The Age of Miracles

18

We called it gravity sickness at first, the slowing syndrome later, and there would come a time eventually when you need only mention the syndrome and everyone understood what you meant. The symptoms were wide-ranging but related: dizziness, nausea, insomnia, fatigue, and sometimes, as was the case with my mother, fainting.

Only certain people were affected. A man might stumble in the street. A woman might collapse in a mall. In some small children, the effects included the excessive bleeding of gums. Some victims were too weak to leave their beds for days. The exact cause was unknown.

My mother stayed home from work that first week after the accident. She spent her days hunting for news of the pedestrian while the cut on her forehead scabbed over and began to scar. Her dizziness came and went. She moved slowly through the house, always bracing herself on a banister or a wall. Whenever the feeling cleared, she focused her attention on the pedestrian. She called the hospital but was given no information. She sent flowers: To the man who was hit by a car on Samson Road on New Year’s Eve. She begged my father to find out if the man had lived or died, but he was reluctant for us to get involved. “We’ll find out eventually,” he said.

She slept even less than before, wakeful just as often on the dark nights as the light ones. I would wake some nights in the pitch black and find her searching obscure local websites and police blogs, her eyes red and watery, the white light of the screen throwing her features into unflattering relief. On one of these nights, she fainted again. She fell right off her chair, bit her tongue, and made it bleed.

She stopped driving. She ate less and less.

I wondered what the symptoms were that had preceded Seth Moreno’s mother’s death. The illnesses were different, I knew, but I sometimes worried that the outcome could be the same. No one knew where the slowing syndrome might lead.

It was a bright clear morning the day Seth Moreno came back to school.

His dark hair had grown a little longer, and he’d developed a new habit of flicking his bangs away from his eyes with one thumb, but he looked otherwise the same, same tired look on his face, same slow gait, same skateboard tucked under one arm. I hadn’t seen him since his mother died.

I felt my face flush when he showed up at the bus stop that morning. I wondered what he thought about my card.

Various rumors of Seth’s whereabouts since his mother died had trickled down to me: He was staying with a relative in Arizona, or he’d moved to a real-timers’ settlement in Oregon or to a boarding school in France.

But here he was at the bus stop. He didn’t speak to anyone that morning. He just stood by himself, like always. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t. I wanted to be near him, but I stayed away.

In math, I went back to staring silently at the back of Seth Moreno’s head.

Meanwhile, the oceans were shifting, the Gulf Stream was slowing, and Gabby shaved her head.

She called me over to her house one afternoon. The sun had set. The sky had turned black and clear. On the way to her house, I passed a group of younger kids playing Ghosts in the Graveyard on the street, some crouching behind parked cars or tree trunks while others searched in pairs, clinging to each other’s sleeves and whispering as they moved through the shadows.

“Watch this,” said Gabby.

We were in her bedroom. She held a thick section of her dyed black hair out from her head and raised a pair of scissors to the root.

“You’re cutting it yourself?” I said.

Downstairs, a construction crew pounded on a wall. They were remodeling the kitchen. Gabby’s parents were at work.

“First I’m cutting it all off,” she said, and snapped the scissors shut. “And then I’m shaving it.”

The hair fell from the blade and landed soundlessly on the carpet.

“But why?” I said. She cut another section. “It’s going to take forever to grow back.”

On the dresser, Gabby’s cell phone rattled with a message. She looked at the screen and grinned. Then she dropped the scissors on the desk and locked the bedroom door.

“I have a secret to tell you,” she said. “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

I promised.

“You know that guy I met online?”

I nodded. The headlights of a passing car washed over the room and vanished.

“We’ve been talking every day,” she added.

I felt a stab of jealousy.

The boy was older: sixteen. He lived a hundred miles away in one of the new colonies that had sprouted from the sand in the desert.

“It’s called Circadia,” she said. I could tell she liked saying the word. “They have a school and a restaurant and everything.”

I’d heard that similar settlements had been popping up in every state, built by eccentrics who had rejected the clock. In the homes and streets of these communities, the sun governed the day and the night, and I suppose the pace of life really was slower, the time only inching along, a gradually advancing tide.

“A lot of the girls there shave their heads,” she added.

She tapped a text message in response. The dark polish on her fingernails flashed in the light of her lamp. Then she picked up the scissors and went on with her cutting, the strands of her hair collecting on the cream carpet beside her crumpled school uniform.

She used her father’s electric razor to do the rest, the motor buzzing as she ran it over her head. Little by little, the architecture of her skull began to surface, the ancient curves and hollows now revealed.

“Holy shit,” she said when she looked in the mirror. “This is awesome.”

She turned her head from side to side, running her fingers over the stubble. She looked ravaged by sickness or treatment.

She sat down on the bed. A lacy black bra and panty set was spread out on the comforter. She saw me looking at it. “Do you like it?” she said.

“I guess,” I said.

“I ordered it online.”

One of the candles on her dresser had melted down to a pool of wax. The flame sputtered and then went out, leaving a thin puff of white smoke in the air.

“Hey,” she said, changing the subject. “Did your mom really kill some guy on New Year’s?”

I looked at her. “We don’t know if he died,” I said.

Downstairs, the workers dropped something heavy on the tile.

“I heard she ran over someone.”

“She’s sick,” I said.

Gabby turned toward me. “Sick with what?”

“We don’t know.”

“Can she die from it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Shit,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Gabby had recently painted her walls a deep maroon, and you could smell the paint fumes in the air, mixing with the vanilla from the candles.

“I should go home,” I said.

“Here,” said Gabby. She handed me a plastic bag bulging with hair clips and bobby pins. “Take these. I can’t use them anymore.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want her things.

Outside, a pair of headlights approached as I walked home, a slim black BMW that belonged to Gabby’s mother. She waved to me as she drove, and I waved back. I watched her pull into the driveway and wait for the electric garage door to trundle open on its tracks. I knew that those were the last few minutes before certain consequences would come down on Gabby’s shaved head. The BMW floated into the garage. The door dropped down behind the car. I heard the engine die, the first soft pings as it cooled.

I would later learn that Gabby immediately lost access to her computer and her cell phone, leaving her unable to communicate with the boy in Circadia who was writing her poems.

That night I spent hours gazing at Sylvia’s house through my telescope, looking for a glimpse of my father, but I spotted only Sylvia. Her habits had turned increasingly bizarre as the days had grown. She would disappear inside her house during every stretch of darkness, and while the neighbors’ windows glowed all day, she left hers unlit, as if she’d learned to sleep for twenty hours or more in a row. A stranger passing Sylvia’s driveway on some dark afternoon might have guessed the house was vacant or the owner out of town. The newspaper often landed in the driveway twice before the sun came around again.

But on white nights, Sylvia came back to life. I could see her slender fingers gliding over the piano keys long after the neighbors had gone to bed. She pulled weeds at midnight. She went jogging while the rest of us dreamed our dreams. In the hush of one bright night, I watched her drag her Christmas tree out to the sidewalk in the sunshine, the scrape of the pot on the pavement the only sound on the sleeping street.

Certain countries in Europe had made it more or less illegal to live the way Sylvia did. On that continent, the real-timers were mostly immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, off the clock for religious reasons. Curfews had been imposed in Paris. Riots followed. One member of our own city council had proposed a similar ban. A small town nearby had successfully passed a clock curfew, but it was soon struck down by the courts.

That same week, the power went off in certain houses on our street. Televisions shut down without warning. Washing machines whirred to a stop. Music ceased to flow from speakers, and the lights went out over dinner tables.

The damage, however, was limited to just three homes: the Kaplans’, Tom and Carlotta’s, and Sylvia’s. It was no accident. The real-timers had been targeted. Someone had cut through the lines.

A pair of policemen showed up to examine the marks on the wires. They interviewed the neighbors. No one had seen a thing. It took six hours for the power company to reconnect the real-timers to the grid. The perpetrators were never caught.