People younger than me have asked me: Why didn't you panic? Why didn't anyone panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?
Sometimes I say, But terrible things did happen.
Sometimes I say, But we didn't understand. And what could we have done about it?
And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he'll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there's a problem.
The obliteration of the stars wasn't slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.
English-language media called it "the October Event" (it wasn't "the Spin" until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multibillion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weathersats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.
It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.
And many terrible things did happen as a consequence of that night, though most of them were obscured by media blackouts. News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space: it was almost a week before we learned that a Pakistani Hatf V missile tipped with a nuclear warhead, launched by mistake or miscalculation in the confusing first moments of the Event, had strayed off course and vaporized an agricultural valley in the Hindu Kush. It was the first nuclear device detonated in war since 1945, and, tragic as that event was, given the global paranoia ignited by the loss of telecommunications, we were lucky it only happened once. According to some reports we nearly lost Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang.
Reassured by sunrise, I slept from dawn to noon. When I got up and dressed I
found my mother in the living room, still in her quilted robe, staring into the television screen and frowning. When I asked her if she'd eaten breakfast she said she hadn't. So I fixed lunch for both of us.
She would have been forty-five years old that fall. If I had been asked to choose a word to describe her it might have been "solid." She was rarely angry and the only time in my life I had ever seen her cry was the night the police came to the door (this was back in Sacramento) and told her my father had died on the 80 near Vacaville, driving home from a business trip. She was, I think, careful to show me only this aspect of herself. But there were others. There was a portrait on a shelf in the étagère in the living room, taken years before I was born, of a woman so sleek, beautiful, and fearless before the camera that I had been startled when she told me it was a photo of herself.
Clearly she didn't like what she was hearing from TV. A local station was doing nonstop news, repeating shortwave and ham radio stories and fuzzy stay-calm statements issued by the federal government. "Tyler," she said, waving me to sit down, "this is hard to explain. Something happened last night—"
"I know," I said. "I heard about it before I went to bed."
"You knew about this? And you didn't wake me up?"
"I wasn't sure—"
But her annoyance waned as quickly as it had come. "No," she said, "it's all right, Ty. I guess I didn't miss anything by sleeping. It's funny . . . I feel like I'm still asleep."
"It's just the stars," I said, idiotically.
"The stars and the moon," she corrected me. "Didn't you hear about the moon? All over the world, nobody can see the stars and nobody can see the moon."
The moon was a clue, of course.
I sat awhile with my mom, then left her still fixed in front of the TV ("Back before dark this time," she said, meaning it) and walked to the Big House. I knocked at the back door, the door the cook and the day maid used, though the Lawtons were careful never to call it a "servant's entrance." It was also the door by which, on weekdays, my mother entered to conduct the Lawtons' household business.
Mrs. Lawton, the twins' mother, let me in, looked at me blankly, waved me upstairs. Diane was still asleep, the door of her room closed. Jason hadn't slept at all and apparently wasn't planning to. I found him in his room monitoring a short-wave radio.
Jason's room was an Aladdin's cave of luxuries I coveted but had given up expecting ever to own: a computer with an ultrafast ISP connection, a hand-me-down television twice as big as the one that graced the living room at my house. In case he hadn't heard the news: "The moon is gone," I told him.
"Interesting, isn't it?" Jase stood and stretched, running his fingers through his uncombed hair. He hadn't changed his clothes since last night. This was uncharacteristic absentmindedness. Jason, although certifiably a genius, had never acted like one in my presence—that is to say, he didn't act like the geniuses I had seen in movies; he didn't squint, stammer, or write algebraic equations on walls. Today, though, he did seem massively distracted. "The moon's not gone, of course—how could it be? According to the radio they're measuring the usual tides on the Atlantic coast. So the moon's still there. And if the moon's still there, so are the stars."
"So why can't we see them?"
He gave me an annoyed look. "How should I know? All I'm saying is, it's at least partly an optical phenomenon."
"Look out the window, Jase. The sun's shining. What kind of optical illusion lets the sunshine through but hides the stars and the moon?"
"Again, how should I know? But what's the alternative, Tyler? Somebody put the moon and the stars in a sack and ran away with them?"
No, I thought. It was the Earth that was in the sack, for some reason not even Jason could divine.
"Good point, though," he said, "about the sun. Not an optical barrier but an optical filter. Interesting . . ."
"So who put it there?"
"How should I—?" He shook his head irritably. "You're inferring too much. Who says anybody put it there? It could be a once-in-a-billion-years natural event, like the magnetic poles reversing. It's a big jump to assume there's some controlling intelligence behind it."
"But it could be true."
"Lots of things could be true."
I had taken enough gentle ribbing about my science-fiction reading that I was reluctant to say the word "aliens." But of course it was the first thing that occurred to me. Me, and plenty of other people. And even Jason had to admit that the idea of intervening extraterrestrials had become infinitely more plausible over the course of the last twenty-four hours.
"But even so," I said, "you have to wonder why they'd do it."
"There are only two plausible reasons. To hide something from us. Or to hide us from something."
"What does your father think?"
"I haven't asked him. He's been on the phone all day. Probably trying to put in an early sell order on his GTE stock." This was a joke, and I wasn't sure what he meant by it, but it was also my first hint of what the loss of orbital access might mean for the aerospace industry in general and the Lawton family in particular. "I didn't sleep last night," Jase admitted. "Afraid I might miss something. Sometimes I envy my sister. You know, wake me when somebody figures it out."
I bristled at this perceived slight of Diane. "She didn't sleep either," I said.
"Oh? Really? And how would you know?"
Trapped. "We talked on the phone a little bit. . . ."
"She called you?"
"Yeah, around dawn."
"Jesus, Tyler, you're blushing."
"No I'm not."
"Yes you are."
I was saved by a brusque knock at the door: E. D. Lawton, who looked like he hadn't slept much either.
Jason's father was an intimidating presence. He was big, broad shouldered, hard to please, easily angered; on weekends he moved through the house like a storm front, all lightning and thunder. My mother had once said, "E.D.'s not the kind of person you really want attention from. I never did understand why Carol married him."
He wasn't exactly the classic self-made businessman—his grandfather, retired founder of a spectacularly successful San Francisco law firm, had bankrolled most of E.D.'s early ventures—but he had built himself a lucrative business in high-altitude instrumentation and lighter-than-air technology, and he had done it the hard way, without any real industry connections, at least when he started out.
He entered Jason's room scowling. His eyes lit on me and flashed away. "Sorry, Tyler, but you'll have to go home now. I need to discuss a few things with Jason."
Jase didn't object and I wasn't especially eager to stay. So I shrugged into my cloth jacket and left by the back door. I spent the rest of the afternoon by the creek, skipping stones and watching squirrels forage against the coming winter.
The sun, the moon, and the stars.
In the years that followed, children were raised who had never seen the moon with their own eyes; people only five or six years younger than myself passed into maturity knowing the stars mainly from old movies and a handful of increasingly inapt clichés. Once, in my thirties, I played the twentieth-century Antonio Carlos Jobin song Corcovado—"Quiet nights of quiet stars"—for a younger woman, who asked me, eyes earnestly wide, "Were the stars noisy?"
But we had lost something more subtle than a few lights in the sky. We had lost a reliable sense of place. The Earth is round, the moon circles the Earth, the Earth circles the sun: that was as much cosmology as most people owned or wanted, and I doubt one in a hundred thought more about it after high school. But they were baffled when it was stolen from them.
We didn't get an official announcement about the sun until the second week of the October Event.
The sun appeared to move in its predictable and eternal manner. It rose and set according to the standard ephemeris, the days grew shorter in their natural precession; there was nothing to suggest a solar emergency. Much on Earth, including life itself, depends on the nature and amount of solar radiation reaching the planet's surface, and in most respects that hadn't changed. Everything about the sun we could see with the naked eye suggested the same yellow class-G star we'd been blinking at all our lives.
What it lacked, however, were sunspots, prominences, or flares.
The sun is a violent, turbulent object. It seethes, it boils, it rings like a bell with vast energies; it bathes the solar system in a stream of charged particles that would kill us if we weren't protected from it by the Earth's magnetic field. But since the October Event, astronomers announced, the sun had become a geometrically perfect orb of unwaveringly uniform and unblemished brightness. And news came from the north that the aurora borealis, product of the interaction of our magnetic field with all those charged solar particles, had shut down like a bad Broadway play.
Other lapses in the new night sky: no shooting stars. The Earth used to accrete eighty million pounds of spaceborne dust annually, the vast majority of it incinerated by atmospheric friction. But no more: no detectable meteorites entered the atmosphere during the first weeks of the October Event, not even the microscopic ones called Brownlee particles. It was, in astrophysical terms, a deafening silence.
Not even Jason could offer an explanation for that.
So the sun wasn't the sun; but it went on shining, counterfeit or not, and as the
days passed, days layered and stacked on days, the bewilderment deepened but the sense of public urgency ebbed. (The water wasn't boiling, it was only warm.)
But what a rich source of talk it all was. Not just the celestial mystery but the immediate consequences of it: the telecom crash; the foreign wars no longer monitored and narrated by satellite; the GPS-guided smart bombs rendered irremediably stupid; the fiber-optic goldrush. Pronouncements were issued with depressing regularity from Washington: We have as yet no evidence of hostile intent on the part of any nation or agency and The best minds of our generation are working to understand, explain, and ultimately reverse the potential negative effects of this shroud that has obscured our view of the universe. Soothing word salad from an administration still hoping to identify an enemy, terrestrial or otherwise, capable of such an act. But the enemy was stubbornly elusive. People began to speak of "a hypothetical controlling intelligence." Unable to see past the walls of our prison, we were reduced to mapping its edges and corners.
Jason retreated to his room for most of a month after the Event. During this time I didn't speak to him directly, only caught glimpses of him when the twins were picked up by the Rice Academy minibus. But Diane called me on my cell almost every evening, usually around ten or eleven, when we could both count on a little privacy. And I treasured her calls, for reasons I wasn't quite ready to admit to myself.
"Jason's in a pissy mood," she told me one night. "He says if we don't know for sure if the sun is the sun, we don't really know anything at all."
"Maybe he's right."
"But it's almost a religious thing for Jase. He's always loved maps—did you know that, Tyler? Even when he was very little, he got the idea of how a map worked. He liked to know where he was. It makes sense of things, he used to say. God, I used to love to listen to him talk about maps. I think that's why he's so freaked now, even more than most people. Nothing's where it's supposed to be. He lost his map."
Of course, there were already clues in place. Before the week was out the military had begun to collect debris from fallen satellites—satellites that had been in stable orbits until that night in October but had plunged back to Earth before dawn, one and all, some leaving wreckage that was invested with tantalizing evidence. But it took time for that information to reach even the well-connected household of E. D. Lawton.
Our first winter of dark nights was claustrophobic and strange. Snow came
early: we lived within commuting distance of Washington, D.C., but by Christmas it looked more like Vermont. The news remained ominous. A fragile, hastily brokered peace treaty between India and Pakistan teetered toward war and back again; the U.N.-sponsored decontamination project in the Hindu Kush had already cost dozens of lives in addition to the original casualties. In northern Africa, brushfire wars smoldered while the armies of the industrial world withdrew to regroup. Oil prices skyrocketed. At home, we kept the thermostat a couple of degrees under comfortable until the days began to grow longer (when the sun came back and the first quail called).
But in the face of unknown and poorly understood threats the human race managed not to trigger a full-blown global war, to our credit. We made our adjustments and got on with business, and by spring people were talking about "the new normal." In the long run, it was understood, we might have to pay a higher price for whatever had happened to the planet . . . but in the long run, as they say, we're all dead.
I saw the change in my mother. The passage of time calmed her and the warm weather, when it finally came, drew some of the tension from her face. And I saw the change in Jason, who came out of his meditative retreat. I worried, though, about Diane, who refused to talk about the stars at all and had lately begun to ask whether I believed in God—whether I thought God was responsible for what had happened in October.
I wouldn't know about that, I told her. My family weren't churchgoers. The subject made me a little nervous, frankly.
That summer the three of us rode our bikes to the Fairway Mall for the last time.
We had made the trip a hundred, a thousand times before. The twins were already getting a little old for it, but in the seven years we had all lived on the property of the Big House it had become a ritual, the summer-Saturday inevitable. We skipped it on rainy or swelteringly hot weekends, but when the weather was fine we were drawn as if by an invisible hand to our meeting point at the end of the long Lawton driveway.
Today the air was gentle and breezy and the sunlight infused everything it touched with a deep organic warmth. It was as if the climate wanted to reassure us: the natural world was doing all right, thank you, almost ten months after the Event . . . even if we were (as Jase occasionally said) a cultivated planet now, a garden tended by unknown forces rather than a patch of cosmic wildwood.
Jason rode an expensive mountain bike, Diane a less flashy girls' equivalent. My bike was a secondhand junker my mother had bought for me at a thrift shop. No matter. What was important was the piney tang of the air and the empty hours arrayed before of us. I felt it, Diane felt it, and I think Jason felt it, too, though he seemed distracted and even a little embarrassed when we saddled up that morning. I put it down to stress or (this was August) the prospect of another school year. Jase was in an accelerated academic stream at Rice, a high-pressure school. Last year he had breezed through the math and physics courses—he could have taught them—but next semester he was signed up for a Latin credit. "It's not even a living language," he said. "Who the hell reads Latin, outside classical scholars? It's like learning FORTRAN. All the important texts were translated a long time ago. Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god's sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?"
I didn't take any of this too seriously. One of the things we liked to do on these rides was practice the art of complaining. (I had no idea who Alan Dershowitz was; some kid at Jason's school, I guessed.) But today his mood was volatile, erratic. He stood up on his pedals and biked a little way ahead of us.
The road to the mall wound past deeply treed lots and pastel houses with manicured gardens and embedded sprinklers that marked the morning air with rainbows. The sunlight might be fake, filtered, but it still broke into colors when it cut through falling water and it still felt like a blessing when we rolled from under the shading oaks onto the glittering white sidewalk.
Ten or fifteen minutes of easy riding later the top of Bantam Hill Road loomed ahead of us—last obstacle and major landmark on the way to the mall. Bantam Hill Road was steep, but on the other side it was a sweet long glide to the mall's parking lot. Jase was already a quarter of the way up. Diane gave me a mischievous look.
"Race you," she said.
That was dismaying. The twins had their birthdays in June. Mine was in October. Every summer they were not one but two years older than me: the twins had turned fourteen but I was still twelve for another frustrating four months. The difference translated into a physical advantage. Diane must have known I couldn't beat her up the hill, but she pedaled off anyway and I sighed and tried to pump my creaking old junker into plausible competition. It was no contest. Diane rose up on her gleaming contrivance of etched aluminum, and by the time she reached the upslope she had gained a ferocious momentum. A trio of little girls chalk-marking the sidewalk scurried out of her way. She shot a glance back at me, half encouraging, half taunting.
The rising road stole back her momentum, but she shifted gears deftly and put her legs to work again. Jason, at the peak, had stopped and balanced himself with one long leg, looking back quizzically. I labored on, but halfway up the hill my ancient bike was swaying more than moving and I was forced to sidle off and walk it the rest of the way up.
Diane grinned at me when I finally arrived.
"You win," I said.
"Sorry, Tyler. It wasn't really fair."
I shrugged, embarrassed.
Here the road ended in a cul-de-sac, where residential lots had been sketched with stakes and string but no houses built. The mall lay down a long, sandy decline to the west. A pressed-earth path cut through scrubby trees and berry bushes. "See you at the bottom," she said, and rolled away again.
We left our bikes locked to a rack and entered the glassy nave of the mall. The
mall was a reassuring environment, chiefly because it had changed so little since last October. The newspapers and television might still be in high-alert mode, but the mall lived in blessed denial. The only evidence that anything might have gone askew in the larger world was the absence of satellite dish displays at the consumer-electronics chain stores and a surge of October-related titles on the bookstore display racks. Jason snorted at one paperback with a high-gloss blue-and-gold cover, a book that claimed to link the October Event to Biblical prophecy: "The easiest kind of prophecy," he said, "is the kind that predicts things that have already happened."
Diane gave him an aggravated look. "You don't have to make fun of it just because you don't believe in it."
"Technically, I'm only making fun of the front cover. I haven't read the book."
"Maybe you should."
"Why? What are you defending here?"
"I'm not defending anything. But maybe God had something to do with last October. That doesn't seem so ridiculous."
"Actually," Jason said, "yes, it does seem ridiculous."
She rolled her eyes and stalked ahead of us, sighing to herself. Jase stuffed the book back in its display rack.
I told him I thought people just wanted to understand what had happened, that's why there were books like that.
"Or maybe people just want to pretend to understand. It's called 'denial.' You want to know something, Tyler?"
"Sure," I said.
"Keep it secret?" He lowered his voice so that even Diane, a few yards ahead, couldn't hear him. "This isn't public yet."
One of the remarkable things about Jason was that he often did know genuinely important things a day or two in advance of the evening news. In a sense Rice Academy was only his day school; his real education was conducted under the tutelage of his father, and from the beginning E.D. had wanted him to understand how business, science, and technology intersect with political power. E.D. had been working those angles himself. The loss of telecom satellites had opened up a vast new civilian and military market for the stationary high-altitude balloons ("aerostats") his company manufactured. A niche technology was going mainstream, and E.D. was riding the crest of the wave. And sometimes he shared secrets with his fifteen-year-old son he wouldn't have dared whisper to a competitor.
E.D., of course, didn't know Jase occasionally shared these secrets with me. But I was scrupulous about keeping them. (And anyway, who would I have told? I had no other real friends. We lived in the kind of new-money neighborhood where class distinctions were measured out with razor-sharp precision: the solemn, studious sons of single working mothers didn't make anyone's A list.)
He lowered his voice another notch. "You know the three Russian cosmonauts? The ones who were in orbit last October?"
Lost and presumed dead the night of the Event. I nodded.
"One of them's alive," he said. "Alive and in Moscow. The Russians aren't saying much. But the rumor is, he's completely crazy."
I gave him a wide-eyed look, but he wouldn't say anything more.
It took a dozen years for the truth to be made public, but when it was finally
published (as a footnote to a European history of the early Spin years) I thought of the day at the mall. What happened was this:
Three Russian cosmonauts had been in orbit the night of the October Event, returning from a housekeeping mission to the moribund International Space Station. A little after midnight Eastern Standard Time the mission commander, a Colonel Leonid Glavin, noted loss of signal from ground control and made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to reestablish contact.
Alarming as this must have been for the cosmonauts, it got worse fast. When the Soyuz crossed from the nightside of the planet into dawn it appeared that the planet they were circling had been replaced with a lightless black orb.
Colonel Glavin would eventually describe it just that way: as a blackness, an absence visible only when it occluded the sun, a permanent eclipse. The rapid orbital cycle of sunrise and sunset was their only convincing visual evidence that the Earth even existed any longer. Sunlight appeared abruptly from behind the silhouetted disc, cast no reflection in the darkness below, and vanished just as suddenly when the capsule slid into night.
The cosmonauts could not have comprehended what had happened, and their terror must have been unimaginable.
After a week spent orbiting the vacuous darkness beneath them the cosmonauts voted to attempt an unassisted reentry rather than remain in space or attempt a docking at the empty ISS—to die on Earth, or whatever Earth had become, rather than starve in isolation. But without ground guidance or visual landmarks they were forced to rely on calculations extrapolated from their last known position. As a result the Soyuz capsule reentered the atmosphere at a perilously steep angle, absorbed punishing G-forces, and lost a critical parachute during the descent.
The capsule came down hard on a forested hillside in the Ruhr Valley. Vassily Golubev was killed on impact; Valentina Kirchoff suffered a traumatic head injury and was dead within hours. A dazed Colonel Glavin, with only a broken wrist and minor abrasions, managed to exit the spacecraft and was eventually discovered by a German search-and-rescue team and repatriated to Russian authorities.
After repeated debriefings the Russians concluded that Glavin had lost his mind as a result of his ordeal. The colonel continued to insist that he and his crew had spent three weeks in orbit, but that was obviously madness. . . .
Because the Soyuz capsule, like every other recovered piece of man-made orbital gear, had fallen back to Earth the very night of the October Event.
We ate lunch at the food court in the mall, where Diane spotted three girls she
knew from Rice. These were older girls, to my eyes impossibly sophisticated, hair tinted blue or pink, wearing expensive bell-bottoms that rode low on their hips and tiny gold crosses on chains around their pale necks. Diane balled up her MexiTaco wrapper and defected to their table, where the four of them ducked their heads together and laughed. Suddenly my burrito and fries looked unappetizing.
Jason evaluated the look on my face. "You know," he said gently, "this is inevitable."
"What is?"
"She doesn't live in our world anymore. You, me, Diane, the Big House and the Little House, Saturday at the mall, Sunday at the movies. That worked when we were kids. But we're not kids anymore."
Weren't we? No, of course we weren't; but had I really considered what that meant or might mean?
"She's been getting her period for a year now," Jason added.
I blanched. This was more than I needed to know. And yet: I was jealous that he had known it and I had not. She hadn't told me about her period or her friends at Rice, either. All the confidences she had offered over the phone, I suddenly understood, had been kid confidences, stories about Jason and her parents and what she had hated at dinner. But here was evidence that she had hidden as much as she had shared; here was a Diane I had never met, blithely manifesting at a table across the aisle.
"We should go home," I told Jason.
He gave me a pitying look. "If you want to." He stood up.
"Are you going to tell Diane we're leaving?"
"I think she's busy, Tyler. I think she found something to do."
"But she has to come back with us."
"No she doesn't."
I took offense. She wouldn't just dump us. She was better than that. I stood and walked to Diane's table. Diane and her three friends gave me their full attention. I looked straight at Diane, ignoring the others. "We're going home," I said.
The three Rice girls laughed out loud. Diane just smiled embarrassedly and said, "Okay, Ty. That's great. See you later."
"But—"
But what? She wasn't even looking at me anymore.
As I walked away I heard one of her friends ask whether I was "another brother." No, she said. Just a kid she knew.
Jason, who had become annoyingly sympathetic, offered to trade bikes on the
ride home. I didn't really care about his bike at that point, but I thought a bike trade might be a way to disguise what I was feeling.
So we worked our way back to the top of Bantam Hill Road, to the place where the pavement stretched like a black ribbon down into tree-shaded streets. Lunch felt like a cinder block embedded under my ribs. I hesitated at the end of the cul-de-sac, eyeballing the steep incline of the road.
"Glide on down," Jason said. "Go ahead. Get the feel of it."
Would speed distract me? Would anything? I hated myself for having allowed myself to believe I was at the center of Diane's world. When I was, in fact, a kid she knew.
But it really was a wonderful bike Jason had lent me. I stood on the pedals, daring gravity to do its worst. The tires gritted on the dusty pavement but the chains and derailleurs were silky, silent except for the delicate whir of the bearings. Wind sluiced past me as I picked up speed. I flew past primly painted houses with expensive cars parked in their driveways, bereft but free. Near the bottom I began to squeeze the hand brakes, bleeding momentum without really slowing down. I didn't want to stop. I wanted never to stop. It was a good ride.
But the pavement leveled, and at last I braked and keeled and came to rest with my left shoe on the asphalt. I looked back.
Jason was still at the top of Bantam Hill Road with my own clunky bike under him, so far away now that he looked like a lone horseman in an old western. I waved. It was his turn.
Jason must have taken that hill, upslope and down, a thousand times. But he had never taken it on a rusty thrift-shop bike.
He fit the bicycle better than I did. His legs were longer than mine and the frame didn't dwarf him. But we had never traded bikes before, and now I thought of all the bugs and idiosyncrasies that bike possessed, and how intimately I knew it, how I had learned not to turn hard right because the frame was a little out of true, how you had to fight the wobble, how the gearbox was a joke. Jason didn't know any of that. The hill could be tricky. I wanted to tell him to take it slow, but even if I had shouted he wouldn't have heard me; I had zoomed too far ahead. He lifted his feet like a big gawky infant. The bike was heavy. It took a few seconds to gather speed, but I knew how hard it would be to stop. It was all mass, no grace. My hands gripped imaginary brakes.
I don't think Jason knew he had a problem until he was three quarters of the way down. That was when the bicycle's rust-choked chain snapped and flailed his ankle. He was close enough now that I could see him flinch and cry out. The bike wobbled but, miraculously, he managed to keep it upright.
A piece of the chain tangled in the rear wheel, where it whipped against the struts, making a sound like a broken jackhammer. Two houses up, a woman who had been weeding her garden covered her ears and turned to watch.
What was amazing was how long Jason managed to keep control of that bike. Jase was no athlete, but he was at home in his big, lanky body. He stuck his feet out for balance—the pedals were useless—and kept the front wheel forward while the back wheel locked and skidded. He held on. What astonished me was the way his body didn't stiffen but seemed to relax, as if he were engaged in some difficult but engaging act of problem-solving, as if he believed with absolute confidence that the combination of his mind, his body, and the machine he was riding could be counted on to carry him to safety.
It was the machine that failed first. That dangerously flapping fragment of greasy chain wedged itself between the tire and the frame. The wheel, already weakened, bent impossibly out of true and then folded, scattering torn rubber and liberated ball bearings. Jason came free of the bike and tumbled through the air like a mannequin dropped from a high window. His feet hit the pavement first, then his knees, his elbows, his head. He came to a stop as the fractured bike rotated past him. It landed in the gutter at the side of the road, the front tire still spinning and clattering. I dropped his bike and ran to him.
He rolled over and looked up, momentarily bewildered. His pants and shirt were torn. His forehead and the tip of his nose had been brutally skinned and were bleeding freely. His ankle was lacerated. His eyes watered from the pain. "Tyler," he said. "Oh, uh, uh . . . sorry about your bike, man."
Not to make too much of this incident, but I thought of it occasionally in the years that followed—Jason's machine and Jason's body locked into a dangerous acceleration, and his unflappable belief that he could make it come out right, all by himself, if only he tried hard enough, if only he didn't lose control.
We left the hopelessly broken bicycle in the gutter and I walked Jason's high-
end wheels home for him. He trudged beside me, hurting but trying not to show it, holding his right hand over his oozing forehead as if he had a bad headache, which I guessed he did.
Back at the Big House, both Jason's parents came down the porch steps to meet us in the driveway. E. D. Lawton, who must have spotted us from his study, looked angry and alarmed, his mouth puckered into a frown and his eyebrows crowding his sharp eyes. Jason's mom, behind him, was aloof, less interested, maybe even a little drunk by the way she swayed when she walked out the door.
E.D. examined Jase—who suddenly seemed much younger and less sure of himself—then told him to run in the house and clean up.
Then he turned to me.
"Tyler," he said.
"Sir?"
"I'm assuming you're not responsible for this. I hope that's true."
Had he noticed that my own bike was missing and that Jason's was unscathed? Was he accusing me of something? I didn't know what to say. I looked at the lawn.
E.D. sighed. "Let me explain something. You're Jason's friend. That's good. Jason needs that. But you have to understand, as your mother understands, that your presence here comes with certain responsibilities. If you want to spend time with Jason, I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Maybe he seems ordinary to you. But he's not. Jason's gifted, and he has a future ahead of him. We can't let anything interfere with that."
"Right," Carol Lawton chimed in, and now I knew for a fact that Jason's mom had been drinking. She tilted her head and almost stumbled into the gravel berm that separated the driveway from the hedge. "Right, he's a fucking genius. He's going to be the youngest genius at M.I.T. Don't break him, Tyler, he's fragile."
E.D. didn't take his eyes off me. "Go inside, Carol," he said tonelessly. "Do we understand each other, Tyler?"
"Yessir," I lied.
I didn't understand E.D. at all. But I knew some of what he had said was true. Yes, Jason was special. And yes, it was my job to look after him.