Twenty-Six (38 page)

“What else? Money and a kind of blind faith that things had to get better. Progress. That’s what we’re all supposed to believe in. Everybody knew an explosion
could
happen. But they convinced themselves it
wouldn’t
. Or that it might happen, but not to them.”

The commissioner shuffles through some of the notes he’s taken.

“Could I get someone to refill this water?” Gavin says. “Please.”

A clerk comes by with a pitcher and fills his glass.

“We understand from previous testimony that, after you left the underground operation at Eastyard, there was a meeting between yourself and the rest of your former crew.”

Gavin’s stomach tightens. A pulse begins pushing in at his temples. “That’s right.” His eyes flit to the spot where Arvel Burrows’s brother is sitting. The glimpse is so brief, he is unable to see an expression on the big man’s face.

“Whose idea was it to have such a meeting?”

“I don’t know, exactly. It wasn’t mine. I don’t know if one particular person on the shift asked for it, or if they all just agreed to it together.”

“Why did they want to meet with you?”

“Well, it wasn’t clear to me at first …”

“Where did the meeting take place?”

“At the Tartan Tavern.” Laughter fills the hearing room.

“That’s a local beverage room,” the chairman says.

“It’s walking distance from here, if you’re looking for a place to get a steak for supper. Stay away from the fish and chips.” More laughter.

“Why was the purpose of the meeting unclear to you?”

“Well, I didn’t know if
they
had a clear idea of what they wanted to talk about right off. There was a lot of griping and complaining about safety, but that was nothing new to me. I told them if they all quit together, something would have to be done.”

“Why would something have to be done?”

“Because a company with that much public money in it would come under real close scrutiny if a quarter of the workforce quit overnight. Quit or die, is how I explained it to them, more or less. They already knew that anyway.”

“You told them they could quit or
die
?” The commissioner has a surprised look on his face. “What was their response?”

“Well, I could see they were thinking about what I’d said. But I didn’t expect them to start writing out their letters of resignation on their napkins or anything.”

“What did happen, then?”

“Well, I was getting ready to leave, I thought the conversation had reached an end when one of the guys, Arvel Burrows, a big guy, a guy who’s dead now. One of the twenty-six. We worked together on the United Mine Workers drive.”

Gavin stops in mid-thought and peers again into the gallery. He looks Ziv Burrows straight in the eye and feels himself tear up momentarily as the emotion of the memory overtakes him. “Arvel Burrows was a real good fellow,” he says. He takes a drink of water, sets the glass back on the ring of condensation on the desk in front of him. “He told me they had a request to make of me,” he continues.

“A request.”

“Burrows said that if they died underground, would I make sure and tell the world what happened?”

“Tell the world what happened.”

“That’s right.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I told them I’d do what I could.”

“Who, exactly, was at that meeting? Arvel Burrows. How many others?”

“It was A-shift. The shift that died. My old shift.”

“It was the same twenty-six men who perished.”

“Well, it would have been close to the same guys. Not everyone from the shift would have been there. But I’d say, of the twenty-six who died, there were, conservative estimate, fifteen or sixteen guys out of the twenty-six at the table that day in the Tartan Tavern.”

“How do you feel about the request now? Do you feel burdened with a responsibility?”

“What responsibility?”

“Telling the world.”

“I just did.
You’re
the world,” Gavin says to the commissioner. He points at the
TV
camera. “There’s the world right there. The world knows what went on at Eastyard Coal. Now it’s the world’s decision what they want to do about it. You can’t bring the dead back to life. I know that much for sure.”

Gavin senses some movement in the gallery and looks over to see Ziv Burrows standing up, towering over the gallery and the whole proceedings before him. He has his mouth open as though he has just said something and is waiting for a reply. Gavin looks at Ziv’s hands and notices how much they are trembling.

The commissioner looks nervously at Ziv and there is a momentary stirring among the security guards positioned in the corners of the room. The commissioner looks at Gavin, as though Gavin might know this massive man standing over them, trembling, his bruised face terrified or enraged.

“This man’s brother, …” Gavin begins. But Ziv has turned around quickly and is halfway to the door before Gavin can finish his sentence.

M
eta crosses the square of bus gates behind the south exit of Shinjuku Station. For the only time ever, out of the hundreds of people visible, she is walking the fastest. The ground is dusted with enough snow not to have melted immediately, and the city has spun into confusion. Taxis have all been fitted with snow chains or belts of reinforced wire wrapped around the tires. These have turned the streets into a calamitous racket as the chains clank and squeal, the wire belts drum the roadway. Pedestrians are slipping and writhing about everywhere with no idea how to negotiate snow-covered ground. The more comical ones are motionless as if frozen, clinging helplessly to a light post or phone box, terror blanching their faces as they watch the people who have foolishly unmoored themselves from something solid sliding about in a completely uncontrolled manner.

Meta has never before thought of the ability to walk on snow-covered ground as a skill. When she got up this morning, she saw the snow and made sure she wore shoes that had a tread.
Once she was about and realized she was not experiencing the same troubles as others were, she noticed that she had adjusted her stride. She was taking smaller steps and focusing the thrust of each step upward rather than back. The other secret is to slide when the sidewalk dictates, skating on the soles of your shoes when conditions underfoot are especially slippery.

The cliché among the Japanese is that all Canadians ski. But as she walks toward her college, Meta forms a fresh stereotype: all Canadians can walk easily on slippery sidewalks.

She is the first to arrive in her section of the office, but she is just hanging her coat in the locker when Sue Shooltz, a teacher from Tennessee, arrives. She is wrapped in a down-filled parka. Half of her face is covered by a scarf. Thick lambskin mitts are pulled halfway up her forearms.

Meta bursts into laughter at the sight of her, so outrageously overdressed for such a mild cold. “Where’s your Ski-Doo?” she says.

Sue pulls the tasselled wool hat from over her ears. “My what?” she says, her Southern accent drawing out the second word.

“You look like you came to work on a Ski-Doo,” Meta says.

“A Ski-Doo? I’n’t that one of those skimpy little bathing suits that men wear?”

“You’re kidding me,” Meta says. “A Ski-Doo! A Ski-Doo! You’ve never heard of a Ski-Doo!”

Sue looks blankly at her as she peels the heavy clothes off and tucks them into her locker.

“ ‘Twenty-three skidoo,’ ” Sue says. “My granny used to say that. I have no idea what it means. It’s freezing out there!”

“What a country!” Greg Ulesso says as he comes through the door. “Boiling hot in summer,” he says. “Freezing cold in winter,
typhoons, torrential rains. It’s the worst of all possible worlds.”

A tremor sets up in the building, the room begins shifting slowly from side to side. Everyone stands up straight and looks at each other with blank expressions. The Great Kanto quake flattened Tokyo in 1923, and the same tectonic plates and the faults between them are set to release a similar disaster at any time. Each time the floor begins to rock this way, Meta braces herself for the Next Big Shakeup. She closes her eyes briefly and thinks,
I wonder if I’ll open my eyes to find this building destroyed around me. I wonder if I’ll ever open my eyes again
.

She opens her eyes when the rocking gets worse. Someone in the room is screaming. The sound rises up against the rattling furniture, the growling of the walls and ceiling and floor. She grips the edge of the nearest desk and feels her stomach beginning to heave, her equilibrium lost. She goes down on one knee. Books and papers come down from shelves that are bolted to the walls. The coffeemaker skitters off its table in the corner and falls to the floor, the carafe disintegrating immediately, sending coffee up the wall beside it.

“Stand in a doorway!” someone in the room screeches, remembering an instruction from some safety pamphlet or other. But walking to a doorway is impossible. The floor has turned liquid, rising and falling in waves.

When the earth stops moving, the building keeps rocking a few moments longer, the walls reorienting themselves to the foundation.

Thank God, thinks Meta. Thank God. Thank God. This is not going to be it. She releases her grip on the edge of the desk, and when she looks at her hand, discovers that she was holding on tightly enough to make her fingers bleed. A few crimson
pellets creep out from beneath the nails of the index and middle fingers of her left hand.

Sue Shooltz is flat on her back. Her hands cover her face, protecting it from whatever might have fallen on her but didn’t.

“Hadja. Hadja-ja,” Meta says to her. She is surprised to hear herself say this, since it does not mean anything, and what she was trying to say was, “Are you okay?”

She shakes her head. A mild aftershock rocks the building gently, sends the walls swaying in a manner that is almost soothing. She rights a seat that was sent over onto its side and sits on it. Greg Ulesso stands to his full height and smoothes the wrinkles from his clothing.

“Earthquakes!” he says. “I forgot earthquakes. What a bloody country!”

Meta tries hard to pull herself together after the quake. At her desk, she sits jittering and fluttering, drinking several cups of green tea from a pot someone had brewed just prior to the quake that had miraculously not been damaged or even spilled. Janitorial staff and a few teachers are moving noisily about the room, trying to put things back in order. They mop up coffee, stuff books back on shelves. Meta pulls all the materials together for her first class and tries to review them. She cannot hold a book still enough in her hand to read it. When she steadies the book by placing it flat on the desk, she finds it difficult to control her hand enough to turn a single page. With ten minutes remaining before the first class, she goes down the hallway from the teacher’s room and through the door to Mr. Takeuchi’s office.

He is a prim, excessively well-groomed man with soft features and big, round eyes.

“Nichols-san,” he says when she enters his office. Unlike the staff room, which still looks like there has just been a strong earthquake, Takeuchi’s office is as tidy and proper as ever. He must have been running around putting things back on shelves even as they were falling.

He does not mention the earthquake or ask her how she is. He merely sits with a scrubbed-looking face, his expression pleasant, his head cocked alertly to the side, waiting for her to say something.

“Mr. Takeuchi,” she says. At least she’s regained the ability to say that much.

He looks at her steadily.

She apologizes for such short notice, but tells Takeuchi she is not well enough to teach today. Except for the few weeks she was away last year, she has not missed a day of work. Takeuchi is not happy – though his permanently blissful expression will never show it. Meta surmises his unhappiness from the long silences that punctuate his speech, but he puts up no argument about her leaving.

She walks the whole way home. The temperature has risen enough to melt almost all the snow. Nothing anywhere speaks of the morning’s earthquake. Businesses are all open. With the snow gone from underfoot, people rush headlong down sidewalks. Taxis and trucks and buses and scooters and buggies and bicycles and motorcycles choke the streets.

It takes almost an hour to walk from her college to her apartment. When she enters the hallway on her floor, she hears shrieking. High, desperate, wordless cries fill the hallway.

“Gai, gai, gai, gai!” The sound is so desperate and animal-like that it takes her a moment to recognize it as Yuka’s voice. She
knows that Yuka’s boyfriend is a black belt in some martial art or other, so she quietly opens the door to her own apartment and rummages in the kitchen for a weapon. She finds a vase that has been drilled from a conical stone. She removes the dead flower from its centre and feels the weight of it steady her right fist.

She knocks on Yuka’s door, but there is no answer. When she twists the knob, she finds the door is unlocked, and pushes it forward. The screams turn louder. “Gai! Gai! Gai!”

Meta imagines Yuka standing over a bloody body with a knife, stabbing, stabbing. There is a sound like a fist impacting flesh. She removes her shoes in the genkan, carefully steps up onto the tatami, and goes down the short hallway to the living room. The furniture is upset. Things are not where they should be. There are pieces of clothing spread about. The earthquake has strewn laundry and dishes and small appliances everywhere. A place has been cleared hastily in the middle of the floor. Yuka lies on her back with her eyes thrown wide open. The thick, hairy body of a naked man lies face-down on top of her. She is staring at the ceiling, screaming from between lips that stretch back to show her rear teeth. “Gai! Gai!” Her bare legs are bent at the knees and spread wide apart. The man’s head is covered with curly black hair that is longer on top, but shorn close at the back of the neck. The shoulders, arms, back, buttocks, and legs of the man are swirled over with little black curls. The hairy buttocks pull up and thrust forward again. “Gai!” Yuka cries.