Our school had shed a quarter of its population since the slowing began, but five hundred and forty-two of us remained. Every morning before the first bell rang, five hundred and forty-two voices called out to one another from five hundred and forty-two throats. Five hundred and forty-two mouths battled to be heard, the roar mounting as buses dumped load after load of kids on the quad. Rumors surged from group to group—there were cliques inside cliques inside cliques. Loud rounds of laughter exploded constantly into the air. Five hundred and forty-two voices bounced and echoed off the stucco exterior of the walls, accompanied by the ringing of five hundred and forty-two cell phones. Someone was always shocked by a thing they’d just heard. Someone was always screaming. From where I stood lately, at the far edge of the crowd, the sounds seemed as meaningless as if all those tongues were speaking different tongues, a great, incomprehensible chatter.
In that environment, silence was deadly. Talk ruled. It did not pay to be the quiet kind.
Every school day I looked forward to the soft landing of afternoon, to the click of my key in the lock of our door, the hush of the empty house. My mother tried to keep going to work, so she was gone most afternoons, or upstairs asleep.
I was reading on one of these days when I heard a hard knock at the door.
We were reading Ray Bradbury in English class. That day’s assignment was a short story about a group of human schoolchildren who live on Venus, where, according to the story, the sun breaks through the dense cloud cover only once every seven years, and then for only one hour.
The doorbell rang twice before I got to the door. On the other side stood Gabby, still in her St. Mary’s uniform: green plaid skirt and white polo, navy sweater tied around her waist.
I opened the door.
“Your parents aren’t home, are they?” she said. She was rubbing her hands together and kept glancing back at the street. Her hair had grown out some but not much. A layer of brown fuzz covered her scalp.
“They’re still at work,” I said.
She came into the house and motioned for me to shut the door.
“I need to check my email on your computer,” she said softly, as if the house might be bugged.
For several weeks, she said, she’d been cut off from the Internet, and her cell phone had remained locked inside a drawer in her mother’s desk. During these two weeks, she’d had sparse contact with the boy in Circadia, but of course, those were the exact conditions under which love grew best.
Once at the computer, she worked quickly. A rattle of fingernails on keys, a few clicks of the mouse. Then she stood up.
“I probably won’t see you for a while,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” she said. “Tomorrow Keith is picking me up from school, and I’m going to go live with him in Circadia.”
This was not the first she’d threatened to run away. Gabby was always scheming and dreaming, but she had never followed through.
“What about your parents?” I said.
“You better not tell them.”
“They’re going to freak out,” I said.
She was pacing our entry hall. Her loafers, school-issued, squeaked with every step.
“Everything here is bullshit, anyway,” she said. She waved her hand in a broad way.
Beside her, our ficus was withering away in its pot. Houseplants were faring even worse than the outdoor varieties.
“Are you really serious?” I asked.
“I guess I shouldn’t have told you,” she said. “You’re too much of a goody-goody to understand.”
Gabby opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.
“Wait,” I said.
“Keith’s right,” she said. “Everyone is half asleep here. Clock time is just another way for society to trick us and keep us numb.”
The sun had dropped behind the hill. The sky was pink. Sunsets had always been beautiful where we lived, but they seemed even more dramatic these days, made more so for being twice as rare.
“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said.
Anyone who knew Gabby the way I did would have assumed that she wasn’t actually going anywhere. The plan, if there was one, would likely fall apart. Something would change: Her mind shifted quickly, her mood even faster. I was pretty sure that Gabby would return home from school as usual the next day. She would sleep in her own bed and go right on plotting another improbable way to flee.
She gave me a quick hug and said goodbye. I went back to my homework.
I still remember how that Bradbury short story ended: On the day the sun finally shines on Venus, after seven years away, one boy convinces the other children to lock one little girl in a closet. When the sun emerges, the other children rush outside to feel the sunshine on their faces for the first time in their lives. The sun shines for only one hour. The girl remains trapped in the closet. By the time someone remembers she’s there, the sun has moved back behind the clouds not to return for another seven years.
It was dark when I got home from school the next day. Sunrise was several hours away. I walked straight to Gabby’s house, shivering as I passed Tom and Carlotta’s driveway. They still lived there, but the house was unlit; it was the middle of their night. Within months, they were both convicted and sentenced, the house sold to pay the legal bills.
When I reached Gabby’s driveway, I saw that her house was dark, too. The porch light glowed alone.
I rang the doorbell. No one answered. I rang it again.
Through the kitchen window, a row of brand-new stainless-steel appliances gleamed in the moonlight.
I’d grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.
Now I saw Gabby’s situation in this same light: A twelve-year-old girl had run away from home with a man she’d met three weeks earlier on the Internet. He claimed to be sixteen, but who knew. Supposedly, he lived in one of the daylight colonies, but I did not even know his last name. Narratives like that one didn’t usually end well, and since the start of the slowing, these stories had become only more frequent. The rates of every kind of violent crime were going up.
The worry began in my stomach, a tightening that spread up to my chest and out to my shoulders until it reached the back of my neck. The worry smoldered all afternoon, and I was surprised my parents couldn’t see it on my face.
That night my mother brought up my birthday. “We have to do something,” she said. “Why don’t we have a party?”
I didn’t want a party. Who would I invite? My mother had no way of knowing that I’d been spending all my lunch periods pretending to be on the phone. The change had happened so quickly, a shifting of sands. Now Gabby was gone, too.
“In times like these,” said my mother, “it’s even more important to celebrate the good things.”
I finally agreed to a dinner. “But just us and Grandpa,” I said.
“Let’s invite Hanna, at least,” said my mother. “I haven’t seen her in months.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not inviting Hanna.”
By dinnertime, my whole body was hot with guilt about Gabby. It seemed to be radiating off my skin, like pheromones or smoke or some other chemical signal with the power to attract Gabby’s mother to our porch, where she arrived just after eight o’clock to ask if we had seen her daughter.
My mother looked apologetic in the doorway. “We haven’t,” she said. “Have you tried her other friends?”
Gabby’s mother looked right at me. She wore a skirt suit and heels. Lip liner ringed her lips from the workday, but the lipstick had faded away.
“Please don’t tell her I told you,” I said.
“You know where she is?” said my mother.
“I think she went to Circadia,” I said. I paused. “With a boy.”
“What the hell is Circadia?” said Gabby’s mother.
She wore contacts, but they dried out her eyes. She was always blinking, and she blinked even more at that moment as tears flooded her dark eyes.
“You know,” I said. “It’s one of the daylight colonies.”
Gabby’s mother called the police and she and Gabby’s father drove out to the desert right away, knocking on doors all night as the sun blazed in the sky—it was daytime in Circadia. Everyone there was awake.
By morning Gabby had been found drinking wine at a barbecue with a teenage runaway from a different part of the state: Keith. She spent only one night in Circadia.
She was never the same after that. Back on our street, she lay around, dazed and disappointed, a traveler forced to return from an exotic and enlightening land.
“Did you tell my mom I was there?” she said.
“No,” I said.
She rolled her head in my direction, skeptical. “Really?”
“I swear,” I said.
“I’m going back there someday,” she said. A new knowingness had seeped into her voice. “It’s hard to explain, but Circadia is like one of those places, you know, what do you call it? A utopia? Everyone’s totally mellow. And they treat you like an adult. No one cares what you look like or what you wear.”
The history of Circadia was brief, and I learned it only later. A hundred miles from anything, those cement foundations were poured a year before the slowing started by a developer who dreamed that the wild sprawl of California’s coastal cities would soon penetrate that particular stretch of desert. But the developer went bankrupt six months before the slowing started. The work stopped. For months the houses stood empty and half built—until a group of committed real-timers bought the land and everything on it and named it after their own internal clocks.
Gabby described for me a golden land, a reverse negative of where we lived. Time really did flow differently, she insisted. Every hour had felt to her like a day. Hearts beat fewer beats per minute. People breathed deeper breaths. Anger took ages to bloom. They would live longer, she swore. And everything lasted: a good meal, a crackle of laughter, the look in Keith’s eyes after they kissed for the first time.
“Living like that changes people,” she said. “They’re so much better than the people out here.”
In the Circadia of Gabby’s telling, the inhabitants were a new wave of gentle pioneers, hardworking but well rested—sleeping for twenty-four hours straight and then staying awake for just as long or even longer without tiring. It did not sound possible to those of us on the outside, but already the science was bearing it out: Human circadian rhythms were turning out to be vastly more malleable than anyone had previously thought.
Gabby’s memories of Circadia stayed with me. I liked the idea of going somewhere far away. Sometimes on white nights, as the sunlight crept in beneath my curtains, I tried to recall what it felt like to sleep in sync with the sun. How strange and peaceful it sounded to dream every night in the dark. And how quiet that thick desert darkness must have been with only the stars to light the land. No freeways rumbled there. No power lines buzzed. Maybe I’d never heard such a silence as that one. Not even the ticking of clocks could wake you—because no one kept clocks in Circadia.
As soon as Gabby’s hair grew out enough to be mistaken for a cute pixie cut, she was sent to a boarding school a hundred miles away. She was the last friend I had left, and just like that, she was gone.
23
In the great reshuffling of fortunes and fates that followed the start of the slowing, most of us had lost. We were worse off, most of us, than we had been before. Some grew sick, some depressed. A great many marriages dissolved under the stress. Billions of dollars had drained from the markets. And we were missing certain other valuables, too: our way of life, our peace of mind, our faith.
But not everyone was suffering. A lucky few had gained. Michaela and her mother were among them.
Michaela had begun the school year, six months earlier, in a rented apartment that overlooked a parking lot at the far edge of the district line. A rusted black staircase clung to the exterior of the complex, and a knock on 2B would produce a rattling of the security chain as Michaela unhooked it from the inside.
By February though, a visitor could reach Michaela’s front door only by showing a driver’s license at a guardhouse out front. The guard was required to call Michaela’s house for authorization before opening the electric gate. Her mother had a rich new boyfriend, and Michaela and her mother had moved into his house.
I was shocked to be invited there that Saturday. No one had asked me anywhere in months.
“And bring a swimsuit,” Michaela had said on the phone. “There’s a pool and a Jacuzzi in the back.”
Once inside the gate, my father and I drove in silence past a dozen large houses, each one set off from the road and fronted by fountains or ponds. Stables and tennis courts fanned out in all directions.
“Look at this place,” said my father. “Who’s this guy she married?”
My mother was at home, having one of her spells. There was no predicting when a fog might descend upon her.
“They’re not married,” I said. “But I think he started some kind of company.”
The sky glowed an extraordinary orange as we drove. Wildfires were burning in the open country out east, and the smoke had drifted to the coast. It wasn’t the right season for brushfires, but they were feeding on the remains of dead and dying plants. You could smell the burning in the air. You could see it in the dimming of the light. Everything white looked faintly amber.
At the address Michaela had given me, a circular driveway surrounded a giant artificial lawn. It looked almost real, that grass, no two blades exactly alike. It was made of something soft, an engineered texture designed to fool feet. It smelled real, too. Some of the priciest brands came scented that way, a fad that fell away, I guess, as we less and less clearly remembered the smell of real grass.
The house was a vast ranch-style spread out across the property like a sunbather stretched beside a pool. A thick iron knocker hung on the front door. Michaela appeared in the doorway before I could ring the bell. She was already in a swimsuit, her pink bikini showing through her white tank top. Pink strings dangled down her neck.
“Come on,” she said.
Inside, a small Mexican woman was zipping her purse near the door. The air smelled sweet. Something was baking.
“Alma made cookies,” said Michaela.
“Thanks, Alma,” called a voice from another room. I recognized it as Michaela’s mother’s. “See you tomorrow.”
A nearly endless road of terra-cotta tile led us eventually to the kitchen, just visible in the distance.
“You can leave your stuff here,” said Michaela. My backpack and my sleeping bag formed a neat stack against the wall.
In the kitchen, every surface was stainless, barely used, brand-new. In my memory, Michaela’s mother looked that way, too, as she leaned on the counter in a silk peach robe. Her face was heavily made up. A silvery charcoal shimmered on her eyelids and at the corners of her eyes. Her blond hair had been straightened to form a smooth shiny sheet.
“You girls want me to read your horoscopes before I go?” she said. An astrology chart was spread out across the marble counter.
“Do Julia’s,” said Michaela.
On the countertop shone a deep glass bowl full of green grapes. I hadn’t seen grapes since before Christmas.
“These cost like a hundred dollars a pound,” said Michaela, tossing one into her mouth. “Isn’t that weird?”
It was the last time I ever tasted a grape.
A series of small explosions boomed in the adjoining living room. On a white leather couch sat a boy a little older than we were, a video-game controller in his hands.
“That’s Josh,” whispered Michaela. “He’s Harry’s son.”
/>
Harry was her mother’s boyfriend. This was Harry’s house.
“Julia, honey, do you know your sign?” asked Michaela’s mother.
I didn’t.
“When’s your birthday?”
“March seventh,” I said.
“So soon,” she said. “Are you having a party?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
The doorbell rang, and Michaela skipped down the hall.
“You should have a party,” said Michaela’s mother. Then she turned her attention to the chart. “If you’re a Pisces, and you were born the same year as Michaela—”
She ran two fingers over the chart until the two red tips of her fingernails met in one corner.
“Hmm,” she said. She frowned.
I could hear Michaela’s distant laugh at the front of the house.
“Is it bad?” I asked.
“The important thing isn’t so much your horoscope as what you do with it,” said her mother. “Anyway, the slowing totally changed the charts. Everything’s a little unstable right now, so we can’t necessarily trust it.”
Michaela was coming closer. I heard a boy’s voice.
“But be careful, okay?” said her mother to me. Her eyelids shimmered as she blinked. “If I were you, I’d just be a little more careful than usual for a while.”
Michaela returned to the kitchen with a boy I recognized from school. Kai was a year older and half Hawaiian, and he made me shy, the way he stood there in the kitchen, no smile, waiting to be entertained. His skin was a creamy tan, his teeth a crisp white. He kept his two thumbs hooked on the pockets of his blue board shorts and glanced at Michaela’s mother in her robe.
“Is it seven already?” said Michaela’s mother. “Shit, I better get dressed.”
She left the three of us alone in the kitchen. A silence opened up behind her. The only sound was the running of water from the pair of swan-shaped fountains that streamed into the swimming pool outside. The music of the video game surged behind us.
“Is that Street Avenger?” asked Kai.
These were the first words he’d spoken. He shuffled toward the living room, his flip-flops brushing the tile.