The Age of Miracles

34

It still amazes me how little we really knew.

We had rockets and satellites and nanotechnology. We had robot arms and robot hands, robots for roving the surface of Mars. Our unmanned planes, controlled remotely, could hear human voices from three miles away. We could manufacture skin, clone sheep. We could make a dead man’s heart pump blood through the body of a stranger. We were making great strides in the realms of love and sadness—we had drugs to spur desire, drugs for melting pain. We performed all sorts of miracles: We could make the blind see and the deaf hear, and doctors daily conjured babies from the wombs of infertile women. At the time of the slowing, stem cell researchers were on the verge of healing paralysis—surely the lame soon would have walked.

And yet, the unknown still outweighed the known. We never determined the cause of the slowing. The source of our suffering remained forever mysterious.

I was twenty-three when plans for the Explorer were announced. A new kind of rocket, designed for high-speed travel, the Explorer would carry no humans with its cargo. This was a message in a bottle, a souvenir of Earth, perhaps our last communiqué. It would bring on its journey a gold disc containing information about our planet and its people, in case, in some distant realm of the universe, the ship crossed paths with intelligent life.

A special team was assembled to decide what to include on the disc. Among the final contents were the sounds of waves crashing on a beach, human voices speaking greetings from around the world, images of extinct flora and fauna, a diagram of the Earth’s exact location in the universe. Certain basic facts were engraved in symbols on the outside of the disc, the goal to record in hieroglyphs the whole history of the twenty-first century, to convey in the fewest possible strokes the story of our time.

Not mentioned on the disc was the smell of cut grass in high summer, the taste of oranges on our lips, the way sand felt beneath our bare feet, or our definitions of love and friendship, our worries and our dreams, our mercies and our kindnesses and our lies.

The Explorer would eventually travel distances so great that only time could measure them. A patch of uranium in the middle of the disc would function as a radioactive clock so that one day—maybe 60,000 years from now, when the Explorer first floats near the nearest other star—some other beings might be able to determine the age of the ship.

They would also learn from the disc that at the time of the Explorer’s launching, the darknesses were deepening and our food supply was more and more at risk. Though the pace of the slowing had slackened over the years, it had never stopped. The damage had been done, and we had come to suspect that we were dying. But perhaps the disc will also convey that we carried on. We persisted even as most of the experts gave us only a few more years to live. We told stories and we fell in love. We fought and we forgave. Some still hoped the world might right itself. Babies continued to be born.

My mother continued to teach part-time at the high school until it closed a few years back, after too many kids stopped coming. Her sickness didn’t progress the way Seth’s did. My father works at the hospital to this day.

They live in the same house where I grew up, but it looks very different from the way I remember it. The grass and the bougainvillea are long gone, of course, and thick steel sheeting now coats the exterior walls to keep out the radiation. Sunproof shutters block the view I used to see from my old bedroom window. Across the street, Sylvia’s house has been torn down. An empty lot sits where her porch once stood.

My mother says I spend too much time thinking about the past. We should look ahead, she says, to the time that’s left. But the past is long, and the future is short. As I write this account, one ordinary life, our days have stretched to the lengths of weeks, and it’s hard to say which times are most hazardous now: the weeks of freezing darkness or the light.

It’s only a matter of time before the fuel that keeps us alive runs out.

I do try to move forward as much as possible. I’ve decided to try to become a doctor, though some of the universities have closed. No one knows what the world will be like by the time I finish school.

It’s hard, I find, not to think of better times. Late on certain bright nights, during the long weeks of light, I lie awake, unable to sleep. My mind drifts, and I remember Seth. I sometimes find myself believing that he might come back to me someday. I’ve become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in a while, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it’s finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I’m always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.

Seth and I used to like to picture how our world would look to visitors someday, maybe a thousand years in the future, after all the humans are gone and all the asphalt has crumbled and peeled away. We wondered what those visitors would find here. We liked to guess at what would last. Here the indentations suggesting a vast network of roads. Here the deposits of iron where giant steel structures once stood, shoulder to shoulder in rows, a city. Here the remnants of clothing and dishware, here the burial grounds, here the mounds of earth that were once people’s homes.

But among the artifacts that will never be found—among the objects that will disintegrate long before anyone from elsewhere arrives—is a certain patch of sidewalk on a California street where once, on a dark afternoon in summer at the waning end of the year of the slowing, two kids knelt down together on the cold ground. We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew—our names, the date, and these words: We were here.