He was being made to stand up in front of cameras and say that everything was just dandy. He walked out of the containment area and through the narrow space between the great doors of the hangar, into the doomed light of the day. He was still trying to figure a way out of this when the mobile inside his pants pocket buzzed against the top of his thigh. He pulled it out, an envelope icon slowly revolving on the LCD screen. A text message from Matt’s mobile. Eph opened it:
Yanks 4 Sux 2. gr8t seats, wish u wre here, Z.
Eph stood staring at this electronic dispatch from his son until his eyes lost focus. He was left staring at his own shadow on the airport tarmac, which, unless he was imagining things, had already begun to vanish.
Anticipation grew on the ground as the slender nick in the western side of the sun—the lunar “first contact”—became a creeping blackness, a rounded bite gradually consuming the afternoon sun. At first there was no obvious difference in the quality or quantity of light on the ground. Only the black gouge high in the sky, making a crescent of the normally reliable sun, marked this day as being different from any other.
The term “solar eclipse” is in fact a misnomer. An eclipse occurs when one object passes into a shadow cast by another. In a solar eclipse, the moon does not pass into the sun’s shadow, but instead passes between the sun and the earth, obscuring the sun—causing the shadow. The proper term is “occultation.” The moon occults the sun, casting a small shadow onto the surface of the earth. It is not a solar eclipse, but in fact an eclipse of the earth.
The earth’s distance from the sun is approximately four hundred times the moon’s distance from the earth. In a remarkable coincidence, the diameter of the sun happens to be approximately four hundred times the diameter of the moon. This is why the area of the moon and the sun’s photosphere—its bright disk—appear roughly the same size from the perspective of earth.
A total occultation is possible only when the moon is in its new phase, and near its perigee, its closest distance to the earth. The duration of totality depends upon the orbit of the moon, never to exceed seven minutes and forty seconds. This occultation was due to last exactly four minutes and fifty-seven seconds: just under five minutes of uncanny nighttime in the middle of a beautiful early fall afternoon.
Half-covered now by the new (and otherwise invisible) moon, the still bright sky began to take on a dusky cast: like a sunset, only without any warming of the light. At ground level, the sunlight appeared pale, as though filtered or diffused. Shadows lost their certainty. The world, it seemed, had been put on a dimmer.
As the crescent continued to thin, being consumed by the lunar disk, its smothering brightness blazed as though in a panic. The occultation appeared to gain momentum and a kind of desperate speed as the ground landscape went gray, colors bleeding off the normal spectrum. The western sky darkened faster than the east as the shadow of the moon approached.
The eclipse was to be partial in much of the United States and Canada, achieving totality along only a lengthy, narrow trail measuring ten thousand miles long by one hundred miles wide, describing the moon’s dark umbral shadow upon the earth. The west-to-east course, known as the “path of totality,” began at the horn of Africa and curved up the Atlantic Ocean, ending just west of Lake Michigan, moving at more than one thousand miles per hour.
As the crescent sun continued to narrow, the complexion of the sky became a strangled violet. The darkness in the west gathered strength like a silent, windless storm system, spreading throughout the sky and closing in around the weakened sun, like a great organism succumbing to a corrupting force spreading from within.
The sun grew perilously thin, the view—through safety glasses—like that of a manhole lid being slid shut high above, squeezing out the daylight. The crescent blazed white, then turned to silver in its agonal last moments.
Strange, roving bands of shadow began moving over the ground. Oscillations formed by the refraction of light in the earth’s atmosphere—similar to the effect of light moving on the floor of a swimming pool—writhed like shadowy snakes at the corner of one’s vision. These ghostly tricks of light made the hair stand on the back of every viewer’s neck.
The end came quickly. The last throes were chilling, intense, the crescent shrinking to a curved line, a slicing scar in the sky, then fragmenting into individual pearls of fiery white, representing the last of the sun’s rays seeping through the deepest valleys along the lunar surface. These beads winked and vanished in rapid succession, snuffed out like a dying candle flame drowned in its own black wax. The crimson-colored band that was the chromosphere, the thin upper atmosphere of the sun, flared for a precious, final few seconds—and then the sun was gone.
Totality.
Kelton Street, Woodside, Queens
KELLY GOODWEATHER could not believe how quickly the day went dark. She stood out on the sidewalk, as did the rest of her Kelton Street neighbors—on what was normally, at that time of day, the sunny side of the street—staring up at the darkened sky through the cardboard-framed glasses that had come free with two two-liter bottles of Diet Eclipse soda. Kelly was an educated woman. She understood on an intellectual level what was occurring. And still she felt an almost giddy surge of panic. An impulse to run, to hide. This lining up of celestial bodies, the passing into the shadow of the moon: it reached something deep inside her. Touched the night-frightened animal within.
Others surely felt it. The street had grown quiet at the moment of total eclipse. This weird light they were all standing in. And those wormy shadows that had wriggled on the lawn, just out of their vision, against the sides of the house, like swirling spirits. It was as though a cold wind had blown down the street and not ruffled any hair but had only chilled their insides.
That thing people say to you, after you shiver: Someone just walked over your grave. That was what this whole “occultation” seemed like. Someone or something walking over everyone’s grave at once. The dead moon crossing over the living earth.
And then, looking up: the solar corona. An anti-sun, black and faceless, shining madly around the nothingness of the moon, staring down at the earth with glowing, gossamer white hair. A death’s head.
Her neighbors, Bonnie and Donna, the couple renting next door, stood together with their arms around each other, Bonnie with her hand in the back pocket of Donna’s saggy jeans. “Isn’t it amazing?” Bonnie called, smilingly, over her shoulder.
Kelly could not respond. Didn’t they get it? To her, this was no mere curiosity, no afternoon entertainment. How could anyone not see this as some kind of omen? Astronomical explanations and intellectual reasoning be damned: how could this not mean something? So maybe it had no inherent meaning, per se. It was a simple convergence of orbits. But how could any sentient being not imbue it with some significance, positive or negative, religious or psychic or otherwise? Just because we understand how something works doesn’t necessarily mean we understand it …
They called back to Kelly, alone in front of her house, telling her it was safe now to remove her glasses. “You don’t want to miss this!”
Kelly was not going to remove her glasses. No matter what the television said about it being safe to do during the “totality.” The television also told her she wouldn’t age if she bought expensive creams and pills.
Oohhs and aahhs all up and down the street, a real communal event as people got comfortable with the singularity, embracing the moment. Except for Kelly. What is wrong with me? she wondered.
Part of it was just having seen Eph on TV. He didn’t say much at the press conference, but Kelly could tell by his eyes and the way that he spoke that something was wrong. Really wrong. Something beyond