A-Splendid-Ruin(70)
Union Square.
I remembered my uncle and his mistress walking that circled path. Goldie pulling me back behind the pedestal. “Is she wearing any new jewelry? Can you see?” So long ago. Hard to think it had been my life. Now the square felt entirely different, alien and yet oddly safe and companionable, as thronged as it was. We were all survivors of a disaster, and the wonder of it, the disbelief that it had happened, that it was still happening, was evident in the voices of those all around me as they recounted their stories of this morning.
“I was on my way home from the night watch and the road just rose up under me. Thought I was drunk at first, but I hadn’t had a drop. Not a drop.”
“I got up to start the stove and I heard this terrible sound and then the stove jumped like it’d come alive.”
“The pigeons would not quiet. Did you notice that? They would not quiet. I wonder if they knew?”
“I thought it was a train off the tracks—”
“—a tornado—”
“—I never heard a sound like that.”
On and on, people repeating themselves with fervor, as if repetition might make it more real. I was exhausted. There were more explosions, someone said they were setting off dynamite to stop the fires. It only added to the nightmarishness. The sun lowered, turning the sky a weird greasy orange, and the smell was sickly and hot and sweetly cloying. A death smell. A roasting smell. When I remembered what must be roasting, I wanted to be sick.
Some of the people in the square had army tents. A relief wagon at the edge of the square offered soup and water. I had not been hungry, especially now, with the smell, though I was still thirsty. But there were so many people. Someone might recognize me.
I could not bring myself to care just then. I got some water and collapsed in the grass like the others, and there I slept until the wee hours of the night, when the St. Francis Hotel and the other buildings around Union Square caught fire, and we were ordered to flee into streets, where the pavement was so hot the cobbles popped. Shattered glass and brick flew from all sides. My lungs burned. My ears rang with gunshots, explosions, and a hundred different shatterings and rumblings and crashings, and the roaring, gasping suck of the fire-fueled wind, and all there was to do was keep going through the restless night, moving blind and purposeless into the weird, dusky copper darkness, until finally I was on a street too quiet to be alive. I was so tired and bleary I could no longer feel any part of myself, and I had no idea where I was.
The throbbing pulse of the city had stilled. Shadows huddled in corners, men and women and children sleeping, or trying to. Now and again a scampering rat. A group of people wrapped in blankets and carpets slept on the sidewalk before a house that dipped and sagged. A rosebush twined about its porch, and how red those roses glowed in the strange bronze light. I’d never seen such a vibrant color. It did not look real. I was mesmerized by them, such beauty in the desolation, such an otherworldly hue.
I stared at them for a long time.
On your feet!”
I jerked awake to the shout and a sharp jab in my shoulder.
A soldier, young and angry, with another very tired-looking soldier behind him, prodded me again with the bayonet fixed at the end of his rifle. “I said, get up!”
I stared at him, disoriented. There had been no bells to wake me, I was not in Blessington, there were no roses; all these things came to me before I remembered, though I had no idea really where I was. An alcove of some kind, slumped in a filthy corner that stank of old beer.
Slowly, I rose.
He gestured with the rifle to a broken window. The still intact part read SHOEMAC. “All saloons are closed. Liquor is forbidden. Looters are to be shot on sight.”
“I wasn’t looting anything,” I protested. “I didn’t know this was a saloon.”
“How’d the window get broken?”
“The earthquake? I don’t know. I was only sleeping—”
He backed away, aimed his rifle at my chest, and said, “Empty your pockets.”
I resisted the urge to feel for the gold button. “I was only sleeping,” I protested again. A shouted, “Hold! No looting!” came from across the street. The soldier training his gun on me jumped, the other turned to look.
“I said hold!” Again, the shout across the street. Another shout, and a shot shattered the quiet.
I cried out, but I wasn’t hurt, the shot wasn’t for me, not from my soldier’s gun. By the time it registered, the two questioning me had run to their comrade and the man who’d been looting, now lying sprawled and lifeless. People ran, more shots rang out, the soldiers, everyone, panicking.
I too ran. Someone shouted behind me; I braced myself for a shot that didn’t come, and didn’t relax until I’d turned the corner, but even then I hurried on, my feet aching, my heart racing.
The city was misery and ruin. Groups gathered in the middle of streets, sitting around stoves that had been dragged from houses, or makeshift ones made of brick and metal. The yellow-gray pall of smoke made it hard to see anything past a half block, and the fires still raged. Find Shin. Find Dante LaRosa. Yes, but how exactly was I to do that in this chaos? I needed someplace safe to sit and think and plan my next steps.
Explosions from dynamite shuddered the air, the crashing of walls its accompanying thunder. When I came upon a bread line, I waited, too hungry and thirsty now to care if I met someone I knew. I must look like everyone else anyway—dust covered, filthy, unrecognizable. After two hours of standing, drinking hot coffee and water passed out by a man making his way down the line, I took the box they offered, and then hurried off alone to eat whatever was inside.