Must be a civic administrator, Rafferty thought, or perhaps an engineer or an architect. He seemed familiar. I know him. I’ve seen him somewhere. A forgettable face, but still. Where do I know him from? It wasn’t the face, Rafferty realized. It was the destruction, the pall. They passed each other in the rain, exchanging nods, and Rafferty couldn’t shake that sense of unease, murky and ill defined. Travel long enough, and everyone reminds you of someone else.
A plastic CAUTION notice was posted at the entrance to the bar, with yellow police tape stretched across. Rafferty ducked under—EMERGENCY POLICE EMERGENCY POLICE EMERGENCY—walked through the abandoned movie set of the bar. Broken glass and bottles. Down the hallway and up the back stairs, thirty-nine steps to the third floor. Cautioned, he reminded himself. Not condemned. Cautioned.
The building was leaning like an ocean liner poorly moored, the floor creaking underfoot as he made his way, fun house style, down the skewed perspective of the now torqued corridors to his room. The power was out, but the hotel’s backup generator had kicked in and the emergency lights cast wan pools along the way. His door had been wrenched open, was hanging on one hinge, and he entered to find his laptop covered in grit, but still glowing. He pulled a bottle of water from the dying minifridge, swallowed a fistful of muscle relaxants and anti-inflammatories. Sighed. Checked his inbox.
Messages had been cascading in, and he scrolled to the bottom, read through the ascending tones of panic, worry, excitement, impatience. “Are you alright??” “Is everything okay?” “Are you still alive?” “Where are you?” “Are you still in CC? Tell me you are still in CC!” “Front row seat, baby! Forget travel assignment. Our news editor wants an exclusive. Two thousand words, plus pics, if you can—camera phone images are fine—with follow-up, magazine rates, plus 50% on reprint. Couldn’t believe it when I told her we had someone on the ground!”
Rafferty replied: Here is the article you asked for.
He attached a file, “New Zealand is for Lovers,” hit SEND.
The response was immediate: What the fuck is this?? Are you trying to be funny? We want 2K words on the fucking earthquake, not nude bungee jumping! Write that up for us, pronto.
Pronto? Who the fuck says “pronto”? Rafferty re-sent the same article as before.
Quit messing around. If you can’t write what we asked, you will never write for us again.
Rafferty: Promises, promises.
Fuck you.
He left his beseeching laptop, walked back down the leaning stairs of Christchurch and out again, onto the shrouded streets, oddly monochromatic in their pallor. Rafferty moved to the next collapsed building, began tossing aside the roof tiles and sodden drywall. He was still there, under the floodlights, in the rain, when Tamsin Greene arrived.
“Raff!”
He turned, wiped his face, watched as she made her way toward him, watched as though he’d been expecting her all along.
“I’ll want royalties on that,” he said, gesturing to the camera now slung over her shoulder under a protective rain sheath.
“I don’t pay royalties to shadows. Jesus, Raff. You look like shit.”
“Having a city fall on top of you will do that.” Floodlights and needles of rain. Jumbled ruins in the dark. He looked at her. “Shouldn’t you be in Libya?”
It was the Arab Spring, but they hadn’t started killing each other wholesale—not yet. Her editor was keeping an eye on Syria, as well. Could be trouble, he’d texted (hopefully). Protests have begun. Might be the start of something more. In the meantime, she’d been pulled off rotation, sent here.
“So,” he said, as though they’d run into each other at a farmer’s market or in line at the bank. “What brings you to Christchurch?”
She could never tell when he was fucking with her. “Really?” she said. “You’re asking me why I’m here? I’ll give you three guesses.”
“This isn’t a war zone.”
She looked around her. “Sure as hell is. Buildings start falling, I’m there.”
He wiped his face again, using his forearm, considered this nemesis-friend standing in front of him. “Are you still with the CIA?”
She laughed, but the laughter was lost in the rain. This was a running joke of theirs, one that had been going on for seventeen years, had been going on since they first met. At least, she thought it was a joke; with Rafferty you could never be entirely sure. “I’m not with the CIA,” she said.
“You’re with someone.”
“I’m not with anyone, you dick. Not at the moment, anyway.” Her way of letting him know she was single again. Subtlety was never her strong suit. “And you?” she shouted. “Still writing magazine filler and birdcage liner?”
“Proudly so.”
“Shouldn’t you be reporting on this mess instead of, I dunno, crawling around in the muck like a subterranean mole?” She opened an umbrella, stepped up to him. He ignored the offer.
“Moles are subterranean by nature,” he said. “That’s a redundancy. If you’d paid more attention in school, you’d know that.”
“Y’know, Raff, the fact that you haven’t been throttled in your sleep remains a mystery for the ages. Seriously. This is a pretty big story. Why aren’t you out interviewing survivors, capturing the moment, running up your bylines? We could link up. I’ll provide the images, you do that typety-type thing you do.”
“I’m not a journalist. I’m a travel writer.” The spasms in his back were getting worse. It always got worse when he stood still. Rafferty returned to the task at hand. “Well, it was nice seeing you again, Sally McGhoul. Still have a lot more shit to move.”
“You really think there’s anyone under there?”
“Won’t know till I look.”
“Leave it for the professionals, Raff.”
He turned to face her. “I am a professional. Remember? I’ve been here before. We both have.” Rivulets of water running down his face. Salt water and rain.
“True enough,” she said.
They had first met in a refugee camp in eastern Congo, Rafferty stunned and struck with fear, not sure which way to turn. Tamsin spotting him in the mass of humanity, pulling him free. And here he was, lost again in the rain. Rafferty, among the ruins. “Déjà vu all over again, eh Raff?” They had danced around it, but never faced it: what they’d been through. Allusions and sidelong glances, but never sobbing confessions in the dark. Rwanda and the Congo.
The rain was becoming insistent. “C’mon,” she shouted. “Let’s call it a night. You’ve done more than enough. We need to get you out of those wet clothes.”
“I’m not walking away from this.”
“No one said you were. But look around you, Raff. You’re the only one out here. There’s no one else.”
That wasn’t entirely true.
Across from them in the distance, in an open pit, heads barely visible, rain angling through the floodlights, the pair of workers he’d seen earlier were flinging wet debris out of the hole. The small man stood at the edge of the pit under an umbrella, perfectly still, backlit and barely there. That single slab of wall, masonry knuckled with rock, marked the spot as surely as a headstone.
“I know that guy,” said Rafferty.
“You know everyone. C’mon, let’s go.”
“No, really. I’ve seen him somewhere.”
But Tamsin was already making her way back across the obstacle course that was Christchurch after the quake. Rafferty caught up and they walked through it together, streets eerily still. Rain falling in sheets, listless, letting gravity do all the work. Territorial officers in rain gear were patrolling the drop zone; they waved them through. Tamsin had her press credentials, but there was no need. Rafferty’s hazard vest and work gloves were like an all-access pass. Puddles had become ponds, ponds had become lakes.
A broken avenue. Windows like empty eye sockets. “My hotel,” said Rafferty.
“Still standing,” said Tamsin.
The pub on the ground floor,
Busby & Hobson’s, was still intact as well, more or less. And as they approached, an inebriated voice called out to them. “Rafferty, you prick! You’re alive!” It was almost an accusation, the way he said it. Andy the Englishman was standing in the open doorway, bellowing like Lear. “To hell with the weather, come have a drink! Bar’s open! On me!”
A drink? “Trust Andy the Englishman to find the one bar that’s still open,” Raff shouted as he and Tamsin walked over.
“And trust Tom Rafferty to walk into a war zone and come out the other side with a girl on his arm!” Andy gave Tamsin a courteous, semi-satirical bow, then hustled them into the hotel bar. “We have coalesced, my friend! We have gathered in conclave!”
Inside was a remarkable sight. The hotel generator was keeping the exit signs illuminated, throwing doilies of illumination across the tables. Candles cast competing circles, overlapping in Venn diagrams. Shadowy figures were sitting, numb in the silence, waiting for the booze to kick in. A more subdued crowd than earlier, Rafferty noted. Faces flickering in the shadows. A scorched smell, like spent gunpowder. All of the rain in the world couldn’t rid them of that.
“Is it safe?” said Andy, answering a question they hadn’t asked. “Of course it is! Didn’t you see the notice posted out front? Cautioned, but not condemned! That’s us, Rafferty, in a nutshell. Cautioned, but not condemned. Freebie found loads of bottles packed in the back in cardboard cartons, still gloriously intact.”
“You’re looting the bar?”
“Certainly not! I’m not some common cutpurse. We’re stuffing money into a jar to cover our tab, a pay-what-you-can sort of thing.”
Tamsin turned to Rafferty. “I think you got the last round,” she said. “Back in Malta. This one’s on me. Gin?”
“If they have it. Anything else if they don’t.” She made her way to the bar—someone had pushed a broom through the broken glass, clearing a path—and Rafferty asked Andy, “There was this guy, small, well dressed. Had a pair of hired workers with him. He seemed familiar. I think he was carrying a set of blueprints. Know who he is?”
“I do not.”
“But you did see him, in among the ruins?”
“I did. An engineer, I presume. Certainly seemed to be in charge. Addison, you prat!” And off he went, maître d’ to the apocalypse.
Rafferty pulled up a chair next to Freebie, whose face was hovering above the candles like a campfire ghost story. “Raff! You’re alive! We were taking wagers.”
“You don’t take wagers, you place them.”
“And a happy fuck you to you, too.”
The journalists were comparing notes: “Liverpool Street, completely gone.” “Territorials doing a sweep.” “I interviewed the mayor, he said the entire city is ‘munted.’ Anyone here have any idea what the fuck that means?” “The ground billowed, up and down like a blanket. Never seen anything like it.”
On the other side of the room, under an EXIT sign that was urging her to leave, sat Erin of the rose madder lips. She was covered in dust, and in the strange glow of the sign, she looked as though she’d been painted in phosphorous. Raff shuffled over to see how she was doing. A bottle of wine and a pair of work gloves were laid out on the table in front of her. She must have had the good sense to come in before it rained. How long had she been sitting there?
“You okay?”
She nodded.
“And Ewan?”
“He left.” The dust on her face was streaked with mascara-like smears. Tears, Rafferty realized. Tears, long dried. “He didn’t stay to help,” she said. “Didn’t even try. Just left.”
“Damn. A boy that big, could’ve lifted some major wreckage.”
“That’s what I thought.” Then, with a hollow-chested half laugh. “You know the old adage, ‘You never really know someone till you see how they behave in an earthquake.’ ”
“Wise words.”
She tried to finish her wine, couldn’t. “They had to amputate legs to get people out,” she said. “An office building. Corner of Madras and Cashel. It folded in on itself like a house of cards, each floor falling into the next. There were students inside. A language school. International students. The roof collapsed onto a classroom. A steel beam had pinned three students across their legs. Japanese, I think. Couldn’t speak English very well, only knew a few words. We could hear them crying, ‘Dangerous. Dangerous.’ Rescue workers cut their way through, crawled in. Couldn’t move the beam, and anyway their legs were crushed. Medical teams were called in. Three amputations. We pulled twenty people out of that building, maybe more, and every time someone was rescued a cheer went up, like we were winning. Then the building caught fire.” She looked at Rafferty. “There were people still inside.”
He wanted to hold her, he wanted to rock her back and forth, wanted to make the pain go away. But he couldn’t. Here lies Thomas Rafferty, he never saved anyone.
Her eyes were wet in the EXIT light. “One building fell on top of a bus. The entire storefront fell away. It looked like a doll’s house that’d been opened up. You could see inside the rooms. A bus that was passing by was crushed. A bunch of us climbed up, tried to move chunks of the wall, but it was too heavy. I held one woman’s hand as she died. You could feel it slip away, everything she was. The Number 3 bus. I remember that, the number on the crumpled front. Imagine, you get on the Number 3 bus, thinking ahead to the errands you have to run or the people you have to meet, and your world just… falls apart. How does that happen?”
How does anything happen? He wanted to say: Maybe the world is supposed to break your heart. Maybe that’s the whole entire point of it. But he didn’t. He sat quietly with her, instead. Paul Bunyan had fled the scene, and the better half of Erin and Ewan was now on her own. It was Erin, alone. Years later, Ewan would be watching a report on an insurgency in Yemen, would see Erin in a flak jacket squinting into the sun, trying desperately to give a sense of scale to the humanitarian crisis that was unfolding, and he would tell himself, “It took an earthquake to break us apart, that’s how strong our love was.” He would then go back to his online world of Twitter wars and hashtag activism, and with every telling of the story his actions in Christchurch on that fateful day would grow larger, grander, more beard-like.
“Raff! Get yer flabby ass over here.” It was Tamsin, holding up a tumbler of gin like a beacon for the weary. “You still owe me on that Hanoi handshake!”
Erin asked, “A friend of yours?”
“I wouldn’t say friend. More like a piece of gum that got stuck on the bottom of my shoe, years ago, that I can’t get rid of. Everywhere I go, she turns up.” Stage whisper: “Madly in love with me, you see.”
Erin laughed, was grateful for a reason to. She would wander away soon after, into a ruined city on the far side of the world, trying to make sense of it and mostly failing, but still trying.
Back at the main table, Tamsin was braying over something Freebie had said. She had the most annoying laugh. Not like Erin’s, not at all.
He shoved his way into the conversation. “What the hell is a Hanoi handshake anyway?” he asked.
Tamsin spit-laughed her drink. “You really don’t remember?” She smeared a hand across her mouth, stevedore style. Might as well have belched, too. “If y’don’t know, I ain’t sayin’. You came up with it in the first place, don’t you remember?”
“I did?” So that’s why the phrase sounded so familiar.
Tamsin raised a glass. “Chin chin,” she cried. And then: “You know what ‘chin chin’ means in Japanese? Penis.”
“Penis!” said Andy, always delighted to learn something scatological. The rest of the table joined in. “Penis penis!” and, because it sort of rhymed, “Happiness and penis!”
Tamsin slung her camera, with telephoto lens still attached, onto the table the way a soldier might hoist a gun, finished her brandy with a flourish.
Freebie leaned over, asked her, “How does this stack up? Disasterwise.”
“I’ve seen
worse. East Timor. South Sudan. Sarajevo. Christchurch? Decent amount of devastation, but not too bad. They’re saying maybe one hundred, one hundred eighty dead.”
“Only that?” said Freebie. He sounded disappointed. “A miracle there weren’t more, I suppose.” But it didn’t feel like a miracle. When legs are being amputated, it was hard to see divine intervention at play.
That figure in the rain was niggling away at Rafferty. This wasn’t simply a vague feeling of familiarity. There was more to it than that, even if he couldn’t quite articulate what that was. He turned to Freebie for help. “There was this guy, out in the ruins, had some hired help with him. Looked like an architect, maybe an engineer. You know him?”
“Little fellah? Kind’a dapper?”
“That’s him.”
“No idea. Heard he arrived on a private plane, though. Must have been with an aid agency or something. That would be my guess. Why?”
Good question. “I don’t know. He just—he seems familiar.”
“Perhaps he’s the friend you never had,” said Tamsin.
Rafferty swished his gin, stared into the glass. It was the closest he ever came to meditation, even after a dreary month spent at a Zen monastery in Shikoku for Vice magazine. Zen Buddhism: A Study in Contrasts!
Rafferty, moody and morose. Tamsin, sighing. It was a wonder he ever got laid, this guy. “Tell me,” she said. “What is Thomas Rafferty doing on a prepackaged press trip? Since when do you sign up for tourist department junkets and sponsored content?”
“Times are hard all over.”
“A commission?”
“A commission? You sound like Andy the Englishman. My assignment is to write a series of promo pieces on New Zealand, Land of Whatsit.”
“What the hell happened, Raff? You used to write for National Geographic, were a contributing editor at Travel and Leisure. Why are you squandering what little talent you have at newspaper rates, the worst rates in the world? A church newsletter pays more. What is it, a whopping twenty-five cents a word at newspapers now?”
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