The vote had been Nora's idea, which meant the city's anger had somewhere to land.
She had gathered the signatures herself, over eighteen months, clipboard in hand on street corners and outside train stations in the wind. Not a politician or a scientist, but a woman who had grown up somewhere dark, under skies dense enough with stars they seemed structural, and who had moved to the city at twenty-two and had been quietly grieving the sky ever since. She was forty-one. She had been grieving for nineteen years.
The measure passed by eleven thousand votes. The city would extinguish all non-essential artificial light for one year, beginning the first of November. Emergency services, hospitals, traffic signals: exempt. Everything else: off.
The night it started, Nora was on her roof.
She had expected something immediate, the sky opening up as if it had been waiting. She had told herself she had no expectations, and she had been lying.
The first hour was disorienting. The streetlights below went dark at 7pm, and the city went gray rather than black. Cloud cover. The ambient glow of the exempt lights, hospitals and traffic signals, still pooling faintly at the horizon. She could see her neighbors' windows, unlit. She could see, for the first time, how many windows there were.
The clouds moved through sometime after midnight.
She had brought a blanket and a thermos and her old star chart, the one she had carried from her childhood home in a tube and never managed to throw away. She lay down on it.
The Milky Way was there, dimmer than she remembered, the city's residual glow still washing the horizon, but there: a smear of deeper density across the dark, a place where the stars became too numerous to separate. She had forgotten it was a texture as much as an image. Something you could almost feel.
She stayed on the roof until 4am.
What she noticed, besides the sky, was the sound. The city made a different noise in the dark. The ordinary hum of commercial lighting was not something she had ever consciously heard, but its absence changed the register of everything: footsteps were louder, voices carried, the sound of the river three blocks east was audible in a way she was certain it had not been the night before. A man on the street below was singing softly to himself, apparently unaware of how far sound traveled in the dark. An old song. She did not recognize it.
She had not thought about what people would add back. Through darkened windows she could see, here and there, the blue-white flicker of screens, laptops and phones permitted under the measure, and beyond them, in apartments further from the street, candles. More candles than she had expected. Small flames up and down her block, the warm light of people who had done what people have always done in the dark, which is to make a smaller, more honest light of their own.
She had been thinking about darkness as subtraction. She had not thought about what people would add back.
She rolled up the star chart and went inside before dawn.
She did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table and watched the dark.