“I guess I seem pretty stupid,” Simon said. “Especially in the company I’m keeping. I never much grasped scientific or mechanical things.”
“I’m no expert either. Even if we get the motor running a little smoother you ought to have a real mechanic look at it before you start driving cross-country.”
“Thank you, Tyler.” He watched with a sort of goggle-eyed fascination as I inspected the engine. “I appreciate that advice.”
The most likely culprit was the spark plugs. I asked Simon whether they had ever been replaced. “Not to my knowledge,” he said. The car had 60,000-plus miles on it. I used the ratchet set from my own car to pull one of the plugs and showed it to him: “Here’s most of your trouble.”
“That thing?”
“And its friends. The good news is it’s not an expensive part to replace. The bad news is, you’re better off not driving until we replace it.”
“Hmm,” Simon said.
“We can go into town in my car and pick up replacements if you’re willing to wait till morning.”
“Well, surely. That’s very kind. We weren’t planning to leave right away. Ah, unless Jason insists.”
“Jason will calm down. He’s just—”
“You don’t have to explain. Jason would rather I wasn’t here. I understand that. It doesn’t shock or surprise me. Diane just felt she couldn’t accept an invitation that made a point of disincluding me.”
“Well…good for her.” I guess.
“But I could just as easily rent a room somewhere in town.”
“No need for that,” I said, wondering exactly how it had come to pass that I was pressing Simon Townsend to stay. I don’t know what I had expected from a reunion with Diane, but Simon’s presence had aborted any nascent hopes. For the best, probably.
“I suppose,” Simon said, “Jason’s talked to you about New Kingdom. It’s been a point of contention.”
“He told me you guys were involved in it.”
“I’m not about to make a recruiting speech. But if you have any anxiety about the movement maybe I can put it to rest.”
“All I know about NK is what I see on television, Simon.”
“Some people call it Christian Hedonism. I prefer New Kingdom. That’s the idea in a nutshell, really. Build the chiliasm by living it, right here and now. Make the last generation as idyllic as the very first.”
“Uh-huh. Well…Jase doesn’t have much patience with religion.”
“No, he doesn’t, but you know what, Tyler? I don’t think it’s the religion that upsets him.”
“No?”
“No. In all honesty I admire Jason Lawton, and not just because he’s famously smart. He’s one of the cognoscenti, if you’ll pardon a ten-dollar word. He takes the Spin seriously. There are, what, eight billion people on Earth? And pretty much each and every one of them knows, at the very least, that the stars and moon have disappeared out of the sky. But they go on living in denial. Only a few of us really believe in the Spin. NK takes it seriously. And so does Jason.”
This was almost shockingly like what Jason himself had said. “Not in the same…style, though.”
“That’s the crux of the matter. Two visions competing for the public mind. Before long people will have to face up to reality whether they want to or not. And they’ll have to choose between a scientific understanding and a spiritual one. That worries Jason. Because when it comes down to matters of life and death, faith always wins. Where would you rather spend eternity? In an earthly paradise or a sterile laboratory?”
The answer didn’t seem as clear-cut to me as it evidently did to Simon. I recalled Mark Twain’s reply to a similar question:
Heaven, for the climate. Hell, for the company.
There was some audible arguing from inside the house—Diane’s voice, scolding, and her brother’s sullen, uninflected replies. Simon and I pulled a couple of folding chairs out of the garage and sat in the shade of the carport waiting for the twins to finish. We talked about the weather. The weather was very nice. We reached a consensus on that point.
The noise from the house eventually settled down. After a while a chastened-looking Jason came out and invited us to help him with the barbecue. We followed him around back and made more nice talk while the grill warmed up. Diane stepped out of the house looking flushed but triumphant. This was the way she used to look whenever she won an argument with Jase: a little haughty, a little surprised.
We sat down to chicken and iced tea and the remains of the three-bean salad. “Do y’all mind if I offer a blessing?” Simon asked.
Jason rolled his eyes but nodded.
Simon bent his head solemnly. I braced myself for a sermon. But all he said was, “Grant us the courage to accept the bounty You have placed before us this and every other day. Amen.”
A prayer expressing not gratitude but the need for courage. Very contemporary. Diane smiled at me across the table. Then she squeezed Simon’s arm, and we proceeded to dig in.
It was early when we finished, sunlight still lingering, the mosquitos not yet at their evening frenzy. The breeze had died and there was a softness in the cooling air.
Elsewhere, things were happening fast.
What we didn’t know—what even Jason, for all his vaunted connections, hadn’t yet been told—was that somewhere between that first bite of chicken and that last spoonful of three-bean salad the Chinese had pulled out of negotiations and ordered the immediate launch of a brace of modified Dong Feng missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads. The rockets might have been rising in their arcs even as we pulled Heinekens out of the cooler. Icy green rocket-shaped bottles dripping summer sweat.
We cleared the patio table. I mentioned the worn spark plugs and my plan to drive Simon into town in the morning. Diane whispered something to her brother, then (after a pause) nudged him with her elbow. Jase finally nodded and turned to Simon and said, “There’s one of those automotive superstores outside Stockbridge that’s open till nine. Why don’t I drive you over there right now?”
It was a peace offering, however reluctant. Simon recovered from his initial surprise and said, “I’m not about to turn down a ride in that Ferrari, if that’s what you’re offering.”
“I can put it through its paces for you.” Mollified by the prospect of showing off his car, Jason went into the house to fetch his keys. Simon shot back a well-gosh expression before following him. I looked at Diane. She grinned, proud of this triumph of diplomacy.
Elsewhere, the Dong Feng missiles approached and then crossed the Spin barrier en route to their programmed targets. Strange to think of them streaking over a suddenly dark, cold, motionless Earth, operating solely on internal programming, aiming themselves at the featureless artifacts that drifted in suspension hundreds of miles over the poles.
Like a drama without an audience, too sudden to see.
The educated consensus—afterward—was that the detonation of the Chinese warheads had no effect on the differential flow of time. What was affected (profoundly) was the visual filter surrounding the Earth. Not to mention the human perception of the Spin.
As Jase had pointed out years ago, the temporal gradient meant that massive amounts of radically blue-shifted radiation would have bathed the surface of our planet had that radiation not been filtered and managed by the Hypotheticals. More than three years of sunlight for every second that passed: enough to kill every living thing on Earth, enough to sterilize the soil and boil the oceans. The Hypotheticals, who had engineered the temporal enclosure of the Earth, had also shielded us from its lethal side effects. Moreover, the Hypotheticals were regulating not only how much energy reached the static Earth but how much of the planet’s own heat and light was radiated back into space. Which was perhaps why the weather these last few years had been so pleasantly…average.
The sky over the Berkshires, at least, was as cloudless as Waterford crystal when the Chinese payloads reached their targets, 7:55 Eastern time.
I w
as with Diane in the front room when the house phone rang.
Did we notice anything before Jason’s call? A change in the light, something as insignificant as the feeling that a cloud might have passed in front of the sun? No. Nothing. All my attention was on Diane. We were drinking coolers and talking about trivia. Books we’d read, movies we’d seen. The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. What we said was trite and conventional, but the undertalk was deep and occasionally treacherous.
And pretty soon we were flirting with each other, as if Simon Townsend and the last eight years signified nothing. Joking at first, then maybe not joking. I told her I’d missed her. She said, “There were times I wanted to talk to you. Needed to talk to you. But I didn’t have your number, or I figured you were busy.”
“You could have found my number. I wasn’t busy.”
“You’re right. Actually it was more like…moral cowardice.”
“Am I that frightening?”
“Not you. Our situation. I suppose I felt as if I ought to apologize to you. And I didn’t know how to begin to do that.” She smiled wanly. “I guess I still don’t.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for, Diane.”
“Thank you for saying so, but I happen to disagree. We’re not kids anymore. It’s possible to look back with a certain amount of insight. We were as close as two people can be without actually touching. But that was the one thing we couldn’t do. Or even talk about. As if we had taken an oath of silence.”
“Since the night the stars disappeared,” I said, dry-mouthed, aghast at myself, terrified, aroused.
Diane waved her hand. “That night. That night—you know what I remember about that night? Jason’s binoculars. I was looking at the Big House while you two stared off into the sky. I really don’t remember the stars at all. What I remember is catching sight of Carol in one of the back bedrooms with somebody from the catering service. She was drunk and it looked like she was making a pass.” She laughed bashfully. “That was my own little apocalypse. Everything I already hated about the Big House, about my family, it was all summed up in one night. I just wanted to pretend it didn’t exist. No Carol, no E.D., no Jason—”
“No me?”
She moved across the sofa and, because it had become that kind of conversation, put a hand on my cheek. Her hand was cool, the temperature of the drink she’d been holding. “You were the exception. I was scared. You were incredibly patient. I appreciated that.”
“But we couldn’t—”
“Touch.”
“Touch. E.D. would never have stood for it.”
She took her hand away. “We could have hidden it from him if we’d wanted to. But you’re right, E.D. was the problem. He infected everything. It was obscene, the way he made your mother live a kind of second-class existence. It was debasing. Can I confess this? I absolutely hated being his daughter. I especially hated the idea that if anything, you know, happened between us, it might be your way of taking revenge on E. D. Lawton.”
She sat back, a little surprised at herself, I think.
“Of course,” I said carefully, “it wouldn’t have been.”
“I was confused.”
“Is that what NK is for you? Revenge on E.D.?”
“No,” she said, still smiling, “I don’t love Simon just because he makes my father angry. Life’s not that simple, Ty.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“But you see how insidious it is? Certain suspicions come into your head and get stuck there. No, NK isn’t about my father. It’s about discovering the divinity in what’s happened to the Earth and expressing that divinity in daily life.”
“Maybe the Spin isn’t that simple, either.”
“We’re either being murdered or transformed, Simon says.”
“He told me you’re building heaven on Earth.”
“Isn’t that what Christians are supposed to do? Make the Kingdom of God by expressing it in their lives?”
“Or at least dancing to it.”
“Now you sound like Jason. Obviously I can’t defend everything about the movement. Last week we were at a conclave in Philadelphia and we met this couple, our age, friendly, intelligent—‘alive in the spirit,’ Simon called them. We went out to dinner and talked about the Parousia. Then they invited us up to their hotel room, and suddenly they were laying out lines of coke and playing porn videos. All kinds of marginal people are attracted to NK. No question. And for most of them the theology barely exists, except as a fuzzy image of the Garden of Eden. But at its best the movement is everything it claims to be, a genuine living faith.”
“Faith in what, Diane? Ekstasis? Promiscuity?”
I regretted the words as soon as I’d said them. She looked hurt. “Ekstasis isn’t about promiscuity. Not when it succeeds, anyway. But in the body of God no act is prohibited as long as it isn’t vengeful or angry, as long as it expresses divine as well as human love.”
The phone rang then. I must have looked guilty. Diane saw my expression and laughed.
Jason’s first words when I picked up: “I said we’d have some warning. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
“What?”
“Tyler…haven’t you seen the sky?”
So we went upstairs to find a window facing the sunset.
The west bedroom was generously large, equipped with a mahogany chifferobe, a brass-railed bed, and big windows. I drew the curtains wide. Diane gasped.
There was no setting sun. Or, rather, there were several.
The entire western sky was alight. Instead of the single orb of the sun there was an arc of reddish glow that stretched across at least fifteen degrees of the horizon, containing what looked like a flickering multiple exposure of a dozen or more sunsets. The light was erratic; it brightened and faded like a distant fire.
We gaped at it for an endless time. Eventually Diane said, “What’s happening, Tyler? What’s going on?”
I told her what Jason had told me about the Chinese nuclear warheads.
“He knew this might happen?” she asked, then answered herself: “Of course he did.” The strange light gave the room a roseate hue and fell on her cheeks like a fever. “Will it kill us?”
“Jason doesn’t think so. It’ll scare the hell out of people, though.”
“But is it dangerous? Radiation or something?”
I doubted it. But it wasn’t out of the question. “Try the TV,” I said. There was a plasma panel in each bedroom, framed in walnut paneling opposite the bed. I figured any kind of remotely lethal radiation would also screw up broadcasting and reception.
But the TV worked well enough to show us news channel views of crowds gathering in cities across Europe, where it was already dark—or as dark as it was going to get that night. No lethal radiation but plenty of incipient panic. Diane sat motionless on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, clearly frightened. I sat beside her and said, “If any of this was going to kill us we’d be dead by now.”
Outside, the sunset stuttered toward darkness. The diffuse glow resolved into several distinct setting suns, each ghostly pale, then a coil of sunlight like a luminous spring that arced across the whole sky and vanished just as suddenly.
We sat hip to hip as the sky grew darker.
Then the stars came out.
I managed to get hold of Jase one more time before the bandwidth was overwhelmed. Simon had just finished paying for the plug set for his car, he said, when the sky erupted. The roads out of Stockbridge were already crowded and the radio reported scattered looting in Boston and stalled traffic on every major route, so Jase had pulled into a parking lot behind a motel and rented a room for the night for himself and Simon. In the morning, he said, he would probably have to head back to
Washington, but he’d drop Simon at the house first.
Then he passed his phone to Simon and I passed mine to Diane and left the room while she talked to her fiancé. The summerhouse seemed ominously huge and empty. I walked around turning on lights until she called me back.
“Another drink?” I asked her.
“Oh yes,” she said.
We went outside a little after midnight.
Diane was putting on a brave face. Simon had given her some kind of New Kingdom pep talk. In NK theology there was no conventional Second Coming, no Rapture or Armageddon; the Spin was all these things put together, all the ancient prophecies obliquely fulfilled. And if God wanted to use the canvas of the sky to paint us the naked geometry of time, Simon said, He would do so, and our awe and fear were entirely appropriate to the occasion. But we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by these feelings because the Spin was ultimately an act of salvation, the last and best chapter in human history.
Or something like that.
So we went outside to watch the sky because Diane thought it was a brave and spiritual thing to do. The sky was cloudless and the air smelled of pine. The highway was a long way off, but we heard occasional faint sounds of car horns and sirens.
Our shadows danced around us as various fractions of the sky lit up, now north, now south. We sat on the grass a few yards from the steady glow of the porch light and Diane leaned into my shoulder and I put my arm around her, both of us a little drunk.
Despite years of emotional chill, despite our history at the Big House, despite her engagement to Simon Townsend, despite NK and Ekstasis and despite even the nuke-inspired derangement of the sky, I was exquisitely conscious of the pressure of her body next to mine. And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.
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