The Age of Miracles (20 page)

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One day we heard a strange sound in the sky: a crinkling, a tearing, like cellophane rustling in the wind.

It came from every direction. The sound lasted for three minutes. It was heard—some say
felt
—from Mexico City to Seattle. Nothing was seen. Whatever swirled in the atmosphere that day was invisible to human eyes.

During the following darkness, a great stream of green was spotted undulating on the horizon. Thousands of cameras recorded its flamelike movements. At the same time, navigation systems failed. Certain satellites went dark. My mother suffered one of her worst episodes yet, sliding to the kitchen floor for balance, as if on the deck of a pitching ship. She was briefly unable to stand.

By the time the sun came around again, the news had spread: Something was happening to the earth’s magnetic field.

At the time of the slowing, little was known about the dynamo effect. More theory than fact, it was just an elegant mathematical guess that hovered like string theory at the crossroads of science and faith. Untested and untestable, the dynamo theory was a dreamy speculation that the earth’s magnetic field might somehow depend upon the steady rotation of the planet.

For millions of years, the magnetic field had been shielding the earth from the sun’s radiation, but in the eighth month after the start of the slowing, the magnetic field began to wither. A massive breach, the North American anomaly, opened up over the western half of the continent.

It was not the first time I ever heard the word
radiation,
but if you’d asked me to define the word on any day before that one, I would have linked it to history, to the atomic bomb and the wars of a previous century.

Now, we were told, radiation was streaming into our upper atmosphere.

Aircraft and satellites were rerouted throughout the region. The government insisted that the threat to humans was minimal, but we were advised to avoid all exposure to the sun—just in case. It would take time to determine the true risk.

And so, as the days grew to sixty hours long, amusement parks and outdoor malls began to close during daylight hours. Some sporting events were canceled or moved to covered stadiums. The industrial greenhouses were tented; radiation could kill plant cells as easily as ours. After that, the crops lived entirely on artificial light.

At the time, of course, we hoped these measures might be temporary. All the officials were repeating the same neat phrase:
out of an abundance of caution.
It was only later that I would come to think of this shift as not just one more weird phenomenon but as something different, a final swing.

My mother took the warnings seriously, and so did my father. The schools did as well. Our travels during daylight were immediately limited to the route of the school bus, which itself had been outfitted with blackout shades. We kept our curtains perpetually closed. We saved our errands for the dark. Every time the sky began to lighten, we hurried home and shut our doors against the radiation of the sun.

We swallowed vitamin-D tablets to make up for what we were missing from the sunlight. We hunkered down and waited for the all-clear.

Those daylight days were dreary. Those daylight days felt slow. My mother would not allow me out of the house except for school, so I saw much less of Seth on those bright days. I spent my time alone in my bedroom, longing for the freedom of the dark.

Sunset took on new importance for me during those weeks, no matter when it struck. Whenever the sun slipped down behind the earth, there’d be a knock at my door a few minutes later, and there Seth would be, standing on our porch in the twilight.

“Hey,” he’d say.

“Hey,” I’d say, and then I’d wave him into the house.

On dark days, we spent almost all of our time together.

I hadn’t seen Sylvia in weeks. Her curtains were perpetually closed these days. My telescope was of no use. I couldn’t tell you what went on in her house. Her roses, like all the others, were dead, but she’d made no effort to clear away the remains. Instead, the bushes stood skeletal near her driveway. She’d done nothing about her lawn, either, as all the other neighbors had done by then. No artificial turf surrounded her house. A fine dirt blew perpetually across the driveway. She never seemed to come out. The graffiti had been covered hastily with a splash of brown paint that stood out against the white garage. The hole in her roof continued to gape, the white plastic sheeting slowly browning in the air.

Superstitions about Sylvia brewed among the younger kids, who crossed the street to avoid passing her house or else dared one another to ring the bell, though none were brave enough to do it. I once watched a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses inspect Sylvia’s house from the sidewalk. They moved on without knocking, kept their message to themselves. If my father ever crossed into that house again, I hadn’t seen him do it. As far as I could tell, no one entered Sylvia’s house. And no one, seemingly, left.

“Maybe she only goes out on white nights,” said Seth. “When everyone else is asleep.”

We were sprawled out on separate couches in his living room, eating ice cream from metal bowls and enjoying the last few hours of darkness. Through the windows, we watched the sky flare—the Northern Lights had swooped down almost to the equator, one more result of the changes to the magnetic field. There was a new name for this new effect: the aurora medius.

“Maybe,” I said.

“That’s what I would do if I were her,” said Seth.

“Maybe she moved away,” I said.

Seth considered the possibility. His ice cream spoon clinked against his front teeth.

“Without her car?” he said.

We had noticed that Sylvia’s newspapers never piled very high before they disappeared from the porch. The mailbox never overflowed.

“I think she’s still in there,” he said.

The lights in Seth’s living room flickered. It was happening more and more often. We were using more and more fuel.

“I know what we should do,” said Seth. He sat up quickly and set his empty bowl on the coffee table. A strip of tan stomach flashed as he moved. I liked the way his hip bone jutted out above his belt. “We’ll sneak out in the middle of a white night and see if she ever comes out.”

As soon as he said it, I knew we would do it that night. The idea was irresistible. Sylvia was one more rare specimen for the two of us to observe: the last real-timer in the neighborhood.

I called my mother and told her I was spending the night at Hanna’s. It was getting easier for me to lie.

“Oh, good,” said my mother. She sounded sleepy on the phone. “I knew you and Hanna would make up eventually.”

I could tell from the seconds beading up between her words that she was recovering from another wave of dizziness. She never would have believed me if she were well. I hadn’t been to Hanna’s in months.

“But Julia,” she said, “just please stay out of the sun.”

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

But that night we ignored the warnings.

Seth and I spent that evening alone by the pool, watching the sun climb over the hills. Weeks had passed since I’d seen the sun directly. The old sunrises never produced so much pleasure, but these new ones, more rare—and now forbidden—arrived like mercy and set off something chemical: a euphoria of daylight.

Seth’s father came home around nine. “Julia should probably go home now,” said his father as he headed up to bed.

“She’s leaving right now,” said Seth.

I nodded. Seth’s father rubbed his beard in the doorway. He looked exhausted.

“Good night, then,” he said, and disappeared into his bedroom.

But I didn’t leave.

Instead, we lay out on lawn chairs, Seth and I, waiting in the dimness, waiting, waiting, waiting for the sun to touch our skin. When it finally did, we let it heat our bodies to the point of faintness, and then we stumbled, delirious, into the shade.

I learned later that the radiation was more hazardous to children than to adults. Our bodies were smaller, incomplete. We had more time ahead of us for cell damage to ripen into cancer. Our brains were still developing. Whole regions were not yet fully formed—most crucially, we understood later, the frontal cortex, realm of decision making and forethought, the weighing of costs and consequence.

In other houses, the sick were growing sicker. New cases of gravity sickness were sprouting throughout the region. Projections about the future were turning more and more dire. But Seth and I felt fine. We felt better than fine. Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve. We were young and we were hungry. We were strong and growing stronger, so healthy we were bursting.

At midnight we left Seth’s house. It was a radiant night. In my memory, that night was brighter than usual, but that can’t be true—the radiation was invisible to human eyes.

Three hundred miles to our north, Yosemite was burning. Dead trees make good kindling. The smoke had drifted south to us, thinning to a whitish haze that produced in our skies an unfamiliar sunshine, still brilliant but diffuse.

The streets were silent. Nothing moved. All the windows in all the houses were blacked out against the sun. We were the only ones out at that late hour. We didn’t bother with sidewalks that night; instead we walked right down the middle of the road. It was as if the time of cars had passed.

“We can do anything we want right now,” said Seth. He knelt in the middle of the street and then lay down flat on his back, face up to the midnight sun. I lay down beside him, my hair pooling around my head, the asphalt hot against my skin.

“Close your eyes,” he whispered, and I did.

We lay in the street for many minutes, blind and vulnerable. There was a certain romance to the acrid smell of the blacktop, a pleasant rush of danger. Finally, a noise made us jump. My eyes snapped open—it was only a cat running on the sidewalk.

We walked past the bus stop, dusty and deserted, and the, its stores shuttered for the night. We wandered across the parking lot, the quietest parking lot on earth—it was empty of cars—and we imagined we were visitors to this strange world: what purpose this vast open space, these rows of cross-hatched lines?

Then we ran down the hill to my street, our shadows long in the early light.

Soon we reached Sylvia’s house. My father was at work for the night, but my mother was home sleeping—or not sleeping—right across the street. I was afraid of getting caught, so we crouched low behind a parked car.

Up close, I could read the graffiti beneath the paint on Sylvia’s garage door, the sloppy letters still blaring:
Get the fuck out.
I wondered what the house now looked like inside and whether she’d had her piano removed or if it remained on the floor in broken pieces. I imagined everything in ruins—the floors sagging, shelves collapsed, the macramé long ago frayed to threads. The only sound was the faint buzzing of the electric lines that ran above the roof.

Sylvia’s side gate, we noticed, was standing open, revealing a thorny tangle of dead bushes in her backyard.

“Let’s go back there,” whispered Seth.

Before I could argue, he sprinted through the gate. I liked the way he looked in that bright light, rushing past the stucco and then squinting as he turned his head and motioned for me to follow, which, of course, I did. Leaning against the side of Sylvia’s house, we laughed as softly as we could, shoulders shaking, unable to breathe. We were kids, and it was summer. We were trespassing and half in love.

We tried to look through a window, but the curtains were closed. We saw no sign of Sylvia.

The natural days had stretched to sixty hours: almost two days of darkness, then two days of light. If Sylvia was still living there, she couldn’t possibly be sleeping through the length of every darkness or staying awake for the whole stretch of each daylight. But we didn’t know for sure. And we wanted to—we wanted to know everything there was to know.

We could have waited in that yard for hours and never spotted Sylvia, but instead, suddenly, the side door swung open, and there she was in the side yard, as thin as ever in an orange linen dress, no shoes. We hid behind a row of trash cans and watched her walk toward the driveway. She looked up and down the street, then up and down again. She sneaked out like a thief. She carried two cardboard boxes, taped shut. She set them down in the driveway and then went back inside.

“You were right,” I whispered. “Guess she’s been here all along.”

Seth nodded. He raised one finger to his lips.

Sylvia returned with two more boxes and headed again for the driveway. She slipped out of sight, but we heard the rattle of keys out front, the trunk of her car opening and closing.

Seth coughed a soft cough. He put his hand over his mouth, trying to muffle another one, but the cough burst out just as Sylvia returned to the side yard. She looked in our direction.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, her hand on her chest. “You scared me. What are you guys doing back here?”

We stood when she saw us, but we didn’t say anything. We’d been caught.

Sylvia glanced at the side door. The usual sweep of her gestures, formerly so graceful, had been replaced by the tight crossing of her arms, the anxious biting of her lower lip.

“Well?” she said.

We didn’t speak.

“I think you should both go home,” she said. “Right now.”

I’d never heard her talk this way. As a teacher, she was endlessly patient and calm.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice rising.

We heard the side door creak open behind her. Sylvia closed her eyes.

And there he was: my father, carrying two brown suitcases, one on either side.

Maybe I should not have been surprised to see my father emerge from her house like that, but I was. He stopped when he saw us. I heard him take a sharp, quick breath. He set the suitcases down on the pavement.

“What are you doing here?” he said. He looked at Seth, then back at me. A pair of sunglasses dangled from his shirt.

I was too stunned to answer.

“I thought you were at Hanna’s,” said my father. He was about to say something else, but Seth cut him off.