We Don't Know

The family on the cots by the doors packed their car at half past nine.

A man and a woman, two boys of perhaps nine and twelve, a grandmother in a wheelchair. After the radio said San Francisco the man had gone out to the car park and come back and said something low to the woman, and she had shaken her head, and he had said it again, and she had stopped. Now they were folding the blankets from the people in the orange vests into neat squares, and picking up their things: a bag, a coat, a box of cereal bars, the younger boy’s shoes.

“Where are they going?” said Theo.

“Arizona,” said Marcus. “He said his brother’s in Tucson.”

“It’s seven hundred miles to Tucson.”

“He said everybody’s saying it. On the phones. The whole coast is going to go, San Diego to San Francisco, one after another, like dominoes.” Marcus was quiet a moment. “He said they should have gone in November.”

They went out into the white morning, the man pushing the wheelchair and the woman carrying the blankets after all. At the door the younger boy turned and looked back at the cots, and at Frederick, for a second, without knowing who he was. The door swung shut.

Through the high windows they heard the car start.

---

By ten the man at the climbing frames had told the whole gym.

A thin man of about forty in a suit he had slept in, dust in the creases. He had got through to somebody in Bakersfield on the telephones at seven, and now he was going from cot to cot the way the orange vests did, with what he had heard instead of water.

They’re saying it’s the whole San Andreas, bottom to top. Ventura set off San Francisco and San Francisco’s going to set off the middle, at Parkfield, and then it’s all going. They’re saying the scientists knew in November and didn’t tell anybody.

The woman with the baby under the climbing frames. The old man with the oxygen tank. A family of five by the stage, where the mother began to cry and the father stood up and told him to go away, and he went, to the next cot.

He looked at the Ellicott rows. Frederick watched him see Castellanos, and decide.

Castellanos had not moved.

“Is it true?” said Lucía, across the aisle, with her phone in her lap still saying No Service. She had been to the table twice since seven and the line to Pomona had rung and rung. “What he’s saying.”

“I don’t know.”

“You always say you don’t know.”

“Because I don’t. Nobody does. Not him, not the man in Bakersfield.” The thin man was bending over the next cot. “He’s not lying. He’s frightened. He heard something frightening and he can’t hold it by himself, so he has to give it to somebody.”

Lucía looked at him.

“That’s what you do with the trains. Isn’t it. You gave them to your dad.”

---

At half past ten Priya turned the radio up again, and it was not the tired man.

Doctor Inés Carvalho, of the Seismological Laboratory at Pasadena, at her desk since nine forty-one on Thursday. A low, rough, unhurried voice, like somebody stopped in a corridor and answering because it would be rude not to.

People on the cots round Priya sat up and leaned. The woman with the baby stopped rocking. By the climbing frames, the thin man stopped beside a cot and turned his head.

Had the earthquake off Ventura caused the one in San Francisco?

“We don’t know.”

Was it possible?

“It’s possible. A large earthquake changes the stresses on the faults around it. Sometimes it makes another more likely. Sometimes less. We’ll know more in weeks, perhaps months. Perhaps we’ll never be sure. This morning, we don’t know.”

Would there be another? Was Parkfield next?

“We don’t know.” A pause, in the same voice. “I know that’s not what anybody wants me to say. People want yes or no so they know what to do. I can’t say either. What I can tell you is that there will be aftershocks from both, many of them, for weeks, and most will be smaller than what you’ve felt. The buildings that stood on Thursday are very likely to stand through them, because the buildings that were going to fall mostly fell. Nobody knew in November, and nobody knew yesterday morning, and anybody who tells you they knew is wrong, and anybody who tells you they know what happens next is wrong too.”

Should people leave the coast?

A long pause.

“I live in Pasadena. I have two children. They’re at home with my husband. We’re not leaving. I’m not telling anybody what to do. But if you get in your car this morning and drive into the desert with no water, you are swapping a danger that probably won’t happen for one that probably will. The roads east are full. It’s going to be a hundred and five in Barstow this afternoon.” She stopped. “That’s all. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’ve been saying it since Thursday and I’m going to keep saying it, because it’s true.”

You’re welcome, she said, like somebody who wanted to get back to her desk, and the radio went back to the roads.

By the climbing frames the thin man sat down on the edge of an empty cot with his hands between his knees, and stayed there. After a while the woman with the baby went across and sat beside him. Neither of them spoke.

“She said it four times,” said Theo. “We don’t know. I counted. And it was the best thing anybody’s said on that radio since Thursday. How does that work?”

“Because everybody else is guessing. She’s the only one who isn’t. So she’s the only one you can believe.”

---

Mr Abernathy was writing.

The women at the table had given him a stack of flattened water cartons and a marker, because that was what there was, and he had been on the end of a cot since nine with the cartons on his knee and the T-shirt round his left hand. Small neat capitals on the grey insides, edge to edge. Four finished, face down beside him.

Frederick stood by him at eleven.

“Hanover.” Mr Abernathy did not look up. “The Prime Minister’s office asked me to write down what I saw. For the Crown’s committee. With the times, in order. I’m told this was your idea.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a good idea.” He turned the carton over. “Sergeant Brannigan. Mr Ferrante, as far as I saw him. The man with the wheel, whose name nobody seems to know. I’m doing the surfers. Then the nurse, whom I didn’t see, so I’m writing down what Hartigan and Miss Paredes tell me and saying that’s what I’m doing. A citation is a record. It’s only worth anything if it says who’s speaking.”

Frederick looked at the cartons.

“Did you do yourself?”

The marker stopped. Mr Abernathy looked up over the carton, grey, dust in his hair, and his face did nothing. The homeroom face.

“No.”

“You stood at the foot of the wheel with the sea going out and your hand cut, and you didn’t go until we were down.”

“I counted you on, so I counted you off. That isn’t gallantry, Hanover. That’s homeroom.” He found his place. “And a man doesn’t write his own citation.”

Frederick went back to his cot and sat by Theo.

“You saw Mr Abernathy at the foot of the wheel.”

“Yeah,” said Theo slowly.

“Write it down. Everything you saw, with the times. Say it’s you that saw it. Give it to Castellanos, not to Abernathy.” The small brown figure at the end of the row, writing. “A man doesn’t write his own citation. So somebody else has to.”

Theo got a carton and a pen from the table and sat with his back to Mr Abernathy and wrote for forty minutes. Then he folded it and took it down the row to Castellanos, who read all of it, slowly, and put it in the inside pocket of the grey suit beside the satellite telephone, and nodded once.

---

He could not write the speech.

Señora Ruiz had given him the last blank slip in the folder at nine, and he had had it on his knee for three hours, and the back was still blank.

Not it’s going to be all right. He did not know that. Not the coast is not going. Not stay, to the people on the road to Barstow; he had stayed because his class could not go, and that was not the same thing. Not we don’t know. That was Doctor Carvalho’s.

“Say the stairs,” said Theo, who had been watching him not write for half an hour.

“I said the stairs last night.”

“So say them again. Nobody pushed. That’s the best thing you ever said.”

“It’s not new.”

“It doesn’t have to be new, Freddie. It’s not homework.”

Priya put her head round Theo. “Say some of it in Spanish. Half the people in this gym speak Spanish. Half the state does. Señora Ruiz says you’re the best in the year. She said it in April when you weren’t there. She said the King conjugates like a cathedral.” She looked slightly embarrassed. “So they know you mean them too.”

“Like a cathedral?”

“It’s a compliment. I think. In Spanish it sounds like one.”

Lucía, across the aisle, without looking up from the phone: “Tell them about the six-oh-two.”

Everybody looked at her.

“Grandpa’s train. In November. The ninth day, when the water came back and the first train was the six-oh-two and he sat down on the grass in his yard and cried.” Now she looked up. “That’s what’ll make people stay. Not you saying stay. Somebody telling them the trains come back. That on the ninth day somebody’s driving the six-oh-two. He’d want you to. He’d tell everybody on Holt Avenue the King said it.”

Frederick looked down at the blank slip.

He started to write.

---

At a quarter to one a white van came up the rise and turned into the car park. ABC on its side in blue and red, LOS ANGELES under it, and on its roof a dish folded down like a flower closed for the night. A woman in jeans and a grey jacket got out with a lanyard and a clipboard and the look of somebody who had not slept since Wednesday. A man went round the back and began taking out cables.

With a long electric whine the dish rose. It unfolded and turned and tilted, searching the white sky over the playing field and the tents and the flagpole, and stopped.

On his knee were nine sentences in Señora Ruiz’s blue pen, three of them in Spanish, crossed out twice and written a third time.

“That’s for you,” said Theo. “It’s going to send you up to a satellite and down to the whole state.”

“Yes.”

Theo watched the dish.

“Freddie. Can I tell you something before you do it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to be really bad at the start. Your voice is going to go thin on the first sentence and you’re going to hate it. And then it’s going to get better on the second one. It always does. The morning room. The assembly. The bluff, when you told Castellanos to send Brannigan. The car in October, when you practised on me.” He did not look away from the window. “So don’t stop after the first one. You’ll think it’s all going to sound like that. It isn’t. Get to the second one.”

“That’s the best advice anybody’s given me since short.”

“I know. I’ve been saving it.”

The woman with the lanyard had come in and was standing inside the doors, looking at the cots and the scoreboard and the FOUND and LOOKING FOR lists on the wall. She found Castellanos, already on his feet, and then Frederick on the end of his cot with a permission slip on his knee, and her face went through the thing.

She came across the gym towards them, between the cots, with her clipboard.