by John Barnes
They end up using a spare basement timber as a battering ram, hoping to make whatever it is tip over. No one seems to be much worried—it isn’t urgent to get out of the shelter at this very moment, and anyway there will no doubt be a party of rescuers along soon enough.
When all the men are set on the little flight of steps up to the door, five of them holding the timber endwise to the door, they start to swing it in their arms, bringing it sharply into the steel door on every third swing: “Uno, dos, tres!” boom! and then there’s the rattle of gravel and other things sliding down the door over the next “uno, dos, tres!”
As the eighth boom! echoes through the cellar, sinking dully into the earthen walls, there is a blinding flash from the door, and the men stagger back, crying out and dropping the timber as they cover their eyes. There is a moment of terrible stillness as everyone wonders what could be out there; the fear of what they will see merges with tens of thousands of images of the nuked cities of the world, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Port au Prince, Cairo, Damascus, Washington, and for one dreadful moment the thought that somehow there has been a nuclear war—
“El sol,” says an old woman next to Naomi, and then everyone, as if not quite understanding yet, says “el sol,” a mass whispering in the dim cellar—and then everyone laughs.
The bright sunlight outside dazzles eyes that have been in the dark for many hours. Looking away from the door to shield their eyes, the men swing the heavy timber again, twelve swings, four impacts—and with the fourth there is a groan and rumble like distant thunder, and something goes scraping and bouncing down the face of the door, and falls with a crash outside.
One of them puts his hands on the door and pushes, and it flies open.
Everyone groans as the brilliant glare pours in, and they cover their eyes, but the warmth and dryness pull them forward, still shielding their faces and looking down at the ground.
Naomi staggers forward with the rest, her forearm across her eyes, watching only the motion of her sneakers at her feet and following the crowd more by her sense of touch than anything else. The first step comes under her feet, and she steps up.
There is such a diversity of noise, after the tomb-silence of the shelter and the ear-battering storm roar, that it is not easy to sort out the sounds ahead of her.
But just as she gets to the top, she realizes people are crying out and it’s not a happy sound. She drops her arm, and sees the wreck in front of her.
It’s a little self-driving car, and if the bodies in the backseat are any indication, probably what happened was that the two children in it were trying to get home and didn’t know that with the access to the guidance grid cut, the car couldn’t steer itself. There’s a safety cutoff—the little localized radar/ultrasound system that lets the car find somewhere where traffic isn’t moving and stop there without running into anything—but sometimes things like that aren’t working anymore, especially if a car is usually driven on manual control, and then again maybe the car did bring the kids to a safe stop and then the wind got it and rolled it.
They weren’t belted in, and from the look of the roof and hood, the car was rolled a lot. It’s all mud and wind-sanded metal now; Naomi can’t see what color it was originally.
The kids look like bent dolls; nothing in the spinning, bouncing car pierced their bodies, but they were slammed around in it like mice in a shaken glass jar, and they are visibly bruised everywhere; clotted blood stains their shirts. Legs and arms are not so much bent as reshaped; the bone must have been broken up so much that the limbs hang as if made of rags.
The faces are not recognizable; first the facial bones were crushed, and then blood flowed freely under the skin, so that both of them seem to be blue-black in color and their faces are at an oddly crushed repose, like rubber masks left lying faceup.
Others around Naomi are crying out as well, and there’s some argument about exactly what to do. A moment later the question is settled; two policemen come over a rubble pile.
People are being asked to go to their own property and secure it, and to “avoid the appearance of looting,” which means to stay put and not look like they are stealing anything. Supposedly the Army will at last be here tomorrow morning; the policía have only shrugs for the question about what might have delayed them so long, and rolls of the eyes when a couple of people press the question. Who, after all, can explain the Army?
Volunteers, or those with nothing to retrieve from their own property, are welcome to go to the Zócalo to join rescue workers.
Naomi has nothing here, so she drifts to the Zócalo naturally, and yet even this is different, because when she gets there, she realizes most of the people there are not volunteering. Rather, they are sitting around, some disoriented, some in despair, but many just sitting, waiting for someone or something to take care of them. She wonders if that ought to bother her. It’s hard to tell the people who can’t help out, or even help themselves, from those who for various reasons just won’t.
She also notices that the Zócalo is now warm and bright with sunlight, and the awesome winds have scoured it bare, so that there are great heaps of rubble in all directions—Tehuantepec does indeed look like one of the great war ruins in pictures—and the palms that once sheltered the little square are gone, shorn off into splinters a bare meter above the dirt, but the ground itself is warm and pleasant, and the thought occurs to her that it might be very nice to stretch out and take a long nap in the sun here.
Well, she hasn’t changed that much; she’s already bored, and greatly relieved, five minutes later, when the volunteer truck swings by again.
She’s put on a rescue crew with a group of other women. The job is to listen at rubble piles, climbing around on them with bowls or pans to place their heads against so that they can listen for anyone moving or crying for help.
The rubble piles are all brand-new, and in the fierce winds they have been sculpted like dunes into high peaks. Without the wind to hold them up any longer, most of them are beginning to slide and slump. Moreover, many of the objects in the piles are less than stable. So there’s a constant crumbling, and things are moving, falling, and bumping in the piles all the time. After they have searched only a couple of piles they realize that right now the search is hopeless unless they hear someone calling or crying, and that therefore the best hope of saving any lives is to cover as many piles as they can as quickly as they can.
It has been more than a dozen piles—Tehuantepec has become a landscape of walls cut off at ground level and row on row of these dunes of rubble—when they hear the sobbing sound. With picks, shovels, and prybars, the women work together, silently, afraid of what they may find—will it be someone hurt too badly to survive the rescue, or even to know a rescue happened? Will they find some pathetic child on top of its mother’s body?
They find a corpse; it’s a man, probably older to judge by the gray hair on what remains of his head; if whatever hit him there is what killed him, he surely didn’t suffer long.
He’s very heavy, and the body is soft and flexible; Naomi thinks she read somewhere that rigor mortis doesn’t last very long, or perhaps being buried in the wet rubble is what did it. There’s not yet much of a smell, but he feels cold and slimy under their hands as they lift him up. It takes four of them—he couldn’t have weighed much less than 250 pounds—and Naomi has him by the knees, which is hard work. They lug him down into one of the wind-ripped passageways between the rubble and put him in one of the body bags that the Tehuantepec police sent out with the digging crews.
“Should we say anything over him?” one of the women asks.
“Leave it for the priests—they will be along soon enough,” another answers, and the party goes back to assist the others, who have been digging steadily.
They are almost there when they hear the wail—a baby’s cry? Did a baby somehow survive under that? It occurs to Naomi that she’s seen all kinds of junk used as bassinets, and if the baby was in a metal footlocker, say, or even
a washtub—
They all run forward, eager to be there when they find a living one.
“Under this piece of iron!” one of the women cries, and now they are all there, carefully moving rubble from the rusted corrugated iron, clearing the weight off so that they can lift it straight up. It seems to take forever to get everything cleared, even as fast as they are working. Finally they all get around it to lift the iron—
With a slow, steady heave, they pull it up and flip it over onto the rubble slope beside them.
A cat runs out, meowing frantically. That’s all. As often happens, its cry was mistaken for that of a baby.
They dig four more times when they hear noises during the rest of the day. Twice they are stymied by objects too heavy for their crew, and are forced to phone for men with treaded tractors, cranes, and power winches; each time as soon as the new crew is there, they take off to look for more. Once the noise turns out to be a pig. Once the pile collapses as they work and the noises stop; they dig frantically but they cannot find the source of the sound.
They find so many more corpses that they have to send back for additional body bags twice. Toward the end of the day as the heat soaks into the rubble, the bodies begin to smell more strongly; Naomi had a roommate once who only pretended to be vegetarian, who accidentally left behind a cooler with a pound of hamburger in it when she moved out, and that’s what the bodies smell like when you first bring them out; contact with the air seems to bring out the strong stench of shit and the iron tang of blood, so that the three smells mingle around her. She suspects the smell is in her hair and clothes, along with her own sweat, and she longs for a bath more than she has ever wanted anything.
When they return to the Zócalo at dusk, they find the Army has already arrived, and there are communal showers in tents and a field kitchen with soup and bread. As far as Naomi is concerned, the only problem with the shower is that you can’t stand under it all night; with all of them scrubbing in there, it’s like the freshman dorm.
As it becomes fully dark, Naomi is sitting with her back to the wall of the cathedral, a military ration plate in front of her. Like many others, she’s been back for seconds and thirds—they may have gotten here late, but they came with plenty. Or perhaps the Army hadn’t realized how many of the people here would be dead.
A man is loudly reading messages off a display screen in Spanish, so that everyone can hear that Clem Two has broken through into the Caribbean and is rampaging around among the islands, spitting off another hurricane every few hours.
She finds herself thinking of Jesse’s brother Di, and wonders if the poor guy is going to get a chance to see his kids this week. Then she thinks about the number of dead kids she’s seen today, and the hundred or so lost kids whose parents are very probably dead who sit huddled together in a large tent on the other side of the Zócalo while a kind-voiced older sergeant goes among them asking the same questions over and over.
She’s embarrassed but she starts crying, right there, and when the older woman beside her puts an arm around her, Naomi just falls right into the embrace and cries until she’s through. She still feels sniffly and miserable when she curls between blankets on the ground.
All that night she dreams of Tehuantepec before, how the streets were dusty but the little houses were kept with such pride, the softness of the voices, the warm browns and reds against the dark sky at night—and in her dreams she wanders an empty town where in front of every house there is a little thicket of white crosses. She wants to call someone’s name, to bring someone alive out of a house, but although she worked here for so many months and knows the town intimately, the only name she can think of is her mother’s.
The dreams fade toward dawn, and at last she gets a few hours of gracious unconsciousness, before the soldiers wake them again to give them a quick desayuno of sweet rolls, fruit drink, and coffee. She refrains from the sausage, but she has never been so tempted by the smell of meat before. It seems like a feast, and after what she ate last night, how can she be so hungry that she finishes it all? Maybe she was right all along about how powerful the life force is… and maybe she had only neglected to realize what it is really interested in.
After breakfast she has two choices—stay and work with the volunteers for another two days, and thus earn herself a spot to ride all the way on the trucks that will be rolling back up to Oaxaca City, or join the refugee parties walking the thirty-five kilometers up the highway to Ixtepec, where there’s a zipline head. They say the zipline will be working later today.
The question, of course, is whether the Army, which she at least knows has trucks, or the government zipline monopoly, which may or may not have a working zipline, is more apt to keep its word. She decides to walk, partly because the Army already let her down and now she wants to give Lineas Rápidas Mejicanas their chance to let her down, and mainly because now that she’s decided to make some room in her life for selfishness, she doesn’t feel like she owes them any more time digging out corpses. Maybe when she gets to Oaxaca she’ll call Father and tell him she’s all right; he probably won’t lecture her about how he doesn’t care about her any more than about anyone else on Earth, that all life is precious to him and she is important but that Earth itself must be more important, the way Mother would.
That decision made, she joins a party and starts the long hike out of town. At the top of the first big hill, there used to be a good view of the town—she used to love the sight of it early in the morning, when her bus would come in at about six A.M., with the warm sun turning the city gold against the deep blue sky. Now she looks back and finds she has a fine view of the ruins.
It’s not scoured to rock the way Hawaii was, at least. That takes a storm surge, and Mexico is lucky enough to be high and rocky, though what happened to the beach and port communities down below on the coast is better not thought about, just now.
The Cathedral stands, and six or seven other buildings—and that’s all. Tehuantepec, otherwise, is a wasteland of shards and fragments strewn over foundations. There will be another town here, she thinks—it’s a natural junction in the natural places to run a road, and the roads are still here—but that town will be Tehuantepec only in name.
It’s already getting hot, but still the dusty road won’t be as bad as mining for bodies was. She runs to catch up with her party.
By noon she’s tired; her group has set a pace that’s too much for her, and she doesn’t want to tell them that, because they don’t like her. The group seems to be made up of university students from Ciudad de Mexico and their hangers-on from Juárez University, and though one might think that students are the truly international people, especially in this age when jumplanes and ziplines have put most parts of the world within budget, and the vast net of data and XV links has tied not just voices but brains themselves together, the reality is that students are also the most politicized and least civilized travelers, not yet having gotten the habit of going along and being accommodating.
Out of the eight in her group, there are four who seem to believe that the yanqui is the cause of the hurricanes, and each wants to explain to her exactly why and how. Before, she’d simply have agreed with them, beginning each of her replies with “Es verdad” and then going on to express her understanding of their feelings, then finally correcting their values and analysis. Now, she doesn’t give a shit.
Also, she’s not formulating what to say next, and thus she’s paying more attention to what they say, where she is, and what’s going on. It may be good in the abstract, but here in the concrete—or on the concrete, she thinks sourly—it’s wearing. They seem to enjoy being angry with her and abusing her. She can’t help but notice that the denunciations of imperialismo are being mixed with a lot of staring at the way her breasts bounce around in her blouse, and where a couple of days before she’d have tried to link all that in an analysis that would show the unity of oppression, now she has a feeling that she’s being hassled just because she’s a woman and
these guys don’t really give a damn about imperialismo. Or indeed much of anything other than priority one (getting back to Oaxaca) and priority two (checking out the tits on the gringa).
And punishing her for simultaneously not being available and being a puta. She’s also thinking that there are plenty of real victims of imperialismo around—she spent a lot of time working with them—but these kids owe their whole position in their society to being mediators between the Eurocentric capitalist power structure and the peasant underclass. If the industrialized world went away tomorrow, these guys wouldn’t matter a fart in a windstorm, to use a Jesse-ism she’s gotten to like.
She’s never noticed before that people are angry in political discussions, that much of the anger is personal, and that it often intentionally hurts feelings. Hers, for example.
The road thus far has been empty and quiet, and despite what the lieutenant at the start point said about roving packs of looters and the danger to anyone, particularly any woman walking by herself, she hasn’t seen anyone in the past few hours, her thighs are getting sore from trying to keep up with these guys, and she’s getting out of breath. Plus there’s still plenty of time to make it to Ixtepec by daylight walking at a pace that is comfortable for her.
Naomi gulps. This is the tough part. She has to do something entirely for herself; nobody else in the party seems to be tiring or to be getting harassed, so she can’t defend anyone except herself. That seems to stick in her throat and she doesn’t say anything for a whole additional kilometer after she makes her decision, but finally she remembers something Jesse told her once—the first time he had an orgasm with a woman, he had to pretend he was being stimulated by his own hand. She tries pretending that she is defending someone else. Like Naomi is another person, a woman being abused by these men….
