The Age of Miracles

14

By the end of November, our days had stretched to forty hours.

Those were days of extremes. The sun blazed longer each time it came around, baking our street until it was too hot to cross barefoot. Earthworms sizzled on patios. Daisies wilted in their beds.

The periods of darkness, when they came, were just as sluggish as the daylight. The air turned cold during twenty hours of night, like the water at the bottom of a lake. All over California, grapes froze on the vine, orange groves withered in the dark, the flesh of avocados turned black from the frosts.

Dozens of experimental biospheres were commissioned for the cultivation of essential crops, and the seeds of a thousand fragile species were rushed to a seed bank in Norway.

Certain scientists struggled to predict the future rate of the slowing and to map its multiplying effects, while others argued that the rotation might still correct itself. But some were inclined not to forecast at all, likening this new science to the prediction of earthquakes or brain tumors.

“Will we end up like the birds?” posed one ancient climatologist, interviewed on the nightly news. His dark eyes were nested in thick folds of sun-spotted skin. “Maybe we will,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest. Six or seven weeks after the slowing started, a certain boredom developed. The daily count of new minutes dropped off the front pages of the newspapers. And television reports on the subject became hardly distinguishable from the more ordinary bad news that streamed each night into our living rooms and went largely ignored.

The few people who had rejected clock time carried on, living like bean sprouts, reacting to sunlight when it appeared and going dormant whenever our patch of earth slipped into the dark. Already, these real-timers seemed very different from us, their customs incompatible with ours. They were widely regarded as freaks. We did not mix.

The handful who lived on our street were left off the guest list of that year’s fall block party, held every year in the bulge of our cul-de-sac on the night before Thanksgiving. Orange flyers were left on every doorstep on the street but theirs.

Later that same week, one sunrise revealed a hundred strands of toilet paper tangled in the branches of Sylvia’s olive tree. Tom and Carlotta’s house had received the same treatment. I watched Sylvia from my bedroom as she carefully tore the paper from her rosebushes. She rested for a moment, hands on hips, looking around from beneath the wide brim of a straw hat, as if the culprits might be lurking nearby. She retrieved a stepladder from her garage. But she could not reach every piece. For weeks, bits of shredded toilet paper remained lodged in the highest branches.

The Kaplan family was eventually outed. Off the clock for the sake of their Sabbath, which ran from sundown to sundown on every seventh day, they’d been keeping it secret from the neighborhood. Once the news was out, Beth, the oldest daughter, was never again asked to babysit the Swansons’ toddler. We mingled with them even less than we had before.

I spent a lot of time watching Sylvia through my telescope during that time.

On white nights, I might see her watering her roses at midnight or dropping pasta into a pot at three A.M. Sometimes she went walking by herself in the silent middle of the night.

She seemed more isolated than the other real-timers did. She was always alone. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d watch her play piano through my telescope. I was sure I could detect in the slight slump of her shoulders as she played, and in the heavy way she held her head, a certain persistent sadness. She looked lonely through the lens of my telescope, like one of those faraway stars, still visible to our eyes but no longer really there. She looked lonelier even than I was.

Certain disasters evolved into attractions. My father and I sometimes drove down to the coast to look at what the ocean had done to the beachfront houses, evacuated since the slowing had mysteriously swelled the tides. At high tide, waves rolled across rooftops, the rooflines forming a geometric shoreline, while divers secretly scoured the insides for treasures. At low tide, those mansions dripped and creaked like sunken ships, exposed. They were magnificent houses, the homes of movie stars and millionaires. But the ocean had aged them at high speed. All the windows had blown out and would someday wash up in pieces on the sand, bits of smooth sea glass mixing with the shells.

The beaches had been closed since the start of the slowing. But my father liked to explore at low tide.

“Come on,” he said one Sunday when I hesitated in the driveway of an abandoned Cape Cod. Dozens of yards of police tape flapped in the wind. No one else was around. Even the seagulls were gone, the sickness having swept them all away.

The house was enormous. Its shingles were warped from the water, and the front door was missing. Most of the contents had been flushed out by the waves. Everything inside was gray. One whole wall was missing; the living room faced out to the sea like an open garage.

“Look at these,” said my father. He had crouched down on the soggy carpet to watch sand crabs burrow into the mud that had collected there. “Want to hold one?”

He looked like a clamdigger, his pants rolled up to his knees.

“No, thanks,” I said.

An extreme low tide had pulled the water hundreds of feet out from the beach that morning, but I could tell it was on its way back. Small waves were beginning to lap at what was left of the back porch.

“The tide’s coming in,” I said.

“We have time,” said my father. “Come on.”

There was plenty of life left in that house. Starfish clung to the granite countertops, and sea anemones lived in the sinks.

“Watch your step,” said my father as we headed down a hall.

The floors were littered with driftwood and seaweed and glass.

“I was in this house once, years ago,” said my father. He was squinting in the sunlight. I had noticed only recently how many wrinkles formed around his eyes when he smiled. “I came to a Christmas party here once with an old girlfriend. This was her parents’ house.”

A foamy surge of water rushed into the room. We were instantly ankle-deep. My sandals felt heavy under the weight of the cold water.

“Dad, please,” I said, looking back down the hall. A layer of white water swirled over the hardwood floor. Two teenagers had recently drowned in just this way in one of the old houses farther up the coast. “Can we go now?”

“There was a huge Christmas tree right here,” said my father, motioning with two hands to indicate the width. He was almost yelling to be heard above the sound of the water. “And a grand piano over there. We almost got married, that girl and I. This was before I met your mother, of course.”

The water was getting higher with each new surge. A small plastic bottle was adrift in the room.

“Dad,” I said. “Seriously.”

“You’ll see when you’re older,” he said. “You won’t believe how quickly the years will pass. I feel like I was just here, but it’s been twenty years.”

The tide had risen to my calves. I felt the strong pull of the water against my skin, and it scared me.

“Can we please go now?” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “All right. Let’s go.”

We waded together back through the house and out to the driveway. My father spotted a seagull as we climbed back up to the road.

“Look,” he said, squinting. I hadn’t seen a live one in weeks. It did seem amazing, in that moment, that there had ever existed a creature with the power to fly.

My jeans were sticking to my thighs. The whole car stank of salt water.

“You used to be much braver, you know,” said my father as he started the engine. “You really did. You’re getting to be as bad as your mother.”

And he was right: I had grown into a worrier, a girl on constant guard for catastrophes large and small, for the disappointments I now sensed were hidden all around us right in plain sight.