WINTER AND SPRING 1979
Out in the prison yard, the guards told them not to look up. They were hundreds of miles from the path of totality, but still might go blind if they stared at the eclipse.
Or go ahead and look up, the guards said. What do we care?
He had spent almost two years here in increasing desperation, pulled farther from the phase to the time before the room, before Isabella, back to that life where hope was beyond reach. There were days when he was six again, in that old apartment with that other mother, packing his toy soldiers for the last time. Days when he was back on the school playground, dodging rocks. He had just about given in to his despair when he saw the TV news in the dayroom, the coming of the first total solar eclipse in forty years.
The sky darkened. Men shuffled around the yard, heads bowed like penitents. Some joked and roughhoused, daring each other to raise their eyes. Others fell to their knees and prayed, murmuring into folded hands.
He wondered about Isabella. Was she in her own prison yard, watching others panic as the false sun was devoured high above? Back during his sentencing, when Tanner learned that the room was intended as an art piece, he hadn’t given much thought to the woman who made it. But Isabella’s attack changed things. She pointed him in that direction. He found a few articles in the prison library, pictures of Jess Shepard and descriptions of her work, first-person recollections of experiences in spaces she had created. He read about a studio transformed into adjoining rooms of different colors; a site in France where the shadows of birds swept into the barn beneath them; a small house deep in the Vermont woods, made to receive the water from a nearby stream. To Tanner they seemed like tentative steps toward the room she was destined to create. He thought of it as their room now. They had revealed each other’s true purpose.
He imagined her sitting across from him in his cell. The two of them, alone in a room. He wondered what that would be like, if Jess Shepard would feel this connection, if she understood the forces to which she had given shape.
Zero Zone. He liked the name. He repeated it each night as he drifted off to sleep. A refrain or mantra, a summoning.
A sickly dusk fell. The prison yard grew quiet. Tanner felt a pause in the air, the world holding its breath. He looked at the shadows stretching from the basketball hoop, the guard towers. They were all wrong—too long and black, less like shadows than marks or lines drawn.
He wanted to witness the eclipse, lifting his face to the false sun’s last moments. But something told him this was not quite the time, not yet. An awareness in the back of his mind.
This wasn’t the end, but the end’s beginning.
A month later, just before Tanner’s scheduled release, the men watched the news of Three Mile Island on the dayroom TV. Shots of the steaming reactor silos, convoys of emergency vehicles, interviews with hysterical neighbors. One of the nuclear reactors was melting down. A man swept a car with a Geiger counter. Hard-helmeted engineers faced a control room gone haywire with flashing lights. Locals gathered in churches, holding hands, begging for deliverance.
Tanner’s cellmate Emmett sidled up alongside, his pale gray eyes fixed on the TV. Emmett was spare and compact, with a bushy mustache that looked out of proportion on his small-featured face. He reminded Tanner of a hyena—wily, perpetually amused, always on the verge of an outburst of laughter that sounded like barking. He was dead serious now, though.
What if this is it? Emmett said. What you’ve been talking about.
A man on TV, one of the churchgoing fearful, said, This is the end of days.
Emmett was nearing the end of a lengthy sentence for making bombs. He told Tanner he had planned to mail them to the White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon. Retaliation for the war in Vietnam, which was where Emmett learned to make bombs in the first place.
You should have seen them, Emmett said, whenever the subject came up, which was often. My little babies. So small and light.
The guards let them stay in the dayroom longer than usual, on account of the fact that the world might end. The men stood and paced, restless, watching police cars coming and going on the screen, firefighters in gas masks entering the facility, government officials giving unconvincing statements at a podium, looking green around the gills.
A man in one of the churches pleaded: Jesus, save us, please.
But then, slowly, things began to settle, one shot at a time, the temperature on-screen dropping along with a coffee-colored evening outside the dayroom’s barred windows. There were fewer sirens and flashing lights, then shots of men in hard hats clapping each other on the back, the churchgoers raising their hands in gratitude.
The news anchor took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, breathed a sigh of relief.
The dayroom crowd thinned, a disappointed dispersal, like when a football game they had watched was lost in the final minutes. One of the guards switched off the TV. Tanner stared at the black screen. He didn’t feel disappointed. He felt that same awareness from the day of the eclipse, the world holding its breath.
Signs, signals, possibilities.
He needed to find Isabella.