Spin (8 page)

I was about to turn him down. But I thought about Diane. I thought about the few letters and phone calls we had exchanged on the predictable occasions and all the unanswered questions that had stacked up between us. I knew the wise thing would be to beg off. But it was too late: my mouth had already said yes.

So I spent another night on Long Island; then I crammed the last of my worldly possessions into the trunk of the car and followed the Northern State Parkway to the Long Island Expressway.

Traffic was light and the weather was ridiculously pretty. It was a tall blue afternoon, just pleasantly warm. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. I felt as stupidly, corporeally happy as I’d been in a long time.

Then I turned on the radio.

I was old enough to remember when a “radio station” was a building with a transmitter and a tower antenna, when radio reception flooded and ebbed from town to town. Plenty of those stations still existed, but the Hyundai’s analog radio had died about a week out of warranty. Which left digital programming (relayed through one or more of E.D.‘s high-atmosphere aerostats). Usually I listened to twentieth-century jazz downloads, a taste I’d picked up rummaging through my father’s disc collection. This, I liked to pretend, was his real legacy to me: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, music that had been old even when Marcus Dupree was young, passed down surreptitiously, like a family secret. What I wanted to hear right now was “Harlem Air Shaft,” but the guy who serviced the car before the trip had dumped my presets and programmed a news channel I couldn’t seem to lose. So I was stuck with natural disasters and celebrity misbehavior. There was even talk of the Spin.

We had begun calling it the Spin by then.

Even though most of the world didn’t believe in it.

The polls were pretty clear about that. NASA had released data from their orbital probes the night Jason broke the news to Diane and me, and a flurry of European launches confirmed the American results. But still, eight years after the Spin had been made public, only a minority of Europeans and North Americans considered it “a threat to themselves or their families.” In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sturdy majorities considered the whole thing a U.S. plot or accident, probably a failed attempt to create some kind of SDI defense system.

I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, “Consider what we’re asking them to believe. We’re talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy. How much do you really need to know about the moon and the stars when your life consists of scrounging enough biomass to feed yourself and your family? To say anything meaningful about the Spin to those people you have to start a long way back. The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with. Let them wrestle with the concept of ‘a billion years,’ maybe for the first time. It’s a lot to swallow, especially if you’ve been educated in a Moslem theocracy, an animist village, or a public school in the Bible Belt. Then tell them the Earth isn’t changeless, that there was an era longer than our own when the oceans were steam and the air was poison. Tell them how living things arose spontaneously and evolved sporadically for three billion years before they produced the first arguably human being. Then talk about the sun, how the sun isn’t permanent either but started out as a contracting cloud of gas and dust and will one day, some few more billion years from now, expand and swallow the Earth and eventually blow off its own outer layers and shrink to a nugget of superdense matter. Cosmology 101, right? You picked it up from all those paperbacks you used to read, it’s second nature to you, but for most people it’s a whole new worldview and probably offensive to a bunch of their core beliefs. So let that sink in. Let that sink in, then deliver the
real
bad news.
Time itself
is fluid and unpredictable. The world that looks so ruggedly normal—in spite of everything we just learned—has recently been locked up in a kind of cosmological cold storage.
Why
has this been done to us? We don’t exactly know. We think it’s caused by the deliberate action of entities so powerful and inaccessible they might as well be called gods. And if we anger the gods they might withdraw their protection, and pretty soon the mountains will melt and the oceans will boil. But don’t take our word for it. Ignore the sunset and the snow that comes to the mountain every winter same as always. We have proof. We have calculations and logical inferences and photographs taken by machines. Forensic evidence of the highest caliber.” Jason had smiled one of his quizzical, sad smiles. “Strangely, the jury is unconvinced.”

And it wasn’t only the ignorant who weren’t convinced. On the radio, an insurance industry CEO began to complain about the economic impact of “all this relentless, uncritical discussion of the so-called Spin.” People were starting to take it seriously, he said. And that was bad for business. It made people reckless. It encouraged immorality, crime, and deficit spending. Worse, it screwed up the actuary tables. “If the world doesn’t come to an end in the next thirty or forty years,” he said, “we may be facing disaster.”

Clouds began to roll in from the west An hour later that gorgeous blue sky was flatly overcast and raindrops began spattering the windshield. I put the headlights on.

The news on the radio progressed from actuary tables. There was much talk of something else from recent headlines: the silver boxes, big as cities, hovering outside the Spin barrier, hundreds of miles above both poles of the Earth. Hovering, not orbiting. An object can hang in a stable orbit over the equator—geosynchronous satellites used to do that—but nothing, by the most elementary laws of motion, can “orbit” in a fixed position above the planet’s pole. And yet here these things were, detected by a radar probe and lately photographed from an unmanned fly-by mission: another layer of the mystery of the Spin, and just as incomprehensible to the untutored masses, in this case including me. I wanted to talk to Jason about it. I think I wanted him to make sense of it for me.

It was raining full-out, thunder rumbling through the hills, when I finally pulled up at E. D. Lawton’s short-term rental outside Stockbridge.

The property was a four-bedroom English country-style cottage, the siding painted arsenic green, set into a hundred acres of preserved woodland. It glowed in the dusk like a storm lantern. Jason was already here, his white Ferrari parked under a dripping breezeway.

He must have heard me pull up: he opened the big front door before I knocked. “Tyler!” he said, grinning.

I came inside and set my single rain-dampened suitcase on the tiled floor of the foyer. “Been a while,” I said.

We had kept in touch by e-mail and phone, but apart from a couple of brief holiday appearances at the Big House this was the first time we’d been in the same room in nearly eight years. I suppose the time showed on both of us, a subtle inventory of changes. I had forgotten how formidable he looked. He had always been tall, always at ease in his body; he still was, though he seemed skinnier, not delicate but delicately balanced, like a broomstick standing on end. His hair was a uniform layer of stubble about a quarter-inch long. And although he drove a Ferrari he remained unconscious of personal style: he wore tattered jeans, a baggy knit sweater pocked with balls of unraveling thread, discount sneakers.

“You ate on the way down?” he asked.

“Late lunch.”

“Hungry?”

I wasn’t, but I admitted I was craving a cup of coffee. Med school had made a caffeine addict of me. “You’re in luck,” Jason said. “I bought a pound of Guatemalan on the way here.” The Guatemalans, indifferent to the end of the world, were still harvesting coffee. “I’ll put on a pot. Show you around while it’s brewing.”

We trekked through the house. There was a twentieth-century fussiness about it, walls painted apple green or harvest orange, sturdy barn-sale antique furniture and brass bed frames, lace curtains over warped window glass down which the rain streamed relentlessly. Modern amenities in the kitchen and living room, big TV, music station, Internet link. Cozy in the rain. Downstairs again, Jason poured coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and tried to catch up.

Jase was vague about his work, out of modesty or for security reasons. In the eight years since the revelation of the true nature of the Spin he had earned himself a doctorate in astrophysics and then walked away from it to take a junior position in E.D.‘s Perihelion Foundation. Perhaps not a bad move, now that E.D. was a ranking member of President Walker’s Select Committee on Global and Environmental Crisis Planning. According to Jase, Perihelion was about to be transformed from an aerospace think tank into an official advisory body, with real authority to shape policy.

I said, “Is that legal?”

“Don’t be naive, Tyler. E.D.‘s already distanced himself from Lawton Industries. He resigned from the board and his shares are being administered by a blind trust. According to our lawyers he’s conflict-free.”

“So what do you at Perihelion?”

He smiled. “I listen attentively to my elders,” he said, “and I make polite suggestions. Tell me about med school.”

He asked whether I found it distasteful to see so much of human weakness and disease. So I told him about my second-year anatomy class. Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. But it was also a marker, a passage. Beyond this point there was nothing left of childhood.

“Jesus, Tyler. You want something stronger than coffee?”

“I’m not saying it was a big deal. That’s what’s shocking about it. It
wasn’t
a big deal. You walk away from it and you go to a movie.”

“Long way from the Big House, though.”

“Long way. Both of us.” I raised my cup.

Then we started reminiscing, and the tension drained out of the conversation. We talked about old times. We fell into what I recognized as a pattern. Jason would mention a place—the basement, the mall, the creek in the woods—and I would supply a story: the time we broke into the liquor cabinet; the time we saw a Rice girl named Kelley Weems shoplift a pack of Trojans from the Pharmasave; the summer Diane insisted on reading us breathless passages from Christina Rossetti, as if she had discovered something profound.

The big lawn
, Jason offered.
The night the stars disappeared
, I said.

And then we were quiet for a while.

Finally I said, “So… is she coming or not?”

“She’s making up her mind,” Jase said neutrally. “She’s juggling some commitments. She’s supposed to call tomorrow and let me know.”

“She’s still down south?” This was the last I’d heard, the news relayed from my mother. Diane was at some southern college, studying something I couldn’t quite remember: urban geography, oceanography, some other unlikely -ography.

“Yeah, still,” Jason said, shifting in his chair. “You know, Ty, a lot of things have changed with Diane.”

“I guess that’s not surprising.”

“She’s semi-engaged. To be married.”

I took this pretty gracefully. “Well, good for her,” I said. How could I possibly be jealous? I had no relationship with Diane anymore—had never had one, in that sense of the word “relationship.” And I had almost been engaged myself, back at Stony Brook, to a second-year student named Candice Boone. We had enjoyed saying “I love you” to each other, until we got tired of it. I think Candice got tired first.

And yet: semi-engaged? How did that work?

I was tempted to ask. But Jason was clearly uncomfortable with the whole drift of the conversation. It called up a memory: once, back at the Big House, Jason had brought a date home to meet his family. She was a plain but pleasant girl he’d met at the Rice chess club, too shy to say much. Carol had remained relatively sober that night, but E.D. had clearly disapproved of the girl, had been conspicuously rude to her, and when she was gone he had berated Jase for “dragging a specimen like that into the house.” With great intellect, E.D. said, comes great responsibility. He didn’t want Jason to be shanghaied into a conventional marriage. Didn’t want to see him “hanging diapers on the line” when he could be “making a mark on the world.”

A lot of people in Jason’s position would have stopped bringing home their dates.

Jason had just stopped dating.

The house was empty when I woke up the next morning.

There was a note on the kitchen table: Jase had gone out to pick up provisions for a barbecue.
Back noon or later
. It was nine-thirty. I had slept luxuriously late, summer-vacation languor creeping over me.

The house seemed to generate it. Last night’s storms had passed and a pleasant morning breeze came through the calico curtains. Sunlight picked out imperfections in the grain of the butcher-block kitchen counters. I ate a slow breakfast by the window and watched clouds like stately schooners sail the horizon.

A little after ten the doorbell rang, and for a second I was panicked by the thought that it might be Diane—had she decided to show up early? But it turned out to be “Mike, the landscape guy,” in a bandanna and sleeveless T-shirt, warning me that he was going to do the lawn—he didn’t want to wake anybody up but the mower was pretty loud. He could come back this afternoon if it was a problem. No problem at all, I said, and a few minutes later he was riding the contours of the property on an ancient green John Deere that smudged the air with burning oil. Still a little sleepy, I wondered how this yard work would look to what Jason was fond of calling the universe at large. To the universe at large, Earth was a planet in near-stasis. Those blades of grass had arisen over centuries, as stately in their motion as the evolution of stars. Mike, a force of nature born a couple of billion years ago, scythed them with a vast and irresistible patience. The severed blades fell as if lightly touched by gravity, many seasons between sun and loam, loam in which Methuselah worms slid while elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps, empires rose and fell.