The Age of Miracles

15

It happened in the dark: the sweep of the headlights, the quick closing of car doors, the red lights flashing noiselessly at the end of the street.

From my window, I watched three police cars park in a crooked row outside Tom and Carlotta’s house. My first worry, for some reason, was murder. Through my telescope, I spotted Gabby’s mother in a pantsuit, arms crossed and face lit red by the lights, as she stood at the end of her driveway and peered at the house next door. I knelt on the carpet and waited. Minutes passed. It was four in the afternoon clock time, but it was the middle of the natural night. The sky was black and clear, the moon its slimmest, most delicate self. The crickets buzzed, a dog barked, a breeze rustled the eucalyptus trees.

Finally, a woman in white emerged from the house, ghostlike: Carlotta in a nightgown, her long gray hair hanging loose on her shoulders. I could see one of the officers walking beside her, his arm resting on hers. Tom shuffled behind them, his white hair disheveled from sleep.

Both husband and wife had been handcuffed.

Only later were the details of the crime revealed to the neighborhood. A police team spent three hours the next day carting dozens of potted plants out of Tom and Carlotta’s ranch-style and into a giant white truck. The plants were leafy and green, supernaturally healthy. They’d lived their whole lives inside, nurtured by sunlamps, which, we later learned, were powered by the solar panels that glittered on the slopes of the roof. Police officers trudged back and forth across the lawn, packing up whatever they could, even scooping the compost pile into three fat black sacks. When the work was done, I noticed that the small sign in the front yard had been uprooted and was now directing its message to the sky: THIS HOUSE LIVES ON REAL TIME.

According to a rumor that circulated after the arrests, Tom and Carlotta had been growing marijuana undetected for years, but the police had only recently received an anonymous tip from a neighbor. You had to wonder about the timing and whether the caller was motivated, at least in part, by a certain other life choice that Tom and Carlotta had made. There was no way around it: The real-timers made the rest of us uncomfortable. They too often slept while the rest of us worked. They went out when everyone else was asleep. They were a threat to the social order, some said, the first small crumbles of a coming disintegration.

I worried more and more about Sylvia.

Meanwhile, a trickle of real-timers had begun to leave the cities and the suburbs. They were turning up en masse in makeshift communities in the deserts and woodlands of this country. In those early days, they were a tiny, loosely organized minority, a scattering of shadow societies, the earliest advocates of a movement.