Book Eight: Santa Monica Part Three: The Stay Characters
Chapter Eighteen
Live
Frederick. Santa Monica, in the Commonwealth of California. Friday, 1 June 2029.
The services are also, in practice, emergency infrastructure.
“I’m Dana. I’m the producer, ABC Los Angeles. I haven’t slept since Wednesday, so if I say something stupid it’s that.” She looked at him, and at Castellanos beside the cot, and back. “Your Majesty. I’m told you want to do this from here.”
“Yes. From the gym.”
“From in here, with all of this. You’re sure.”
“This is where I am.”
She nodded once and called, quite quietly, Raúl. The man from the van came in with a microphone on a stand, a coil of black cable over his shoulder and a box with lights on it, and set them up at the end of the Ellicott rows, on the polished floor between the painted lines of the court, in about four minutes, without a word.
The gym watched. Raúl ran the cable back across the floor and out to the van, taping it to the boards every few feet. Dana spoke to the principal, and the principal to the women in orange vests, and they went round the cots, low, one at a time. The King is going to speak on the radio at two. From here. You don’t have to be quiet. He asked for it to be here.
People sat up. A man asleep with a newspaper over his face took it off and folded it and put it under his cot. The woman with the baby, still beside the thin man in the suit, said something to him, and he looked at the microphone, and at Frederick, and down at his hands.
By the front doors the old man in the wheelchair with the oxygen tank on the back reached up, slowly, with both hands, and straightened his collar.
Dana crouched in front of him with her clipboard on her knee. The whole class was on the two rows, watching.
“At two exactly Bill in the studio, the tired man, he’s been on since Thursday, says and now, from Santa Monica, the King. Then this light goes red.” She touched the box. “When it’s red, you’re on. Everybody in California with a radio on. Probably the whole Realm in four minutes, when the network picks it up. You talk as long as you want. When you’re done, you stop, and I bring my hand down like this, and Bill comes back.”
“What if I stop in the middle?”
“Then you stop in the middle. It’s live radio. Nobody’s going to mind anything you do this afternoon, Your Majesty. They just want to hear you.”
Nine sentences. Three in Spanish.
“Stand or sit?”
The morning room in October, at the empty table. The lectern at Ellicott, too low, his fingers under the lip where nobody could see.
“Stand.”
Raúl raised the stand, unasked, to exactly the height of his mouth.
At a minute to two Dana put on headphones and held one hand up, flat.
The gym had gone quiet on its own, from the near end to the far. The generator outside. A child being shushed. From Priya’s radio, turned right down, Bill reading the last of the roads.
He stood at the microphone in Thursday’s clothes, two strips of tape over his eye, holding the permission slip in both hands by the edges. There was nothing underneath to hold.
And now, from Santa Monica, the King.
Dana’s hand came down and pointed at him. The light went red.
“This is the King.”
Thin. He heard it come out of Priya’s radio a fraction later, a boy’s voice, higher than his own, and he hated it, and for a second the words on the slip swam.
Get to the second one.
“I’m in a school gym in Santa Monica, with my class, and with two hundred people from this city, on cots, and I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon.”
Level. Lower. From the radio it sounded like somebody older.
“Yesterday morning I was on the pier when the ground moved. I watched the sea go out and come back. And I saw strangers carry each other up a staircase, ninety-eight steps, with the sea behind them, and nobody pushed. I said that last night. I’m saying it again because it’s the most important thing I know.”
Nobody in the gym moved.
“This morning it happened again, in San Francisco. I know a great many of you are frightened it’s going to keep happening, all the way up the coast. Some of you are in your cars this afternoon because of it. I’m not going to tell you it won’t happen. I don’t know. Nobody does. The people who know the most have said so, and I believe them, because they’re the only ones who aren’t guessing.”
His hands turned the slip over.
“But I want to tell you something a man from Pomona told me on Wednesday night, at a table in a hotel.” He was not looking at the paper. He was looking at the old man by the doors, with his collar straight. “He drove the trains on the Pomona line for thirty-one years. In November, after the earthquake there, the trains stopped, and the water stopped, and he went out into his yard every morning and waited. On the ninth day, at six in the morning, he heard the first train come back. The six-oh-two, going west. And he sat down on the grass and cried, because the six-oh-two was running, and somebody was driving it.”
Somebody in the gym made a sound.
The next lines were in Spanish. He breathed.
“A todos los que me escuchan en español, no están solos.”
Along the second row Señora Ruiz put both hands over her mouth.
“El seis cero dos volvió al noveno día, y volverá…”
The microphone stand hummed in his hands. The note from the bench of the blue car, the organ before anybody touches the keys. Then it was in the floor. Then it was the floor.
No roar this time. A hard sideways shove, as if the whole gym had been punched, and the stand went over and he went with it, onto his knees, and two hundred cots skidded across the boards at once with a noise like a hundred chairs pushed back. The lights swung on their chains. The big dark heaters up in the girders swung. Dust came down out of the roof in a long golden curtain through the light from the high windows, and the whole gym screamed.
The microphone was in his hand. It had come out of its clip and he had caught it. The box had slid three feet and stopped against a cot leg, and its light was still red.
He put the microphone to his mouth.
“Get down.” Louder than he had ever spoken. “Get down. Get under something. Cover your head. Hold on.” And the drill Señora Ruiz had made them learn in the first week of the first year, in the voice of a fire alarm: “¡Agáchense! ¡Cúbranse! ¡Agárrense!”
The gym did it.
Two hundred people stopped screaming and got down, under the cots, between them, arms over their heads. The woman curled round the baby, the thin man on top of both. The old man in the wheelchair bent forward with his hands over the back of his neck. The class under their cots all at once, as they had practised every term since they were eleven. Theo flat under his, looking at him through the green canvas legs.
Up in the girders one of the heaters came off its chain.
It came down slowly. A dark metal box the size of a car, turning over once in the golden dust, its chain trailing, onto the far side of the gym by the climbing frames, where the thin man had been sitting on the edge of an empty cot. He was three cots away, on the floor, on top of the woman and the baby. The heater hit with a sound like the world ending and went through the boards and stuck there, on its end, crooked.
The shaking stopped all at once, as if switched off. The lights went on swinging, slower. From under every cot came a long low moan, all of them together, the sound a room makes when it has been frightened past screaming.
The red light was still on.
“That was an aftershock. In Santa Monica, just now. A big one. We’re all right. I think we’re all right. A heater came down out of the roof.” It stood in the floor with the dust round it. “Nobody was under it. Everybody got down.” He did not know if it was true. It was what he could see. “I’m going to stop now. I’m sorry. We have to go outside.”
Dana, under the nearest cot with her headphones round her neck, put up her flat hand and brought it down. The light went off.
The principal was on her feet first, by the doors, dust all over her, her plait come loose, a gym whistle on a cord round her neck. One long blast went through the moaning like a knife.
“Everybody out. Every door. Now. Walk. Don’t run. Help the person next to you. Out to the field.”
The same in Spanish.
The gym got up off the floor and went, through every door it had. The double doors by the scoreboard, onto the playing field. The fire door by the climbing frames, past the heater. And a plain grey door in the corner behind the stage curtain that he had not known was there, with a green sign over it, a little running figure and an arrow.
The class went to the front. Kimura in the middle of the rows with her arm straight up, as on the bench on the bluff, and they went in pairs towards the double doors: Marcus and Felix, Priya and Lucía, Devon and June, Señora Ruiz at the side with the folder, Mr Abernathy at the end with his good hand on the last shoulder, counting.
Theo was on his feet, looking at him across four yards of floor, over the fallen stand. He started towards him. Kimura put a hand on his arm and said something short. Theo looked at her, at Frederick, at her, and his face did something, and he went with her.
Frederick started after them. Two steps. Then Castellanos had him by the back of the collar, turning him the other way, towards the stage and the grey door.
“Sir. This way.”
“The class went that way.”
“I know, sir. Nearest door. Eight steps. Kimura has the class, Brannigan’s at the front, I have you. We meet on the far side.”
They got three of the eight.
The heater had come down three yards from the fire door, and the people from the far end, going for the nearest door, came up against the crooked box of it and the hole in the floor, and stopped, and turned. The only other door at that end was the grey one.
They came across the gym towards it. Sixty people, perhaps, from the cots by the climbing frames and the far wall, the woman with the baby and the thin man and the family of five and faces he had never looked at, coughing in the dust, arms still over their heads because nobody had told them to put them down, all at once, like the gulls going up off the beach.
Between them and the door: Frederick, Castellanos, and the old man in the wheelchair.
He had been by the front doors all night. Something in the shaking had moved him here, into the aisle between the Ellicott rows and the stage, alone, the clear tube running up to his face, his hands on the wheels, and a cot had slid against them.
The crowd came round the end of the rows into a space meant for ten, the way water comes into a narrow place.
The wheelchair tipped. Slowly, sideways. The tank swung round and hit the boards with a clang, the tube pulled out of his face, and the old man went down among the feet with his arms over his head, as the radio had told him a minute ago.
Frederick went for him.
He twisted, hard, sideways, the way a four-year-old twists out of hands that want to lift him, and the hand on his collar, which had held him on the pier and the beach and the bluff, was not expecting it. Not from him. The collar tore. He heard it. He was on his knees in the crowd, among the legs, with the old man.
“Sir!”
Once, behind him, a voice he had never heard raised in twelve years. Then a man’s back. A woman’s legs. A child carried over somebody’s head. When he looked round there was no grey suit. Sixty strangers pushing towards a grey door, and he could not see over any of them.
“Help me.”
A young woman in a T-shirt that said SANTA MONICA LIFEGUARDS on the back looked down at him and at the old man, and bent. They got him up between them under the arms. He was much lighter than Frederick had expected, breathing in short hard gasps.
“The tank. Get the tank.”
Frederick found it rolling on the boards, and the tube, and pushed the end up towards the old man’s face, and the old man’s shaking hands found it and held it there.
“The chair,” said the woman.
Under the crowd. Gone.
“Out, then. Whatever door. Come on.”
The crowd took them, the woman on one side and Frederick on the other with the tank under his arm, cold and heavy, banging his hip. It was not going to the grey door any more. Somebody at the front had found the corridor beyond it too narrow, or locked, or full, and the crowd had turned, back past the heater, round the hole, to the fire door, which somebody had got open after all.
Through it, into the white heat of a side car park, across it, through a gate, onto the street.
The wrong side. He had walked up the rise to the school on Thursday with the class in pairs. The playing field was on the other side. The double doors, where Theo had gone looking back, opened onto the field. He was on the street at the back.
The lifeguard had the old man, and a man from the crowd had his other arm, and somebody had found a folding chair, and they were sitting him in it on the pavement under a tree, the tank beside him, the tube in his face, breathing. He looked up at Frederick once, collar straight, and his lips moved. Frederick did not hear what they said.
He looked for the way round.
A covered walkway ran along the side of the school from the back of the gym to the field, with a tall chain-link fence on its far side and the houses beyond. Its roof had come down, the whole length of it, a long heap of concrete and steel and tiles with the dust still going up off it. Two men in orange vests stood at the end with their arms out. No, no, not this way, nobody goes this way.
Back to the fire door, then. Through the gym and out the front.
A fireman in a yellow coat stood in the doorway with both arms across it. Behind him, through the dust, the heater stuck in the floor, and above it, among the girders, a long dark crack that had not been there an hour ago.
“Nobody goes back in. Not for your bag, not for your phone, not for your mother. That roof’s coming down. Round the front, by the road. Whoever you’re looking for, they’ll be on the field or at the gathering point on Pico.”
“How far by the road?”
The fireman looked at him for the first time.
“Two blocks down, two along, and back up. Twenty minutes, the way the streets are. Half an hour.” A pause. “Kid, you’re bleeding.”
He put his hand to his face. The tape had come off. The cut had opened again.
“It’s nothing.”
No Castellanos. The last of him was a voice over a crowd. No Kimura, no Brannigan, no satellite telephone. Theo’s phone was with Theo, on the field. Nobody who knew where he was.
A torn collar, a cut bleeding into the corner of his eye, Thursday’s dust, and in his pocket a permission slip, crushed, torn at one corner.
He took it out. The sentence he had not finished:
El seis cero dos volvió al noveno día, y volverá otra vez.
He had got to volverá.
He folded it and put it back.
The street was full of people, out of the fire door and the houses and the other doors of the school, standing in the road in groups, calling names, holding each other, looking at the building. Some were looking at him. A woman across the road. A man beside her with a child on his shoulders. A boy of about ten on a bicycle. A head turning, and then another, all along the street, looking for half a second at the King to see whether he knew more than they did.
He knew less than any of them. They knew where their own people were.
He wiped the blood out of his eye, and started to walk. Two blocks down. Two along. Back up. Nobody behind him, nobody in front, nobody at the edge of the room.