The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

  On the sign above the earth, Mr. Jensen replaced 24 Hours with 25:37, but he wrote the new figure on a Post-it note so we could update it if we needed to.

  Classrooms were half empty all day or, depending on your outlook, half full. Dozens of desks stood unused, attendance sheets went largely unchecked. It was as if certain kids really had been sucked up from the earth to the heavens, the way some Christians were expecting, leaving the rest of us behind, we the children of scientists and atheists and the simply less devout.

  Our teachers discouraged us from following the news during class, but one kid had a radio and we all had cell phones.

  The first outbreaks of gravity sickness were already popping up around the globe. Hundreds of people were experiencing symptoms of dizziness, faintness, and fatigue. In P. E., some kids got out of running the mile by clutching their stomachs, complaining of nausea and mysterious pains. “I can’t help it,” they’d say. “It’s the sickness.”

  The teachers pretended not to worry. But at lunch, they all watched the news in the teachers’ lounge. We could see their expressions as they watched, their tired eyes, their wrinkled foreheads, the naked fear in their faces.

  I didn’t see Seth Moreno again until fifth period. We had math together. His assigned seat was directly in front of mine, and I looked forward every day to being near him. I knew everything about the back of that head—the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon.

  We never talked to each other. I had never even said his name out loud, not even to Hanna. “Come on,” she used to whisper in the dark of my living room, both of us curled deep inside sleeping bags. “There must be someone,” she’d say. But I’d always shake my head and lie. “Nope,” I’d whisper back. “There’s no one.”

  For weeks I’d been hoping that Seth might look my way, but not today. I was too embarrassed about what had happened that morning.

  Mrs. Pinksy was trying to make a lesson out of the slowing. On the chalkboard, she’d written the Daily Math Brain Teaser: The length of a day on earth has increased by ninety minutes in two days. Assuming a steady rate of increase, how long would a day on earth be two days from now? What about three days from now? A week?

  “Do we have to do this?” asked Adam Jacobson, slouching in his chair. He was always asking this question.

  “The only thing you have to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky. This was one of her favorite sayings. “Everything else is a choice.”

  Mrs. Pinsky was morbid and intimidating. If ever a kid got the hiccups in her class, she called the kid up to her desk. By the time you reached the front of the classroom, the hiccups were always gone; it was as sure a cure as any other sudden fright.

  “Don’t just write the answer, show your work,” she said, walking up and down the aisles, the folds of her orange dress swishing against the chrome-colored legs of our chairs. “And no guesswork. Use your algebra.”

  The walls of her classroom were lined with encouraging posters: never say never, expect the unexpected, the impossible is possible.

  Mrs. Pinsky called a few of us up to the board to show our answers. Seth and I were among the chosen, and we stood side by side, transcribing our work from our notebooks to the board. I remember being aware of his right arm beside me, stretching up to write his answers, his numbers slanting down and to the right as his chalk scraped the board. The hard brown carpet felt worn out beneath my feet. Thirty years worth of sixth-graders had worked out solutions in these exact same spots.

  Seth clapped two erasers together. The dust made him sneeze. Even his sneeze was endearing. He had wonderful hands. You could see the strength in his wrists, right in the veins, and in the tendons that traversed the backs of his hands. Seth’s mother was at home, dying. But here Seth was, growing stronger every day.

  As I checked my work, I noticed that Seth’s answer was wrong, and I felt a sharp protective stab for him. I wanted to fix it or say something, but he’d already dropped his chalk in the tray and was walking back to his seat.

  Through the open windows of the classroom, we heard the screech of a fire truck racing away somewhere. A moment later, a second one set off in the same direction. But these were the ordinary sounds of our school days. There was a fire station across the street. Sirens rang out all day. The sounds had bothered me at first, all the emergencies of strangers, but I’d grown used to them. We all had.

  The shift in the air was barely perceptible at first: a fading. It was the feeling you get when a cloud moves across the sun.

  “Something weird is happening outside,” said Trevor from the back of the classroom. He’d been playing with a metal compass but now dropped it on his desk with a clink. “Something really weird.”

  “If you have something to say, Trevor, please raise your hand,” said Mrs. Pinsky. She was preparing the rest of our lesson on a transparency. A cooler breeze had begun to blow. I could hear the squeak of her pen on the plastic, the hum of the projector’s fan. She preferred the old technology over the computers that all the other teachers were using by then.

  “Holy crap,” said Adam Jacobson, whose desk was closest to the windows. “Holy shit.”

  “Adam, watch your language,” said Mrs. Pinsky.

  We could hear voices rising in the neighboring classrooms too.

  “Come look,” said Adam. “It’s getting dark.”

  The windows were on one side of the classroom, and we all rushed to that side like objects sliding across the deck of a listing ship. I couldn’t see much over the heads of the taller kids, but I sensed the changing light. A strange gloom was moving in like a storm, but this was no storm. The sky was cloudless. The sky was clear.

  The rest happened quickly—thirty seconds.

  “Return to your seats,” said Mrs. Pinsky. But no one did. “I said return to your seats.”

  She stepped outside to see for herself what was happening. Back in the classroom, she snapped into emergency mode. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Stay calm. Everyone just stay calm.”

  She grabbed the whistle and the bull horn, the master keys and the walkie-talkie. These were the supplies for fire drills and earthquake drills and drills to practice what to do if a shooter started shooting at our school.

  All the colors of the spectrum had collapsed to a few dusky grays. There was a paleness in the classroom. That light was the light of the last small moments of a day, the thin wedge of time just after the sun has set but just before you reach for a lamp. A sudden sunset at high speed. It was 1:23 in the afternoon.

  Kids began to leak out of classrooms, a trickle at first, then a flood.

  Someone grabbed my wrist. I looked up. I was shocked to see that it was Seth, his sharp features even more lovely in the halflight.

  “Come on,” he said. His palm on my wrist felt electric. Even then I noticed it, the sweaty warmth of his hand on my arm.

  We burst outside together.

  “Come back here,” said Mrs. Pinsky, but no one was listening. She said it again, this time shouting it through the bullhorn. Not a single kid turned her way. We were running in every direction, most of us rushing up the grassy hill behind campus.

  Within a few seconds, it was as dark as dusk outside and growing darker. The sky turned a brackish evening blue. An orange glow ringed the whole horizon.

  Seth and I threw ourselves on the grass, sensing it was safer to lie low.

  “This might be it,” he said. I thought I heard a thrill in his voice.

  All around us, kids were screaming. I heard someone sobbing in the dark. Camera phones were clicking and flickering in the blackness. We could see the stars in the sky.

  On the road beside campus, dozens of cars were stopped. Drivers stood in the streets, car doors flung open like wings, headlights flipped on in the dark. Every eye was on the sky. A cool night wind was blowing across the grass.

  At the bottom of the hill, Mr. Jensen was yell
ing from the doorway of the science lab. He was waving his hand. I could not hear him over the screams of the crowd, but I could see that he was frantic. If even Mr. Jensen was panicked, what chance was there for the rest of us to stay calm?

  Seth reached for my hand, our fingers interlaced. I’d never held hands with a boy this way. I almost couldn’t breathe.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I hoped it might be Hanna, but when I saw that it was my mother, I ignored it.

  “What if this is how we die?” whispered Seth. He sounded serious. He did not seem afraid.

  We all grew quieter as the seconds passed, hushed by the darkness and the chill in the air. I became aware that dozens of dogs were barking, howling, from their yards. Minutes passed. The temperature continued to drop.

  A vague prayer slipped out of my mouth: Please, please let us be okay.

  We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky.

  We know now that the darkness lasted four minutes and twenty-seven seconds, but it seemed to stretch much longer. Time moved differently in those first few days. If it weren’t for the records—hundreds of people filmed the event—I’d still swear that at least an hour passed before the first glint of light reappeared in the sky.

  “Look,” I heard Seth saying. “Look. Look.”

  A bleed of brightness was spreading directly overhead, a sliver of sun returned to us, as if by miracle. Now we could see the outline of the whole thing, a thin circle of light with a blinding bulge on one side, like a diamond on a ring.

  I saw Mr. Jensen hurrying through the crowd. When he reached us, we finally heard what he’d been shouting.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “This is just an eclipse. It’s harmless. It’s just the moon’s shadow passing in front of the sun.”

  As we would learn in the coming hours, Mr. Jensen was right: A total solar eclipse had been anticipated for the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was to be visible only from the decks of passing ships and from a handful of thinly populated islands. But the slowing had shifted the coordinates of all predicted eclipses—they used to have them all figured out, every future eclipse charted to the minute and the decade. This one had caught us by surprise. The eclipse was seen from a thick swath of the western United States.

  Relief passed through my whole body. We were fine. And there I was, lying on a hill with Seth Moreno.

  Seth seemed disappointed by the news.

  “That’s it?” he said. “It was just an eclipse?”

  We remained on the hill together, watching the sun reemerge. We squinted side by side, our backs on the grass. I was so close to him I could see the hairs on his forearm.

  “Do you ever wish you could be a hero?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I want to save someone’s life someday.”

  I thought of his mother. My father had explained to me once how cancer worked, how it almost never gave up, how you had to kill every single cell of it. And you were never completely sure that you had won. It could always come back, and mostly, it did come back.

  “I might want to be a doctor,” I offered. This was only half true. I didn’t really know then if I could do what my father did. I didn’t know then if I could stomach all that blood and sadness.

  “Whenever I’m in a bank,” said Seth, “I kind of hope that a robber will come running in with a gun and that I’ll be the one who tackles him and saves everyone else.”

  From a distance, it had seemed that Seth’s mother was not going to die of her disease. The year before, she was still bringing brownies for bake sales and raising money for Mrs. Sanderson’s Christmas gift. She’d remained so active that it had looked like her cancer would be merely a trait she lived with, like being overweight or going gray. But I hadn’t seen her in a while.

  The color was returning to the sky, slowly but surely, the way a person’s face recovers after fainting.

  “I’m going to be an Army Ranger when I’m older,” he said. “That’s the most elite branch of the military.”

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  People were climbing back into their cars. Horns were honking. Dogs continued to bark. Some kids were heading back to their classrooms. Others were drifting away, off campus and into the world, too jittery to obey any rules or routine.

  Seth and I stayed where we were on the hill. A silence stretched between us, but it was an easy silence. We were alike, I thought, the quiet, thinking kind.

  I watched him watching the sky. A frail-looking cirrus was gliding in from the west, the first and only cloud of the day. I wanted to say something important and true.

  “I’m really sorry about your mom,” I said.

  “What?” he said. He turned toward me. He looked surprised.

  It was suddenly hard to look him in the eye. So I didn’t. Instead, I looked back up at the sky.

  “I’m just sorry that she’s sick,” I said. “That must be really hard.”

  Seth sat up and brushed his palms on the front of his jeans.

  “What the hell do you know about it?” he said.

  He was standing now. The sun was nearly full again, and it was too bright to look up; it was hard to see his face in the light.

  “You don’t know anything about my mom,” he said. His voice cracked. “Don’t talk about her. Don’t ever talk about my mom. Never talk about her again.”

  I felt each word sting a separate sting.

  I tried to apologize, but Seth was already walking away, hurrying off campus and out into the world. I watched him cross the street, looking angry and reckless, dodging traffic as he walked, moving farther and farther away from me.

  By then the sky had turned to its afternoon self, its boldest, bluest blue. I sat up and discovered that I was the only one left on the hill.

  I began to walk slowly back toward math. I passed Michaela on the way. She was heading toward the campus gate with a group of older kids I didn’t know.

  “We’re going to the beach,” she said as she passed me.

  “What about next period?” I said. I regretted these words as soon as they left my mouth.

  Michaela laughed. “Oh, God, Julia,” she said. “Have you ever done one bad thing in your life?”

  That afternoon soccer practice was canceled. My mother picked me up from school. She was furious.

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

  I climbed into the passenger side of the car and slammed the door shut behind me, hushing in an instant the giddy voices ringing from the bus lines.

  “It was just an eclipse,” I said. I clicked my seat belt and leaned back as my mother pulled away from the curb.

  “You should have answered your phone,” she said. “You should have called me back.”

  The air conditioner was blasting in the car. News about the eclipse was streaming from the car radio.

  “Are you listening to me?” my mother said, her voice rising as we waited in a line of slow-moving cars, waiting for the crossing guards to wave us out of the school parking lot.

  I was watching a swarm of kids through the window. They seemed suddenly distant out there on the quad. I traced my finger on the glass.

  “Hanna moved to Utah,” I said. I had known for two days, but this was the first time I mentioned it to my mother.

  She turned toward me. Her expression softened. A red Mercedes squeezed past our car.

  “She moved?”

  I nodded.

  “Oh, Julia,” said my mother. She reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “Really? Are you sure it’s permanent?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  We headed toward the freeway. I could feel my mother glancing at me as she drove. She turned the radio down.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think they’ll come back.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “People are scared right now,” she said. “You know? They’re not thinking straight.”

  When
we got home, we discovered that the garbage cans my father had wheeled out to the curb that morning were still heaping with trash. The garbageman had not shown up to collect, but the ants and the flies were busy. The bird was still in there. We rolled the garbage back into our side yard and unloaded the groceries from the car. My mother had bought several boxes of canned food, six jugs of bottled water. She suspected that shortages were on the way—and she wasn’t the only one who thought so.

  That night my father claimed he’d understood right away that the eclipse was an eclipse and nothing more.

  “You’re telling me that you weren’t afraid even for a single second?” asked my mother.

  “Not really,” he said. “I knew what it was.”

  The nightly news was dominated by the story and featured a handful of eclipse enthusiasts who, before the slowing started, had traveled to a remote Pacific island, one of the few specks of dry land from which it was supposed to be possible to view the total solar eclipse. These people had packed expensive camera equipment in their luggage, special filters designed for capturing pictures of vanishing suns. But their tools sat unused in cushioned cases. Their special filters were unnecessary, their protective glasses remained folded in chest pockets, never used—the eclipse struck the West Coast instead.

  That night the baseball playoffs went on without interruption. To play on in the face of uncertainty seemed the only American thing to do. But that night’s game was terrible. It was harder than ever to defy gravity. Seven pitchers were pulled. No one could hit. With each new hour, every bit of matter on the earth was more and more fettered by gravity.

  It seemed the stock market, too, was subject to the same downward pull, having plunged to a record low. The price of oil, on the other hand, was shooting upward.

  By the time I climbed into bed that night, we’d gained another thirty minutes. All the television stations had added perpetual crawls to their screens, which reported, instead of stock prices, the changing length of a day on earth: twenty-six hours, seven minutes, and growing.