Things That Happened Before the Earthquake

by Chiara Barzini

  “What the fuck did you do?” she screamed.

  I replied with a slow, unhurried voice, hoping she’d made a mistake looking at me like I’d done something bad. Maybe she hadn’t assessed the situation correctly.

  “He was going to hurt you,” I replied in a whisper.

  “No he wasn’t, you crazy bitch.”

  I peered over the rock toward the outcropping below. He was there, heaving, legs open wide on a dry bush halfway down the crag. He was far from dead, I reassured myself, and turned to Deva once again, but her face had hardened. I invited her to get up, but she was somewhere else. Her contours merged into the fading sunlight and she began to recede into the canyon. She gave me a final look of outrage and then she was gone. The sun had disappeared into the ocean, only blue hills and black shadows now. Everything caved in, and a different Deva would emerge out of that concave world. The previous one had departed.

  “You’re fucking nuts!” she shot at me with furious, limpid eyes, then climbed around the rock from the side and crawled into the escarpment. Her father was sprawled there. He moaned, eyes turned skyward like a martyr, bedraggled and vacant. Deva hovered over him protectively. I stayed above the rock and looked as her hair fell across his Adonis face. She was Venus, engulfing him back, conjoined. Her face was transfixed by a new light like she’d aged years in the span of a few instants. He let himself go to her embrace and abandoned his arms around her.

  I felt stupid and remorseful, but also disgusted.

  “Deva!” I screamed from above as she helped her father up. He limped, his arms and face scratched, but he was alive, standing.

  “I’m reporting you to the police! I’m getting you kicked out of my country! You crazy Italian bitch.” Even though his eyes fumed, his rage was a show. His body was squat and comfortable in his daughter’s arms, his face a bright-red exploded moon.

  “Deva!” I called again.

  Her eyes glassed over. “You heard what he said,” she said in a low drawl.

  I felt myself droop. I’d heard that drawl before, on the phone from Montana. It was Deva’s tone when she put up her wall. It rose above us, higher than the meteor boulder that had dropped in the canyon. It stretched over the Sicilian islands, the Mojave Desert, the Valley, and Topanga, and it was inscrutable like all the secret rules of children who’d grown up in that canyon. Topanga was a place where things were different and girls loved and feared their fathers, maybe slept in their beds, became their assistants and wives.

  “You better leave or I’ll kill you,” her father screamed, starting to hobble his way up the trail.

  I waited one more second, hoping to see Deva’s translucent green eyes, if nothing else to bid me farewell, but she did not look up so I got back on my feet and ran away.

  24

  I galloped in a headlong descent toward the bottom of the canyon. Green patches shot across the corners of my eyes, out of focus. Suspended sycamores and rotten branches smashed against my mouth, filling it with bitter leaves. I scratched my arms with thorns, tumbling over brambles and branches, gathering momentum. I fell down and picked myself up again while the twigs sprung against my thighs. I ran through the apple orchards, the split-open oak tree trunks, past the commune’s stream and the bathtub, past the red rocks. A giant hand was slapping me downhill, hitting me behind the rib cage, urging me to hurry on. I tripped and kept running down the woods toward the dark Pacific waters in the distance. I ran without looking back. I had seen my father run this way when we were kids—like a crazy spirit with flailing arms. I kept one hand on my aching spleen. On every beat, a shudder of pain shot across my back, reminding me that as fast as I could run away, it was still going to hurt in the end.

  I stumbled into a gorge at the bottom of the canyon and onto a cement patch invaded by stinging needles. I crawled through a hole in a fence and suddenly I was in the lush garden of an uninhabited home in the Pacific Palisades. There was a stagnant green pond, perhaps once a private artificial lake filled with swans. A small flight of swallows flew down to sip on the water and dashed back up. Banana trees surrounded the pond and tropical plants curved their thick leaves toward the ground. On the other side of the lake, farther into the garden, I noticed the path to an S-shaped swimming pool. I walked over. A blow-up mattress covered in leaves drifted, half deflated, over blue and aquamarine tiles. The water wasn’t too dirty. The home had been abandoned only recently. The pool house behind the diving board was infested with white bougainvillea trapping the roof tiles. Climbing plants made their way toward the sky, battling for space, gripping drainpipes with furry, thirsty roots. Two pots with overgrown flower stems drooped from the roof.

  On the other side of the garden the dark ocean shimmered through the trees, pulsating gently. I stopped. The leaves swayed in the evening wind. The garden, overgrown and abandoned, made me feel that time was still again. My heart settled, adrenaline dwindled. I was safe.

  A faded FOR SALE sign was posted on the lawn of the boarded-up three-story mansion. Under the front porch was a glass-topped wicker table covered in the typical last-minute debris left behind in the final stretch of a move: open cardboard boxes with old toys, buckets of dried-out wood paint and solvent, tumbled bedsheets, dirty towels. A heap of clothes spilled from a flung-open suitcase.

  I dug my fingers into the musty fabric. I felt something soft and pulled it out. Thanks to my time at Henry’s store, my second nature now was to seek and protect any abandoned thing coming out of a suitcase. It was a leopard coat, a real one from the thirties at least. It was wrinkled and smelled like mold, but the fur hadn’t aged. Once I patted the dust off, it returned to life with the slippery viscosity of an untamable animal. How could the owners of that mansion have left something like that behind, I wondered. The sleeves and collar had come unstitched, but they could easily be fixed. It was cut for a size smaller than me. I imagined it belonged to one of those silent-movie stars who vacationed in Topanga Canyon in the twenties. It had been part of the mansion for decades and now that the place was being sold, the owners, like all LA owners, had not gotten sentimental about it. I slid into the leopard fur, walked back to the pool, and stretched out on a torn deck chair.

  A chilling wind began to blow. After a few minutes it was suddenly cold. The leaves still trembled, but with less electricity running through them.

  I sank deeper into the coat and asked the leopard to give me paws with padding strong enough to bounce off any collision. Supreme hunter, fueled by nocturnal energies, let me be brave, I asked. I didn’t know what to do or how to get home. I was afraid of something terrible happening to me if I went back into the canyon. The magnified shadow of a eucalyptus branch reflected under a dim surveillance light that was running out of batteries and a cool darkness began to cloak the rest of the garden. A fierce leopard, I thought. And with a shiver I fell asleep.

  —

  I woke up in the night to the sky crashing to pieces above my head, the roaring sound of a train tunneling through me, smashing against the pool house. My eyes flashed open and I saw Deva’s father standing there, shaking me inside out, screaming. I rose in a jolt. There was nobody there. It wasn’t the sky that was breaking apart but the earth. The train was being regurgitated from underground. I felt it under my feet. The soil moved in waves. Water splashed out of the pool. A part of the roof smashed to the ground bringing potted plants with it. Coyotes howled in the canyon recesses as the earth kept shaking, then everything went back to darkness and quiet. I knew what it was. We did the drills in school. They’d told us about how the land in Los Angeles rattled, but I could have never expected something like that.

  I went out through the hole in the fence and walked around the periphery of the house until I emerged on a small hilltop street. There were no lights below the slope, only shimmering bits of crumpled tar. I walked down and it was like sinking into a dark gorge, guided by the sound of human screams on both sides. I couldn’t understand where the drawn-out cries came from, if they were above m
e in the canyon or below me in the darkness, but they were reassuring. It was like having company. The earth began to shake under my feet again. This time I started to run, but couldn’t steer my legs in any direction. They moved in a wobbly motion over the ribbed asphalt and I couldn’t feel what I was running toward. The second rumble was shorter than the first, but when it stopped my feet kept swaying, trying to anticipate the earth’s next roll. The screaming in the mountains intensified and I kept running in that awkward stumble until I realized I had landed on Sunset Boulevard. It was terra incognita, a part of the road with no houses or human signs, just trees and dirty foliage. I’d never noticed that rural pass of the boulevard from the car. We’d driven down the road countless times with the Cadillac’s top down—Serena doing her best Gloria Swanson impersonation. But now it didn’t look anything like that place.

  Emergency vehicles and police cars lined the boulevard. Broken glass was everywhere, the smell of saltwater and cracked-open booze bottles in front of a busted-in liquor store. Sirens blared and the quiet but desperate chatter arose of people beginning to group. I walked along the highway until I found a parked police car and flailed my arms to a cop getting inside. I stuttered something about being lost and scared and needing to get back home. He frowned at my leopard fur and I suddenly realized what I looked like. It wasn’t until I’d heard my own voice that I understood I was completely in shock.

  “You should have stayed where you were safe,” the policeman said as he let me inside his car. But nowhere was safe anymore. We pulled away from the dark ocean. In the car, alarmed voices spoke over the static on his radio. They said the Northridge Fashion Center in the Valley had collapsed and hazardous material was spilling on Winnetka, right by my high school. A building was burning in Sherman Oaks, a few blocks from our house. Ruptured gas and water mains were causing fires and flooding all over the Valley. The cop shook his head.

  He said the worst of the earthquake had struck just blocks from my house. All the freeways were closed. The only way to the Valley was back through the canyon, and still he didn’t know whether he’d be able to get me to the other side. The earthquake of January 17, 1994, was a 6.7 on the Richter scale.

  “The big kind,” the cop explained. “The kind that will have a name and a personality one day, the kind everyone will have a story about.”

  Police, highway patrolmen, even the National Guard were involved.

  “Do you think my family will be okay?” I asked. “They live in Van Nuys.”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  I thought of the Sound City Studios at the edge of my neighborhood. I imagined Nirvana’s platinum records falling off the wall, Kurt Cobain’s bright eyes watching over the disaster from the corkboard. Another extreme event occurring in the Valley. All the more reason to love that place. What could be more grunge than a recording studio cracking open and falling into the earth?

  As we got closer to the San Fernando Valley, we could see it from above shooting up in flames in the predawn light. The flat grid I’d walked far and wide and knew by heart was under siege. The city lights I used to see stretch for miles were gone. We stood over a dimmed city. I’d seen it like that before—a barren, pockmarked expanse—on the day we arrived, streets still fuming from the riots. That land had a fixed way of reacting to tragedies. Like a celebrity after a scandal, it begged for invisibility. It lay low under pressure, squat and compressed until disasters passed. Magnolia and cypress trees cowered into flaming bushes, buildings shrank, streets folded over, and lakes flung fish out of their waters. Everything waited for nature to rapidly take its course so that an ancient harmony could be restored.

  I could see the Woodland Hills Mall in the distance, a beached cement whale, emanating no life pulse—a shaken slab of concrete. I thought of Arash and saluted him. For the first time he felt far away, a memory beginning to fade, replaced by new quakes.

  The auroral rays intensified. The night’s chill retreated behind us and we were expelled into the fiery morning below. Day broke, racing against a chorus of manic chirping birds, howling dogs, and roosters. Hungry, fast rays of sun began to climb across the crushed roofs and treetops, cracked antennas, and telephone wires that hung off wobbling poles—a far-reaching sun, responsible for the Valley’s sameness, for the changeless days and odorless air. It engulfed you.

  “Let’s hurry home, sir,” I said as we drove up Ventura Boulevard. We tried to make our way through smaller side streets, but every avenue was blocked by a collapsed building or a pile of cars. My head spun and I felt like throwing up. The cop said to stay calm. Disorientation and nausea were normal reactions to earthquakes.

  From the car, I saw families huddled together. Lines formed around the few functioning pay phones, tent villages were beginning to rise while dogs roamed in packs looking for food. We met the hollow stares of those who had had a home and then thirty seconds later did not. The Valley was denuded and nakedness made no sense to a town so used to being dressed up. Without its vestments there was no Los Angeles.

  The cop dropped me off on Sunny Slope Drive and I was happy to see that it hadn’t fallen into the earth, that it was still there. Just more crooked.

  “I hope your family is okay,” he said.

  I tried to hug him, but he pushed me back at arm’s length.

  “Just doing my duty,” he said in a rush as more horrific news radioed in: the looting had begun.

  “Remember what happened to this town the last time things got out of control,” the cop proclaimed. “We’re not going to let that happen again.” He gave me a nod and took off.

  Most of our neighbors were out on the street. The Mormons prayed on their front lawn. Desmond, the star, with his wife, mother, and blind dogs, wandered about in a silk bathrobe. He’d been so keen on safeguarding his privacy, but now he looked around, desperate for someone to recognize him, to talk to him and ask him how he was doing. I gave him a quick consoling nod and moved on.

  Timoteo was asleep in my mother’s lap. My parents sat cross-legged on the front lawn, eyes wide open. They waited silently for someone to walk over and tell them what to do. They lit up when they saw me with my unstitched leopard-fur coat and messed-up hair. Our driveway was cracked open. The living room had folded in, giving the house a crumpled Z shape. The garage door had fallen out. Boxes had toppled onto the Cadillac’s windshield, breaking it, but everything else seemed fine.

  “Where have you been?” my father screamed. “Your mother has already filed three missing-person reports!”

  “I’m sorry. I had no way to call. I got here as soon as I could.”

  Timoteo awoke and walked up to me, staring at my unlikely outfit.

  “You look crazy.” He smiled.

  “I know.”

  He opened my coat and nuzzled inside. “I thought you weren’t going to come back.”

  I opened the fur as wide as I could and wrapped it around him. My parents joined us and I fit them all in. We stayed there, squeezed together in our crammed group hug.

  “What about the monitors?” I asked my father. “Is the Alexandria footage damaged?”

  “Don’t worry about that now,” he said. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  Those were the words I’d waited to hear for so long, but now that he’d said them I was worried. If he had gotten to that point it meant he’d surrendered.

  Someone had told them not to go back inside because there might be aftershocks. The house was not safe, my mother explained, clutching a battery-less flashlight, vaguely remembering that was something you were supposed to have handy when earthquakes struck. She set up breakfast on the front yard: dry cereal, bread, butter, and milk. She’d managed to put together a meal out of the derelict kitchen. Everything had spilled and crashed to the floor, but she was on caretaker autopilot. We were to have breakfast because it was morning and that’s what people did when they woke up. So we ate, sitting on pillows on the front lawn. Neighbors trickled by to talk about loss and damage and my mo
ther welcomed them stoically with her improvised breakfast plates. Everyone said where they were and what they heard when it happened. Some had sad stories, some had happy stories.

  I curled up next to my brother on the ground.

  “I didn’t wake up when it happened,” he said with a smirk. “I could have died.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t tell them about the guys in the pickup truck.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled, like any of that even mattered now. I leaned against him, exhausted.

  My father looked at us with ironic commiseration and started to laugh.

  “What?” Timoteo and I glared at him.

  “Well we can now say we’ve done it all. Non ci siamo fatti mancare niente. The whole California experience with the earthquake grand finale too. Pretty cool, right?”

  Serena rolled her eyes at him. “It’s not funny.”

  “There’s dead people, Dad,” I interjected.

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. I was trying to be lighthearted.”

  Creedence and his brothers, led by their father, DeLoyal, and their pale, wide-eyed mother, Cresta-Lee, approached our house and asked us if we wanted to join their prayer circle.