The sky over the Berkshires, at least, was as cloudless as Waterford crystal when the Chinese payloads reached their targets, 7:55 Eastern time.
* * * * *
I was with Diane in the front room when the house phone rang.
Did we notice anything before Jason's call? A change in the light, something as insignificant as the feeling that a cloud might have passed in front of the sun? No. Nothing. All my attention was on Diane. We were drinking coolers and talking about trivia. Books we'd read, movies we'd seen. The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. What we said was trite and conventional, but the undertalk was deep and occasionally treacherous.
And pretty soon we were flirting with each other, as if Simon Townsend and the last eight years signified nothing. Joking at first, then maybe not joking. I told her I'd missed her. She said, "There were times I wanted to talk to you. Needed to talk to you. But I didn't have your number, or I figured you were busy."
"You could have found my number. I wasn't busy."
"You're right. Actually it was more like… moral cowardice."
"Am I that frightening?"
"Not you. Our situation. I suppose I felt as if I ought to apologize to you. And I didn't know how to begin to do that." She smiled wanly. "I guess I still don't."
"There's nothing to apologize for, Diane."
"Thank you for saying so, but I happen to disagree. We're not kids anymore. It's possible to look back with a certain amount of insight. We were as close as two people can be without actually touching. But that was the one thing we couldn't do. Or even talk about. As if we had taken an oath of silence."
"Since the night the stars disappeared," I said, dry-mouthed, aghast at myself, terrified, aroused.
Diane waved her hand. "That night. That night—you know what I remember about that night? Jason's binoculars. I was looking at the Big House while you two stared off into the sky. I really don't remember the stars at all. What I remember is catching sight of Carol in one of the back bedrooms with somebody from the catering service. She was drunk and it looked like she was making a pass." She laughed bashfully. "That was my own little apocalypse. Everything I already hated about the Big House, about my family, it was all summed up in one night. I just wanted to pretend it didn't exist. No Carol, no E.D., no Jason—"
"No me?"
She moved across the sofa and, because it had become that kind of conversation, put a hand on my cheek. Her hand was cool, the temperature of the drink she'd been holding. "You were the exception. I was scared. You were incredibly patient. I appreciated that."
"But we couldn't—"
"Touch."
"Touch. E.D. would never have stood for it."
She took her hand away. "We could have hidden it from him if we'd wanted to. But you're right, E.D. was the problem. He infected everything. It was obscene, the way he made your mother live a kind of second-class existence. It was debasing. Can I confess this? I absolutely hated being his daughter. I especially hated the idea that if anything, you know, happened between us, it might be your way of taking revenge on E. D. Lawton."
She sat back, a little surprised at herself, I think.
"Of course," I said carefully, "it wouldn't have been."
"I was confused."
"Is that what NK is for you? Revenge on E.D.?"
"No," she said, still smiling, "I don't love Simon just because he makes my father angry. Life's not that simple, Ty."
"I didn't mean to suggest—"
"But you see how insidious it is? Certain suspicions come into your head and get stuck there. No, NK isn't about my father. It's about discovering the divinity in what's happened to the Earth and expressing that divinity in daily life."
"Maybe the Spin isn't that simple, either."
"We're either being murdered or transformed, Simon says."
"He told me you're building heaven on Earth."
"Isn't that what Christians are supposed to do? Make the Kingdom of God by expressing it in their lives?"
"Or at least dancing to it."
"Now you sound like Jason. Obviously I can't defend everything about the movement. Last week we were at a conclave in Philadelphia and we met this couple, our age, friendly, intelligent—'alive in the spirit,' Simon called them. We went out to dinner and talked about the Parousia. Then they invited us up to their hotel room, and suddenly they were laying out lines of coke and playing porn videos. All kinds of marginal people are attracted to NK. No question. And for most of them the theology barely exists, except as a fuzzy image of the Garden of Eden. But at its best the movement is everything it claims to be, a genuine living faith."
"Faith in what, Diane? Ekstasis? Promiscuity?"
I regretted the words as soon as I'd said them. She looked hurt. "Ekstasis isn't about promiscuity. Not when it succeeds, anyway. But in the body of God no act is prohibited as long as it isn't vengeful or angry, as long as it expresses divine as well as human love."
The phone rang then. I must have looked guilty. Diane saw my expression and laughed.
Jason's first words when I picked up: "I said we'd have some warning. I'm sorry. I was wrong."
"What?"
"Tyler… haven't you seen the sky?"
* * * * *
So we went upstairs to find a window facing the sunset.
The west bedroom was generously large, equipped with a mahogany chifferobe, a brass-railed bed, and big windows. I drew the curtains wide. Diane gasped.
There was no setting sun. Or, rather, there were several.
The entire western sky was alight. Instead of the single orb of the sun there was an arc of reddish glow that stretched across at least fifteen degrees of the horizon, containing what looked like a flickering multiple exposure of a dozen or more sunsets. The light was erratic; it brightened and faded like a distant fire.
We gaped at it for an endless time. Eventually Diane said, "What's happening, Tyler? What's going on?"
I told her what Jason had told me about the Chinese nuclear warheads.
"He knew this might happen?" she asked, then answered herself: "Of course he did." The strange light gave the room a roseate hue and fell on her cheeks like a fever. "Will it kill us?"
"Jason doesn't think so. It'll scare the hell out of people, though."
"But is it dangerous? Radiation or something?"
I doubted it. But it wasn't out of the question. "Try the TV," I said. There was a plasma panel in each bedroom, framed in walnut paneling opposite the bed. I figured any kind of remotely lethal radiation would also screw up broadcasting and reception.
But the TV worked well enough to show us news channel views of crowds gathering in cities across Europe, where it was already dark—or as dark as it was going to get that night. No lethal radiation but plenty of incipient panic. Diane sat motionless on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, clearly frightened. I sat beside her and said, "If any of this was going to kill us we'd be dead by now."
Outside, the sunset stuttered toward darkness. The diffuse glow resolved into several distinct setting suns, each ghostly pale, then a coil of sunlight like a luminous spring that arced across the whole sky and vanished just as suddenly.
We sat hip to hip as the sky grew darker. Then the stars came out.