The Age of Miracles

29

After that, Seth and I were often together.

Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. Time moved differently for us that spring: A string of long afternoons was as good as a year.

We quit spending lunches in the library and stretched out instead beneath a pair of dead pine trees at the far edge of the quad, where we watched the clouds drift across the sky. Seth started saving me a seat on the bus every morning and every afternoon.

At first I was aware of the other kids watching us. I sensed their chatter. But soon I ceased to notice. I stopped caring what they thought.

“He seems like a nice boy,” said my mother. “Let’s have him over for dinner.”

But I only wanted to be alone with Seth. I didn’t want anyone else around.

• • *

I was with Seth on the day we passed the wheat point. Now it was official: Wheat could no longer grow on this planet without the aid of artificial light. We watched from a hillside as people pushed grocery carts across the supermarket parking lot, heaped full of canned food. Panic had returned. You could feel it in the air, an ending, a tingling, like a taste in the back of your throat.

“Would you rather starve?” said Seth. “Or die of thirst?”

This had become a game of ours. We were serious kids made more so by the times.

“Starve,” I said. “You?”

“Thirst,” he said. He kicked a rock down the slope. Dust sputtered behind it. The rock disappeared into a tangle of desiccated ice plant. Seth always chose the quickest death.

Seth was at my house when my mother’s greenhouse was delivered. We watched the workers assemble it out back. The glass glittered as they mounted the sunlamps and poured the soil. We watched them unfurl an orange electrical cord and then insert the fat plug into an outdoor socket. We were one of the last families on our street to buy one. My mother had ordered it without consulting my father, and while she lowered a series of small plants into the soil, my father watched from the dining room table, his arms crossed. Then he went upstairs. By the end of the day, we had two rows of green beans and three rows of strawberries growing in the greenhouse.

“Strawberries are a waste,” said my father. “If we’re going to be growing anything, we should be growing mushrooms. They don’t depend so much on light.”

A rash of white-night crimes also struck our city. The real-timers were blamed. Who else would be out at those late hours? The windows of Sylvia’s car were smashed in her driveway. Her garage was soon spray-painted with thick, drippy words: Get the fuck out.

I wondered how my father felt about that, but I didn’t ask, and he didn’t say.

It seemed to me that time moved at high speed that spring. Seth’s hair grew long again and began to fall into his eyes. I grew out my bangs, and Seth said he liked them. I started shaving my legs, and I bought a real bra—one that fit this time. One dark afternoon Seth taught me to ride his skateboard, and I still remember the way his hand felt on my back as he jogged beside me in the glow of the streetlights, me wobbling over the cracks in the sidewalk, content.

After school, we’d go searching in the canyons for the skeletons of birds—they were everywhere, a profusion of bone and feather, as abundant as seashells. We hunted for the last living eucalyptus, which we found, we were certain, withering on the edge of a sandstone bluff by the ocean. We collected the neighborhood’s last blades of grass. We kept the final flowerings of daisies, of marigolds, of honeysuckle. We pressed petals between the pages of dictionaries. We lined our shelves with relics from our time. Look here, we pictured saying someday, this one we called maple, this one magnolia, this aspen, this oak. On dark days, Seth drew maps of the constellations as if those bodies, too, might soon fall away.

Seth’s father was frequently at his lab. He left home early. He came home late. He was the coffee cup in the kitchen sink, the cigarettes in the ashtray out back, the lab coat slung over the banister. He was a name on the envelopes that piled, unopened, in a huge stack by the door, a voice on the phone instructing Seth to order pizza, eat without him. My parents never knew how little Seth’s father was at home when I was there.

We were home alone at Seth’s house on the day the power went out.

The television snapped off, the lights, too. I grabbed Seth’s hand in the dark. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. A quiet flooded the house, as if silence were a condition of the dark. We had sixteen hours, maybe more, until the sun would rise again. We fumbled together to the front door, swung it open: It was dark out there, too, a prehistoric dark, the soundless glittering of stars.

My mother called my cell phone from work. “Stay put,” she said. “Just stay put. Lock the doors, and don’t let anyone in.” We scoured the house for flashlights. We bumped each other in our blindness and ran into the walls. We broke a lamp and laughed for a long time. Seth lit candles with one of his father’s lighters. We carried them around like torches, our faces shadowy in the flame light. We wondered if it might last forever, the age after electricity.

Finally, we sat down on the hardwood floor of the living room, our candles flickering around us. Seth produced a deck of cards.

“Watch this,” he said.

He began to build a tower, three cards at a time.

The house was so silent in the dark that I could hear the sound of the cards brushing one another as he worked. He looked older in candlelight. I watched him for a long time.

“Try it,” he said. He held out a pair of cards. His eyes were shining in the candlelight.

But my hand turned shaky. I worried I’d knock the whole thing down.

“That’s okay,” he said. “The second level is a lot harder than the first.”

I’d been wanting for weeks to tell Seth about my father and Sylvia—and it felt possible, in that low light, to say the words out loud.

I took a breath and swallowed hard.

“I’m going to tell you a secret,” I said.

Seth stopped what he was doing and looked at me.

“I’ve seen my dad at Sylvia’s house.”

I felt aware of the quiet, of the refrigerator not humming, of the cable box not glowing, of the digital clocks failing to tick.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I’ve seen them, you know.” I paused. “Together.”

Now that I’d said it, the facts seemed more true than they ever had before.

Seth didn’t say anything at first. I waited. Then he nodded as if he’d come to expect such things from life. He never talked about his mother—and I had learned never to ask—but I sometimes sensed her absence in his reactions to certain events, as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief.

“Does your mom know?” he said at last.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

He slotted two new cards into the tower. The whole structure moved slightly in response, and then he held his hands in the air for several seconds, as if he commanded some invisible force that could keep the cards upright. It seemed to work: The house of cards continued standing.

“It’s not fair to your mom,” he said. “I hate things that aren’t fair.”

I nodded. “Me, too.”

We said nothing else, but the secret buzzed between us. It felt good to have told. It felt good to be known by this boy. Later, after the cards had collapsed to the floor and the candles had burned down to nothing, we put on our swimsuits and dropped into the pitch-black waters of Seth’s Jacuzzi. We couldn’t see a thing except the stars. Our legs grazed one another under the surface. Seth leaned over and kissed me. I kissed him back. I felt happier than I had in a long time.

Two hours later, the power was restored.

Officials blamed the outage on the sunlamps and the greenhouses—they were straining the electrical grid. That was when the energy rationing began.

No lights after ten P.M. No air-conditioning unless the temperature exceeded eighty-eight degrees. But the industrial greenhouses went on guzzling up light. The entire food supply was being nursed by sodium sunlamps. All the farms in the country were reliant by then on periods of artificial sun.

One day in the middle of that spring, thick pink envelopes showed up in our mailboxes, announcing in glitter the details of Michaela’s twelfth birthday party at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was the first time I’d ever been invited to one of the big dance parties, and I wondered if it was because of Seth. If I had torn the seal of that envelope a few months earlier, I would have felt grateful and glad.

But Seth and I decided right away not to go.

“I hate these things,” he said. “And Michaela gets on my nerves. Let’s watch movies at my house instead.”

“You’re not coming?” Michaela said to me at school the next day. “Are you kidding me?”

She’d invited a hundred other kids. Plenty of people would show.

“It’s just not my kind of thing,” I said.

Her mouth tightened.

“Does that mean Seth’s not coming, either?”

I felt a burst of pride that she thought of us as linked.

“I don’t think he is,” I said.

She bit her lip hard and put her hands on her hips.

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever. I don’t care if you two losers come or not.”

But I didn’t care what she thought as she swished away in her sundress, her glittery flip-flops slapping the cement.

Meanwhile, the heat on certain days was becoming dangerous. It was only April, but we were warned to stay indoors whenever the duration of sunlight exceeded twenty-five hours. Record-high temperatures were often produced at these times.

But the weather could swing just as wildly the other way, too. I woke one dark morning to a miraculous sight.

“Holy shit,” said my mother in her green bathrobe.

I looked out the window: snow.

This was California, sea level, spring.

Five inches had fallen while we slept, and it was still snowing. Temperatures had been dropping further and further as each darkness stretched longer. Now the neighborhood shimmered, bluish in the moonlight: sugarcoated cars, fences frosted white, the terra-cotta roofs encrusted in snow. The sidewalks looked repaved. The artificial lawns had been swallowed whole overnight in one smooth sheet of clean, creamy white. Our street sparkled.

Seth showed up on my porch in a red ski parka I’d never seen before and a frayed knit cap, which sat crooked on his head. Snow-flakes were melting on his shoulders.

“We have to go sledding,” he said. He held up the blue boogie board he’d carried down from his house.

I grabbed a coat and followed him out to the whitened street.

“Wait,” called my mother from the doorway. “I don’t know if I want you going out there.”

“Helen,” said my father. “It’s just snow.”

We were beach kids, sunshine kids. We did not know the properties of snow. I had never seen it fall, never knew how soft it felt at first, how easily it collapsed beneath feet, or the particular sound of that crunch. I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world’s noise.

Our garages did not contain snow shovels or snowblowers. Our cars lacked snow tires. The nearest snowplow was parked in the mountains a hundred miles away. And so that was that: We were snowed in. School was canceled, and my father had the day off. There was nothing to do but throw ourselves down and make snow angels, or build snowmen, or sled down the nearest hill on whatever we could find. All the kids in the neighborhood took to the streets. We caught snowflakes on our tongues and in our eyelashes, let them melt in the palms of our hands. We watched Tony, our Southern California cat, stepping on snow for the first time—he hated it, shook his paw and retreated inside.

My father laughed when he saw that, maybe the first time he had laughed since my grandfather disappeared. My father had been spending all his weekends driving out to various real-time colonies in search of his father. A visit to one colony often led to another, farther out in the desert or else somewhere up in the mountains. There were dozens of colonies scattered across the state. He handed out missing-person flyers wherever he went. Six weeks had passed with no word. It was hard to imagine that my grandfather would let so much time pass without calling. I began to worry that something had happened to him, but I kept these fears to myself.

“I hope he’s seeing this,” said my father, bending to touch the snow. “Wherever he is.”

He grabbed a handful and tossed a snowball in my direction. Later, he helped Seth and me build a snowman in our yard.

The snow would all melt away as soon as the sun returned two days later. But for now, on this day, beauty was momentarily restored to our world.

I was only dimly aware of my mother that morning, a peripheral shape of worry.

“This is not right,” she kept saying, her voice barely audible over the squeals of children at play. She wouldn’t come near the snow. “This is California,” she said. “This isn’t right.”