We walked past the bus stop, dusty and deserted, and the, its stores shuttered for the night. We wandered across the parking lot, the quietest parking lot on earth—it was empty of cars—and we imagined we were visitors to this strange world: what purpose this vast open space, these rows of cross-hatched lines?
Then we ran down the hill to my street, our shadows long in the early light.
Soon we reached Sylvia’s house. My father was at work for the night, but my mother was home sleeping—or not sleeping—right across the street. I was afraid of getting caught, so we crouched low behind a parked car.
Up close, I could read the graffiti beneath the paint on Sylvia’s garage door, the sloppy letters still blaring: Get the fuck out. I wondered what the house now looked like inside and whether she’d had her piano removed or if it remained on the floor in broken pieces. I imagined everything in ruins—the floors sagging, shelves collapsed, the macramé long ago frayed to threads. The only sound was the faint buzzing of the electric lines that ran above the roof.
Sylvia’s side gate, we noticed, was standing open, revealing a thorny tangle of dead bushes in her backyard.
“Let’s go back there,” whispered Seth.
Before I could argue, he sprinted through the gate. I liked the way he looked in that bright light, rushing past the stucco and then squinting as he turned his head and motioned for me to follow, which, of course, I did. Leaning against the side of Sylvia’s house, we laughed as softly as we could, shoulders shaking, unable to breathe. We were kids, and it was summer. We were trespassing and half in love.
We tried to look through a window, but the curtains were closed. We saw no sign of Sylvia.
The natural days had stretched to sixty hours: almost two days of darkness, then two days of light. If Sylvia was still living there, she couldn’t possibly be sleeping through the length of every darkness or staying awake for the whole stretch of each daylight. But we didn’t know for sure. And we wanted to—we wanted to know everything there was to know.
We could have waited in that yard for hours and never spotted Sylvia, but instead, suddenly, the side door swung open, and there she was in the side yard, as thin as ever in an orange linen dress, no shoes. We hid behind a row of trash cans and watched her walk toward the driveway. She looked up and down the street, then up and down again. She sneaked out like a thief. She carried two cardboard boxes, taped shut. She set them down in the driveway and then went back inside.
“You were right,” I whispered. “Guess she’s been here all along.”
Seth nodded. He raised one finger to his lips.
Sylvia returned with two more boxes and headed again for the driveway. She slipped out of sight, but we heard the rattle of keys out front, the trunk of her car opening and closing.
Seth coughed a soft cough. He put his hand over his mouth, trying to muffle another one, but the cough burst out just as Sylvia returned to the side yard. She looked in our direction.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, her hand on her chest. “You scared me. What are you guys doing back here?”
We stood when she saw us, but we didn’t say anything. We’d been caught.
Sylvia glanced at the side door. The usual sweep of her gestures, formerly so graceful, had been replaced by the tight crossing of her arms, the anxious biting of her lower lip.
“Well?” she said.
We didn’t speak.
“I think you should both go home,” she said. “Right now.”
I’d never heard her talk this way. As a teacher, she was endlessly patient and calm.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, her voice rising.
We heard the side door creak open behind her. Sylvia closed her eyes.
And there he was: my father, carrying two brown suitcases, one on either side.
Maybe I should not have been surprised to see my father emerge from her house like that, but I was. He stopped when he saw us. I heard him take a sharp, quick breath. He set the suitcases down on the pavement.
“What are you doing here?” he said. He looked at Seth, then back at me. A pair of sunglasses dangled from his shirt.
I was too stunned to answer.
“I thought you were at Hanna’s,” said my father. He was about to say something else, but Seth cut him off.
“She thought you were at work,” said Seth. He looked wound up, ready for a fight.
“Don’t talk to me that way,” said my father. “I’m talking to Julia.”
My father suddenly noticed the open gate and looked alarmed. If my mother were to wake up and look out, she could easily see us in the side yard.
“Shit,” he said.
This was the first time I noticed it, the inevitable space between father and man. A frustrated man was standing there on that pavement. A stranger would have recognized the signs from a distance as my father rushed to close the gate, the sharp movements of a furious human being.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Nowhere,” said my father. But the suitcases glowed like hard evidence against him.
“Tell me the truth,” I said.
Sylvia began to move away from the scene. She was floating almost imperceptibly back toward the side door.
“I want you to go home right now,” my father said to me. He indicated our house, just visible over the top of the gate, and it looked so sad and lovely sitting there across the street, its simple white stucco almost shining in the sun: our home.
“No,” I said.
Sylvia was back inside now. I heard the door slowly shut behind her.
“Now,” said my father.
But I stayed put. Maybe it was the effect of Seth standing next to me, or maybe it was the sunshine—they do say the daylight makes us more impulsive than the dark.
“I’m not going home,” I said.
Seth grabbed my hand.
“He can’t make you,” he said. “You could go tell your mom about this right now.”
Anger flashed on my father’s face, anger and disbelief.
“Your mother and I have already talked about this,” he said.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. I started to cry. I felt Seth’s hand on my back.
“If you won’t go home, then go back to Seth’s house.” He was pleading. It was something I hadn’t seen him do before. “Please,” he said. “It’s not safe to be out so late, and you shouldn’t be in the sun.”
After some argument, we agreed, but we refused to let him drive us. He followed us in his car, moving at the slow pace of our strides. Seth held my hand the whole way. I had the feeling as we walked that I was glimpsing in tableau the world of someone older, the odd dramas that took place only in the middle of the night.
When we reached Seth’s driveway, my father called my name. “I’m not going to tell your mother that you lied about going to Hanna’s.” He paused. The engine fan began to whir. “Okay?”
“You’re the one who’s lying,” I said.
“Julia,” he said again, but I didn’t answer. I did not know when I would see my father again.
Seth and I walked hand in hand across the dirt where the lawn used to be. We climbed the steps to the front door and crept inside, so we wouldn’t wake his father.
Inside, we sat for a while on the living room couches. The light was low from the blackout curtains. It was late, nearly two.
“You should tell your mom,” Seth said. He yawned and stretched out on the carpet.
I lay back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. A few minutes passed. Somewhere a faucet was dripping. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, the sun was beating down on the land.
“She’s going to find out anyway,” I said.
When I turned to look at Seth, I found he was asleep. He was curled on the floor in his T-shirt and shorts. I listened for a while to the reassuring sound of that boy breathing near me. I watched the slight movement of his eyelids as he dreamed. It wasn’t enough just to be near him. I wished I could see wh
at he was dreaming right then. I would have traveled even there with him.
31
It was not until we woke the next morning that we discovered the burns. Sunburns, the worst of our lives.
We were feverish and thirsty, our whole bodies bright red. It hurt to bend our knees. It hurt to turn our heads. Seth ran to the bathroom and threw up. I still remember how he looked afterward, coughing as he lay down on the couch. In his eyes I saw the beginnings of tears and something else too: fear.
My mother was horrified when I got home. Bits of white skin were already peeling from my cheeks.
“Jesus,” she said. “I told you not to go out in the sun.”
She came alive that day, as if my sunburn were her cure. She spent a long time smearing aloe on my face. The touch of her fingers—the therapeutic sting—made me feel like a younger girl.
“Was this your idea?” she said. “Or Hanna’s? And where the hell were her parents?”
I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“I want your father to take a look at this the minute he gets home,” she said. Tiny flakes of skin were coming off in her hands. I could see the flurry in the lamplight. “He’ll be home from work in an hour.”
I hoped she was right, but I knew that something had swerved in the night, some final shift that had led eventually to the packing of two suitcases and the loading of the trunk of Sylvia’s car. My father and Sylvia could be in Nevada by now, or halfway up the coast of California. I didn’t tell my mother that. I just waited for the truth to land.
My mother leaned toward me, inspected my cheeks. Up close, she looked older, the wrinkles around her eyes more profound, her whole face like the dried flower petals that Seth and I had collected that spring.
She turned me around, lifted the back of my shirt. I was wearing the plain white training bra I’d secretly bought. I closed my eyes and waited for her say something about the bra. But she didn’t mention it. Instead, I heard only the sound of her gasping at the sight of my skin.
“My God,” she said. “Weren’t you wearing a shirt?”
But the sun had developed an alarming new trick—it had burned us right through our clothes.
That same morning a moving van appeared in front of Sylvia’s house. Through my curtains, I watched box after box bob across the dirt in the arms of two movers. They carried floor lamps, shag rugs, two baskets of yarn, yards and yards of macramé. Furniture followed: the rustic dining room table, the brown velvet couch, two overstuffed armchairs, a bed frame, the empty birdcage. The packing of the van went on all morning, but Sylvia did not appear. Her car was already gone by then. A patch of oil was drying in the driveway.
After a while, the moving van drove away.
Twelve o’clock came and twelve o’clock passed, and there was no sign of my father.
My mother tried his cell phone. No answer.
“His shift should be over by now,” she said.
I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn’t coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.
Around twelve-thirty, the lights flickered. A few minutes later, they went out.
“Shit,” said my mother. “Not again.”
Every window in our house was draped with a blackout curtain, but a little sunlight was seeping through, so it was not quite pitch dark in our kitchen, where the two of us sat waiting and worrying like women of some earlier time, my mother lighting candles in the gloom.
I rubbed my face with the palms of my hands. Small flakes of sunburned skin fell to the floor.
“Don’t do that,” said my mother. “You’ll only make it worse.”
It was not long after the power went out that the cats began to yowl. I’d never heard them make that sound. Chloe moaned into the empty air. A trail of fur stood straight up on her spine. Tony paced the kitchen, ears swiveling. He growled a low growl. When I reached for him, he hissed.
Soon the neighborhood dogs began to bark. They howled from all directions, their voices swelling like a tide. A Great Dane sprinted down our street, his leash whipping behind him. In the nearby rural areas, cattle charged; horses broke through fences.
We humans didn’t feel a thing. The sky looked blue and simple to our eyes.
When we tried the radio, static poured from the speakers. No voice drifted on any frequency. Only later would we recognize what seems so obvious in retrospect: This was the first of the solar superstorms, triggered by the withering of the magnetic field.
My mother called my father again. Nothing.
Chloe’s cry grew mournful, a relentless wavering chord. My mother shut her in the guest room and then went around closing the windows against the noise.
She called my father again. This time his phone went straight to voice mail.
“Where is he?” she said.
I think she knew that he was more than late. Something had changed, and she knew it.
“Maybe you should save the battery,” I said.
She looked about to cry.
An hour passed, then two. There was no word from my father. My mother called his hospital. He wasn’t there.
She tried his cell phone once more. I remember the quick beeps of the numbers being dialed again and again, her fingers moving more urgently each time, the soft sounds of a lost cause.
Before the start of the slowing, no one would have predicted my father to be the kind of man who would abandon his wife and child. Here was a man who showed up, a man who did his work and went home every night. Here was a man who handled crises and paid his bills on time. Much study has been devoted to the physical effects of gravity sickness, but more lives than history will ever record were transformed by the subtler psychological shifts that also accompanied the slowing. For reasons we’ve never fully understood, the slowing—or its effects—altered the brain chemistry of certain people, disturbing most notably the fragile balance between impulse and control.
32
Thirty miles away, a different drama was unfolding. It began with a golden retriever—or you might say instead that the story starts earlier, much earlier, sixty years back, in the year 1961, when Americans first received instructions on how to build a backyard bomb shelter, a time when everyone knew how many inches of cement it took to shield a human being from nuclear fallout.
But the events of this day begin with the golden retriever. Like the animals in our neighborhood, this dog was spooked by the solar storm, this dog especially so. He leaped over his backyard fence and went running.
He sprinted for ten blocks, passed driveways, tree stumps, the plastic approximations of lawns. This was a planned community, still new at the time of the slowing, and bent on appearing as little changed as possible. The slopes were naked of trees, of course, but the houses now offered distant ocean views, unobstructed for miles. Finally, this golden retriever scuttled up a hill and burst onto a piece of property that lay just beyond the development, a slice of parched land on which my grandfather’s house stood. By the time the dog’s owners caught up to him, he was digging at a piece of metal that was half buried in the dirt behind the woodpile. It was a rusty trapdoor pressed flat into the earth.
The owners of the dog soon called the police.
Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn’t right. It’s not love—it’s relief.
I remember the exact pitch of my mother’s voice as she called up to me from downstairs. “There he is,” she said. “There he is.”
Our whole future was rewritten by the brief sound of my father’s engine dying in the driveway.
“Sorry,” he said, shaking his phone in the air. “I tried to call.”
Only later did we discover that the solar storm had wiped out the cell phone satellites. A million desperate calls flew into space that day but landed nowhere.
“Where have you been?” asked my mother.
But I didn’t care anymore. He was home. He was here. I forgave him in an instant.
I didn’t notice right away the look of trouble on my father’s face. I should have known by then that it’s never the disasters you see coming that finally come to pass; it’s the ones you don’t expect at all. There was a reason my father was late that day. He’d been to my grandfather’s house.
Behind my grandfather’s woodpile, where wildflowers once grew, there lay an ancient trapdoor, flat and rusted. This was the entrance to the underground shelter he had built six decades earlier in case of nuclear war.
I had not known about the shelter. My father remembered it from his youth but could barely recall its location in the yard. In fact, he would later say that he had assumed the shelter had collapsed years ago. But in the months before he disappeared, we discovered, my grandfather had secretly repurposed the space for the fears of this new age.
It was ten feet by twelve, the walls lined with thirteen inches of cement. Inside were cases of bottled water, rows of canned food, two shotguns, and a hand-crank radio. There were four sleeping bags and four cots, one for each of us. There were several boxes of my favorite granola bars. Much of what was missing from his house was also found in the shelter. In one corner stood several boxes of photographs and valuables, shoe boxes full of the gold bars I’d seen him packing in his dining room. A two-year calendar hung on one wall. This was a cavity designed for waiting out the crumbling of society and whatever else came next. It was designed not only for him but for us, for my parents and for me. I guess he wasn’t so eager after all to escape the confines of this life.
Spilled across the floor were the contents of my grandfather’s final bundle: a deck of cards, an old edition of Monopoly, a checkerboard and checkers. All the pieces were scattered on the cement. On the floor of the shelter, a wooden ladder lay at an unnatural angle. According to the police report, it was here that my grandfather’s body was found.
He was once a hardy man, but the first thing I thought when I heard the news was how delicate his skin had become, how easily and often it released his blood.