Our distant early warning: Living in the twilight zone

There is an hour in the late afternoon when the trees in the park outside my apartment darken into upright shadows, frozen against a skyline that has not yet lost its colour. The furniture in my living room gleams with the airless weight of underwater things. Outside an engine idles; I can't tell whether it's coming or going. This is the in-between hour, when the sun sinks below the horizon, but its rays are scattered by Earth's atmosphere to create the distillations of twilight.

In previous years, this hour would signify pre-drinks before a film at Cinema du Parc or the race to procure the last baguette for a dinner party; it would mean a poetry reading, a flurry of lights snapping on in welcome, friends smiling across the room.

This year, I am alone with the twilight hour. Darkness fills my apartment, until the inside has become solvent with the outside. Just like this hour dissolves the daylight, the pandemic has turned my days into a twilight existence.

During these lockdown months, while Montreal experienced its prolonged twilight state, I started watching the iconic 1950s American television series The Twilight Zone, a show in which reality is distorted and the familiar is made uncanny. Each episode ends with an unexpected twist that upends viewers' expectations.

Consider this plot: A tiny invisible burglar sneaks into the neighbourhood through droplets in the air. He begins rearranging furniture, disrupting the inhabitants' daily rhythmsand hindering the operations they use to regulate their lives. He dismantles the electric circuits on the block, he confiscates the air the inhabitants need to breathe, he takes their heartbeats with him when he leaves, on to the next neighbourhood, the next city.

This is the episode of The Twilight Zone that we are currently living in. I keep waiting for the moral or the enlightening twist. It doesn't arrive.

Standing in my dark kitchen, I listen to a WhatsApp message from my aunt. For six days now, she has been battling the virus. She wants a distraction. Tell me what you see from your window, she says.

Shadows, blue as rivers, pool on the icy sidewalk. In the park, someone has abandoned three paper plates filled with Cheetos, glaring orange against the snow.

When The Twilight Zone premiered during the height of the Cold War, the world was under another invisible threat: nuclear annihilation. People dwelling in North America were encouraged to build underground bunkers in which to shelter in the event of a nuclear fallout.

In fact, several nuclear alert stations were erected along Canada's Arctic frontier in a project called the Distant Early Warning.

Today, we hole up in our shelters, awaiting the vaccine that will inoculate us from this pervasive, unseen menace. Yet, what this pandemic has shown is that even when the vaccine arrives, we are still not safe. As humans encroach upon animal habitats and animals experience the twilight of their existence on Earth, we know that global pandemics will become more frequent. Could the 2020 virus be our present Distant Early Warning, letting us know that we are entering into the last hours of our own species' existence?

What if instead of building fallout shelters against climate change, we pried back our world from the twilight zone we have entered? Perhaps this is the twist ending I have been waiting for.

Tell me what you see from your window, says my aunt.

I see bold pink clouds overhead, I tell her. There's light on the horizon. I see the possibility for change.

This article is part of the CBC/QWF Writers-in-Residence program. More information can be found here.