Spin (7 page)

“People are talking about a hypothetical controlling intelligence.”

“But what’s the purpose, what’s it supposed to achieve?”

“I don’t know. No one knows.”

Diane stared at her brother across a gap of cold and motionless winter air. She hugged her parka and shivered. Not because of the temperature but because she had come to the fundamental question: “How
much
time, Jason? How
much
time is passing out there?”

Out there beyond the blankness of the sky.

Jason hesitated, visibly reluctant to answer her.

“A lot of time,” he admitted.

“Just tell us,” she said faintly.

“Well. There are all kinds of measures. But the last launch, what they did was bounce a calibration signal off the surface of the moon. The moon gets farther away from the Earth every year, did you know that? By some minuscule but measurable amount. If you measure that distance you have a kind of rough calendar, more accurate the more time has passed. Add that to other signifiers, like the motion of nearby stars—”

“
How much time
, Jason?”

“It’s been five years and a couple of months since the October Event. Outside the barrier, that translates into a little over five hundred million years.”

It was a breathtaking number.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not a single word. I was rendered speechless. Thoughtless. At that moment there was no sound at all, nothing but the crisp emptiness of the night.

Then Diane, who had seen straight to the scary heart of the thing, said, “And how long do we have left?”

“I don’t know that either. It depends. We’re protected, to some degree, by the barrier, but how effective is that protection? But there are some unavoidable facts. The sun is mortal, like every other star. It burns hydrogen and it expands and gets hotter as it ages. The Earth exists in a sort of habitable zone in the solar system, and that zone is moving steadily outward. Like I said, we’re protected, we’re okay for the time being no matter what. But eventually the Earth will be inside the heliosphere of the sun. Swallowed up by it. Past a certain point there’s simply no going back.”

“How
long
, Jase?”

He gave her a pitying look. “Forty, maybe fifty years,” he said. “Give or take.”

The pain was difficult to manage, even with the morphine Diane had purchased at ridiculous cost from a pharmacy in Padang. The fever was worse.

It wasn’t continuous. It came in waves, clusters, bubbles of heat and noise bursting unexpectedly in my head. It made my body capricious, unpredictable. One night I groped for a nonexistent glass of water and smashed a bedside lamp, waking the couple in the next room.

Come morning, temporarily lucid again, I couldn’t remember the incident. But I saw the congealed blood on my knuckles and I overhead Diane paying off the angry concierge.

“Did I really do that?” I asked her.

“Afraid so.”

She sat in a wicker chair next to the bed. She had ordered up room service, scrambled eggs and orange juice, so I guessed it was morning. The sky beyond the gauzy drapes was blue. The balcony door was open, admitting wafts of pleasantly warm air and the smell of the ocean. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“You were out of your mind. I’d tell you to forget about it. Except you obviously
have
.” She put a soothing hand on my forehead. “And it’s not over yet, I’m afraid.”

“How long—?”

“It’s been a week.”

“Only a week?”

“Only.”

I wasn’t even halfway through the ordeal.

But the lucid intervals were useful for writing.

Graphomania was one of the several side effects of the drug. Diane, when she was undergoing the same ordeal, once wrote the phrase
Am I not my brother’s keeper
in hundreds of nearly identical repetitions over fourteen sheets of foolscap. My own graphomania was at least a little more coherent. I stacked up handwritten pages on the bedside table while I waited for the fever to launch a renewed offensive, rereading what I’d written in an attempt to fix it in my mind.

Diane spent the day out of the hotel. When she came back I asked her where she’d been.

“Making connections,” she told me. She said she’d contacted a transit broker, a Minang man named Jala whose import-export business served as cover for his more lucrative emigration brokerage. Everybody on the docks knew Jala, she said. She was bidding for berths against a bunch of crazy-utopian kibbutzim, so it wasn’t a done deal, but she was cautiously optimistic.

“Be careful,” I said. “There might still be people looking for us.”

“Not as far as I can tell, but…” She shrugged. She glanced at the notebook in my hand. “Writing again?”

“It takes my mind off the pain.”

“You can hold the pen okay?”

“It’s like terminal arthritis, but I can deal with it.”
So far
, I thought. “The distraction is worth the discomfort.”

But it wasn’t just that, of course. Nor was it simply graphomania. The writing was a way to externalize what felt threatened.

“It’s really very well done,” Diane said.

I looked at her, horrified. “You
read
it?”

“You asked me to. You begged me to, Tyler.”

“Was I delirious?”

“Apparently… though you seemed fairly rational at the time.”

“I wasn’t writing with an audience in mind.” And I was shocked that I had forgotten showing it to her. How much else might already have slipped away?

“I won’t look at it again, then. But what you wrote—” She cocked her head. “I’m amazed and flattered you felt so strongly about me, way back then.”

“It could hardly come as a surprise.”

“More than you might think. But it’s a paradox, Tyler. The girl on the page is indifferent, almost cruel.”

“I never thought of you that way.”

“It’s not your opinion that worries me. It’s mine.”

I had been sitting up in bed, imagining this was an act of strength, evidence of my own stoicism. More likely it was evidence that the painkillers were temporarily in charge. I shivered. Shivering was the first sign of a resurgent fever. “You want to know when I fell in love with you? Maybe I should write about that. It’s important. It was when I was ten—”

“Tyler, Tyler. Nobody falls in love when they’re ten.”

“It was when St. Augustine died.”

St. Augustine was a lively black-and-white pedigreed springer spaniel who had been Diane’s particular pet. “St. Dog,” she had called him.

She winced. “That’s just macabre.”

But I was serious. E. D. Lawton had bought the dog impulsively, probably because he wanted something to decorate the hearth at the Big House, like a pair of antique andirons. But St. Dog had resisted his fate. St. Dog was decorative enough, but he was also inquisitive and full of mischief. In time E.D. came to despise him; Carol Lawton ignored him; Jason was fondly bemused by him. It was Diane, who had been twelve, who bonded with him. They brought out the best in each other. For six months St. Dog had followed her everywhere except the school bus. The two of them played together on the big lawn summer evenings, and that was when I first noticed Diane in a particular way— the first time I took pleasure in simply watching her. She would run with St. Dog until she was exhausted, and St. Dog was always patient while she got her breath back. She was attentive to the animal in ways none of the other Lawtons even tried to be—she was sensitive to his moods, as St. Augustine was to hers.

I couldn’t have said why I liked this about her. But in the uneasy, emotionally charged world of the Lawtons it was an oasis of uncomplicated affection. If I’d been a dog, I might have been jealous. Instead it impressed on me that Diane was special, different from her family in important ways. She met the world with an emotional openness the other Lawtons had lost or never learned.

St. Augustine died suddenly and prematurely—he was still hardly more than a pup—that autumn. Diane was grief-stricken, and I realized I was in love with her…

No, that
does
sound macabre. I didn’t fall in love with her because she mourned her dog. I fell in love with her because she was
capable
of mourning her dog, when everyone else seemed either indifferent or secretly relieved that St. Augustine was finally out of the house.

She looked away from the bed, toward the sunny window. “I was heartbroken when that animal died.”

We had buried St. Dog in the wooded tract beyond the lawn. Diane made a little mound of stones as a monument, and she built it up again every spring until she left home ten years later.

She also prayed over the marker at every change of the seasons, silently, hands folded. Praying to whom, or for what, I don’t know. I don’t know what people do when they pray. I don’t think I’m capable of it.

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

The fever came again that night. I remember nothing of it apart from a recurring dread (it came at hourly intervals) that the drug had blanked more memory than I would ever recover, a sense of irretrievable loss akin to those dreams in which one searches futilely for the missing wallet, watch, prized possession, or sense of self. I imagined I felt the Martian drug working in my body, making fresh assaults and negotiating temporary truces with my immune system, establishing cellular beachheads, sequestering hostile chromosomal sequences.

When I came to myself again Diane was absent. Insulated from the pain by the morphine she had given me, I got out of bed and managed to use the bathroom, then shuffled out onto the balcony.

Dinner hour. The sun was up but the sky had turned a duskier blue. The air smelled of coconut milk and diesel fumes. The Archway glimmered in the west like frozen quicksilver.

I found myself wanting to write again, the urge coming on like an echo of the fever. I carried with me the notebook I had half filled with barely decipherable scribbling. I’d have to ask Diane to buy me another one. Maybe a couple more. Which I would then fill with words.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.

I didn’t see Jason for several years after the sledding party, though I kept in touch. We met again the year I graduated from med school, at a summer rental in the Berkshires about twenty minutes from Tanglewood.

I had been busy. I had done four years of college plus volunteer time at a local clinic and had started prepping for the MCAT a couple of years ahead of writing it. My GPA, the MCAT results, and a sheaf of recommendation letters from undergraduate advisors and other venerable worthies (plus E.D.‘s largesse) had bought me admission to the SUNY medical campus at Stony Brook for another four years. That was done, behind me, finished, but I was still looking at at least three more years of residency before I was ready to practice.

Which put me among the majority of people who continued to conduct their lives as if the end of the world had not been announced.

It might have been different if doomsday had been calculated down to the day and hour. We all could have chosen our motifs, from panic to saintly resignation, and played out human history with a decent sense of timing and an eye on the clock.

But what we were facing was merely the strong likelihood of eventual extinction, in a solar system rapidly becoming unfit for life. Probably nothing could protect us indefinitely from the expanding sun we had all seen in NASA images captured from orbital probes… but we were shielded from it for now, for reasons no one understood. The crisis, if there
was
a crisis, was intangible; the only evidence available to the senses was the absence of the stars—absence as evidence, evidence of absence.

So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction? The question defined our generation. It was easy enough for Jason, it seemed. He had thrown himself into the problem headlong: the Spin was rapidly
becoming
his life. And it was, I suppose, relatively easy for me. I had been leaning toward medicine anyway, and it seemed like an even wiser choice in the current atmosphere of simmering crisis. Maybe I imagined myself saving lives, should the end of the world prove to be more than hypothetical and less than instantaneous. Did that matter, if we were all doomed? Why save a life if all human life was due to be snuffed out? But physicians don’t really
save
lives, of course, we prolong them; and failing that, we provide palliative care and relief from pain. Which might prove to be the most useful skill of all.

On top of that, college and med school had been one long, relentless, grueling, but welcome, distraction from the rest of the world’s woes.

So I coped. Jason coped. But many people had a much rougher time. Diane was one of them.

I was cleaning out my one-bedroom rental at Stony Brook when Jason called.

It was early in the afternoon. The optical illusion indistinguishable from the sun was shining brightly. My Hyundai was packed and ready for the drive home. I had planned to spend a couple of weeks with my mother, then drive across country in a lazy week or two. This was my last free time before I started interning at Harborview in Seattle, and I intended to use it to see the world, or at least the part of it bracketed between Maine and the state of Washington. But Jason had other ideas. He barely let me get out a hello-how-are-you before he launched into his pitch.

“Tyler,” he said, “this is too good to pass up. E.D. rented a summerhouse in the Berkshires.”

“Did he? Good for him.”

“But he can’t use it. Last week he was touring an aluminum extrusion plant in Michigan and he fell off a loading platform and cracked his hip.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s not serious, he’s recovering, but he’s on crutches for a while and he doesn’t want to ferry himself all the way to Massachusetts just so he can sit around and suck Percodan. And Carol wasn’t that enthusiastic about the idea to begin with.” Not surprisingly. Carol had become a career drunk. I couldn’t imagine what she would have done in the Berkshires with E. D. Lawton, except drink some more. “The thing is,” Jase went on, “he can’t back out of the contract, so the house is empty for three months. So I thought, with you finishing med school and all, maybe we could get together for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe talk Diane into joining us. Take in a concert. Walk in the woods. Be like old times. I’m headed there now, actually. What do you say, Tyler?”