All Stories Are Love Stories (12 page)

Then came the season of the awful silence, the hush of awe, when mankind held its breath and things stood still and humanity gazed on havoc and hideous horror and then, out of the silence, out of toppled buildings, ruined palaces, and dismal hovels, came the besom of flame. With a hideous roar it advanced, this terrible thing, this red and yellow monster, and, its fiery arms outstretched, it reached the seven hills and it hissed and roared and with infernal intensity, it consumed, ate, and devoured.

—PIERRE N. BERINGER, 1906

We had passed some engines on their way to extinguish a fire at North Beach, where a huge gas tank had exploded, and we had noted a smaller fire nearby, but the possibility of a general conflagration seemed too remote to be considered. “Why, what nonsense,” I said. “The whole city can't burn.” As we reached the crest of the hill, [a] man pointed. “See,” he said, and from the northern shore of the city to the extreme south, from North Beach to the far end of Mission, fires were blazing aloft.

—MARY ASHE MILLER, 1906

We tried to make the fallen Brunswick Hotel at Sixth and Folsom Streets. We could not make it. The scarlet steeplechaser beat us to it, and when we arrived the crushed structure was only the base of one great flame that rose to heaven with a single twist. By that time we knew that the earthquake had been but a prologue, and that the tragedy was to be written in fire.

—JAMES HOPPER, 1906

Gene slid halfway down Vermont Street with the dislodged parking sign in his hands, its jagged concrete base the only defense he could put up between himself and the bucking earth. The violence with which it shook seemed almost jubilant, wild in its thoughtlessness.

Then, just as suddenly as it had all begun, everyone and everything came to a stop.

Like figures in a fun house, Gene and everyone else around him rose on unsteady legs. Gene found himself staring at the face of a woman with an afro as symmetrical as the moon, one hand clamped across her mouth, the other pointing out, toward downtown San Francisco. In the distance, a collapse of buildings distorted the familiar skyline to the east, the tip of the Transamerica Pyramid neatly upended into a high-rise beside it. Gene swallowed back the hot, acidic liquid that raced into his throat. Frantically, he fished for his phone in his pocket, thinking it would be dead. The battery was almost gone and there was no signal, but a text from Franklin, sent while he'd been in traffic, greeted him:
Where RU? Smelsmerelda won't go until you get back. I'm in olfactory hell.
Thank God. Thank God! He almost laughed his relief. Esmerelda would carry Franklin
out on her back before she'd leave him in danger. He tried to drape himself in the comfort of that, thin as it was.

One block north, a fire truck broke through a crooked garage door and dove into the street, sirens and lights blazing. Despite all its urgency, it wasn't long before it was choked by a distended mass of people and cars and trees and the bricks and woods and steel and the unnamable, hidden parts of buildings. The machine honked desperately, its alarm insisting that access was either a matter of negotiation or battle. But its outrage was a sound swallowed into the air, already thick with an indecipherable jumble of noise.

Gene's first instinct was to get to flatter ground in case another tremor set in, and he found himself nearly tripping over his own feet to get the rest of the way down the hill. He stopped short when he did, dizzy again, unsure of how to make sense of where he was and how he had found himself there. He took a deep breath. He couldn't panic. He could be, must be, helpful, couldn't he? But how?

Like a doctor faced with his own fatal injury, he tried to make objective sense of what was happening, what had just happened. A 7.0 or higher on the peninsula when he was on the freeway, followed by a significant aftershock or another event farther up the San Andreas just as he walked off the exit? But he wasn't even exactly sure where he was. He looked around. His hand went to his pocket to check his phone before remembering; helplessly, he checked it again anyway. He forced himself to put it away, steeling himself to find his bearings by what he could see in front of him. The street signs told him he was at the intersection of Vermont
and Seventeenth. Gene could feel the speed of his heart in his chest, but his mind was hesitant, his thoughts clumsy and disconnected. He looked down at his wrist, remembering that he was wearing a watch. It was 4:26. He had to stare down at it to make sense. Had he left Stanford only an hour and a half ago?

He made his way haltingly down Seventeenth on stiff legs, his entire being a divining rod for further hazards; he wanted to look nowhere but couldn't look away. There was no narrative to guide him in the aftermath of upheaval, only pieces of stories: a car sideways in the middle of the street, a tiny, elderly woman sitting in the driver's seat, unseeing, the doors locked around her; an uprooted trio of topiaries, cement still clinging to their roots; a girl running with a small dog in her arms, its leash dragging loose and threatening to trip her; a bicyclist crashed into an art gallery's display windows; a downed power line and a river of water emerging from no obvious origin about to converge.

He started to see stars again, pinpoints of light.

Surely it was only this bad in this particular area of the city, he tried to tell himself, all the brick buildings packed in so close together. It was the design district's own fault, wanting to preserve the beauty of old buildings. Even the newest building didn't stand a chance if it was sandwiched between brick high-rises, as many were, or bookended by blocks of wooden Victorians in the path of a thirsty fire. Mentally he ran through the catalog of disaster prevention and preparedness that every good geologist in the area would have ready on the tip of his tongue, but his lips were chapped and dry
with fear. He was walking unevenly over ground still wet with rain and now covered in every manner of liquid and he slipped, catching himself at the last minute, though his chest tightened and his forehead broke out in a sweat.
Think
,
Gene!
he told himself.
Pull yourself together!

But his ability to think things through, to make sense when nothing made sense, the ability he believed in more than any other he had, was gone. Or it was there, but it had undergone dissolution, his thoughts suddenly airy and impossible to direct. Every building that he could bring to mind seemed sickeningly vulnerable. He tried to look up, away, out, to latch on to a sight, a person, anything that would steady him, bring him back to himself. He tried to remind himself that it wasn't he who had sustained the injury. It was the earth. The earth had been—was—was always?—yes—had always been—fractured. Fractious.

He had the strange sensation that, if he could just find his way to some hidden alley, the right knob to turn on some door he'd failed to notice, he would find himself back where he should be. Maybe he could find himself back even further, so that he could correct what he'd done several weeks ago, a mistake sure to haunt him for the duration of whatever was left of his career.

In the days leading up to that fateful faculty meeting, Sam Smythe had been pestering Gene nonstop about a cluster of correlated seismic and electromagnetic activity registering on their joint baby—CERISY (Correlative Energies Interpretive System), the new darling of NCEPT—along the peninsula section of the San Andreas Fault. CERISY's ticket
to fame was its unprecedented ability to measure correlative energies around seismic events to a level of unheard-of refinement. After playing with their creation incessantly, Sam identified what he believed to be her first prodigal work: a previously unidentified correlation between seismic and electromagnetic activity in the weeks leading up to Loma Prieta in 1989, Northridge in 1994, and Tōhoku in 2011. And—far more controversially and controvertibly—Sam claimed that the same correlative patterns were showing up in data he was beginning to collect on current activity around the peninsula section of the San Andreas, and that the similarities should not—could not—be ignored.

Gene had been quick to concede that Sam's observations were interesting, but—arrogantly, foolishly, probably jealously, at least a little meanly—he told himself and others that Sam's desire to broadcast them was just a premature attempt to draw attention to their work. Didn't others think, Gene said around the department, that it was a little odd that Sam wanted the results published right before his teaching contract was up for renewal? Of course the data was exciting, very promising, but the name of the research game was provable, replicable findings, and all they had were a few tests they'd conducted themselves. It would be at least several more months before they could get them reproduced, if they were reproducible; several more after that to get their articles peer-reviewed.

Sam hadn't relented, though, using every opportunity to convince Gene that the exact same correlation that preceded the two most damaging Bay Area earthquakes in recent
history was coming together right beneath their feet. He was sleep deprived, Gene told himself, overblown and grandiose, generally out of touch. And both of them knew that without Gene's support, Sam wouldn't have the social capital to breathe a word of his concerns to senior faculty. At best, they'd laugh him off; at worst, he'd be accused of crying wolf: an occupational hazard for geologists in the nascent and, some even argued, soft science of earthquake prediction—and a potentially fatal blow to the career of any junior faculty member. But still, Sam could talk of nothing else when anyone stopped to listen. And unfortunately, the person who usually did was Gene.

He realized that his gaze had suddenly settled on something quiet, something several blocks away to the east with less activity, fewer people. He had to think: What was in that direction? It couldn't be more than a dozen blocks from the bay. If he remembered correctly, Third Street wound along the coast out here. He closed his eyes, trying to jog his memory. His heart jerked violently.

Of course.

Oh God. Of course.

Everyone knew that the edges of the city were built on landfill—a friendly term for what was really packed sand and dirt and houses and old ships and probably hundreds of luckless materials easily forgotten and paved over. “Made” ground, as hastily erected and collapsible as straw houses made by pigs in a fairy tale.

How many thousands of videos on liquefaction had he watched, he and his colleagues soberly analyzing the
mistakes people made all over the world, building and living on surface area that turned to liquid once the undulating began, the earth's stability in such places nothing more than a sleight of hand.

Of course, though—it was never said, but it contextualized every scrupulously somber conversation they had, every discussion that dutifully spoke to possibility but never edged into any real sense of fear—San Francisco was different. San Francisco had modern building codes and retrofitting. Stanford and Berkeley geologists as insurance against the worst. Money and significance. Culture and history. Simply too many important people and places to be instantly struck down by anything as impersonal and random as a geological event. But they knew—deep down they had known, hadn't they—that people could prepare themselves for seismic activity of this proximity and magnitude exactly as well as ants can protect their nests from backhoes.

Gene's face prickled with shame and fear. What a fool's errand to be a geologist in San Francisco, of all places. An entirely impractical, egocentric exercise. The earth was an organism of its own design, mostly insensible to the creatures swarming over its surfaces. Creatures who believed in the protection of governments and kings. And among them, Gene was nothing but a jester.

He turned away from the sinking coastline and walked quickly back from where he'd come, veering sharply right onto Kansas when he came to it again, the first right that looked halfway passable, keeping to the center of the street, avoiding the sidewalks shadowed now by partial brick
buildings, heading north. North. Yes. That was it: he needed to get out of his head and onto a path. To North Beach and their home and Franklin. It was only a few miles away, after all, and closer to stable ground. In fact, the inn was on a rise, which was just as good as a bedrock foundation—maybe even better. Maybe, just maybe, it would be OK.

Gene broke into a stiff trot, forcing himself to focus now on an image of Fin de Siècle: its charmingly neat white stucco exterior draped with scads of brilliant pink bougainvillea; Franklin's rooms on the top floor with their perfectly preserved midcentury modern furnishings and Gump's sinks, the windows with their views of the water. If Gene kept up this pace, he might be there in a matter of hours, even though darkness was descending everywhere, the city already beginning to resemble a wilderness of extinguishing light.

The summer before Max and his parents moved to San Francisco, a young girl drowned in the Altona town lake. She had been playing near a long, wide dock, practicing somersaults, and wound up underneath it, unable to find her way out. The newspapers said her sister tried to save her, calling out and reaching underneath, but the girl panicked and became disoriented, struggling to find her way out. By the time her sister got help, it was too late.

It was the first time Max had heard of something that he couldn't forget or make bearable. He'd be fine during the day, but then at night, the thought of the drowned girl loomed like something that must be swallowed but can't be chewed. One night, after he had lain in bed staring at the ceiling until well past his bedtime, his father came in and sat at the foot of the bed. It was clear that he somehow knew Max was still awake, despite the dark between them, but he didn't speak for several minutes. Just before his father stood to go, he squeezed Max's ankle. “Never panic or struggle if you're stuck,” he said into the opaque dark. There was a long moment during which Max wondered if his father would say anything else. He did, though he heaved a long sigh before offering his parting advice, “If she hadn't struggled, she might have lived.” His father's voice sounded as sad as Max felt, and Max stiffened under the
unexpected softness. All at once, he wanted his father and his awkward comforts to leave so he could sleep. When he did, Max closed his eyes, relieved.

Trapped and barely conscious, Max felt the familiar, desperate pull of a waking nightmare. Suddenly he was looking over his father's shoulder, watching him try to write a letter, but the ink wouldn't form itself into words. What did he want to say?
What?
he demanded, tearing the paper out from under his father's hands. His father looked up, sad again.
Don't struggle
,
Max. If she hadn't struggled
,
she might have lived.

Vashti opened her eyes to a dark garden full of bluish-white flowers, each petal smooth and luminous as marble. She wasn't quite sure where she was, but it seemed familiar. She squinted, trying desperately to see better, to remember.

Once upon a time, before her mother died and her grandfather moved back to Iran, he would visit them and tell her stories. Usually he came to her parents' spacious but perpetually fogged-in home at Twenty-Third and Vicente on an afternoon when Vashti's father wasn't there, but sometimes Vashti's mother would take her daughters to visit him at his apartment in Cupertino. Her grandfather would sit over a steaming cup of tea on his sunny patio, sipping from it though the water was still so hot, it burned her finger to touch it. He'd laugh and squeeze the juice from a slice of lemon into the golden liquid, sucking on the rind while he told Vashti about things she wasn't sure were real.

In Tehran, he told her once, there were gardens with flowers so beautiful that they shone even at night, the light itself
unwilling to part company with them. Her mother scolded him for his romanticism, but she was smiling when she did, and later, sometimes very late at night, her mother would tell such stories, too.
Maybe this is such a garden
, Vashti thought, touching a petal experimentally. Her grandfather's garden? Her own? Had either one of them ever had a garden? Vashti squinted even harder. Who was that in the distance? Were there other people there, too? Yes, there were!

She moved forward cautiously, approaching a bench where two figures were seated, a man and a woman.

Vashti,
the man said, smiling warmly.

It was Dale, still pale but looking better, sitting beside a woman in shadow. Dale! She was glad to see him, relieved, wanting to explain where she was and why she'd come there. But as she rushed over, he stood to block her way. As he did, his color returned and the smile disappeared.

Wake up
,
Vashti
, he said sternly.
Wake up.

The woman stood, too. Vashti peered at her, her heart fluttering dangerously, equal parts joy and disorientation. Vashti suddenly felt as desperate to see that face as she had once wished for the woman herself, as if this vision of her mother could be a conduit to the lost parts of her own life. But as soon as her mother stepped toward her, Vashti's mouth filled with dirt.

No
, her mother cried softly, reaching out to wipe Vashti's lips, but her mouth was still filling and then her mother was cupping Vashti's jaw and, in one decisive and intimate stroke, used her other hand to deftly scoop the dirt from her daughter's mouth.

It was a movement so gentle and quick, as natural and strange as what Vashti often found herself doing to clear her infant daughter's mouth, using her fingers to open her throat or her fist to press into her rib cage because there wasn't time to reach for anything else when she aspirated or otherwise choked on something sudden and simple and life-threatening, or simply stopped breathing yet again. It was strange how, in such moments, the bodies of mothers and daughters no longer recognized separation, as if the physical self could lose track of its own boundaries.

Near the stage, in a lucky space that hadn't been the direct victim of the mechanical avalanche, everything and everyone—no more than a priest, a sort of priestess, the two girls, and a stray boy—were covered in a fine, snowlike dust of plaster. The five of them were corralled between the fallen lighting and the collapsed balcony to the west, walls of debris all around them. On the floor where the stage and an aisle and the fireman had been, a monstrous chunk of wire and ceiling and black curtains and glass and casings had settled into a treacherous pile more than thirty feet high.

The girls stared out into the new dark, the whites of their wide-open eyes seeming to glow. The questions poured from their mouths, whipping by so fast that the priest could barely speak quickly enough to catch them. The debris had blocked the exits, and in the dim light of the draining generator, there was no clear way out.

“Oh my God.” The nun began weeping into her hands.

Watching her, Ally's face crumpled.

“Don't cry,” the priest said, addressing the girl.

“We're stuck here, aren't we?” Her sister's expression was pinched and insistent, falsely collected. Terror looked different on children, distorting their smooth features grotesquely. This one's face seemed to have gone dry with fear, as if it might crack if she moved it. “He's dead, isn't he,” she said, gesturing to where the fireman had been.

The priest glanced toward the fallen balcony, his gaze traveling up and out toward the heaps of debris blocking the doors. The fireman hadn't stood a chance. And what of that young director, Max? The priest tried to look toward where he might have been, at least a hundred feet away and thirty feet down. Why had the poor man run up there?
Ah yes
, he remembered the woman. The priest shook his head in wonder and dismay, though he was not without understanding. Still. If they had survived, he guessed, it would only be because the auditorium seats had created some kind of cushion from the blow, some kind of cramped cave for them. He shuddered. That was probably the best-case scenario—and the least likely. “We'll let the experts decide that when they come,” the priest said after scrambling for an answer that wasn't exactly a lie but wasn't exactly the more horrible and likely truth. “Don't worry,” he said.

“What about Max?” Ally asked, newly anxious. “Did he get out in time? He got out, didn't he?” she asked her sister, who shrugged, staring.

“It's going to be OK,” the priest told her as cheerfully as
he could. He guessed, correctly, that if he could comfort the younger one, the older would follow. “Don't cry,” he said again to her. “Tell me your name.”

“I'm Tia,” the older girl blurted out. “Concertina Velasquez. But no one calls me anything but Tia. She's Ally. What's yours?”

“Father Jon,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes to slits. “We're not going to call you father anything.” There was the briefest of pauses while she regarded him. “Our father is dead,” she declared, as if challenging him to defy her tragedy.

“Jon then, if you'd like,” the priest replied, trying to sound nonchalant. He was not an old man, but he was old enough to have been a young and impressionable social welfare counselor when AIDS hit the city like a battering ram. Those years exposed him to every manner of cruel and lingering pain, made him more fluent in reading the expressions of grieving than he honestly cared to be. Within the year, he guessed. Better to back off. Grief that new was still charged, ready to go off at any moment, and they had enough on their hands without having to crowd in further sadness.

“Her real name's Allegra,” Tia interrupted his thoughts. “But everyone calls her Ally.”

“Your parents must have loved music.”

“My dad did,” Tia said, pinning him with her eyes.

“This is Willie.” He gestured to the nun, whose heavily made-up face was streaked with tears. “Sister Coco. Honey,” he addressed her, “did you bring anything for your nerves?”
He remembered who was listening, their ears as wide as their eyes. “Just a little medicinal clonazepam,” he explained to them. “It's something adults take for sleeping.”

“How are we going to get out of here?” Tia demanded.

“We'll figure something out,” the priest said soothingly. “It'll just take some thinking.”

“You don't need to lie to her, and you don't need to lie to me.” He studied her momentarily, wondering if there was an approach to her that wouldn't result in disdain. She was thin and narrow-chinned, and she would have had the strangely appealing good looks of a wild colt—all dark hair and wide eyes and sinewy power—had her expression not so easily collapsed into the sour. But his own exhaustion was weighing him down, and he didn't have the energy to imagine another way in.

“OK,” he agreed wearily. “Let's just settle down. Make your sister as comfortable as we can.”

“I will not settle down, and we can't make her comfortable.” She looked as miserably compromised as her sister while watching the other girl in pain. “What about food? Water?”

“It will come,” the priest said. “Listen . . .”

“I might have some food.” A boy everyone had forgotten about and no one had noticed emerged from the shadows, tall and lanky. “Sorry,” he said, seeing the priest startle. “I'm Phil,” he added, fishing his backpack out from under the rubble. He had the giraffelike limbs and acne-scarred skin of someone in the final throes of adolescence. All this made him
pitiable and strange, but also endearing. He wasn't handsome or particularly charismatic; he wasn't there because he'd been trying to save or help anyone; he'd just stuck around because the sister he'd escorted to rehearsal—Anna Louise, age thirteen—had made fun of him thirty minutes earlier in the lobby, when he'd said they should go back into the auditorium to see if the girl Ally who couldn't walk out on her own was OK. Anny Lou guessed aloud—and loudly—that his concern was driven by his
pathetic
lust for Tia, a girl who, his sister had heatedly and mercilessly pointed out, didn't even know he existed. Phil—who was as lovesick as they come and, like so many seventeen-year-olds before him, had actually convinced himself he could march blithely into and out of the front lines unscathed—denied his sister's truths and insisted that they needed help and he couldn't just walk away and that he'd be fine and that Anny Lou should just go home. It was only an earthquake, he told his disdainful and incredulous sister, and the building would have already fallen if it was going to.

So Anna Louise, sure the earth had shaken loose her brother's sanity, left in tears while Phil worked up the courage to race back into the auditorium, hoping to find some way to win the attention of a girl who had no desire to be noticed. Still, youth lent a disproportionate eagerness to his actions, and there was a certain charm in how he fished out half a package of gummy worms and two PowerBars and held them up over his head as triumphantly as a more reasonable person might a cache of jewels.

Tia remained studiously unimpressed, though the boy
kept his eyes on her face as hopefully as a stray dog looking for any hint of promise from the food source it had fixated upon.
Poor thing
, the priest thought, thanking his lucky stars that, despite his generally poor luck in life, at least he'd had the good sense never to have loved a woman.