All Stories Are Love Stories (11 page)

At the top of the exit and Vermont Street, Gene found himself on a block he'd never known was there: a residential stretch backing up to the freeway, dirty and dusty with old Victorians like aging geishas he'd rather not see without their paint on. He tried to place what he was looking at within his catalog of San Francisco: Potrero Hill? Or at least the Inner Mission side of it, shadowed by overpasses and empty streets with old shopping carts embedded in their shoulders. He tried desperately to orient himself, to see what was before him as familiar, but even if there hadn't been an earthquake, he was on foreign ground. The downside of living in a city that meant so many things to so many people was that every one of its dense blocks changed according to its own peculiar pulse, almost deliberately hiding its beat from infrequent visitors.

To his right, an entire wall of a grand two-story building had dropped open like a dollhouse, its moniker—Slovenian Hall—undisturbed on a sign stuck in its front lawn. Gene stared, the destruction visually mystifying. Three sides remained stately and upright, the panes of their elaborate windows still intact; the fourth's absence was so incongruous and neat, its disappearance might have been the work of a magician. The neighborhood was similarly upended, the aftermath
of such inhuman violence hard to comprehend. A tree with a shredded torso lay across a car, its exposed parts pale blond and wet with life. A big dog limped heavily across the street, the hunted look in its eyes making it seem more wild than domestic. Everywhere people wove and drifted, similarly unhinged, many of them openmouthed and silent. And just as Gene realized he was even more afraid to look up and out at the city than he was to look into yet another stranger's devastated, questioning eyes, his eyes lifted skyward.

The drizzle and twilight didn't do enough to obstruct the view. Like any good city, San Francisco presented a jagged line of architectural prowess to the distant eye. But now, like the city in a bad movie or other distortion, it presented a handful of tall buildings looking back or tilted in unfathomable disrepair. Gene wanted to look away. The cityscape seemed larger than life, too close—had it always been so close from up here?—certainly it had never seemed so easily consumed.

Columns of smoke had sprung into the sky like sinister, living things, rising up through the mist and haze in black and billowing defiance. Gene felt the hair on the skin of his arms rise, as if he had come into contact with a predatory animal. Looking around him, he saw the shadows of photographs he'd pored over a thousand times in the archives of Berkeley or Stanford libraries: photographs of stupefied, well-dressed people facing vistas of fire, walls of smoke on the morning of April 18, 1906. The similarities were so acute that he felt a new wave of disassembling, as if the passage of time were nothing more than a falsely soothing construct, a
frame through which his vision had been warped into seeing a first-world metropolis's vulnerability to naked tragedy as a thing of the past.

He tore his eyes away from the gathering smoke. The desire to see nothing clearly was overpowering, even as he was acutely aware that of all the people right then and there, he was one of the only ones who could make sense of what he saw. In truth, there were few people who knew as well as Gene exactly what sorts of disasters lurked in the aftermath of an earthquake.

Broken gas lines and downed power lines. Fire. The volatile San Andreas running directly beneath an already severely depleted water supply. Wooden buildings packed side by side, and soft stories over garages. Crowds and debris. Panic and liquefaction. Each possibility surmountable on its own, but when they worked as a collective, small armies advancing from all directions on a surprised and handicapped target—well, the stone that sets off an avalanche does not speak to what it will trigger.

A flush began creeping up Gene's neck and into his face. He had read about all of these contingencies and probabilities and likelihoods so many times. Read and studied and analyzed and lectured and spoke. And here it was. Here he was. Dazed and dumbstruck. His knees threatened to buckle, even as he shouted silently to himself to keep going, to run toward Franklin, away from here, but suddenly he couldn't. He stumbled to the sidewalk, heavy with the knowledge he dragged along with him like an anchor too large for the ship
it was supposed to steady, pulling it under instead. What use was it now? What he knew. What he had known.

If the Big One hits in the next six months
,
Sam
,
then we all owe you an apology.
It had been warm. A rare warm day in the midst of an overcast winter, after lunch. They had taken their fill of the smorgasbord of salads and sandwiches provided by Bon Appétit, followed by fresh polvorones, courtesy of a colleague who lived by a Mexican bakery. The windows were cracked open in January, lending a robustness to their faculty meeting that usually wasn't there. Gene's promise brought chummy laughter all around.

Sam had smiled, but his eyes had narrowed. Unlike everyone else, he sat as if at any minute he might stand up.
As charming as your patronization
always
is
,
Dr. Strauss
, Sam said—then, stopping himself,
Gene
(he always reverted to Oxford customs when riled, isolating himself further from the informal first-name basis at the heart of Stanford culture)—
it doesn't change the fact that we're staring down the barrel of a massive seismic event
,
the effects of which could yield unprecedented urban catastrophes. How long are we expected to sit on that before it jumps up and bites us in the ass?

Gene hesitated for a moment, frowning.
Six months?

Everyone had laughed.

Sam stiffened even more, suddenly looking too thin, drained. He'd been putting in ridiculous hours, and now Gene almost felt bad, even though he really couldn't hold himself responsible for a colleague willing to kill himself just to score an academic win. He smiled generously at Sam from
his seat, leaning back ever so slightly to milk the contrast between his relaxed confidence and Sam's uptight proselytizing. He dropped the smile just as generously before speaking, replacing it with a look of sympathetic concern.

Sam
,
you're right
,
the data is concerning
,
and I don't think any of us is suggesting we ignore it. Quite the contrary
:
we need to take it seriously. And to do that
,
we need to take the work that produced it seriously. And right now
,
it's just too new to be reliable! God
,
Sam
,
if we run off to the media with unproven results
,
it'll be academic suicide. You know that. We'll look like fools.

Sam sat down, the fight gone out of him.
As always
,
you make some excellent points, Dr. Strauss
, he muttered.
Of course
,
the work
,
our careers
,
must come first. If lives are unnecessarily lost
,
well
,
I guess that's just bad luck.

Our work and its impact are one and the same
, Gene had rejoined, rising above Sam's emotional barbs to adopt the sober tone and expression of measured reason.
The peninsula section of the San Andreas has been threatening to go for decades. Centuries! A few more months won't make a difference, and we'll be glad we waited in the long run. You know as well as I do
,
Sam
,
that earthquake prediction is just too new a science to risk premature exposure! Let's let it mature
,
hold our horses
,
and it will save many more lives than either you or I could imagine.

He had really believed that, too. When he said it, and for the past twelve years of homing in on a technology so enthralling, he almost dreaded the moment it would be perfected.

Gene leaned against a broken railing, listening to nothing and everything in the chaos around him. If only he didn't
have to look up. Like a lifting veil, his life's work seemed suddenly to disappear before him, or to be metamorphosing into a nightmarish version of itself: a poorly defended city taking blows from the enemy he'd built a career on promising to foresee. Just as the full weight of regret and humiliation began to settle on him, the earth began to stutter anew, a rollicking that increased in volume and intensity. The railing he'd been leaning against came loose under his palms and he fell, beginning to slide downhill. Scraping his palms and shins, he regained his balance in time to grab onto a street sign—
NO PARKING, 9–11, MONDAYS, STREET CLEANING
—holding desperately on to the only solid thing he could find, a man dangling over the edge of the world.

Maybe, Max thought dumbly, none of this is real. The earthquake, the overturned lobby, the chorus of untraceable, unrelieved despair, both human and non, drifting in from outside. Maybe it was all a figment of an imagination that had already begun to take over earlier in the day, when he thought he had glimpsed Vashti.

Because now, standing over the kaleidoscopic litter made by the lobby's second-story glass and felt and linen and silk and feathered and shelled mural when it shattered, amid the panicked children running by him and out the door, Vashti was there. Standing right in front of him.

Still so beautiful. A little older and softer, though just as luminous as ever. More luminous. More beautiful.

She was close enough that if he lifted his hand, he could touch her. The idea was like an overwhelming pain, unbearable and hypnotic. How quickly everything surged forward from the past, his heart swelling so rapidly he felt like it might drown.

Where could she possibly have come from? What was she doing here, still in the body and face he had once memorized with his hands, standing right in front of him? He
had
seen her, after all. And his mother hadn't believed him. Oh God. His heart began to shut a series of quick locks, knowing that
if he conceded one inch of territory to terror or panic, he would lose the whole battle. He forced himself to speak.

“Vashti,” he said slowly, as if pronouncing an unfamiliar name.

For her part, as many times as she had imagined the possibility of seeing Max again, Vashti would never have guessed that she would have, in the end, run right into him, nor that she would find him with a child in his arms, and that the sight of that would make her lose control of the kind of tears she'd promised herself she'd hold back. But one look at Max, and there they were. As if she hadn't only run into him bodily but also figuratively, the sight of the man she'd loved and left instantly bruising her heart, exposing tenderness that was still raw to the touch.

“Vashti?” He sounded so stricken, her name itself might have been a question.

“Max. I—”

“Is that everyone? Are we clear?” A huge, blue-black fireman in full regalia had materialized beside them, gesturing toward the child in Max's arms, who was wriggling to be let go. He put her on her feet and let her scamper toward the door, vaguely aware that he should be monitoring a child that young more closely, but she was already gone. The fireman was waiting for an answer. Then the delayed panic set in that he couldn't have stomached until help appeared: his mother!

“My mother,” he told the fireman. “She's older, elderly.” His head was swimming.

“Is she in the building?”

“No, no,” Max said, “she's over at Buena Vista.” He
glanced again at Vashti, still trying to piece together her presence, the complete reversal of what he normally understood to be constant truths: his mother present, Vashti gone, a stable earth.

“Are there any more children in the building?” the fireman asked sternly.

“Yes!” Max exclaimed, startled into comprehension. “A girl. Her name is Allegra. I mean Ally, I think they call her Ally. She's down there. Hurt her leg, maybe more. I didn't think she should be moved.”

“Show me,” the fireman said, striding away so quickly Max had to jog to catch up, then he stopped short. He turned around, still not knowing what to say to Vashti but desperate to keep her there until he did. “Please,” he implored. “Don't go. Wait.”

He was strangely grateful to find Ally and her sister where he'd left them, even more grateful that the two representatives from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—who'd slipped his mind yet again—had stayed behind to watch over her. How could anyone forget a six-and-a-half-foot-tall transgender nun and her sidekick, who looked for all the world like your average priest, were it not for the
Make
love, not
war
tattoo across the back of his neck. “Hello!” he called out cheerily. The heavy wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, cultivated by sun and tragedy, squinted in on themselves when he smiled. “She's doing just fine,” he reassured Max as he approached.

The fireman knelt by the child while her sister hovered
beside him. “I think it's her ankle,” she said, her young voice high with tension, “or her leg, or something.”

The leg was clearly broken near the shin, just above her ankle; Max could see that now, standing over her, his head clearing as he watched. The fireman grabbed a seat back from a broken chair to wedge underneath the leg and stabilize it, but the girl cried out when he touched her. Max heard the mannish, pink-wigged nun suck in air through her teeth, and a wave of sympathetic repulsion passed through him. When he'd found his mother after she'd broken her hip, he remembered thinking that the break had seemed to puncture her spirit, too, the cries she made small and shrill. His mind wandered to her room at Buena Vista, with her knickknack shelves and books, the heavy painting over her bed. If only he hadn't passed her off to a retirement community, had taken on the job of looking after her. He forced himself to imagine her with a blanket around her shoulders, someone bringing her a drink of water. Just then, the eight doors from the anteroom to the auditorium rattled en masse. Everyone froze, but it was only the wind, blustering as greedily through the new rents and tears of the building as a new lover might explore his beloved's body.

Left alone in the lobby, Vashti had drifted through the anteroom and through the auditorium doors. She stopped near the back of the orchestra section, watching Max. He was thinner and a little taller than she remembered, and his face, his whole expression, was much more guarded. It used to be that she could look at him and know what he was thinking. Now he was a man with a set jaw, his curls cropped close to
his head. For some reason, that sight above all filled her with a measure of regret so deep, she wished she could look away.

Curiously, as if he could hear her thoughts, Max suddenly looked up. He was wondering what he might say to her, wanting suddenly to reach out to her. That had always been the way to get to her essence, and he could not fault himself for having only the old ways to fall back on; for wanting, above all, to touch her. She took a few more steps forward, her eyes locked on his, when the ground beneath them heaved, wrenching loose a section of the balcony over her head.

Vashti ducked and Max ran, reaching her just in time for the second earthquake to begin in earnest, a pregnant rumbling that gathered in volume as ominously as a stampede of beasts devouring the earth. The loosened balcony dipped and swayed, threatening to fall. Max grabbed a stunned Vashti by the hand and yanked her into the nearest row, where they half fell, half stumbled to the floor between the lifted seats. Max hunkered down as the rigging began to moan, but Vashti looked up, peering toward where the children were. Below, the lighting over the stage began to swing again. And seconds later, as if it had been holding on by just a thread, the rigging dropped from the ceiling, crashing to the floor seventy feet below, right on top of the priest and the nun, the girls and the fireman. Vashti screamed, a sound that hadn't ended when an earsplitting pop came from overhead.

The balcony's right side came down first, tilting in and then crashing onto the seats and floor below, bringing the center section with it seconds later, all fifty rows and nine
hundred seats collapsing in an avalanche of thwarted stability. And then, just after the earth had finally stuttered to a stop, the remaining overhead section of the balcony moaned out its death rattles and dropped. For a long moment, there was nothing but absolute silence.