He turned off the radio. The lawns and woods on either side of him were dark, dark. A flashing ambulance appeared in his mirrors and expanded, its tires throwing up a spray of sandy water as it passed him. He had to close his window, and for a moment, in the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember the season or the hour; whether it was maybe early on an autumn evening? An ambulance passing him on a chilly, rain-soaked road? It felt like autumn and there was little in his head to persuade him otherwise. If only the road were less dark, or less straight, or if he could see a little better . . .
Sweeting-Aldren had manufactured the Warning Orange pigment in the hazard cones blocking the entrance ramps to Route 128 and in the jackets of the patrolmen standing on the overpass, where apparently one of the spans had lost its footing. A Highway Department truck’s butterscotch-colored lights were pulsing in the humid air. “What a mess,” Louis said as he turned down a dark street that paralleled the expressway. His mask was beginning to make his face itch.
He had followed the street for maybe half a mile, past cavities of blackness that he took to be front lawns, when his headlights caught a flash of something wrong in the underbrush to his left—the exposed white flesh of trees with freshly broken limbs, and a car-like shape in an uncar-like position. He slowed and made a U-turn, angling his high-beams to light the scene.
The something was indeed a car. Its tires were pointed at the sky and the passenger compartment was flattened and buried in mud and shrubs and tree litter at the foot of Route 128’s elevated grade. Broken scrub maples and torn earth marked the trajectory the car had taken in its plunge from the expressway. Louis left his engine running and pushed his way through weeds and branches to the wreck. Only the parts of the car lit by his headlights, the creased metal and contorted chassis, made any sense; there was a pregnant, dark confusion at his feet, and in the middle of it, dimly, he saw the figure of a man. The body was intact but had flowed halfway out the open driver-side window, hands first, hands bending as the arms flowed onto them, arms bending as head and torso came to rest on them. The body’s angles were like a dancer’s when the dancer touches his limp curled hands to his face and hugs his elbows to his chest and bends his head to evoke tenderness or mourning or submission. The man had a thick neck and wore a cheap pink dress shirt and had possibly never once been so expressive with his body while he lived, his posture never so eloquent of anything as it was now of death; because it was totally evident that he was dead.
There was no traffic on the highway above. Louis stumbled around to the other side of the car, moaning a little with self-pity, and made sure there’d been no passengers. Now that he couldn’t see the man he didn’t believe so absolutely that he was dead. He returned to him and knelt and touched his neck. The skin was cool. He shoved gently and the head twisted forward. He took his hand away. He could hear voices, male and female, from the lawns across the road, and he ran to say what he had to say, which was that a man was dead.
♦
Peter’s sisters were complaining about their gas masks. They said they felt stupid wearing them. They pointed out that nobody else, none of the cops and bystanders they’d passed in Lynnfield Center and Middleton, was wearing a mask.
“Keep them on,” said Peter, driving. “Your livers will thank you for it.”
Eileen had leaned her tired, laden head against her back-seat window and was letting her eyes open and close on the dark blur of exurb they were passing through. She could have slept if Peter hadn’t kept braking for real or suspected hazards—snapped power lines, flooded low spots in the road, and curves that looked at first like fault scarps. She let her body swing however it wanted to, let her masked face press into the glass as the car bounced and banked. It had always been comforting for her to keep on riding and riding without stopping, and it was especially comforting now to be rocked very long and very gently, to have it be the car and not the ground. She watched the alternating woods and settlements and fields. There was a vapor plume on the southern horizon, rising from a point many miles away. She saw it and then she didn’t for a long time, and then another southern vista opened up and she saw it again, a fist of gray gas punching the black belly of the sky, its billowy knuckles glowing orange. It evolved like a normal cloud in a normal sky, appearing stationary if she stared but changing if she didn’t. At first it was a puffy exclamation point listing to the left, and then more trees blocked her view, and then it had buckled and sagged into a question mark. Her eyes kept falling shut as motion lulled her. She recognized the sounds in the car as words spoken by Peter and his family and the radio announcer, but even the minimal effort of understanding them was beyond her. The plume stayed the same size, growing larger as the road carried her away from it. She didn’t say anything. She was almost asleep now and she was afraid that if the others saw the plume it would stop being just a thing in her head and become real.
♦
A family was clustered around a pickup truck, listening to the radio in the light of a Coleman lantern on the hood. There were two young couples, an older couple, and a baby. The older woman saw Louis coming in his gas mask and gaped at him. He said there was a dead person across the street.
Now everyone was gaping at him. “Is . . . something wrong?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “I guess there’s some concern about the chemical plant in Peabody.”
He’d known he had to tell them, but he wasn’t sure if it was a mistake. The family began to shout questions at him two and three at a time. He tried to bring the discussion back to the dead man across the street, but before he knew it he was left standing alone in the driveway while people hurried away in all directions, some disappearing into the house, others running off to tell the neighbors.
The radio said:
There are reports now of at least eighteen people dead, most of them in Essex County. This figure is certain to rise, and it’s a good guess that there have been scores if not hundreds of injuries in what is clearly the worst natural tragedy ever to strike the Boston area
.
“Do you need a ride?” the older woman asked Louis. She and her husband were stowing plastic Star Market bags of food and bottles of water in the bay of the truck.
“No . . .” Louis gestured vaguely. “Thanks anyway.”
“Might as well get going, huh?”
“Yeah, although . . .” He nodded at the street.
“Forget about him.”
He trudged down the driveway and pushed through the brush and poison ivy and stood quietly by the overturned car, looking down at this faceless victim who had become his. Word of a possible chemical leak was leaking up and down the street. More and more engines were starting, and again the earth was trembling.
♦
Eileen woke up when the car stopped on the gravel drive in front of her mother’s house. She took off her mask and followed Peter as he limped towards the front door. An emergency light in the living room, installed to foil burglars, lit the smithereens of a major trashing—the shuffled furniture, the cratered walls. The sky’s darkness had grown waxy, as if night had grown tired of being night and was reconsidering. Peter knocked on the door. Eileen heard a radio voice outside somewhere and went around the side of the house.
Her mother was sitting in an Adirondack chair halfway down the wide lawn that sloped away from the eastern wing. On the grass beside her were a silver ice bucket and a boom box playing news. She was drinking champagne from a fluted glass.
“Are you OK?” Eileen said.
“Eileen.” Melanie swung her head around loosely. “You’re fine. I knew you would be fine. Everything is fine.”
. . .
raging unchecked at this hour at their facility in Peabody. We have no official word yet, but residents who have not already left the surrounding communities should consider staying indoors with their windows shut tightly and their airconditioners off
.
“You’re OK?” Eileen said.
Melanie drained her glass and held it aloft. “I am triumphant.” she said. “Triumphant!”
. . .
structural damage, and the major arteries are jammed. From what I can see here, it appears that fire fighters are making no attempt to enter the installation. There is a . . . choking . . . harsh . . . smoke in the air, and I’m sure the fire chief is concerned for the safety of his men
.
“How is she?” Peter said, also maskless.
Eileen rolled her eyes and turned away. “Triumphant.”
“Hi, Mrs. Holland.”
“Hello, Peter.” Melanie emptied the last drops of champagne into her glass and returned the bottle to the bucket upside down. “Tell me how your family is. Are they all fine?”
Eileen heard a loud hiccup as she started back up the hill. She couldn’t remember ever missing Louis, but she missed him now.
“Eileen, honey, there’s more champagne in the refrigerator, you can offer it to Peter’s family. Peter, bring some chairs down. There are snacks there too, Eileen. You’ll see them.”
Mrs. Stoorhuys was still wearing her mask. She stopped by Eileen on the dew-slicked grass. “How is she?”
“Oh, she’s great,” Eileen said.
“Such a lovely woman. Such a lovely house.” Janet tiptoed down the hill and touched Melanie on the shoulder. “Melanie?”
Melanie looked up at her and screamed. The radio was barking about the fire in Peabody. Eileen lay down on the grass and fell asleep.
♦
How long it took to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you were living in the black. How long it took even to get from Lynnfield to the Fens of Boston when the expressways were closed and the power was out. Louis figured that he and his Civic were averaging about the speed of a cantering horse as they nosed south through Wakefield, Stoneham, Melrose. He stopped to consult his map, he stopped at damaged bridges and had to circumvent. He stopped and helped a Cambodian man get his rust-blasted Gremlin out of a ditch and on the road to Peabody, where his wife and children were. He gave the man his gas mask when they parted.
The streets with their curbs and sidewalks and sewer holes were not anchored to the ground. Ten Melrose firemen walked away from an extinguished blaze with the easy gait of people leaving church, their backs to the black timbers that had risen victoriously from the earth. A library building had been incontinent of bricks, and the proximity of strong motion, the radiant and lingering randomness of it all, changed the rubble’s stillness from an elementary quality into a kind of pain, an immanence.
The eighteenth century haunted the unfathomable side streets, so latent in the darkness that Louis almost expected to hear the thud of horse hooves in the mud. He saw how black the nights must have been in a town center two hundred years ago, before there were gaslights and long before the insomnia of the current age had spread insomniac hallucinations in strips along the edges of its towns and made the outdoors indoors: how the buildings themselves must have rested, as sightless and dead-seeming as the people asleep inside them. How scary and pretty those nights must have been. How they must have made some kind of true repose and true solitude a possibility.
But that age was only an echo now, dying if you tried to come too close, and wherever he passed people—they weren’t in the business districts or at the malls but on the residential streets—they were glued to automobiles with lights and radios and engines running, and he could not deny that these little tableaux, repeated innumerable times as he proceeded south, were the only things he saw all night that felt bona fide. The stationary headlights drove beams of reality through the supposed fact of the earthquake and lit up patches of the real foliage and real houses that were indifferently surviving the darkness. And the radio, though he kept his own unit mainly off, was the voice of his own age, the one voice in the night he understood. The broken windows and dangling wires and ambulances and injured faces looming up in the night were meaningless. Meaningless because he could look at them and somehow feel no vengefulness, none at all. Not even by the expressway back in Lynnfield, as he’d stood by the first dead person he’d ever seen, had there been any room in his heart for anger. He couldn’t connect the earthquake-killed thing at his feet to any actions within a scheme of right and wrong, couldn’t bring himself to think: the company is responsible for this and they must pay. And yet how could you believe in responsibility if responsibility had limits? How could an earthquake caused by the cupidity and faithlessness of real individual men nonetheless become purely an act of God, with an act of God’s windy inhuman vacuity? Remembering the dead man’s crumpled arms and cradled head, he wasn’t even able to feel horror. The body now seemed like the purse-snatchings he’d witnessed in Chicago, or like the tattered man he’d once seen lying with his pants down jerking off in the bushes of Hermann Park in Houston, an image as unreal as everything else about this earthquake, as unreal as war reportage or assassination footage on television, except that unreality wasn’t quite the word either for what he’d felt there, standing in poison ivy in the last decade of the twentieth century, surrounded by aftermath and wondering why he lived and what a world that encompassed death was really made of. The word was mystery.
He was traveling a parkway in Everett or Medford (he wasn’t exactly sure which) when lights came on and it became apparent that the city and the inner suburbs were far from fully wrecked. A number of houses had dropped to their knees or lost walls, but even the worst streets looked better than an average ghetto block. Irish youths were milling on the roof of a ball-field dugout, drinking beer. Children were playing in the restored light the way children of the desert play in rainstorms. He let himself relax a little, and immediately felt sick with exhaustion and the abject regret that staying up all night had always caused him.
The sky was pink and yellow when he reached Back Bay. Unreality still adhered to the various fixtures from which destruction had emanated—to the buckled sidewalk, to the wet crack angling across Marlborough Street, to the loose bricks and cast concrete finials and chunks of masonry that lay on the grass or pavement with pointed, disingenuous motionlessness, as if hoping to pass as fragments of a Roman temple or boulders at the bottom of a cliff, things that hadn’t budged in centuries. Eileen and Peter’s building, however, was standing just the way Louis had left it.