Dorothy had nearly dozed off again when she heard a crashing noise. That’s when she realized the tremors weren’t caused by the delicious, black tar vapors wearing off. Instead, the ground was indeed shaking, lurching violently. The building began roaring, as dust fell from the ceiling in the windowless room and the smoke-stained walls erupted into a jigsaw of splintering, cracking, falling plaster. A roar, a guttural wave of subterranean sound, muffled the screaming of men and women from the gambling room upstairs—choking, gagging sounds, ivory mahjong tiles and bodies falling to the floor.
In a waning moment of opiate-induced splendor, lingering like the warmth of a goodbye kiss, Dorothy closed her eyes and tried to imagine that the rocking, swaying, was her Nai Nai holding her. Her grandmother, like most descendants of China’s fallen Celestial Empire, had called the great comet the Broom Star.
The Seattle Times had renamed the astral visitor the Sidereal Tramp. Dorothy had also read that Edmond Halley, in a moment of colonial hubris, initially named the comet after himself, as though ship’s captains hadn’t been periodically led off course by that wandering light in the sky for the last four thousand years. As if planting a flag that bore a genteel name, one reflecting the teetotaling civility of Britannia could assuage the fact that the Broom Star’s long tail was made of mercury cyanide and could sweep the Earth clean of all life.
Dorothy blinked as the drugs wore off. She rubbed swollen, bloodshot eyes, and saw that no one else in the dimly lit smoking parlor seemed to notice the calamity, except the attendant who had crawled beneath one of the heavy wooden bunks. The rest of the men and women—the patrons—were fast asleep, smiling euphorically as fist-sized chunks of the ceiling rained down around them. A handful lay on their sides, still amiably puffing away, even as their pates rocked back and forth on their wooden headrests.
Dorothy wanted to stay, to spend the last of her money on one more sweet breath of sugary splendor. But she was knocked to her hands and knees, then flat on her stomach. Her dime skittered away, down a rift in the floor, as the room seemed to move, jolting two feet to the north and then buckling three feet to the southwest. Dorothy covered her head as she heard the crashing of copper spittoons all around her. Tins of Pilus Lunares, sounding like the plucked strings of a zither as the cans bounced, pinging off the wooden floor, spilling their contents, balls of fine British opium mixed with silver nitrate, camphor and musk which pharmacists had dubbed Hair of the Moon. Chemists had stopped trying to turn lead into gold. It was much more lucrative to turn poppies into vaporous whiffs of Heaven, even if the potent silver turned the user’s skin to an ashen shade of blue.
Dorothy struggled to sit up while the building swayed. Then her nostrils flared as the dark, fuzzy lumps of opium caught fire amid burning slicks of peanut oil. The heating lamps and bowls had shattered on the ground and the shards of manganese looked like islands of purple glass in a lake of fire. The patrons—those still nursing their long copper pipes—closed their eyes as if this were the happiest moment in all their lives; in many ways, this strange, serene dream of theirs probably was. While those who slumbered kept smiling, even as their sackcloth clothing caught fire, hair, skin, and fatty tissue burning as they succumbed to a sleep that would last from this moment until the next visitation of the comet, when no one would be left to notice the return.
I’m only sixteen. I’m too young to die! Dorothy’s panicked thoughts raced, sobering her intentions. Whenever she’d imagined dying she thought about her parents who were conscripted as dredgers and now were buried somewhere beneath Mount Rainier along with four hundred other mixed-breed workers who’d struggled for tailings in a played out silver mine. Now all she had left was her Nai Nai, and an assortment of calabash cousins that she knew of but never saw, like Darwin Chinn Qi, who worked as a servant at the Sorrento Hotel. She hadn’t seen him in years. Not since she’d spurned him when they were ten years old and a matchmaker’s I-Ching machine predicted that they would witness an important event and then eventually wed. Dorothy thought that meant they’d get pregnant and later married. So she ran away only to be caught by British colonials. The same company that later sold her entire village to a subsidiary in the Northwest where the children had been forbidden to marry, ever, and breeding would only be allowed for the purpose of replacing themselves in the servants’ lottery.
So much for predictions, Dorothy thought as she crawled over warm bodies while the earthquake subsided and spreading orange flames licked at the walls.
She struggled to her feet in the entryway where two guards were dead but their bodies still warm, the moneychanger as well, his quad-abacus shattered, beads scattered everywhere along with dirty wads of folding money. Dorothy lifted the hem of her dress and gathered her petticoats, stuffing handfuls of cash into her underwear along with a packet of opium. Then she climbed another tall set of smoke-filled stairs, sliding back the bolt and opening the heavy door. She savored a rush of semi-fresh air.
Inside the chamber she found another doorman, his face swollen, mouth twisted in a rictus of pain. There was another, a middle-aged man, finely dressed—a Caucasian, with bluish skin, probably from comet pills, the preferred drug of the rich and powerful, slumped in a chair. She recognized him as one of the club and casino owners, by the familiar cleft in his chin that was now filled with a rivulet of blood from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the forehead.
Most had ignored the prudent warnings of the Royal Hydrographic Office. They celebrated with comet parties, she thought. Science to the rich was like the I Ching to the poor—only believed when favorable. Meanwhile others surrendered to their fears.
When Dorothy finally reached the alleyway entrance, the door was open, jammed with fallen bodies. Half-naked men in silken robes and women in skin-tight cheongsam dresses made of brushed silver lamé, patinaed in jade, were clumped together and those who’d escaped to the alley didn’t travel far. Dorothy stepped over their swollen bodies scattered like leaves, arms and legs akimbo. She sniffed the cool breeze, which smelled like almonds, chloroform, and seaweed, then covered her nose and mouth with a scarf.
When she stumbled out onto South Jackson, the street was a frieze of cadaverous statuary. More men, women, and children dead on the stoops of collapsed apartment buildings, seafood restaurants, and the headquarters of the Chong Wa Benevolent Association. Others perished at the wheel of their motorcars and roadsters, steam turbines still turned, spitting jets of water vapor into the air. An electric trolley had jumped the track, crushed a jinricksha, and careened though a storefront and into the Manila Dance Hall. The passengers slumped out of their seats; others lay strewn among the broken glass and smoking rubble. Dorothy noticed a team of draft horses, still in harness, pitched on their sides. Pools of froth leaked from their nostrils. The half-dozen cloned beasts had fallen in the same direction, their markings and brands lined up perfectly, their legs jutting out as orderly as a book of matches. Scores of lifeless gulls and carrier pigeons were sprinkled among the ruin as well and feathers slowly rained like confetti. Dorothy stared at the red paper messages still tied to the legs of the many pigeons. She didn’t have to read them to know they were farewells and goodbyes, frenzied words hastily sent from the dying to their loved ones, who in all likelihood, where dead as well.