The Age of Miracles

23

In the great reshuffling of fortunes and fates that followed the start of the slowing, most of us had lost. We were worse off, most of us, than we had been before. Some grew sick, some depressed. A great many marriages dissolved under the stress. Billions of dollars had drained from the markets. And we were missing certain other valuables, too: our way of life, our peace of mind, our faith.

But not everyone was suffering. A lucky few had gained. Michaela and her mother were among them.

Michaela had begun the school year, six months earlier, in a rented apartment that overlooked a parking lot at the far edge of the district line. A rusted black staircase clung to the exterior of the complex, and a knock on 2B would produce a rattling of the security chain as Michaela unhooked it from the inside.

By February, though, a visitor could reach Michaela’s front door only by showing a driver’s license at a guardhouse out front. The guard was required to call Michaela’s house for authorization before opening the electric gate. Her mother had a rich new boyfriend, and Michaela and her mother had moved into his house.

I was shocked to be invited. No one had asked me anywhere in months.

“And bring a swimsuit,” Michaela had said on the phone. “There’s a pool and a Jacuzzi in the back.”

Once inside the gate, my father and I drove in silence past a dozen large houses, each one set off from the road and fronted by fountains or ponds. Stables and tennis courts fanned out in all directions.

“Look at this place,” said my father. “Who’s this guy she married?”

My mother was at home, having one of her spells. There was no predicting when a fog might descend upon her.

“They’re not married,” I said. “But I think he started some kind of company.”

The sky glowed an extraordinary orange as we drove. Wildfires were burning in the open country out east, and the smoke had drifted to the coast. It wasn’t the right season for brushfires, but they were feeding on the remains of dead and dying plants. You could smell the burning in the air. You could see it in the dimming of the light. Everything white looked faintly amber.

At the address Michaela had given me, a circular driveway surrounded a giant artificial lawn. It looked almost real, that grass, no two blades exactly alike. It was made of something soft, an engineered texture designed to fool feet. It smelled real, too. Some of the priciest brands came scented that way, a fad that fell away, I guess, as we less and less clearly remembered the smell of real grass.

The house was a vast ranch-style spread out across the property like a sunbather stretched beside a pool. A thick iron knocker hung on the front door. Michaela appeared in the doorway before I could ring the bell. She was already in a swimsuit, her pink bikini showing through her white tank top. Pink strings dangled down her neck.

“Come on,” she said.

Inside, a small Mexican woman was zipping her purse near the door. The air smelled sweet. Something was baking.

“Alma made cookies,” said Michaela.

“Thanks, Alma,” called a voice from another room. I recognized it as Michaela’s mother’s. “See you tomorrow.”

A nearly endless road of terra-cotta tile led us eventually to the kitchen, just visible in the distance.

“You can leave your stuff here,” said Michaela. My backpack and my sleeping bag formed a neat stack against the wall.

In the kitchen, every surface was stainless, barely used, brand-new. In my memory, Michaela’s mother looked that way, too, as she leaned on the counter in a silk peach robe. Her face was heavily made-up. A silvery charcoal shimmered on her eyelids and at the corners of her eyes. Her blond hair had been straightened to form a smooth shiny sheet.

“You girls want me to read your horoscopes before I go?” she said. An astrology chart was spread out across the marble counter.

“Do Julia’s,” said Michaela.

On the countertop shone a deep glass bowl full of green grapes. I hadn’t seen grapes since before Christmas.

“These cost like a hundred dollars a pound,” said Michaela, tossing one into her mouth. “Isn’t that weird?”

It was the last time I ever tasted a grape.

A series of small explosions boomed in the adjoining living room. On a white leather couch sat a boy a little older than we were, a video-game controller in his hands.

“That’s Josh,” whispered Michaela. “He’s Harry’s son.”

Harry was her mother’s boyfriend. This was Harry’s house.

“Julia, honey, do you know your sign?” asked Michaela’s mother.

I didn’t.

“When’s your birthday?”

“March seventh,” I said.

“So soon,” she said. “Are you having a party?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

The doorbell rang, and Michaela skipped down the hall.

“You should have a party,” said Michaela’s mother. Then she turned her attention to the chart. “If you’re a Pisces, and you were born the same year as Michaela—”

She ran two fingers over the chart until the two red tips of her fingernails met in one corner.

“Hmm,” she said. She frowned.

I could hear Michaela’s distant laugh at the front of the house.

“Is it bad?” I asked.

“The important thing isn’t so much your horoscope as what you do with it,” said her mother. “Anyway, the slowing totally changed the charts. Everything’s a little unstable right now, so we can’t necessarily trust it.”

Michaela was coming closer. I heard a boy’s voice.

“But be careful, okay?” said her mother to me. Her eyelids shimmered as she blinked. “If I were you, I’d just be a little more careful than usual for a while.”

Michaela returned to the kitchen with a boy I recognized from school. Kai was a year older and half Hawaiian, and he made me shy, the way he stood there in the kitchen, no smile, waiting to be entertained. His skin was a creamy tan, his teeth a crisp white. He kept his two thumbs hooked on the pockets of his blue board shorts and glanced at Michaela’s mother in her robe.

“Is it seven already?” said Michaela’s mother. “Shit, I better get dressed.”

She left the three of us alone in the kitchen. A silence opened up behind her. The only sound was the running of water from the pair of swan-shaped fountains that streamed into the swimming pool outside. Then the music of the video game surged behind us.

“Is that Street Avenger?” asked Kai.

These were the first words he’d spoken. He shuffled toward the living room, his flip-flops brushing the tile.

“Isn’t he hot?” Michaela whispered to me as we followed him. “He’s not really my boyfriend, but he kind of is.”

“Is anyone else coming?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

Josh and Kai played three rounds of Street Avenger while Michaela and I watched. I tried to look casual, constantly crossing and uncrossing my legs. I often had the feeling in those days that I was being watched, but I think the sensation was a product of the exact opposite conditions.

Michaela’s mother reemerged in a glittery dress and heels, with Harry at her side in a brown sport coat. He was trim and athletic, but he must have been twenty years older than she was. They’d known each other for three months.

“Have fun, kids,” said Michaela’s mother. “We’ll be back late.”

My mother would not have let me come over if she knew we would be here alone.

“Josh,” said Harry to his son as they left the room, “you’re in charge.”

The clicking of Michaela’s mother’s heels moved quickly down the hall, and soon we heard the rattle of the garage door opening and closing, the hum and fade of the car driving away.

“I’m sick of video games,” said Michaela. “Let’s go in the Jacuzzi.”

“First,” said Josh, “we need some beers.”

“You guys have beer?” said Kai.

I tried to affect the appearance of a girl who could not be surprised by beer.

“They’ll notice if we take it,” said Michaela.

“Not if we take it from the safe room,” said Josh.

“What’s the safe room?” I asked.

Josh hopped up from the couch and hurried down the hall. We followed. He was older—13—a tall skinny kid, all limbs. He stopped at a full-length mirror that hung on one wall, bordered by a heavy mahogany frame. He ran his fingers along the edge, then after a moment, he pulled. The mirror was secretly hinged; it swung open like a door. In the wall behind it was embedded a second door, this one made of metal.

“That’s steel,” said Josh as he entered a code in a nearby keypad. We could hear the sound of the locks releasing. “And it’s six inches thick.”

At that time, I’d never seen anything like it.

It was dark on the other side of the door. A flip of the light switch revealed a huge room lined with wooden shelves, each one overflowing with supplies: dozens of boxes of candles, hundreds of packs of batteries, crates of canned fruit and canned tuna, canned vegetables, canned juice, condensed milk, and powdered milk, and twenty-five jars of peanut butter. A cluster of clear plastic bins held oats, grains, and rice. A pile of slim silver packages glittered under the lights.

“Freeze-dried meals,” said Josh.

Hundreds of gallons of bottled water stood three deep on one shelf. There was a pyramid of toilet paper. A large green tub was labeled in thick letters: SURVIVAL SEED VAULT. Several rolled sleeping bags were piled near a hand-crank radio and a camping stove. Towering above us were boxes of bandages, gauze, soap, and bottles of pills organized in rows: antibiotics, vitamins, iodine.

“Holy shit,” said Kai. He was staring at a glass case on the far wall, inside of which hung two rifles and seven sheathed knives. Six boxes of bullets sat stacked beneath the guns.

“What is all this?” I asked.

“What does it look like?” said Josh.

He was handing out beers. I held mine with two fingers by the neck. I didn’t even know how to handle the bottle.

“His dad thinks that the end of the world is coming,” said Michaela, “so he put all this stuff in here.”

“We have enough food to live for a year,” said Josh. “And this room is architecturally invisible, so you can’t tell it’s here. That way, when everyone else runs out of food, no one will break in and take ours.”

Compared to this, the supplies my mother had gathered were nothing.

The safe room was not the only special feature in the house. The whole place had been retrofitted. The lights in all six bedrooms were equipped with sophisticated dimmers, set to the clock and meant to mimic the effects of sunrise and sunset. State-of-the-art blackout shutters could block 100 percent of the natural light on white nights, and the master bathroom’s tanning bed—which Michaela called a sunbed—could deliver in twenty minutes a full day’s worth of sunshine on days when the sun never bobbed above the horizon. A fully functioning greenhouse, where carrots and spinach grew, was hidden in the pool house out back. A solar-powered generator stood ready for service.

“You’ll see,” said Josh. “One day you’re going to go to the grocery store, and all the shelves will be empty.”

The Jacuzzi was so hot that it hurt. We sat on the rim for a while, legs dangling, adapting, before finally dropping in, one by one. Michaela landed in Kai’s lap. He twisted a strand of her hair while we talked. Josh sat right beside me in the water. I drank a little beer. It tasted awful. But I began to feel bold, sitting there with those kids in my new two-piece, steam rising between us.

Meanwhile, the sun shone—dusky and smoke-dimmed—and the wind blew bits of ash around until it settled on the patio like snow. Those distant fires only added to our enjoyment. They meant we were living in important times.

“Did we show you the cult house?” said Michaela.

She turned and pointed to one of the nearby mansions. There were no fences out there, for some reason, so you could see the back of one house from the back of another. This one looked like any other house out there—a two-story Spanish-style with a three-car garage. But it was between those walls that fourteen people had killed themselves with poisoned wine on New Year’s Eve.

“One guy wasn’t home when they did it,” said Michaela. “So now he lives there all by himself.”

Josh’s foot brushed mine under the water. I decided he looked a little like Seth Moreno. I took a tiny sip of beer. A cluster of eucalyptus trees swayed above the pool. They looked remarkably healthy, those trees, kept that way—I later learned—by sunlamps hidden among the branches.

We ordered pizza, extra cheese. We ate in our swimsuits, soaking the couch through our towels. We tracked wet ash right into the house and left the door wide open behind us. We watched whatever we could find on television, lingering on a long German sex scene. We ate cookies and ice cream and opened more beers. It came back to me quickly: the old feeling that I belonged.

Josh suggested a game I’d never heard of.

“But that’s only fun in the dark,” said Michaela. It was ten o’clock on a white night; sunset was at least six hours away.

“We can make it dark with the shutters,” said Josh. “Watch this.”

He entered a code into another keypad in the kitchen. A sequence of short beeps was followed by a soft mechanical whir that radiated from every direction. Gray metal sheets descended slowly over the windows behind us.

“What the hell?” said Kai.

The sunlight faded fast as the shutters slid toward the ground. Michaela flipped a light switch before the house went dark.

“Those shutters are made of steel, too,” said Josh. We stood around the one lamp as if it were a campfire, a yellow glow on our faces. “They’re not just for the light. They can keep people out, too.”

They were preparing for a time of monsters, it seemed to me, but the monsters were only the neighbors, maybe even their friends.

Michaela explained the rules of the new game while running her fingers through Kai’s black hair. It was like hide-and-seek, she said, except when you found the person, you joined whoever it was in the hiding place. The last to find the others lost.

We rolled dice to see who would hide first, and the dice chose me. The others closed themselves in Michaela’s bedroom to give me time to hide. At the count of twenty, they would turn out the last light and start searching in the dark.

I hid in the safe room, which we’d left open. I crouched low, near the toilet paper at the back of the room. After a while, I saw the light go out. I heard the sound of distant laughter.

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they didn’t. Not a trace of daylight made its way through those shutters. Only blackness remained, a kind of blindness. It was, as we used to say, dark as night.

After a few minutes, I heard footsteps outside the safe room, the creak of the door swinging open, the sound of breathing. Someone was in the room with me.

Several cans toppled to the floor.

“Shit,” said a boy’s voice. I could tell it was Josh, but I couldn’t see him, not even an outline, not a shadow, nothing.

He felt around the room until his hands bumped my shoulder.

“Found you,” he whispered.

I was glad. He sat down next to me on the floor. He touched my shoulder again, as if by accident. We had a miraculous new power: invisibility.

“You looked pretty in your swimsuit,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. I smiled an unseeable smile. It might have been the first time a boy had said he liked the way I looked. We sat without speaking for a long time.

“I’ve never kissed a girl,” he whispered.

There are creatures at the bottom of the ocean that can live without light. They’ve evolved to thrive where other animals would die, and the darkness endowed us, too, with certain special abilities. What was possible in the dark never would have worked in the light. I kept quiet and waited for something to happen.

I felt his breath on my cheek and held still. Seconds passed. And then: His lips pressed my chin. He’d misjudged in the dark.

“That’s okay,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He cleared his throat. “Can we try again?” he asked.

But I’d lost my nerve. “We’re in the middle of the game,” I said.

When I felt him lean toward me again, I leaned back.

“Come on,” he whispered. “We’re all going to be dead in a year or two, anyway.”

“No one knows what’s going to happen,” I said.

I listened for Kai and Michaela but heard nothing.

“When we run out of food, there’s going to be wars,” he said. “Major wars.”

He tried to kiss me one more time, but I jumped up, bumping one of the shelves behind us. Something crashed to the floor. In case of catastrophe, they’d have one less jar of jam.

“Fine,” he said. “I should have known you’d be totally lame.”

I heard him stand and shuffle toward the door in the dark. The smell of strawberries began to waft through the air.

“Anyway,” he said, “Michaela only invited you because her mom made her. She wouldn’t let her have her boyfriend over here unless someone responsible was here, too.”

I knew it was true as soon as he said it—the whole night, an optical illusion, now made clear. Michaela hadn’t invited me anywhere all year.

The door creaked open and clicked closed. I was alone again in the dark.

I huddled there awhile longer. The only option seemed to be to continue the game. But no one else came, and soon a crack of light appeared beneath the safe room door. They’d turned on the lights in the house—or raised the shutters.

In the hall, I had to squint to see. My eyes were slow to adjust to the light. They were watching television again: Michaela and Kai, legs intertwined on the couch. Michaela was eating bonbons from a carton. Josh was not with them.

“There you are,” said Michaela. She was in her bikini and nothing else. Her hair was still ropy from the Jacuzzi. “We couldn’t find you anywhere.”

The blue light of the television flickered on her face. Kai kept his eyes on the screen.

“You stopped looking?” I said.

“We couldn’t find you,” she said. She turned back to the television. “Josh said he checked the safe room and you weren’t in there.”

Later, I fell asleep in my jeans on the couch. I woke up twice: once when Michaela’s mother and Harry breezed into the house—the tapping of her heels on the tile, the two of them laughing—and later, to the sound of one of the boys—Josh, I think—throwing up in the bathroom.

I was the first one awake in the morning. A pizza box lay open on the counter, and a full carton of melted ice cream sat slumped beside it. Someone had cleared away the beer bottles.

The sun had set overnight. It was dark and cold, and it would be dark all day.

I called home, and my mother sent my father to pick me up. I left without saying goodbye. Someone must have answered the phone when the guard called because my father’s car soon appeared in the circular driveway, headlights blazing.

“Why so early?” he said as I climbed into the car. “Is something wrong?”

The air smelled heavily of smoke. The firefighting planes could not fly without the light, so the fires would burn free for hours. The car radio carried news of one more strange story: An earthquake had struck rural Kansas. It was the first of its size ever recorded there.

“I just felt like coming home,” I said.