The Age of Miracles

22

But no force on earth could slow the forward march of sixth grade. And so, in spite of everything, that year was also the year of the dance party.

Whenever the birthday of one of my classmates rolled around, invitations were mailed to a select list of boys as well as girls. Gone were the days of single-sex parties. Now D.J.s were hired and dance floors rented. Strobe lights and disco balls were strung from the ceilings of basements or from backyard fences or, in the case of Amanda Cohen, from the eaves of a cavernous hotel ballroom. Michaela used to describe these festivities to me while we waited for the school bus on certain mornings. But sometimes I didn’t need to be told: On one particular Monday, all the prettiest girls showed up at school zipped snugly into matching pink sweatshirts with Justine Valero’s name and birth date spelled out in rhinestones on the back, favors from the previous Saturday’s party.

I know that it was considered good fortune for a birthday to land on a dark night, the romance upped considerably by the moonlight and the stars. But as for the precise goings-on of these events, I couldn’t say. I was never invited.

“I’m sure Justine just forgot to invite you,” said Michaela. A brand-new set of feathery red bangs dangled above Michaela’s eyelids. “She probably just forgot.”

Hanna was leaning against the fence nearby in a mint-green sweater set and a blond French braid. She laughed into her cell phone. We hadn’t spoken in weeks.

“Besides,” Michaela added, “you wouldn’t have fun anyway. You’re too shy. I bet you’d just stand in the corner.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I would dance.”

My own birthday was only a few weeks away. There would be no party. There would be no dancing.

“You’d dance?” said Michaela. “Really?”

It was dark that morning, the air wet with fog, which glowed around the streetlights as it rolled up over the lip of the canyon, where, like everywhere else, dozens of native plant species were slowly dying from insufficient light.

“I danced with Seth Moreno on Saturday for like an hour,” Michaela continued.

Seth’s name flared in my head.

“He was there?” I asked.

“He’s super-hot up close,” she said. She shivered in her miniskirt. “I could feel his thing.”

Right then Seth pulled up to the bus stop on his skateboard, and Michaela stopped talking.

Our school had shed a quarter of its population since the slowing began, but five hundred and forty-two of us remained. Every morning before the first bell rang, five hundred and forty-two voices called out to one another from five hundred and forty-two throats. Five hundred and forty-two mouths battled to be heard, the roar mounting as buses dumped load after load of kids on the quad. Rumors surged from group to group—there were cliques inside cliques inside cliques. Loud rounds of laughter exploded constantly into the air. Five hundred and forty-two voices bounced and echoed off the stucco exterior of the walls, accompanied by the ringing of five hundred and forty-two cell phones. Someone was always shocked by a thing they’d just heard. Someone was always screaming. From where I stood lately, at the far edge of the crowd, the sounds seemed as meaningless as if all those tongues were speaking different tongues, a great, incomprehensible chatter.

In that environment, silence was deadly. Talk ruled. It did not pay to be the quiet kind.

Every school day I looked forward to the soft landing of afternoon, to the click of my key in the lock of our door, the hush of the empty house. My mother tried to keep going to work, so she was gone most afternoons, or else upstairs asleep.

I was reading on one of these days when I heard a hard knock at the door.

We were reading Ray Bradbury in English class. That day’s assignment was a short story about a group of human schoolchildren who live on Venus, where, according to the story, the sun breaks through the rainy cloud cover only once every seven years, and then for only one hour.

The doorbell rang twice before I got to the door. On the other side stood Gabby, still in her St. Mary’s uniform: green plaid skirt and white polo, navy sweater tied around her waist.

I opened the door.

“Your parents aren’t home, are they?” she said. She was rubbing her hands together and kept glancing back at the street. Her hair had grown out some but not much. A layer of brown fuzz covered her scalp.

“They’re still at work,” I said.

She came into the house and motioned for me to shut the door.

“I need to check my email on your computer,” she said softly, as if the house might be bugged.

For several weeks, she said, she’d been cut off from the Internet, and her cell phone had remained locked inside a drawer in her mother’s desk. During these two weeks, she’d had sparse contact with the boy in Circadia, but of course, those were the exact conditions under which love grew best.

Once at the computer, she worked quickly. A rattle of fingernails on keys, a few clicks of the mouse. Then she stood up.

“I probably won’t see you for a while,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I’m getting the fuck out of here,” she said. “Tomorrow Keith is picking me up from school, and I’m going to go live with him in Circadia.”

This was not the first time she’d threatened to run away. Gabby was always scheming and dreaming, but she never followed through.

“What about your parents?” I said.

“You better not tell them.”

“They’re going to freak out,” I said.

She was pacing our entry hall. Her loafers, school-issued, squeaked with every step.

“Everything here is bullshit, anyway,” she said. She waved her hand in a broad way.

Beside her, our ficus was withering away in its pot. Houseplants were faring even worse than the outdoor varieties.

“Are you really serious?” I asked.

“I guess I shouldn’t have told you,” she said. “You’re too much of a goody-goody to understand.”

Gabby opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

“Wait,” I said.

“Keith’s right,” she said. “Everyone is half asleep here. Clock time is just another way for society to keep us numb.”

The sun had dropped behind the hill. The sky was pink. Sunsets had always been beautiful where we lived, but they seemed even more dramatic these days, made more so for being twice as rare.

“Please don’t tell anyone,” she said.

Anyone who knew Gabby the way I did would have assumed that she wasn’t actually going anywhere. The plan, if there was one, would likely fall apart. Something would change: Her mind shifted quickly, her mood even faster. I was pretty sure that Gabby would return home from school as usual the next day. She would sleep in her own bed and go right on plotting another improbable way to flee.

She gave me a quick hug and said goodbye. I went back to my homework.

I still remember how that Bradbury short story ended: On the day the sun finally shines on Venus, after seven years away, one boy convinces the other children to lock one little girl in a closet. When the sun emerges, the other children rush outside to feel the sunshine on their faces for the first time in their lives. It shines for only one hour. The girl remains trapped in the closet. By the time someone remembers she’s there, the sun has moved back behind the clouds not to return for another seven years.

It was dark when I got home from school the next day. Sunrise was several hours away. I walked straight to Gabby’s house, shivering as I passed Tom and Carlotta’s driveway. They still lived there, but the house was unlit; it was the middle of their night. Within months, they were both convicted and sentenced, the house sold to pay the legal bills.

When I reached Gabby’s driveway, I saw that her house was dark, too. The porch light glowed alone.

I rang the doorbell. No one answered. I rang it again.

Through the kitchen window, a row of brand-new stainless-steel appliances gleamed in the moonlight.

I’d grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.

Now I saw Gabby’s situation in this same light: A twelve-year-old girl had run away from home with a man she’d met on the Internet. He claimed to be sixteen, but who knew? Supposedly, he lived in one of the daylight colonies, but I did not even know his last name. Narratives like that one didn’t usually end well, and since the start of the slowing, these stories had become only more frequent. The rates of every kind of violent crime were going up.

The worry began in my stomach, a tightening that spread up to my chest and out to my shoulders until it reached the back of my neck. The worry smoldered all afternoon, and I was surprised my parents couldn’t see it on my face.

That night my mother brought up my birthday. “We have to do something,” she said. “Why don’t we have a party?”

I didn’t want a party. Who would I invite? My mother had no way of knowing that I’d been spending all my lunch periods pretending to be on the phone. The change had happened so quickly, a shifting of sands. Now Gabby was gone, too.

“In times like these,” said my mother, “it’s even more important to celebrate the good things.”

I finally agreed to a dinner. “But just us and Grandpa,” I said.

“Let’s invite Hanna, at least,” said my mother. “I haven’t seen her in months.”

“No,” I said. “Not Hanna.”

By dinnertime, my whole body was hot with guilt about Gabby. It seemed to be radiating off my skin, like pheromones or smoke or some other chemical signal with the power to attract Gabby’s mother to our porch, where she arrived just after eight o’clock to ask if we had seen her daughter.

My mother looked apologetic in the doorway. “We haven’t,” she said. “Have you tried her other friends?”

Gabby’s mother looked right at me. She wore a skirt suit and heels. Lip liner ringed her lips from the workday, but the lipstick had faded away.

“Please don’t tell her I told you,” I said.

“You know where she is?” said my mother.

“I think she went to Circadia,” I said. I paused. “With a boy.”

“What the hell is Circadia?” said Gabby’s mother.

She wore contacts, but they dried out her eyes. She was always blinking, and she blinked even more at that moment as tears flooded her dark eyes.

“You know,” I said. “It’s one of the daylight colonies.”

Gabby’s mother called the police and she and Gabby’s father drove out to the desert right away, knocking on doors all night as the sun blazed in the sky—it was daytime in Circadia. Everyone there was awake.

By morning Gabby had been found drinking wine at a barbecue with a teenage runaway from a different part of the state: Keith. She spent only one night in Circadia.

She was never the same after that. Back on our street, she lay around, dazed and disappointed, a traveler forced to return from an exotic and enlightening land.

“Did you tell my mom I was there?” she said.

“No,” I said.

She rolled her head in my direction, skeptical. “Really?”

“I swear,” I said.

“I’m going back there someday,” she said. A new knowingness had seeped into her voice. “It’s hard to explain, but Circadia is like one of those places, you know, what do you call it? A utopia? Everyone’s totally mellow. And they treat you like an adult. No one cares what you look like or what you wear.”

The history of Circadia was brief, and I learned it only later. A hundred miles from anything, those cement foundations were poured a year before the slowing started by a developer who dreamed that the wild sprawl of California’s coastal cities would soon penetrate that particular stretch of desert. But the developer went bankrupt six months before the slowing started. The work stopped. For months the houses stood empty and half built—until a group of committed real-timers bought the land and everything on it and named it after their own internal clocks.

Gabby described for me a golden land, a reverse negative of where we lived. Time really did flow differently, she insisted. Every hour had felt to her like a day. Hearts beat fewer beats per minute. People breathed deeper breaths. Anger took ages to bloom. They would live longer, she swore. And everything lasted: a good meal, a crackle of laughter, the look in Keith’s eyes after they kissed for the first time.

“Living like that changes people,” she said. “They’re so much better than the people out here.”

In the Circadia of Gabby’s telling, the inhabitants were a new wave of gentle pioneers, hardworking but well rested—sleeping for twenty-four hours straight and then staying awake for just as long or even longer without tiring. It did not sound possible to those of us on the outside, but already the science was bearing it out: Human circadian rhythms were turning out to be vastly more malleable than anyone had previously thought.

Gabby’s memories of Circadia stayed with me. I liked the idea of going somewhere far away. Sometimes on white nights, as the sunlight crept in beneath my curtains, I tried to recall what it felt like to sleep in sync with the sun. How strange and peaceful it sounded to dream every night in the dark. And how quiet that thick desert darkness must have been with only the stars to light the land. No freeways rumbled there. No power lines buzzed. Maybe I’d never heard such a silence as that one before. Not even the ticking of clocks could wake you—because no one kept clocks in Circadia.

As soon as Gabby’s hair grew out enough to be mistaken for a cute pixie cut, she was sent to a boarding school a hundred miles away. She was the last friend I had left, and just like that, she was gone.