Box Girl (23 page)

The front pane of glass shakes. I
knew
there would be an
earthquake while I was in the box. As with most situations that require me to take some sort of action, I freeze. I have neither fight nor flight: I just stand there, dumfounded, like a kid who just peed in his pants.

I'm going to be buried alive in a pile of concrete and glass while sitting in the box. What a way to go. I can see His Majesty now, manning the pearly gates with a clipboard and a headset, like a bouncer at a nightclub, making his final judgments. “Well,” he'll say, giving me the old holier-than-thou once-over as only He can do, “Based on
that
getup, I think we're gonna have to redirect you downstairs for reassignment—
way
downstairs.”

I finally look up. I was wrong. It's not an earthquake at all. It's the concierge. He's cleaning the glass with paper towels and Windex. I should point out that he is doing this very aggressively. Does he have any idea how startling that is in here? Is he trying to hurt the glass? This guy's a little firecracker, bald and compact. He stands at his computer with his legs far
apart, like a football coach, or a male cheerleader. Next to his computer is a hot coffee with a straw, and beside that, a pack of Parliament Lights.

Since I took my first steps into California, I have been certain The Big One will come for us at any minute. Because of this, I am constantly hatching disaster preparedness plans. Every building I enter is assessed for structural soundness, and the first thing I do when I walk into a room is survey the furniture to determine the safest place to hunker down. I always move my water glass away from my laptop whenever I step away from it, for even a minute, and I will never go more than one floor below ground level in a parking garage.

My neurosis about natural disasters no doubt has something to do with my dad, who fancies himself something of a recreational meteorologist. He is fascinated by weather and other terrifying natural phenomena. In college, he used to tell me I needed to drive up to Yellowstone “before she blows.” He would remind me, “It's not an ‘if,' it's a ‘when.'” This wasn't particularly comforting considering I went to school only five hundred miles south of there. “Oh, that wouldn't matter,” he'd say, and I'd feel momentarily relieved. “If she blows, it would be the end of mankind as we know it.”

I called my parents after I heard an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier was supposed to hit Earth later that day. Not supposed to, but could have. It was closer than any other asteroid since 1976—only two hundred thousand miles away. The “Near Earth Objects Scientist” who was being interviewed on NPR said if it hit land, it would take out all of Los Angeles, and if it hit sea, it would create two-hundred-foot waves. Either way, in the words of our former governor, “Hasta la vista, baby.”

My mom answered the phone as I merged onto the 105 East. “Did you hear about this asteroid that's supposed to hit earth today?” I asked.

“No! What?” She then shouted, “Bill! Have you heard about this asteroid that's supposed to hit earth today?”

I waited a moment for her to come back to the receiver. “Your father just smirked and said we've got at least another hour.”

“Put him on the phone,” I said. “Dad, what do you mean? It's not supposed to hit us, is it?”

“Well,” he said. “If our scientists are worth a damn then it's not. But I'm enjoying a stiff Stoli martini right now just in case they're wrong.”

Shortly after, I had a nightmare about an earthquake. The world was swaying from side to side, like a cruise ship righting itself just before it capsizes. I was sliding from one end of a mall to the other. Everyone was slipping toward Nordstrom, then slamming back against Bloomingdale's. Somehow, I got out of the mall and climbed a cliff with a waterfall. (I don't know; it was a dream.) At the top of the waterfall, there was a room. I tried to get under a table, but before I could, I was thrown to the other side of the room and ejected out a window, into the sunny LA sky. I flew along the coast, over beautiful beachfront houses, some on fire, and everyone below me was clinging onto something—a mailbox, a tree trunk, a telephone pole—so they didn't get thrown into the air like me. This sort of dream is not uncommon for me. I only have one recurring nightmare, always from the apocalyptic genre.

The glass rattles again. This time, the Firecracker Concierge falls backward and bangs into it. I really wish he would stop. Between the nightmare and a strange, out-of-place earthquake on the East Coast, I've been jumpier than usual.

The earthquake on the East Coast hadn't even stopped trembling when my mom called me, carrying on as if the world
was coming to an end. She was at the Theta House at Yale, of all places, where she is the housemother (seriously), and was helping the girls move in for the fall semester. She said Thetas were screaming and scattering everywhere.

“Don't worry, ya'll!” she announced after the tremors, “I'll call my daughter in California!”

When she called, she asked, “Now if there's an aftershock, should we get in the basement?”

“The basement! God, no!” I said.

“No Betty, the bathtub!” one of the girls shouted.

“No, not the bathtub,” I said. “That is for hurricanes and tornadoes. You've got your natural disasters all mixed up.”

Ivy League or not, these East Coast women had absolutely no idea what to do with an earthquake.

“Get under a table,” I told her.

“We don't have any tables yet!” my mom said, and then she shouted to the other housemother, “Carol, we need to get that dining room table,
now.”

Then my mom said she had to get off the phone because she had to go buy a table.

Because of my illogical and unrelenting fear of where I will be when The Big One hits, I typically spend a few moments each shift deciding what I would do in the event of an earthquake striking while I am in the box. The most serious problem is, of course, that I'm surrounded by glass. I've decided crawling under the mattress is my best bet, but based upon my reflexes tonight, I'm sure I'd probably just lie there and wait for the shards of glass to kill me.

One month, this fear was particularly pronounced because the back wall of the box was covered in little porcelain plates—twenty-six of them. I counted.

Prickly leaves and pastel roses adorned each of the twenty-six darling plates, the edges of which were scalloped and delicately rimmed in gold. I wished I could have flipped them over to see what pattern they were, but they were stuck to the wall. (I tried.) They looked like they once lived in my grandmother's breakfront, removed from their protective cases only for the finer meals. In the front of the box were Lucite boxes filled with even more dinner plates, those ones smashed into big chunks. There were a dozen or so different patterns—I didn't take an exact count of those. I recognized at least two of the patterns. My mom collects the green ones that look like leaves. They're called Majolica, she told me. They have the veiny, lumpy texture of a fern frond. I also recognized the blue-and-white Chinese-looking plates. Those ornate numbers with a picture of a pagoda, two doves, and an apple tree are Blue Willow. My mom doesn't use those for eating, though—they are hung in a cluster on her kitchen wall, for decoration. Then, most terrifyingly, there was a glass box full of plate shards mounted to the wall, right above my head.

I'm actually not sure which would be worse during an earthquake—the box or my apartment in Venice, which is certain to collapse like a house of flimsy, worn-out cards, the ones that are hard to shuffle. The only thing I am sure of is this: In the event of The Big One, the absolute last place I want to be is among the library book stacks at the University of Southern California. While it is one of the most beautiful college libraries in the country, if you happen to find yourself in those book stacks during The Big One, well, it's been a good run.

The first time I ventured into these stacks I was in search of three titles, which I had scribbled on the back of a Coffee Bean receipt. A librarian turned to his computer and told me they didn't have two of the books but one of them was “down there.” Awkwardly gripping a tiny, eraser-less pencil, he hunched over a square of scrap paper and wrote down
the call number: “PS355305789z46252006.” (I'm not kidding, that was it. Of course I still have the piece of paper.) He said it was on Floor Two, so I'd have to go down four floors. Down four floors?
Aren't I on floor one?
I thought.
Is two not above one?

“Have you ever been down there?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

Why did he keep referring to it as “down there”?

He handed me a detailed yet entirely incomprehensible map, which he said needed to be returned when I got “back up.” Was I going spelunking? Did I need a headlamp? An avalanche beacon? What the hell was going on here?

Armed with my map (which I immediately gave up using for its intended purpose and started using as a fan), I began my expedition to the inner bowels of the beast.
How far below ground level is Floor Two
, I thought.
Will I hit water? Uncover a lost treasure? Capture a troll?

Below me, taped firmly to the floor, was a path in the shape of stacked arrows, in a color I can only call emergency red. Laced with hot pink, it was a more panicked version of regular red, which said not just, “Follow me to the nearest exit,” but, “Drop your shit and sprint.” I followed these arrows to an archaic elevator, where I half expected an attendant to be standing inside—top hat, gloves, and all—cranking a lever to deliver me to my destination.

As I emerged from the elevator, I actually laughed. The stacks of books went on as far as I could see, in every direction, so tall and narrow and close together that, when standing with my hands on my hips, both elbows touched book spines. My journey began in section PQ1643: French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Literature; an ocean away from where I wanted to be. While the initial effect of this literary catacomb was dizzying, the smell was heavenly—the dusty, sour-milk-and-starch stench of old books.

The books went on forever—books of poems, books of plays, an entire section of books of quotations:
The Quotable Woman, Who Said What In 1971, What Great Men Say About Other Great Men
. I began to get lost in the titles, pulling out intriguing ones, stopping, sitting, starting again. Before I knew it, I had an armful of books, none on my original list.

Though the setting was ideal for a psychological thriller, I didn't want to leave. It was so quiet and set apart. My own little underground world. I stopped in front of a book I'd always wanted to read and slid down the side of the stacks onto the floor. An hour went by. Maybe a day? A chair scratched against the floor above me, and I looked up. Neon white lights buzzed overhead, and the shelves, towering almost to the ceiling, were loaded with heavy, hardbound books. I took a picture from below and send it to Peter with a caption that said, “I hope there's not an earthquake.” But the text wouldn't send. My Blackberry signal said “SOS,” no one in, no one out.

I began picturing my demise. The ground would start to shake, and the lights would swing overhead, some snapping in half. Shelves would fall like dominoes, one onto another, books crashing below. I'd be huddled there, hands-over-head, in the American Lit section, trapped between H.L. Mencken, J.D. Salinger, and other writers who were already dead. The final blow would come from above: At 1,285 pages, Norman Mailer's
The Time of Our Time
would be the end of me.