by John Shirley
“Hi,” said a girlish voice below. “So you got here.”
Russ looked down to see a young woman about his age, maybe a little younger, with a tanned, heart-shaped face, sunglasses pushed back over her spiky honey-colored hair. She wore a dark green sweatshirt, Army fatigue pants, Doc Marten boots. Even at this distance he could see the sharp blue of her eyes.
“Whassup?” Russ said, casually, hoping that sounded cool without trying to sound cool. “Got here—uh, yeah, we got here.” That didn’t sound cool. He wished he still smoked—better to have a cigarette in his hand right now, instead of binoculars.
“My grandma pointed you out, she knows your dad. If your dad is Drew Haver?”
“Yeah.”
“ ’Kay, well, I’m supposed to invite you guys to have dinner, some kind of veggie stew. I think she really sent me so we could meet, which is, you know—lame.” The girl shrugged. “But I don’t know anyone around here. She worries about it. Wants me to make friends. My Gram’s really nice, it’s hard to tell her no. But she’s a vegetarian. So it’ll be, like, all tofu.”
“Oh.” Her grandmother had put her up to talking to him. He’d hoped she’d talked to him on her own initiative.
Another flock of birds passed raucously over, heading inland. “There go some more,” she said. “Birds have been coming in, like there’s a big storm out there. I felt the ground shaking too. There was something on the radio . . . ” She frowned.
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know, it got fuzzy, something about Monterey and seismic advisories. Makes me nervous, I grew up in San Francisco.”
“Yeah? Supposed to be a great place to live.”
“It’s not so great. Earthquakes. Two since the clusterquakes thing started. Not that big but—got kinda ugly. And it’s expensive. And, you know—people get shot. I was living in Potrero Hill, though, that’s pretty tight. But then my mom died, and my dad was already dead, so I came to stay with my Gram. What you looking at with those binoculars?”
“Um—nothing yet. Not even sure how to use ’em.”
“You having the stew?”
“I’ll ask my dad if he . . . I mean, you know, probably. Um—I’m Russ.”
“Oh yeah. Pendra.”
“Pendra?”
“Yeah. My mom was all about Celtic stuff. Something to do with that.”
She looked at him and he could feel her evaluating him and he thought, I look like a fucking worse dork than usual from this angle, for sure.
He said, “I’ll ask my dad about the dinner.” He hesitated, then added, “I felt the ground shake too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah—it was . . . a ways from here.” Another ragged flight of shrieking birds overhead, and a rumbling from the ocean. He looked out to sea—and what he saw puzzled him.
The horizon had changed. It was white and frothy out there, now. A line of white, straight as a rule, erased the horizon’s curve.
“Christ. I cannot believe I agreed to this,” Brand muttered.
His full name was Brando Marlon Robinson. His mother had been a Brando fan. She’d also been more than a little crazy. But Mom was no longer in a mental hospital; at seventy-four, living in a San Diego condo, she was more cheerful than Brand, who was now forty-seven.
“You see?” Songbird said, leaning toward him, with her best look of compassion. “You cannot believe! And that is the problem.” She shook her head sadly. “The way people talk is full of unintended messages about them.”
Maybe he was sitting here with this woman because she talked like his half-cracked mom. Her real name was probably Susan or something, Brand supposed. She was thirteen years younger than he was, a pert woman with a mauve streak in her mane of curly red hair, a tattoo of a hummingbird on her right wrist, and she was presuming to coach him on his life. She was a “life coach.”
They sat on his broad back porch on Highcrest Street, the covered porch people usually put out front on a big ramshackle wooden house like this one, but it had been built here for the view. Below the tiers of houses and highway, the beach was a swath of gray and tan at the foot of the larger hill that crowned the town of Freedom.
“Songbird” was wearing a canary-colored Patagonia hiking coat and Rain Bird pants; Brand was wearing a regular ski jacket, grimy orange, and jeans—it was cold out here, the wind always swiping at the house. They were drinking mugs of green tea, something he almost never drank. His daughter, who lived in Santa Cruz, had given him the tea, as well as this session. The tea tasted like wet hay, to Brand.
The life coach was gazing at him with a look of keen interest. Mixed interest, he suspected. She had no wedding ring and, inwardly wincing, he wondered if she was measuring him as a possible mate, a widower she could straighten out, remake into a healthy middle-aged, marriageable man.
He missed his wife; missed walking with Marilee, watching movies with her, having dinner with her, sleeping with her. He missed sailing with her. He’d sold their little sailboat when she’d died and had never gone sailing again. And another thing he missed—she’d insulated him from troublesome females.
Better give the conversation a chance. What else had he been doing? Sitting around, halfheartedly trying to illustrate his book. A book that would sell barely enough copies to keep his publisher interested in publishing him. But he wanted to please Annette. Talk to Songbird and get it over with.
His daughter Annette had paid the life coach to talk to him—Songbird had a timeshare in Freedom, and supplemented her income, when in town, with “life coaching.” Or tried. Brand doubted there were many takers. It was more of a Los Angeles thing. Most of the time she lived in Westwood. His daughter had found Songbird on the Internet.
There was no way he could bring himself to call her Songbird out loud.
“ . . . you see,” she was saying, “there’s a secret that is so obvious, people overlook it. Believing is almost magic. You have to train yourself to believe . . . ”
She went on in that vein. He tuned her out, nodding at the appropriate intervals, checking in now and then to be sure she was still on the therapy-lite refrain. He looked at the cacti he’d tried to grow in the Navajo pots along the wooden fence in his back yard. He was from Arizona, originally, and he’d thought they’d cheer him up. They were turning brown. It was really too cold and damp for them here. The vegetable garden he’d attempted was overgrown with weeds. A few onions had done all right. He really ought to dig down and see if any of the potatoes had made it . . . This time of year, though, they were probably ruined. Things grew—and died. Languishing and fading in dead soil . . .
“ . . . there’s a reason religions emphasize faith, because faith heals us and I don’t mean like ‘faith healers,’ I mean . . . ”
Brand knew he was being unkind, not following what she was saying—and by extension he was being unkind to Annette. He ought to play the game and let this woman “coach” him. Be mindful, listen to her nattering. That’s what it was, nattering, but he could be nice about it. Why not?
“ . . . belief is so subjective, but I know that when I believe in my own happiness, I’m happier. It seems like a paradox . . . ”
“I don’t lack belief,” he said suddenly, surprising her. “I believe in various things. What I lack is denial.”
“Uh . . . ” She blinked. “Denial?”
“Denial. I need denial. I’m lacking in it. I need to be in denial that I suffer from a terminal disease, that we all do, from the time we’re about twenty-five.”
“What disease?”
“The long, slow terminal disease called aging. I’m missing all kinds of denial. Like—denial that we’re using the rest of the world as our piss pot and denial about my own responsibility for that. Denial that my daughter will inevitably die—and most people, I believe, die unhappily. So—she will probably die unhappily too.”
Songbird was slowly shaking her head, smiling sadly, but she’d never be able to ‘coach’ him if she didn’t
understand, at least a little, what he thought about life, so he went forcefully on: “Denial that millions of people are being enslaved—indentured servitude, sex slavery—and that hundreds of millions, billions of foolish, brutal people are going to have children and just make billions more foolish, brutal people who will have yet more children who will learn from their parents to be even more foolish, brutal, and cruel—and who will absolutely insist on believing in stupid superstitions, religions that spread ignorance and war. Denial about the hopeless wreckage we’re making of the natural world. Denial about the ways that I myself have failed in this life—like the fact that I should have done a lot more to ease my wife’s passing.” His voice went hoarse, but he pressed on: “That maybe I could have saved her life if I’d worked harder so we had better health care. Denial about the isolation and suffering all around me. Denial about my failure to make a difference in the world in any consistent way. Denial! If only my denial was intact, I could look away from all those things. Insulate myself from them. I could look away from my own culpability and everyone else’s. I could look away from the slow ruination of my brain and my health. But . . . I’m short on denial. Haven’t got any at all, in fact.”
She gave him a pitying look. “Brand—once you heal, you won’t see things that way. Healthy people don’t see it that way.”
“No, healthy people have denial, that’s all. Or they take Prozac. Which is pharmaceutical denial. But look—if it’s spirituality you’re talking about, I can grasp that. You’ve read the Diamond Sutra—or the Upanishads—or the Bhagavad Gita?”
“Um—I’m familiar,” she said, blinking.
She hasn’t read them, he thought. He shrugged and went on, “The Gita tells us to approach life head-on, accept your transience, identify with the eternal—now that has value. It also says accept death. But this approach you have—I mean, yeah, I know I’m a depressive but it seems so unbalanced to me to pretend that the dark side of existence is just a matter of having negative energy. No, it’s part of living. And tragedy is part of living, and suffering.”
“It’s hard to see, from here,” she went on. “But things happen for a reason. Everything happens for a reason.”
“Oh Christ, not that one! Everything happens for a reason? You mean it all ultimately has a point? Really! Two weeks ago, in Sacramento, a man murdered a woman in front of her three children and then he murdered the kids one by one. And not quickly. What reason is there for that?”
She took a deep breath, sipped her tea, twisted her lips into a skewed cone. “Maybe we’ll try another approach . . . Let’s try a healing chant. This chant teaches that all things are possible.”
She taught him the chant, took his left hand between hers—probably imagining she could transfer “good energy” to him that way—and she repeated the mantra softly, a faux Native-American incantation. Her hands felt clammy. He noticed that her nails were badly chewed.
Dutifully mumbling the chant, he lifted his gaze beyond the splintery gray line of his back fence, taking in the sea, an eighth-mile below: the blue and green waves tipped with horses of white; mottled, in the hollows, with the green and brown of kelp, and disturbed sand. The ocean seemed to be churning with more excitement than the wind would explain. And the horizon looked strange . . .
Hamish, his white-haired neighbor, popped his head up above the northern fence. He had a perpetual worried smile and big down-slanting dark eyes.
Brand knew Hamish was standing on a scuffed little boulder he routinely used to look over the fence. Hamish’s thin white hair lifted in the breeze. “Brand, did you—oh . . . sorry.”
“Sorry? About what? Oh.” He took his hand back from Songbird’s. “Not what it looked like.” He was grateful for the interruption. “Did I what?”
“Did you feel that? Several times, the last couple hours . . . ”
“Oh, hello there!” Songbird said chirpily, beaming at Hamish. “Did you feel something special, over there? Sometimes these mantras travel through the air and affect the neighbors! When the energy is lifting, it reaches out to everyone nearby . . . ”
“I did feel something,” Hamish said, adding puzzlement to his wide smile. “Like—the ground shaking.”
“The ground shaking—wow! That’s a powerful response.”
“I didn’t notice the ground shaking,” Brand said, feeling sure that Hamish meant something physical, not metaphysical. “Anyway, the wind is always rattling the house so I tend to discount anything like that.”
Hamish squinted at the sea. “The radio said something about an evacuation. For the whole county.”
“Evacuation?” Brand was suddenly feeling more alert. Distantly aware that Songbird was rattling on about “having the courage to bring positive energy into a negative world.” He glanced at Hamish. “Why an evacuation?”
“Because . . . Jeezus God, look at that!” Hamish pointed down at the sea.
Brand looked at the ocean, standing, shading his eyes with his hands. The horizon had lifted itself up, and now it was rolling toward them like an endless wheel, catching the light.
A sky-breaching wall of seawater was rising above the nearer sea, was rushing toward them. It came on thunderously, inexorably, toward the small town of Freedom, California.
Brand turned to speak to Songbird—and saw that she had gone. He heard the front door bang shut; heard her running feet on the walk.
Her footsteps were lost in the growing rumble, the rising, world-shaking roar from the infinitely populous waves of an invading army: the sea.
There was a long, deep, unprecedented rumble from the sea—and a sudden prolonged hysterical shriek from Old Jenkins . . .
They ran to the window, and saw the waves—and in a handful of seconds Ferrara had rushed from the front window to the back stairs.
The creaking staircase led to the second story of the tavern building and the splintery sun deck, which they hadn’t used in years. Ferrara led the others by at least four steps, rushing to the top of the stairs; he unlocked the metal door from inside with a twist of the rusty lock-knob, shouldered through onto the sun roof, blinking in the sudden light.
Hearing—and feeling—the tympanic roll of the oncoming wall of water, Ferrara climbed up the steeply angled roof behind the sundeck, his feet slipping on mossy wooden shingles. Got to the top, straddling it, just in time, heart hammering, wheezing, to turn and see a mountain range of seawater, more than a hundred feet high, rising up, up . . .
It came booming toward him, stampeding across the beach below the town, the churning at its base like countless running white feet . . .
Some beachcomber in its path screamed hoarsely, the scream cut off as the wave swept the man up, sucked him tumblingly in, and swallowed him, the onrushing wall of water—a hundred feet high—not slowing as it hit the beach, seeming to lean eagerly toward the town as it smashed onward, across the highway, coming at the buildings facing the sea, including the Bobbing Buoy Bar and Barbecue . . .
Then it was looming over Lon Ferrara, pushing a cold wind ahead of it that made Ferrara’s clothing flap. The great wave was dark brown at the base, then tan, then transparent green, brilliant white, flecked with flotsam, veined with seaweed . . .
The wave. A dirty but translucent mountain. Throwing a shifting mix of reflected light and gloom.
Monumentally towering, beyond time, throwing a chill, fulsome shadow across Freedom, California . . .
THREE
Russ was watching from the balcony; his dad hurried out, and Pendra was watching from the ground under the balcony, and they all three stared down the hillside at the wall of water, its bigness on an apocalyptic scale, its crest seeming to hang over the highway, and the streets spread out below them—to hanging there like a cobra poised to strike . . . for a single long second.
It took him a moment to fully comprehend. A tsunami . . .
And then the wave came crashing into the town with a growl within a rumble within thunder, all bursting into one master roar.
The ground shook with it; a wind was forced up the hill toward them, smelling of sea and petroleum.
“Oh God, oh no,” Dad muttered. Staring.
Seeing the vast wave slam the town Russ thought of a really big, muscular man standing in front of a miniature model of a village on a table, the man suddenly sweeping his arm into the little buildings, bashing them to flinders with one sideways massive swipe, crushing one little house into the next . . . A giant, smashing the town . . .
Instinctively, he raised the binoculars to his eyes . . .
It was more than Russ could take in. The Pacific Ocean had displaced the town, below the hill: every building along the beachside highway was submerged, or sucked from its foundation like plants torn up by the roots. And the wave—the word seemed inadequate, it was more like the muscular shoulders of the ocean, lifting up—this immense surge from the deeps was changing its color as it scooped up dirt and debris, so the trough behind the wave became the color of an old bruise.
Russ became aware of another sound, through the ongoing roar: a thin, many-sourced warbling. Then he realized he was hearing screams. They were attenuated from here, icicle-thin: hard to hear, yet icily penetrating the malicious bellowing of the mountainous wave.
And the bodies . . .
As the wave splintered and tossed the line of boxy wooden buildings, moving on to the next row of houses, Russ saw bodies—tiny figures at this distance—flipped up as if the wave were throwing them over its shoulder, like a big vicious dog killing its way through trapped rodents. It was impossible to tell if any were still living, or if their apparent flailing was driven by the churning, gray-brown element. They were just more debris mixed in with the shattered timbers, drifting doors, whole sections of wall, furniture, cars upside down, unrecognizable objects rising and subsiding—as the wave moved on, plowing over the next street and the next, redefining shapes as it went, human artifacts liquefying into the chaos of the dirty living sea. The water went from dark brown to black with debris; the odd shapes of broken walls, panels of wood, debris that had lost all identify merged into one grinding irregular mass, bullying its way forward. The tsunami heaved against the hills like a football player trying to tackle a bigger man, the tackler flying asunder in dirty foam. And another great wave, not quite as big but as forceful, followed quickly, picking up new flotsam: a minivan spinning like an overturned turtle, a man trying to climb onto it, slipping back, vanishing in a whirlpool; logs that had been at sea for years were hurled like javelins, crunching into the houses on the hill. Houses collapsed down into the hysterical sea with a squealing and wrenching Russ could hear even at this remove, the shattered faces of buildings disgorging furniture and people. And the wave moved onward, upward . . .