DID YOU GUYS FEEL THE EARTHQUAKE? I RAN OUTSIDE AND LEFT THE DOOR OPEN AND NOW I CANT FIND PRICK
*PICKLE
Pickle was Jen’s cat.
A lamp had fallen over in the living room. We had gotten it at a garage sale and put it on a stool to simulate a tall floor lamp. Now it was splayed across the floor, shade bent, glass bulb dangling but miraculously still intact. When we lifted it we saw a dent in the floorboards. The crooked metal frame of the lamp could no longer support itself and so we laid it on its side like a reclining nude. There were other reclining forms too. Tony had put toy action figures among my plants and books; all but Wolverine had fallen on their faces or backs. He sent a photo of a downed Obi-Wan Kenobi to his best nerd friends back home.
He seemed strangely elated. That he would be able to say, Look, this happened to us too, and without any real cost.
Later, while Tony was at work, I pored over earthquake preparedness maps on the Internet. Tony’s office was in a converted warehouse with large glass windows on the edge of the expanding downtown. On the map this area was marked in red, which meant it was a liquefaction zone. I didn’t know what liquefaction meant but it didn’t sound good. Around lunchtime Tony sent me a YouTube video showing a tray of vibrating sand on which a rubber ball bobbed in and out as if through waves in a sea. He’d forgotten about the earthquake already, his caption said: SO COOL. I messaged back: WHEN THE BIG ONE HITS, YOU’RE THE RUBBER BALL.
That afternoon I couldn’t stop seeing his human body tossed in and out through the rubble of skyscrapers. I reminded myself that Tony had a stable psyche. He was the kind of person you could trust not to lose his mind, not in a disruptive way, at least. But I didn’t know if he had a strong enough instinct for self-preservation. Clearly he didn’t have a good memory for danger. And he wasn’t resourceful, at least not with physical things like food and shelter. His imagination was better for fantasy than for worst-case scenarios.
I messaged:
IF YOU FEEL SHAKING, MOVE AWAY FROM THE WINDOWS. GET UNDER A STURDY DESK AND HOLD ON TO A LEG. IF THERE IS NO DESK OR TABLE NEARBY CROUCH BY AN INTERIOR WALL. WHATEVER YOU DO, COVER YOUR NECK AND HEAD AT ALL TIMES
He sent me a sideways heart. I watched his avatar think and type for many moments.
I’M SERIOUS, I wrote.
Finally he wrote back:
UMM WHAT IF MY DESK IS BY THE WINDOW
. . .
SHOULD I GET UNDER THE DESK OR GO TO AN INTERIOR WALL
I typed: GET UNDER YOUR DESK AND PUSH IT TO AN INTERIOR WALL WHILE COVERING YOUR HEAD AND NECK. I imagined the rubber ball. I imagined the floor undulating, dissolving into sand. I typed: HOLD ON TO ANY SOLID THING YOU CAN.
* * *
I couldn’t focus on work. I had recorded myself singing a series of slow glissandos in E minor, which I was trying to distort over a cello droning C. It was supposed to be the spooky intro before the drop of an irregular beat. The song was about failure’s various forms, the wild floating quality of it. I wanted to show Tony I understood what he had gone through back east, at least in its primal movement and shape, that despite the insane specificity of his suffering he was not alone.
Now all I could hear were the vibrations of sand, the movements of people and buildings falling.
I went to the hardware store. I bought earthquake-proof cabinet latches and L-bars to bolt our furniture to the walls. According to a YouTube video called “Seeing with earthquake eyes,” it was best to keep the bed at least fifteen feet from a window or glass or mirror—anything that could shatter into sharp shards over your soft sleeping neck. Our bed was directly beneath the largest window in the apartment, which looked out into a dark shaft between buildings. The room was small; I drew many diagrams but could not find a way to rearrange the furniture. Fifteen feet from the window would put our bed in the unit next door. I bought no-shatter seals to tape over the windows. I assembled the necessary things for an emergency earthquake kit: bottled water, instant ramen, gummy vitamins. Flashlight, batteries, wrench, and a cheap backpack to hold everything. I copied our most important contacts from my phone and laminated two wallet-sized emergency contact cards in case cell service or electricity went down.
I bought a whistle for Tony. It blew at high C, a pitch of urgency and alarm. I knew he would never wear it. I’d make him tie the whistle to the leg of his desk. If the sand-and-ball video was accurate and a big earthquake struck during business hours, there was a chance Tony would end up buried in a pile of rubble. I imagined him alive, curled under the frame of his desk. In this scenario, the desk would have absorbed most of the impact and created a small space for him to breathe and crouch. He would be thirsty, hungry, afraid. I imagined his dry lips around the whistle, and the dispirited emergency crews layers of rubble above him, leaping up, shouting, “Someone’s down there! Someone’s down there!”
* * *
Suddenly I remembered I had forgotten to text Jen back.
DID U LOOK IN THE DRYER? OR THAT BOX IN THE GARAGE?
EVERYTHING OK OVER HERE THANKS JUST ONE BROKEN LAMP
It’d taken me five hours to text Jen, yet now I was worried about her lack of instant response.
DID U FIND PICKEL? LET ME KNOW I CAN COME OVER AND HELPYOU LOOK
MAYBE SHE’S STUCK IN A TREE??
TONY CAN PRINT OUT SOME FLYERS AT HIS OFFICE LET ME KNOW!!!
I was halfway through enlarging a photo of Pickle I’d dug up from Google photos when my phone buzzed.
FOUND PICKLE THIS MORNING IN BED ALMOST SAT ON HER SHE WAS UNDER THE COVERS BARELY MADE A BUMP
She sent me a photo. Pickle was sitting on a pillow, fur fluffed, looking like a super grouch.
* * *
My office had no windows. It was partially underground, the garage-adjacent storage room that came with our apartment. We had discarded everything when we moved so we had nothing to store. The room had one outlet and was just big enough for my recording equipment and a piano. It was soundproof and the Internet signal was weak. The recordings I made in there had a muffled amplified quality, like listening to a loud fight through a door.
The building where Tony and I rented was old, built in the late nineteenth century, a dozen years before the big earthquake of 1904. It had survived that one, but still by modern building codes it was what city regulators called a soft story property. According to records at City Hall, it had been seismically retrofitted by mandate five years ago. I saw evidence of these precautions in the garage: extra beams and girding along the foundations, the boilers and water tanks bolted to the walls. I couldn’t find my storage/work room on any of the blueprints. Tony thought I was hypocritical to keep working there, given my new preoccupation with safety. I liked the idea of making music in a place that didn’t technically exist, even if it wasn’t up to code.
Or maybe it was. I imagined, in fact, that the storage rooms had been secret bunkers—why else was there a power outlet? I felt at once safe and sober inside it, this womb of concrete, accompanied by the energies of another age of panic. Now I filled the remaining space with ten gallons of water—enough for two people for five days—boxes of Shin noodles and canned vegetable soup, saltine crackers, tins of Spam, canned tuna for Tony (who no longer ate land animals), a small camping stove I found on sale. I moved our sleeping bags and our winter coats down.
My office, my bunker. More and more it seemed like a good place to sit out a disaster. If we ran out of bottled water, the most vital resource, there stood the bolted water heaters, just a few steps away.
* * *
“Holy shit,” Tony said when he came home from work. “Have you seen the news?”
I pursed my lips. I didn’t read the news anymore. The sight of the new president’s face made me physically ill. Instead I buried myself in old librettos and scores, spent whole days listening to the kind of music that made every feeling cell in my brain vibrate with forgetting: the Ring Cycle, Queen’s albums in chronological order, Glenn Gould huffing and purring through the G
oldberg Variations.
Tony did the opposite. Once upon a time he had been a consumer of all those nonfiction tomes vying for the Pulitzer Prize, big books about social and historical issues. He used to send me articles that took multiple hours to read—I’d wondered when he ever did work. Now he only sent me tweets.
He waved his phone in my face.
Taking up the entire screen was a photograph of what appeared to be hell. Hell, as it appeared in medieval paintings and Hollywood films. Hills and trees burning so red they appeared liquid, the sky pulsing with black smoke. A highway cut through the center of this scene, and on the highway, impossibly, were cars, fleeing and entering the inferno at top speed.
“This is Loma,” Tony said.
“Loma?”
“It’s an hour from here? We were there last month?”
“We were?”
“That brewery with the chocolate? Jen drove?”
“Oh. Yeah. Wow.”
According to the photograph’s caption, the whole state was on fire. Tony’s voice was incredulous, alarmed.
“Have you gone outside today?”
I hadn’t.
We walked to Chinaman’s Vista, where there was a view of the city. Tony held my hand and I was grateful for it. The air was smoky; it smelled like everyone was having a barbecue. If I closed my eyes I could imagine I was in my grandmother’s village in Zhejiang, those hours before dinner when families started firing up their wood-burning stoves.
“People are wearing those masks,” Tony said. “Look—like we’re in fucking Beijing.”
Tony had never been to Beijing. I had. The smog wasn’t half as bad as this.
We sat on a bench in Chinaman’s Vista and looked at the sky. The sun was setting. Behind the gauze of smoke it was a brilliant salmon orange, its light so diffused you could stare straight at it without hurting your eyes. The sky was pink and purple, textured with plumes of color. It was the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen. Around us the light cast upon the trees and grass and purple bougainvillea an otherworldly yellow glow, more nostalgic than any Instagram filter. I looked at Tony, whose face had relaxed in the strange beauty of the scene, and it was like stumbling upon a memory of him—his warm dry hand clasping mine, the two of us looking and seeing the same thing.
* * *
Tony’s failure had to do with the new president. He had been working on the opposing candidate’s campaign, building what was to be a revolutionary technology for civic engagement. They weren’t only supposed to win. They were the ones who were supposed to go down in history for changing the way politics used the Internet.
My failure had to do with Tony. I had failed to save him, after.
Tony had quit his lucrative job to work seven days a week for fifteen months and a quarter of the pay. The week leading up to the election, he had slept ten hours total, five of them at headquarters, facedown on his desk. He didn’t sleep for a month after, though not for lack of time. If there was ever a time for Tony to go insane, that would have been it.
Instead he shut down. His engines cooled, his fans stopped whirring, his lights blinked off. He completed the motions of living, but his gestures were vacant, his eyes hollow. It was like all the emotions insisting and contradicting inside him had short-circuited some processing mechanism. In happier times Tony had joked about his desire to become an android. “Aren’t we already androids?” I asked, indicating the eponymous smartphone attached to his hand. Tony shook his head in exasperation. “Cyborgs,” he said. “You’re thinking of cyborgs.” He explained that cyborgs were living organisms with robotic enhancements. Whereas androids were robots made to be indistinguishable from the alive. Tony had always believed computers superior to humans—they didn’t need to feel.
In this time I learned many things about Tony and myself, two people I thought I already knew very well. At our weakest, I realized, humans have no recourse against our basest desires. For some this might have meant gorging on sex and drink, or worse—inflicting violence upon others or themselves. For Tony it meant becoming a machine.
* * *
Because of the wildfire smoke, we were warned to go outside as little as possible. This turned out to be a boon for my productivity. I shut myself in my bunker and worked.
I woke to orange-hued cityscapes. In the mornings I drank tea and listened to my audiobook. Earth was being shredded, infinitely, as it entered the supermassive black hole, while what remained of humanity sped away on a light-speed ship. “It’s strangely beautiful,” one character said as she looked back at the scene from space. “No, it’s terrible,” another said. The first replied, “Maybe beauty is terrible.” I thought the author didn’t really understand beauty or humans, but he did understand terror and time, and maybe that was enough. I imagined how music might sound on other planets, where the sky wasn’t blue and grass wasn’t green and water didn’t reflect when it was clear. I descended to my bunker and worked for the rest of the day. I stopped going upstairs for lunch, not wanting to interrupt my flow. I ate dry packets of ramen, crumbling noodle squares and picking out the pieces like potato chips. When I forgot to bring down a thermos of tea I drank the bottled water.
Fires were closing in on the city from all directions; fire would eat these provisions up. The city was surrounded on three sides by water—that still left one entry by land. It was dry and getting hotter by the day. I thought the city should keep a ship with emergency provisions anchored in the bay. I thought that if a real disaster struck, I could find it in myself to loot the grocery store a few blocks away.
In the evenings Tony took me upstairs and asked about my workday. In the past he had wanted to hear bits of what I was working on; now he nodded and said, “That sounds nice.” I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to share this new project with him—with anyone—until it was done. We sat on the couch and he showed me pictures of the devastation laying waste to the land. I saw sooty silhouettes of firefighters and drones panning gridwork streets of ash. I saw a woman in a charred doorway, an apparition of color in the black and gray remains of her home.
Once Jen came over to make margaritas. She put on one of Tony’s Spotify playlists. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I really need to unwind.” She knew I didn’t like listening to music while other noises were happening. My brain processed the various sounds into separate channels, pulling my consciousness into multiple tracks and dividing my present self. For Jen, overstimulation was a path to relaxation. She crushed ice and talked about the hurricanes ravaging the other coast, the floods and landslides in Asia and South America, the islands in the Pacific already swallowed by the rising sea.
Jen’s speech, though impassioned, had an automatic quality to it, an unloading with a mechanical beat. I sipped my margarita and tried to converge her rant with the deep house throbbing from the Sonos: it sounded like a robot throwing up. Tony came home from work and took my margarita. Together they moved from climate change to the other human horrors I’d neglected from the news—ethnic cleansings, mass shootings, trucks mowing down pedestrians. They listed the newest obscenities of the new president, their voices growing louder and faster as they volleyed headlines and tweets. In the far corner of the couch, I hugged my knees. More and more it seemed to me that the world Jen and Tony lived in was one hysterical work of poorly written fiction—a bad doomsday novel—and that what was really real was the world of my music. More and more I could only trust those daytime hours when my presence coincided completely with every sound I made and heard.
* * *
I was making a new album. I was making it for me but also for Tony, to show him it was still possible, in these times, to maintain a sense of self.
My last album had come out a year earlier. I had been on tour in Europe promoting it when the election came and went. At the time I had justified the scheduling: Tony would want to celebrate with his team anyway, I would just get in the way. Perhaps I had been grateful for an excuse. On the campaign Tony ha
d been lit with a blind passion I’d never been able to summon for tangible things. I’d understood it—how else could you will yourself to work that much?—I’d even lauded it, I’d wanted his candidate to win too. Still, the pettiest part of me couldn’t help resenting his work like a mistress resents a wife. I imagined the election-night victory party as the climax of a fever dream, after which Tony would step out, cleansed, and be returned to me.
Of course nothing turned out how I’d imagined.
My own show had to go on.
I remember calling Tony over Google Voice backstage between shows, at coffee shops, in the bathroom of the hotel room I shared with Amy the percussionist—wherever I had Wi-Fi. I remember doing mental math whenever I looked at a clock—what time was it in America, was Tony awake? The answer, I learned, was yes. Tony was always awake. Often he was drunk. He picked up the phone but did not have much to say. I pressed my ear against the screen and listened to him breathe.
I remember Amy turning her phone to me: “Isn’t this your boyfriend?” We were on a train from Brussels to Amsterdam. I saw Tony’s weeping face, beside another weeping face I knew: Jen’s. I zoomed out. Jen’s arms were wrapped around Tony’s waist; Tony’s arm hugged her shoulder. The photograph was in a listicle published by a major American daily showing the losing candidate’s supporters on election night, watching the results come in. I remembered that Jen had flown in to join Tony at the victory arena, in order to be “a witness to history.” The photo-list showed the diversity of the supporters: women in headscarves, disabled people, gay couples. Tony and Jen killed two birds in one stone: Asian America, and an ostensibly mixed-race couple. Jen was half Chinese but she looked exotic white—Italian, or Greek.
That night I’d called Tony. “How are you?” I’d asked as usual, and then: “I was thinking maybe I should just come back. Should I come back? I hate this tour.” There was a long silence. Finally Tony said, “Why?” In his voice a mutter of cosmic emptiness.
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