indicated that they were twenty kilometres from the city. As they advanced, they started to see people outside their houses, along the sides of the road, frightened, trying to look up at the sky; there were groups of people here and there—kneeling, praying.

“You’ve got to come with me to my house,” Fernanda said. “I’m scared to go there alone.

As they entered the city they saw that the traffic lights weren’t working. But there was no chaos: drivers politely took turns, as if fearing that any act of aggression would be punished immediately in some unknown way.

Salomón’s apartment was a few blocks from the main road they were on. He wouldn’t accompany her home; instead, he would get out at the next corner, walk to his apartment, stop at Don Pancho’s corner store to buy a six-pack, then shut himself up to drink, with nobody to bother him because he was fortunate enough to live alone. And that’s just what he did.

“What are you doing?” Fernanda said as he opened the door; she wanted to grab his arm, but he was already outside, walking away as quickly as possible. It was impossible for her to follow him: the street he disappeared down was one way in the opposite direction.

He found the neighbourhood guys crowded into Don Pancho’s store. Nervously drinking beer and afraid to be exposed to that artificial light, they were discussing the most outrageous ideas, trying to find some explanation for the phenomenon.

“There’s no electricity, no means of communication. We’re cut off from the world,” Don Pancho said as he opened the refrigerator with the beer.

One of the guys suggested that the planet had changed its axis, and what used to be the Tropics was now the North Pole; another said—just like Fernanda—that it was the start of a nuclear war, but the bombs were exploding so far away that the only thing that reached them was the light.

“But what about the roaring sound?” Don Pancho asked.

Salomón was exhausted, sick and tired of listening to nonsense; he paid, grabbed the six-pack, opened one, poured some down his throat right then and there, said goodbye to Don Pancho and the gang and walked to his apartment.

The light in the sky was still as intense as before.

Salomón ran up the stairs, taking two at a time; some of his neighbours were in the hallways, talking. He entered his apartment, put the beer in the refrigerator, closed the curtains, and collapsed onto the living room sofa. The only thing he wanted to do was rest, relax, forget the whole confusing day. Good thing Fernanda didn’t know where he lived, and good thing the telephones weren’t working. He looked at his watch: it was still seven thirty-two. He finished the beer in one gulp. Tomorrow would be another day; he didn’t give a damn about Fernanda’s bullshit, or what she might tell the company’s director, or that inexplicable light. He just wanted sleep, and peace.

Author photo credit to Iván Giménez.

Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador. For two decades he worked as an editor in news agencies, magazines, and newspapers in Mexico, Guatemala, and his own country. As a fiction writer, he has been granted residencies by the Frankfurt Book Fair, the City of Asylum program in Pittsburgh, and the University of Tokyo in collaboration with the Japan Foundation. He has taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Iowa, and been awarded the Premio Nacional de Novela and the Premio Iberoamericano de Narrativa Manuel Rojas.

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