The Age of Miracles

9

There had always been regions of the earth where the sun could not be trusted, where the days were never measured by the rising and setting of our star. At certain remote coordinates, the sun had always set in December and then failed to rise all season. There, every summer had always been one continuous loop of daylight, the sun relentless in the June night sky.

These were difficult places. Trees refused to grow. They were the ancient fishing settlements of northern Scandinavia, the icy slopes of Siberia, the Inuit villages of Canada and Alaska. For the inhabitants of these places, night and day had always been abstract. Morning did not necessarily bring with it the light. And not all nights were dark.

Those of us living in the lower latitudes were about to experience a lifestyle strange to us but long familiar in the land of the midnight sun.

The announcement was made at night, fourteen days after the start of the slowing. Broadcasts were interrupted. Newscasters broke in with a special message. I remember the blare of the trumpets—the network’s emergency intro music—slicing through the crowd noise of Game 7 of the World Series.

“Jesus,” sighed my mother. “What now?”

We’d been watching the game over dinner, plates of Bellisario’s cheese pizza steaming on our knees. It had been a good day: that afternoon I had finally heard from Hanna—she’d written me a cheerful postcard with a picture of the desert on the back. My mother had relaxed a little. My father was drinking a beer. A quart of cookies and cream was waiting in the freezer. A stranger passing our window that night could have detected our moods from the sounds: the clean crack of bat striking ball and the synchronized cheers of my parents. We were happy.

But now my mother lifted her dinner plate from her lap and set it on the coffee table. She pulled her hair away from her face, as if to better hear the news. I was sure her roots were turning grayer every day. She’d skipped her monthly salon appointment—and the slowing of the planet had interfered not at all with the speed at which human hair grew.

My father sat on the couch beside her, his mouth tight. I could see him chewing the inside of his cheek. He took one slow sip of beer.

Outside, the sky was bright—the days had swelled beyond thirty hours, and the slowing was showing no signs of letting up.

“Maybe they figured out how to fix things,” I said from the floor, where I’d stretched out on my stomach with the cats.

No one said anything.

Rumors must have surged through certain circles before the official announcement was made. There must have been some early, unconfirmed reports. Doesn’t big news always leak before it’s meant to? Aren’t secrets usually spilled? Anonymous sources love to talk. But if there was any chatter about this development, we hadn’t heard it.

The network took us live to the White House, where the president was waiting behind an enormous polished desk, his hands folded stiffly on its surface. A large American flag hung in folds beside him.

A series of meetings between congressional leaders, White House officials, and the secretaries of Commerce, Agriculture, Transportation, and the Interior had produced a radically simple plan: in the face of massive global change, we, the American people, would be asked to carry on exactly as we always had.

In other words, we would remain on the twenty-four-hour clock.

My first response was disbelief. The cable box glowed a green 11 A.M., but it was the end of the day. We had learned, by then, to disregard the clocks.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “How can we?”

The Chinese government had taken the same sweeping step. The European Union was expected to follow suit. The alternative, we were told, would be disastrous.

“Markets need stability,” said the president. “We can’t continue this way.”

It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There’s a certain boldness to inaction.

But it seemed to me that we were being asked to perform the impossible, as unlikely a strategy as if they’d proposed strapping ropes to the sun and dragging it across the sky.

I waited for my mother to react, but she only sighed a loud sigh. I turned to look at her and saw her as she was: a woman on a couch, looking weary. There’s a limit to shock, I suppose, even for her.

“This is never going to work,” she said.

My father said nothing. That was one of his specialties, I was learning, the ability to remain silent at all the crucial junctures, to meet each crisis with a simple, stalwart quiet. I can see now that I inherited a bit of that habit from him.

My father went back to his dinner. He ate his pizza with a knife and a fork, a paper napkin spread neatly across his knees.

The green of the infield snapped back onto the television screen.

As obvious as the implications would be later, the effects of the plan were not immediately clear to me. What would become apparent soon enough was this: We would fall out of sync with the sun almost immediately. Light would be unhooked from day, darkness unchained from night. And not everyone would go along with the plan.