He was startled to see us.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Did my father come here with you?” said my father.
By now the question sounded ridiculous. My grandfather was not in this house.
“No,” Chip said. He set the book flat on his lap. “Why?”
A few feet away, a young couple lay intertwined on a lawn chair. They didn’t notice us, or they didn’t care. They kissed for a long time, and my mother made a show of holding her hand up to the side of her face to block the view.
My father showed Chip one of the flyers we’d found at my grandfather’s house.
“I know he agrees that clock time is total bullshit,” said Chip. “But if he’s not at home, I don’t know where he is.”
The back patio was fenceless. There was no yard. It opened out to the desert, where a vast field of solar panels sparkled in the sun.
“That’s where we get our power,” said Chip when he saw me staring.
The electrical grid did not extend there. Water had to be trucked in as well.
“You should think about joining us out here,” said Chip. “You know, tune out, drop in.”
“It’s tune in, drop out,” said my mother. She was fanning herself theatrically with a magazine she’d pulled from her purse. “Let’s go.”
My father wrote his cell phone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to Chip.
“If you see him or hear from him,” he said, “please call.”
Chip walked us back through the house and outside. The girls were still laughing as we passed. They couldn’t seem to stop.
“You probably think we’re a bunch of pipe dreamers out here,” said Chip. The girl beside him lit another cigarette. “But it’s just the opposite. We’re not the ones in denial.”
The wind was picking up, blowing bits of dust and trash around in little circles in the street. Soon we would leave this place, and I would listen to my heartbeat as he drove, trying to catch it speeding up.
“We’re the realists,” Chip added. “You’re the dreamers.”
27
My grandfather once had an uncle who disappeared in Alaska. It was 1970, early summer near the arctic circle, twenty-two hours of daylight per day. He was a fisherman who had come to Alaska from Norway three decades earlier and had become a legend along a certain stretch of coastline, renowned for his ability to predict where the salmon ran thickest as they spawned. He lived alone on a tiny island a few miles off the coast. He was frugal. He slept in a one-room cabin with no electricity or running water, and he buried the money he made in a secret location on the island. My grandfather spent two salmon seasons working for this uncle, and for decades afterward, my grandfather kept a small photograph of him, dressed in waders and a black knit cap, a tangled net draped over thick knuckles.
One day this uncle set out alone on his fishing boat. It was a short trip from the port to the island. The sky was clear. The sea was calm. He was never seen again.
“It was June,” my grandfather used to say, as if he’d been there on that day. By 1970 my grandfather was living in California again, but whenever he told this story, he made a sweeping gesture with the palm of his hand to indicate the flatness of the ocean on the day his uncle vanished.
“The weather was perfect,” he’d say. “Not a shred of wind.”
His uncle was presumed lost at sea. But my grandfather never believed it. Several searches of his property failed to unearth his fortune.
“Rolf could handle anything on the water,” he would often say. “There’s no way that boat sank.”
Fifteen years passed. No one heard from the uncle.
And then my grandparents took a trip to Norway—this was years before I was born. They were riding a bus in the northern part of the country, where my grandfather’s relatives lived. When the bus stopped in a small fishing village, an old man boarded the bus.
“I knew it was him as soon as I saw him,” my grandfather used to tell me.
At this moment in the story, he would shake his head slowly, close his eyes, and whistle slightly, satisfied by the proof in flesh of a truth long sensed.
“I always knew he was alive,” he would say. “I always knew.”
My grandfather once lost his wedding ring—it flew off his finger and into an Alaskan snow bank—but he found it months later, in the spring. The snow had melted. The gold ring was lying in the dirt. Finger was reunited with band. My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.
“But why did Rolf disappear in the first place?” I always asked. For my grandfather, this was not a key part of the story. Or perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name.
“I know he recognized me on that bus,” my grandfather would say. “But he didn’t say anything. At the next stop, he just stood up and got off. Didn’t even look back.”
His uncle disappeared into the woods on the side of the road. My grandfather never saw him again.
“That would be just like Rolf,” my grandfather used to say with a certain admiration crackling in his voice. “Just like him.”
It was after midnight when we got home from Circadia. Our street was bright and quiet, almost everyone asleep. It was the lifeless middle of a bright white night. Our cul-de-sac looked evacuated. Not even Sylvia was out. The slamming of our car doors echoed against the stucco. A pair of clouds scudded westward on the breeze. The only sign of life was a skinny Siamese cat squinting in the sunshine as it traipsed across the Petersons’ artificial lawn.
My parents stayed up all night, calling hospitals.
I pulled my curtains and tried to sleep. Cracks of sunlight streaked the carpet. My alarm clock ticked on my dresser, and I was newly aware of its swiftness: the ticking, ticking, ticking. Minutes zoomed. Hours flew. I slept little. I dreamed unsettling dreams. Days, months, years, whole lives—everything was rushing toward its end. At the appointed hour, my alarm clock exploded: It was time to get up for school. I woke with a racing heart, out of breath and sweaty in my sheets.
Later that morning, the police called with a report of an elderly man who had been found wandering, disoriented, in a nearby grocery store. My father drove down to the police station to confirm what we already knew: It wasn’t him.
28
Three days passed. There was no word from my grandfather.
And it felt as if Seth Moreno had gone missing from my life as well. He arrived later and later at the bus stop each morning. He didn’t talk to me at school. We had not exchanged a single word since the day we saw the whales. I spent a lot of time in class wondering what I’d done wrong.
Meanwhile, the days kept growing, the nights kept spreading. There was talk of tipping points, feedback loops, points of no return.
Later that week, NASA announced that the astronauts were coming back, in spite of the risk. No one knew exactly how the slowing would affect reentry, but they had run out of food in the space station. A thousand calculations were made, some necessary guesses. We’d been told that the Orion would streak across the southern California sky at three minutes after four o’clock on its way to Edwards Air Force Base.
I planned to watch it through my telescope, alone.
It was bright and hot outside as I stepped off the bus that afternoon. The sun had been shining for twenty-something hours. The asphalt was glittering. A warm breeze was blowing leaves and litter through the neighborhood.
As I walked toward home, I was thinking of the astronauts. They’d been away for eight months, the last humans left who had not yet experienced a day longer than twenty-four hours.
As I cut across a vacant lot, I was surprised to see Seth on his skateboard. He had disappeared from the bus stop right away but had paused here and was using the curb to do jumps near a fire hydrant.
I resisted the urge to look in his direction as I walked. I could hear the clean clip of his board striking the curb again and again. I kept walking.
&n
bsp; But when I turned in the direction of my street, the noise stopped. In its place, I heard the most unbelievable sound: the three syllables of my name shouted on the wind.
“Yeah?” I said.
A sudden lump formed in my throat.
The other kids had scattered. It was just the two of us and the dust from the dirt lot blowing across the street.
“Are you gonna watch the rocket?” he said. He shielded his eyes from the sun with one hand. Our shadows mingled on the sidewalk.
“Maybe,” I said. I was skittish and shy.
“I’m gonna watch it from my roof,” he said. A breeze blew. Seconds passed. “Come on.”
Maybe I should have been angry about the way he’d acted before, but all I remember is the wave of his hand as he motioned for me to follow him, the way he pronounced the exact words that my ears most wanted to hear.
From his cluttered garage, we dragged two rusty beach chairs into the house and then up the ladder through the attic and out. We arranged them side by side on a flat section of roof, lined with black tar paper and wiring, mounds of ancient bird poop. Seth brought us two Cokes and some pretzels, and then we leaned back and waited for the Orion to zoom over our heads. The sky was clear. The air was warm. The chairs smelled like sunscreen and salt. I could feel Seth sitting next to me. I could hear him breathing near me. We didn’t talk for a long time.
Seth broke the quiet.
“Why were you being like that the other day?” he said.
I felt a rush of panic.
“Being like what?” I said.
He didn’t look at me. He sipped his Coke and set it down on the tarpaper. We could hear cars whooshing past on the freeway in the distance.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You were being kind of weird at the bus stop last week.”
I felt a tightening in my chest. I gripped the metal arm of my chair.
“I wasn’t being weird,” I said. “You were.”
He was careful not to look in my direction. I was aware of his nose in profile, the left line of his jaw, one ear, one eye, as he stared straight ahead toward the mountains that rose to our east. He looked better than ever.
He cleared his throat and added: “It kind of seemed like you didn’t want anyone to talk to you.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “That’s not true at all.”
They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.
“And you were all dressed up and stuff,” he went on. “Why were you so dressed up?”
I could hardly breathe, but I felt a tiny thrill. Here was proof that he’d given me some thought.
“You were the one being weird,” I said. “You didn’t even say hi.”
He turned and looked at me for the first time in several minutes. He had dark brown eyes, a thick fringe of lashes, no freckles.
“You didn’t say anything, either,” he said.
And then his mouth opened into a wide and sudden smile. I saw his front teeth were a little bit crooked.
“It was my birthday that day,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, happy birthday.”
Who knew what would happen next, but we were together for now, sipping our Cokes and looking at the sky.
“Wait,” said Seth, sitting up in his beach chair. “What time is it?”
He was the first to realize it: The Orion was overdue.
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
His dark eyes, squinting, searched the open sky.
We waited a few more long minutes, but the sky remained a perfect blue, ominously empty of aircraft and contrails.
It was as if we knew even then what had happened.
We learned from Seth’s television the details of the Orion’s final fate. It disintegrated two hundred miles off the coast of California, cause unknown. All six astronauts on board were killed.
Seth and I sat stiffly on opposite sides of his couch, watching the stream of news reports flow into his living room.
Already, the networks were flashing photos of the astronauts from the day they’d left the earth ten months earlier, their faces fresh and happy, their white suits so crisp and bright in the sunshine, their gigantic helmets gleaming beneath their arms as they waved—so different from the way they looked in the recent video transmissions, after they’d grown so thin and frail in space that it seemed almost natural the way they floated, weightless, while they spoke to Houston via satelite link.
We said nothing for a while. I shifted in my seat. The couch squeaked beneath me. There were holes in the leather.
Seth was the first to speak.
“Would you rather die in an explosion?” he asked. “Or of a disease?”
I let the question hang. His mother had died here. I didn’t want to say the wrong words.
“The thing about an explosion,” he said, “is that it only takes a second.”
29
After that, Seth and I were often together.
Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. Time moved differently for us that spring: A string of long afternoons was as good as a year.
We quit spending lunches in the library and stretched out instead beneath a pair of dead pine trees at the far edge of the quad, where we watched the clouds drift across the sky. Seth started saving me a seat on the bus every morning and every afternoon.
At first I was aware of the other kids watching us. I could feel them staring all the time. I sensed their chatter. But soon I ceased to notice. I stopped caring what they thought.
“He seems like a nice boy,” said my mother. “Let’s have him over for dinner.”
But I just wanted to be alone with Seth. I didn’t want anyone else around.
I was with Seth on the day we passed the wheat point. Now it was official: Wheat could no longer grow on this planet without the aid of artificial light. We watched from a hillside as people pushed grocery carts across the supermarket parking lot, heaped full of canned food. Panic had returned. You could feel it in the air, an ending, a tingling, like a taste in the back of your throat.
“Would you rather starve?” said Seth. “Or die of thirst?”
This had become a game of ours. We were serious kids made more so by the times.
“Starve,” I said. “You?”
“Thirst,” he said. He kicked a rock down the slope. Dust sputtered behind it. The rock disappeared into a tangle of desiccated ice plant. Seth always chose the quickest death.
Seth was at my house when my mother’s greenhouse was delivered. We watched the workers assemble it out back. The glass glittered as they mounted the sunlamps and poured the soil. We watched them unfurl an orange electrical cord and then insert the fat plug into an outdoor socket. We were one of the last families on our street to buy one. My mother had ordered it without consulting my father, and while she lowered a series of small plants into the soil, my father watched from the dining room table, his arms crossed. Then he went upstairs. By the end of the day, we had two rows of green beans and three rows of strawberries growing in the greenhouse.
“Strawberries are a waste,” said my father. “If we’re going to be growing anything, we should be growing mushrooms. They don’t depend so much on light.”
A rash of white-night crimes also struck our city. The real-timers were blamed. Who else would be out at those late hours? The windows of Sylvia’s car were smashed in her driveway. Her garage was soon spray-painted with thick, drippy words: Get the fuck out.
I wondered how my father felt about that, but I didn’t ask, and he didn’t say.
It seemed to me that time moved at high speed that spring. Seth’s hair grew long again and began to fall into his eyes. I grew out my bangs, and Seth said he liked them. I started shaving my legs, and I bo
ught a real bra—one that fit this time. One dark afternoon Seth taught me to ride his skateboard, and I still remember the way his hand felt on my back as he jogged beside me in the glow of the streetlights, me wobbling over the cracks in the sidewalk, content.
After school, we’d go searching in the canyons for the skeletons of birds—they were everywhere, a profusion of bone and feather, as abundant as seashells. We hunted for the last living eucalyptus, which we found, we were certain, withering on the edge of a sandstone bluff by the ocean. We collected the neighborhood’s last blades of grass. We kept the final flowerings of daisies, of marigolds, of honeysuckle. We pressed petals between the pages of dictionaries. We lined our shelves with relics from our time. Look here, we pictured saying someday, this one we called maple, this one magnolia, this aspen, this oak. On dark days, Seth drew maps of the constellations as if those bodies, too, might soon fall away.
Seth’s father was frequently at his lab. He left home early. He came home late. He was the coffee cup in the kitchen sink, the cigarettes in the ashtray out back, the lab coat slung over the banister. He was a name on the envelopes that piled, unopened, in a huge stack by the door, a voice on the phone instructing Seth to order pizza, eat without him. My parents never knew how little Seth’s father was at home when I was there.
We were home alone at Seth’s house on the day the power went out.
The television snapped off, the lights, too, I grabbed Seth’s hand in the dark. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. A quiet flooded the house, as if silence were a condition of the dark. We had sixteen hours, maybe more, until the sun would rise again. We fumbled together to the front door, swung it open: It was dark out there, too, a prehistoric dark, the soundless glittering of stars.
My mother called my cell phone from work. “Stay put,” she said. “Just stay put. Lock the doors, and don’t let anyone in.” We scoured the house for flashlights. We bumped each other in our blindness and ran into the walls. We broke a lamp and laughed for a long time. Seth lit candles with one of his father’s lighters. We carried them around like torches, our faces shadowy in the flame light. We wondered if it might last forever, the age after electricity.