“Maybe we should move it,” I said.
“I don’t want you touching it,” said my mother. “Daddy will deal with it.”
And so we left the bird exactly as it lay. We kept the cats inside for the rest of the night.
We left the kitchen as we’d found it, too. We’d remodeled it recently, and you could smell the paint in the air, but that chemical scent was mixing with the tinge of soured milk. My mother poured a fresh drink: Two new ice cubes cracked and resettled beneath a stream of sparkling Scotch. I’d never seen her drink so much in one day.
She headed back out to the front porch. “Come on,” she said.
But I was tired of being with her. I went up to my room instead and lay flat on my bed for a while.
Twenty minutes later, the sun finally did slip behind the hill, proof at last that the earth, however slowly, continued to turn.
The wind reversed in the night and turned hard, blowing in from the desert instead of up from the sea. It howled and shrieked. Outside, the eucalyptus trees struggled and heaved, and the glittering stars showed that the sky was clear of clouds—this was an empty, stormless wind.
At some point, I heard the creaking of cabinets in the kitchen, the soft squeak of hinges. I recognized the shuffling of my mother’s slippered feet, the uncapping of a pill bottle, and a glass of water slowly filling at the sink.
I wished my father were home. I tried to picture him at the hospital. Maybe babies were being born into his hands right at that moment. I wondered what it might mean to come into the world on this of all nights.
Soon the streetlights flashed off, sucking the low glow from my room. This should have marked dawn, but the neighborhood remained submerged in the dark. It was a new kind of darkness for me, a thick country black, unseen in cities and suburbs.
I left my room and crept into the hall. Through the crack beneath my parents’ door, I could see the sickly blue light of the television leaking onto the hall carpet.
“You’re not sleeping, either?” said my mother when I opened the door. She looked slouchy and worn in an old white nightgown. Bouquets of fine wrinkles fanned out from her eyes.
I climbed into bed beside her. “What’s all that wind?” I asked.
We spoke in low tones as if someone were sleeping nearby. The television was on mute.
“It’s just a Santa Ana,” she said, rubbing my back with the palm of her hand. “It’s Santa Ana season. It’s always like this in the fall, remember? That part, at least, is normal.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Seven-forty-five.”
“It should be morning,” I said.
“It is,” she said. The sky remained dark. There was no hint of dawn.
We could hear the cats, restless in the garage. I could hear a scratching at the door and Tony’s persistent, uncertain wailing. He was nearly blind from cataracts, but I could tell that even he knew something was wrong.
“Did Daddy call?” I asked.
My mother nodded. “He’s going to work another shift because not everyone showed up.”
We sat for a long time in silence while the wind blew around us. The light from the television flashed on the white walls.
“When he gets home, let him rest, okay?” said my mother. “He’s had a very rough night.”
“What happened?”
She bit her lip and kept her eyes on the television.
“A woman died,” she said.
“Died?”
I’d never heard of such a thing happening under my father’s care. To die in childbirth seemed to me a frontier woman’s death, as impossible now as polio or the plague, made extinct by our ingenious monitors and machines, our clean hands and strong soaps, our drugs and our cures and our vast stores of knowledge.
“Daddy feels it never would have happened if they were working with a full staff. They were stretched too thin.”
“What about the baby?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. There were tears in her eyes.
For some reason, it was right then and not earlier that I really began to worry. I rolled over in my parents’ bed, and the scent of my father’s earthy cologne wafted up from the sheets. I wanted him home.
On the television screen, a reporter was standing in a desert somewhere, the sky pinkening behind her. They were charting the sunrise as they would a storm—the sun had reached the eastern edge of Nevada, but there was no sign of it yet in California.
Later, I would come to think of those first days as the time when we learned as a species that we had worried over the wrong things: the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never
is
what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.
4
At last, like a fever, the night broke. Sunday morning: The sky glowed a delicate blue.
Our backyard was littered in pine needles from the wind. A pair of potted marigolds lay overturned on the patio, the soil spilling from the pots. The umbrella and the lawn chairs had been strewn around the deck. Our eucalyptus trees stood listing and windblown. The dead blue jay remained unchanged.
In the distance, a wisp of smoke was puffing up from the horizon, floating quickly westward with the wind. I remembered then that this was fire season, too.
A news helicopter circled the plume like a fly. It was reassuring to know that at least one crew had been assigned to cover this most ordinary of disasters.
After breakfast, I tried Hanna’s cell phone, but it just rang and rang. I knew it was different for her: Hanna’s life was noisy with sisters, her house a maze of bunk beds and shared sinks where the washing machine ran perpetually just to keep up with the dresses that piled each night in the laundry basket. It took two station wagons to carry her family away.
In my house, I could hear the floors creak.
By the time my father came home from the hospital in the late afternoon, the winds had calmed, and a low fog was rolling in from the coast, obscuring the slow motion of our sun across the sky.
“Had my headlights on the whole way home,” said my father. “Couldn’t see five feet in front of me in that fog.”
He looked exhausted, but it was a relief to see him standing in our kitchen.
He ate half a sandwich standing up. Then he cleared the counters of the dishes we’d left out the day before and wiped everything down with a sponge. He watered my mother’s orchids, and then he stood at the sink, washing his hands for a long time.
“You should get some sleep,” said my mother. She was wrapped in the same gray sweater she’d worn the day before.
“I’m too wired,” he said.
“You should lie down, at least.”
He looked out the window and surveyed the back deck. He pointed at the dead bird. “When did that happen?”
“Last night,” I said.
He nodded and slid open the drawer, where he kept a supply of surgical gloves for use in household jobs. I followed him outside.
“It’s a shame,” he said, crouching low near the bird.
A troupe of ants had discovered the body and were marching back and forth from the edge of the deck, descending deep into the feathers, and emerging with tiny bits of the bird on their backs.
My father flapped a white trash bag in the air until it snapped open and inflated.
“Maybe it’s because gravity changed,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Birds have always had trouble with our windows. Their eyesight isn’t very good.”
He stretched a surgical glove over each of his hands. A wave of rubbery dust floated off the wrist cuffs. I could smell the latex where I stood.
He closed one gloved palm over the bird’s rib cage, the wings sagging like tree branches as he lifted it into the air. Two black eyes the size of peppercorns remained motionless in its head. A few lost ants ran in frantic circles across my father’s wrist.
“Sorry about what happened at work,” I said.
“What do you mean?” said my father. He let the bird slip from his hand and into the bag. The sound was wet and echoey against the plastic. He blew on his wrist to get rid of the ants.
“A woman died, right?” I said.
“What?”
He looked at me, surprised. I understood then that it was a mistake to mention it.
My father was quiet. I could feel my cheeks turning hot and red. He used two fingers like tweezers to pick up the last stray feather from the deck and drop it into the sack. Then he rubbed his forehead with the back of one bent wrist.
“No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one died.”
This was the first lie I ever heard my father tell—or the first time I knew that he was lying. But it would not be the last. And not the boldest, either.
On the deck where the bird had lain, a hundred ants ran in circles, in search of their lost feast.
My father pulled the trash bag’s drawstring shut and tied it firmly at the top.
“You and your mom worry too much as it is,” he said. “I told you two that nothing would happen overnight, and see? Nothing did.”
We took the bag to the garbage cans on the other side of the house. The bird’s dark silhouette showed through the white plastic as we walked, the body folding in on itself as the bag swung in time to my father’s quick paces.
He pulled the hose out to the deck and washed away the ants and the blood, but a spot of grease would remain on the window for weeks, like skid marks after a car accident.
Finally, he went upstairs to sleep, and my mother went with him.
I sat alone in the living room for a long time, watching television, while my parents murmured together through the closed door of their bedroom. I heard my mother ask a question. My father raised his voice: “What is that supposed to mean?”
I turned the television down and strained to hear the rest.
“Of course I was at work,” he said. “Where the hell else would I be?”
We were living under a new gravity, too subtle for our minds to register, but our bodies were already subject to its sway. In the weeks that followed, as the days continued to expand, quarterbacks found that footballs didn’t fly as far as they used to; home-run hitters slipped into slumps. I would find it harder and harder to kick a soccer ball across a field. Pilots would have to retrain themselves to fly. Every falling thing fell faster to the ground.
It seems to me now that the slowing triggered certain other changes too, less visible at first but deeper. It disrupted certain subtler trajectories: the tracks of friendships, for example, the paths toward and away from love. But who am I to say that the course of my childhood was not already set long before the slowing? Perhaps my adolescence was only an average adolescence, the stinging a quite unremarkable stinging. There
is
such a thing as coincidence: the alignment of two or more seemingly related events with no causal connection. Maybe everything that happened to me and to my family had nothing at all to do with the slowing. It’s possible, I guess. But I doubt it. I doubt it very much.
5
Two days passed. More new minutes were flooding in with every hour. Now it was Monday. There was no new news.
I’d been hoping that school would be canceled—all the kids were. Instead, school was simply delayed. A hasty plan had been devised to push back our start time by ninety minutes, roughly the amount by which we were running behind.
We’d been asked by the government to carry on as usual. This was not true later, obviously, but for now our leaders stood before microphones, dressed in dark suits and red ties, American-flag pins glinting from navy blue lapels. Mostly, they talked economics: Go to work, spend money, leave your cash in the banks.
“They’re definitely not telling us everything,” said Trevor Watkins at the bus stop that Monday morning. More than half the kids who usually waited there had stayed home or left town with their families.
I missed Hanna like a phantom limb.
“It’s just like Area 51,” said Trevor, chewing the frayed black straps of his backpack. “They never tell the public the truth.”
Our lives were mild back then. We were girls in sandals and sundresses, boys in board shorts and surf shirts. We were growing up in a retiree’s dream—330 days of sunshine each year—and so we celebrated whenever it rained. Catastrophe, too, like bad weather, was provoking in all of us an uneasy excitement and verve.
From the other side of the lot came the echo of a skateboard striking the curb. I knew who it was without looking, but I wanted to look: Seth Moreno—tall and quiet and always on his own, now stepping carefully off of his skateboard and into the dirt, his dark hair falling into his eyes as he moved. I had never spoken much to Seth Moreno, though I sat behind him in math. I had perfected a way of watching him that didn’t look like I was watching.
“Trust me,” Trevor went on. He was skinny and friendless, and his enormous green backpack was so heavy that it forced him to hunch forward, like an old man, for balance. “The government knows a lot more than they’re saying.”
“Shut up,” said Daryl. Daryl was the new kid, the bad kid, the kid who left fourth period every day to go to the nurse’s office to swallow a dose of Ritalin. He was the kid we all tried to avoid. “No one’s listening to you, Trevor.”
The bus stop was the hard ground where our school days always began, where insults were slung and secrets spilled or spread. We were standing where we always stood, in the same patch of dirt beside the same empty lot, the morning sun slanting at roughly the same slant. Our watches were useless, but the light felt right.
“I’m serious, you guys,” said Trevor. “This is the end of the world.”
“If that bus doesn’t show up in the next two minutes,” said Daryl, “I’m leaving.”
Daryl slouched against the chain-link fence that surrounded a neighboring vacant lot. Years earlier, the house that used to sit on that lot had slipped into the canyon along with a section of limestone cliff. You could still find remnants of the house below, splinters of wood tangled in the brush, shards of tile in the dirt. Not much was left of the property. A cracked driveway led nowhere. Weeds grew where the lawn once was. Yellow signs warned of the instability of the bluff.
“Here’s how it’s going to happen,” said Trevor. “First the crops are going to die. And then all the animals are going to die. And then the humans.”
But at that moment, my own anxieties were closer at hand: Without Hanna, I felt awkward standing alone on that curb. Even on a normal day, the bus stop was a bad place to be without a friend. Bullies reigned. No supervisor supervised here.
I decided to stand beside Michaela because we’d been elementary school friends, but those bonds had worn thin.
“Hey, Julia,” she said when she saw me. “You’re smart. Do you think this earth thing could screw up my hair somehow?” She was redoing her red ponytail. “Because my hair is going crazy today.”
She looked ready for the beach, in miniskirt and baby tee. Sequined flip-flops clung to her feet. My mother never would have let me wear flip-flops to school.
“I don’t know,” I said, regretting my practical outfit, white canvas tennis shoes double-knotted beneath plain jeans. “Maybe.”
These days, Michaela’s lips perpetually shimmered with gloss. Her hips perpetually swayed. Mascara streaked her cheeks at every soccer practice, and she spoke of boys in multitudes—it was hard to keep track of all her Jasons and Brians and Brads. How could I admit to her my own modest desire? How could I explain to her that for months I’d hoped to talk to just one boy who right then was waiting with us at the bus stop, slowly rolling his skateboard back and forth on the other side of the lot? Seth Moreno: like a blinking light in my head.
“Seriously,” said Michaela, holding up the ragged tip of her ponytail. “Look at all this frizz.”
A fruity shampoo scent wafted up from her hair whenever she moved.
“Ouch,” said Michaela, whipping around as if stung by a bee. There was Daryl, snapping the strap of her bra. “Quit it, Daryl,” she said.
That bra wasn’t supporting much. Michaela was as flat as I was. But she wore it anyway, a racy symbol of things to come. Visible through the white cotton of her tank top, those two empty cups held at least the possibility of breasts, if not the real things, and I guess just the expectation, just the idea, the mere dream of a female body was enough to lure the boys to her side.
“I mean it,” she said as Daryl snapped it again. I could hear the quick slap of the elastic landing on her skin. “You’re annoying me.”
In the distance, I watched Seth Moreno throw a rock over the chain-link fence and into the canyon. I had the feeling that he cared about important things. His sadness was always apparent. It was in the angry whip of his wrist as he let the rock go. It was in the tired motion of his head. It was in the way he squinted at the sky but would not look away.
Seth already knew about disaster: His mother was sick, and she’d been sick for a while. I’d seen him with her once or twice at the drugstore, a red bandana wrapped round her head where her hair once was, her skinny legs planted in a pair of chunky orthotic shoes. Breast cancer: She’d had it for years already, forever, it seemed, but I’d heard that now she was really dying.
Suddenly, I felt a hard pinch through the back of my T-shirt. I turned. Daryl was behind me. He was laughing at me.
“Gross!” he said, turning his head toward the rest of the kids. “Julia’s not even wearing a bra!”
My cheeks turned hot.
I realized that Hanna would have known what to do. She was the leader between the two of us, the talker, the boss. She could be mean when she needed to be. Maybe having sisters had trained her. She would have stepped in at that moment and said to Daryl the exact right thing.
But I was on my own that day and unaccustomed to getting teased.
A few months earlier, I’d passed through the lingerie section of a department store with my mother. A salesclerk had asked if we’d like to see the training bras. My mother looked at the clerk as if she’d said something about sex. I looked at the department store floor. “Oh,” said my mother. “I don’t think so.”
Daryl was staring at me. He had the palest white skin, the sharpest, freckliest nose. I could feel the eyes of the other kids on my face, attracted to cruelty like flies to meat.
I longed for the sounds of the school bus to rescue me but heard nothing—only the faint murmur of insects, busy among the flowers in the canyon, and the dull ring of Seth’s skateboard striking the curb again and again. The power lines were humming above us as usual, the flow of electric current uninterrupted by the slowing. I would later hear that all our machinery would keep working for a while even if all the humans were gone.
A lie formed in my mouth. It tumbled out like a broken tooth. “I am too wearing one,” I said.
A silver minivan came around the corner, kept moving, and was gone.
“Oh yeah?” said Daryl. “Then let’s see it.”
Everyone but Seth was watching us. The older boys, the eighth-graders, had stopped their shoving matches to see what would happen. Even Trevor had stopped talking. Diane watched, too, rubbing with two fingers the silver cross that always hung around her chubby neck. The Gilbert twins stared their silent stare. Seth was the only one who stayed apart. I hoped he hadn’t noticed what was happening. He was standing on his skateboard, facing the other way, the wheels crunching the dirt, as he rolled back and forth on the other side of the lot.
“If you’re wearing a bra,” said Daryl, leaning toward me, “then prove it.”
I fiddled with my necklace. Suspended from a delicate chain around my neck was a tiny gold nugget, unearthed sixty years earlier by my grandfather’s hands when he worked in the mines of Alaska. It was the one artifact of his that I treasured.
“Leave her alone,” Michaela finally said, but her voice was too thin and too late.
What I understood so far about this life was that there were the bullies and the bullied, the hunters and the hunted, the strong and the stronger and the weak, and so far I’d never fallen into any group—I was one of the rest, a quiet girl with an average face, one in the harmless and unharmed crowd. But it seemed all at once that this balance had shifted. With so many kids missing from the bus stop, all the hierarchies were changing. A mean thought passed through my mind: I didn’t belong in this position; it should have been one of the uglier girls, Diane or Teresa or Jill. Or Rachel. Where was Rachel? She was the nerdiest one among us. But she’d been kept home by her mother to prepare and to pray—they were Jehovah’s Witnesses, convinced that this was the end of days.
Another car floated around the corner. This time it was my father in the green station wagon, on his way to work. He waved as he passed. I wished I could flag him down, that he could rescuse me. But he could not have read in that plain scene the signs of any trouble.
“Either you show it,” said Daryl, “or I’ll do it for you.”
As has been well documented, rates of murder and other violent crime spiked in the days and weeks following the start of the slowing. There was something in the atmosphere. It was as if the slowing had slowed our judgment too, letting loose our inhibitions. But I’ve always felt that it should have produced the opposite effect. This much is certainly true: After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what
not
to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known—no law of physics can account for desire.
I heard the bus rumbling around the corner toward us, its brakes squeaking, its engine rattling. Daryl heard It too, and that’s when he grabbed hold of the front of my shirt and pulled up. I twisted away from him, but I was too late. As I turned, I saw Seth, his long limbs swinging as he walked, heading in our direction, just in time to see my bare chest.
Here’s what I remember next: the white of my T-shirt over my face, the whoosh of damp air on my bare breastbone and bare ribs, over the whole flat plane of my chest. The excited squeals of the other kids. Daryl held me that way for a few long seconds while I twisted and turned, the two of us locked in a perverse dance. I could feel the cold air on my skin and the chain of my necklace digging into the back of my neck.
Finally, Daryl let the edge of my shirt drop.
“Liar,” he said. “I knew you weren’t wearing a bra.”
The bus stopped at the curb and began to idle there. The light sweet smell of diesel filled the air. I felt faint. I was blinking back tears.
“Jesus, Daryl,” said Seth, coming up and shoving him in the shoulder. “What the hell?”
Months later, Michaela’s mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone’s astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day.
“Don’t worry,” whispered Michaela as we climbed up the steps and into the bus. “No one saw anything.”
But I knew that this was just something you said when the exact opposite was true: Everyone saw everything.
Seth was the last one onto the bus. He smiled a weak smile as he passed me, heading as usual for the back rows. What I saw in his face was more alarming than what I’d seen in Daryl’s. In Seth’s dark eyes and his thick, pressed lips, I saw something different, something worse: I saw pity.
I considered running off the bus right then, but it was too late. The doors were closing.
“I bet they’re already sending the president and the smartest scientists to the space station, where they’ll be safe,” said Trevor from the front seat, as if his stream of theories had never been interrupted. For once, I was glad that he was talking.
The bus jerked away from the curb. The driver, a fat man in a thick black belt, looked rattled and distracted. He kept glancing up through the windshield at the sun.
I reached for my necklace, and that was when I noticed it was gone, my grandfather’s tiny gold nugget, flung somewhere in the dirt.
I turned to Michaela, panicked. “My necklace,” I said, tears blurring my eyes. “Where’s my necklace?”
But Michaela didn’t hear me. She was already involved in a conversation on her phone.
“I’m telling you,” said Trevor. “This is Armageddon.”
At school, we were told to disregard the bells, now rogue, the whole bell system having come unhooked from time.
Without the morning bell to prod us, we turned aimless and imprecise. Kids floated this way or that, a shifting flock of birds. The crowd was wilder than usual, harder to herd. We were loud and wound up. I hid out at the edge of the group while teachers tried in vain to corral us. Their thin voices were drowned out by the ocean of our own.
This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. I knew I still looked like a child.