Ear to the Ground
Page 14
When the shaking finally ended, the stillness was intense. Not even the whisper of a ghost. From the city below came the screaming of car alarms, a million of them punctuating the horror of the night. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, felt around for my machines. I kept feeling the earth beneath me to make sure it was there. The video camera was still running, although it, too, had fallen, and the lens was dug face first in the dirt. I found the binoculars, turned them in the direction of the darkened city, where I saw the hot spots of newborn fires, and wisps of curling smoke rising to meet the sky. The elevated highway I’d noticed only minutes before had shaken onto its side; I looked at it once, twice, and a third time before I understood what I saw. All over Kobe, buildings were down, some in rubble, others slid akimbo halfway off their foundations. And the people, from this distance, were small as insects, swarming from the ruins into the streets.
I put down the binoculars, and lay out across the grass. It was cold, but my body had gone numb; it didn’t matter anymore. For a moment, the thought flashed across my mind that it had happened as I’d predicted, that I was vindicated, that I was right. But then I remembered that elevated highway, down off its base like a child’s plaything, and I thought less about the people who hadn’t listened to me than those who’d never heard. By now, there were fires big enough to see with the naked eye, and sirens pulsing underneath the car alarms in a sharp and steady refrain. I tried to block the sounds out of my mind, but it was as if the night itself were screaming, and my entire body began to clench. I picked up the binoculars again, but it was too overwhelming. There was no such thing as scientific detachment anymore.
Instead, I found myself doing what my father might have done. I turned away from the earth and looked to the sky.
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