Brydon almost took time to punch his fat face.
The second tier was more difficult. They had to be just as exact and extra careful not to cause the whole thing to collapse. The main problem was what would serve as resistance at each end of the tier, as the perpendicular planks did the base.
Brydon could have used Kemp’s cooperation at this point, but he didn’t ask for it. Instead he decided to chance reducing the weight on the base. He had Elliot Janick step off. Peter and Elliot each took up an eight-foot plank. From opposite ends they lowered their planks onto the top of the first tier. Not perpendicular, but with the grain so to speak, so that the thickness of their planks provided a perpendicular resistance at each end. Brydon guided, measured and made sure they allowed just enough distance, thirteen feet, four inches between the two. He reminded Peter and Elliot that they would have to hold their positions. It seemed they would be able to, by resting the planks on their shoulders while maintaining their grips.
Now Brydon and Spider would construct the second tier upon the first by snugly butting planks and making a pair of supports of equal height in the same triangular manner as before. And topping them horizontally, apex to apex, with an eight-foot plank.
Finally, it was done.
A double-tiered scaffold ten feet high.
Without a single nail.
Not because Brydon wanted to prove anything. They simply had no way of driving nails through the boards firmly enough, and Brydon had decided it was better, at least psychologically, to know there were no nails rather than possibly depend on them too much.
As precarious as the scaffold appeared, Brydon was reasonably confident it would support the weight of a man. As a matter of fact, the more weight put upon it the stronger it would become. That was the structural system Brydon had put to use. Resistance and opposing pressures. If the scaffold collapsed it probably wouldn’t be because of weight upon it but because it was not properly aligned or balanced. Well, they’d done, by eye, the best they could.
The island was six feet high. The scaffold was ten. That left seven from the top of the scaffold to the ceiling. A man could reach it easily.
Dan Mandel told Brydon: “I used to be a gymnast. Really. I was all conference for two years at Oregon State.”
Brydon hadn’t even considered that anyone other than himself should climb up there and try.
“My specialty was the horse and the parallel bars,” Dan said. “I still work out now and then.”
“Mostly then?”
“It’s been a while,” Dan admitted.
Brydon appreciated Dan’s willingness to put himself on the line, told him that, told him: “Thanks anyway.”
“I’ve got better balance than you,” Dan contended.
He went to the next island, to the end of it, got a short running start, performed a couple of front flips and, for good measure, a hand stand. He even walked on his hands a ways. By no means were the flips snappy perfect, and Dan wavered some during the hand stand.
He looked to Brydon for approval.
Brydon decided anyone who wanted to do it that badly had a need to do it. And more to the point — however imperfect, Dan’s demonstration had been impressive.
The idea was for Dan to get up there, use the gardening claw to remove one or more of the acoustical panels and climb up into the space above the ceiling. That accomplished, strips of clothing would be knotted together to make a rope that Dan would secure to a cross beam or whatever, so that other survivors could climb or be hoisted up.
Dan removed his shoes.
Spider squatted.
Dan stood on Spider’s shoulders. Brydon helped Dan’s balance while Spider came up slowly to a standing position. When Brydon let go, Dan was shaky, unsure, but soon he had the feel of it and was steady enough.
Spider moved to the scaffold, taking short steps, lifting his feet as little as possible so as not to jounce. He approached the scaffold from the side, at mid-point, got close up to it.
The top of the second tier was level with Dan’s chin. He gripped the horizontal plank squarely, left and right. What he was about to do was something he’d done often in the gym — but years ago. He tensed his body, gradually took his weight off Spider’s shoulders, pulled himself up by the arms to a vertical stiff-arm position. At once he transferred all his weight to his right hand. That allowed him to swing his left leg up and over, so he was then sitting astraddle the ten-inch-wide top plank.
The scaffold creaked, jammed itself against itself at every joint. It actually became a more solid structure.
Dan kept his concentration.
Brydon, watching him, now knew that he would surely have failed at it. Hell, by comparison Dan was a regular Olga Korbut.
Dan drew his legs up, placed his feet flat on the plank, one before the other, about seven inches apart. With arms out straight on each side for balance, in a single smooth motion he stood up.
It’s going to work, Brydon thought.
Apparent success made Kemp decide it would be better for him if he participated. He added his weight to one of the perpendicular planks at the base.
The ceiling was now within reach for Dan. Brydon was shining the flashlight upward, and Dan saw where the acoustical panels joined, not fitted as well as they appeared from below. Dan got the gardening claw in the seam between two of the panels and dug and pried at various points along the seam. He managed to shred away the edges of the panels a little, but that was all.
“Maybe I can punch a hole through it,” he said.
To punch hard enough and keep balance would be difficult if not impossible, Brydon thought. He told Dan to keep at it with the gardening claw. “You’ll find a loose spot.” Brydon was hoping for something he ordinarily detested: poor workmanship — a limit of two hits allotted to each nail and good luck if that just happened to drive it home.
Dan jangled his arms to revitalize them.
He was reaching to the ceiling again.
At that moment the whole building interfered. Not a sway or a roll or a settling, but a sudden snapping pitch, just one.
The scaffold fell apart.
Dan leaped for the spherical television fixture that was hung from the ceiling off to his left over the aisle.
He would have been better off if he’d taken the fall straight down with the scaffold, but he grabbed hold of the stem of the fixture and, simianlike, swung his feet up, locked them around the stem.
It seemed he hung there a long while, much longer than thirty seconds.
The fixture itself was heavy. Not installed to hold an extra one hundred and sixty-one pounds.
It ripped away from the ceiling.
Nothing anyone could do.
Dan hit the mud still holding on to the heavy black sphere. He and it quickly sank from sight.
21
Since then, for an hour, Brydon had said nothing.
He’d just sat there, unmoved by Gloria’s sympathetic words and touches. No consolation for him that the scaffold attempt had nearly succeeded. And he should have foreseen, taken into account, how a failure would affect the others.
When the scaffold collapsed, so did the hope they had built, the faith in rescue they had used for spiritual support. It was as though invisible fingers had been snapped before their eyes, snapped them out of their wishful reasoning, made them see reality all the way to the evident end.
They had felt special. So many had died in this catastrophe, but they were still alive. It seemed they had been chosen to survive by whatever force determined such things, or, to take the other way of looking at it, that they had been rejected by death. As it turned out, neither was the case. They were merely the ones who would be taunted, tortured with a little additional time.
Should they pray?
Maybe, Brydon thought, they should offer supplications to this goddamned supermarket. Pardon the blasphemy, almighty check-out. He would, for minor atonement, make the sign of the dollar with his thumb on his forehead, a milli
on million times. What tremendous values. Cash registers ringing beneath the mud, and over there was Kemp, wearing his money bags like a holy trapping.
Peter and Amy Javakian were on Island Four, lying side by side.
She said: “The air is getting close, isn’t it?”
He didn’t think so.
“I can’t seem to get a deep breath. Are we running out of air?”
“No,” he assured her, after assessing his own easy breathing. Anyway, it was too soon for the air to be depleted in such a large place, and besides, there was the chance that some was getting in through an opening they couldn’t see.
He sat up.
“Where you going?”
“Just here.” He kneeled above her head. His fingers found she was tense where her shoulders and neck joined. He massaged gently. She felt so delicate to him and yet substantial.
“I feel a tightness.” She indicated the middle of her chest.
“Does it hurt?”
“Not a regular kind of hurt, more like a knot.”
He kneaded the rounds of her shoulders. There was love in his hands.
She told him: “Know what I think it is, the knot?”
“What?”
“All the things I’ve left unsaid trying to get out at the same time.”
He bent over and worshipped her with his most tender kiss.
“Are you forgiving me?” she asked, slightly ironic.
“No.”
“You mean you won’t?”
“Will you forgive me?”
“I can’t blame you anymore.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But I was such a bitch, hassling you all the time.”
“Not all the time.”
“I never told you but when I was working in Sacramento I was awful lonely. That’s the trouble with independence, it’s lonely.”
He remembered how much he’d missed her when she was in Sacramento, and all the other times apart. He also recalled when he last told her that, just the day before yesterday. She hadn’t wanted to hear it, as though it revealed weakness. He wondered about the difference between then and now.
“Don’t let me do all the talking,” she said. “Anyway, at least say you love me.”
He decided to believe in now.
“Please?” she asked.
He said it. It wasn’t difficult. It was true.
While she absorbed his words, the baby in her changed its position. It seemed settled but then it shifted again. Finally it became calm. Restless, Amy thought, but immediately she realized that probably wasn’t what the baby was feeling, that was only what she thought it was feeling. Even though connected to her, symbiotic, it was already having its own experiences.
“What are you thinking?” Peter asked.
“That in a way we never could have gotten completely together anyway.”
He was very aware of the past tense. “Never?”
“Even if we spent every second of fifty years in the same room.”
He understood. “That’s a fact people have to live with.”
“It’s why I got the crazies,” she said. “I was crashing against my aloneness and taking it out on you.”
She had always felt it to some extent, naturally, but only over the past year had she tried to deal with it straight on. She could even remember the night, the moment, it had come forward in her mind, and instead of replacing it as usual with other less serious ruminations, she had opened it, fold after fold, as though it were an interesting package. She was exploring its contents before she realized she maybe should have left well enough … alone.
Aloneness.
What a maddening realization. All her life she had taken for granted that her common experiences were truly common, the same as those of others. Now she wasn’t sure that her senses were not unique. And if they were hers alone, not sharable.…
The most ordinary things became embossed in her observation. Peter eating a peach. Peter painting with blue. Peter going barefoot.
Once at a nighttime outdoor concert, she got to thinking about all the different experiences the thousands of people were having as they listened to the same music. She imagined what a cacophony of responses lay beneath their collective attentiveness. An abstract din. It bothered her. It came between her and enjoyment. She developed a headache and went home.
“What’s the matter, Amy?”
“I’m in an emotional valley.”
A chronic case of aloneness was what she really had, that struck and spread to the nerve roots. Poets and such had died by their own hands from it. Of course she didn’t suffer from it as intensely as that. Enough, though.
It was the reason, actually, why she hadn’t had an abortion. She’d thought perhaps pregnancy might be the one way of overcoming aloneness, at least temporarily. She would be literally connected to another human being. Soon, and too late, she found her body was shared but not her feelings. No, unless she fooled herself, pregnancy wasn’t the way to verify her existence.
Now, on Island Four, there had been silence enough for Peter to ask again what her thoughts were.
“I’m figuring out life,” she said, matter-of-fact. She also managed a smile.
“When you do, let me in on it.”
She hushed him. Her mind was going through a colloquy she’d started and stopped countless times before. Now it seemed more coherent.…
“Do you believe in God?”
“I believe in a creator.”
“Why?”
“Because creativity is organization and nature is intricately organized, so it must have been created.”
She didn’t stop to consider whether or not that was logical.
“And we are part of nature?”
“Part of the arrangement.”
“The creator had a free hand?”
“Certainly.”
“Why, then, did the creator give us such a dilemma? Aloneness.”
Her mind was racing now.
“There must have been a reason.”
“Purpose.”
“The creator could have made us differently, a more compatible design.”
“Stick a finger in another person’s ear to share an experience.”
“Could have.”
“What makes aloneness bearable?”
“Love.”
“Doesn’t cure it but makes it bearable?”
“Love.”
“Perhaps, then, what the creator intended was to motivate us to love.”
“Force us to love.”
“Personal choice.”
“Either love or be miserable.”
It made sense.
Amy reached up, traced two fingertips along Peter’s cheek, beneath his chin. A look of amazement on her face. She led his face down to hers.
“Open your mouth.”
He did.
“Wide.”
Into his mouth she said, “I love you.”
And kept her words in with a kiss.
Across the way, only seven or eight feet away, Judith Ward and Marion Mercer sat facing one another. Connected by their hands. Judith had her hair pulled back severely, contained with a rubber band she’d found in one of her pockets. In the dim light her eyes appeared exaggerated, dark-socketed, and at times Marion thought the whites looked phosphorescent. It was eerie, and she thought perhaps it was Judith’s fear showing or something in her anticipating death.
They had been quiet, had heard everything said by Amy and Peter. They had borrowed those words, emphasized them by squeezing each other’s hands.
Knowing how easy it was to be heard, they whispered.
“What would we have done? Tell me.”
“Gone away.”
“Defied everyone?”
“Been together.”
“Yes. We would have made it somehow.”
“I wonder.”
“I was getting ready to tell Fred.”
“Were you?”
“I’d set a
deadline for myself. Next Wednesday.”
“Why then?”
“Just an arbitrary day.”
“It surely would have been.”
“Anyway. I couldn’t have gone on being deceitful. It was hurting us.”
“I know.”
“Did you ever think that maybe we were using us to escape from other things?”
“Well, I guess that’s something we’ll never have the chance to disprove.”
A silence.
“Judith?”
“Hmm?”
“I was happy until I met you.”
“Oh?”
“Then I was happier.”
“Darling …”
They leaned forward, placed their heads in the dip of each other’s shoulders, Judith giving lover’s kisses to Marion’s neck. Anyone observing would have thought them merely a pair of distraught women exchanging consolations.
Marion whispered: “The things left unsaid, I also feel that.”
“You do?”
“It’s probably natural at a time like this.”
“Actually, I think we communicated more than average.”
“Average meaning normal?”
“Whatever. Even without words we said more.”
“I agree.”
“Because neither of us ever pretended to be a man.”
“Once at Bullocks I came close to buying a boy’s suit, tie and everything.”
“Why?”
“To wear for you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“I decided you would be.”
“One of the things that made us special was our being female, our sameness.”
“Likes attract.”
“Yes, and that was beautiful.”
Past tense. They both became painfully aware of it, soothed it away somewhat with their silence.
Judith said: “A lot of times when I made love to you I felt that you were me.”
“Don’t talk so loud.”
Back to a whisper. “I was both doing and being done. It seemed as though I could feel what you were feeling.”
“I know. It was like that for me when I made love to you. At certain times more than others, but always some. Like being melted, connected.”
“Yes, in every way.”
“Every possible way.”
“Kiss me.”
Judith did, a long kiss on the cheek. And although in its tenderness it conveyed all her affirmations of love, it appeared sisterly.
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