But sometimes a bit of wind or a certain smell might remind me of the way it used to be. The horizon might look stark again, and I’d wonder for just a moment what had happened to the trees. A sudden sense of silence sometimes rushed into my ears, and I’d remember what we had lost: the songs of all the birds.
On other continents, famine spread. We tried to remember that we were luckier here than most.
In August of that year, the power company dug up our street. It had something to do with the earthquakes, some related repair. Workmen in orange vests jackhammered a stretch of sidewalk to reach the cables that snaked beneath the street. A few hours later, when the work was finished, they poured two new squares of cement in the sidewalk to replace the ones they’d destroyed. The cement was still wet when the workmen drove away; it was guarded only by two orange cones and one strip of yellow caution tape.
Seth and I knelt beside it, eager to leave our mark but unsure what to write. I was aware of his body next to mine as we crouched beneath the streetlights and conferred.
“Whatever we write is going to last a long time,” he said. He stared hard at the cement and chewed his lip—this was one of his habits. I knew all his habits by then. He looked up at me. “Maybe our whole lives.”
I felt a vague sadness then, the premonition of a future feeling.
The surface of the wet cement was as smooth as new snow, and it smelled like sea salt. We spent a long time deciding what to write, thinking only slightly faster than the speed at which wet cement dries in open air.
And still the earth turned, and the days passed, and the constellations wound across the sky. Gradually, we learned to sleep away the white nights in the radiation shelters we’d all dug beneath our yards, where the air smelled like dirt and like stone, so you never forgot you were under the ground.
Little by little—and then all at once—that summer slipped away.
What happened after that has been well recorded elsewhere. But I doubt that Seth’s name has appeared in any account but mine.
He couldn’t hide it forever. We were walking home from the beach one afternoon, headlights flashing past us. It was early in a stretch of darkness, and the moon was shining low in the sky, just visible above the rooftops of the neighborhood.
We were sharing a bag of sour candy as we walked. Seth was looking at the stars.
“If humans really could go to Mars,” he said, “would you want to go?”
I loved the way he thought about these things.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’d be too afraid.”
“I’d go,” he said. “I’d love to do something like that.”
It was only a few seconds later that I heard the sound of the bag drop from Seth’s hand. I remember the slight smack of the plastic hitting the sidewalk as the candy spilled into the street.
As I turned toward him, I felt his body lean hard into my shoulder. The he jerked headfirst to the sidewalk.
I think I knew then that nothing would be the same after that.
I shouted his name. I looked at his eyes: they were half open and blank. His head was rolling forward and back. His whole body was shaking on the pavement.
I ran what felt a long distance from the sidewalk to the front door of the nearest house, at a pace that reminds me now of a dream I sometimes had at that age and do still, where the ground falls away wherever I step. Soon I was knocking on a stranger’s door with two fists. Soon I was screaming at the woman who lived there. Then she was calling an ambulance, her voice as panicked as mine.
“Oh my God,” she shouted into the phone. “There’s a boy having a seizure in the street.”
I was grateful to that woman during those first few seconds, but then I wanted her to get away from us, and not crouch next to me the way she did while Seth rolled on the sidewalk, his head jerking, my young arms unable to hold his body still, my mind even more useless, those minutes too intimate for a stranger to see.
The seizure finally subsided, but Seth spent that night in the hospital. When he came home the next day, he called me to tell me what I had already guessed:
“They think it’s the syndrome,” he said.
I could feel the words pressing down on my chest.
“I know,” I said.
We didn’t say anything for a little while. I could hear him breathing into the phone.
“But I’m not that worried about it,” he said. I didn’t believe him. “I mean, doesn’t your mom feel okay a lot of the time?”
“Kind of,” I said.
I didn’t tell Seth then that his case already seemed much worse than my mother’s.
He weakened rapidly after that. Soon he was spending most of his time in bed. After school, I’d rush over to his house, and we’d watch movies together or play cards, or just look at the stars through the windows of his room.
“When I get better,” he’d say, “let’s build a fort in the yard and set up your telescope out there.”
“Ok,” I’d say, nodding hard.
But it scared me how thin and wan his face began to look. Sometimes he’d close his eyes for a few seconds, riding out a sudden pain in his head. His nose would bleed and bleed. He talked less and less. His skateboard sat silent in the corner of his room.
Soon, he could barely walk. I felt him drifting away, like ice on a sea.
Seth’s father never did develop the corn he was working on, the one that could live without any light. He gave up and closed his lab. One day that fall, he decided that he and Seth would move away—to Mexico where the radiation was said to be weaker.
I still remember the afternoon Seth told me they were leaving, the way I hung, desperate, on the words he said afterward: “But I bet we’ll come back.”
I remember the day they packed the van, his father carrying Seth in his arms, the way Seth’s legs dangled, spindly, where once they’d been strong. I’d helped Seth pack his things, and he’d given me his skateboard; he couldn’t ride it anymore.
“Keep it for me,” said Seth from the passenger seat. I spent those last minutes crying so hard I couldn’t talk. I remember Seth’s father averting his eyes as he packed the van. “It’s just for a few months,” said Seth, touching my face with his hand. His skin had lost its color, but his dark eyes were as dark as ever. “You’ll see: We’ll come back.”
I remember watching the van rolling away from me, Seth’s face receding in the distance. I stood in the dark street for a long time after that, clutching the skateboard to my chest and waiting, as if there existed some slim possibility that the van might change directions and begin to move backward in time instead of forward, while all around me life continued to proceed in only the one direction.
Seth sent me a short email the next day, a few precious words:
Mexico is weird,
he said,
and hot! I miss you!
I read it over many times that day and the next. I could hear the echo of his voice in the words.
It was two days later that the whole of North America went dark, the largest power failure in history. For seventy-two hours, we lived by candlelight and rationed our supplies. All across the continent, crops were left without the nurture of artificial lights. We worried we would run out of food. Looters roamed the cities and the malls. For the first time in my memory, my father stayed home from work. The three of us huddled together in our radiation shelter. My father locked the doors with a chain. My mother worried we didn’t have enough water, so we sipped it as slowly as we could. We counted hours, then days. In the middle of the second night, we heard distant gunshots in the darkness. We didn’t sleep at all.
Finally, on the third day, the lights flicked on again.
But not everything returned. The massive servers that powered our computer networks and our email systems and most of our major websites were temporarily shut down to conserve electricity. All nonessential uses of power were put on hold.
And, as we well know, those servers never went back up.
I wasn’t the only one who lost touch with someone they loved. I still remember the flyers that appeared in post offices and grocery stores; names and photos of people soon hung from the same signposts that had previously carried the new of lost pets.
If you see this woman, please tell her Daniel is looking for her. If you’re out there, J. T., here’s my number.
It was the newest relationships that were the least likely to survive—millions of new connections were cut off in midbloom. Think of all those potential loved ones lost once again on a planet of strangers. I didn’t have Seth’s phone number, but he’d given me a mailing address in Baja.
I started sending letters. I wrote one every day—every day for weeks.
Maybe it wasn’t the right address. Maybe there was something wrong with the mail.
Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words: I never heard from Seth Moreno again.
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 intertile 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 the food supply was more and more at risk. Though the pace of the slowing had slackened over the years, it had never stopped, and the damage had been done. 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. Babies continued to be born. Some still hoped the world might right itself.
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 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.