A clear night
It was already 3pm in the morning, far later than usual when Professor Jonathan Sunderland left his working place on this night in early June and other than usual he didn’t go straight to his old dodge to drive to the suburbs of Carson where his wife was already asleep in their bungalow.
This night was remembered by the newspapers as the clearest night of the year and on this clearest night, in the middle of the desert of Nevada Professor Sunderland was the loneliest person in the entire universe, because he had discovered something no one else knew.
He didn’t want to go home, he just wanted to stay here in the middle of nowhere because he felt his secret was well hidden in this place where he was alone with the universe. And he made a secret pact with the universe that he Professor J. Sunderland won’t ever tell anyone not even his wife, what he has seen tonight
There was something ceremonial in the way this pact was made. For when the professor lighted up a cigarette with his shaking hands and it is worthwhile to mention that he usually never smoked and that the cigarettes were just left-overs of his colleague Billy who went home already 3 hours earlier, he inhaled the smoke deeply and his head slowly sank into his neck, fixing a certain bright point in the sky as if he expected something to happen and when the glowing end of the cigarette touched the filter, he flicked it away and tears were streaming down his cheeks. One moment later he collapsed into the sand crushing both fists into the ground and cried out in despair as if he wanted to scatter his pain across the whole universe.
