It was his editor, stateside: WTF is this??? Rafferty peered at the screen as the words came slowly into focus.
It’s a family feature, you nitwit. NOT adventure travel. FAMILY TRAVEL. The entire Sunday insert is about FAMILY. We’ve already sold the ads! Re-write and re-send, asap. We have the typeset standing by.
Rafferty replied: ASAP means ‘as slowly as possible,’ correct?
Fuck you.
With a sigh, Rafferty brought up the article he’d just sent, went through it line by line, making the necessary changes: “New Zealand is where bungee jumping began, and even but today it remains a hotbed of adventure family travel! You may not want to try a bungee jump yourself, but there are many more extreme family adventures you can undertake along the way.” He did a final search and replace, “family” for “extreme,” hit SAVE.
He had to rewrite the sidebar from scratch, though. It had originally been “Inside Tips on Adventure Travel in New Zealand!” as cribbed from one of the pamphlets in his press kits. There was no time to rummage through it again, and instead he typed: “New Zealand is a Family-Friendly Destination!” Everywhere on earth was a family-friendly destination, if that was the assignment. Baghdad was a family-friendly destination if that’s what was called for. No writer was going to go all the way to, say, Bermuda, to write a family travel feature only to file an article reading, “Sorry, but when it comes to family travel, Bermuda sucks.”
Under the new heading “Family Travel in NZ,” he typed, “Here’s a handy tip!” then sat back, tried to come up with some handy tips. After a moment he wrote: “Remember to pack lots of wet naps for those long drives through New Zealand’s scenic countryside!” There wasn’t a nation on earth that didn’t boast scenic countryside. (That’s what travel destinations did, they “boasted.” They boasted more three-star Michelin restaurants than any other city in the tristate area; they boasted some of the best shopping in eastern Europe; they boasted scenic countryside.) Rafferty checked the word count, scratched his crotch, thought some more, added: “And don’t forget to top up your ‘petrol,’ as the locals refer to it, before you hit the road, because if you’re that fucking stupid, you deserve to run out of gas and starve to death in a muddy sheep paddock with the rest of your braying snot-nosed brood.” He thought about this, deleted that last bit, hit SEND.
The reply came back quickly: About fuckin time.
Rafferty had been cutting his deadlines closer and closer in ever-decreasing increments, an apparent Zeno’s paradox, seeing how near he could get to infinity before he missed one. So far, he never had. He was a professional, after all. Took pride in his work.
A few moments later his laptop dinged again:
You owe us three more, jackass. It’s a series, don’t forget. Next one is for our Valentine’s Day insert. “New Zealand is for Lovers.” That kind of thing. We’ve already sold the ads: cruise lines, package deals, etc. so don’t SCREW IT UP.
Hadn’t Rafferty read something about nude bungee jumping being invented in New Zealand as well? He opened a new document, titled it “New Zealand is for Lovers!” and began to type: “Spice up your love life with his-and-hers bungee jumping—in the buff!” Mental note: check that that’s really a thing. Rafferty couldn’t imagine anything less appealing than naked flesh flappity-flapping on the boingy end of a bungee cord, but any time you could mention nudity in an article, it was a wise move. Almost axiomatic in the trade.
He would have run up the word count even more, maybe added another sidebar—a “secret getaway” or an exclusive “off the beaten track” insider’s tip—if it hadn’t been for a sound so incongruous, he almost didn’t recognize it, not at first. It echoed across the years, from somewhere in the farthermost hallways of his childhood: the rise-and-fall peal of church bells. This late at night? He lugged back the hotel curtains, apparently made of the same lead used by old-time X-ray technicians—it was one of his many peeves, the fact that the average hotel curtain could stop a bullet, yet still couldn’t keep light from bleeding in—and he saw the square lit up below, cobblestones pebbled with rain as people made their way into the cathedral, its graceful arches and open doors. A midnight mass of some sort.
Christchurch never seemed entirely real to him; he’d been here before, maybe ten, twelve years ago, and nothing had really changed. It reminded him of one of those miniature landscapes you see in model railways, lovingly mimicking a larger world, yet somehow tidier, tinier, more dreamlike and surreal. This most English of English cities, out here on the outer reaches of the world, beyond Tahiti, beyond Pitcairn.
A city of the plains, a collection of gardens, of roses and costly mosses, of staid Edwardian architecture and ornate Victorian shoppes. (As a travel writer, Rafferty knew that Edwardian architecture was always “staid,” Victorian was always “ornate.”) Christchurch even had its own miniature railway, chugging tourists around on an endless loop. In Christchurch, it was always four in the afternoon. Even when it rained, it was sunny.
A soft rain was falling now. Framed by the hotel window, the city’s namesake cathedral, a Gothic re-imagining without plague carts and scurvy boils, bell tolling, was calling out to its wayward flock—and at some level all of New Zealand was a wayward flock, a lost kingdom set adrift in a southern sea, and Rafferty watching from the window.
What the hell, I must have some sins worth confessing. The priest can tell me whether they’re original or not. He pulled on his jacket, was galumphing down the back stairwell when he ran into Erin-of-the-Blog coming up the other way. They stopped, awkwardly, Rafferty unsteadily above, Erin craning up at him from below. “You,” she said.
Might as well settle this tab, too. “Erin, is it? Just want you to know I feel bad about, y’know, the way I was acting. It was the gin talking.”
“I’ll take that as an apology.”
“And Paul Bunyan? Where is he, this fine night?”
“Ewan? He’s back in our room, not feeling well. Travel doesn’t really agree with him.”
Asleep, then. No doubt dreaming his blue ox dreams.
She held his eyes, just a beat too long. Tipped your hand, Erin. Gotta watch that. She hesitated—and in that hesitation entire continents appeared. Continents of possibility, of turn and counterturn, of small gasps and low moaning sighs deep into the night. Pleasure pumping pleasure into hips.
“I, ah… I should be going,” he said.
He squeezed past her, face to face, was three steps down when she called back to him. “The offer still stands, by the way.”
He turned, looked up. Their positional advantages had shifted. She held the high terrain, was now calling in artillery.
“The offer?” he said. “What offer?”
“To tell your side of the story. The hit-piece we did on you. If you’d like to respond, we can do it tonight, we can do it right now, in fact.”
He smiled. “As long as you used the phrase ‘devastatingly handsome’ somewhere in there, I’m good.”
She laughed, for the first time since they’d met. “Ah, but we didn’t,” she said. “An oversight on our part.”
He could see the night branching out in two directions: regret versus loneliness. He chose loneliness; were he younger, he would have chosen regret. “I appreciate the gesture,” he said with a wobbly nod of the head. “I truly do. But I’m afraid I would only disappoint,” and he left her there in the stairwell to watch his retreating shoulders with a mix of pity and puzzlement. It was a look Rafferty often left in his wake.
* * *
AN ANGLICAN CATHEDRAL, AS IT turned out, so no priests, no confessional sins-be-gone phone booths, no wine into blood, no papal decrees.
Not that it mattered. By the time Rafferty got past the hotel bar, the one dubbed Busby & Hobson’s (he’d veered in for a bit of Dutch courage before crossing the cobblestones to face his conscience), the church service was already over. People were filing out, the organ was playing a dirgelike hymn—and hymns were always dirgelike, even the happy on
es. He looked around, returning to a hometown he hadn’t been to in years. Everything was both familiar and strange at the same time.
Above the altar, an empty cross. In an alcove, a crucifix, arms held out somewhere between surrender and embrace. These etiolated images of Christ, so far removed from the rough-knuckled carpenter with his booming presence and healthy appetites whose voice could command a thousand in a Sermon on the Mount. When did that change? When did we change? When did we begin to want our gods so weak?
Inside churches, all voices become whispers. Rafferty walked through the cathedral, and it opened up an emptiness he didn’t know was there. The smell of candle wax, more a presence that a smell. Accumulated layers of prayers and sins, and sadness unburdened. The rose window at the cathedral’s end. Works of mercy in the mosaics below. Mary, mother of God, draped in blue, and now he was crying and lighting a candle and he didn’t know why or for whom, and maybe this was what we are all searching for, those fleeting glimpses past the world and into yourself, like looking through your own reflection in a train window to the landscape beyond, and maybe it was here, in a temple in Nara, in a mosque in Kuala Lumpur, amid the stone circles of Battleford, or a sleepless night on Lough Derg, a medieval island oratory in Donegal, said to be an entranceway to the underworld, an antechamber of lost souls caught between departure and arrival, maybe it was here, in the blessings and confessions, in the Stations of the Cross, everyone searching for a state of grace. The beggars at Tibetan monasteries. Prayer wheels in Nepal. Candles in Christchurch. You know you’ve been traveling too long when every place reminds you of someplace else.
Rafferty searched his pockets for coins, for some sort of offering, but had none to give, bowed instead, clapping his hands, once, twice, as he’d seen in Japanese Shinto shrines, where petitioners roused sleepy gods with the rattling of an empty husk.
Outside, on a night that was wet with rain, Rafferty turned, looked up at the spire of Christchurch Cathedral one last time. It was the same steeple he would see fall twelve hours later.
CHRISTCHURCH: 12:51 P.M.
TWENTY-EIGHT SECONDS. THAT’S HOW MUCH warning the city had: twenty-eight seconds.
A clap of thunder, but from below, a rending sound like fabric ripping. The cobblestone streets began to judder, then jounce, then bounce—a phenomenon known as “trampolining,” layers of the earth separating along strata. The looser upper levels lifted above the slower swell of bedrock below, then dropped down, as one wave pushed the next farther up. On February 22, Christchurch was caught on the trampoline, unable to escape, as wave after wave rolled in. On the edge of the city, boulders crashed through affluent homes like bowling balls, a tumble of rock that stopped just short of a public school, sparing the students who were huddled inside, terrified, crying.
A gray tide followed.
Across the city, the tremors had transformed the soil into a liquid state, earth and water separating to create a sludge that bubbled up like a blocked drain. Hundred-year-old oak trees began to topple; their roots, suddenly standing in the liquefied soil, couldn’t hold. The Avon River ran gray. (This same silt would later dry and be blown into the air, cloaking the city. But by then, Rafferty would be gone. So would the small man who had arrived, well dressed and unannounced, in the aftermath of the destruction.)
Rafferty was alone at the bar and deep in his third gin-and-cider when the shaking began, rattling the upside-down glasses. They sound like castanets. A bone crack of rafters, and the bartender ducked behind the counter, as the entire building seemed to expand and then contract. Rafferty stumbled out onto the cobblestones of Cathedral Square, watched the spire fall, sending its weather vane and cross onto the steps below. The sound of them hitting was like a physical blow, a shove of air that struck Rafferty full force in the chest. Instant darkness and a mouth filled with grit; he would feel it on his teeth for days. Eyes gummy, lungs choking, and when the dust lifted, the rose window was twisted in agony. Sirens and car alarms, and beneath it all, a terrible silence.
Across Christchurch, heritage buildings were falling. Windows were imploding, brick walls were collapsing into cubist avalanches, falling outward onto passing traffic. There was an arbitrariness at play: some of the oldest structures rode out the rise and fall, others unraveled in an instant. One hotel, twenty-six floors high, had fallen at a dangerous angle, was propped up only by the office building beside it. Wrenched free of its moorings, a fire escape dangled in midair, barely attached, like a child’s loose tooth.
The cloud of dust pushed Rafferty back, into the bar where bottles had shattered, wet on the floor and sickly aromatic, but the hotel itself, four floors tall, was still standing. He picked his way through broken glass, grateful not to find the bartender lying dead behind the counter. Small mercies. Soaked a bar towel in water, tied it around his nose and mouth, headed back onto a street populated with silhouettes.
The noon sun had been transformed into a blood orange, bloated in the sky, swollen and ripe. Disembodied voices. Trapped pleas. A mother, crying frantically. A child, answering. Rafferty climbed onto the first pile he came upon, began pulling aside the rubble. He was still there at nightfall, amid the ruins, searching for survivors under the glare of rescue floodlights, was still there when Tamsin arrived on scene.
Emergency crews set up triage stations as best they could to help the shell-shocked and the walking wounded. Tourniquets and the fast twist of cloth bandages. Facial wounds with bones exposed. Businessmen, ties tossed over shoulders, carrying stretchers, shop clerks joining in. The blood of it all formed a red paste in the settled dust, and a soft rain began to fall. First as mist, then a steady sheeting fog. The paste became a slurry, and the slurry ran between the cobblestones.
Nine major aftershocks followed, a rolling barrage that tore away further masonry, toppled landmarks. Damaged buildings would suddenly move, sending rescue teams scrambling to get clear.
Rafferty hardly noticed. Knuckles bloodied and face beaded with rain, he was wrestling a slab of drywall free from the beam that had impaled it when someone tossed him a pair of gardening gloves. He pulled them on, and the slab slid free. The rebar below was twisted like a mass of pipe cleaners, and wedged in, deeper down and caked in clay, was a face. Rafferty squirmed through, stretching to pull out—a mannequin’s head. In the sixteen hours he spent in the rubble, returning to the hotel for water, but then right back, he never saved anyone. An apt epitaph, he realized, one to be chiseled onto his own gravestone when the time came: Here lies Thomas Rafferty. He never saved anyone.
The New Zealand defense forces arrived, helicopters airlifting rescue teams in and casualties out. Firefighters, paramedics, and army engineers: they poured in. Within hours, international teams began arriving as well. Military transport planes landed, carrying supplies and personnel. The first to appear were the Aussies. They brought a fully equipped field hospital with seventy-five beds. The Japanese arrived soon after. No strangers to urban disaster, they sent in their own teams with search dogs, as did Taiwan and Singapore and the UK. The Americans arrived with forty tons of supplies and equipment, and the county of Los Angeles, which had experienced similar catastrophes, sent a team of its own.
With the rescuers came members of the media, though the line between the two occasionally blurred. A TV crew from Channel Nine in Sydney was reporting on the disaster when their cameraman picked up a faint noise. He waved for his crew to stop talking. They listened. It was a woman’s voice, buried deep in a building. Alerted by the TV crew, a band of rescuers rushed in to dig out what would be the last living survivor. After that, only bodies were retrieved.
Through contacts in the US Defense Department, Tamsin Greene had hitched a ride on one of the transport planes. Long acclimated to the presence of marines, she found the search-and-rescue teams more subdued, but still with that same muscular swagger about them, especially the women. Tamsin, meanwhile, looked like someone they had bullied in high school. Round-shouldered and short, stocky even, not unlike a
compressed spring, a slinky, say, after it had reached the bottom of the stairs. She’d worn thick glasses throughout her school years, until corrective surgery had given her near-perfect vision. Near, because the operation had also left a strange afterglow, a halo effect in her peripheral sight, one that slipped away whenever she tried to look at it. And perhaps that was her strength as a photographer, the fact that the world around her was always slightly askew; she was capturing images that weren’t entirely there.
Eschewing offers of manly help (from the women, as well), Tamsin lugged her camera gear onto the tarmac. Sweaty. Alive. Almond eyes and warm skin tones, “vaguely Asian” as she called it, Tamsin had Filipina, Welsh, Ecuadorian, and—if family lore is anything to go by; and it usually isn’t—a bit of Cherokee as well, though that last one was more rumored than real. Her own family was firmly ensconced in the bland mire that is Wisconsin. “The only exotic thing about me is my name,” she liked to say. “I’m just a cheese head with a camera.” A camera—and a scar running down the left side of her face, thin as a razor, visible only in a certain light, a souvenir of war zones past and the endless rounds of plastic surgery that followed. (Which configuration of ethnicities had reared up the “Greene” surname was never clear, though, even to her.)
A jeep brought her into the heart of the matter and, from there, she hiked in, ducking under the danger tape that now lassoed the city center, a no-go zone deemed unstable. It was Iraq after Saddam. It was Beirut after the bombs.
A dark night. A fallen city. Floodlit beams streaked with rain. One precarious slab of wall stood, improbably upright amid the ruins like a new landmark. And there, in the middle: a lone rescuer, framed heroically against the glare. Tamsin adjusted her settings, focused through the rain, low res for a nice grainy texture, kicked up the f-stop half a notch, a low depth of field to really make it pop, and… “Son of a bitch,” she said. That’s Tom Rafferty. Fucker owes me fifty bucks on a Hanoi handshake.
The Finder Page 13