Cold War stories, 3 of 3

 3. Dragon's Hoard

 

When Mikhail Gorbachev disappeared, I got a bad case of coup flu. For three whole days I held my breath. I would go up to people and ask, "What do you think?" and they knew what I was talking about, because they too had coup flu. For three whole days the world watched the past and the future play chess. We hovered, suspended, over the abyss. We saw ourselves within it, screaming, burning, dying, but we did not have time to be afraid. We did not fall; we flew.

 Then suddenly the crisis was past, the coup had failed, the Cold War was over, our deaths had died.

 Days later, driving home under the influence of the full moon, I was still grinning, still laughing at nothing in particular. The attendant at the toll plaza had headphones on, and he was dancing. 

 I parked my car at home, then climbed up to a park atop a nearby hill. I sat on a stone bench there, and I stared at the city. Downtown was close by, for long before I had moved to within the second circle in the explosion maps, where death would be within milliseconds. I never intended to envy the dead.

 It was night. The city's lights were on.  White incandescent lights, blue mercury lights, orange sodium lights. The city at night was... beautiful. It looked like a dragon's hoard of citrons and sapphires. I gazed at the city at night. I said to myself,

 "Maybe we'll live after all."