The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

  6

  The days passed. More and more people drained away from our suburb. They fled to wherever they were from, and this was California—almost everyone had migrated here from someplace else. But my family stayed. We were natives. We were home.

  On the third day, my mother and I drove out to my grandfather’s house after school.

  “He says he’s okay,” my mother said as she drove. “But I want to make sure.”

  He was my father’s father, but it was my mother who worried over him most. I had begun to worry about him, too—he lived all alone out east.

  We stopped at a gas station on the way and discovered a long line of cars, waiting for the pumps. Dozens of minivans and SUVs formed a chain that overflowed the parking lot and wrapped around the street corner.

  “Jesus,” said my mother. “This line looks like something out of a war zone.”

  A woman in a pink-floral-print dress hurried between the cars, slipping orange flyers beneath windshield wiper blades as passengers looked away: The end is now! Repent and save yourself!

  I avoided her eyes as she passed, so frantic and so sure, but she sought out mine and paused at my window to shout through the glass: “And the Lord God said, ‘On that day, I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.’ ”

  My mother flicked the lock on the doors.

  “Is that from the Bible?” I asked.

  “I can’t remember,” my mother said.

  We inched forward slightly. I’d counted nineteen cars ahead of ours.

  “Where is everyone going?” asked my mother. She rubbed her forehead and exhaled. “Where is there to go?”

  My grandfather lived in the middle of a luxury housing development. His old house was a holdout against the new. Once off the freeway, we drove through a network of fresh black streets, sliced at every corner by a shimmering white crosswalk. The stop signs were new. The speed bumps were new. Everything here was new. Curbs remained sharp and unscuffed. Fire hydrants stood gleaming and rust-free. Rows of saplings grew at evenly spaced intervals along the sidewalks, and the sidewalks literally sparkled. All the houses had lawns like thick heads of hair.

  Amid all this newness, my grandfather’s dusty acre persisted, invisible, like a patch of dark matter: You could tell it existed from the way the roads curved around it, but you couldn’t see it from the outside. You only sensed it. The developer of the neighboring community had planted thick pine trees on every side of my grandfather’s lot, so the neighbors could avoid looking at it.

  We drove through my grandfather’s open wooden gate, where the smooth asphalt turned to chunky gravel beneath our tires and the carefully planned green spaces of the development gave way to the region’s natural landscape: scraggly and dry, barren and brown and unlovely. My father had grown up on this land in an age when there were chickens and horses here. But the last horse had long since died, and now the stable stood like a relic of an ancient era. The wooden fence posts and crosspieces lay bleaching in the sun. The chicken coop was empty of chickens. My grandfather was eighty-six years old. All his old friends were dead. His wife was dead. He had grown bitter about his own longevity.

  “Just hope you didn’t inherent my genes, Julia,” he said to me often. “It’s a curse to live too long.” I liked the way he always said exactly what he thought.

  Years earlier, the developers had tried to buy my grandfather’s property. But he refused to sell. “Dammit,” he said, “I got things buried in this land.” I knew that at least two cats had been interred out behind the woodpile, and I suspected he had also buried certain other valuables over the years. The developers went ahead without him, laying roads and foundations around him, erecting houses and street signs on every side of his property. The new neighborhood rose up around my grandfather’s land like floodwater surrounding high ground.

  My mother and I walked into the kitchen without knocking. When you moved around in this house, the shelves rattled slightly, knickknacks teetering on every surface. My grandfather was sitting at the table in a red sweatshirt, the newspaper and a magnifying glass in front of him.

  “Hi, Gene,” my mother said. “How are you doing?”

  “I told you on the phone I’m fine,” he said without looking up. “Chip’s been here.”

  Chip was a neighbor of his, a teenager who helped keep the house going. Chip wore black T-shirts and black jeans every day, and a lip ring was responsible for the slight drooping of his lower lip. They were an unlikely pair, but I think Chip hated the development as much as my grandfather did, though he lived with his parents in one of the new houses.

  “This is bullshit, anyway,” said my grandfather.

  “What is?” asked my mother.

  “I figure it’s all a trick to take our minds off the Middle East.”

  He had the palest blue eyes, like my father’s but lighter, and they seemed to be fading as he aged, like fabric left too long in the sun. A few wisps of white hair fell now and then on his forehead.

  “Come on, Gene,” said my mother. “How could someone rig all this?”

  “I’m just saying, how do you know it’s true? Have you measured it? They can do anything these days.”

  “Gene—”

  “You just wait. They’ve got something cooked up. That’s all I know. They’re messing with the clocks or some damn thing. I’m just saying I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it for a second.”

  My mother’s cell phone buzzed, and I could tell from the way shw answered that it was my father on the other end. She stepped outside to talk to him. I sat down at the table—this was the same table where my grandfather and I used to play hours of Old Maid together, but his eyesight had grown too poor to see what kind of cards he held. I missed how he used to be.

  “So, Julia,” said my grandfather. “You see anything around here you want?”

  He waved at his shelves of antique glass, his rows of weathered hundred-year-old Coke bottles, my grandmother’s silver tea service, her collections of decorative thimbles and tiny silver spoons, the pewter and porcelain figurines she had arranged on lace doilies in some different, better decade.

  “I can’t take it with me, you know,” he went on. It was sad to hear him talk this way. “You should take what you want now, because when I’m dead, Ruth is going to try to get her hands on everything.”

  Ruth was my grandmother’s younger sister. She lived on the East Coast.

  “No, thanks, Grandpa,” I said. I hoped he wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t wearing my gold nugget necklace. “You should keep your stuff.”

  Before the arthritis, he used to spend his mornings at the beach running a metal detector over the sand, hunting for coins and treasure in the dunes. But now he’d grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth and, by giving them away, he could snip those strings.

  He stood up from his chair and shuffled to the counter for another cup of coffee. He stood at the window. My mother was pacing out there, making hand motions while she talked on the phone. The wind was blowing her hair all to one side, and she kept brushing it out of her face.

  “Did I ever tell you that I seen a guy killed out there in that yard once?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “He wasn’t more than seventeen,” he said, shaking his head. “A horse trampled right over top of him.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “It sure was.”

  My grandfather nodded slightly as if to underline the thought. He had a vast memory for awful things. Somewhere farther back in the house, I could hear a faucet dripping.

  “This whole thing reminds me of when I worked in Alaska,” he said. Alaska was one of his favorite subjects. “We had sun all day and all night in the summer. We had sun at two in the morning. The sun never went down. Not for weeks. And then in the winter, it was pitch-dark all day every day for two or three months.… ”

  He trailed
off. I noticed a television satellite wobbling on a nearby roof, barely visible through the pine trees. I could smell a hint of smoke in the air.

  “This whole thing is bullshit, believe me,” he said. “I just can’t figure how.”

  “You really think so?”

  He looked at me with a serious, steady gaze.

  “Do you know that in 1958 the United States government began running a secret nuclear test program right here in this county?” he said. “They were testing the effects of nuclear substances on regular people. They were putting uranium in the water and then monitoring the cancer rates. Have you ever heard that?”

  I shook my head. Somewhere under his backyard, a bomb shelter lay abandoned. My grandfather had built it himself in the sixties.

  “Of course you haven’t,” he said. “That’s the way they like it. That’s exactly how they like it.”

  A gust of wind whooshed past the back of the house, carrying a paper bag past the window.

  “Have your mother and dad been taking you to church?” he asked.

  “We go sometimes,” I said.

  “You should go every week,” he said. He picked up a pair of tiny boots encased in a skin of tarnished silver. “You want these?”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “These were my shoes when I was four years old. Don’t you want anything around here?”

  I could hear the labor of his lungs as he breathed, the sound of his air whistling through narrowing passageways.

  “Wait a minute. I know what you’d like.” He pointed to a low cupboard on the far side of the kitchen and instructed me to kneel down on the floor. “Now reach all the way inside,” he directed. “Feel that?”

  “What?”

  I was up to my shoulder in the cupboard. The linoleum was pressing its paisley pattern uncomfortably into my kneecaps. But I didn’t want to hurt him, so I kept going.

  “It’s a false back, see?” he said. “Slide it to the right.”

  In my grandfather’s house, a cereal box was never full of cereal; soup cans almost always contained a substance more precious than soup. It’s no wonder he believed so fiercely in forces unseen. Behind the false back of the cupboard stood a row of coffee cans, so old I didn’t recognize the labels.

  “The Folgers can,” he said. “Give it here.”

  He pulled at the lid, wincing. He seemed weaker than usual.

  “Let me do it,” I said.

  The lid came off easily in my hands, but I tried, for his sake, to make it look like a harder task than it was. The can was stuffed with layers of crumpled newspaper. At the bottom was a small silver box, inside of which, on a bed of stiff velvet, lay a tarnished gold pocket watch, its chain snaking around behind its face.

  “This was my father’s,” he said. “You wind that up, and it’ll tell the time. It’ll last forever. Them gears are good quality. That’s how they used to make things, good quality, you know? I’ll bet you never even seen something as well made as that.”

  I did not want the watch. I would only add it to the stack of other objects my grandfather had given me, all of them ancient and obscure: uncirculated commemorative silver dollars packed in plastic, four pairs of my grandmother’s old clip-on earrings, framed maps of our city as it was a hundred years ago. But he insisted, and I couldn’t admit to him that I had lost the one heirloom of his that I really loved. That morning I had searched the dirt for my gold nugget necklace at the bus stop, but I couldn’t find where it had flung.

  “Thanks,” I said, holding the watch in my hand. “It’s pretty.”

  “Be even prettier once you shine it up,” he said. He rubbed the face with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “You take good care of that, Julia.”

  The screen door slammed, and my mother came into the kitchen. She noticed the pocket watch in my hand. “Oh, Gene, don’t give away all your things.”

  “Let her keep it,” he said. “I can’t take it with me.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.

  He waved her off.

  “Take this too,” he whispered to me as we were leaving. He handed me a ten-dollar bill. A quick smile flashed across my grandfather’s face, a rare and precious sight. I could see the outline of his false teeth against his gums.

  “Do something fun with it,” he said.

  I squeezed his hand and nodded.

  “And Julia,” he said. “Don’t believe everything you hear, okay? You’re a smart girl. You can read between the lines.”

  We took what we always referred to as the scenic route home, back roads with less traffic. We listened to the news on the radio as we drove. Reporters from around the world were describing local reactions. From South America streamed more reports of gravity sickness. The Centers for Disease Control were investigating.

  “Jesus,” said my mother. “Tell me if you start to feel sick.”

  At that moment, I did begin to feel a little dizzy.

  “This disease seems to be affecting some people more than others,” said one official on the radio. “The name of this disease is paranoia.”

  In our own country, according to the report, clusters of born-again Christians were making their final arrangements, hoping at any moment to be summoned from their beds, leaving behind empty houses and piles of crumpled clothing where their bodies once stood.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why wouldn’t your clothes come with you?”

  “I don’t know, honey,” said my mother. “You know we don’t believe in that stuff.”

  We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.

  They were interviewing a televangelist on the radio. “The signs of the revelation have been in place for years,” he said. “We’ve known it was coming ever since the restoration of Israel.”

  As the road turned, I could see a sliver of shining ocean through a gap in the hills ahead. They had evacuated all the beachfront homes by then—no one knew what might happen to the tides.

  Outside, housing developments streaked past the window, the homes and the lots shrinking in size as we neared the coast. The land was so valuable near the ocean that some houses hung out over the edges of canyons, supported on one side by giant stilts.

  We came to a stop sign, and as my mother turned her head from right to left to check for traffic, I noticed the skinny path of gray that sometimes ran along the part in her hair where the roots showed through the dark dye. She’d gone gray at thirty-five, and I never liked seeing it, that earliest sign of her physical decline.

  I felt a wave of loneliness, as we drove. It occurred to me for perhaps the first time, as the car lurched forward, that if anything were to happen to my family, I’d be all alone in the world.

  We were passing the fairgrounds now. The county fair was scheduled to open its gates in a week. Hanna and I had been planning to go on opening day.

  Usually, the construction workers worked nonstop every day to get the rides up and running. But I saw as we passed that the construction had ceased. I imagined the workers and the carnies had fled to their hometowns, too—everyone wanted to be close to their families. The roller coasters stood half built, colored skeletons in the wind. The log ride, incomplete, was a suicide leap. The Ferris wheel stood only partially erect: A single red bucket dangled from a single spoke like the last fruit of summer, or autumn’s final leaf.

  7

  For a while the days still felt like days. The sun rose and the sun also set. Darkness was followed by light. I remember the cool swell of morning, the slow burn of afternoon, the sluggishness of dusk. Civil twilight stretched for hours before fading finally into night. Time slunk lazily by, slower and slower as it passed.

  With each new morning, we fell further out of step with the clocks. The earth still turned and the clocks still ticked, but they now kept different times. Within a week, midnight no longer necessarily struck at some dark hour of night. The clocks might hit nine A.M. in the middle
of the day. Noon sometimes landed at sunset.

  Those were chaotic, makeshift days.

  Every morning officials announced the minutes gained overnight, like raindrops collected in pans. The totals varied wildly, and we never knew what to expect. Our school start time was decided at sunrise each day—it was always different, and I remember watching the local news channel with my mother in the mornings, waiting to hear what time they’d choose.

  More and more kids stopped coming to school.

  Extra hours emerged between the cracks in workers’ shifts. Planes were grounded for days, and trains were halted on tracks until new scheduling schemes could be invented and put into place. Timetables had to be tossed out and reimagined every day.

  We improvised. We adapted. We made do.

  My mother slowly packed our cupboards full of emergency supplies. She accumulated them gradually, a rising tide of condensed milk and canned peas, dried fruit and preserves, four dozen cans of soup. She never returned to the house anymore without a package of batteries under her arm, or a box of tapered candles, or more dehydrated food sealed in plastic or aluminum—the unperishable, the unending, the never-ever-to-expire.

  Meanwhile, my soccer team practiced mostly as usual, and my mother’s drama students continued to rehearse their production of Macbeth. All across the country, events like these were held as planned. Shows had to go on. We clung to anything previously scheduled. To cancel seemed immoral, it might mean we’d given up or lost hope.

  New minutes surfaced everywhere. Time was harder to waste. The pace of living seemed to slow.

  Some say that the slowing affected us in a thousand other unacknowledged ways, from the life expectancy of lightbulbs to the rate at which ice melted and water boiled and human cells multiplied and human cells died. Some say that our bodies aged less rapidly in the days immediately following the start of the slowing, that the dying died slower deaths, that babies took longer to be born. There is some evidence that menstrual cycles lengthened ever so slightly in those first two weeks. But these effects were the stuff of aneċe, not science. Physicists will tell you that if anything, the opposite should have been true: It’s the man on the speeding train who experiences time more slowly, and not the other way around. As far as I could tell, the grass grew as it always had, the bread in our bread box molded at the usual pace, and the apples on Mr. Valenica’s apple tree next door ripened as they did every fall, then dropped to the ground, rotting among the weeds at what seemed the traditional speed.