Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  It took a few moments for Callie to realize what was missing from the scene: any emergency vehicles or rescue workers. No ambulances or fire trucks, not even a patrol car, and no cordon of yellow tapes and orange cones. This was a tragedy that played out alone in the middle of a destroyed city.

  The damage was so complete—from where Callie stood in the street, she could actually see across the tilted plane of the composition roof—that at first she thought it would be impossible for her to wade in, trying to find and help the survivors, trying to find her daughter. She made several attempts at penetrating the jumble of bricks, broken steel, window frames, and particle board that cascaded across the pavement. Finally, she found a disjunction, a place where two walls had come together, supported each other, and left a gap, like a cave, four feet wide and three feet high.

  Callie got down on her hands and knees, crawled forward into the darkness, and pushed against pieces of wooden paneling and cracked drywall.

  “Raffi!” she called into the still, dead air. “Anybody?”

  Within five or eight feet of progress, the overhead hung lower than her shoulders, and she was reduced to crawling. Almost immediately her hands and elbows encountered a crunchy surface—floor tiles? ceiling tiles?—that was also damp. Soon she was wet with some liquid that, in the utter darkness, she could only hope was the outflow from a broken pipe and not from broken bodies.

  “Hello!” she called again.

  In slow motion, the ground beneath her surged and rolled with another aftershock. The mass of broken building above her shifted, creaked, and groaned. If she stayed, it would fall on her, killing her outright or trapping her for hours or days. She couldn’t help anyone in that condition.

  Callie pushed back out, shoving with her palms and elbows, wriggling with her hips, clawing with the toes of her once beautiful leather pumps, until the feeble daylight started to glow around her shoulders. She worked her way back out onto the street, where she sat staring at the cave she had feared to follow into the core of the building. As she watched, the ground shifted again, and the cave collapsed. She was utterly defeated.

  “Oh, Raffi!” she croaked.

  Callie stood up and trudged back to her apartment. Surprisingly, the power was still on, the faucets worked—a trickle of cold water, brown with sediment—and the cable connection was still delivering television and internet. She cleaned up as best she could, determined that the liquid soaking the front of her blouse and skirt was water, not blood, and changed into jeans and a shirt. Then she scanned the local news for any word about rescues or survivors at the school, but that tragedy was too far down the list to get noticed so soon. The local stations were still digging out themselves. Even the instant resources of the internet had not begun to address the scale of the event. The school’s own website only showed old content: pictures of the buildings on sunny days, the catalog of upcoming events and activities, the list of trustees, and opportunities for parent involvement.

  The world would turn on a dividing point at two o’clock that afternoon, Callie realized—at least as far as San Francisco and Northern California were concerned. The before days would be times of confidence and security, expectation and fulfillment. The after days would be dark and sad, buried in death and rubble.

  Callie was so deep into her mourning that she did not hear the door to the apartment open. She only became aware when a voice shouted, “Mom!”

  She rushed out to the foyer and embraced her darling daughter, who stood there without a scratch and only a few smudges on her leggings and tank top. It was only then she realized Rafaella wasn’t wearing the school-approved dress code of black skirt, white blouse, and maroon sweater.

  Callie held the girl at arm’s length. “What happened to your clothes?”

  “I’m wearing them,” Rafaella said with simple logic.

  “No, I mean your school uniform.”

  “No school today, Mom.”

  “Sure there was.”

  “Well … a couple of friends and I, Amy and Tasha—you know them—decided to, well … we ditched. We went over to Stonestown for the day, and before we knew it, there was this big earthquake and the buses weren’t working, and then it took forever to get through to Tasha’s mom, and she had to come pick us up—”

  “What have I told you about ditching school?”

  “I know, but it was Amy’s birthday and—”

  Callie suddenly understood that this act of minor disobedience had probably saved Rafaella’s life. “From now on,” she said with authority, “you ditch whenever you get the notion, whenever it feels right. You hear me?”

  Her daughter frowned in puzzlement. “Uh … sure, Mom.”

  * * *

  Sitting in the kitchen of their apartment in Oklahoma City, while her sister Helen programmed the food printer for the night’s dinner, Antigone Wells saw the first of the newsfeeds breaking on her tablet to report the earthquake in San Francisco. They were already referring to it as the “Great Bay Quake,” all in capitals, and declaring this was the day of devastation that had been long overdue.

  The first approximations from the F.R. Geological Survey put the magnitude of the initial shock at 7.1, with aftershocks already coming in at 6.5 and 5.4. The epicenter was in the East Bay Hills, just in back of the Berkeley campus on the Hayward Fault. Those were the facts that distant scientists using geological monitoring equipment could establish within minutes. Less clear was the extent of damage and loss of life, because the people in a position to report authoritatively were also at ground zero or its environs and had already acquired victim status for themselves.

  “Helen?” she called out, flipping the screen for the other woman to see.

  Her sister’s eyes flicked across the banners. “Oh … Good … Lord!”

  Wells had a strong urge to contact someone—John, Callie, one of the children, anyone at the engineering firm—to find out how they were doing. But in between the news updates, the media were warning anyone outside the area to refrain from calling or texting, as all communication systems—other than rare and expensive satellite phones—were damaged and strained beyond capacity, and the call would only create more confusion.

  And what would she want to communicate anyway? “Hi! How are you? I hope you’re alive.” That would be her own selfish desire for knowledge, when she had already removed herself from their lives, effectively making herself dead to those people. Better to wait and see …

  “Looks like you got away just in time,” Helen said at last. “Maybe that—accident—with your face—was a really blessing in disguise.”

  Wells stared at her. “Shut uxh!” she said.

  Part 5 – 2058:

  Digging In and Digging Out

  1. Celebrations

  The party to celebrate her father John’s 105th birthday was held at Fort Point in San Francisco. The three-tiered, brick-and-granite fortification had guarded the Golden Gate since the Civil War—the First Civil War, Callie Praxis reminded herself—when black-powder cannon stood ready to defend San Francisco Bay against invasion by sailing ships back in the 1860s. And then the same fort had crouched beneath the trusswork arches supporting the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge since that structure was erected ninety-odd years later.

  The fort’s ancient and unsupported masonry by now had withstood two massive earthquakes. The first had been the great San Francisco Earthquake at the turn of the twentieth century. The second was the Great Bay Quake, centered in Berkeley, just a quarter-century ago. In fact, in the prolonged shaking of that second quake, aside from a few new cracks in the south wall and the sally port tunnel, the fort had fared better than the bridge that soared above it. That was a tribute, Callie knew, to laying slabs of granite atop concrete footings secured to bedrock. By comparison, the bridge’s roadway had swayed so much during the quake across the Bay that the deck had buckled and needed to be rebuilt. And that was one more of the many quake-related jobs completed by Praxis Engineering & Construction—an
d another link to this evening’s event.

  Callie had been the driver behind this birthday party. She had planned it as a place to bring together, not just family and friends, but also PE&C’s past clients and business associates. It was a reminder that her firm had virtually rebuilt the Bay Area and much of Northern California after the quake. Now a thousand people swarmed though the brick-arched gun emplacements, mingled across the granite parade ground, and danced on the concrete roof tier.

  Two live, human bands played into the night. One was doing Classic Rock from her father’s era—Beatles, Stones, Zeppelins, Deadheads—with loudspeakers and amplifiers down among the tortured acoustics at ground level. The other was up among the barbette emplacements of the roof, sending a synthesized wail of current favorites in Jazzeola and Voix Reggae—Sneech, A Mon Ton Ton, Caterwaul, and Bombe—off into the evening fog that blew in from the ocean and on toward the city. Between these two poles of the party, human waiters and waitresses, recruited from three of the city’s most fashionable restaurants, passed among the guests with trays full of drinks and nibbles.

  From down on the parade ground inside the fort, strolling among the important people on her guest list, Callie could look up to where the party’s colored lights shone on the moving underside of the fog. Even at seventy-two years of age, she longed to be up there dancing with the young people—dancing with abandon, dancing to keep warm, dancing to life—rather than down here with the squawks, thumps, and awkward lyrics of music that had been popular a generation before hers and was just noise in the ears of everyone she knew. She could understand, intellectually, how important the music of the 1960s had been to America, even though three of the groups being covered had actually been British, but you still couldn’t dance to it. And in late April the nights out here at the edge of the water were still—damned—cold.

  No one was too old to dance anymore, although her father claimed he never did learn how. In the last ten years, Callie had received her first new heart, a newly grown esophagus and stomach to replace organs ravaged by spicy foods and nervous tension, bone-and-cartilage grafts supporting her knees, hips, and shoulders, and a flawless new face. She looked young, and she felt young. Although she was now beyond the traditional “three score and ten” mark, she knew that—judging by how gracefully her father was aging—she would keep going for a long time thanks to good genes, stem cells, and daily exercise.

  “Senator Gutierrez?” she said, coming up behind a woman in a sheath of iridescent spider silk. “Do you want a wrap? Or to move inside? I think we can find someplace warm for you in the museum.”

  The politician turned with a smile. “Callie!” They exchanged air kisses. “What? Do you see me shivering?”

  “That’s a lovely gown, Sandra, but I’m sorry the evening couldn’t be more accommodating.”

  “Never you mind, dear. This dress has a built-in heater circuit. I’m sweltering, actually.”

  Callie congratulated her on such foresight and moved on.

  She briefly joined a group of city council members and staffers around the mayor, Don T’ang. They were standing in a gun emplacement out of the wind and noise.

  “Great party, Callie,” the mayor said. “How did you persuade the National Park Service to let you use the fort?”

  She smiled demurely. “I offered to mow their lawn,” she replied.

  T’ang frowned. “That strip out there, along the seawall? It can’t be more than, oh, ten feet wide, hundred feet long. Did they really—?”

  Callie laughed. “Only in a manner of speaking, sir. We agreed to send one of our crews from the Stanislaus into the back country above Yosemite. We’re helping them with a drainage problem.”

  “Ah!” The mayor and the people around him nodded.

  She acknowledged their appreciation and moved on.

  It might be fun to be young, she thought, although her own youth had been too preoccupied with schoolwork, studying, getting good grades, and then clawing her way up through the engineering hierarchy. Even though she had been a daughter of the founding family, back in that first Praxis engineering company—the one her brothers had crashed and burned—she still had needed to prove herself. Those had been the days when a woman who did not excel at her job got no respect at all. But youth, as she remembered it, was still a time of perpetual uncertainty and awkwardness. The young spent too much effort trying to guess what others might know that they did not. They lived on a knife’s edge of doubt and fear.

  No, these days it was better to be old—or rather, mature, established, at the top of her game—but without the aches and pains of a failing body and the approaching doom of retirement, that enforced lull dedicated to casual incompetence before the end of a natural lifespan. These days, Callie had more to work to do than anyone half her age: more knowledge and skills, more contacts, more resources, more history to give her points of comparison and perspective. She also had more to fight for, as well as a better appreciation of the odds. And if she did things right, she would have more allies in the fight, while her enemies would have given up, found someone new to torment—or simply died off.

  Life was better at the top of the heap. And Callie Praxis could look forward calmly to holding that position for the next hundred years.

  * * *

  John Praxis didn’t have a place of honor at his birthday party—nothing like a throne, head table, or presence chamber. He took pleasure in wandering around, meeting and greeting people, and absorbing the ambience, just like any other partygoer. Early on, Callie had suggested he might move into the old fort’s museum if he got chilled.

  “Nonsense! I’m as hardy as anyone here,” he had replied.

  “Just a suggestion, Dad. It can get cold with all this stonework.”

  Praxis was conscious of being the oldest person at the party. That meant he was probably the only one there who had actually heard The Beatles, all four of them, in a live performance, or at least on vinyl. Come to think of it, he was probably the only person who had actually heard any of the songs recorded on LP disks. He had stopped by the band—the one playing the old songs—and they were all youngsters. The drummer, probably the oldest member, was about forty.

  “You played that drum solo wonderfully,” Praxis told him at the break.

  “Thanks, man!” the man said, wiping his face. “Whew! Yeah! What a blast!”

  “You know, ‘Soul Sacrifice’ went five minutes when he played it at Woodstock.”

  “And who was that, you say?”

  “Uh, Carlos Santana?”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  That was pretty much the routine here. Everyone seemed to be half his age. He knew from the replies to Callie’s guest list that they had most of the local government in attendance: the San Francisco and Oakland mayors, three state senators and four assemblymen, both national senators, five California congressmen and -women, and the California and Oregon governors. The oldest among them all was one of the senators, and he wasn’t even seventy—the age when Praxis was still working on his first heart implant.

  “Hello, Governor, glad you could come.”

  “Great party, John. Happy birthday!”

  As he got older and older, Praxis had noticed the years rushing by faster and faster. He would no sooner celebrate the start of another year in January and suddenly everyone was celebrating Easter or Memorial Day or Reunification Day.

  As a child, he could remember an hour seeming like an intolerably long time, especially when he was stuck in a boring class or waiting for something, like a doctor’s appointment. Time probably went by faster when he was having fun, but he could still recall afternoons of riding around on his bike or playing baseball that were satisfyingly long and indulgent. By the end of the day, morning and his breakfast had seemed like a long time ago.

  The school year lasted forever back then. As they got toward June, the two-week break over the Christmas holidays was just a distant memory. Yet summer vacation was straight ahead: three whole months of pl
ay in the sunshine, and it would last forever, too. But then, by the end of August, with the prospect of school looming again, that day of blessed release back in June was also in the distant past.

  Now the hours were simply flying by him. Praxis could barely start a project and the morning was half gone. The day filled up with things to do: work at the office, the inevitable interruptions, and then socializing with clients over lunch. The rest of the day was taken up with maintenance activities like eating, grooming, and personal errands.

  “Senator Gutierrez! My, you look great in that dress!”

  “Thank you, John. I wore it especially for you.”

  The seasons appeared and disappeared, not quite like flickering lights in the windows of a passing train, but nearly so. One minute, he would look up to discover it was spring and the days were getting longer. Then without warning it was summer, and the Bay would fill up with fog. And before he could look around, it was September already. And the seasons were just standing in for the years, which went by so fast he would lose track sometimes. Did the company complete that project last year, or the year before? Was it really five years ago that he went on that trip? Nine years since he moved into the new apartment?

  Some of this was simply an effect of being a busy adult with more responsibilities and demands on his time than any child in grade school or young adult in college. But not all of it. Praxis believed, privately, that his experience of time’s collapsing—

  A flash of light momentarily blinded him.

  A voice from behind it said, “Hey, Dad!”

  “Hello, Alexander,” Praxis said, peering.

  “Happy birthday!” And the boy was gone.

  Boy? No, his son with Antigone was now in his mid-twenties—twenty-six?—and he had just completed a master of fine arts degree at Berkeley. Alexander’s specialty was photography and photographic effects. He had become the family’s pictorial historian—when he wasn’t cropping and pixelizing abstract art out of people’s faces. It seemed like only yesterday that Alexander was a child. The years rushing by …