by Alan Drew
The breeze felt like air blowing off an open fire. He heard the metal droning of cranes at the docks, a place that never stopped moving. You could hear its machinery grinding away at all hours of the day, during prayers, waking before sunrise in the morning—it didn’t matter, the sound was always there, like the scrape of gnashing your own teeth together. He could see a party boat floating close to shore, the white lights strung from its bow reflecting against the black water. As it got nearer to shore Sinan heard the thumping of music from loudspeakers and watched dozens of people dancing on its flat rooftop. The sound was distant and sad, like the echo of some lost pleasure. But as the boat drew closer to the dock, he heard individual voices, the laughter of women, a deejay announcing a raffle, and the clapping of hands. The deejay played another song, and it was so loud that Sinan got angry because he thought it might disturb his family’s sleep.
Then there was another sound, an odd low rumbling like the shuddering of a tank coming down the street. And at first that’s what he thought it was, one of the police tanks on patrol, but the rumbling grew louder and it seemed to be rolling across the water toward him, toward the town.
He sat up, looked for a ship leaving the docks, searched the sky for a plane, but the sound wasn’t right for anything man-made. Then, in the distance, out of the black water, flashed a brilliant spark of green. The flash was so bright that when he blinked there were little bursts of green blindness in his vision. The rumble had separated itself from the sound of the boat and had become something wholly distinct, a horrible growl. He looked at the party boat, hoping the sound was some new type of music. The shining hull bobbed out there silently, reflecting itself back on the water, but all the dancing people had turned their faces toward the growing sound.
Sinan had an instinct to get back to his family, he tried to run for the stairs, tried to get back to them, but his feet skipped out from beneath him and he found himself facedown on the cement rooftop. He rolled onto his back and lifted himself up, but above him the sky shifted, sending the stars falling across the sky, their pinpoints streaking in his vision.
He got to his feet and wrapped a fist around a piece of rebar, and when he did he looked toward the bay where the boat lifted on a wave of water, rose into the air like a toy ship, tipped sideways, listed, and spilled its passengers into the surging sea. There was nothing to think about it because it was something unbelievable, something in a terrible dream, and as soon as he did think, They won’t make it, the building directly next to his own dropped from his vision. The crash was so loud that it was like the silence of blood in his ears.
He heard screams, explosions of gas lines rupturing, the bursting of water pipes thrusting up pieces of road, even the sirens of car alarms, but none of these sounds could be isolated; they were simply the cacophonous rush of destruction. Then Sinan’s stomach lifted into his throat and he was dropped through the air. For a moment he felt as though he were flying; he looked beneath his feet to find the rooftop falling. It dropped ten feet and tilted sideways as if the whole building was tumbling into the street. Then his body was thrown over the side of the rooftop. He closed his eyes, sure that this was the end, and fell for what seemed like minutes until he slammed into the tiled floor of the terrace beneath. He was rolled to his left, and got wedged against the railings of the terrace, his arms tangled in the wrought iron and his head dangling over the edge.
As he opened his eyes he saw the white circumcision bed come through the open window below, and on that white bed was his son. smail lay on his back with his arms thrown behind him like he was doing the backstroke. Their eyes briefly met. smail had a questioning look on his face—he didn’t seem scared at all—just a question mark in his eyes, as if to say, “Look, what a strange thing to happen, Baba.”
In his white circumcision dress, smail floated out above the crumbling building, as if on a pillow of air. Sinan reached a hand out toward his son, stretching his fingers as far as he could. Cement blocks tumbled beneath the boy, crashed together, crushed and disintegrated, and the bed, too, spun around in the air. smail did a somersault, his tiny feet rolling above his head, his back coming briefly into view, his whole body flipping gracefully through the sky, before it disappeared in the dust and crumble below.
Chapter 8
SINAN HEARD SCREAMING, A SHRILL SOUND IN THE DISTANCE, like a throng of women standing outside and beating themselves. The screaming pierced his ears, slicing a sharp pain into his temple, and light grew at the corners of his vision. “Sinan,” a voice cried. “Sinan!” The sound seemed to move through his body, out into a world that surrounded him with heavier sounds—crashing cement, car alarms, screams, and moans—and when he heard the voice a third time, he knew it was his wife’s.
He came to finally and found himself wrapped around the twisted mess of wrought iron. His shirt had caught on the metal, and it was pulled up over his head so that when he opened his eyes he faced the darkness of the material. For a moment he thought he was dead, then the pain at his temple shocked him into consciousness. His legs dangled over the edge of the rooftop. He should have fallen, but the shoulder of his shirt, hooked on the rebar, had saved him. When he touched his head his fingers smeared with blood.
“Sinan!” he heard Nilüfer scream.
He kicked his feet and wrenched himself back onto the terrace. Everything that had happened came back to him, and in the darkness he scrambled across the collapsed rooftop and stumbled in the direction of the stairs. The stairwell was intact. He climbed down into the passageway where the early-morning darkness grew darker. He groped his way down the circling staircase until he heard his daughter crying. He tried shoving open the door, but it was stuck and he had to smash his shoulder against the wood. Inside, the floor slanted steeply and he slipped on the cheap marble tiles where they had become wet from a severed kitchen pipe. He already knew the answer, but he ran into the front room to check the window anyway, hoping that the vision of smail falling had been a dream. The bed, the window, his son, the whole front wall of his apartment were gone. The couch and coffee table dangled off the edge of the room, the back feet of the couch suspended in air, balanced delicately against falling. Beyond the missing front wall a cloud of dust hovered in the air like coal smoke. What had once been geometric planes of square walls and straight streets and a traffic circle, was now a jumble of broken buildings.
Sinan, then, began to shake uncontrollably; smail was buried out there.
From one of the bedrooms he heard rem sobbing. He found her and his wife crouching on the floor, the rest of the bedroom stripped empty. Nilüfer clutched rem to her chest and rocked her like she was a child.
“smail?” Nilüfer cried, panicked, her eyes pleading.
“He’s safe,” he said.
“Where, Sinan?”
“He’s safe,” he repeated.
“Where? Where is he?”
“We have to get out of here.”
Sinan took Nilüfer by the shoulders and helped her stand. She wouldn’t let go of rem’s hand, and he had to gently prize his wife’s fingers loose before lifting his shaking daughter to his chest. rem was too heavy for him, but it didn’t matter. She clung to his neck and cried huge sobs that convulsed her body and made her harder to carry.
“rem, canm,” he said, whispering in her ear. “You’re okay. Calm down. You’re okay.” He repeated this through the leaning hallway, into the stairwell, and down the cracked steps until the passageway came to a dead end of fallen concrete slabs. He set rem down and in the darkness ran his hands over the rough cement, trying to find a way out, but there was none. They should have been on the second floor, but the second floor was gone.
“Ahmet?” Nilüfer said. “My brother!”
“I know,” he said, and he reached behind to touch her on the wrist.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Gülfem, Ahmet, Zeynep.” She yelled into the wall, but the sound was stifled. “Oh, God!”
Sinan took her in his arms and held her.
“Nilüfer,” he said, “you have to be calm now.”
She stopped yelling and breathed deeply, and when she grew calmer he began to panic. He didn’t know what to do. His chest constricted and his mind wouldn’t work. His head pounded as though his brain were bashing up against his skull.
“Upstairs,” Nilüfer said. “The Türkolu s’.”
She took his hand and he grabbed rem’s, and Nilüfer led them back up the stairwell. When they reached the neighbor’s threshold, Sinan didn’t even think of knocking, but simply threw open the unlocked door and entered their neighbors’ apartment.
“Mehmet!” he yelled, but there was no response.
They ran together down the leaning hallway, past the kitchen and into the front room; the wall was gone. This apartment had been on the third floor, but now it sat on the ground, the two floors beneath it a crush of cinder blocks and broken glass.
They teetered out into the darkness of the destroyed town, down nearly thirty meters of rubble. They scrambled over ledges of concrete, stepped over kitchen sinks, jumped across crevasses of rooftops, and the whole time, with each step, Sinan was afraid he might be stepping on his son. He tried to place his feet lightly, but he had to walk, had to lead the rest of his family down, and there was no way to be weightless.
“Forgive me, smail,” he said to himself.
A water main broke beneath the street, and a rush of water burst into the air. The alarm of a crushed car bleated out a call and headlights flashed on and off, and in each strobe-light flash Sinan glimpsed the outlines of the destroyed town. People were scaling walls, hugging in the street, scrambling out of broken windows. Strafed by the light, their gestures looked mechanical, the clipped preciseness of limbs moving by degrees, and he hoped this might be a terrible dream. But it was real—he felt the dust landing on his skin, the grainy scratch of it in his lungs, the fingernails of his daughter scraping his palm.
Finally they reached the street, and he led Nilüfer and rem to a little space of green that used to be the center of the traffic circle.
“Don’t move from here,” he said.
The light from the car alarm caught Nilüfer’s face and the look scared him; her eyes were distant, as though a film had clouded over her pupils. He shook her lightly to make sure she understood him. She nodded her head, but it was the movement of someone who could no longer hear, someone who wasn’t there anymore.
“rem,” he said, “do not let go of your mother. Do you understand me?”
“Don’t leave me,” rem said.
“Do not let go of her, and stay here.”
She nodded, but pleaded, “Don’t leave me, Baba.”
But he was already running back to the pile in front of his apartment.
Now sprinkles of water fell through the air, mixed with the floating dust, and dropped to the ground as mud. The strobe light illuminated the front of the now-teetering apartment building; it looked like a great hulking monster, the ripped innards of insulation hanging from the walls, the sockets of empty rooms, the limbs of electrical wires. Beneath the looming building, he saw people digging in the debris, but his vision was blurry at the edges, prismed through the pain in his head, and he didn’t recognize anybody.
He didn’t know where to begin, so he started at his feet, digging his hands into a space between slabs and pulling at the first chunk of concrete he could wrap his hands around. He dislodged it and it tumbled onto his foot. Kicking the chunk away, he slipped his fingers down into the rubble again, throwing pieces aside, between his legs. His palms ripped on metal sheeting and shards of glass stabbed his wrists. The cement crumbled under his nails and turned to sand in his fists.
His heart slammed against his ribs and his lungs seemed to shred. His hands worked faster than he thought possible, his arms lifting impossibly large blocks of cement. Digging in again, deeper this time, all the way to his shoulder: he felt something soft. His fingertips met fingertips. Then he felt a ring on the finger, and he knew it was not smail. Pulling himself up to where the body lay, he saw the caved-in face of a man. His scalp was cleaved open and it might have been Ahmet, but in the flashing light he couldn’t tell.
“Allah rahmet eylesin,” he said to the body, and he kept going.
He dug for what seemed like hours before coming to a long slab of unbroken cement he couldn’t break through. He climbed out of the hole and tried digging in another area, but he met the same impenetrable wall.
He ran around the corner to Ali Sünbay’s hardware store, with the idea that he would get a metal pick and break the slab into smaller pieces, then he could move them with his hands, but the whole street was gone. Three buildings had toppled sideways, the floors strewn across the road like extended accordion bags. Another building had simply jumped fifteen feet to the side, completely intact save the first floor, which was left broken on its foundation. A woman stumbled down the street with a young man in her arms, his head tilted back, his feet scraping the ground. He was too old to be carried, and the woman’s legs buckled beneath her. She stood again, holding the man to her breast, carrying him away from the collapsed buildings. Sinan should have helped her, but he was shocked by the vision, and as she got closer he ran the other way.
He was panicked now, running on his twisted foot, the reality of it all expanding in his chest. He was helpless. Everyone was helpless. There wasn’t one thing he could do to help his son. When that thought exploded in his head, he dropped to his knees in the dirt, turned his palms toward the sky, and prayed.
Chapter 9
ONLY THE PRAYER AND THE TERRIBLE VISION OF HIS SON falling filled his mind. He had a vague memory of sunlight and darkness followed by sunlight again. Perhaps another night passed, but he didn’t know. His head hurt, a throbbing pain as though a hot balloon had expanded inside his skull, and the world outside his head sounded muffled and fluid, like screams drowned underwater. And within this muffled space, he heard his daughter’s voice.
“Baba,” he heard rem say, as if from across some great flooded cavern. “Baba, I need your help. Anne is saying crazy things.”
But he had to pray; he couldn’t break this prayer.
“She’s pulling out her hair. I can’t make her stop.”
His words of prayer were the most fragile strands of a thread pulling smail toward life. One skipped phrase, one misplaced recitation, and he knew that thread would snap, severing him from his son.
“He’s dead, Baba.” rem seemed to be crying from the bottom of the sea, her voice barely rising through fathoms of water. “smail is dead.” too far away.
“I need you,” he heard her say again. There was distant sobbing, but after a while it stopped and he didn’t hear her voice again.
He wanted to slap her for giving smail up so quickly, but she was After that there were only the words of supplication and the space in his head, the space in which he tried to lift his soul closer to God so God could see that he couldn’t live if smail should die. He might have slept; he had a vague memory of someone making him lie down, tree limbs swaying above his head, but he wasn’t sure, and when he was most lucid he found himself prostrated in the very same spot in the dirt. In his mind he offered his own life for the life of his son, he offered his wife’s and his daughter’s, he even bartered away their time in Heaven. He swore if God should be merciful that smail’s life would be the picture of Muslim humility; he would see to it, make it his personal mission in life.
Then sometime later, hours, days, when he began to weaken and the sounds of bulldozers rattled his skull and the shouts of men filled his head, he realized he was demanding God to bend to his will. He was not offering God anything; he was fighting him, throwing up his fists and spitting into the sky. And then a calm suddenly came over him, a calm like the moment before he drifted off to sleep, when breathing becomes steady and the brain feels submerged in warm water, and he said clearly in his mind:
“Take my son if it’s your will. If it is your will, then it’s his fat
e.”
He repeated this in his head, until the words began to lose their meaning, until his voice became nothing and he felt as though every bone in his body was as insubstantial and weightless as a bird’s. He whispered it to himself until he no longer felt the muscles in his mouth, and his tongue seemed to have been cut out, until even his heart ceased beating in his ears and he was no longer a father, a husband, or a man. He was dust, simply the grains of God’s making.
He heard the voice cry out, “There’s someone here.” The words pierced the fog and emptiness and shocked him into consciousness. He didn’t know how long he had been collapsed in the dirt, but he could no longer feel his legs and he was bent to the side, half-lying in the street. A tractor with a scoop attached to the front lumbered by him, the wheels spinning up dust just in front of his face. The sun beat down and his brain pounded as though someone had hit him in the forehead with a hammer. He was thirsty, starving. He looked toward the voice and found a dozen men pulling at a pile of debris. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t work.
“Help me!” he screamed.
The man who had just parked the tractor jumped from the driver’s seat and pulled Sinan to his feet.
“I can’t walk,” Sinan said.
The man carried him to the pile of rubble and set him down. There Sinan began to shove his bare hands back into the shards of broken buildings. As he dug, his legs tingled back to life. He plunged into a hole in the pile and pulled at every torn thing in front of him, searching for something round, something soft—skin, the curve of a skull, the length of an arm, the tender underside of bare feet.