“I did the best I could,” the older man said, which also might mean anything. He went on, “Hope I land the job. I’m gettin’ awful sick of pork and beans, know what I mean?”
“Oh, man, do I ever!” Bryce said. “Not much out there these days.”
“Not much? There’s fuckin’ nothin’,” the other guy said. “Good luck to you, Jack-but not too much, no offense.”
“Yeah, well, back atcha,” Bryce replied. They swapped wry grins.
It was raining when Bryce went to his car. The only rain L.A. was supposed to get in later summer was the occasional thundershower when the monsoon slopped over the mountains from the desert to the east. This wasn’t like that. It was chilly. Clouds blanketed the sky. It felt like December or February.
He turned on his wipers and his lights. He made sure he remembered to turn the lights off again when he got back to his apartment building. Calling AAA to come out and give you a jump was a pain in the ass.
Waiting in his mailbox were a couple of bills and a letter from a no-account university in Florida. It was a form rejection. He didn’t even remember applying for a job there, but that proved nothing much. He’d sent out a hell of a lot of resumes, all right.
He carried the depressing snailmail up to his place. If he wanted to apply to some school in Minnesota or the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, he might have a decent chance of landing something. But he wouldn’t have wanted to live in Minnesota or Michigan even before the supervolcano went boom. These days. . Los Angeles was getting what would have been unseasonable rain. Minnesota and Michigan were getting what would have been out-of-season snow, though not all of what they’d got this past winter had ever melted. If you were into sled dogs, they weren’t bad places to go. Otherwise? He shook his head. Next to those places, even moving back in with his mom looked, well, not so bad.
When he called Susan, he got her voice mail. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Classes at UCLA had already started. That didn’t matter so much to him, not any more, but it did to her. She was finishing her diss on the eleventh-century Holy Roman Empire. And she had a TAship, so she was probably ramming The Epic of Gilgamesh down the undergrads’ throats right this minute.
At the tone, he said, “Well, I took the DWP test. I guess I did okay. Call when you get a chance. Love you. ’Bye.”
As he stuck the phone back in his pocket, he shook his head again, this time in slow wonder. Had they really been going together for three years? Longer than that now. He’d had a few random dates after Vanessa dumped him, but nothing that was going anywhere-till he met Susan Ruppelt. They’d just clicked.
One of these days, he’d ask her to marry him. He had no doubt she’d say yes. But he wanted to be able to support her before he did. Fathers-in-law with jobs-hers was a mechanical engineer-tended to look down their noses at unemployed sons-in-law.
She called back about four that afternoon. “Hi, hon,” she said. “So it went all right?”
“It didn’t seem that hard. Not as bad as the SAT,” Bryce answered.
“How many other people were taking it?” she asked.
“Bunches. Fifty, maybe seventy-five. It was in this big lunchroom thing.” Bryce sighed. Every job that got advertised drew swarms of people. He did his best to stay hopefuclass="underline" “They’ve got to pick somebody. Maybe it’ll be me.”
“I hope it is.” Susan paused. “I guess I hope it is. I mean, you worked so hard, doing what you wanted to do. Seems a shame if you don’t get to use it.”
“Welcome to the real world,” Bryce said. “That’s pretty much what my chairperson told me when I turned in the thesis. Hey, it was fun while it lasted.”
“Yeah.” Every day brought Susan closer to banging her head against the same wall. She tried to look on the bright side: “Like you said, somebody’s going to get that job. You know how things are at the universities. When somebody retires or dies, half the time they just close the damn position. More than half.”
“Tell me about it!” Bryce said bitterly. How many times had some classics department’s chair or, more often, boss secretary signed a letter saying their slot wouldn’t be filled after all? More than he cared to remember-he knew that.
“Well. . Something good will happen. People got through the Great Depression. We’ll get through this.” Susan had a sunny temperament. She sometimes needed it, too, to put up with Bryce’s spells of gloom.
“We didn’t have the whole planet screwing us to the wall then, though,” he said now. “It was just bank failures and stuff.”
“They wouldn’t have called it just,” she said.
“That’s ’cause they hadn’t seen this,” he returned. But she kept trying to cheer him up, and he let her think she had. Making her worry less about him actually did make him feel-some-better. It was convoluted, but it was there.
Two days later, he got an e-mail from the DWP asking if he could come back for an interview and more testing on the following Monday. He wrote back that he could. He’d made them think twice about him, anyhow. He’d already sent his confirmation before he wondered how much he honest to God wanted a real-world job.
More than he wanted to live with his mother ever again. That pretty much settled that.
“Yes, this was a large eruption, even by supervolcano standards-nearly six hundred cubic miles,” Kelly Ferguson told her class at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “This was just about the size of the first Yellowstone eruption, more than two million years ago, and almost as big as the Mount Toba blast in Indonesia seventy-five thousand years ago.” She paused. “Anybody remember how many times the Yellowstone supervolcano blew between that first big boom and this last one?”
Anybody remember? was a prof’s shorthand for How many of you did your reading? A couple of tentative hands went up. Kelly pointed at one of them. The owner of the hand, a big, broad brown guy she guessed was a Samoan, said, “Uh, two?”
He didn’t sound very sure, but he was right. She beamed at him. “Good!” she said.
He looked relieved. If she remembered how he’d done on the last quiz, he had reason to look that way. The State University was California’s second tier, behind the University of California. Students here came in two kinds: the ones who couldn’t get into the UC system, and the ones who couldn’t afford it. Some of the latter bunch were as good as anybody who did get into the University of California. The others. . mostly weren’t. Kelly’d done enough TAing to know the kind of work UC students did. Too many of these kids couldn’t come close to that standard.
Well, you did what you could with what you had. She went on, “Both those other eruptions were still enormous. Even the smaller one ejected about sixty-four cubic miles of rock and dust and ash. That’s four times the size of the blast from Mount Tambora, back two hundred years ago, and Mount Tambora’s the volcano that gave the United States and Europe what they called the Year Without a Summer.” She glared out at them. “And anybody who mixes up Mount Tambora and Mount Toba is in big trouble, you hear? Mount Tambora is still there. One of these days, it’ll go off again. What used to be Mount Toba is Lake Toba now-the volcano blew itself to hell and gone. One of these days, it’ll go off again, too, but I pretty much promise we won’t have to worry about it. We’ve got enough other things to worry about.”
The kids laughed nervously, for all the world as if she were kidding. They scribbled notes. Some of them just recorded what she said, so they could listen to it again before the test. She’d always thought putting the material into her own words helped make it hers. She still did, but she’d come to see not everybody worked the same way. Recording sure was easier than taking notes.
“Okay,” she said. “The smallest Yellowstone eruption was four times the size of the one from Mount Tambora-and Mount Tambora was pretty big for an ordinary volcano. How much bigger than that ‘little’ supervolcano eruption was this last one?”