He sighed heavily and stood up from his chair.
“Think of the birds,” he said. “Birds have always been messengers. After the flood, it was a dove holding an olive branch that told Noah the flood was over. That’s how he knew he could leave the ark. Think about that. Our birds aren’t carrying any olive branches. Our birds are dying.”
He had turned his attention to the old hunting rifle he kept in the hall closet. It was coated in dust, which he brushed away with the back of his hand. He hadn’t used it in years.
“Next time you’re over here, remind me to show you how to shoot a gun.”
“A gun, Grandpa?” I said.
“I’m serious,” he said. “This is serious. I’m worried for all of us.”
Later, on his bulky television, I watched recordings of the earlier fireworks in Tokyo, Nairobi, and London, as the New Year drifted westward across the planet.
There had been some debate about the timing. Technically, we were running a day behind, thanks to the weeks we had spent living off the clocks. But a quick solution had been crafted and agreed to by most of the world’s governments: We had simply skipped December 30, an extra onetime leap, to make up for lost time.
Between firework shows, the television news reported that certain religious leaders had gathered their flocks inside churches, fearing or hoping that the last day of the year of the slowing might also mark the passing away of this world.
I fell asleep in an armchair before midnight. I dreamed of blood and broken glass, a car lurching to a stop. Hours later, I woke up, awash in the blue light of the television, my teeth clenched, my neck stiff from the armrest. The sun had sunk at last, and my grandfather had gone to bed. The year had turned while I slept. A new one had begun in the dark. Anything seemed possible in those days. Any prediction could turn out to be true. It bothered me in a fresh way: not knowing what the next year would bring.
In the morning my parents picked me up on the way home from the hospital. There was no news of the pedestrian.
My mother was still wearing her black party dress, now wrinkled. She held her crystal earrings in her palm. A hospital ID bracelet dangled from one wrist. My father gently guided her into our house as if she were blindfolded, flipping light switches with one hand and cupping the small of her back with the other.
The bruise would fade. The cut would heal. Every bone in her body was intact. With the help of an MRI, the doctors had searched her brain for hidden damage and found none. But that machine could not, of course, search her mind. And at that time, almost nothing was known about the syndrome.
18
We called it gravity sickness at first, the slowing syndrome later, and there would come a time eventually when you need only mention the syndrome and everyone understood what you meant. The symptoms were wide-ranging but related: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, fatigue, and sometimes, as was the case with my mother, fainting.
Only certain people were affected. A man might stumble in the street. A woman might collapse in a mall. In some small children, the effects included the excessive bleeding of gums. Some victims were too weak to leave their beds for days. The exact cause was unknown.
My mother stayed home from work that first week after the accident. She spent her days hunting for news of the pedestrian while the cut on her forehead scabbed over and began to scar. Her dizziness came and went. She moved slowly through the house, always bracing herself on a banister or a wall. Whenever the feeling cleared, she focused her attention on the pedestrian. She called the hospital but was given no information. She sent flowers: To the man who was hit by a car on Samson Road on New Year’s Eve. She begged my father to find out if the man had lived or died, but he was reluctant for us to get involved. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said.
She slept even less than before, wakeful just as often on the dark nights as the light ones. I would wake some nights in the pitch black and find her searching obscure local websites and police blogs, her eyes red and watery, the white light of the screen throwing her features into unflattering relief. On one of these nights, she fainted again. She fell right off her chair, bit her tongue, and made it bleed.
She stopped driving, and she ate less and less.
I wondered what the symptoms were that had preceded Seth Moreno’s mother’s death. The illnesses were different, I knew, but I sometimes worried that the outcome could be the same. No one knew where the slowing syndrome might lead.
It was a bright clear morning the day Seth Moreno came back to school.
His dark hair had grown a little longer, and he’d developed a new habit of flicking his bangs away from his eyes with one thumb, but he looked otherwise the same, same tired look on his face, same slow gait, same skateboard tucked under one arm. I hadn’t seen him since his mother died.
I felt my face flush when he showed up at the bus stop that morning. I wondered what he thought about my card.
Various rumors of Seth’s whereabouts since his mother died had trickled down to me: He was staying with a relative in Arizona, or he’d moved to a real-timers’ settlement in Oregon or to a boarding school in France.
But here he was at the bus stop. He didn’t speak to anyone that morning. He just stood by himself, like always. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t. I wanted to be near him, but I stayed away.
In math, I went back to staring silently at the back of Seth Moreno’s head.
Meanwhile, the oceans were shifting, the Gulf Stream was slowing, and Gabby shaved her head.
She called me over to her house one afternoon. The sun had set. The sky had turned black and clear. On the way to her house, I passed a group of younger kids playing Ghosts in the Graveyard on the street, some crouching behind parked cars or tree trunks while others searched in pairs, clinging to each other’s sleeves and whispering as they moved through the shadows.
“Watch this,” said Gabby.
We were in her bedroom. She held a thick section of her dyed black hair out from her head and raised a pair of scissors to the root.
“You’re cutting it yourself?” I said.
Downstairs, a construction crew pounded on a wall. They were remodeling the kitchen. Gabby’s parents were at work.
“First I’m cutting it all off,” she said, and snapped the scissors shut. “And then I’m shaving it.”
The hair fell from the blade and landed soundlessly on the carpet.
“But why?” I said. She cut another section. “It’s going to take forever to grow back.”
On the dresser, Gabby’s cell phone rattled with a message. She looked at the screen and grinned. Then she dropped the scissors on the desk and locked the bedroom door.
“I have a secret to tell you,” she said. “You have to promise not tell anyone.”
I promised.
“You know that guy I met online?”
I nodded. The headlights of a passing car washed over the room and vanished.
“We’ve been talking every day,” she added.
I felt a stab of jealousy.
The boy was older: sixteen. He lived a hundred miles away in one of the new colonies that had sprouted from the sand in the desert.
“It’s called Circadia,” she said. I could tell she liked saying the word. “They have a school and a restaurant and everything.”
I’d heard that similar settlements had been popping up in every state, built by eccentrics who had rejected the clock. In the homes and streets of these communities, the sun governed the day and the night, and I suppose the pace of life really was slower, the time only inching along, a gradually advancing tide.
“A lot of the girls there shave their heads,” she added.
She tapped a text message in response. The black polish on her fingernails flashed in the light of her lamp. Then she picked up the scissors and went on with her cutting, the strands of her hair collecting on the cream carpet beside her crumpled school uniform.
She used her father’s electric razor to do the rest, the moto
r buzzing as she ran it over her head. Little by little, the architecture of her skull began to surface, the ancient curves and hollows, now revealed.
“Holy shit,” she said when she looked in the mirror. “This is awesome.”
She turned her head from side to side, running her fingers over the stubble. She looked ravaged by sickness or treatment.
She sat down on the bed. A lacy black bra and panty set was spread out on the comforter. She saw me looking at it. “Do you like it?” she said.
“I guess,” I said.
“I ordered it online.”
One of the candles on her dresser had melted down to a pool of wax. The flame sputtered and then went out, leaving a thin puff of white smoke in the air.
“Hey,” she said, changing the subject. “Did your mom really kill some guy on New Year’s?”
I looked at her. “We don’t know if he died,” I said.
Downstairs, the workers dropped something heavy on the tile.
“I heard she ran over someone.”
“She’s sick,” I said.
Gabby turned toward me. “Sick with what?”
“We don’t know.”
“Can she die from it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Shit,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Gabby had recently painted her walls a deep maroon, and you could smell the paint fumes in the air, mixing with the vanilla from the candles.
“I should go home,” I said.
“Here,” said Gabby. She handed me a plastic bag bulging with hair clips and bobby pins. “Take these. I can’t use them anymore.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want her things.
Outside, a pair of headlights approached as I walked home, a slim black BMW that belonged to Gabby’s mother. She waved to me as she drove, and I waved back. I watched her pull into the driveway and wait for the electric garage door to trundle open on its tracks. I knew that those were the last few minutes before certain consequences would come down on Gabby’s shaved head. The BMW floated into the garage. The door dropped down behind the car. I heard the engine die, the first soft pings as it cooled.
I would later learn that Gabby immediately lost access to her computer and her cell phone, leaving her unable to communicate with the boy in Circadia who was writing her poems.
That night I spent hours gazing at Sylvia’s house through my telescope, looking for a glimpse of my father, but I spotted only Sylvia. Her habits had turned increasingly bizarre as the days had grown. She would disappear inside her house during every stretch of darkness, and while the neighbors’ windows glowed all day, she left hers unlit, as if she’d learned to sleep for twenty hours or more in a row. A stranger passing Syliva’s driveway on some dark afternoon might have guessed the house was vacant or the owner out of town. The newspaper often landed in the driveway twice before the sun came around again.
But on white nights, Sylvia came back to life. I could see her slender fingers gliding over the piano keys long after the neighbors had gone to bed. She pulled weeds at midnight. She went jogging while the rest of us dreamed our dreams. In the hush of one bright night, I watched her drag her Christmas tree out to the sidewalk in the sunshine, the scrape of the pot on the pavement the only sound on the sleeping street.
Certain countries in Europe had made it more or less illegal to live the way Sylvia did. On that continent, the real-timers were mostly immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, off the clock for religious reasons. Curfews had been imposed in Paris. Riots followed. One member of our own city council had proposed a similar ban. A small town nearby had successfully passed a clock curfew, but it was soon struck down by the courts.
That same week, the power went off in certain houses on our street. Televisions shut down without warning. Washing machines whirred to a stop. Music ceased to flow from speakers, and the lights went out over dinner tables.
The damage, however, was limited to just three homes: the Kaplans’, Tom and Carlotta’s, and Sylvia’s. It was no accident. The real-timers had been targeted. Someone had cut through the lines.
A pair of policemen showed up to examine the marks on the wires. They interviewed the neighbors. No one had seen a thing. It took six hours for the power company to reconnect the real-timers to the grid. The perpetrators were never caught.
19
At school, we dissected frogs, we ran the mile, our spines were checked for scoliosis. Soccer season stretched into January because of all the games we’d canceled in the fall. But I’d lost interest in the sport. What was the point anymore? What did it matter?
“But you like soccer, don’t you?” said my father as I sulked in the car on the way to practice one day. After my mother got sick he had changed his schedule so that he could drive me.
“How do you know if I like it or not?” I said.
He turned toward me. I never talked to him that way, and he looked surprised. Outside, the sky was a fiery orange, a sunrise in the late afternoon.
“What’s going on with you lately?” he asked.
He looked tired. His hair, a pale brown, was beginning to thin at the edges. A layer of stubble had grown on his chin since the morning. I wondered if he sensed that I knew what he’d been doing with Sylvia.
“Nothing,” I said. “I just don’t want to do this anymore.”
My father didn’t answer. We continued driving toward the soccer field.
The main thing I remember about those afternoons at the field were the moments when the boys’ team would come jogging past our practice. We could hear the boys panting as they got close, the syncronized click of their cleats on the asphalt. We could smell the sweat of their jerseys as they passed. I’d always search the pack for Seth, who ran at the edge of the group near the front and never looked in our direction. The eyes of all the other boys usually fell on Michaela as they passed—and she received their attention with a wide-open smile. I never understood how she knew what they wanted. I avoided looking at the boys as they approached, until the sound of their footfalls faded and then went mute as they hit the dirt path at the edge of the field. That was when I’d take one last look at Seth before he and all the other boys disappeared into the eucalyptus trees dividing their field from ours.
We reached the parking lot, and my father pulled up to the curb.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You’re not quitting soccer.”
I stepped out of the car, my soccer bag swinging on my shoulder. I slammed the door.
The parking lot was a long way from the field, and I walked as slowly as possible. I could see Hanna’s skinny outline in the distance on the field. I hated the way our old closeness hung over us like a stink, unacknowledged but forever wafting in the air.
An idea flickered in my mind: I didn’t have to go to practice—I could walk away.
My father had already driven off. No one else was nearby.
Maybe the slowing was affecting my emotions, too: I felt brave and impulsive that day. I began to move away from the field, first slowly and then faster, until soon I was rushing down the steep slope of a landscaped hill, ice plant crunching beneath my cleats.
I landed in the shopping-center parking lot that neighbored the field.
The first thing I saw was a health food store that catered to real-timers. It was late afternoon, but the store was opening its doors for the day, revealing its rows of vitamins, dried kale, and herbal sleep remedies.
Next door, people were pushing carts in and out of the giant drugstore I sometimes visited with my mother. They were running a special on survival gear: A giant stack of canned goods stood out front beneath a sign that read, is your family prepared?
I wandered inside, conscious of the sound of my cleats on the linoleum, as if they might give me away, but no one seemed to notice. I could hear the buzz of fluorescent lights, the watery classical music flowing from the speakers in the ceiling.
Whenever I came here with my mother, certain aisles felt a little ilicit to me,
and I was eager to explore them on my own. In the cosmetics aisle, fifty feet of shelving displayed in glittering packages all the powders and the polishes and the creams, the shimmer sticks and eyebrow pens, the tweezers and clippers and razors that, I had begun to suspect, if applied in the correct combinations, might begin to transform me into a girl more lovely and more loved.
At the far end of the cosmetics aisle, an older girl with perfectly straight black hair and car keys jingling in her hand was twisting open nail polishes and testing the colors on her nails. I remember the satisfying clink of the bottles against one another. I envied the casual way that she dropped the ones she liked into her basket.
Behind her, hanging from a circular rack, was a small selection of bras.
I was too embarrassed to approach the rack while she was there, so I wandered up and down the aisle for a while, picking up lipsticks and then dropping them back into place. When she was gone, I drifted toward the rack of bras. They had only five or six styles, and one seemed much nicer than the rest. I remember the way it looked hanging on the rack, a crisp bright white with blue polka dots and straps made of blue satin ribbon and tiny bows where the straps met the cups. When I was certain that no one was around, I held the bra up to my chest.
The tag said $8.99. I had my grandfather’s ten-dollar bill in my soccer bag.
When my father pulled up to the soccer field, I was sitting on the curb as usual, my soccer bag in my lap, the bra radiating from deep inside it. The other girls on my team were beginning to move toward the parking lot, small figures in the distance, pausing to stretch their legs or adjust their ponytails, sweaty from the drills I had missed.
I climbed quickly into the car.
“How was practice?” my father asked.
I was taking big gulps from my water bottle. Deception, like algebra, was a newly learned skill.
“Fine,” I said.
“What did you guys do?”
I worried that he knew. “We always do the exact same thing, Dad,” I said. “That’s why it’s so boring.”