Dark Sky

In 2017, my husband Nathan and I were fanatical in our search for real and complete darkness. In our apartment in downtown Salt Lake City––the second apartment we shared as a young, married couple in our twenties––we shut the blinds tight against the streetlamps and headlights outside. We placed black electrical tape over the blinking lights of the wifi router, the smoke detectors. We griped about the glowing numbers on the microwave and oven, threw away our bedside clock. In the absence of blackout curtains, we cut a plank of cardboard to fit inside our bedroom window. Each night we wedged the cardboard up against the glass and each morning removed it to let the daylight in again.

In Powell, Wyoming at 4:45am on Saturday, August 26, 2017, David Williamson called 911. This was the second time dispatchers had heard from the Williamsons in twenty-four hours. “Wife is dead,” David said on the phone. “Send the cops.” On the horizon, nothing. The sun would not rise for another hour and forty-five minutes.

I am writing a story. Or rather, two stories. This writing is not so much a recounting as a construction. What to say when and where? Don’t misunderstand me: this does not make it untrue. As I write, the room goes from dark to light, the transition so subtle it’s hardly noticeable. And even when I notice, I do not leave the bed.

Without darkness, circadian rhythms are disturbed. Studies show that consistent exposure to artificial light at night increases risk for weight gain, depression, sleep disorders, diabetes, and cancer. And that’s just in humans. Animal populations, too, are adversely affected. In 2017, living in Salt Lake, Nathan was a graduate student studying urban planning at the University of Utah. He specialized in environmental planning, the design of more eco-friendly cities. For his master’s thesis, he stumbled upon a distinct and emerging niche of conservationism: the preservation of darkness. Nathan––rail thin with a big smile and straight, dark hair that was beginning to gray already––walked to campus each morning. I began taking the train south to another university to begin my own master’s degree. On Friday nights, we walked twenty minutes to the movie theatre downtown. On our walk home, we passed through a dark night, interrupted occasionally by glaring streetlights above.

Darkness is not symbolic. Resist reading it as such.

“Wife is dead. Send the cops.” When the police arrived, David Williamson was in the dark on the porch. His home sat outside the city limits but remained under the jurisdiction of the Powell police. Here, there were no streetlights. Only homes and fields. To the east, Williamson’s neighbor stockpiled old cars, over a dozen of them parked on the grass. To the west, another neighbor kept a well-manicured lawn on a large corner lot. It was clear and windless and, though the sun had not risen, the moon had already set. The darkness was complete.

“I need to go to jail, I guess,” Williamson told the Sheriff’s Investigator.

In the summer of 2017, Nathan and I stopped setting our alarms. We went to bed early and rose with the rays of sun that seeped in through our covered windows. I felt good. Better than I ever had. I checked out books from the downtown library and we read barefoot on the balcony, the sun warming our feet. I worked part-time and enrolled in an accelerated summer Shakespeare course. This marked the first class I would take for my master’s degree in English.

Working again on a degree, my life acquired a sense of direction and purpose that had been missing since I’d graduated with my bachelor’s. Without a clear aim, I’d been floating through my days, spending a few hours each week at a dead-end job and the rest of my time at home, scrolling through job listings, watching reality TV, baking cookies. What kept me rooted, if anything, was Nathan. His easy confidence, his ambition, his insistence that we would figure our lives out.

One weekend, we went to Helper, Utah (population 2,201) on assignment. Or rather, Nathan was on assignment, and I tagged along. Lenise, a jovial woman on the city council who would eventually become the town’s mayor, had asked Nathan and two of his classmates to come. The city put us up in the living quarters above a downtown art gallery. After dark, Nathan and his classmates photographed every outdoor light in the city, plotting each fixture’s location on a map and recording the light’s color temperature and luminescence. Later, they collated this data and used it to calculate how much light the city put out each night. Then, they offered suggestions for how to reduce these lighting emissions. Lenise wanted to have the town added to the International Dark Sky Association’s official list of Dark Sky Communities, a designation that requires revised lighting ordinances and extensive documentation of the city’s light emissions. The work was tedious and time consuming; Nathan was well suited for the job.

“I’m the one that killed her,” David Williamson told the Sheriff’s Investigator. “That’s all you need to know.”

A year later, a defense attorney would argue that this is not all we need to know. David and Shirley were married for thirty-six years. Early in their marriage, Shirley began to lose her vision, and for the last ten years of her life, she suffered from severe paranoia. She heard voices and frequently believed there were intruders in the house. Half a dozen times a day, Shirley called David in a panic. It became difficult for him to hold down a job, always running home to reassure Shirley that she was safe. She was safe? She was safe. He hung bells over the doors of the house, hoping that they might reassure her. By now, she was completely blind, and if there truly were an intruder, she may not be able to see them, but she would hear the bells.

“Completely blind.” This is an exaggeration. I mean only to indicate that the process of loss––that prolonged transition––had ended. It’s likely Shirley could still make out whispers of light and color and shadow, that her world had simply become a gauzy, dimensionless place, one impossible for her to make sense of by sight alone.

Among the many things that David must have done to help Shirley feel safe, I only know of two:

First, he hung the bells, brought their welcoming peal into the home. An absence of ringing should have made her feel safe.

Second, he bought Shirley a gun.

It is the bells that I think about most. Their delicate chime. While writing the paragraph above––I tell no lie––my ears began to ring.

The dangers of light pollution aren’t just health related. They’re cultural, too. City lights obscure a clear view of the stars, a view humanity and wildlife have gazed at, read from, and relied upon forever. Admittedly, I am not an avid stargazer. But as Nathan began collaborating with the Dark Skies Association to perform lighting inventories, we both understood, at least intellectually, that darkness was critical and that it was vanishing.

Nathan was getting ready to leave. It was our second night in Helper. The town was small, so the inventory did not take long, only a few days. While Nathan put on his shoes, I sat on the creaky mattress and sighed. The living quarters above the gallery in Helper where we stayed were under renovation. The building was old––as old, I suspect, as the town––and this room where Nathan and I slept was furnished with two twin beds that we’d pushed together and thin quilts, feather pillows. The space below us was part gallery, part studio. We took the liberty of walking through it when no one was there. The artist who owns this space, Christopher Kanyusik, was either out of town or uninterested in meeting us. Kanyusik is a sculptor who works in ceramics and mixed media, and his studio was full of oddities hanging from the wall, bunched up towels, and five-gallon buckets. On a pedestal sat a white roller skate with pink wheels. Scrap metal littered the floor. There was a staircase that led down to a basement, which I felt certain must contain a multitude of other props and supplies. I wanted to explore further but felt that I had already intruded enough.

Presumably, not all this work was Kanyusik’s. He was running a residency program where other working artists were welcome to stay for free so long as they pitched in to help out with the ongoing renovations upstairs.

The artists above moved through the space like apparitions. They whispered to one another; they did not speak to us. We’d been allowed to stay for the weekend because Kanyusik was friends with Lenise, but our residency felt unearned. I treaded lightly over squeaking floorboards.

If it feels that I am building toward something, it would only be because we are conditioned to expect this of a narrative. Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement. Real life doesn’t come in such a shape. There was a gun in the first act; it has already been fired. It went off before you knew it was there.

Denouement is a French word for untying, the unraveling of conflict we expect from our stories. Real life is full of knots.

Hours before shooting and killing Shirley, David Williamson tried to take her to the ER. For days, Shirley’s episodes of paranoia had been frequent and intense. Neither of them had slept in a very long time. Shirley screamed and yelled in the parking lot of the ER and refused to enter the hospital. Someone on staff gave David the business card of the closest mental health facility and sent them on their way. David pocketed the card and started for home. The moon, a waxing crescent, was going down in the west.

In all that I have read about Shirley, the information is limited. I know only that she was married to David. They raised three children together. She was sighted when they married, blind when she died. She was sixty-five years old, and the three children had left home.

I do not know how she passed her days. I don’t know her favorite song or gameshow. I can’t say if she preferred to go out or stay in. I cannot even tell you what she looked like.

In Helper, I brought with me The Collected Shakespeare, a massive, red tome. This is what I read from while Nathan went out to catalog lights in the city at night. Enrolling in a Shakespeare course had been a condition of my acceptance into the master’s program, required because I did not major in English as an undergraduate. For this reason, I resented Shakespeare. Reading at the fast clip of an accelerated course, I found the plays difficult and only marginally rewarding. But it seemed to me that this night was a good one for reading, I settled myself on the bed with the colossal volume on my lap.

“Bye, I love you,” Nathan said before he went. “You sure you don’t want to go out with us?”

We’d been married for two years, and “I love you” came easily. So did staying in while the other went out.

“No, really,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ve got to get this reading done.”

Maybe the reading in question was one of the tragedies: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, or even Romeo and Juliette .

Even in this strange gallery space, I was not bothered by another night in. When Nathan returned in the lightening hours of the night, he found me asleep atop my sinking twin mattress, Shakespeare cast aside. When he climbed into the twin bed next to mine (one of the two we’d pushed together) our legs and arms found and held each other across the distance.

Before leaving the hospital parking lot, Shirley Williamson called 911. This was the first of the two calls dispatchers received from the Williamsons that night. Shirley was calling to report intruders in the garage of her home a few miles away. A deputy followed them from the hospital to their house, checked the property, and found nothing. Shirley still did not want to go inside. She believed someone was coming to kill them. David suggested they stay at a hotel for the night, but she refused. Eventually, they went inside, and the deputy left.

Inside the house, Shirley got her gun, pointed it at David. He must have been a whisper of light and shadow, her world clouded but not necessarily dark. There can be brightness in blindness.

She pulled the trigger. The gun, though, was not loaded.

We must take all this with a grain of salt. Everything that happened after the deputy left David and Shirley alone at their home late on the night of August 25th is a mystery. David Williamson is the only survivor, and thus, his word is the only account of events.

Just outside the room where I slept in Helper, there was a small galley kitchen. The cabinets were painted a robin’s egg blue. The countertops were smooth and white. From the fridge, I ate a yogurt that I thought Nathan bought. I learned later that it was not ours, and I flushed with embarrassment but was not sure to which of the whispering artists I should apologize. On the wall by the fridge hung a painting of a kitchen. Of this very kitchen. To look at it was disorienting. I pointed it out to Nathan.

“Look,” I whispered. “You can see where they must have been standing when they painted this.”

We moved back and forth between the end of the room and the wall where the painting hung, comparing the views. In the painting, a morning illuminates the room. There is fruit on the counter, and the kitchen is somehow joyful: vacant and bright, full of the light of a new day, but the kitchen I inhabited felt like a neutral space. Structurally, no single identifiable thing was different. I knew only that I did not experience the space as nearly so lovely. Nathan was unsettled by this facsimile, but I was delighted. When I considered the ways the painting both altered and mimicked the kitchen I stood in, I realized that this must be what we mean when we say that art is composed.

The light, too, is not a symbol. It is radiation detected by the human eye. It is energy, both particle and wave.

In the bedroom, David wrestled the gun away from Shirley and threw it on the floor. Shirley went off to look again for the intruders. When she returned, she asked David to kill her.

When, I wonder, was the gun loaded? How did it go from being a menacing but empty threat to a viable possibility?

David told Shirley no, he would not kill her. She’d asked this of him many times before. This time, she grew calm, appeared more lucid. She said again that he should shoot her. She asked for this and one last kiss.

We already know how it ends.

From David’s court testimony: “We kissed, she laid over, closed her eyes. I laid back down, but I didn’t think I was going to do anything.”

Think of a trigger. Think how easily the mechanism slides. A gun is a heat engine that produces thousands of pounds of force even as the trigger offers very little resistance.

“The next thing I know,” David told the court, “I heard the gunshot.”

Once, driving through Wyoming, Nathan and I pulled off the road on a dark night, killed the engine and the headlights. We got out of the car to hold hands and crane our necks and look up at the sky. There was no moon, there were no clouds, no other cars, no cities for miles. Only stars dotting the sky. More of them than I’d ever seen before.

“You see that?” Nathan asked, dragging his finger across the sky while my eyes adjusted.

“The stars?”

“Not just the stars,” he said. “The Milky Way. It’s out tonight.”

And I see it. A vein across the sky, the Milky Way is lit up. I look so long that I think I even see it pulse. Alive. How long did we stand there looking?

Between us, there is something electric. The night is still and warm, and I love him, this man who knows both how to stay and when to hold. The darkness gives us rest, and we sit in it for a time as the galaxy above us, all around us, turns and glows.

When Shirley’s case went to court, David Williamson took the stand. “Did you love Shirley?” asked the defense attorney. “Did you love Shirley on August 26, 2017, when you took her life?”

“Yes,” said David.

“And do you still love her today?”

“Yes,” said David.

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This essay was originally published in issue 44.2 of Pleiades.