Tom and Carlotta, our neighbors down the street, went public as real-timers right away. I guess it was no surprise that they would resist clock time—their roof sparkled with a dozen solar panels, and they drove two worn-out trucks, freckled with peeling peace signs and ancient, sun-bleached bumper stickers that proclaimed, among other optimistic dreams, make love not war. Tom was a retired art teacher who wore a hemp necklace and ragged jeans stained with stray paint. Carlotta’s long gray hair swung near her waist, a ghost, I suspected, of its younger and sexier self.
A few days after the return of clock time, a new sign appeared in the corner of their front lawn. The sign was small and white and similar in style to the one in Mr. Valencia’s yard, which alerted passersby to the fact that the Valencia home was protected by a Safelux security system. Tom and Carlotta’s new sign carried a different message: this household lives on real time.
“My mom thinks they’re drug dealers,” said Gabby, whose house was right next door to theirs. Her mother, a lawyer, clicked around in high heels and navy blue suits. “She thinks they’re growing shitloads of pot in their house.”
“You think?” I said. I had stopped by her house that Saturday, having nothing else to do. We were sitting around in her bedroom.
“It’s total bullshit, of course,” said Gabby. “My mom thinks that anyone who’s different is some kind of criminal.”
Two scabs had formed on the inside of Gabby’s right wrist in the shape of a sun and a perfect crescent moon. Her parents, when they saw the scabs, had sent her to a psychiatrist whom she now met with every week.
“Guess what,” she continued. “I met this guy online, and he thinks there’s going to be some kind a revolution.”
“What do you mean?”
“He thinks millions of people are going to fight the government over clock time.”
While the rest of us purchased sunlamps and installed blackout curtains for sleeping through the white nights, several thousand Americans attempted to remain in tune with daylight. The human body could adapt, they claimed, right alongside the earth. Already their circadian rhythms were adjusting, they reported, gradually stretching like elastic. They simply slept longer, stayed awake for more hours, ate a fourth meal in the late afternoon.
I used to hear Tom and Carlotta outside sometimes in the middle of our night. On sunny evenings, they would work in their yard while the rest of the street tried to sleep. I recall the metallic ring of gardening shears, the shuffle of sandals on the sidewalk, the voices moving through the quiet air. It was like a haunting: two dimensions of time occupying a single space.
In science that week, our butterflies wiggled out of their cocoons. It happened in fifth period, the last class of the day, but the sun was just beginning to rise. We had learned that butterflies almost always emerge in the morning.
“See?” said Mr. Jensen, a mug of coffee in his hand. “You can’t fool them. They know it’s morning.”
We all watched the butterflies hop and flutter, then flicker off into the sky. We knew, of course, what those butterflies did not: how short and hard their lives would be.
I remember that Mr. Jensen’s eyes looked red and watery that day. He seemed exhausted, his ponytail shaggier than usual, his beard a little wilder.
On the following Monday, we arrived in science to find sitting behind Mr. Jensen’s metal desk a young woman in a gray pantsuit. She’d written her name on the board: Miss Mosely. A substitute. “For a while,” she said. “Probably for the rest of the year.”
That’s the way it happened sometimes—people just disappeared.
Some of Mr. Jensen’s things stayed in the lab with us for the rest of the year: his silver thermos, a mud-splattered pair of hiking boots, a blue windbreaker wadded up on a shelf. Some of our sundials would sit in the windowsill until June, forever reporting fantastical times. One butterfly cocoon remained smoothly sealed in the terrarium, its inhabitant never to emerge and instead, weeks later, to be scraped off the ceiling by Miss Mosely’s scalpel and tossed into the trash with the shards of a broken beaker.
We were not told the reason for Mr. Jensen’s departure, a rumor spread that he had gone off the clock, and unlike the earlier reports, which had contended that Mr. Jensen spent his nights in a sleeping bag under his desk, I sensed that this new rumor was true.
We never saw Mr. Jensen again, but I continued to see Sylvia sometimes on our street.
She soon lost most of her students, and I worried for her. She looked cheerful enough from a distance, though, always waving to me from her driveway as she unloaded her car of canvas bags from the health food store or set out for a run, her red hair flying in the breeze behind her.
I knew that her life during that time must have been complicated. After all, most everything ran on the clock. It wasn’t just the schools but the doctors and the dentists and the mechanics, the grocery stores and the gyms, the restaurants and the movie theaters and the malls. Inevitably, Sylvia and the other real-timers must have arranged certain aspects of their lives around ours, or else they simply went without.
It must have grown harder with each passing week as the earth continued to slow and the days continued to expand.
13
In the first few weeks on clock time, sales of prescription sleeping pills spiked. The manufacturers of blackout curtains could not keep up with demand. Sleep masks went on backorder for months. There were runs on valerian root and other herbal sleep remedies. Some grocery stores sold out of chamomile tea.
Sales of alcohol and cigarettes also increased, and there is some evidence that clock time spelled big business for the harder drugs, too. Urban police departments reported steep rises in the price per ounce of anything capable of knocking a person out.
In some parts of the country, people took to sleeping in basements on the brightest of the white nights, but most houses in California were built without roots, leaving us trapped aboveground with the light.
Certain clock nights still coincided with the dark, but perfect alignment was rare. Whenever a lightless night did roll around, we slept as much as we could. But it was never enough. We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour but unable to store the rain.
Sleep had never come easily to my mother. Insomnia ran in her blood. On clock time, she could rest only when it was truly dark. I used to hear her in the kitchen, late on luminous nights, the teakettle whistling, the muffled music of the television on low. Sometimes she scrubbed the bathrooms all night, and the smell of pine and bleach would seep under the door of my bedroom. I lay awake, too, on some of those evenings. A thin square of light glowed around the edges of the quilts we’d tacked over my bedroom windows. You could always tell when it was daylight outside. You just knew.
My father, on the other hand, slept fine. He bought my mother all kinds of gadgets for her troubles. A special device, part sunlamp, part alarm clock, was supposed to mimic the effect of sunset with the slow fade of its bulb. A brand-new sound machine on her bedside table emitted the soothing sounds of ocean waves and waterfalls, breezes rustling through trees.
Nothing worked for my mother.
I don’t know how she stayed awake to teach her classes or lead the rehearsals of her students’ production of Macbeth.
The skin beneath her eyes turned a shadowy gray. She cried over the tiniest things. “I don’t know why I’m crying,” she’d say as she mopped up a broken wineglass or nursed a stubbed toe. She would wipe her eyes with the backs of her wrists. “I’m not really this upset.”
I caught her sobbing once in her bathroom, crouched over a bottle of liquid makeup that had cracked open on the white tile, its contents slowly bleeding across the floor. Her spine arched and shook as she wept. It was the twentieth hour of light.
Meanwhile, the birds continued to suffer. I never thought about how many had lived among us until they started dropping from the sky. Once, an entire flock of starlings lay down together to die in the street near our school. Traffic
was rerouted while a special crew cleared the bodies away. The flies lingered for hours.
As we stepped off the school bus one dusky afternoon, we found a tiny sparrow, half dead, in the middle of the sidewalk. A few of us crouched around it as the bus pulled away. The bird was breathing but otherwise motionless.
I reached down and touched it on its back. I gave it the gentlest stroke. I could feel the shadows of the other kids standing near me, watching.
“Maybe it needs water,” said someone behind me. I was surprised to hear Seth Moreno’s voice. He usually rode away on his skateboard as soon as he got off the bus. “Does anyone have any water?” he asked.
“I do,” I said. I pulled from my bag a half-empty bottle. I was glad that I could supply in that moment the one thing that Seth wanted. Our fingers brushed as I handed him the bottle. He didn’t seem to notice.
Trevor sacrificed his retainer case, and then Seth filled it with water for the bird.
We stared at the sparrow. We waited. It continued to breathe, a rapid irregular shudder, but it made no move for the water. It made no move at all. The sun was setting behind us, and the orange light shone brightly on its feathers.
I watched Seth watching the bird. He was only a few feet away from me, but I sensed an enormous space between us. I could not guess what he was thinking.
Then Daryl suddenly rushed into the circle, the Ritalin in his veins perhaps unable to override his desires. He grabbed the little bird with his bare hands and spun away with it and ran.
“Daryl,” we all shouted. “Leave it alone!”
Seth took off after him, sprinting toward the edge of the canyon.
The next thing happened quickly: Before Seth could catch up to him, Daryl snapped his arm back like a pitcher and threw the bird up into the sky and over the lip of the canyon.
This was a time in my life when things were happening every day that would have seemed impossible only the day before, and here was one more. I still remember the bird’s long arc through the sky. I kept waiting for its wings to flap open and catch the wind. But it dropped to the floor of the canyon like a rock.
“Fuck you, Daryl,” shouted Seth.
“It was dying anyway,” said Daryl.
That’s when Seth pulled Daryl’s backpack right off of his shoulders and hurled it into the canyon in the same direction as the bird. We watched the backpack soar and then fall through the air, the straps flailing as it fell, just as we had watched the bird.
Daryl stood at the rim of the canyon, staring down.
I felt a swell of gratitude for Seth. I wanted to say something, but he jumped on his skateboard right away and zoomed off, leaning hard into the turn that took him out of sight.
Soon the rest of us scattered, too. We were growing more accustomed every day to the small terrors of life. There was nothing to do but go home.
Around that same time, we heard that the cancer had spread to Seth’s mother’s bones, and Seth stopped coming to school. I heard she died at home in the middle of a long white night.
I composed a letter of sympathy on the inside of one of my mother’s notecards, the front of which shimmered with van Gogh’s Starry Night. I wanted to communicate something important and right. But I quickly crossed out everything I’d written and pulled a fresh card from the stationery box. This time I wrote a single sentence, just two words: I’m sorry. I signed my name and dropped it in the mail.
14
By the end of November, our days had stretched to forty hours.
Those were days of extremes. The sun blazed longer each time it came around, baking our street until it was too hot to cross barefoot. Earthworms sizzled on patios. Daisies wilted in their beds.
The periods of darkness, when they came, were just as sluggish as the daylight. The air turned cold during twenty hours of night, like the water at the bottom of a lake. All over California, grapes froze on the vine, orange groves withered in the dark, the flesh of avocados turned black from the frosts.
Dozens of experimental biospheres were commissioned for the cultivation of essential crops, and the seeds of a thousand fragile species were rushed to a seed bank in Norway.
Certain scientists struggled to predict the future rate of the slowing and to map its multiplying effects, while others argued that the rotation might still correct itself, but some were inclined not to forecast at all, likening this new science to the prediction of earthquakes or brain tumors.
“Will we end up like the birds?” posed one ancient climatologist, interviewed on the nightly news. His dark eyes were nested in thick folds of sun-spotted skin. “Maybe we will,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest. Six or seven weeks after the slowing started, a certain boredom developed. The daily count of new minutes dropped off the front pages of the newspapers. And television reports on the subject became hardly distinguishable from the more ordinary bad news that streamed each night into our living rooms and went largely ignored.
The few people who had rejected clock time carried on, living like bean sprouts, reacting to sunlight when it appeared and going dormant whenever our patch of earth slipped into the dark. Already, these real-timers seemed very different from us, their customs incompatible with ours. They were widely regarded as freaks. We did not mix.
The handful who lived on our street were left off the guest list of that year’s fall block party, held every year in the bulge of our cul-de-sac on the night before Thanksgiving. Orange flyers were left on every doorstep on the street but theirs.
Later that same week, one sunrise revealed a hundred strands of toilet paper tangled in the branches of Sylvia’s olive tree. Tom and Carlotta’s house had received the same treatment. I watched Sylvia from my bedroom as she carefully tore the paper from her rosebushes. She rested for a moment, hands on hips, looking around from beneath the wide brim of a straw hat, as if the culprits might be lurking nearby. She retrieved a stepladder from her garage. But she could not reach every piece. For weeks, bits of shredded toilet paper remained lodged in the highest branches.
The Kaplan family was eventually outed. Off the clock for the sake of their Sabbath, which ran from sundown to sundown on every seventh day, they’d been keeping it secret from the neighborhood. Once the news was out, Beth, the oldest daughter, was never again asked to babysit the Swansons’ toddler. We mingled with them even less than we had before.
I spent a lot of time watching Sylvia through my telescope during that time.
On white nights, I might see her watering her roses at midnight or dropping pasta into a pot at three A.M. Sometimes she went walking by herself in the silent middle of the night.
She seemed more isolated than the other real-timers did. She was always alone. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch her play piano through my telescope. I was sure I could detect in the slight slump of her shoulders as she played, and in the heavy way she held her head, a certain persistent sadness. She looked lonely through the lens of my telescope, like one of those faraway stars, still visible to our eyes but no longer really there. She looked lonelier even than I was.
Certain disasters evolved into attractions. My father and I sometimes drove down to the coast to look at what the ocean had done to the beachfront houses, evacuated since the slowing had mysteriously swelled the tides. At high tide, waves rolled across rooftops, the rooflines forming a geometric shoreline, while divers secretly scoured the insides for treasures. At low tide, those mansions dripped and creaked like sunken ships, exposed. They were magnificent houses, the homes of movie stars and millionaires. But the ocean had aged them at high speed. All the windows had blown out and would someday wash up in pieces on the sand, bits of smooth sea glass mixing with the shells.
The beaches had been closed since the start of the slowing. But my father liked to explore at low tide.
“Come on,” he said one Sunday when I hesitated in the driveway of an abandoned Cape C
od. Dozens of yards of police tape flapped in the wind. No one else was around. Even the seagulls were gone, the sickness having swept them all away.
The house was enormous. Its shingles were warped from the water, and the front door was missing. Most of the contents had been flushed out by the waves. Everything inside was gray. One whole wall was missing; the living room faced out to the sea like an open garage.
“Look at these,” said my father. He had crouched down on the soggy carpet to watch sand crabs burrow into the mud that had collected there. “Want to hold one?”
He looked like a clamdigger, his pants rolled up to his knees.
“No, thanks,” I said.
An extreme low tide had pulled the water hundreds of feet out from the beach that morning. I could tell it was on its way back. Small waves were beginning to lap at what was left of the back porch.
“The tide’s coming in,” I said.
“We have time,” said my father. “Come on.”
There was plenty of life left in that house. Starfish clung to the granite countertops, and sea anemones lived in the sinks.
“Watch your step,” said my father as we headed down a hall.
The floors were littered with driftwood and seaweed and glass.
“I was in this house once, years ago,” said my father. He was squinting in the sunlight. I had noticed only recently how many wrinkles formed around his eyes when he smiled. “I came to a Christmas party here once with an old girlfriend. This was her parents’ house.”
A foamy surge of water rushed into the room. We were instantly ankle-deep. My sandals felt heavy under the weight of the cold water.
“Dad, please,” I said, looking back down the hall. A layer of white water swirled over the hardwood floor. Two teenagers had recently drowned in just this way in one of the old houses farther up the coast. “Can we go now?”
The Age of Miracles Page 10