I was twelve, and the twins were thirteen, the night the stars disappeared from the sky.
It was October, a couple of weeks before Halloween, and the three of us had been ordered to the basement of the Lawton house—the Big House, we called it—for the duration of an adults-only social event.
Being confined to the basement wasn't any kind of punishment. Not for Diane and Jason, who spent much of their time there by choice; certainly not for me. Their father had announced a strictly defined border between the adults' and the children's zones of the house, but we had a high-end gaming platform, movies on disk, even a pool table . . . and no adult supervision apart from one of the regular caterers, a Mrs. Truall, who came downstairs every hour or so to dodge canapé duty and give us updates on the party. (A man from Hewlett-Packard had disgraced himself with the wife of a Post columnist. There was a drunken senator in the den.) All we lacked, Jason said, was silence (the upstairs system was playing dance music that came through the ceiling like an ogre's heartbeat) and a view of the sky.
Silence and a view: Jase, typically, had decided he wanted both.
Diane and Jason had been born minutes apart but were obviously fraternal rather than identical siblings; no one but their mother called them twins. Jason used to say they were the product of "dipolar sperm penetrating oppositely charged eggs." Diane, whose IQ was nearly as impressive as Jason's but who kept her vocabulary on a shorter leash, compared them to "different prisoners who escaped from the same cell."
I was in awe of them both.
Jason, at thirteen, was not only scary-smart but physically fit—not especially muscular but vigorous and often successful at track and field. He was nearly six feet tall even then, skinny, his gawky face redeemed by a lopsided and genuine smile. His hair, in those days, was blond and wiry.
Diane was five inches shorter, plump only by comparison with her brother, and darker skinned. Her complexion was clear except for the freckles that ringed her eyes and gave her a hooded look: My raccoon mask, she used to say. What I liked most about Diane—and I had reached an age when these details had taken on a poorly understood but undeniable significance—was her smile. She smiled rarely but spectacularly. She was convinced her teeth were too prominent (she was wrong), and she had picked up the habit of covering her mouth when she laughed. I liked to make her laugh, but it was her smile I secretly craved.
Last week Jason's father had given him a pair of expensive astronomical binoculars. He had been fidgeting with them all evening, taking sightings on the framed travel poster over the TV, pretending to spy on Cancun from the suburbs of Washington, until at last he stood up and said, "We ought to go look at the sky."
"No," Diane said promptly. "It's cold out there."
"But clear. It's the first clear night this week. And it's only chilly."
"There was ice on the lawn this morning."
"Frost," he countered.
"It's after midnight."
"It's Friday night."
"We're not supposed to leave the basement."
"We're not supposed to disturb the party. Nobody said anything about going outside. Nobody will see us, if you're afraid of getting caught."
"I'm not afraid of getting caught."
"So what are you afraid of?"
"Listening to you babble while my feet freeze."
Jason turned to me. "How about you, Tyler? Want to see some sky?"
The twins often asked me to referee their arguments, much to my discomfort. It was a no-win proposition. If I sided with Jason I might alienate Diane; but if I sided too often with Diane it would look . . . well, obvious. I said, "I don't know, Jase, it is pretty chilly outside . . ."
It was Diane who let me off the hook. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Never mind. I suppose a little fresh air is better than listening to him complain."
So we grabbed our jackets from the basement hallway and left by the back door.
The Big House wasn't as grandiose as our nickname for it implied, but it was larger than the average home in this middling-high-income neighborhood and it sat on a bigger parcel of land. A great rolling expanse of manicured lawn gave way, behind it, to an uncultivated stand of pines bordering a mildly polluted creek. Jason chose a spot for stargazing halfway between the house and the woods.
The month of October had been pleasant until yesterday, when a cold front had broken the back of Indian summer. Diane made a show of hugging her ribs and shivering, but that was only to chastise Jason. The night air was merely cool, not unpleasant. The sky was crystalline and the grass was reasonably dry, though there might be frost again by morning. No moon and not a trace of cloud. The Big House was lit up like a Mississippi steamboat and cast its fierce yellow glare across the lawn, but we knew from experience that on nights like this, if you stood in the shadow of a tree, you'd disappear as absolutely as if you had fallen into a black hole.
Jason lay on his back and aimed his binoculars at the starry sky.
I sat cross-legged next to Diane and watched as she took from her jacket pocket a cigarette, probably stolen from her mother. (Carol Lawton, a cardiologist and nominal ex-smoker, kept packs of cigarettes secreted in her dresser, her desk, a kitchen drawer. My mother had told me this.) She put it to her lips and lit it with a translucent red lighter—the flame was momentarily the brightest thing around—and exhaled a plume of smoke that swirled briskly into the darkness.
She caught me watching her. "You want a drag?"
"He's twelve years old," Jason said. "He has enough problems. He doesn't need lung cancer."
"Sure," I said. It was a point of honor now.
Diane, amused, passed me the cigarette. I inhaled tentatively and managed not to choke.
She took it back. "Don't get carried away."
"Tyler," Jason said, "do you know anything about the stars?"
I gulped a lungful of cold, clean air. "Of course I do."
"I don't mean what you learn from reading those paperbacks. Can you name any stars?"
I was blushing, but I hoped it was dark enough that he couldn't see. "Arcturus," I said. "Alpha Centauri. Sirius. Polaris . . ."
"And which one," Jason asked, "is the Klingon homeworld?"
"Don't be mean," Diane said.
Both the twins were precociously intelligent. I was no dummy, but they were out of my league, and we all understood that. They attended a school for exceptional children; I rode the bus to public school. It was one of the several obvious distinctions between us. They lived in the Big House, I lived with my mother in the bungalow at the east end of the property; their parents pursued careers, my mother cleaned house for them. Somehow we managed to acknowledge these differences without making a big deal of it.
"Okay," Jason said, "can you point at Polaris?"
Polaris, the North Star. I had been reading about slavery and the civil war. There had been a fugitive slave song:
When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
The old man is waiting to carry you to freedom
When you follow the Drinking Gourd.
"When the sun comes back" meant after the winter solstice. Quail winter in the south. The gourd was the Big Dipper, wide end of the bowl pointed at Polaris, due north, the direction of freedom: I found the Dipper and waved my hand hopefully in that direction.
"See?" Diane said to Jason, as if I had proved a point in some argument they hadn't bothered to share with me.
"Not bad," Jason allowed. "You know what a comet is?"
"Yes."
"Want to see one?"
I nodded and stretched out next to him, still tasting and regretting the acrid tang of Diane's cigarette. Jason showed me how to brace my elbows on the ground, then let me hold the binoculars to my eyes and adjust the focus until the stars became blurred ovals and then pinpricks, many more than I could see with the naked eye. I panned around until I found, or guessed I had found, the spot to which Jason had directed me: a tiny node of phosphorescence against the merciless black sky.
"A comet—" Jason began.
"I know. A comet is a sort of dusty snowball falling toward the sun."
"You could say that." He was scornful. "Do you know where comets come from, Tyler? They come from the outer solar system—from a kind of icy halo around the sun that reaches from the orbit of Pluto halfway to the nearest star. Out where it's colder than you can possibly imagine."
I nodded, a little uncomfortably. I had read enough science fiction to grasp the sheer, unspeakable largeness of the night sky. It was something I sometimes liked to think about, though it could be—at the wrong time of night, when the house was quiet—a little intimidating.
"Diane?" Jason said. "You want to look?"
"Do I have to?"
"No, of course you don't have to. You can sit there fumigating your lungs and drooling, if you prefer."
"Smartass." She stubbed the cigarette into the grass and held out her hand. I passed over the binoculars.
"Just be careful with those." Jase was deeply in love with his binoculars. They still smelled of shrinkwrap and Styrofoam packing.
She adjusted the focus and looked up. She was silent for a time. Then she said, "You know what I see when I use these things to look at the stars?"
"What?"
"Same old stars."
"Use your imagination." He sounded genuinely annoyed.
"If I can use my imagination why do I need binoculars?"
"I mean, think about what you're looking at."
"Oh," she said. Then: "Oh. Oh! Jason, I see—"
"What?"
"I think . . . yes . . . it's God! And he has a long white beard! And he's holding up a sign! And the sign says . . . JASON SUCKS!"
"Very funny. Give them back if you don't know how to use them."
He held out his hand; she ignored him. She sat upright and aimed the binoculars at the windows of the Big House.
The party had been going on since late that afternoon. My mother had told me the Lawtons' parties were "expensive bull sessions for corporate bigshots," but she had a finely honed sense of hyperbole, so you had to take that down a notch or two. Most of the guests, Jason had said, were aerospace up-and-comers or political staffers. Not old Washington society, but well-heeled newcomers with western roots and defense-industry connections. E. D. Lawton, Jason and Diane's father, hosted one of these events every three or four months.
"Business as usual," Diane said from behind the twin ovals of the binoculars. "First floor, dancing and drinking. More drinking than dancing at this point. It looks like the kitchen's closing up, though. I think the caterers are getting ready to go home. Curtains pulled in the den. E.D.'s in the library with a couple of suits. Ew! One of them is smoking a cigar."
"Your disgust is unconvincing," Jason said. "Ms. Marlboro."
She went on cataloguing the visible windows while Jason scooted over next to me. "Show her the universe," he whispered, "and she'd rather spy on a dinner party."
I didn't know how to respond to that. Like so much of what Jason said, it sounded witty and more clever than anything I could come up with.
"My bedroom," Diane said. "Empty, thank God. Jason's bedroom, empty except for the copy of Penthouse under the mattress—"
"They're good binoculars, but not that good."
"Carol and E.D.'s bedroom, empty; the spare bedroom . . ."
"Well?"
But Diane said nothing. She sat very still with the binoculars against her eyes.
"Diane?" I said.
She was silent for a few seconds more. Then she shuddered, turned, and tossed—threw—the binoculars back at Jason, who protested but didn't seem to grasp that Diane had seen something disturbing. I was about to ask her if she was all right—
When the stars disappeared.
It wasn't much.
People often say that, people who saw it happen. It wasn't much. It really wasn't, and I speak as a witness: I had been watching the sky while Diane and Jason bickered. There was nothing but a moment of odd glare that left an afterimage of the stars imprinted on my eyes in cool green phosphorescence. I blinked. Jason said, "What was that? Lightning?" And Diane said nothing at all.
"Jason," I said, still blinking.
"What? Diane, I swear to God, if you cracked a lens on these things—"
"Shut up," Diane said.
And I said, "Stop it. Look. What happened to the stars?"
They both turned their heads to the sky.
Of the three of us, only Diane was prepared to believe that the stars had actu-
ally "gone out"—that they had been extinguished like candles in a wind. That was impossible, Jason insisted: the light from those stars had traveled fifty or a hundred or a hundred million light-years, depending on the source; surely they had not all stopped shining in some infinitely elaborate sequence designed to appear simultaneous to Earthlings. Anyway, I pointed out, the sun was a star, too, and it was still shining, at least on the other side of the planet—wasn't it?
Of course it was. And if not, Jason said, we would all be frozen to death by morning.
So, logically, the stars were still shining but we couldn't see them. They were not gone but obscured: eclipsed. Yes, the sky had suddenly become an ebony blankness, but it was a mystery, not a catastrophe.
But another aspect of Jason's comment had lodged in my imagination. What if the sun actually had vanished? I pictured snow sifting down in perpetual darkness, and then, I guessed, the air itself freezing out in a different kind of snow, until all human civilization was buried under the stuff we breathe. Better, therefore, oh definitely better, to assume the stars had been "eclipsed." But by what?
"Well, obviously, something big. Something fast. You saw it happen, Tyler. Was it all at once or did something kind of move across the sky?"
I told him it looked like the stars had brightened and then blinked out, all at once.
"Fuck the stupid stars," Diane said. (I was shocked: fuck wasn't a word she customarily used, though Jase and I were pretty free with it now that both our ages had reached double digits. Many things had changed this summer.)
Jason heard the anxiety in her voice. "I don't think there's anything to be afraid of," he said, although he was clearly uneasy himself.
Diane just scowled. "I'm cold," she said.
So we decided to go back to the Big House and see if the news had made CNN or CNBC. The sky as we crossed the lawn was unnerving, utterly black, weightless but heavy, darker than any sky I had ever seen.
"We have to tell E.D.," Jason said.
"You tell him," Diane said.
Jase and Diane called their parents by their given names because Carol Lawton imagined she kept a progressive household. The reality was more complex. Carol was indulgent but not terribly involved in the twins' lives, while E.D. was systematically grooming an heir. That heir, of course, was Jason. Jason worshipped his father. Diane was afraid of him.
And I knew better than to show my face in the adult zone at the boozy tag-end of a Lawton social event; so Diane and I hovered in the demilitarized zone behind a door while Jason found his father in an adjoining room. We couldn't hear the resulting conversation in any detail, but there was no mistaking E.D.'s tone of voice—aggrieved, impatient, and short-tempered. Jason came back to the basement red-faced and nearly crying, and I excused myself and headed for the back door.
Diane caught up with me in the hallway. She put her hand on my wrist as if to anchor us together. "Tyler," she said. "It will come up, won't it? The sun, I mean, in the morning. I know it's a stupid question. But the sun will rise, right?"
She sounded absolutely bereft. I started to say something flippant—we'll all be dead if it doesn't—but her anxiety prompted doubts of my own. What exactly had we seen, and what did it mean? Jason clearly hadn't been able to convince his father that anything important had happened in the night sky, so maybe we were scaring ourselves over nothing. But what if the world really was ending, and only we three knew it?
"We'll be okay," I said.
She regarded me through pickets of lank hair. "You believe that?"
I tried to smile. "Ninety percent."
"But you're going to stay up till morning, aren't you?"
"Maybe. Probably." I knew I didn't feel like sleeping.
She made a thumb-and-pinky gesture: "Can I call you later?"
"Sure."
"I probably won't sleep. And—I know this sounds dumb—in case I do, will you call me as soon as the sun comes up?"
I said I would.
"Promise?"
"Promise." I was thrilled that she'd asked.
The house where I lived with my mother was a neat clapboard bungalow on
the east end of the Lawton property. A small rose garden fenced with pine rails braced the front steps—the roses themselves had bloomed well into the fall but had withered in the latest gush of cold air. On this moonless, cloudless, starless night, the porch light gleamed like a beacon.
I entered quietly. My mother had long since retreated to her bedroom. The small living room was tidy save for a single empty shotglass on the side table: she was a five-day teetotaler but took a little whiskey on the weekends. She used to say she had only two vices, and a drink on Saturday night was one of them. (Once, when I asked her what the other one was, she gave me a long look and said, "Your father." I didn't press the subject.)
I stretched out on the empty sofa with a book and read until Diane called, less than an hour later. The first thing she said was, "Have you turned on the TV?"
"Should I?"
"Don't bother. There's nothing on."
"Well, you know, it is two in the morning."
"No, I mean absolutely nothing. There are infomercials on local cable, but nothing else. What does that mean, Tyler?"
What it meant was that every satellite in orbit had vanished along with the stars. Telecom, weather, military satellites, the GPS system: all of them had been shut down in the blink of an eye. But I didn't know any of that and I certainly couldn't have explained it to Diane. "It could mean anything."
"It's a little frightening."
"Probably nothing to worry about."
"I hope not. I'm glad you're still awake."
She called back an hour later with more news. The Internet was also missing in action, she said. And local TV had begun to report canceled morning flights out of Reagan and the regional airports, warning people to call ahead.
"But there have been jets flying all night." I'd seen their running lights from the bedroom window, false stars, fast-moving. "I guess military. It could be some terrorist thing."
"Jason's in his room with a radio. He's pulling in stations from Boston and New York. He says they're talking about military activity and airport lockdowns, but nothing about terrorism—and nothing about the stars."
"Somebody must have noticed."
"If they did they're not mentioning it. Maybe they have orders not to mention it. They haven't mentioned sunrise, either."
"Why would they? The sun's supposed to come up in, what, an hour? Which means it's already rising out over the ocean. Off the Atlantic coast. Ships at sea must have seen it. We'll see it, before long."
"I hope so." She sounded simultaneously frightened and embarrassed. "I hope you're right."
"You'll see."
"I like your voice, Tyler. Did I ever tell you that? You have a very reassuring voice."
Even if what I said was pure bullshit.
But the compliment affected me more than I wanted her to know. I thought about it after she hung up. I played it over in my head for the sake of the warm feeling it provoked. And I wondered what that meant. Diane was a year older than me and three times as sophisticated—so why did I feel so suddenly protective of her, and why did I wish she was close enough that I could touch her face and promise everything would be all right? It was a puzzle almost as urgent and nearly as disturbing as whatever had happened to the sky.
She called again at ten to five, when I had almost, despite myself, drifted off to
sleep, fully dressed. I groped the phone out of my shirt pocket. "Hello?"
"Just me. It's still dark, Tyler."
I glanced at the window. Yes. Dark. Then the bedside clock. "Not quite sunrise, Diane."
"Were you asleep?"
"No."
"Yeah, you were. Lucky you. It's still dark. Cold, too. I looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Thirty-five degrees. Should it be that cold?"
"It was that cold yesterday morning. Anyone else awake at your place?"
"Jason's locked in his room with his radio. My, uh, parents are, uh, I guess sleeping off the party. Is your mom awake?"
"Not this early. Not on a weekend." I cast a nervous glance at the window. Surely by this time there ought to be some light in the sky. Even a hint of daylight would have been reassuring.
"You didn't wake her up?"
"What's she going to do, Diane? Make the stars come back?"
"I guess not." She paused. "Tyler," she said.
"I'm still here."
"What's the first thing you remember?"
"What do you mean—today?"
"No. The first thing you can remember in your life. I know it's a stupid question, but I think I'll be okay if we can just talk about something else besides the sky for five or ten minutes."
"The first thing I remember?" I gave it some thought. "That would be back in L.A., before we moved east." When my father was still alive and still working for E. D. Lawton at their startup firm in Sacramento. "We had this apartment with big white curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze." The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. "What about you?"
The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father's prisoner.
It wasn't a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.
We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, "Check out the sky."
I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.
I didn't want to confess to the relief I felt.
"I guess you were right," she said, suddenly buoyant. "The sun's coming up after all."
Of course, it wasn't really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn't know that yet.