I pretended to read. The clock ticked. Seth did not appear.
On dark days like that one, the library windows looked lit up like an aquarium, the inhabitants on display for all the other kids to see: Here the most exotic fish, the lonely, the unloved, the weird.
By evening Sylvia’s eucalyptus had been cut into pieces, and the pieces lay stacked like cleaned bones in the driveway. White plastic sheeting covered the hole in the roof, rustling whenever the wind blew. The sun had yet to rise.
My father spent a long time that night inspecting the last eucalyptus in our own yard. Half of it produced leaves, but the other half was dead, and the death seemed to be spreading. He called a tree removal service before we left for my birthday dinner.
My mother came home with a present for me: a pair of gold ballet flats with a crinkled finish. The other girls at school had been wearing them for months. I slipped them on. They squeaked on the tile.
My father gave me a book.
“This was my favorite book when I was about your age,” he said. On the cover was a series of mountains, a valley, a moon. The pages smelled like dust and mildew. “It’s about a kid who’s all alone in the world. He’s really lonely for a long time. But then, well, you’ll see.”
I remembered that book passing through our classroom two or three years earlier. I hadn’t read it, but I was too old for it now.
“Thanks,” I said, and pressed it to my lap.
He squeezed my shoulder. We left for dinner.
“It’s lucky I’m not sick on your birthday,” said my mother as we drove east toward my grandfather’s house. We were picking him up on our way to my favorite restaurant. I was looking forward to seeing him. His voice had a way of cutting through everything else.
“I still think we should’ve had a party,” said my mother. “We should be celebrating the good things.”
“We are,” said my father. He glanced at me in the rearview. “This is what she wanted.”
The landscape outside looked less alive each time we did this drive. It wasn’t only the grass and the eucalyptus trees. There were subtler signs too. I was certain the banks of the lagoon were browner than they used to be, the cattails and the reeds less abundant than before. We avoided saying it out loud—we had the greenhouses and the sunlamps to keep us fed for now—but it was hard to ignore the way the plants were quietly slipping away, a creeping devastation. God knows what was happening on the less fortunate continents. But the golf course, when we passed it, looked better than ever, more lush and more pristine than it had ever looked in life. All the old greens had been replaced with high-end artificial turf, and now golf carts trundled slowly over the hills: the golf course in afterlife.
“I don’t know why we couldn’t invite Hanna,” said my mother. She turned toward me in her seat, the seat belt cutting into her neck. “You two used to be such good friends.”
“Well, we’re not anymore,” I said.
My grandfather’s property looked worse than usual. He had refused to cut down any of his eucalyptus trees. Some stood leafless and grim against the sky. Others had fallen to the ground. But the pines, at least, were persisting and still kept his house hidden from the road and the surrounding development.
We pulled into his driveway. I jumped out onto the gravel, ran up to the door. My parents waited in the car, engine running.
He didn’t answer the door, so I rang the bell again. I knocked. A group of gnats was circling the porch light. Behind me, the black sky was fading, turning ever so slightly light. A slow sunrise was beginning. I tried the doorknob: It was locked.
I went back to the car, my ballet flats crunching hard on the gravel.
“He’s not answering,” I said.
“Maybe he forgot to put in his hearing aid,” said my father.
He turned off the car and followed me back up the walk to the house. My mother cracked the car door for air.
My father had keys to the house. He unlocked the door, and we stepped inside.
“Dad?” said my father. The house was hot and quiet. The only sound was the ticking of clocks. The only light was the overhead in the kitchen. “We’re here.”
The windows were closed, and the shelves were as bare as they had been the last time I visited.
“Where is everything?” asked my father. He ran one finger along a vacant shelf. He peered through the glass front of a mahogany cabinet, empty of its guts of china and crystal.
“On New Year’s,” I said, “he was kind of sorting through his stuff.”
“What do you mean?” said my father.
We took my grandfather out to dinner most Sundays. He was usually waiting on the porch for us, ready to get in the car, insisting we were late.
“He was also putting some of his stuff in boxes,” I said.
“What?” A spark of concern flickered across my father’s face. “But I just talked to him last night.”
The boxes were gone. The table was clear. Everything of any value had vanished. We checked his bedroom and found the bed empty and unmade. We opened the closet: At least half of his clothes were missing, maybe a few pairs of shoes.
In the kitchen we discovered a stack of obscure newsletters and leaflets. A small newspaper was dominated by this headline: what they don’t want you to know: the truth about “clock time.” To the refrigerator was clipped a political cartoon in which people wandered the street, eyes glazed. The caption read: the clock zombies.
My mother wandered in behind us.
“Where is he?” she said.
“I don’t know,” said my father.
“Oh, God,” said my mother. “This place looks like it’s been robbed.”
“Julia says she saw him packing.”
Something was bubbling in my father, a fast current running beneath ice.
“Not exactly packing,” I said.
My mother turned to me, frantic.
“You need to stop keeping secrets, young lady.”
Outside, my father called my grandfather’s name, shouting into the dawn light: “Dad, are you out here?” Through the window, I watched my father search the old stable, the backyard, the dying woods at the edge of the property.
My grandfather could no longer drive. He did not even own a car. He could not have left on his own. He relied on us and on Chip, the teenager who lived down the road, to help him with groceries and rides.
“He’s too old to be living alone,” said my mother. “We should have known.”
I felt tears coming to my eyes.
My father jogged down to Chip’s house, which was one of the new ones in the regular development.
My mother began calling the phone numbers that were posted on my grandfather’s refrigerator. They were mostly members of his church, the phone tree, the carpool. The house still smelled like my grandfather, like Listerine and old paper. An antique clock chimed seven times in the living room. My mother’s voice cracked as she talked, leaving her cell phone number in case he turned up.
My father soon returned to us with news: Chip had dropped out of high school and moved away.
“Moved where?” said my mother.
My father rubbed his forehead and blinked a slow blink. A sliver of sun had peaked above the horizon and was shining through the windows, illuminating the dust that floated everywhere in that house. Back then a certain euphoria usually accompanied the arrival of sunshine after so many hours in the dark, but we barely noticed it that night. We all just squinted in the brightness.
“His mother says Chip went to that place in the desert,” said my father. “Circadia. He left last night.”
26
Circadia did not exist on any map. In the section of the Thomas Guide where we had heard it would be, we found only a patch of blank space, a slight crease in the page, a wash of beige symbolizing desert. So it felt as if we were heading to a fictive place, some imagined land, dreamed up or invented. And in one sense, we were. Once in the desert, we would leave the two-lane highway fo
r a hairline road that dead-ended on the map but would lead eventually to a second road, unpaved and too new for the maps to register. This was how we would reach Circadia.
“Do you think he’s really there?” said my mother. Sunlight was streaming in through the windshield. She adjusted the overhead visor.
“Maybe,” said my father. His eyes were narrow against the rising sun. It was nine o’clock at night. “Maybe not.”
We had called the police from my grandfather’s house, but he was not a missing person. Old and eccentric but not senile, he had packed up his own things before leaving.
We drove toward the desert right away, skipping dinner. The highway curved through the hills, some of them blackened from the recent fires. The temperature rose with every mile. Out there, plant life had always struggled to survive, so the land looked less ravaged than the coastal regions did. A few scruffy bushes persisted on the rocky slopes, looking no more spindly than usual.
“It’s just so hard to picture your father joining anything,” said my mother.
“He belongs to a church,” I said from the backseat.
Power lines were whipping by beside the road, undulating as they traveled from pole to pole.
“Don’t you think it’s hard to imagine?” said my mother.
“Helen,” said my father. He sat stiffly in his seat, both hands on the wheel, eyes straight ahead. “I just don’t know.”
The radio turned to static as the last of the suburbs fell away. Traffic thinned. The land flattened. The desert peeled open all around us, and the blue sky hung low to the ground. The sun hovered for hours on the horizon.
The surface of the road blurred in the heat, and I began to smell the leather of the seats in the car, the surfaces cooking in the sun. My mother turned up the air.
As the hours passed, we all began to yawn. My father rubbed the edge of his chin, where a layer of stubble had formed since the morning.
We passed the ruins of an ancient gas station where one pump remained, rusted red. Beside it stood a humble sun-bleached structure leaning heavily to one side, without its roof. There was a certain heartbreak in that scene. Someone had built those walls. Someone had once felt some kind of hope for the future of this place. Now you could see right through the cracks in the walls to the sky on the other side.
Eventually, I fell asleep, my head against the window. I dreamed that we moved to Circadia but that we brought our house with us—only the views and the neighbors changed.
I awoke sometime after ten P.M. to the bumping of the car over dirt.
“Go slower,” said my mother. She was holding tight to the handle in the ceiling. We were driving straight into the sun.
Through the haze, I could see the outline of rooftops in the distance, neat rows of white houses bordered by an ocean of sand dunes rippling across the desert.
The developer’s original sign still stood at the entrance, a heavy slab of granite, fronted by a dry fountain and a patch of dead grass. Etched in thick cursive were the words: the homes at rancho domingo del sol. Above the sign, a makeshift banner flapped from two posts: welcome to circadian. Beneath that, someone had written, Land of the Free.
I was secretly thrilled. I had the idea from Gabby that maybe this was a place where life was more fair.
The streets had names like Desert Rose Lane and Dune Way. Some were paved. Others weren’t. Clear Sky Drive ran paved for a few hundred feet and then sputtered out into dirt, as if to record the precise moment in time when the developer had run out of cash.
“Can you imagine living out here?” said my mother.
The houses stood in varying stages of completion. Some lacked garages, others roofs. Some were just wooden frames naked of drywall and stucco, the studs beginning to weather in the hot, dry air. But you could see what the developer had been aiming for: twelve streets aspiring to a suburb. The nearest grocery store was an hour away.
Though it was ten-thirty at night, Circadia was just waking up. Twenty-five hours of daylight stretched out ahead of us. Hammers echoed in the distance. Somewhere, a saw buzzed.
A man in a faded blue T-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat was crouched in a gravel driveway, pouring white paint into a tray. Beside him, a ladder leaned against a house.
My father slowed the car, rolled down his window. It was hard to breathe the desert air.
“Excuse me,” my father called out from the car.
The man turned, squinted.
“I’m looking for my father. He’s in his eighties, and his name is Gene. Have you seen him?”
The man walked over to our car. His face was badly sunburned, and the beginning of a black beard was growing on his checks and chin.
“Did he tell you he was coming here?” he said when he reached my father’s window.
I had the idea that the people of Circadia had not only escaped the clocks but had also managed to slip loose of time itself. I searched the man’s face for evidence that he was different from us, somehow changed. I imagined the transformation might be deep, molecular, as if every atom in his body were right then spinning at a slightly slower speed than the atoms in ours. Sweat dripped along his hairline. Sweat was showing through his T-shirt.
“He would have arrived last night,” said my father, who was still in his white collared shirt. His wristwatch flashed in the sun. The air conditioner struggled against the wafting heat.
The man glanced at me through the window. He chewed his lower lip. I was aware of the ticking of our dashboard clock as it registered in neon the passage of one more minute, our Volvo a separate universe in which time raced by at high speed.
“He might have come here with a seventeen-year-old kid,” said my mother, leaning toward the driver’s side. “Named Chip.”
The man rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist. He touched the brim of his hat.
“If he didn’t tell you he was coming here,” he said, “maybe he didn’t want you to know.”
We gave up and drove on, but the man stood in his driveway, for a while, his hands on his hips, watching our car move down the street.
We came to a fork in the road and turned right, where we found a woman walking a yellow lab.
“Sorry,” she said. “Haven’t seen them.”
She kept walking.
“Not the friendliest bunch,” said my mother.
We passed a series of greenhouses. Everywhere we looked, sheets dangled from clotheslines.
At the end of one cul-de-sac, we arrived at what was obviously meant to be the community swimming pool, no doubt touted in the original brochures for the project. But it was only a dry hole in the ground, deep at one end, shallow at the other, and not yet lined with cement.
Beside the pool was a small playground where a girl in a green sundress was sitting on one of the swings, her brown hair flying around in the wind. I recognized her from soccer: Molly Kopachek.
“Stop here,” I said. I rolled down my window. “Molly?”
She looked up, pulled her hair from her face, and twisted a makeshift bun. We’d been fullbacks together one year, but she was not the competitive kind. She used to pick dandelions in the penalty box during games.
Now she hopped from the swing and walked to my window, her sandals grinding the dirt.
“Are you moving here, too?” she said.
Behind her stood a skeletal structure, a wooden frame, suggestive of a house.
“We’re just looking for my grandpa,” I said.
She hadn’t seen him, but when I said Chip’s name, she pointed across the street.
“I think there might be a guy named Chip staying at that house over there,” she said.
My father pulled the parking brake.
The exterior of the house was coated in unfinished gray stucco. Paint cans lay scattered nearby.
A wisp of a girl in a white tank top stood smoking a cigarette out front. She was lanky and pale, her head was shaved, and she stared at us through a pair of oversize sunglasses as we approached
the house. I could see the sky in her lenses. It was everywhere, that sky, somehow wider in the desert, more visible, than anywhere else on earth.
“Are you his parents?” she said when my father asked about Chip. From inside the house, guitar chords floated out to us in waves. Someone was singing. It was so hot I could barely breathe.
“We just want to talk to him,” said my mother.
The girl took a long slow breath and exhaled. She held her cigarette with two fingers near her hip. The smoke smelled different from other smoke: cloves.
“I think he’s out back,” she said. She nodded toward the front door but didn’t move. “It’s unlocked.”
Inside, we found a living room empty of furniture but lined with sleeping bags, at least one of which was occupied. A ceiling fan spun insufficiently, circulating hot air.
“Hello?” said my father. He looked around. He didn’t seem to know where to stand. A recycling bin had overflowed in the hall. Empty wine bottles lay like bowling pins on the hardwood floor.
The music was coming from the kitchen, where two girls—each one as willowy as the one out front—sat in mismatched chairs while a boy without a shirt played guitar.
The boy was the first to see us. The music stopped.
“Yes?” he said.
The girls turned sluggishly toward us. Their eyes were watery and red. They laughed as soon as they saw us. My small family was in the kitchen of strangers.
“We’re looking for Chip,” said my father. His words, crisp and quick, sliced embarrassingly through the air. I thought I could feel it then, the slowness of the house around us, the sluggish pace at which time unfolded in this place.
The girls glanced outside to the back of the house.
“Hey, Chip,” called the boy. “Your dad’s here.”
The girls laughed, and the boy began to play again.
They were college kids, or formerly so—I’d heard they were dropping out by the thousands, stealing clocks from classrooms and smashing them in the streets.
Outside, Chip looked the same as ever: black T-shirt and cutoff black shorts, black tennis shoes, dyed black hair. Under the shade of a frayed umbrella, he was reading a book in a faded beach chair.