Sulfur fell from the factory skies, staining the pavement, and a teacher at the school said it was sand blown north from Libya on one of those lovely desert winds.
She sat on the sofa in pajamas and socks reading a book on local flora. A blanket covered her legs. A half-filled glass of water sat on the end table. Her eyes wandered from the page. It was two minutes before midnight. She paused, looking off toward the middle distance. Then she heard it coming, an earth roar, a power moving on the air. She sat for a long second, deeply thoughtful, before throwing off the blanket. The moment burst around her. She rushed to the door and opened it, half aware of rattling lampshades and something wet. She gripped the edges of the door frame and faced into the room. Things were jumping up and down. She formed the categorical thought, This one is the biggest yet. The room was more or less a blur. There was a sense that it was on the verge of splintering. She felt the effect in her legs this time, a kind of hollowing out, a soft surrender to some illness. It was hard to believe, hard to believe it was lasting so long. She pushed her hands against the door frame, searching for a calmness in herself. She could almost see a picture of her mind, a vague gray oval, floating over the room. The shaking would not stop. There was an anger in it, a hammering demand. Her face showed the crumpled effort of a heavy lifter. It wasn’t easy to know what was happening around her. She couldn’t see things in the normal way. She could only see herself, bright-skinned, waiting for the room to fold over her.
Then it ended and she pulled some clothes over her pajamas and took the stairway down. She moved fast. She ran across the small lobby, brushing past a man lighting a cigarette at the door. People were coming into the street. She went half a block and stopped at the edge of a large group. She was breathing hard and her arms hung limp. Her first clear thought was that she’d have to go back inside sooner or later. She listened to the voices fall around her. She wanted to hear someone say this very thing, that the cruelty existed in time, that they were all unprotected in the drive of time. She told a woman she thought a water pipe had broken in her flat and the woman closed her eyes and rocked her heavy head. When will it all end? She told the woman she’d forgotten to grab her tote bag on her way out the door despite days of careful planning and she tried to give the story a rueful nuance, make it funny and faintly self-mocking. There must be something funny we can cling to. They stood there rocking their heads.
All up and down the street there were people lighting cigarettes. It was eight days since the first tremor, eight days and one hour.
She walked most of the night. At three a.m. she stopped in the square in front of the Olympic Stadium. There were parked cars and scores of people and she studied the faces and stood listening. Traffic moved slowly past. There was a curious double mood, a lonely reflectiveness at the center of all the talk, a sense that people were half absent from the eager seeking of company. She started walking again.
Eating breakfast in her flat at nine o’clock she felt the first sizable aftershock. The room leaned heavily. She rose from the table, eyes wet, and opened the door and crouched there, holding a buttered roll.
Wrong. The last one was not the biggest on the Richter. It was only six point two.
And she found out it hadn’t lasted longer than the others. This was a mass illusion, according to the word at school.
And the water she’d seen or felt had not come from a broken pipe but from a toppled drinking glass on the table by the sofa.
And why did they keep occurring at night?
And where was the English Boy?
The drinking glass was intact but her paperback book on plant life was wet and furrowed.
She took the stairs up and down.
She kept the tote bag ready at the door.
She was deprived of sentiments, pretensions, expectations, textures.
The pitiless thing was time, threat of advancing time.
She was deprived of presumptions, persuasions, complications, lies, every braided arrangement that made it possible to live.
Stay out of movies and crowded halls. She was down to categories of sound, to self-admonishments and endless inner scrutinies.
She paused, alone, to listen.
She pictured her sensible exit from the room.
She looked for something in people’s faces that might tell her their experience was just like hers, down to the smallest strangest turn of thought.
There must be something funny in this somewhere that we can use to get us through the night.
She heard everything.
She took catnaps at school.
She was deprived of the city itself. We could be anywhere, any lost corner of Ohio.
She dreamed of a mayfly pond skimmed with fallen blossoms.
Take the stairs everywhere. Take a table near the exit in cafés and tavernas.
The cardplayers sat in hanging smoke, making necessary motions only, somberly guarding their cards.
She learned that Edmund was in the north with friends, peering into monasteries.
She heard the surge of motorcycles on the hill.
She inspected the cracks in the west wall and spoke to the landlord, who closed his eyes and rocked his heavy head.
The wind caused a rustling somewhere very near.
She sat up at night with her book of water-stiffened pages, trying to read, trying to escape the feeling that she was being carried helplessly toward some pitching instant in time.
The acanthus is a spreading perennial.
And everything in the world is either inside or outside.
She came across the figurine one day inside a desk drawer at the school, lying among cough drops and paper clips, in an office used as a teachers’ lounge. She didn’t even remember putting it there and felt the familiar clashing agencies of shame and defensiveness working in her blood — a body heat rising against the reproach of forgotten things. She picked it up, finding something remarkable in the leaper’s clean and open motion, in the detailed tension of forearms and hands. Shouldn’t something so old have a formal bearing, a stiffness of figure? This was easy-flowing work. But beyond this surprise, there was little to know. She didn’t know the Minoans. She wasn’t even sure what the thing was made of, what kind of lightweight imitation ivory. It occurred to her that she’d left the figure in the desk because she didn’t know what to do with it, how to underpin or prop it. The body was alone in space, with no supports, no fixed position, and seemed best suited to the palm of the hand.
She stood in the small room, listening.
Edmund had said the figure was like her. She studied it, trying to extract the sparest recognition. A girl in a loincloth and wristbands, double-necklaced, suspended over the horns of a running bull. The act, the leap itself, might be vaudeville or sacred terror. There were themes and secrets and storied lore in this six-inch figure that Kyle could not begin to guess at. She turned the object in her hand. All the facile parallels fell away. Lithe, young, buoyant, modern; rumbling bulls and quaking earth. There was nothing that might connect her to the mind inside the work, an ivory carver, 1600 BC, moved by forces remote from her. She remembered the old earthen Hermes, flower-crowned, looking out at her from a knowable past, some shared theater of being. The Minoans were outside all this. Narrow-waisted, graceful, other-minded — lost across vales of language and magic, across dream cosmologies. This was the piece’s little mystery. It was a thing in opposition, defining what she was not, marking the limits of the self. She closed her fist around it firmly and thought she could feel it beat against her skin with a soft and periodic pulse, an earthliness.