The Age of Miracles

by Karen Thompson Walker

The slowing, we soon came to understand, had altered gravity. Afterward, the earth held a little more sway. Bodies in motion were slightly less likely to remain in motion. We were all of us and everything a little more susceptible to the pull of the ground, and maybe it was this shift in physics that had sent that bird straight into the flat glass of our windowpane.

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.

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.

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.

“Do we have to do this?” asked Adam Jacobson, slouching in his chair. He was always asking this question. “The only thing you have to do in this life is die,” said Mrs. Pinsky. This was one of her favorite sayings. “Everything else is a choice.”

Physicists will tell you that if anything, the opposite should have been true: It’s the man on the speeding train who experiences time more slowly, and not the other way around.

But adrenaline, like any other drug, wears off. Panic, like any other flood, must crest.

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.

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.

Every school day I looked forward to the soft landing of afternoon,

We were reading Ray Bradbury in English class. That day’s assignment was a short story about a group of human schoolchildren who live on Venus, where, according to the story, the sun breaks through the rainy cloud cover only once every seven years, and then for only one hour.

Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn’t right. It’s not love—it’s relief.

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 infertile 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.

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.