The Age of Miracles (10 page)

14

By the end of November, our days had stretched to forty hours.

Those were days of extremes. The sun blazed longer each time it came around, baking our street until it was too hot to cross barefoot. Earthworms sizzled on patios. Daisies wilted in their beds.

The periods of darkness, when they came, were just as sluggish as the daylight. The air turned cold during twenty hours of night, like the water at the bottom of a lake. All over California, grapes froze on the vine, orange groves withered in the dark, the flesh of avocados turned black from the frosts.

Dozens of experimental biospheres were commissioned for the cultivation of essential crops, and the seeds of a thousand fragile species were rushed to a seed bank in Norway.

Certain scientists struggled to predict the future rate of the slowing and to map its multiplying effects, while others argued that the rotation might still correct itself, but some were inclined not to forecast at all, likening this new science to the prediction of earthquakes or brain tumors.

“Will we end up like the birds?” posed one ancient climatologist, interviewed on the nightly news. His dark eyes were nested in thick folds of sun-spotted skin. “Maybe we will,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest. Six or seven weeks after the slowing started, a certain boredom developed. The daily count of new minutes dropped off the front pages of the newspapers. And television reports on the subject became hardly distinguishable from the more ordinary bad news that streamed each night into our living rooms and went largely ignored.

The few people who had rejected clock time carried on, living like bean sprouts, reacting to sunlight when it appeared and going dormant whenever our patch of earth slipped into the dark. Already, these real-timers seemed very different from us, their customs incompatible with ours. They were widely regarded as freaks. We did not mix.

The handful who lived on our street were left off the guest list of that year’s fall block party, held every year in the bulge of our cul-de-sac on the night before Thanksgiving. Orange flyers were left on every doorstep on the street but theirs.

Later that same week, one sunrise revealed a hundred strands of toilet paper tangled in the branches of Sylvia’s olive tree. Tom and Carlotta’s house had received the same treatment. I watched Sylvia from my bedroom as she carefully tore the paper from her rosebushes. She rested for a moment, hands on hips, looking around from beneath the wide brim of a straw hat, as if the culprits might be lurking nearby. She retrieved a stepladder from her garage. But she could not reach every piece. For weeks, bits of shredded toilet paper remained lodged in the highest branches.

The Kaplan family was eventually outed. Off the clock for the sake of their Sabbath, which ran from sundown to sundown on every seventh day, they’d been keeping it secret from the neighborhood. Once the news was out, Beth, the oldest daughter, was never again asked to babysit the Swansons’ toddler. We mingled with them even less than we had before.

I spent a lot of time watching Sylvia through my telescope during that time.

On white nights, I might see her watering her roses at midnight or dropping pasta into a pot at three
A.M.
Sometimes she went walking by herself in the silent middle of the night.

She seemed more isolated than the other real-timers did. She was always alone. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch her play piano through my telescope. I was sure I could detect in the slight slump of her shoulders as she played, and in the heavy way she held her head, a certain persistent sadness. She looked lonely through the lens of my telescope, like one of those faraway stars, still visible to our eyes but no longer really there. She looked lonelier even than I was.

Certain disasters evolved into attractions. My father and I sometimes drove down to the coast to look at what the ocean had done to the beachfront houses, evacuated since the slowing had mysteriously swelled the tides. At high tide, waves rolled across rooftops, the rooflines forming a geometric shoreline, while divers secretly scoured the insides for treasures. At low tide, those mansions dripped and creaked like sunken ships, exposed. They were magnificent houses, the homes of movie stars and millionaires. But the ocean had aged them at high speed. All the windows had blown out and would someday wash up in pieces on the sand, bits of smooth sea glass mixing with the shells.

The beaches had been closed since the start of the slowing. But my father liked to explore at low tide.

“Come on,” he said one Sunday when I hesitated in the driveway of an abandoned Cape Cod. Dozens of yards of police tape flapped in the wind. No one else was around. Even the seagulls were gone, the sickness having swept them all away.

The house was enormous. Its shingles were warped from the water, and the front door was missing. Most of the contents had been flushed out by the waves. Everything inside was gray. One whole wall was missing; the living room faced out to the sea like an open garage.

“Look at these,” said my father. He had crouched down on the soggy carpet to watch sand crabs burrow into the mud that had collected there. “Want to hold one?”

He looked like a clamdigger, his pants rolled up to his knees.

“No, thanks,” I said.

An extreme low tide had pulled the water hundreds of feet out from the beach that morning. I could tell it was on its way back. Small waves were beginning to lap at what was left of the back porch.

“The tide’s coming in,” I said.

“We have time,” said my father. “Come on.”

There was plenty of life left in that house. Starfish clung to the granite countertops, and sea anemones lived in the sinks.

“Watch your step,” said my father as we headed down a hall.

The floors were littered with driftwood and seaweed and glass.

“I was in this house once, years ago,” said my father. He was squinting in the sunlight. I had noticed only recently how many wrinkles formed around his eyes when he smiled. “I came to a Christmas party here once with an old girlfriend. This was her parents’ house.”

A foamy surge of water rushed into the room. We were instantly ankle-deep. My sandals felt heavy under the weight of the cold water.

“Dad, please,” I said, looking back down the hall. A layer of white water swirled over the hardwood floor. Two teenagers had recently drowned in just this way in one of the old houses farther up the coast. “Can we go now?”

“There was a huge Christmas tree right here,” said my father, motioning with two hands to indicate the width. He was almost yelling to be heard above the sound of the water. “And a grand piano over there. We almost got married, that girl and I. This was before I met your mother, of course.”

The water was getting higher with each new surge. A small plastic bottle was adrift in the room.

“Dad,” I said. “Seriously.”

“You’ll see when you’re older,” he said. “You won’t believe how quickly the years will pass. I feel like I was just here, but it’s been twenty years.”

The tide had risen to my calves. I felt the strong pull of the water against my skin, and it scared me.

“Can we please go now?” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. Let’s go.”

We waded together back through the house and out to the driveway. My father spotted a seagull as we climbed back up to the road.

“Look,” he said, squinting. I hadn’t seen a live one in weeks. It did seem amazing, in that moment, that there had ever existed a creature with the power to fly.

My jeans were sticking to my thighs. The whole car stank of salt water.

“You used to be much braver, you know,” said my father as he started the engine. “You really did. You’re getting to be as bad as your mother.”

And he was right: I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.

15

It happened in the dark: the sweep of the headlights, the quick closing of car doors, the red lights flashing noiselessly at the end of the street.

From my window, I watched three police cars park in a crooked row outside Tom and Carlotta’s house. My first worry, for some reason, was murder. Through my telescope, I spotted Gabby’s mother in a pantsuit, arms crossed and face lit red by the lights, as she stood at the end of her driveway and peered at the house next door. I knelt on the carpet and waited. Minutes passed. It was four in the afternoon clock time, but it was the middle of the natural night. The sky was black and clear, the moon its slimmest, most delicate self. The crickets buzzed, a dog barked, a breeze rustled the eucalyptus trees.

Finally, a woman in white emerged from the house, ghostlike: Carlotta in a nightgown, her long gray hair hanging loose on her shoulders. I could see one of the officers walking beside her, his arm resting on hers. Tom shuffled behind them, his white hair disheveled from sleep.

Both husband and wife had been handcuffed.

Only later were the details of the crime revealed to the neighborhood. A police team spent three hours the next day carting dozens of potted plants out of Tom and Carlotta’s ranch-style and into a giant white truck. The plants were leafy and green, supernaturally healthy. They’d lived their whole lives inside, nurtured by sunlamps, which, we later learned, were powered by the solar panels that glittered on the slopes of the roof. Police officers trudged back and forth across the lawn, packing up whatever they could, even scooping the compost pile into three fat black sacks. When the work was done, I noticed that the small sign in the front yard had been uprooted and was now directing its message to the sky: this house lives on real time.

According to a rumor that circulated after the arrests, Tom and Carlotta had been growing marijuana undetected for years, but the police had only recently received an anonymous tip from a neighbor. You had to wonder about the timing and whether the caller was motivated, at least in part, by a certain other life choice that Tom and Carlotta had made. There was no way around it: The real-timers made the rest of us uncomfortable. They too often slept while the rest of us worked. They went out when everyone else was asleep. They were a threat to the social order, some said, the first small crumbles of a coming disintegration.

I worried more and more about Sylvia.

Meanwhile, a trickle of real-timers had begun to leave the cities and the suburbs. They were turning up en masse in makeshift communities in the deserts and woodlands of this country. In those early days, they were a tiny, loosely organized minority, a scattering of shadow societies, the earliest advocates of a movement.

16

By early December, three weeks before Christmas, the days had swelled to forty-two hours. Changes had been detected in the currents of the oceans. Glaciers were melting even faster than before. Certain long-dormant volcanoes had begun to bubble and steam. There were reports that migratory whales were failing to migrate, remaining instead in chilly northern waters. A few fringe experts gave us only a few months to live, but they were roundly dismissed as extremists—as if nothing so extreme could possibly be true.

Colored Christmas lights blinked as usual from the rooflines in our neighborhood, and Mr. Valencia installed on his front lawn the same life-size animatronic manger scene he set up every year. Forests of Christmas trees bloomed at the fairgrounds and in the grocery store parking lots. All the usual carols wafted through the aisles of the drugstores and the malls amid concerns about the health of the holiday shopping season.

My mother and I spent one whole afternoon baking sugar cookies in Christmas shapes.

“It feels good to do something normal,” she said as she flattened the dough with a thick rolling pin. A strand of dark hair kept swimming out from behind her ear. I was glad that her hair was its usual shade again. She’d finally dyed away all the gray.

The Christmas season had turned my mother cheerful. But I felt there was something excessive about her interest that year in the choosing of the ideal noble fir, in the draping of tinsel and the wrapping of presents, the daily marking of the advent calendar. There hummed beneath her good cheer an undercurrent of dread, as if we were conducting each of our annual rituals for the very last time. I sensed it in her constant smoothing of the dining table’s holiday runner, in her glue-gun repair job of a porcelain Santa Claus cookie jar that had lain broken in the closet for years. It was in the way she crouched low on the FoodPlus linoleum as she searched a bottom shelf for the silver sprinkles we used every year but which FoodPlus no longer carried.

“Things change,” she said. “But not everything has to.”

When the last batch of cookies came out of the oven, we filled one whole tin for my grandfather and then divided up the rest for teachers and friends.

“Let’s bring some to Sylvia, too,” I said, leaning on the counter while a buttery scrap of dough dissolved in my mouth. The last batch of stars lay cooling on a rack.

“I don’t think so,” said my mother. She was wrapping each bundle of cookies in green and red cellophane, her fingers working gingerly to preserve the frosting.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It’s not a good idea.”

Both cats appeared at the kitchen door and began to scratch furiously on the glass. They had a taste for sweet things, so they were not allowed inside until the mixing bowls had been washed, the cookie cutters cleaned, the pastry bag emptied and put away.

“But why?” I asked again.

“We didn’t make enough cookies to give them out to everyone we’ve ever met.”

My mother had never forbidden me to talk to Sylvia or the other real-timers. It was never explicitly said. But it didn’t need to be said. I understood well that I was supposed to keep my distance from them, from Sylvia especially. And mostly, that’s exactly what I did.

But I felt sorry for Sylvia, so later that day, when the oven was off and the kitchen cleaned and my mother asleep on the couch, I collected a handful of cookies from our pantry, tied them with red ribbon, and left the house.

I waited a long time on Sylvia’s doorstep before the knob turned and the door swung open, revealing a sleepy Sylvia in a purple silk robe, looking ballerina-thin as she leaned against the doorframe, her hair pulled back in a loose red bun. It was nearly my dinnertime, but the sun was high in the sky—late morning in the natural day.

“Merry Christmas,” I said, and handed her the cookies.

“That’s very kind, Julia,” she said in a voice I wasn’t used to, a heavy, low-pitched scratch. “Excuse me,” she said, and then she spent a long time clearing her throat. “Sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone yet today.”

To me, this was more proof of how alone she was, as if, when too long isolated from other human beings, a person risked losing not only the need to speak but also the ability.

It seemed to me that even her movements, like her days, had turned slow, the unhurried raising of a wrist to brush away a wisp of hair, or the measured turn of her head when she nodded. I realized I was living almost two days for every one of hers. Eventually, if she went on like this, Sylvia would fall months behind us, then years.

I glanced over Sylvia’s shoulder and into her house. “Don’t you have a Christmas tree?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t feel like dealing with all that this year.”

Her wind chimes, made of seashells, rattled softly above my head.

“Thanks again,” she said, closing the door. “Take care, Julia. Remember to practice.”

A few days later, a delivery truck pulled up to Sylvia’s house. Two young men in thick green gloves threw open the back door to reveal a Christmas tree, which they gingerly rolled down the ramp. It was the living kind. It came in a terra-cotta pot and was meant to be planted in the yard after Christmas. Sylvia lugged the tree into her house by herself. She set it up in her living room window and left it there, unlit and undecorated. But it seemed better than nothing. Her house looked a little less sad.

That same day Tom and Carlotta returned home, released on bail. They were awaiting trial.

“How long do you think they’ll be in jail?” I asked my parents that night. My grandfather had come over for dinner.

“It depends,” said my mother. “Probably a long time.”

“What did they do?” asked my grandfather. He took a shaky sip of milk.

“They should have left those poor people alone,” said my father. It was his day off from work, but he was dressed nicely: clean-shaven, with a collared shirt.

“I still don’t know what they did,” said my grandfather, talking louder than before. He took a big bite of salmon and looked at me for an answer as he chewed. “Julia, do you know?”

“Drugs, Gene,” said my mother. “They were growing drugs.”

My grandfather coughed and spit something into his napkin. Then he held a tiny bone, slim as filament, up to the light.

“Who were they harming?” asked my father.

“You didn’t see how much pot they pulled out of that house,” said my mother. She was looking at me. “It
is
illegal.”

My father shoveled the rest of his salmon into his mouth without looking up. My mother poured herself a glass of red wine. Our Christmas tree twinkled nearby, and in the silence that followed, I could hear the inner workings of those lights, a tiny, metallic clicking.

After he drove my grandfather home, my father was called unexpectedly into work. There was a tricky delivery and the hospital was short-staffed.

My mother and I sat on the couch for a while watching a television show about one of the last uncontacted tribes of the Amazon. They had recently surrendered themselves to Brazilian authorities at the edge of the rain forest, convinced that the Brazilians held not only the power of flight—for decades, airplanes had cut across the tribe’s sky—but now also held dominion over the sun and the moon as well.

My mother shifted under her blankets. It was a dark night. The house was cold.

“I think you and I should talk more,” she said.

I stiffened in my seat.

“What do you mean?” I said.

She pointed the remote at the television, and the volume slipped away.

“What about boys?” she said.

“What?” I said.

She looked over at me, and I looked away. A cinnamon Christmas candle flickered on the coffee table, and I kept my eye on the flame.

“I never hear you talk about the boys at school.”

“Why would I talk about them?” I said.

I hadn’t seen Seth Moreno for a while, and I worried he might be gone for good. Michaela had heard that he and his father had moved to a real-time colony after his mother died.

“Do you ever talk to boys?”

“Mom,” I said. “You’re being weird.”

“Are you interested in any of them?” she pressed.

People were doing crazy things all over the world. Everyone was taking new chances, big risks. But not me. I kept quiet. I held my secrets tight.

“I’m really tired,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

“Wait,” said my mother. “Stay down here with me a little while longer. We can talk about something else.” She paused. “Please?”

I could no longer remember the way my mother’s eyes had looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn’t sleeping well, but perhaps it was just age, a gradual shift that I’d failed to register. I sometimes felt the urge to study recent photographs of her in order to locate the exact point in time when she had come to look so weary.

Some of the real-timers insisted that time had begun to affect them differently than it did the rest of us, that bodies aged less rapidly on real time than on the clock. The idea was taking root in Hollywood, an anti-aging measure known in that world as the Slow Time Cure. It had something to do with metabolism. I sometimes wondered back then if it would work for my mother.

Later, when I finally did go upstairs to my bedroom and looked out my window, I was glad to discover that Sylvia had decorated her Christmas tree. Dozens of tiny white lights were shimmering from its branches.

Sylvia’s curtains were closed except for a sliver. With my telescope, I could see through the crack that she was in there. She was a swishing skirt, an open mouth, a streak of strawberry hair gliding past the window. For once she was not alone: A man’s arm swung quickly into view, his sleeve rolled up to the elbow. I watched as he lowered a glittery silver star onto the top of the tree.

The man curled his arm around Sylvia’s slim waist. They kissed a quick kiss. I was relieved to see her smile.

Outside, Sylvia’s car sat alone in the driveway, as if this man had come from nowhere, simply appeared in her living room by some magical means.

I watched for a moment longer.

And then it happened: I realized as he turned that I knew that man’s mouth. I knew the sharp slope of his jaw, the long angle of his hairline. I recognized that blue shirt—I remembered exactly how it had looked when it was brand-new, on Father’s Day at the steak house, the shirt starched flat and folded in a silver department-store box, topped with a purple card, handmade by me.