In Peridot, it was noted that Leon Levitt, a private wealth manager and father of twin eight-year-old girls, appeared in high spirits, inviting attention from press and visiting doctors as his body brightened. He quipped to reporters that he expected a check for reducing the hospital’s electric bill; his presence in a darkened room now tended to give the appearance of the space being lit by stage lights. His pearly white skin had begun to obscure details of his face. Only film calibrated to the lowest levels of exposure could accurately capture his image. Nora Levitt, taken to sleeping alongside him on a pull-out bed, eventually relocated at his insistence to a hotel across the street, where she and their girls could look out the window and see the corner suite on the eighth-floor flash in the night behind shades pulled futilely across.
A UN-appointed council of the world’s leading radiologists had been assembled to study the emergences. It had become clear that Mr. Levitt and others were not expected to darken anytime soon, that their bodies were brightening at an exponential pace, increasing anywhere from a hundred to several thousand lumens a day. Teams assembled a working knowledge of the phenomena in anticipation of treatment options. In several cases around the globe, light emittance alerted doctors to previously undiscovered tumors in organs like the esophagus or liver that blotted dark under the skin. In Nigeria, a ninety-eight-year-old nova died of natural causes while mid-stage, her light ceasing and her skin returning to normal pigment after the moment of her last breath. In Mumbai, an expectant mother’s temperature rose around her cervix five weeks into pregnancy; her unborn nova child’s heart had started to beat.
After another month, Leon Levitt and a handful of mid-stage novas now too bright to be observed by the naked eye without retina damage were moved to a secure facility in the Great Basin for observation at the insistence of the federal government. Emitting about seven-hundred-fifty-thousand lumens, Mr. Levitt was now roughly the brightness of a single-strobe camera flash, the brightest of the American cases. The team observing him wore polarized goggles in his presence; he engaged their black portals instead of eyes throughout the day. Nora spoke to him nightly through an ultraviolet camera feed; they were making every effort to maintain normalcy in their twin girls’ lives. Still, he could not explain to them when he would be back. Their faces, blank and washed of color on his laptop screen, kept him awake far into the night. In Henan, China, a family of five all began emitting within days of each other, feeding rumors of the phenomenon’s heritability. With the UN’s failures thus far to triangulate a cure, demands rose for protective measures. Dr. Merrick, who had accompanied Mr. Levitt and the others to the Great Basin, found herself on television every other day, emphasizing that SDR phenomena remained entirely manageable with the proper equipment. Her doubts, she expressed to no one.