Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Antigone doesn’t see it that way,” Callie went on. “Most women wouldn’t. We have to spend so much time on our looks, on our makeup, clothes, exercise, and diet, that we sometimes—most of the time, maybe—perhaps too often—think of our physical selves as the whole package. A woman’s face and body are her persona, her projection. She’s proud of them. Antigone is an extremely proud woman. And now she’s a freak.”

  “We’ve got to call her back,” he said, “and convince her otherwise.”

  “Dad! Let her go. At least for the time being. Antigone is ashamed of what’s happened. You would shame her further if you tried to make light of it.”

  “But she can’t just go out in the cold like this.”

  “Antigone has resources. She’ll survive. And besides, as we left the doctor’s office, she muttered something about the nerves growing back—how the doctor said it might happen, but she didn’t believe it. So maybe she will heal in time, and then she’ll probably want to return. But for now, let her do what she needs to do.”

  “I can’t …” Praxis realized that with those words he was putting his needs first, which was not what a man was supposed to do. But then another thought occurred to him. “What about Alexander?”

  “We’ll work something out with the nanny,” his daughter said. “Something more structured. Full-time care for Alexander.”

  “But what about when he asks for his mother?”

  “I don’t know, Dad. One day at a time.”

  “We’ll bank her salary in her name.”

  “I doubt she’s worried about that.”

  “Well, no definite decisions—”

  “Not until we hear,” she said.

  “And keep a place for her.”

  “Sure. That’s the spirit.”

  * * *

  Dr. Alfredo Giusto had six people in intensive care with what looked like a new and virulent strain of influenza. The worst cases were Matteo di Rienzi and his son Carlo. The younger man, in the bed next to which the doctor stood, was gravely ill, almost unconscious, and complaining of searing pain throughout his body. Across the aisle, the older man lay near death, pale, barely breathing. Matteo was still writhing feebly under the sheet where just hours before he had been thrashing, bellowing, and had required restraints.

  But four others in another section of the ward were also gravely ill: the former mayor of Torino and his wife, as well as the city’s leading banker and his wife. As Dr. Giusto understood it, all of them had attended a party at the former shipping magnate’s villa across the river. Perhaps—no, likely—they were exposed to the disease there. Perhaps one of them was even the carrier.

  Carlo raised his head. “Help me, Doctor, please,” he said softly.

  “With an influenza like this, it is very difficult,” Dr. Giusto apologized. “You have a virus, you see, for which we have no antibiotics and few effective medications. We can treat symptoms only, not the underlying disease. So we can only watch and wait. Now if you had a bacterial infection—”

  “You must help me,” Carlo whispered again.

  Dr. Giusto had heard about this father and son before, of course. He had been hearing their names for twenty years and more—and not always in a good context, either. Sometimes they were connected with small crimes, corruption, and random acts of violence, sometimes with great swindles. And sometimes the newspaper editors connected them with the lawlessness that infected the southern parts of his country.

  It occurred to the doctor that six people attending a party and all coming down with the same illness was problematic. It had been a large party, he knew, an annual affair for the di Rienzis. But then, with such a virulent strain set loose in such a large crowd, one would expect to see more cases than this. Where were the others? Surely dozens of people should have reported to this hospital and the nearby clinics. But he had heard and seen nothing.

  Dr. Giusto tapped his index finger against the point of his chin.

  It might also be a poisoning of some kind. But even then, with something getting into the food or drinks, or filtering into the water, more people should have been affected. This narrowness of scope—the sickness being limited to such a few, and those being the host and the most important guests—was very disturbing. With such a mystery, it would be appropriate to take more blood samples, to run a wider array of tests, beyond his previous bacterial and viral cultures. The pathologists should test for some of the more lethal inorganic chemicals as well.

  He moved to the bed of the elder di Rienzi. The old man had stopped writhing. His eyes were open, his stare fixed on the ceiling—toward the heaven he had obviously hoped to enter. The doctor felt for a pulse and found nothing.

  Dr. Giusto went back to Carlo’s bedside. “Your father has died,” he said sadly.

  “Papa?” the young man whispered. He, too, was obviously near the very end.

  The four others were more lively. Dr. Giusto would order the tests for them.

  “Doctor, help me!” Carlo said with sudden strength. “And I will give you—”

  “Tranquillo,” he said. “Save your energy. The virus will take its course.”

  And if not a virus, then a death that had been coming for twenty years.

  * * *

  Dr. Gillian Barnes, senior geologist with the F.R. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, studied the webwall view that collected seismological data from around the West Coast.

  Normally, the network recorded a couple of hundred small quakes every day up and down the state’s fault lines. By “small,” she meant magnitudes of 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 with the occasional 4.0. Little shakers and temblors that most people might not even feel. For comparison, at 6.7, the force of the North Ridge quake, down in the Los Angeles basin in the mid-nineties, had been more than a thousand times stronger than any magnitude 4.0. And at 7.1, the Loma Prieta up in the Bay Area a few years earlier was approximately ten thousand times stronger. But magnitude wasn’t everything, Barnes knew. For an effect on people’s lives, ground composition and quake duration counted for a lot more.

  She zoomed in now on the Bay Area and called up an overlay of the global positioning sensors that the Geological Survey had scattered around the state. These tracked ground displacements in real time and offered snapshots and slices that she could dice six ways from Sunday. And the GPS data showed the same thing as the seismology. Or rather, didn’t show it.

  Over the past two weeks, ground movements and tremors in the rest of the state had been down by about a third. Even the increasingly active Parkfield section of the San Andreas Fault had gone relatively quiet. But the fault lines in around the Bay Area—the northern part of the San Andreas Fault, which split the San Francisco Peninsula; the San Gregorio Fault to the west of that, running up through Monterey Bay; the Hayward and Calaveras faults in the East Bay; the Concord-Green Valley, Mount Diablo, and Greenville faults further to the east; and Rogers Creek up in the North Bay—every one of them had gone suspiciously quiet.

  By all popular accounts, and by the Geological Survey’s own estimates, the Bay Area was overdue for a major earthquake. The last really big one, 1906 in San Francisco, at magnitude 7.8, had been a real bell-ringer. Of course, the devastation of that one had been helped along by a city built of solid masonry construction and still heating, cooking, and lighting mostly with coal and gas. The 1868 quake in Hayward, at 6.8 to 7.0, had been notable as well—just that, with fewer people around and less construction on the ground at the time, it didn’t do as much damage.

  As the pressure built up along those Bay Area fault lines, leading to a major release, one would expect more small quakes in the area. But over the last couple of weeks the opposite seemed to be happening. The usual random sampling of little shakes and quakes had all but died out. The ground surface hadn’t moved in all that time. The Bay Area seemed to have frozen solid. Curiouser and curiouser.

  Most people would cheer at that. “Ding-dong, the Great Bay Quake is dead!” “No more teachers, no more
books, no more Great Quake’s evil looks!” Hooray!

  But Gillian Barnes believed in trends and cycles. They reflected normality. Lots of little quakes were the reality, moving up and down the fault lines, collecting their energies in calculable cycles, keeping all that energy flowing. The planet was a living thing. Constant movement was the norm.

  And when it stopped, or slowed so drastically without warning—what then?

  Barnes didn’t have any predictions and no way to test them. All she could do was collect her data, watch and make notes, wonder … and pray.

  6. Temblor!

  When John Praxis returned to the office from lunch, he briefly took note of the unseasonable weather. For a late October day—normally a time of rising wind, high clouds, and eventual rivers of fog pouring between the buildings in late afternoon—the air was still and the heat oppressive, as if the city was holding its breath. The phrase “earthquake weather” passed through his mind, as it did for many Bay Area residents at such times. But then he remembered that it was all superstition, going back to the Greek notion that earthquakes were caused by the god Poseidon trapping the winds in underground caves. How many hot, still days had to pass with nothing more than the leaves falling straight down for people to give up that old myth?

  He settled into his desk chair, brought up his calendar, and began the afternoon’s work. It was mainly reading: reports and summaries from Praxis Engineering & Construction’s department heads and contracts forwarded with questions from the Legal Department—which had grown strangely timid now that Antigone was no longer on hand to decide on their judgment calls. He also had phone messages and emails left over from the morning that needed to be returned.

  At 1:59 p.m. precisely, because he happened to have his eyes on the readout at the bottom edge of his computer screen, the desk started to slide to the left while his chair, a solid piece of high-backed design, slid smoothly to the right, its castors rolling on the broad plastic carpet pad. At first, he had the sensation of being on a ship that was taking a cross sea: no warning sound, no sudden thuds or jars, just the liquid, sideways motion, like furniture passing in the night.

  Then he heard a growling, a deep rumbling, like a train passing right under the structure a hundred feet down. But the nearest subway—a Muni extension into Chinatown—was more than three blocks to the west, and he had never heard it make a sound. This noise was loud, as if the trains were colliding in a grinding crash that went on and on.

  Praxis gripped the edge of the desk, trying to steady it. He knew he was experiencing an earthquake—anyone who had lived for as long as he had in San Francisco knew the feeling of a minor temblor—and only then did the motion change. The desk was still going left and his chair going right, but both began juttering, shaking up and down—and not in synch, but with the desk rising while the chair fell—with a vertical motion of four to six inches. He let go of the desk, grabbed the chair’s arms, tucked his feet back into the legs of the pedestal base, and held on. He felt like he was riding a roller coaster as it went off the rails.

  The desk continued traveling west, toward the wall, banged into it, and flipped over backwards, flinging his computer, desk set, telephone, and pictures of Antigone and his children out into the empty space of the office. The tumbling items were met by a spray of glass coming inward as the windows shattered.

  Praxis dipped his head and squeezed his eyes shut against flying glass. A terrific wallop caught the side of his chair, smacking his elbow and crushing two fingers of his right hand against the armrest, as he slid into the office door while it was swinging itself closed. He withdrew his injured arm and cradled it against his body. At the same time, he put out his legs to stabilize the chair, so that it would not dump him forward into all that broken glass.

  Elsewhere in the office, all the phones were ringing at once, a furious high-pitched burr, louder than the sound of the windows breaking. He guessed that somehow the communications network was getting an overload from broken and crossed wiring in the building.

  The protocol drilled into every Bay Area child was to get into a doorway or crawl under a desk. Both options were ruled out for John Praxis at the moment as he spun around the room. If the ceiling panels and the light fixtures came down on his head, he would just have to endure the pain. The Sansome Street office building where PE&C still maintained its headquarters was old and built of faded yellow brick, but like most of the city it had been reinforced to code. Heavy steel beams held the exterior walls together, and torsion rods crossed inside the walls to lace one floor into the next and then everything into the foundation. He guessed the structure would stand up to a lot of shaking and not fall in on itself.

  As a construction expert, however, Praxis knew that safety depended on the ground as much as on the building. He regretted at that moment not knowing whether this part of Sansome Street, where he had apparently staked his life, lay on top of the bedrock that supported Telegraph Hill to the north, or on the rich, dark mud of the original Yerba Buena Cove to the south, which had been filled in during the Gold Rush of the 1850s. From the fact that the earthquake had not gone through his building as a single shock—bang!—but was instead shaking him and his office like a jelly roll, sending him around in slow circles, he suspected the latter.

  He no longer had his computer monitor to read the time. His watch suggested the quake had gone on for more than a minute, perhaps two. Every structural design and every reinforcement job, he knew, made calculated bets about the stresses likely to be encountered: so much energy expended over so much time. Exceed those limits, trump the bet, and any design would eventually fail and collapse.

  John Praxis could only hold onto his chair, try to stay upright, and hope the shaking would end before that happened.

  * * *

  Brandon Praxis’s first notion that the Great Bay Quake had finally come began with the roadway of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge. He was driving west, toward the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island, when the pavement started to slide under his wheels. He was looking up at the time, toward the widely curved loop of the main suspension cable and the harplike strings of the supporting cables that attached the roadway to the great white cable above. Those strings were vibrating as if the fingers of some huge god were playing a ghostly arpeggio. He listened for the sound of it, but all he could hear was the clanging of metal, crashing of plastic, and honking of horns as the vehicles around him wandered into and out of each other’s lanes.

  He kept his head, kept his lane—except where he had to slalom around cars that had stopped in panic—and drove forward to get off the bridge before it shook itself apart. From the magnitude and duration of the shaking—with his car still bouncing around like a Volkswagen Bug with a pair of teenagers going at it in the back seat—he suspected a long tumble into the Bay waters—or onto the rocky shelf of the island—was not far away.

  As Brandon drove, he had one heart-stopping moment, a moment suspended in time, when he realized that, among all the other near-misses he had experienced, this could well be the day he died. And his one regret, burning like tears that started behind his eyes, was that he would not get to live out a long and happy life with Penny Winston. He would miss all the opportunities to adore her, raise hell with her, fight with her, and raise children with her. So close and yet so far … He blinked away the beginning of those tears and drove on madly.

  Brandon finally took the left exit off the bridge and followed the island’s access road, up around the shoulder of the hill. Ahead of him were other sensible drivers who chose not to go straight through the tunnel and out onto the swaying western span. He pushed forward as far as he could, until the sludge of escaped traffic ground to a halt.

  From where he was stopped, in the middle of the two-lane road, he looked out from a height of perhaps two hundred feet, over the bridge span, across the water, toward downtown San Francisco and the North Beach District—except he couldn’t see much beyond the waterfront. He could see the old piers that e
xtended into the Bay—two of them having collapsed onto their pilings—and the vague outlines of the first rank of high-rises behind them, but the rest of the city was shrouded in mist or haze or fog … or dust. Whether any of the city beyond the Embarcadero was still standing or not, Brandon couldn’t be sure.

  * * *

  After she made sure that everyone in the office was alive and—aside from cuts and bruises, bleeding scalps, bashed fingers, elbows, and knees—unhurt, Callie Praxis left to go to her apartment building in the Western Addition. What would normally have been a twenty-minute cab ride, a half-hour drive, or forty minutes on BART and the Muni, was a four-hour walk, over rubble, in heels. On that trip she endured two more aftershocks, not quite as strong or as long as the first quake, but enough to knock her off her feet and into the street.

  At intervals of ten minutes or so she tried to call the elite De Grew School on California Street, where Rafaella would have been in class at the time of the quake. All she got was line noise or recorded voices telling her to “Please try again later,” because all the phone circuits were jammed—or else they were shut down where the cell towers had toppled and collapsed.

  When she reached her apartment—which was still standing, although the exterior stucco had cracked out in spider-web patterns—Rafaella was not there. Callie knew the girl should have been released from school by then, and the teachers all knew she lived close enough that they probably wouldn’t have tried evacuating her to a shelter someplace else.

  Without staying to check on the apartment, or to dress the cuts on her knees and change her shoes, Callie left to walk three streets over to the school. Even before she came in sight, she had a sinking feeling from the amount of dust and smoke still billowing out from the center of the block on California. As she approached, she saw where a pile of bricks and broken glass had cascaded into the street. The De Grew was in a new building, well constructed and built to code, on solid ground, and yet it had come apart like something made out of Lego blocks, testifying to the power of the earthquake.