The Age of Miracles (12 page)

The sky was still blue and the sun still high when my father opened the police car door. “You didn’t hit your head, did you?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I imagined he’d come from Sylvia’s. I sensed the rushed goodbye on her porch, a quick kiss in the entry hall, Sylvia pulling her hair into a bun as she waved. That was how I imagined these things went. In fact, I knew nothing about it. Perhaps he really had come from work.

“No dizziness?” he said.

I shook my head.

He studied one of my eyes and then the other, and I studied him, too: for evidence. But his collar was straight and his gray tie tied tight. His hospital badge clung neatly to his front pocket.

“Let’s go,” he said, taking my hand in his.

My grandfather was in the midst of some kind of project when we arrived. Every cupboard was open, the insides bare. The shelves had been cleared of heirlooms, the mantels stripped of knickknacks. The pantry had been hollowed out, and the kitchen drawers hung open, drooping toward the linoleum.

“That was quick,” said my grandfather when he saw me. The screen door bounced on the frame behind me. He turned the bolt hard in its lock. I’d never seen him lock that door before. “You okay?”

“I guess so,” I said.

Outside, my father’s tires ground the gravel of the driveway. He was headed to the hospital to be with my mother.

“Not a scratch on you,” said my grandfather. His hair, milky white, was sticking up like tufts of weeds, and he was wearing what he called his work clothes: faded denim overalls and a green flannel shirt. “If you’re hungry, I’ll make you some tuna fish.”

It was still bright outside, but my grandfather’s house was dark. The curtains were closed, the interior dimly lit by a few yellow lamps.

My grandfather shuffled through the gloom and into the dining room, where the contents of the whole house had been spread out on every flat surface. The dark top of the dining table was arrayed with treasures laid out in rows, as if for sale. A line of cardboard packing boxes waited on the floor, half full.

“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.

He’d taken a seat at the table and was leafing through a stack of antique postcards.

“Am I going somewhere?” he said. He looked at me, his eyes faint and watery, a disappearing blue. “Where would I go?”

On the table stood his collections of ancient Coke bottles, sea glass, and sand dollars. My grandmother’s silver tea service, dull from lack of polish, was ringed by a team of dusty porcelain figurines, beside which lay a decorative knife from Alaska, its handle carved from the ivory tusk of a whale. At the far end of the table, towers of limited-edition coins shimmered in their cases, each one packed in plastic, never circulated.

“Then what are you doing?” I asked.

He pressed a magnifying glass hard on the bottom of a faded postcard. His eyes had been clouding over for years, leaving him with a patchwork kind of vision.

“Do me a favor,” he said, tapping the card with a thick index finger. “Tell me what that says.”

The photograph had been artificially colorized, the hillsides painted green, the rooftops an unrealistic red.

“ ‘Childer, Alaska,’ ” I read out. “Nineteen fifty-six.”

“See this hill here?” he said, tracing a bulge of earth that loomed above a cluster of houses and steeples. “A year later, this whole ridge came sliding down in a storm.”

In some distant corner of the neighborhood, firecrackers began to whistle and pop—it was New Year’s Eve, after all. Daylight was radiating beneath the hems of the curtains. In here, the air smelled like dust and Listerine.

“I was at a wedding when it happened,” he continued. “Twenty-three people were buried alive.”

Of my grandfather’s eighty-six years on the planet, he had lived two of them in Alaska, working in gold mines and, later, on various fishing boats. But those two years had expanded, spongelike, in his memory, overtaking much of the rest. Whole decades had passed in California without producing a single worthy aneċe.

“I was lucky,” he said. “I was in the very back of the church. But the bride and the groom and their parents, the bride’s brothers and sisters, and the minister: all swallowed up.”

He shook his head. A slight whistling sound passed from his lips.

“Boy,” he said.

He brushed the card with the tip of a finger. “And see this house here?” he said. “The groom’s brother worked on a salmon boat, and it was salmon season, so he missed the wedding. He was the only one left in his family. Afterward, he hanged himself in that house right there.”

My chair creaked beneath me. I could hear the ticking of his clocks; he had a whole collection, all antique, including two as tall as he was, which clanged every hour and always out of sync.

“It seems like a lot of bad things happened while you were in Alaska,” I said.

He laughed and rubbed the pink creases of his forehead. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “Not any more than anywhere else.”

He turned the card over in his hand. The back was blank, except for a bright red smudge in one corner.

“Are you bleeding?” I asked. It scared me how easily he could bleed.

He studied his fingers. “Dammit,” he said. He stood slowly and trudged to the kitchen.

His skin had grown thin in recent years, his blood slow to clot. A paper cut could flow for many minutes. While he ran his finger under cold water, I explored the boxes that littered the dining room floor. Inside were albums of black-and-white photographs of my grandparents in stylish hats and fur-lined coats, of my father as a toddler and then in a baseball uniform leaning on a bicycle near an enormous rounded fender. There was a whole album of me, his only grandchild, from the day I was born up to my most recent school picture, in which my eyes were half closed, on the verge of a blink, rendering moot all the time I had spent selecting the cream-colored mohair sweater I wore on picture day.

Then there was this: In a dusty shoe box, I found four thick sticks of solid gold, packed together like chocolate bars.

“Hey,” said my grandfather. A crooked Band-Aid crowned his thumb. “You shouldn’t have gotten into those.”

I had pried one from the box. It was cold and heavy in my hand. He took the bar from me and laid it with the others.

“But since you did, I’ll tell you something you should remember.” He dropped the lid on the box and slid it into a corner. “Gold is the safest thing there is. It’s better than dollars, better than banks.”

I sensed the sun was finally setting behind the curtains. A pinkish sunset glow was leaking in through the cracks. The darkness would last until at least the following evening.

“This thing is real, you know,” said my grandfather. “I didn’t believe it at first. But this thing is really happening.”

In other houses, I imagined, corks were popping, glasses fizzing, party hats landing on heads. I’d heard that Hanna had gone to Palm Springs with Tracey’s family. I wondered what Seth Moreno was doing right at that moment.

“And no one’s paying attention,” my grandfather went on. “They put us back on the clock, and they think that solves the problem, but no one’s doing a goddamn thing to prepare for what’s coming.”

He sighed heavily and stood up from his chair.

“Think of the birds,” he said. “Birds have always been messengers. After the flood, it was a dove holding an olive branch that told Noah the flood was over. That’s how he knew he could leave the ark. Think about that. Our birds aren’t carrying any olive branches. Our birds are dying.”

He had turned his attention to the old hunting rifle he kept in the hall closet. It was coated in dust, which he brushed away with the back of his hand. He hadn’t used it in years.

“Next time you’re over here, remind me to show you how to shoot a gun.”

“A gun, Grandpa?” I said.

“I’m serious,” he said. “This is serious. I’m worried for all of us.”

Later, on his bulky television, I watched recordings of the earlier fireworks in Tokyo, Nairobi, and London, as the New Year drifted westward across the planet.

There had been some debate about the timing. Technically, we were running a day behind, thanks to the weeks we had spent living off the clocks. But a quick solution had been crafted and agreed to by most of the world’s governments: We had simply skipped December 30, an extra onetime leap, to make up for lost time.

Between firework shows, the television news reported that certain religious leaders had gathered their flocks inside churches, fearing or hoping that the last day of the year of the slowing might also mark the passing away of this world.

I fell asleep in an armchair before midnight. I dreamed of blood and broken glass, a car lurching to a stop. Hours later, I woke up, awash in the blue light of the television, my teeth clenched, my neck stiff from the armrest. The sun had sunk at last, and my grandfather had gone to bed. The year had turned while I slept. A new one had begun in the dark. Anything seemed possible in those days. Any prediction could turn out to be true. It bothered me in a fresh way: not knowing what the next year would bring.

In the morning my parents picked me up on the way home from the hospital. There was no news of the pedestrian.

My mother was still wearing her black party dress, now wrinkled. She held her crystal earrings in her palm. A hospital ID bracelet dangled from one wrist. My father gently guided her into our house as if she were blindfolded, flipping light switches with one hand and cupping the small of her back with the other.

The bruise would fade. The cut would heal. Every bone in her body was intact. With the help of an MRI, the doctors had searched her brain for hidden damage and found none. But that machine could not, of course, search her mind. And at that time, almost nothing was known about the syndrome.

18

We called it gravity sickness at first, the slowing syndrome later, and there would come a time eventually when you need only mention
the syndrome
and everyone understood what you meant. The symptoms were wide-ranging but related: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, fatigue, and sometimes, as was the case with my mother, fainting.

Only certain people were affected. A man might stumble in the street. A woman might collapse in a mall. In some small children, the effects included the excessive bleeding of gums. Some victims were too weak to leave their beds for days. The exact cause was unknown.

My mother stayed home from work that first week after the accident. She spent her days hunting for news of the pedestrian while the cut on her forehead scabbed over and began to scar. Her dizziness came and went. She moved slowly through the house, always bracing herself on a banister or a wall. Whenever the feeling cleared, she focused her attention on the pedestrian. She called the hospital but was given no information. She sent flowers:
To the man who was hit by a car on Samson Road on New Year’s Eve.
She begged my father to find out if the man had lived or died, but he was reluctant for us to get involved. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said.

She slept even less than before, wakeful just as often on the dark nights as the light ones. I would wake some nights in the pitch black and find her searching obscure local websites and police blogs, her eyes red and watery, the white light of the screen throwing her features into unflattering relief. On one of these nights, she fainted again. She fell right off her chair, bit her tongue, and made it bleed.

She stopped driving, and she ate less and less.

I wondered what the symptoms were that had preceded Seth Moreno’s mother’s death. The illnesses were different, I knew, but I sometimes worried that the outcome could be the same. No one knew where the slowing syndrome might lead.

It was a bright clear morning the day Seth Moreno came back to school.

His dark hair had grown a little longer, and he’d developed a new habit of flicking his bangs away from his eyes with one thumb, but he looked otherwise the same, same tired look on his face, same slow gait, same skateboard tucked under one arm. I hadn’t seen him since his mother died.

I felt my face flush when he showed up at the bus stop that morning. I wondered what he thought about my card.

Various rumors of Seth’s whereabouts since his mother died had trickled down to me: He was staying with a relative in Arizona, or he’d moved to a real-timers’ settlement in Oregon or to a boarding school in France.

But here he was at the bus stop. He didn’t speak to anyone that morning. He just stood by himself, like always. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t. I wanted to be near him, but I stayed away.

In math, I went back to staring silently at the back of Seth Moreno’s head.

Meanwhile, the oceans were shifting, the Gulf Stream was slowing, and Gabby shaved her head.

She called me over to her house one afternoon. The sun had set. The sky had turned black and clear. On the way to her house, I passed a group of younger kids playing Ghosts in the Graveyard on the street, some crouching behind parked cars or tree trunks while others searched in pairs, clinging to each other’s sleeves and whispering as they moved through the shadows.

“Watch this,” said Gabby.

We were in her bedroom. She held a thick section of her dyed black hair out from her head and raised a pair of scissors to the root.

“You’re cutting it yourself?” I said.

Downstairs, a construction crew pounded on a wall. They were remodeling the kitchen. Gabby’s parents were at work.

“First I’m cutting it all off,” she said, and snapped the scissors shut. “And then I’m shaving it.”

The hair fell from the blade and landed soundlessly on the carpet.

“But why?” I said. She cut another section. “It’s going to take forever to grow back.”

On the dresser, Gabby’s cell phone rattled with a message. She looked at the screen and grinned. Then she dropped the scissors on the desk and locked the bedroom door.

“I have a secret to tell you,” she said. “You have to promise not tell anyone.”

I promised.

“You know that guy I met online?”

I nodded. The headlights of a passing car washed over the room and vanished.

“We’ve been talking every day,” she added.

I felt a stab of jealousy.

The boy was older: sixteen. He lived a hundred miles away in one of the new colonies that had sprouted from the sand in the desert.

“It’s called Circadia,” she said. I could tell she liked saying the word. “They have a school and a restaurant and everything.”

I’d heard that similar settlements had been popping up in every state, built by eccentrics who had rejected the clock. In the homes and streets of these communities, the sun governed the day and the night, and I suppose the pace of life really was slower, the time only inching along, a gradually advancing tide.

“A lot of the girls there shave their heads,” she added.

She tapped a text message in response. The black polish on her fingernails flashed in the light of her lamp. Then she picked up the scissors and went on with her cutting, the strands of her hair collecting on the cream carpet beside her crumpled school uniform.

She used her father’s electric razor to do the rest, the motor buzzing as she ran it over her head. Little by little, the architecture of her skull began to surface, the ancient curves and hollows, now revealed.

“Holy shit,” she said when she looked in the mirror. “This is awesome.”

She turned her head from side to side, running her fingers over the stubble. She looked ravaged by sickness or treatment.

She sat down on the bed. A lacy black bra and panty set was spread out on the comforter. She saw me looking at it. “Do you like it?” she said.

“I guess,” I said.

“I ordered it online.”

One of the candles on her dresser had melted down to a pool of wax. The flame sputtered and then went out, leaving a thin puff of white smoke in the air.

“Hey,” she said, changing the subject. “Did your mom really kill some guy on New Year’s?”

I looked at her. “We don’t know if he died,” I said.

Downstairs, the workers dropped something heavy on the tile.

“I heard she ran over someone.”

“She’s sick,” I said.

Gabby turned toward me. “Sick with what?”

“We don’t know.”

“Can she die from it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Shit,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Gabby had recently painted her walls a deep maroon, and you could smell the paint fumes in the air, mixing with the vanilla from the candles.

“I should go home,” I said.

“Here,” said Gabby. She handed me a plastic bag bulging with hair clips and bobby pins. “Take these. I can’t use them anymore.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want her things.

Outside, a pair of headlights approached as I walked home, a slim black BMW that belonged to Gabby’s mother. She waved to me as she drove, and I waved back. I watched her pull into the driveway and wait for the electric garage door to trundle open on its tracks. I knew that those were the last few minutes before certain consequences would come down on Gabby’s shaved head. The BMW floated into the garage. The door dropped down behind the car. I heard the engine die, the first soft pings as it cooled.

I would later learn that Gabby immediately lost access to her computer and her cell phone, leaving her unable to communicate with the boy in Circadia who was writing her poems.

That night I spent hours gazing at Sylvia’s house through my telescope, looking for a glimpse of my father, but I spotted only Sylvia. Her habits had turned increasingly bizarre as the days had grown. She would disappear inside her house during every stretch of darkness, and while the neighbors’ windows glowed all day, she left hers unlit, as if she’d learned to sleep for twenty hours or more in a row. A stranger passing Syliva’s driveway on some dark afternoon might have guessed the house was vacant or the owner out of town. The newspaper often landed in the driveway twice before the sun came around again.

But on white nights, Sylvia came back to life. I could see her slender fingers gliding over the piano keys long after the neighbors had gone to bed. She pulled weeds at midnight. She went jogging while the rest of us dreamed our dreams. In the hush of one bright night, I watched her drag her Christmas tree out to the sidewalk in the sunshine, the scrape of the pot on the pavement the only sound on the sleeping street.

Certain countries in Europe had made it more or less illegal to live the way Sylvia did. On that continent, the real-timers were mostly immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, off the clock for religious reasons. Curfews had been imposed in Paris. Riots followed. One member of our own city council had proposed a similar ban. A small town nearby had successfully passed a clock curfew, but it was soon struck down by the courts.

That same week, the power went off in certain houses on our street. Televisions shut down without warning. Washing machines whirred to a stop. Music ceased to flow from speakers, and the lights went out over dinner tables.

The damage, however, was limited to just three homes: the Kaplans’, Tom and Carlotta’s, and Sylvia’s. It was no accident. The real-timers had been targeted. Someone had cut through the lines.

A pair of policemen showed up to examine the marks on the wires. They interviewed the neighbors. No one had seen a thing. It took six hours for the power company to reconnect the real-timers to the grid. The perpetrators were never caught.