17
Five thousand years of art and superstition would suggest that it’s the darkness that haunts us most, that the night is when the human mind is most apt to be disturbed. But dozens of experiments conducted in the aftermath of the slowing revealed that it was not the darkness that tampered most with our moods—it was the light.
As the days stretched further, we faced a new phenomenon: Certain clock days began and ended before the sun ever rose—or else began and ended before the sun ever set.
Scientists had long been aware of the negative effects of prolonged daylight on human brain chemistry. Rates of suicide, for example, had always been highest above the arctic circle, where self-inflicted gunshot wounds surged every summer, the continuous daylight driving some people mad.
As our days neared forty-eight hours, those of us living in the lower latitudes began to suffer similarly from the relentlessness of light.
Studies soon documented an increase in impulsiveness during the long daylight periods. It had something to do with serotonin; we were all a little crazed. Online gambling increased steadily throughout every stretch of daylight, and there is some evidence that major stock trades were made more often on light days than on dark ones. Rates of murder and other violent crimes also spiked while the sun was in our hemisphere—we discovered very quickly the dangers of the white nights.
We took more risks. Desires were less checked. Temptation was harder to resist. Some of us made decisions we might not otherwise have made.
I like to think that this is how it started between my father and Sylvia. I picture my father arriving home from the hospital after midnight, as he often did, on some long white night, and finding Sylvia pruning her garden in a sun hat or reading a book in the grass while the rest of us tried to sleep. Maybe she waved to my father as he stepped from his car. Maybe they talked for a while. Maybe there were dozens of nights like this, the two of them squinting in the sun while all the curtains on the street were closed for the night. Maybe, in that excessive daylight, they both felt more reckless than usual, a little less likely to think before they acted.
But here’s where my mother would interrupt me. “You can’t blame everything on the slowing,” she’d say. “People are responsible for their own actions.”
The next morning my father walked in through our front door as if he were the same man I had always known. I was sitting at the table, a bowl of yogurt in front of me. My mother was pouring coffee. I had not told her what I knew. I didn’t tell anyone at first.
“Morning,” he said. It was dark outside. The cold rushed in behind him. He wiped his feet on the mat. He hung his keys on the hook in the kitchen. He kissed my mother on the cheek, and he touched me on the back of the head. “Ready for your math test?”
“That was yesterday,” I said.
I swirled my yogurt back and forth around the bowl. I couldn’t eat.
“That’s right,” he said. “Sorry. I lost track.”
I hated him right then, sweeping into our house in his white lab coat as if he hadn’t thrown it on only moments before opening the door.
“How was work?” asked my mother. She looked old, sitting at the table in her bathrobe, no makeup. I felt bad for her.
“Fine,” he said. He leaned against the wall. He peeled an orange with his thumb. That was the worst part: He seemed relaxed.
“I’m exhausted,” he said. “I need to get some sleep.”
He walked slowly up the stairs, eating the orange as he went, spitting seeds in the cupped palm of one hand. I heard the bedroom door close behind him, leaving me alone again with my mother.
For days afterward, a series of magical thoughts flew through my mind. For instance, it seemed somehow surprising that the hours continued to pass in spite of what I knew. It was almost shocking that time did not, in fact, stop. Instead, our lives carried on. My father came and went. Our hearts kept beating. I went to school as usual, hoping every day that Seth Moreno would return. We celebrated Christmas, and the world continued spinning.
Six days passed: New Year’s Eve.
I’ve never understood why the slowing didn’t affect the orbit of the earth right away, or why, on the last day of that first year, we found ourselves at roughly the same position in the solar system as we had the previous year on that day. The earth made its usual swing around the sun, its 400 billionth loop, one of the very few things that year to actually remain on course.
On New Year’s Eve, the sun rose at three
A.M.
in California, and we were still squinting nineteen hours later at eight o’clock that night when my mother turned the key in the ignition and backed the car out of the driveway. We were headed for my grandfather’s house, where I would spend the night so that my parents could attend a New Year’s Eve party worry-free.
“I could’ve stayed home alone,” I said. A purple duffel bag slouched and settled on my lap.
“We already talked about this,” said my mother. “It would have been different if you had somewhere to go.”
“I could have gone to Michaela’s,” I said.
“You know you can’t go to houses where the parents aren’t going to be home.”
Michaela hadn’t exactly invited me, anyway. “You can come if you want,” she’d said the day before at soccer practice.
We drove west from the coast on the old two-lane road beneath a wide and blazing sky. It was the twenty-first hour of daylight. My father was at work—or so he said—but he planned to meet my mother at the party. We were driving a silver station wagon, although the police report would later describe it as blue.
“What’s your New Year’s resolution?” my mother asked me as we passed the racetrack. We had clinked glasses in the kitchen before we left: sparkling apple cider in mine, champagne in hers.
“No one keeps their New Year’s resolutions,” I said.
Outside, the lagoon zoomed by.
“You sound like your father.”
She was chatty and flushed in a black strapless dress. She’d been losing weight since the slowing, and she had squeezed herself into one of the dresses she’d been keeping unworn for years.
“Why are you so grumpy?” she said.
I’d been avoiding my father all week. It felt hazardous to say his name, as if just the crispness of the two
D
’s in
Dad
might somehow transmit to my mother my anger, or somehow reveal what I had seen.
“One of my resolutions is to worry less,” she said. She glanced at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She smoothed one brow with the tip of a finger. “And to live more in the moment.”
We passed a large white house on a hill where someone else’s party guests were sliding out of clean, expensive cars. Two men in tuxedos strode through the front door as we idled at a stoplight, and a young blonde in a gold cocktail dress glittered as she smoked in the yard, stilettos sinking in the lawn.
A car honked behind us. The light had turned green. My mother hadn’t slept since sunrise the night before, and as has been well documented, long stretches of daylight can dull a person’s reflexes. Some studies have shown the impairment to be roughly equivalent to the effect of two drinks.
“But here’s my main resolution,” she said as she pressed the gas pedal. “Are you listening?”
I nodded.
“I’m going to start acting again.”
At the bend in the road, we flew past the reservoir, which for weeks had been clogged with dead birds. The water level was lower than usual, too. Some people were blaming the slowing for the lack of rain and for the way the banks of the reservoir lay exposed, the layers of black mud revealed—and somehow unseemly—and also the tangled roots of the nearby trees, unaccustomed to life out of water.
“I’m serious,” she said. Her crystal earrings swayed through the air as she turned to me. “I called my old agent and everything.”
Her bare shoulders shimmered slightly in the light from a new bronzing powder she’d dusted on her skin. A speck of mauve lipstick flashed from one of her front teeth as she smiled.
That was when it occurred to me: Maybe she already knew about Sylvia.
We drove for a few minutes more. My mother quieted. The road narrowed. The sun shone in our eyes. I remember the trees whipping past us outside, the branches black against a bright blue sky.
She would later describe the feeling as a kind of wooziness, a narrowing of her field of vision, but she said very little as it happened. She rubbed her forehead. She blinked a hard blink.
“I don’t feel so well,” she said.
It was just a moment later that I lost her. I’d never seen anyone faint before. I remember the sudden slackening of her body, the rolling of her head, the way her hands fell from the steering wheel. It was later estimated that we were traveling at forty-five miles per hour.
Eyewitnesses reported seeing a bearded man, dressed in robes, howling Scripture on the side of the road. According to their accounts, a station wagon approached from the west at approximately 8:25
P.M
. Opinions varied about the speed of the vehicle at the time of impact, but all agreed about the way the man lunged into the path of the car, bent on suicide or miracle. At least six other cars had swerved successfully around him. Ours was the seventh.
I saw him only briefly, and I was at the same time reaching for the steering wheel, which was free of my mother’s grip, so I can’t be sure I’m remembering properly, but they do say that time slows in times of danger—you see more. Anyway, this is what I remember: the look in the man’s eyes at the moment when his expression shifted from a kind of certainty to fear, and then the animal flinch. He turned and curled his arms around his head at the last moment.
I remember the hollow thud on the hood and then the screeching of tires as my mother came to and hit the brakes—she was out for less than ten seconds—and the life rushed back into her face. My seat belt jerked. The car heaved. We stopped. I felt a breeze hit my cheeks and the accompanying stink of fertilizer from the nearby polo fields. The windshield had been rendered open air. A spindly curtain of safety glass hung shattered from the frame. But none of the blood that spilled elsewhere had left its mark on the glass.
My mother was breathing hard. Someone was moaning. Sequins of glass flickered on my jeans.
“You okay?” said my mother. She grabbed my shoulders with both hands. A narrow stream of blood was running along her hairline and pooling in her ear.
“Are
you
okay?” I said.
“What happened?” she asked.
Two surfers hopped out of a nearby VW van, sandals slapping the pavement, wet suits peeled down to their waists. They sprinted past our car to a spot of road just ahead of us, where they crouched low and conferred. Behind them, a jogger began directing traffic.
Sirens screamed in the distance.
My mother leaned out her window toward where the surfers were squatting and to where the jogger kept glancing back. “Oh God,” she said. She cupped one hand over her mouth but kept talking. “Oh God,” she said through her fingers. “Oh God.”
The surfers were partly blocking my view of his face, but I could see his lower half, his legs splayed, his hands, palms up, his whole body absolutely still. And I remember this, too: One knee was folded the wrong way.
I made a resolution right then, or something simpler, a prayer—
If this man lives, I will never complain about anything ever again.
A scattering of orange flyers wafted up from the ground beside him, fluttering away like dandelion seeds. One flew into our car through the open windshield and landed on my lap. It was a Xerox of a Xerox of a handwritten note:
Attention all sinners. The trumpets are sounding, and the end is here. Repent or face the wrath of God.
Two police cars and a fire truck swung around the corner and stopped on the side of the road. Two ambulances appeared, lights blinking. A rush of tears blurred my view. Here were strangers speeding to a stranger’s aid.
According to the police report, the man was taken to St. Anthony’s Hospital, two miles from the scene of the crash. Later that night, fourteen members of a suicide cult would pass through those same emergency room doors on fourteen separate stretchers, unconscious and breathing shallowly, their fingernails already turning blue from the arsenic swimming in their veins. Convinced the world was ending, they’d poisoned their wineglasses at the stroke of midnight. While others kissed and drank champagne, these fourteen would die to the chords of “Auld Lang Syne.”
In the back of a parked ambulance, a young paramedic cleaned my mother’s cut, then read her pupils for signs of concussion. A policewoman with a spiral notepad asked questions.
“How fast would you estimate you were going?”
“Is he dead?” my mother asked. She kept looking around. Orange cones had sprouted from the asphalt. A string of yellow caution tape flapped in the breeze. Our car remained frozen in its lane, its mirrors glinting in the sunshine.
“They’re working on him,” said the policewoman. “Forty miles an hour? Thirty?”
“But is he going to die?” My mother’s dress kept slipping lower on her chest. A dark bruise was forming on her forehead near the cut. She had hit her head on the steering wheel. “Was he conscious?” she asked.
“They’re doing everything they can, ma’am.”
Years later, I heard the following statistic: Before the slowing, a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at a speed of forty miles per hour had a one-in-ten chance of surviving the impact. After the slowing, the survival rate dropped by half. It wasn’t only baseballs that fell faster and harder after the slowing. Every body in motion was pulled more forcefully to the ground.
Eventually, my mother was taken to the hospital for tests. The paramedics suspected a concussion. I, unharmed, waited in the back of a police car for my father.
Meanwhile, our skid marks were measured. A tow truck arrived. Someone swept up the glass. The breeze became a wind, and the eucalyptus trees that fringed the road on either side began to whip around in the air, revealing, as they swayed, a crisp sliver of white moon hanging low on the bright horizon.