A-Splendid-Ruin(71)

I found a place behind a pile of rubble, and sat on the tumbled brick near a fallen chimney. The afternoon was advanced by then, the day grimy and unseasonably hot, or maybe it was just the heat of the fires. Soot and ash and dirt itched, and the wool coat was now far too warm, but I kept it on as protection against hot cinders and wind-spun sparks. Nearby, a man sat on the curb of a broken sidewalk, reading a newspaper as if it were perfectly normal to be doing such a thing in the middle of devastation. I could see the headline from where I sat: Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco in Ruins.

Well, I hardly needed a newspaper to tell me that, but I wondered where he’d got it and where I could find one myself. I was hungry for news, for something to show me how to proceed. The man folded the paper again and stood, caught sight of me watching, and before I could look away, came over and handed it to me. “I’m finished.”

I took it eagerly. The newspaper was a combined effort of the Examiner and the Call and the Chronicle.

But not the Bulletin. Why not? What had happened to it? Where was Dante?

No Hope Left for Safety of Any Buildings.

Whole City Is Ablaze.

At Least 500 Are Dead.

Who was dead? Which of those five hundred were those I knew?

I was so lost in my questions that I didn’t notice the man who stood in front of me until his shadow crossed the page. He was as grimy as I was, wearing a ratty gray sweater and sagging trousers.

“Hello?” I said politely.

“I’ll take that,” he said.

“Oh, but I’m still reading it—”

“Not that.” He gestured to the box I’d been given in the bread line. “That.”

At first I was confused. “The line is right over there. They’re giving it away for free. All you have to do is wait.”

“Now why should I do that, when you’ve done it for me?” A quick flex of his fingers. “Hand it over.”

I did not know how to make it more clear. Again, I tried to explain. “No, no, really. You needn’t steal it. They’re giving them away to everyone—”

The knife was in his hand before I could blink. “Give it to me.”

I should hand the box over. I could stand in the line again. It was only time, and what else had I to do? I could explain it to them if they recognized me. Just give it to him.

But I was tired and hot and hungry. I had escaped an asylum, being buried alive, and fire, and suddenly I was angry. Brutally, furiously, inescapably angry that anyone might try to take advantage of me again.

Before I had a chance to think, to even know what I was doing, I kicked, connecting with his knee. He let out a grunt of surprise and went down, and I hurled myself at him, kicking him again in his crotch. He screamed and curled up, clutching himself. The knife clattered to the ground. I kicked it away. It slid beneath a pile of nearby rubble.

“Go stand in the goddamned line like everyone else,” I snarled as I picked up the newspaper and the relief box and walked away.

I had perhaps terribly injured a man for a box of Postum and a few slices of bread. I could not bring myself to feel bad about it, or even anything but awed at the way sheer rage had taken over. Perhaps it had been stupid; he could just as easily have turned on me. I shoved the dry cereal into my mouth. Nothing was as it should be now, the world upended.

I tried to squint through the smoke, to see something beyond the ghostly masts of telephone poles or looming shadows of crumbling buildings, but I could not. Impossible to tell where the fire was, whether Nob Hill had survived, or if, even now, my relatives sat in their garden among my uncle’s angels, drinking champagne and watching the city burn. Had they replaced that gilded mirror with my money, and was it even now shattered into a thousand pieces? Impossible to know if the mansion there had survived the earthquake, or if any of them had, if any of the things and people I’d known still existed, and what I should do if they didn’t—or even what I should do if they did. Think.

All around me, people went about their business, women talking and visiting, men looking restless and ill at ease, as if they’d no idea what to do with themselves. The smoke, the explosions, and the damage made nothing normal, but the thing was not yet at an end, either, and so there was no way to go on into the future because who knew what the future would be? We were all suspended. A holiday that wasn’t a holiday, but uncomfortable and anxious, with dread in every look and word and gesture.

I moved as everyone moved, with no other direction but away from the encroaching fire. At night I lay awake, staring at the simmering bronze-black sky edged with sickly green. The glowing clouds above split to show a glimpse of starry sky, orange against a dazzled greenish black, and it was so beautiful and terrible that for a moment I could not breathe for the sheer majesty of it. Strange, that destruction should hold its own kind of splendor. It nudged something in me, long dormant, but I was exhausted and everything in me said to ignore it and to rest, and I could not remember the last time I’d done that, or if I had, it was in another time entirely, and perhaps this truly was all a dream, and when I woke I would still be in Blessington, waiting for the bells to ring in the dawn.

Three days of this, of booming all night long, of waking to a sun barely visible through the pall of smoke, which pulsed a sickly pink and then a ghastly purplish red and then gray yellow. When the sun did break through—not often—it was a bright red disk.