When she got to her feet and clambered out of the garden it was as she thought. Part of the mansion had collapsed, its walls split down the middle. Cars in the parking lot had rolled into one another. A few people were crushed to death between them and more were on their way, dragging their clenched fists along the metal as though that might help. Farther out, it was worse. From the park she could see the entire panorama—downtown’s hotels and office towers, some of which were missing or leaning to one side, and rightward all the way to the ocean, the beach they’d just cleaned of garbage and filth. Columns of smoke appeared all over the skyline. The roar and rush of traffic was gone, and in its absence not only the city’s millions of car alarms and calls for help but all the birds that’d taken flight now returning to their trees, chittering among themselves. She wanted to feel something but she couldn’t decide what. I’m in shock, she told herself, evaluating this trauma, how she herself could’ve died. But wasn’t that what she wanted, all those times she looked to the sky for an asteroid or prayed for God to strike her down? When she dreamt of funnel clouds, when she drove through traffic wanting someone in the oncoming lane to be drunk? This was her opportunity, and she’d squandered it. This could’ve been her way out.
Her chin began to tremble, her lip threatening to curl and give her away. To what or to whom she couldn’t say; who was watching her now? But what she thought was a heartful of sobs came out in laughter. It shook through her, violent as the earth, and seized every last part of her. She was alive, and glad for it. Glad to have made it. Glad to be looking at all this rather than crushed underneath it. Glad she could, after the emergency was over, go back home and tell everyone how it happened—her mother, Shannon, Tim, and whoever else was listening because it was something she would have to tell people, how she had lived. Soon she would climb back down into the city and make her way among the broken streets and the hissing hydrants, passing—because there was nothing to be done—the casualties and the victims and those whose time had come. She was sorry for them but not for herself, not sorry to be alive. She would find Colin, safe in the motel, and this they’d remember. This they’d share.
My family is strong, Alan had written. My wife is strong. She wouldn’t refuse herself another life, another chance at love. They will all flourish without me, and that leaves me unguarded, unwatched, untethered. How long have I owned this gun, and I’m still writing? All these notes, all these facts, all these made-up pieces of life? Who’s to say I won’t invent one more reason to live just a little longer? One more need for myself? One more love, or fear?
But he hadn’t, Alan. He shot himself in the head and it was she who was untethered and free. Even in this ruined, broken city—for what was perhaps the first time, she thought—she was happy to be alive.
So this is what it means to be grateful, she was thinking, when she noticed something wrong out there in the noise and the panic. There was something new, and she looked, everywhere, for an explanation. Even around her, the groans of the wounded and the dying were quieting, one by one. It was as if someone had switched on a small fan, its white noise swallowing them up. Then something in the ocean’s light caught her eye, the sun’s reflection bending in a way it shouldn’t. It could’ve been something unexplained, a sea monster lifting itself spine-first out of the water and so many miles tall it would soon be everything she saw. People were screaming again. Those who could were clambering past her for higher ground. The water went on rising, higher and higher, as the noise grew to a roar louder than the earthquake itself. Its shadow came first, touching the beach and the first rows of houses as if to say, This may hurt a little. “Oh thank God,” she said, when she understood.
Acknowledgments
To those at Graywolf Press: my immense gratitude for giving this novel such an enthusiastic and caring home; and with special thanks to Steve Woodward for his extensive, detailed edits, as well as his difficult questions during the final drafts.
Thanks to Dawn Frederick, who first read this book as a friend and then, later, as my agent, and who made me feel as if it might have a future after all. Thanks to Laura Zats for her careful edits and suggestions, and for forwarding all those encouraging e-mails.
Thanks to Marlon James for his careful eye on the opening pages, as well as encouraging me to pursue whatever ending I wanted.
Thanks to Nona, Martin, Diana, John, Jeffrey, Elias, Timothy, Heather, Sam, Maysa, and other early readers who helped shape this book’s direction.
Thanks to Michael, who told the truth when the sixth draft was boring.
More than anyone, thank you to my parents and my family, without whom I obviously would not have written this book.
I’m so grateful for all of these people in my life, and others. I’m grateful for everyone’s influence, and for the way everything came together, and for that day in the desert.
PATRICK NATHAN’s short fiction and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Boulevard, Real Life, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. This is his first novel. He lives in Minneapolis.
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