Into That Darkness (3 page)

His mother was crushing him to her chest and he could not breathe.

She held him.

As the ceiling lifted, as the floor gave out, as the world hurtled in with a roar.

When it ended it ended roaring and engulfed them in a white brilliance and it seemed their very bodies burned and then for a long while was nothing but silence and darkness. The woman lay with her son breathing in that new strangeness and then someone was weeping, and she knew it was her own voice, and she hefted a shoulder and sobbed thickly: Go. Now.

And her son wriggled gasping out from under.

In the blackness she told herself she must be calm. She choked and coughed and tugged at her left arm but it did not give and she could feel nothing in it.

Are you hurt? she asked. Her voice shivering. Mason? Are you hurt?

When the boy did not answer she brushed at his nape, his forehead. He felt hot.

Try to keep still, she murmured. Let me think for a moment.

I can't see anything, he said.

I know honey. It was an earthquake.

She flexed her legs, her ankles gone bloodless and just beginning to ache and the chunk of brickwork above groaned deeply. It's alright, she told her son, hush, it's fine. The walls clattered and rapped and fell still. In the darkness with her limbs twisted as they were she could not turn her face and she lay very still, blinked wetly. She coughed.

Listen to me, she said. We'll get out of here. Don't be afraid.

I'm not afraid, he whispered.

The old man snorted and spat a thick clot of dust and blood and he turned his head gingerly as he came to, his eyelids shut fast. The air was grey with dust.

In his ears a white roaring. His head ringing.

He could just make out the slats of the ceiling stoven in around him, loops of wire, a wall leaning wildly. In the ruins of that small tobacco shop he groped about, seized a tin, struck at a girder angrily with shaking hands. Nothing. He kicked his legs and something, broken mortar, brick, shifted loosely. When he shut his eyes he was still plunging through that darkness.

In his left hand he was holding the tobacconist's wrist.

It was not moving and he understood she was dead. He let her go and tried to sit up but just slumped to one side, his head spinning. The cuffs of his shirt were crusted with blood. The old man felt a terror coming up through his body as if it were not his own but coming from someplace deeper. The darkness under him pulsing like a great blood-chambered heart. He turned his head and shut his eyes and he stoppered his ears with his hands.

She could not be certain which wall had collapsed. She did not know how long they had been buried and she wondered then if the entire building had fallen. Likely only the floor above them. Rescuers would be coming soon. They would phone her daughter.

Kat will be trying to reach us, she said in the darkness.

Kat's mad at me, her son murmured.

Oh honey don't say that. She's not. She won't be when we get out of here. I promise.

I don't care. She can be mad at me.

And remembering then her daughter, small, bird-wristed in her bedroom. She wondered if her daughter had tried to reach her yet. Shook her head weakly. Returned instead to a vision of her daughter three years ago, them sitting parked in the driveway at her middle school in the rain. The old school hazed through the windshield, the engine idling smokily in the grey light. The other children in their uniforms running stooped and blurred through the courtyard. And her daughter crying because she felt she was ugly and because she did not want to go in to class. A lump rose in the woman's throat as she remembered. She had sat with her hands on the wheel not knowing what to say as big drops of rain flecked the glass and shadow-flecked her hands, shadow-flecked her daughter's beautiful dark cheeks.

Kat'll find us, her son said quietly and she felt him nodding to himself in the black.

He did not remember clambering free.

There was no sound. The old man stumbled into the square, hands dangling at his sides. Dust billowing and smoking about him. He saw a child's shoe and glinting tins of beans and he saw bits of clothing and drapery wrapped tattered around bricks and pipes and shredded under slabs of masonry and he picked his way between these and the smashed grouts of furniture scattered there.

Then he was crouched on all fours in the manner of a beast and panting. His clothes hanging off him. He stood shakily, staggered into the ruined street. Everything was very still and white as after a snowfall and the stillness moved very slow. He could see others stumbling in the smoke.

Then a high sun, warm and dry on his neck.

Then nothing.

Then his bare skin, trembling. His lips tasted of dirt and steel and he gagged and spat and doubled over hacking. Clawed two fingers into his mouth to clean it. When he straightened he ran his hand across his face and noticed as if from a long way off that he was crying.

The woman coughed and could not stop and then she was gasping long slow ragged gulps of air.

Oh honey, she said. Oh I can't. My arm's stuck.

The air was sour and an oily wisp of gas was seeping in through the walls and a line of sweat slid itching down her ribs. She turned her head this way and that in the darkness, she tilted her chin, she forked her free elbow birdlike behind her and she dropped her hip and rubbed at her legs. Her calves bloodless and prickling there. All at once she froze.

Mason, she hissed into the blackness. Mason do you hear that?

A voice, very faint. Unwinding through that labyrinth of pipe and hairline fracture:
Is anyone in there? Hello? Can you hear me,
hello?

Yes, she cried, yes oh thank god, we're in here—

Her voice, burned hoarse and crackling from the dust and heat and pain. We're in here, hello, get us out of here, she shouted and then her son was shouting also in his own high scream: Hey, hey, hey, hey.

After a moment the voice echoed again down to them but softer now, less distinct.
Hell, anyone, can you hear.
Then it faded and was gone.

I think he heard us, her son said. I think he did.

She reached for his hand.

The old man's ears were bleeding as if the earthquake thundered yet within him and he shook his head slowly to dispel the noise. Cries were coming to him out of the drifting dust, distorted and slow.

He saw the figure of an old man stagger up out of the smoke, face streaked with dirt, and then the two old men approached each other as if stepping towards a reflection.

What happened, the old man whispered. Still shaking his head.

The door, the other was saying, the door, the door.

And then that figure too was gone. The old man walked, turned, walked. Thought vaguely of going to his house and then thought in alarm:
Where's Callie?
although it did not make sense, his wife had been dead almost forty years, and then he leaned against a grimy mailbox and began to tremble. There were people in the street now, standing with arms folded in shock and murmuring to themselves, and now the old man could hear sirens very far off.

A silver motor scooter came wending through the maze of rubble with a low whine and the sunlight flared off its fuel tank. Poles were downed along the sidewalk and there were figures half-naked and shouting. The smoke was lifting. Many buildings had slewed or collapsed entirely. He stood at the corner where the bank once stood and stared down the side street at the houses behind their rows of dahlias and rhododendrons and at the white wood fences and wicker arbours still of a piece and standing. The front yards strewn with bits of glass and with plastic chairs fallen on one side and with twists of clothes hurtled from clotheslines and from the buckled houses themselves. As if all along that street occupants had been evicted in force.

Then he saw the dead girl. Rolled onto her stomach and lying bonelessly on the hot asphalt. Her dress was rucked up over her waist. He sat down next to her socked feet, his face slack. The rubble was moving, there were figures coming out. The old man peered around him and the light in that narrow street seemed suffused with a fiery stillness and all that it fell upon appeared to burn.

Mason, the woman whispered with strain. The counter. Go over to the counter. Can you?

Her son was silent, breathing beside her. She ran a finger lightly over his face.

Mason? You have to get outside, you have to tell them where we are.

He was very quiet and then he said, sleepily: Why is it so dark in here?

She swallowed down her sudden fear.

It was an earthquake honey, she said. You know that. You asked that already. Right?

But when she bundled a dishtowel and lifted the boy's head onto the makeshift pillow he did not stir. As she turned her left arm spasmed with a black spiking pain and she cried out. Her son's thin chest rising and falling under her palm. She rested next to him in that darkness her legs throbbing and her ruined arm spectral beneath her and it seemed almost as if she had dreamed her way to this place, so much was the darkness around her like the darkness within.

She felt herself beginning to drift. Thinking:
Oh god, Kat.
She choked and coughed and spat up a great mouthful of phlegm to keep from crying. A reek of gas still pricking her nostrils, as if the stove lines were punctured.

After a time she could hear a scrape of iron and then the slab overhead shuddered.

She shook her son by the elbow. They're getting closer, she whispered. Mason? Can you hear them? They're coming.

She shut her eyes hard and spots of light flared up and faded before her. So loud was the digging that the woman braced herself, it seemed the slab overhead would peel back any moment, that sunlight would come flooding in upon them, sleek silhouettes bending down to fold them in their arms. But it did not come. And then she could not hear any digging at all.

We're down here, we're in here, we're people in here, she screamed.

The darkness shuddering, the dust sifting down over them.

Her son was awake now and breathing.

They're coming for us, she said.

But then her voice choked and she began to cry silently and when her son held her she cried the harder for it. His dark hands in her hair years ago like small birds, soft, cool, savagely clever. Pecking manifold and dexterous her tight braids. His sober eyes the colour of slate.

The woman lifted her wrist to her mouth, the saliva and dirt and tears smearing there.

The old man stood twisting a brown cardigan in his hands as if to wring it dry. He did not know where he had found it. When he heard a voice mutter something familiar he turned, dazed. Thinking:
What was that? What was that he said?

A kid with a patchy beard was staring him down. Dressed in stained baggy jeans, clutching a crowbar.

I said, are you Arthur Lear?

His teeth were very yellow.

The old man was shaking his head like a fool. Do I know you? he asked.

The kid frowned as if he did not understand the question. You dropped this, he said after a moment, holding out the old man's billfold. I mean I think you dropped it. And then, uncertainly: Didn't you drop this?

The old man took it and stared at it strangely. And then he was remembering the black woman from the café who fainted in the square, and her son in the window, his hand pressed to the glass, and all at once he was shaking.

Hey, the kid said. Hey, easy there. You alright?

What's wrong with him? a girl asked, drifting towards them. She kicked aside a twist of metal with a clatter and stared down at the old man. Is he hurt? Are you hurt?

Where the old man's hands pressed to his knees they left soft bloodied palm prints and he stared at them uncomprehending and then at the kid's knuckles whitening on the crowbar.

After a moment the kid gestured with the crowbar at the ruined building across the street. You came, he said to the girl. I hoped you'd come.

But she just ran both hands along her skirt and sat beside the old man with her knees pressed together and her bottom lip sucked in and she did not meet the kid's eye.

Aza, the old man tried to say. Aza's in there.

What did he say? the girl asked.

The kid's face was grimed black and his eyes were red-rimmed and raw and he wiped at his nose with the back of a hand. He stared at the old man a long moment. He's in shock, he said.

Did he say Aza? the girl asked. Did you say Aza? The cigarette woman?

The old man nodded.

He thinks she's alive too, the girl muttered.

She
is
alive, the kid said quickly. How does he know Aza?

Rory lives right above her shop, the girl said to the old man very slowly. I mean, he lived above it. He thought he could hear her after it hit. Her and some others. How do you know her?

The old man looked blearily from the girl to the kid and back to the girl but said nothing.

We got to get her out, the kid said again.

They'll be sending crews for that. The girl looked at the old man. Tell him, she said. Tell him they'll be bringing crews in to do that.

You tell me, the kid said. Who do you think is coming?

I don't know, the police. The army. For god's sake Rory. You go in there it's just another person they have to save.

No one's coming Sara.

Stop it.

The whole fucking city's gone. What if it was your own family in there? What if it was Mickey, Sara?

He's in Toronto.

The kid looked a long moment at her as if he might say more.

Just say it, the girl said.

The kid looked at her then at the old man and then back at the girl and after a moment he spun around and picked his way through the rubble in the street.

The old man watched the kid climb the bank of the ruined café and cross over to the stoven roof of the tobacconist's, others already in the wreckage there. Sunlight was sifting down through the oak leaves above the old man's head and glancing off the asphalt and the fenders of cars. He pressed a bloodied hand to his eyes and he saw again in that darkness which was not darkness his elbows pinioned under bricks and glass and pipes and he smelled again the clot of dirt in his nostrils and he felt the ground lurch and give way underneath him and he feared he would be sick.