The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

  Later, I would spend a great deal of time obsessing about the rules of cause and effect, how the tipping of that ladder was one in a long chain of events. What if the floor of the shelter had been lined with carpet instead of cement? What if the ladder’s manufacturer had coated the feet with rubber for better grip? Maybe such a ladder would not have slid so easily across the floor. If the Soviets had decided not to ship nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962, my grandfather never would have built the shelter; had the earth’s rotation remained in a steady state, he never would have reclaimed it. I used to lie awake at night tracing the thousand other things that might have prevented my grandfather’s death, but from the moment the ladder wobbled, the possibilities narrowed: His head struck the cement, the blood of his veins poured into his brain, his heart quit beating, and he left this earth for good.

  It was later estimated that he died on the same day he disappeared, two months earlier, my birthday. At the time of his fall, he was wearing his gray slacks, leather shoes, and corduroy sport coat. He was dressed for our dinner. The police surmised that he had climbed down into the shelter less than an hour before we arrived that night, and that he likely only intended to carry one last load of supplies—all the board games he knew I liked best—to the shelter before joining us for dinner. In his coat pocket, they found a pale blue envelope with my name written in my grandfather’s shaky letters on the front. Inside was a birthday card and a twenty-dollar bill. There was a brief handwritten note: Happy Birthday, Julia. God bless.

  33

  It never used to rain where we lived, but it rained on the day we buried my grandfather. We held the service in the cool safety of the dark. My father was quieter at the cemetery than I had ever seen him. My mother cried softly behind me. The black casket gleamed beneath the floodlights as raindrops rolled down the sides. I could not believe he was in there, my grandfather, lying dead. I could still hear the sound of his voice in my ears. I could still see his face. I’d never been to a funeral before.

  Soon the dirt turned to mud, and the rain turned to sleet. Somewhere on the other side of the planet, the sun was shining, and the people there were hiding from the light. I remember shivering in my parka and wondering about the difference between coincidence and fate.

  I recovered quickly from my sunburns, but Seth was sick for weeks. The skin on his arms bubbled and sloughed. A succession of fevers washed over his body. The doctors couldn’t say if it was from the sunburn or from something else. He stayed home from school for two weeks. I sat with him in the afternoons, but he spoke little and slept often. The old hours opened up again like scars—I went back to spending my lunches in the library, anxious and alone.

  Seth eventually revived, but I worried even then that some damage had already been done. Some things that happen during youth, you carry with you into later life, and certain experts were already predicting an approaching tidal wave of cancers.

  April dissolved quickly into May, and May was the month when the earthquakes began. They were mild back then but frequent, an almost daily rumbling. That same month, we built a second greenhouse in the backyard, and we sunproofed our windows. My mother bought padlocks for all the doors in the house. My father bought a gun.

  Seven sunsets later, it was June.

  The last day of school that year was the quietest last day in memory. We failed to summon the usual glee. It was partly the darkness that muted us, the slim sickle moon, but it was something else, too: a new sense of time, I guess, how swiftly it slides away. There was a feeling on that last day of school, as we zipped up our backpacks and stacked our books in the book room, that we might never return to those halls. September loomed just three months away, but we had stopped predicting the future. The signing of yearbooks was taken more seriously that year. Nostalgia flowed from every pen. I hadn’t spoken to Hanna in months, but she insisted on signing the page in my book near her picture, snapped at a time when we were still friends. I never saw Hanna again. She and her family drove back to Utah that summer to wait for whatever would come.

  The afternoon dwindled. The moon slipped out of sight. The English teachers handed out the summer reading lists: Animal Farm, Tom Sawyer, The Diary of Anne Frank. Never before were we so comforted by the screech of our chairs on linoleum, the squeak of a marker on a dry-erase board. But the clocks ticked at the usual speed, so the end of the day arrived on time. The school buses groaned at the curb, headlights blazing in the mist. The bell rang. Some hugged. Some cried. We all scattered. We were less eager for summertime than we’d ever been before.

  The solar storms raged all summer. Seth and I kept close track of them. We never felt them when they struck, but they damaged wiring and sparked fires all over the world. More and more radiation was leaking into the atmosphere. We could trace its presence in the wild arcs of the auroras that shot through the sky whenever it turned dark. We never knew when the electricity might go out. A surge of magnetic particles could knock out the power grid at any time, and so we kept our flashlights close, candles ready.

  We continued to stay away from the sun.

  By then much of what came from the mouths of scientists was unintelligible to the rest of us. But we understood certain stark facts. The same solar wind now pummeling our skies had once, long ago, lapped away the oceans and the atmosphere of Mars.

  “We’ve seen effects like this in the magnetic field before,” said one scientist, “But never on such a grand scale. It should take thousands of years for this kind of deterioration to take place.”

  Their statements sometimes lapsed into poetry. Their imaginations began to run wild. Some speculated that a third force was involved, as yet unknown.

  “We’re seeing something here,” said one researcher, “that undermines our entire understanding of physics.”

  My mother’s sickness ebbed and flowed, but she learned to predict her dizzy spells by the faint metallic taste in her mouth, one more symptom that her doctor could not explain.

  I noticed that my father began to care for her in a newly tender way. I read their interactions from a distance, but I sensed a new closeness between them. Something had shifted, but the cause was mysterious to me. I studied them from afar that summer, the way, as we’d learned in school, astronomers could sometimes detect a distant planet—not by seeing it but by measuring how its mass bent the path of starlight. The clues were in the curve of my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulder, the softening tone of her voice. Sometimes my mother would emerge from her nausea in a state almost cheerful, and we’d play Monopoly or Chinese checkers for a while, my parents sipping beers. Once she felt well for a whole week straight, and they stayed up late together every night, talking softly, laughing now and then. “See?” I remember my father’s voice insisting. “You’ll be fine.” The more time that passed, the less I understood the bond between them, but I began to suspect that the tipping of that ladder in my grandfather’s bomb shelter had changed the course of my parents’ marriage. I’ll never know the exact order of events or which decisions were made when. I’ll never know if my father really had been planning to leave with Sylvia that day or not. I know only that he didn’t leave. I know only that he stayed.

  I never saw Sylvia again. I don’t know if my father ever did. There were times that summer and afterward when I’d hear him on the phone late at night, but I couldn’t say who he was talking to or what was being said.

  When he was not at work, my father spent hours cataloging my grandfather’s possessions. His old oak clock now ticked in our living room. My grandmother’s miniature spoons now dangled from the lemon-yellow wall of our kitchen. My grandfather’s baby shoes, preserved in silver eight decades earlier, now sat on our living room shelf.

  My father never mentioned Sylvia directly. Together, we worked hard that summer to imagine that certain events had never taken place. The mind is a powerful force, two minds especially.

  Sometime in June, the police report from my mother’s accident arrived in our mailbox. It must
have mentioned the pedestrian’s fate—deceased—but I caught one quick glimpse of the document as my father crumpled it up and tossed it into the fireplace among the newspapers he was using to build a fire. It was as if the two of us had learned to travel back in time to someplace simpler where the rules of chronology and consequence, of action and reaction, were different, more diffuse, less sure. He brought up Sylvia on only one occasion.

  It was a clear black night, the moon three quarters full. We were walking down to the elementary school—his idea—to kick the soccer ball on the field for a while.

  “I know not everything makes sense to you,” he said as we walked. A few streetlights showed the way. I was afraid of what he might say next.

  “Do you know what a paradox is?” he said.

  He paused and rubbed his forehead. A chain of nearby houses glowed in silhouette against the dark sky.

  “Not really,” I said.

  I recall the way my hands felt that night, curled tight in the sleeves of my parka. I was still getting used to it, how cold the long darknesses could be.

  “A paradox,” he went on, “is when two contradictory things are both true.”

  He turned his head up to the sky. The tiniest bald patch had opened up at the back of his head; it was everywhere, I was realizing—the sharp evidence of time.

  “Just remember that, okay?” he added. “Not everything is clear-cut.”

  We reached the parking lot and found an opening in the chain-link fence. I remember the crunch of artificial turf beneath cleats. Every outdoor plant in the neighborhood was dead.

  The soccer ball shimmered in the glow of the auroras. My father stood in the goal while I took shots. As the months passed, it had gotten less and less satisfying to kick a ball, harder and harder to make it fly across a field—it wasn’t really gravity that was increasing but centrifugal force. The ball felt heavy on my foot.

  “Did you hear they found another planet that might be kind of like Earth?” said my father, as we headed back to the street.

  “Really?” I asked. “Where?”

  “A long way from here,” he said. “Twenty-five light-years.”

  A string of cars floated down the street, the headlights revealing momentarily a row of tree stumps at the front of the school.

  “So it doesn’t help us,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “No, not us.”

  We walked in silence for a while. I zipped my parka up to my throat. My cleats clicked on the asphalt.

  “I bet you’ll make the traveling team this year,” said my father. Streaks of green and violet flared across the sky.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  But I think we both knew that there would be no traveling team that year.

  From every direction, the echoes of hammers were wafting through the air, the hiss of circular saws, the cutting of steel. Hundreds of radiation shelters were ballooning beneath the ground.

  And still the days grew and kept growing. We hit seventy-two hours on the Fourth of July.

  On dark days that summer, Seth and I roamed beneath the streetlights, pale creatures, still growing. Seth seemed healthy again. He seemed fine. We took turns riding his skateboard down the hills of the neighborhood. We bought candy at the liquor store, drank sodas on the cliffs above the beach. We stood vigil at the dying of the whales.

  One afternoon Seth’s nose began to bleed. A few drops landed on his T-shirt.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand and pulling a tissue from his pocket. We were walking near the ocean, which was dark and loud beneath us. Seth tilted his head back, pinched the bridge of his nose. The blood quickly flowered through the tissue. “It happens sometimes,” he said.

  “It does?” I said. “Maybe my dad should look at it.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” he said.

  After a few minutes, the bleeding stopped. I noticed nothing else. He hid his symptoms well.

  Sylvia’s house remained empty. A for-sale sign stood in the yard, though the roof remained partially collapsed and draped in plastic. No buyers ever came to see it. Once, in our wandering, Seth and I peeked through a window. The wooden floor was slightly darker where the piano had once stood, and the wind chime made of seashells trilled lightly in the breeze. These were the only traces that Sylvia had ever lived there.

  I sometimes wondered where she had gone. One of the networks aired a television special that year about the rea-time colonies and their residents, and I searched it scene by scene for a glimpse of Sylvia in one of its shots, but I never spotted her.

  In Circadia that same summer, three people died of heatstroke in one day, after forty-one hours of sunlight drove the thermometers to 135 degrees in the desert. The colonies would almost all close eventually. As the days grew longer, it proved less and less possible for the human body to adjust. The promise of slow time went largely unfulfilled. For real-timers, the consequences of long periods without sleep began to interfere with certain cognitive functions. Some gave up and joined the rest of us on the clock. Many of those who persisted in the colonies faded into madness. A group in Idaho was found close to starvation, delirious and hallucinating—the whole group had stopped eating, though their cupboards were full of canned food.

  That was also the summer of food shortages and suicide cults. It seemed that every day a new group of people was found dead, poison floating in their bloodstreams.

  Fresh produce was harder and harder to find. In July the government launched the Life Garden campaign to encourage individuals to grow their own food in covered greenhouses. Instructional kits were distributed, as well as packets of the hardiest seeds. We tried to grow carrots, but they came out sickly and small. What little light they got came from artificial lights. Mushrooms were the only abundance.

  We swallowed mouthfuls of vitamins to make up for the lack. But soon the vitamins began to run low. My mother’s collection of canned food grew rapidly that summer. The stockpile took over the dining room.

  Seth and I spent a lot of time imagining what the world would look like after the humans were gone. We heard that everything plastic would outlast the rest, and so we pictured the houses on my street reduced to piles of PVC pipes and LEGOS, tupperware and beach pails, computer chips and cell phones and razors. Bottles of every variety would tower over everything else, the labels fading across the decades and the plastic cracking under the force of a harsh and lifeless sun.

  “Think of all the toothbrushes,” said Seth.

  Once we admired a mosquito landing on a porch light. “Look,” said Seth. His eyes were large and watery. The mosquito fluttered away. It struck us, as it flew, as a delicate, elegant thing. “Look! Look!” We were convinced for one moment that this was the last wild creature on earth.

  We wandered the canyons with flashlights. We peeked beneath our curtains at the sun. We lay flat on our backs in the darkness and watched the auroras the way other kids had once watched clouds.

  At night sometimes we’d kiss for a while in my driveway. I still remember the way his lips felt on mine, the sugary taste of his gum.

  Sometimes it seemed that our memories were failing us. I found I could no longer recall clearly the contours of my grandfather’s face or how my mother looked before she got sick—I was sure that her skin had faded some, turned rougher, but it was hard to say for sure. The sound of Sylvia’s piano completely vanished from my head. Similarly went the sensation of sunshine on my face, the taste of strawberries, the squish of a grape in my mouth. It got harder and harder to recall those ancient mornings when the sun rose like clockwork, the slowly lifting layers of fog, the lovely light, the start of day.

  But sometimes a bit of wind or a certain smell might remind me of the way it used to be. The horizon might look stark again, and I’d wonder for just a moment what had happened to the trees. A sudden sense of silence sometimes rushed into my ears, and I’d remember what we had lost: the songs of all the birds.

  On other continents
, famine spread. We tried to remember that we were luckier here than most.

  In August of that year, the power company dug up our street. It had something to do with the earthquakes, some related repair. Workmen in orange vests jackhammered a stretch of sidewalk to reach the cables that snaked beneath the street. A few hours later, when the work was finished, they poured two new squares of cement in the sidewalk to replace the ones they’d destroyed. The cement was still wet when the workmen drove away; it was guarded only by two orange cones and one strip of yellow caution tape.

  Seth and I knelt beside it, eager to leave our mark but unsure what to write. I was aware of his body next to mine as we crouched beneath the streetlights and conferred.

  “Whatever we write is going to last a long time,” he said. He stared hard at the cement and chewed his lip—this was one of his habits. I knew all his habits by then. He looked up at me. “Maybe our whole lives.”

  I felt a vague sadness then, the premonition of a future feeling.

  The surface of the wet cement was as smooth as new snow, and it smelled like sea salt. We spent a long time deciding what to write, thinking only slightly faster than the speed at which wet cement dries in open air.

  And still the earth turned, and the days passed, and the constellations wound across the sky. Gradually, we learned to sleep away the white nights in the radiation shelters we’d all dug beneath our yards, where the air smelled like dirt and like stone, so you never forgot you were under the ground.

  Little by little—and then all at once—that summer slipped away.

  What happened after that has been well recorded elsewhere. But I doubt that Seth’s name has appeared in any account but mine.

  He couldn’t hide it forever. We were walking home from the beach one afternoon, headlights flashing past us. It was early in a stretch of darkness, and the moon was shining low in the sky, just visible above the rooftops of the neighborhood.