Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (8 page)

6.
Temblor!

When John Praxis returned to the office from lunch, he briefly took note of the unseasonable weather. For a late October day—normally a time of rising wind, high clouds, and eventual rivers of fog pouring between the buildings in late afternoon—the air was still and the heat oppressive, as if the city was holding its breath. The phrase “earthquake weather” passed through his mind, as it did for many Bay Area residents at such times. But then he remembered that it was all superstition, going back to the Greek notion that earthquakes were caused by the god Poseidon trapping the winds in underground caves. How many hot, still days had to pass with nothing more than the leaves falling straight down for people to give up that old myth?

He settled into his desk chair, brought up his calendar, and began the afternoon’s work. It was mainly reading: reports and summaries from Praxis Engineering & Construction’s department heads and contracts forwarded with questions from the Legal Department—which had grown strangely timid now that Antigone was no longer on hand to decide on their judgment calls. He also had phone messages and emails left over from the morning that needed to be returned.

At 1:59 p.m. precisely, because he happened to have his eyes on the readout at the bottom edge of his computer screen, the desk started to slide to the left while his chair, a solid piece of high-backed design, slid smoothly to the right, its castors rolling on the broad plastic carpet pad. At first, he had the sensation of being on a ship that was taking a cross sea: no warning sound, no sudden thuds or jars, just the liquid, sideways motion, like furniture passing in the night.

Then he heard a growling, a deep rumbling, like a train passing right under the structure a hundred feet down. But the nearest subway—a Muni extension into Chinatown—was more than three blocks to the west, and he had never heard it make a sound. This noise was loud, as if the trains were colliding in a grinding crash that went on and on.

Praxis gripped the edge of the desk, trying to steady it. He knew he was experiencing an earthquake—anyone who had lived for as long as he had in San Francisco knew the feeling of a minor
temblor
—and only then did the motion change. The desk was still going left and his chair going right, but both began juttering, shaking up and down—and not in synch, but with the desk rising while the chair fell—with a vertical motion of four to six inches. He let go of the desk, grabbed the chair’s arms, tucked his feet back into the legs of the pedestal base, and held on. He felt like he was riding a roller coaster as it went off the rails.

The desk continued traveling west, toward the wall, banged into it, and flipped over backwards, flinging his computer, desk set, telephone, and pictures of Antigone and his children out into the empty space of the office. The tumbling items were met by a spray of glass coming inward as the windows shattered.

Praxis dipped his head and squeezed his eyes shut against flying glass. A terrific wallop caught the side of his chair, smacking his elbow and crushing two fingers of his right hand against the armrest, as he slid into the office door while it was swinging itself closed. He withdrew his injured arm and cradled it against his body. At the same time, he put out his legs to stabilize the chair, so that it would not dump him forward into all that broken glass.

Elsewhere in the office, all the phones were ringing at once, a furious high-pitched burr, louder than the sound of the windows breaking. He guessed that somehow the communications network was getting an overload from broken and crossed wiring in the building.

The protocol drilled into every Bay Area child was to get into a doorway or crawl under a desk. Both options were ruled out for John Praxis at the moment as he spun around the room. If the ceiling panels and the light fixtures came down on his head, he would just have to endure the pain. The Sansome Street office building where PE&C still maintained its headquarters was old and built of faded yellow brick, but like most of the city it had been reinforced to code. Heavy steel beams held the exterior walls together, and torsion rods crossed inside the walls to lace one floor into the next and then everything into the foundation. He guessed the structure would stand up to a lot of shaking and not fall in on itself.

As a construction expert, however, Praxis knew that safety depended on the ground as much as on the building. He regretted at that moment not knowing whether this part of Sansome Street, where he had apparently staked his life, lay on top of the bedrock that supported Telegraph Hill to the north, or on the rich, dark mud of the original Yerba Buena Cove to the south, which had been filled in during the Gold Rush of the 1850s. From the fact that the earthquake had not gone through his building as a single shock—
bang!
—but was instead shaking him and his office like a jelly roll, sending him around in slow circles, he suspected the latter.

He no longer had his computer monitor to read the time. His watch suggested the quake had gone on for more than a minute, perhaps two. Every structural design and every reinforcement job, he knew, made calculated bets about the stresses likely to be encountered: so much energy expended over so much time. Exceed those limits, trump the bet, and any design would eventually fail and collapse.

John Praxis could only hold onto his chair, try to stay upright, and hope the shaking would end before that happened.

* * *

Brandon Praxis’s first notion that the Great Bay Quake had finally come began with the roadway of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. He was driving west, toward the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island, when the pavement started to slide under his wheels. He was looking up at the time, toward the widely curved loop of the main suspension cable and the harplike strings of the supporting cables that attached the roadway to the great white cable above. Those strings were vibrating as if the fingers of some huge god were playing a ghostly arpeggio. He listened for the sound of it, but all he could hear was the clanging of metal, crashing of plastic, and honking of horns as the vehicles around him wandered into and out of each other’s lanes.

He kept his head, kept his lane—except where he had to slalom around cars that had stopped in panic—and drove forward to get off the bridge before it shook itself apart. From the magnitude and duration of the shaking—with his car still bouncing around like a Volkswagen Bug with a pair of teenagers going at it in the back seat—he suspected a long tumble into the Bay waters—or onto the rocky shelf of the island—was not far away.

As Brandon drove, he had one heart-stopping moment, a moment suspended in time, when he realized that, among all the other near-misses he had experienced, this could well be the day he died. And his one regret, burning like tears that started behind his eyes, was that he would not get to live out a long and happy life with Penny Winston. He would miss all the opportunities to adore her, raise hell with her, fight with her, and raise children with her. So close and yet so far … He blinked away the beginning of those tears and drove on madly.

Brandon finally took the left exit off the bridge and followed the island’s access road, up around the shoulder of the hill. Ahead of him were other sensible drivers who chose not to go straight through the tunnel and out onto the swaying western span. He pushed forward as far as he could, until the sludge of escaped traffic ground to a halt.

From where he was stopped, in the middle of the two-lane road, he looked out from a height of perhaps two hundred feet, over the bridge span, across the water, toward downtown San Francisco and the North Beach District—except he couldn’t see much beyond the waterfront. He could see the old piers that extended into the Bay—two of them having collapsed onto their pilings—and the vague outlines of the first rank of high-rises behind them, but the rest of the city was shrouded in mist or haze or fog … or dust. Whether any of the city beyond the Embarcadero was still standing or not, Brandon couldn’t be sure.

* * *

After she made sure that everyone in the office was alive and—aside from cuts and bruises, bleeding scalps, bashed fingers, elbows, and knees—unhurt, Callie Praxis left to go to her apartment building in the Western Addition. What would normally have been a twenty-minute cab ride, a half-hour drive, or forty minutes on BART and the Muni, was a four-hour walk, over rubble, in heels. On that trip she endured two more aftershocks, not quite as strong or as long as the first quake, but enough to knock her off her feet and into the street.

At intervals of ten minutes or so she tried to call the elite De Grew School on California Street, where Rafaella would have been in class at the time of the quake. All she got was line noise or recorded voices telling her to “Please try again later,” because all the phone circuits were jammed—or else they were shut down where the cell towers had toppled and collapsed.

When she reached her apartment—which was still standing, although the exterior stucco had cracked out in spider-web patterns—Rafaella was not there. Callie knew the girl should have been released from school by then, and the teachers all knew she lived close enough that they probably wouldn’t have tried evacuating her to a shelter someplace else.

Without staying to check on the apartment, or to dress the cuts on her knees and change her shoes, Callie left to walk three streets over to the school. Even before she came in sight, she had a sinking feeling from the amount of dust and smoke still billowing out from the center of the block on California. As she approached, she saw where a pile of bricks and broken glass had cascaded into the street. The De Grew was in a new building, well constructed and built to code, on solid ground, and yet it had come apart like something made out of Lego blocks, testifying to the power of the earthquake.

It took a few moments for Callie to realize what was missing from the scene: any emergency vehicles or rescue workers. No ambulances or fire trucks, not even a patrol car, and no cordon of yellow tapes and orange cones. This was a tragedy that played out alone in the middle of a destroyed city.

The damage was so complete—from where Callie stood in the street, she could actually see across the tilted plane of the composition roof—that at first she thought it would be impossible for her to wade in, trying to find and help the survivors, trying to find her daughter. She made several attempts at penetrating the jumble of bricks, broken steel, window frames, and particle board that cascaded across the pavement. Finally, she found a disjunction, a place where two walls had come together, supported each other, and left a gap, like a cave, four feet wide and three feet high.

Callie got down on her hands and knees, crawled forward into the darkness, and pushed against pieces of wooden paneling and cracked drywall.

“Raffi!” she called into the still, dead air. “Anybody?”

Within five or eight feet of progress, the overhead hung lower than her shoulders, and she was reduced to crawling. Almost immediately her hands and elbows encountered a crunchy surface—floor tiles? ceiling tiles?—that was also damp. Soon she was wet with some liquid that, in the utter darkness, she could only hope was the outflow from a broken pipe and not from broken bodies.

“Hello!” she called again.

In slow motion, the ground beneath her surged and rolled with another aftershock. The mass of broken building above her shifted, creaked, and groaned. If she stayed, it would fall on her, killing her outright or trapping her for hours or days. She couldn’t help anyone in that condition.

Callie pushed back out, shoving with her palms and elbows, wriggling with her hips, clawing with the toes of her once beautiful leather pumps, until the feeble daylight started to glow around her shoulders. She worked her way back out onto the street, where she sat staring at the cave she had feared to follow into the core of the building. As she watched, the ground shifted again, and the cave collapsed. She was utterly defeated.

“Oh, Raffi!” she croaked.

Callie stood up and trudged back to her apartment. Surprisingly, the power was still on, the faucets worked—a trickle of cold water, brown with sediment—and the cable connection was still delivering television and internet. She cleaned up as best she could, determined that the liquid soaking the front of her blouse and skirt was water, not blood, and changed into jeans and a shirt. Then she scanned the local news for any word about rescues or survivors at the school, but that tragedy was too far down the list to get noticed so soon. The local stations were still digging out themselves. Even the instant resources of the internet had not begun to address the scale of the event. The school’s own website only showed old content: pictures of the buildings on sunny days, the catalog of upcoming events and activities, the list of trustees, and opportunities for parent involvement.

The world would turn on a dividing point at two o’clock that afternoon, Callie realized—at least as far as San Francisco and Northern California were concerned. The
before
days would be times of confidence and security, expectation and fulfillment. The
after
days would be dark and sad, buried in death and rubble.

Callie was so deep into her mourning that she did not hear the door to the apartment open. She only became aware when a voice shouted, “Mom!”

She rushed out to the foyer and embraced her darling daughter, who stood there without a scratch and only a few smudges on her leggings and tank top. It was only then she realized Rafaella wasn’t wearing the school-approved dress code of black skirt, white blouse, and maroon sweater.

Callie held the girl at arm’s length. “What happened to your clothes?”

“I’m wearing them,” Rafaella said with simple logic.

“No, I mean your school uniform.”

“No school today, Mom.”

“Sure there was.”

“Well … a couple of friends and I, Amy and Tasha—you know them—decided to, well … we ditched. We went over to Stonestown for the day, and before we knew it, there was this big earthquake and the buses weren’t working, and then it took forever to get through to Tasha’s mom, and she had to come pick us up—”