The Cabin at the End of the World(34)
Leonard shouts, “This is it! This is it!” He turns and for a moment he has an I-got-exactly-what-I-wanted-for-my-birthday smile on his face, which quickly landslides into the pained look of a reluctant witness. “You didn’t stop it from happening and you could’ve. You were supposed to make a sacrifice. When you didn’t, we were forced to make one for you, and now, the consequences. You could’ve stopped this—”
Sabrina is standing and facing the TV. She says, “No, no, no . . .”
Adriane explodes out of the bathroom, her face red and dripping wet. “It’s happening? Is it really fucking happening? Oh, Jesus God . . .”
Leonard continues talking to Eric, Andrew, and Wen, but he watches the screen. His eyes shimmer with tears. He says, “I’m sorry, that’s not fair of me. Of course I mean to say we, not you. We could’ve stopped it but we didn’t. We failed. We are in this together. All of us. I’m sorry. This is hard, this is impossible; I keep saying that but it’s true. And we didn’t stop this. We’re too late.”
Sabrina, Adriane, and Leonard talk and they ask questions; some are rhetorical and some are impossible to answer. They share reactions, looks, and nods of support, nonverbal confirmation that what is happening on the rectangular, one-inch-thick screen is real. Eric strains to block them out and hear what is being said on the news but the cabin is all shouts and exclamations, everything muddying in the echo chamber of his throbbing head.
The room pauses to take a collective breath long enough for one of the seismologists to posit the earthquake in the Aleutian Islands triggered this second quake, which lasted for almost five minutes. Given the proximity of the epicenter, people along the coast will only have minutes to seek higher ground before a tsunami reaches shore. Given the size and duration of the quake, damaged infrastructure and buildings will make it difficult to impossible in some lowlying areas for any sort of mass evacuation to occur in time. Another scientist estimates a tsunami triggered by a quake of this magnitude and proximity to shore as being anywhere from twenty to fifty feet tall, and the wave would be kilometers long so that the initial and sudden surge in sea level would continue for the entire length and duration of that wave, pushing all that water inland. She suggests residents immediately seek areas that are eighty to one hundred feet above sea level; the fifty-foot-tall bluffs along the coastline likely won’t be a safe enough height.
The lead newscaster interrupts the split-screen discussion, announcing a tsunami has indeed struck the Oregon shoreline and they have video footage from Cannon Beach. He warns the images they are about to show are disturbing.
The video plays; a shaky, handheld wide shot of the beach, which is dotted with large rocks jutting out like shark fins from its flat sand and shallow low-tide water. The rocks are as black as shadow, giving them an uncanny, otherworldly feel, like looking at frozen pieces of space-time. One rock dwarfs the others, looming in the center of the shot, big enough to be its own mountain, big enough that it should sink through the sand and to the center of the earth.
Adriane says, “Shit, that’s The Goonies rock! Remember that movie?” She smiles widely and stares at Eric and Andrew, apparently waiting for some sort of response or validation from them. “Come on, you’ve all seen that movie, yeah? The kid solves a clue with that big fucking rock or the rocks around it.”
“It’s called Haystack Rock,” Sabrina says. “Almost two hundred fifty feet tall. I was there last summer. My best friend from college lives in Portland. It’s a beautiful spot.”
A blast of wind crackles through the speakers. There are people still on the beach, some of them a great distance away and some at the rocks and the eerily receded water. They are small digital avatars of actual people, blips of bathing suit colors on blurry legs. A guy off-camera, impossible to tell how far away he is, shouts, “Come on. Let’s go.” The owner of the smartphone, a woman, says, “I know. Okay, we’re going. We’re going. I promise.” But she isn’t going. She and the camera stay in their same spot.
Adriane walks into the middle of the room, points at the TV, and says, “Holy shit, this is what I saw.”
Leonard nods his head and narrows his eyes, but in an exaggerated manner, as though he’s pretending to listen, pretending to deeply consider what she says.
Sabrina backs away from the TV and mumbles something Eric thinks is, “Not what I saw.”
Adriane laughs. “I saw this exact fucking thing and I thought I was crazy, you know, because of The Goonies rock. I really did. There was one night last week I stayed up all night drinking black tea and I was out of milk but I kept drinking it because I didn’t want to go back asleep and see the goddamn Goonies rock get swamped again.” She looks excitedly around the room. “Only crazy people keep having tidal wave nightmares with people getting swallowed up at the fucking Goonies rock, right?” She laughs again, demonstrating what her going crazy would sound like. “Love that stupid movie. Still do. No matter what people say about it now.”
As Adriane talks there’s shouting on and off the screen, and a flash of an angry guy wearing black sunglasses and a white tank top. The camera finally starts moving away from Haystack Rock, which slowly recedes into the horizon, a horizon growing in height and coming toward the camera. There are faraway, small-in-volume screams that sound canned, and loud ones that are close, that could be in the cabin with them, and there are cries and shouts of run and help. A blue wall rises, its darker blue frosted with white contrasts with the indifference of the light blue sky. Those small digital blips of people down by the rocks are running but they are slow. Some of the small blips are smaller than others.