#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  And beyond the airfield lay the city, spread out in a tangle of broken pieces, like a badly arranged jigsaw of smashed concrete, twisted lamp posts and structures split apart, honeycombs of houses with innards exposed. Every now and then the eye would alight for relief on a building standing tall and proud, as if in defiance of the worst that nature could do. And over all of this hung the blackness of a smoke cloud, spreading across my vision as if the sky was closing in, fed by raging infernos below.

  I crossed a highway, buckled and cracked, jammed with cars going nowhere, some still on their wheels, some on their roofs, some perched vertically on crumpled fenders, as if arranged by a mad sculptor. People stood around, gesturing uselessly, weeping or shouting or staring in bewilderment. There was dust in the air, dust everywhere, a thick cloud of concrete dust that had been shaken up by the earth’s hammer blow and was slowly, slowly settling down, coating everything and everyone.

  I clambered across rubble, fresh rubble, with bits of toilets and baths and TV sets and fridges poking out, and people squatted in it, sifting rubble in bare hands. I came down the other side, and walked along a narrow street where all the houses on one side had collapsed, one into the other, like a row of dominoes, but all the houses on the other side stood pristine and untouched, windows unbroken, even a little angel on a water fountain still pissing into his pond, as if mocking the misfortune of his neighbours.

  And that’s where I saw my first corpse, a man of indeterminate age lying on the sidewalk, skin as waxy as a frozen supermarket chicken, so obviously not there any more, so obviously dead, though there was no indication of what felled him. Perhaps it had just been his moment, and he’d gone down as the quake struck, clutching his heart and cursing his bad diet, and missed the whole thing. A pack of children circled around him, and, yes, pack is the only way to describe them, ragged and barefoot and feral, sniffing the air and licking their lips – they prodded at the body then darted in, emptied its pockets, and took off down the street, one of them holding a wallet aloft and howling victoriously.

  And people picked among the ruins of their homes, retrieving whatever was still intact, piling belongings on the sidewalk, creating outdoor replicas of their living quarters, before collapsing in saved armchairs or rescued beds to stare up at the sky and shake their heads in numbed silence. Some gathered in groups to help others in need, tending to the hurt and wounded, yelling at each other in agitation, as if energy and activity might keep the worst at bay and put off the moment when they had to take stock of their own losses.

  And at the top of a hill stood a little church, with its steeple sheared off and driven point first into the ground. A plaster cast Christ had crashed down to earth and lay in the churchyard, still nailed to his crucifix but broken in two, deaf to the prayers of His people, as he’d always been deaf to mine. There were Christs everywhere in this ruined city, peeking out through broken windows, hanging from doors where there was no building left standing, posing on podiums in gardens filled with debris and baring sacred hearts in cracked murals on collapsed walls. Most of all, Christ was to be found dangling on rosaries around the necks of people who still muttered prayers while fingering their magic beads, despite the evidence all around that the bastard Christ and his savage old Father and that sneaky prick the Holy Spirit had not just forsaken the citizens of MedellÍn, they’d actually visited the wrath of the gods upon them, with not one, not two, but three earthquakes in a row, and a mudslide to boot. Still they prayed, thanking the good Lord for delivering them, like a man in a head-on collision that has smashed his legs and torn his right arm from its socket, crawling from the wreckage to thank the drunk driver who hit him for leaving him with at least one functioning limb.

  The pack of children ran past me again, swarming across the cracked pavement and descending like a ravenous horde on the smashed-open front of a neighbourhood supermarket, whooping and laughing as they caroused through the aisles and clambered across tipped-up shelves, filling their hands with whatever they could snatch, and then charging, yelling, back out on to the street, where a befuddled grey-haired man in pyjamas stood shaking his fist in a gesture more of impotence than anger. A cop on a motorcycle started up, as if to give chase, but then stopped, climbed off, went into the store and helped himself to a pack of cigarettes.

  And that’s when I saw my second corpse, and my third, and maybe my fourth and fifth, it was hard to tell among the tangle of limbs in a car flattened beneath a telephone pole brought down by the collapse of an apartment awning, although the rest of the building remained more or less intact. I was already losing count by the time I came face to face with a woman sitting in a comfortable armchair, bolt upright, dead eyes open and staring, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There was a mangy, brown dog at her feet, tail twitching, and at first I thought it was sleeping in the sun, blissfully ignoring the chaos, but then I realised it too was dead, and the hairs of its tail were blowing in the breeze. I swear when I looked up there were vultures circling high overhead, waiting for their moment to pick the bones of the city clean.

  And I passed another car, front flattened beneath slabs of concrete but its boot sprung open and full of fruit, where an old crone in a shawl of red and gold was calling out prices like a hawker at a market. I wanted to stop and buy one of her mangoes, so bright and juicy and delicious, but all I had was four dollars in my jeans, and they had been laundered by Homer and the money came out in a soggy ball, so now I didn’t even have a cent to my name. I tried on my famous smile but the old lady looked right through me. Nobody could see me now. I had been rendered invisible by the sheer incomprehensibility of disaster, by the blindness of shock and grief, as if a veil had been dropped over all of MedellÍn, and nobody could see anything but their own pitiful horror.

  And wasn’t this what I wanted, after all? To be anonymous again?

  Suddenly the noise started to break through and I could hear helicopters overhead, and fire trucks hosing down a blazing petrol station, and ambulances fighting their way through streets littered with immobilised vehicles, and crews of rescue workers digging in the detritus of collapsed apartment blocks. Outside a ruined cinema advertising a Disney double bill a crowd pressed against safety barriers, straining for a view into the crumbling building, and the sound they made was the most horrible sound of all, an orchestra of weeping and wailing, a wall of tears. I kept moving, I kept moving, I had to keep moving, I didn’t want their tears to set off my own, cause if I started crying now, I feared I’d never be able to stop.

  I had walked such a long way, the streets were narrower and steeper and the houses, those still standing, smaller and closer together. I was in one of Consuela’s comunas, one of the most dangerous places on earth, according to Grover, but I felt completely safe, protected by the collective pain of a whole city. At last I came to a halt before the ruin of a house that looked like it had never been much of a house in the first place, a hopeful construction of adobe, concrete and corrugated iron that had come down in one bump, while its two-storey neighbours remained standing.

  There was a woman sitting in front of this wreckage, covered in dust and dirt, face smeared with blood, one arm hanging uselessly by her side, slack mouth emitting a keening wail. I reached out to touch her and dragging some words from my past, from a time my memory could no longer access, I said, ‘¿Que pasa, madre? ¿Te puedo ayudar?’ What’s up, mother? Can I help?

  ‘A mi hija,’ she gasped, suddenly sharp-eyed and hopeful. ‘En la casa! A mi hija! Mi niña!’

  Her daughter was still in the house, if you could call this pile of disarranged building materials a house. There were steps leading to a blue door but the whole front wall had collapsed backwards as the house fell in on itself. I wrenched the door open but it was just rubble beyond, with no way in at all. So I scrambled on to the roof. There was a man already there, a short, fat man, digging frantically with bare hands, body damp with sweat, blood under his nails, gasping for breath. I fell in beside him, to
ssing bricks down the side of the building. He held my eyes for barely a second but what passed between us was the kind of communion that occurs when musicians strike the same chord, a unity and sense of purpose that nothing is needed to be said. ‘Estamos próximos, mi niño,’ he cried out. ‘Estamos próximos.’ We’re coming, my child, we’re near!

  And so we worked together on that roof under the sun, taking it apart broken brick by broken brick, digging our way down into the building beneath. I don’t know how much time passed, and we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, but we kept at it, we kept digging, and soon there was another person on the roof with us, an old man, his moustache coated in dust, taking stones from us and tossing them down. For a moment I had the mad idea that we were going to dismantle this house brick by brick and reconstruct it in the street. But then a kind of narrow tunnel opened up and sunlight glinted through the wreckage into what might be a room below. I thought maybe I could get in there, if I crawled on my belly. The old man was saying no, it was too dangerous, keep digging, the rescue crews will arrive. But the girl’s father was nodding, eagerly. You can do it! Can you hear her? She’s crying? Can you hear? I couldn’t hear anything but I got down, wriggled through, and crawled into the darkness.

  Sometimes I act like I’ve never been afraid of anything but the truth is I’ve always been afraid of everything. I am filled with fear, it is the oxygen I breathe, it is the blood that pumps through my veins.

  I am afraid of the dark.

  I am afraid of the spotlight.

  I am afraid of being alone.

  I am afraid of being in a crowd.

  I am afraid of being ignored.

  I am afraid of being discovered.

  I am afraid of being loved.

  I am afraid of being unlovable.

  I am afraid of dying.

  I am afraid to live.

  For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with me? Fear fills me with self-loathing, self-loathing fills me with anger, anger fills me with adrenalin, adrenalin makes my heart beat faster, my heart floods my body with blood, fear is in my blood, it courses through my veins making me dizzy and crazy and tipping me over the edge and that is what it is like every time I go on stage, like a high diver springing off the board in the middle of the night, not sure whether anyone has thought to fill the pool below. Because most of all I am afraid of being found out. And so I pitched into the hole.

  Did I mention that I was afraid of the dark? Things were poking me in the ribs, brushing against my face, sharp things, hard things, rough things, and I was staring hard into the darkness, seeing nothing, but crawling towards it anyway. The house was groaning, I could feel it moving, and what if there was another tremor? What if God, the almighty bastard, hadn’t finished with MedellÍn yet? What if He was just waiting for me to crawl into this hole to bring the whole thing down? What if this was where it ends, where it was always going to end, under a ton of concrete, buried alive in the home of the mother I abandoned? But that wasn’t right: she abandoned me! Just like she abandoned everything and everyone who ever mattered to her. She left her home in Colombia. She left her mother and father and sisters and brothers and cousins and all the kin I had never even met, if she even had any. And then she left her husband and her sons. She left me. See, you can’t blame me for running. It’s in my genes.

  I started to mutter a prayer beneath my breath, the first time a prayer had crossed my lips since childhood, since before the great reckoning with God the cruel Father, God the useless Son and God the Holy fucking Ghost. I wasn’t going to pray to that Trinity, no matter how bad things got, but I couldn’t see the harm in appealing for the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Christ, who never asked to be dragged into this holy mess in the first place. Just an innocent virgin child, knocked up by the Angel Gabriel in the only recorded instance of divine artificial insemination. I wonder if he used a syringe? Did he blow heavenly sperm through his angelic trumpet? The gospels are vague on this and many other interesting points. Mary, Mary, not a bit contrary, who suffered her whole life for the privilege of watching her only begotten son die, slowly and painfully on a cross that was probably hammered together by her husband, whispering in Jesus’s ear, ‘You never were a son of mine, ya bastard. Let your own father help you now.’ Though the gospels are discreet on that too. Now there’s a tale worth telling. Someone ought to write a musical about that. Or had they done so already? And in the darkness, I heard myself singing, ‘Jesus Christ, Superstar! Walks like a woman and he wears a bra!’

  And my mother slapped me across the face. What did she do that for? It’s just a song they sing in the schoolyard. It doesn’t mean anything, Ma!

  And I can hear her and Daddy going at it in the next room, voices rising and falling in waves of accusation and counter-accusation, pleading and supplication. I know they are arguing about me. I’m responsible for this; I’m sure of it. So I crawl to the central heating vent that circulates air around our building, I open it up and listen. I can hear every conversation in the flat, and some from flats on the same floor and flats below, as the vents weave their tangled way through the whole apartment block, issuing forth a soft rumble of TV sets and radios and disembodied voices. Through it all, with the superfine focus of a child who lives by his ears, I hone in on the only conversation I want to hear, echoing down metal pipes, my ma and da in what they foolishly imagine to be the privacy of their bedroom.

  ‘If my mama could hear the filth that comes out of her grandson’s mouth, she would die of a heart attack on the spot, el Señor cuidarla y protegerla.’

  ‘They don’t even know their grandmother, and she doesn’t know them.’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’

  ‘Come on, Maria, it’s a kid’s song, for fuck’s sake! He doesn’t even know what it means. He’s six years old.’

  ‘It’s not the song, Patrick, it’s everything: this country, it rains all the time, the sun never shines, I’m cold in my bones. I want to go home. I want sunshine. I want my mother.’

  ‘You think they’d be better off growing up in the fucking jungle, picking coca leaves for a few pesos so some fucking rich kids in Manhattan can snort their brains out?’

  ‘I didn’t grow up in the jungle, Patrick. What would you know about that? You’ve never been there.’

  ‘And I’m never gonna go there. And neither are the boys. I’ve heard enough of your stories to know what it was fucking like and it wasn’t fucking paradise. So if you want to fuck off back to Colombia, then you fuck off, but the boys are not going anywhere, they’ll be staying right here with me. For fuck’s sake, Maria! We came here to make a life!’

  ‘You call this living?’

  I stopped in the hole. I was stuck. I couldn’t go ahead and I couldn’t go back. I could feel something pressing down, pushing the air out of my lungs like the voices from the past were pushing my thoughts out of my head. I needed to focus, I needed to breathe, I needed to find the child, and I needed her to be alive, cause I couldn’t go through all of this and pull out a corpse, and take up a limp brown doll to her father, and hear him wail, like my father had wailed, that awful crying that filled the hospital corridor, that terrible sound of hopeless, helpless abandonment. And those wild eyes, locking on to mine. ‘You did this! You did this! This is all your fault!’

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,’ I was muttering, the words tumbling out from the recesses of my mind. And like an echo down the years, I could hear my mother muttering the same prayer, kneeling before the little blue and white porcelain statue of Mary which presided over a recessed corner of her bedroom, bedecked with flowers and beads and candles, wrapped in twinkling fairy lights, a magical shrine that always drew me to it, though I wasn’t allowed to touch because this little statuette was her most precious object, the only thing she had brought with her all the way from the distant home she used to tell me about, where the sun always shone, and ev
eryone was protected by the grace of the Blessed Virgin. ‘Dios te salve, Maria. Llena eres de gracia: El Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres. Y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre…’

  And with those words still whispering in my ear, the bricks beneath me gave way, and I pitched down into the darkness, landing with a thump while debris rained on my head. I lay there for a while, because it was all I could do, eyes adjusting to the gloom. Light was breaking in from the hole above me, and I could see a pathway back to the blue and the face of the anxious padre. His mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear him above the blood thundering in my ears, all I could hear was my mother still praying for my protection: ‘Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.’

  I was in some kind of a room, the ceiling sagging about three feet off the ground, but still holding, propped up by mercifully solid pieces of furniture. And slowly I realised the voice I could hear wasn’t my mother’s at all. There really was another voice, reciting Ave Maria in a terrified whisper. I felt a surge of mad hope. ‘Where are you?’ I called. The praying stopped. I thought for a moment. ‘¿Donde estas?’ I asked again.

  ‘AquÍ,’ came a pitiful little voice. Here.

  I could have wept with joy and relief. I probably did, but it was so hard to tell what was going on in that black hole, I couldn’t be sure if the wetness on my face was blood, sweat or tears, or all three. I crept towards the voice, talking all the time, offering whatever phrases of reassurance I could conjure from my forgotten childhood Spanish, phrases I must have heard my mother say: it’s OK, little one, I’m here, there, there, don’t cry, everything’s all right now, where does it hurt? Mama’s going to kiss it better. I crept under an upturned armchair, around an upturned cabinet and felt my way towards a solid wooden bed that was proudly holding up the ceiling. Reaching underneath, I touched the outstretched fingers of a tiny hand.