Finally, we sat down on the hardwood floor of the living room, our candles flickering around us. Seth produced a deck of cards.
“Watch this,” he said.
He began to build a tower, three cards at a time.
The house was so silent in the dark that I could hear the sound of the cards brushing one another as he worked. He looked older in candlelight. I watched him for a long time.
“Try it,” he said. He held out a pair of cards. His eyes were shining in the candlelight.
But my hand turned shaky. I worried I’d knock the whole thing down.
“That’s okay,” he said. “The second level is a lot harder than the first.”
I’d been wanting for weeks to tell Seth about my father and Sylvia—and it felt possible, in that low light, to say the words out loud.
I took a breath and swallowed hard.
“I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said.
Seth stopped what he was doing and looked at me.
“I’ve seen my dad at Sylvia’s house.”
I felt aware of the quiet, of the refrigerator not humming, of the cable box not glowing, of the digital clocks failing to tick.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I’ve seen them, you know.” I paused. “Together.”
Now that I’d said it, the facts seemed more true than they ever had before.
Seth didn’t say anything at first. I waited. Then he nodded as if he’d come to expect such things from life. He never talked about his mother—and I had learned never to ask—but I sometimes sensed her absence in his reactions to certain events, as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief.
“Does your mom know?” he said at last.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
He slotted two new cards into the tower. The whole structure moved slightly in response, and then he held his hands in the air for several seconds, as if he commanded some invisible force that could keep the cards upright. It seemed to work: The house of cards continued standing.
“It’s not fair to your mom,” he said. “I hate things that aren’t fair.”
I nodded. “Me, too.”
We said nothing else, but the secret buzzed between us. It felt good to have told. It felt good to be known by this boy. Later, after the cards had collapsed to the floor and the candles had burned down to nothing, we put on our swimsuits and dropped into the pitch-black waters of Seth’s Jacuzzi. We couldn’t see a thing except the stars. Our legs grazed one another under the surface. Seth leaned over and kissed me. I kissed him back. I felt happier than I had in a long time.
Two hours later, the power was restored.
Officials blamed the outage on the sunlamps and the greenhouses—they were straining the electrical grid. That was when the energy rationing began.
No lights after ten P.M. No air-conditioning unless the temperature exceeded eighty-eight degrees. But the industrial greenhouses went on guzzling up light. The entire food supply was being nursed by sodium sunlamps. All the farms in the country were reliant by then on periods of artificial sun.
One day in the middle of that spring, a thick pink envelope showed up in my mailbox as well as in Seth’s, announcing in glitter the details of Michaela’s twelfth birthday party at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was the first time I’d ever been invited to one of the big dance parties, and I wondered if it was because of Seth. If I had torn the seal of that envelope a few months earlier, I would have felt grateful and glad.
But Seth and I decided right away not to go.
“I hate these things,” he said. “And Michaela gets on my nerves. Let’s watch movies at my house instead.”
“You’re not coming?” Michaela said to me at school the next day. “Are you kidding me?”
She’d invited a hundred other kids. Plenty of people would show.
“It’s just not my kind of thing,” I said.
Her mouth tightened.
“Does that mean Seth’s not coming, either?”
I felt a burst of pride that she thought of us as linked.
“I don’t think he is,” I said.
She bit her lip hard and put her hands on her hips.
“Fine,” she said. “Whatever. I don’t care if you two losers come or not.”
But I didn’t care what she thought as she swished away in her sundress, her glittery flip-flops tapping the cement.
Meanwhile, the heat on certain days was becoming dangerous. It was only April, but we were warned to stay indoors whenever the duration of sunlight exceeded twenty-five hours. Record-high temperatures were often produced at these times.
But the weather could swing just as wildly the other way, too. I woke one dark morning to a miraculous sight.
“Holy shit,” said my mother in her green bathrobe.
I looked out the window: snow.
This was California, sea level, spring.
Five inches had fallen while we slept, and it was still snowing. Temperatures had been dropping further and further as each darkness stretched longer. Now the neighborhood shimmered, bluish in the moonlight: sugarcoated cars, fences frosted white, the terra-cotta roofs encrusted in snow. The sidewalks looked repaved. The artificial lawns had been swallowed whole overnight in one smooth sheet of clean, creamy white. Our street sparkled.
Seth showed up on my porch in a red ski parka I’d never seen before and a frayed knit cap, which sat crooked on his head. Snowflakes were melting on his shoulders.
“We have to go sledding,” he said. He held up the blue boogie board he’d carried down from his house.
I grabbed a coat and followed him out to the whitened street.
“Wait,” called my mother from the doorway. “I don’t know if I want you going out there.”
“Helen,” said my father. “It’s just snow.”
We were beach kids, sunshine kids. We did not know the properties of snow. I had never seen it fall, never knew how soft it felt at first, how easily it collapsed beneath feet, or the particular sound of that crunch. I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world’s noise.
Our garages did not contain snow shovels or snowblowers. Our cars lacked snow tires. The nearest snowplow was parked in the mountains a hundred miles away. And so that was that: We were snowed in. School was canceled, and my father had the day off. There was nothing to do but throw ourselves down and make snow angels, or build snowmen, or sled down the nearest hill on whatever we could find. All the kids in the neighborhood took to the streets. We caught snowflakes on our tongues and in our eyelashes, let them melt in the palms of our hands. We watched Tony, our Southern California cat, stepping on snow for the first time—he hated it, shook his paw and retreated inside.
My father laughed when he saw that, maybe the first time he had laughed since my grandfather disappeared. My father had been spending all his weekends driving out to various real-time colonies in search of his father. A visit to one colony often led to another, farther out in the desert or else somewhere up in the mountains. There were dozens of colonies scattered across the state. He handed out missing-person flyers wherever he went. Six weeks had passed with no word. It was hard to imagine that my grandfather would let so much time pass without calling. I began to worry that something had happened to him, but I kept these fears to myself.
“I hope he’s seeing this,” said my father, bending to touch the snow. “Wherever he is.”
He grabbed a handful and tossed a snowball in my direction. Later, he helped Seth and me build a snowman in our yard.
The snow would all melt away as soon as the sun returned two days later. But for now, on this day, beauty was momentarily restored to our world.
I was only dimly aware of my mother that morning, a peripheral shape of worry.
“This is not right,” she kept saying, her voice barely audible over the squeals of children at play. She wouldn’t come near the snow. “This is Ca
lifornia,” she said. “This isn’t right.”
30
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 hazar
dous 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.
The Age of Miracles Page 20
