On top of that, college and med school had been one long, relentless, grueling, but welcome, distraction from the rest of the world's woes.
So I coped. Jason coped. But many people had a much rougher time. Diane was one of them.
* * * * *
I was cleaning out my one-bedroom rental at Stony Brook when Jason called.
It was early in the afternoon. The optical illusion indistinguishable from the sun was shining brightly. My Hyundai was packed and ready for the drive home. I had planned to spend a couple of weeks with my mother, then drive across country in a lazy week or two. This was my last free time before I started interning at Harborview in Seattle, and I intended to use it to see the world, or at least the part of it bracketed between Maine and the state of Washington. But Jason had other ideas. He barely let me get out a hello-how-are-you before he launched into his pitch.
"Tyler," he said, "this is too good to pass up. E.D. rented a summerhouse in the Berkshires."
"Did he? Good for him."
"But he can't use it. Last week he was touring an aluminum extrusion plant in Michigan and he fell off a loading platform and cracked his hip."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"It's not serious, he's recovering, but he's on crutches for a while and he doesn't want to ferry himself all the way to Massachusetts just so he can sit around and suck Percodan. And Carol wasn't that enthusiastic about the idea to begin with." Not surprisingly. Carol had become a career drunk. I couldn't imagine what she would have done in the Berkshires with E. D. Lawton, except drink some more. "The thing is," Jase went on, "he can't back out of the contract, so the house is empty for three months. So I thought, with you finishing med school and all, maybe we could get together for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe talk Diane into joining us. Take in a concert. Walk in the woods. Be like old times. I'm headed there now, actually. What do you say, Tyler?"
I was about to turn him down. But I thought about Diane. I thought about the few letters and phone calls we had exchanged on the predictable occasions and all the unanswered questions that had stacked up between us. I knew the wise thing would be to beg off. But it was too late: my mouth had already said yes.
* * * * *
So I spent another night on Long Island; then I crammed the last of my worldly possessions into the trunk of the car and followed the Northern State Parkway to the Long Island Expressway.
Traffic was light and the weather was ridiculously pretty. It was a tall blue afternoon, just pleasantly warm. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. I felt as stupidly, corporeally happy as I'd been in a long time.
Then I turned on the radio.
I was old enough to remember when a "radio station" was a building with a transmitter and a tower antenna, when radio reception flooded and ebbed from town to town. Plenty of those stations still existed, but the Hyundai's analog radio had died about a week out of warranty. Which left digital programming (relayed through one or more of E.D.'s high-atmosphere aerostats). Usually I listened to twentieth-century jazz downloads, a taste I'd picked up rummaging through my father's disc collection. This, I liked to pretend, was his real legacy to me: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, music that had been old even when Marcus Dupree was young, passed down surreptitiously, like a family secret. What I wanted to hear right now was "Harlem Air Shaft," but the guy who serviced the car before the trip had dumped my presets and programmed a news channel I couldn't seem to lose. So I was stuck with natural disasters and celebrity misbehavior. There was even talk of the Spin.
We had begun calling it the Spin by then.
Even though most of the world didn't believe in it.
The polls were pretty clear about that. NASA had released data from their orbital probes the night Jason broke the news to Diane and me, and a flurry of European launches confirmed the American results. But still, eight years after the Spin had been made public, only a minority of Europeans and North Americans considered it "a threat to themselves or their families." In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sturdy majorities considered the whole thing a U.S. plot or accident, probably a failed attempt to create some kind of SDI defense system.
I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, "Consider what we're asking them to believe. We're talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy. How much do you really need to know about the moon and the stars when your life consists of scrounging enough biomass to feed yourself and your family? To say anything meaningful about the Spin to those people you have to start a long way back. The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with. Let them wrestle with the concept of 'a billion years,' maybe for the first time. It's a lot to swallow, especially if you've been educated in a Moslem theocracy, an animist village, or a public school in the Bible Belt. Then tell them the Earth isn't changeless, that there was an era longer than our own when the oceans were steam and the air was poison. Tell them how living things arose spontaneously and evolved sporadically for three billion years before they produced the first arguably human being. Then talk about the sun, how the sun isn't permanent either but started out as a contracting cloud of gas and dust and will one day, some few more billion years from now, expand and swallow the Earth and eventually blow off its own outer layers and shrink to a nugget of superdense matter. Cosmology 101, right? You picked it up from all those paperbacks you used to read, it's second nature to you, but for most people it's a whole new worldview and probably offensive to a bunch of their core beliefs. So let that sink in. Let that sink in, then deliver the real bad news. Time itself is fluid and unpredictable. The world that looks so ruggedly normal—in spite of everything we just learned—has recently been locked up in a kind of cosmological cold storage. Why has this been done to us? We don't exactly know. We think it's caused by the deliberate action of entities so powerful and inaccessible they might as well be called gods. And if we anger the gods they might withdraw their protection, and pretty soon the mountains will melt and the oceans will boil. But don't take our word for it. Ignore the sunset and the snow that comes to the mountain every winter same as always. We have proof. We have calculations and logical inferences and photographs taken by machines. Forensic evidence of the highest caliber." Jason had smiled one of his quizzical, sad smiles. "Strangely, the jury is unconvinced."
And it wasn't only the ignorant who weren't convinced. On the radio, an insurance industry CEO began to complain about the economic impact of "all this relentless, uncritical discussion of the so-called Spin." People were starting to take it seriously, he said. And that was bad for business. It made people reckless. It encouraged immorality, crime, and deficit spending. Worse, it screwed up the actuary tables. "If the world doesn't come to an end in the next thirty or forty years," he said, "we may be facing disaster."
Clouds began to roll in from the west An hour later that gorgeous blue sky was flatly overcast and raindrops began spattering the windshield. I put the headlights on.
The news on the radio progressed from actuary tables. There was much talk of something else from recent headlines: the silver boxes, big as cities, hovering outside the Spin barrier, hundreds of miles above both poles of the Earth. Hovering, not orbiting. An object can hang in a stable orbit over the equator—geosynchronous satellites used to do that—but nothing, by the most elementary laws of motion, can "orbit" in a fixed position above the planet's pole. And yet here these things were, detected by a radar probe and lately photographed from an unmanned fly-by mission: another layer of the mystery of the Spin, and just as incomprehensible to the untutored masses, in this case including me. I wanted to talk to Jason about it. I think I wanted him to make sense of it for me.