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1945, and, tragic as that event was, given the global paranoia ignited by the loss of telecommunications, we were lucky it only happened once. According to some reports we nearly lost Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang.
     
     
    Reassured by sunrise, I slept from dawn to noon. When I got up and dressed I found my mother in the living room, still in her quilted robe, staring into the television screen and frowning. When I asked her if she’d eaten breakfast she said she hadn’t. So I fixed lunch for both of us.
    She would have been forty-five years old that fall. If I had been asked to choose a word to describe her it might have been “solid.” She was rarely angry and the only time in my life I had ever seen her cry was the night the police came to the door (this was back in Sacramento) and told her my father had died on the 80 near Vacaville, driving home from a business trip. She was, I think, careful to show me only this aspect of herself. But there were others. There was a portrait on a shelf in the etagere in the living room, taken years before I was born, of a woman so sleek, beautiful, and fearless before the camera that I had been startled when she told me it was a photo of herself.
    Clearly she didn’t like what she was hearing from TV. A local station was doing nonstop news, repeating shortwave and ham radio stories and fuzzy stay-calm statements issued by the federal government. “Tyler,” she said, waving me to sit down, “this is hard to explain. Something happened last night—”
    “I know,” I said. “I heard about it before I went to bed.”
    “You knew about this? And you didn’t wake me up?”
    “I wasn’t sure—”
    But her annoyance waned as quickly as it had come. “No,” she said, “it’s all right, Ty. I guess I didn’t miss anything by sleeping. It’s funny… I feel like I’m
still
asleep.”
    “It’s just the stars,” I said, idiotically.
    “The stars and the moon,” she corrected me. “Didn’t you hear about the moon? All over the world, nobody can see the stars and nobody can see the moon.”
     
     
    The moon was a clue, of course.
    I sat awhile with my mom, then left her still fixed in front of the TV (“Back before dark this time,” she said, meaning it) and walked to the Big House. I knocked at the back door, the door the cook and the day maid used, though the Lawtons were careful never to call it a “servant’s entrance.” It was also the door by which, on weekdays, my mother entered to conduct the Lawtons’ household business.
    Mrs. Lawton, the twins’ mother, let me in, looked at me blankly, waved me upstairs. Diane was still asleep, the door of her room closed. Jason hadn’t slept at all and apparently wasn’t planning to. I found him in his room monitoring a short-wave radio.
    Jason’s room was an Aladdin’s cave of luxuries I coveted but had given up expecting ever to own: a computer with an ultrafast ISP connection, a hand-me-down television twice as big as the one that graced the living room at my house. In case he hadn’t heard the news: “The moon is gone,” I told him.
    “Interesting, isn’t it?” Jase stood and stretched, running his fingers through his uncombed hair. He hadn’t changed his clothes since last night. This was uncharacteristic absent-mindedness. Jason, although certifiably a genius, had never acted like one in my presence—that is to say, he didn’t act like the geniuses I had seen in movies; he didn’t squint, stammer, or write algebraic equations on walls. Today, though, he did seem massively distracted. “The moon’s
not
gone, of course—how could it be? According to the radio they’re measuring the usual tides on the Atlantic coast. So the moon’s still there. And if the moon’s still there, so are the stars.”
    “So why can’t we see them?”
    He gave me an annoyed look. “How should I know? All I’m saying is, it’s at least partly an
optical
phenomenon.”
    “Look out the window, Jase. The sun’s