The Age Of Miracles

The next day, Julia’s school returns to clock time, starting sharply at 9 a.m. Due to the rapidly lengthening nights, the children arrive at the bus stop to be taken to school when it is completely dark outside. Julia’s mother is hesitant to leave Julia at the bus stop in such darkness: “My mother waited in the car at the curb until the bus arrived, convinced that danger, like potatoes, breeds in the dark” (95).

It is around lunchtime at 12:34 p.m. when the Sun finally rises, right in the middle of Julia’s school day. In the quad, Julia is surprised to see Hanna back at school. Julia approaches her sitting at a lunch table and greets her. Their conversation is strained, and Hanna flatly says that her family returned from Utah because of something related to Hanna’s dad’s job. Julia is confused by Hanna’s terseness: “We’d been friends for years, but a new shyness had flowered between us. I felt as if she were some second cousin, the two of us stranded at a family reunion, connected in some loose way but with no idea what to say to one another. She’d only been gone for three weeks” (98). Tracey, another Mormon girl like Hanna, approaches them, carrying lunches for both Hanna and herself. Tracey and Hanna are also wearing matching outfits. Julia senses that she and Hanna have grown apart. 

Julia notes that environmentalists, herbalists, holistic-health enthusiasts, and other types of naturalists had been warning against a natural catastrophe like “the slowing” for decades. Similarly, though with a different political outlooks, survivalists, back-to-the-landers, and other kinds of fundamentalists also had been “sounding the alarm” that the United States was headed toward natural disaster. Once “the slowing” begins, these are the individuals who refuse to abide by clock time. Julia notes that you could not always tell who the real-timers were at first.

At her next piano lesson, Sylvia gives Julia an envelope addressed to Julia’s parents. Inside, it states that Sylvia will be going to “real time” and that she would do her best to accommodate her piano students still on clock time. When she receives the news, Helen remarks that she never approved of Sylvia’s lifestyle and forbids Julia from taking piano lessons with her going forward. Other real-timers in Julia’s neighborhood include free spirits Tom and Carlotta, the old hippie couple with “Make Love Not War” bumper stickers on their trucks and hemp jewelry.

Julia worries for real-timers, particularly Sylvia: “She soon lost most of her [piano] students, and I worried for her. [...] Inevitably, Sylvia and other real-timers must have arranged certain aspects of their lives around ours, or else they simply went without” (108).

The decision to go on clock time has unexpected consequences in the economic market: “In the first few weeks on clock time, sales of prescription sleeping pills spiked. The manufacturers of blackout curtains could not keep up with demand. Sleep masks went on backorder for months” (109). The use of illicit drugs also spikes: “Sales of alcohol and cigarettes also increased, and there is some evidence that clock time spelled big business for the harder drugs, too. Urban police departments reported steep rises in the price per ounce of anything capable of knocking a person out” (109). Julia’s mother struggles with her insomnia subsequent side effects. Julia observes how “[t]he skin beneath her [mother’s] eyes turned a shadowy gray” and how her mother now “cried over the tiniest of things” (110).

Birds continue to die-off rapidly. At the bus stop, Seth Moreno leads the effort to save a bird that is just barely alive. As the kids gather around the weak bird, Daryl suddenly snatches it and hurls it into a nearby canyon. As retribution, Seth throws Daryl’s backpack into the canyon.

Around this time, Seth’s mother dies of breast cancer, and Seth takes a leave of absence from school to mourn. Julia, unsure of what to say but wanting to reach out, sends him a greeting card with “I’m sorry” written inside.

By the end of November, Julia reports that a single day has stretched to 40 hours long. The difference between clock-timers and real-timers is becoming more obvious: “The few people who had rejected clock time carried on, living like bean sprouts, reacting to sunlight when it appeared and going dormant whenever our patch of earth slipped into the dark. Already, these real-timers seemed very different from us, their customs incompatible with ours” (115). Real-timers, even at this early stage in “the slowing,” are “widely regarded as freaks” (115) and they do not mix with clock-timers. Those who live in Julia’s neighborhood are targeted for petty attacks, such as having their homes covered with toilet paper and other acts of vandalism.

Julia and her father drive down to the coast to look at what the ocean has done to the beachfront houses, which have been evacuated since “the slowing had mysteriously swelled the tides” (116). At low tide, however, the houses could be explored “like sunken ships, exposed” (116) and so Julia and her father enter an enormous house that has been long abandoned. In the house, Julia’s father is increasingly excited to be exploring the wreckage, but Julia is worried that the tide will rush back in and drown them. As water pools in, Joel recalls how, many years ago, he went to a party in the same house with an old girlfriend. Preoccupied with their safety, Julia urges that they flee the house as the foamy sea water rises higher. Julia’s father remarks that she is starting to become a worrier, just like her mother.

Nonconformists Tom and Carlotta are arrested in the middle of the night because, as it’s speculated, they are growing marijuana in their house. However, Tom and Carlotta have been growing for years, yet only after they announced themselves as real-timers are they reported to the police. Julia worries about Sylvia because society is becoming increasingly hostile to real-timers. Some real-timers even flee to “makeshift communities in the deserts and woodlands of this country” (121).