Karen Walker - The Age of Miracles

I felt aware of the quiet, of the refrigerator not humming, of the cable box not glowing, of the digital clocks failing to tick.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I’ve seen them, you know.” I paused. “Together.”

Now that I’d said it, the facts seemed more true than they ever had before.

Seth didn’t say anything at first. I waited. Then he nodded as if he’d come to expect such things from life. He never talked about his mother—and I had learned never to ask—but I sometimes sensed her absence in his reactions to certain events, as if he knew even then that there existed under everything a universal grief.

“Does your mom know?” he said at last.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

He slotted two new cards into the tower. The whole structure moved slightly in response, and then he held his hands in the air for several seconds, as if he commanded some invisible force that could keep the cards upright. It seemed to work: The house of cards continued standing.

“It’s not fair to your mom,” he said. “I hate things that aren’t fair.”

I nodded. “Me, too.”

We said nothing else, but the secret buzzed between us. It felt good to have told. It felt good to be known by this boy. Later, after the cards had collapsed to the floor and the candles had burned down to nothing, we put on our swimsuits and dropped into the pitch-black waters of Seth’s Jacuzzi. We couldn’t see a thing except the stars. Our legs grazed one another under the surface. Seth leaned over and kissed me. I kissed him back. I felt happier than I had in a long time.

Two hours later, the power was restored.

Officials blamed the outage on the sunlamps and the greenhouses—they were straining the electrical grid. That was when the energy rationing began.

No lights after ten P.M. No air-conditioning unless the temperature exceeded eighty-eight degrees. But the industrial greenhouses went on guzzling up light. The entire food supply was being nursed by sodium sunlamps. All the farms in the country were reliant by then on periods of artificial sun.

One day in the middle of that spring, thick pink envelopes showed up in our mailboxes, announcing in glitter the details of Michaela’s twelfth birthday party at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was the first time I’d ever been invited to one of the big dance parties, and I wondered if it was because of Seth. If I had torn the seal of that envelope a few months earlier, I would have felt grateful and glad.

But Seth and I decided right away not to go.

“I hate these things,” he said. “And Michaela gets on my nerves. Let’s watch movies at my house instead.”

“You’re not coming?” Michaela said to me at school the next day. “Are you kidding me?”

She’d invited a hundred other kids. Plenty of people would show.

“It’s just not my kind of thing,” I said.

Her mouth tightened.

“Does that mean Seth’s not coming, either?”

I felt a burst of pride that she thought of us as linked.

“I don’t think he is,” I said.

She bit her lip hard and put her hands on her hips.

“Fine,” she said. “Whatever. I don’t care if you two losers come or not.”

But I didn’t care what she thought as she swished away in her sundress, her glittery flip-flops slapping the cement.

Meanwhile, the heat on certain days was becoming dangerous. It was only April, but we were warned to stay indoors whenever the duration of sunlight exceeded twenty-five hours. Record-high temperatures were often produced at these times.

But the weather could swing just as wildly the other way, too. I woke one dark morning to a miraculous sight.

“Holy shit,” said my mother in her green bathrobe.

I looked out the window: snow.

This was California, sea level, spring.

Five inches had fallen while we slept, and it was still snowing. Temperatures had been dropping further and further as each darkness stretched longer. Now the neighborhood shimmered, bluish in the moonlight: sugarcoated cars, fences frosted white, the terra-cotta roofs encrusted in snow. The sidewalks looked repaved. The artificial lawns had been swallowed whole overnight in one smooth sheet of clean, creamy white. Our street sparkled.

Seth showed up on my porch in a red ski parka I’d never seen before and a frayed knit cap, which sat crooked on his head. Snow-flakes were melting on his shoulders.

“We have to go sledding,” he said. He held up the blue boogie board he’d carried down from his house.

I grabbed a coat and followed him out to the whitened street.

“Wait,” called my mother from the doorway. “I don’t know if I want you going out there.”

“Helen,” said my father. “It’s just snow.”

We were beach kids, sunshine kids. We did not know the properties of snow. I had never seen it fall, never knew how soft it felt at first, how easily it collapsed beneath feet, or the particular sound of that crunch. I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world’s noise.

Our garages did not contain snow shovels or snowblowers. Our cars lacked snow tires. The nearest snowplow was parked in the mountains a hundred miles away. And so that was that: We were snowed in. School was canceled, and my father had the day off. There was nothing to do but throw ourselves down and make snow angels, or build snowmen, or sled down the nearest hill on whatever we could find. All the kids in the neighborhood took to the streets. We caught snowflakes on our tongues and in our eyelashes, let them melt in the palms of our hands. We watched Tony, our Southern California cat, stepping on snow for the first time—he hated it, shook his paw and retreated inside.

My father laughed when he saw that, maybe the first time he had laughed since my grandfather disappeared. My father had been spending all his weekends driving out to various real-time colonies in search of his father. A visit to one colony often led to another, farther out in the desert or else somewhere up in the mountains. There were dozens of colonies scattered across the state. He handed out missing-person flyers wherever he went. Six weeks had passed with no word. It was hard to imagine that my grandfather would let so much time pass without calling. I began to worry that something had happened to him, but I kept these fears to myself.

“I hope he’s seeing this,” said my father, bending to touch the snow. “Wherever he is.”

He grabbed a handful and tossed a snowball in my direction. Later, he helped Seth and me build a snowman in our yard.

The snow would all melt away as soon as the sun returned two days later. But for now, on this day, beauty was momentarily restored to our world.

I was only dimly aware of my mother that morning, a peripheral shape of worry.

“This is not right,” she kept saying, her voice barely audible over the squeals of children at play. She wouldn’t come near the snow. “This is California,” she said. “This isn’t right.”

One day we heard a strange sound in the sky: a crinkling, a tearing, like cellophane rustling in the wind.

It came from every direction. The sound lasted for three minutes. It was heard—some say felt —from Mexico City to Seattle. Nothing was seen. Whatever swirled in the atmosphere that day was invisible to human eyes.

During the following darkness, a great stream of green was spotted undulating on the horizon. Thousands of cameras recorded its flamelike movements. At the same time, navigation systems failed. Certain satellites went dark. My mother suffered one of her worst episodes yet, sliding to the kitchen floor for balance, as if on the deck of a pitching ship. She was briefly unable to stand.