The Blackout

The lights went out at 6:42 on a Thursday evening in August, in the middle of the hottest week of the year. Dana Okafor was on the fifth floor of a red-brick building in Brooklyn, halfway through a video call with her boss, when her laptop screen became the only light in the apartment. A few seconds later the fan stopped turning, and the silence was so complete that she could hear someone on the street below say, "Well, that's just great."

Dana had lived in the building for three years and knew almost nobody in it. She nodded at people in the elevator and occasionally signed for her neighbors' packages, but that was all. It was that kind of building: twenty apartments, twenty closed doors and a laundry room where people avoided eye contact.

By eight o'clock, the apartment was unbearable. Her phone said the outage covered most of the neighborhood and that power might not be restored until the morning. Everything in her fridge was going to spoil. She was sitting on the floor, wondering whether ice cream could be eaten as a main course, when somebody knocked on her door.

It was the old man from 5C, whose name, it turned out, was Mr. Bellini. He was holding a candle in one hand and a large pan of uncooked lasagna in the other. "My oven runs on gas," he said, "so I'm going to cook this before it goes bad. But I live alone, and it's enough for twelve. Some of us are going up to the roof. You should come."

The roof was a place Dana had never been. When she climbed the narrow staircase with her melting ice cream, she found about fifteen people there already, sitting on folding chairs and blankets. Somebody had brought a portable speaker. The Kim family from the second floor had lit a small grill and were cooking all the meat from their freezer. A woman Dana recognized from the laundry room was handing out cold drinks from a cooler.

Over the next few hours, she learned more about her neighbors than she had in three years. The man who always wore headphones in the elevator was a jazz pianist who had once played in Paris. The quiet couple from 3A had been married for fifty-one years and had lived in the building since before it had an elevator. The teenager who never said hello was, it turned out, extremely funny, and had been helping Mr. Bellini with his shopping every week since his wife died.

Without the city lights, the sky above Brooklyn was darker than Dana had ever seen it. Around midnight, someone pointed out that they could see stars, actual stars, and everyone lay back on the blankets to look at them. The pianist said he had grown up in a small town in Georgia and hadn't seen so many since he was a boy. For a few minutes, nobody said anything at all.

The power came back at 4:15 in the morning. Most of them were still on the roof, and when the lights in the windows around them came on all at once, there was a strange moment of disappointment. People started to fold their chairs and collect their plates. Dana remembered thinking that if the lights had come back at nine, they would all have gone to bed, and she would never have known any of these people properly.

The building is different now. There is a group chat called Roof People, and on the first Friday of every month, whether the lights are on or not, the neighbors meet upstairs for dinner. Mr. Bellini always brings lasagna. Dana, who cannot cook, brings ice cream. And every time she walks past a closed door on her floor, she wonders who is behind it, and what she would have missed if she had never found out.