The Alert

Theo could not get the phone out of his pocket.

His hands were shaking too much. It went on screaming against Frederick’s leg through the cloth, the two notes up and down, enormous in the small blue car. Theo’s fingers went into the pocket and came out without it.

“I can’t. Freddie. I can’t.”

“I’ll do it.”

He put his hand into Theo’s pocket and took the phone out. It was hot, buzzing in his hand in time with the notes, the screen bright white with a red band across the top.

EMERGENCY ALERT

Extreme threat

TSUNAMI WARNING for the coast of Los Angeles and Ventura counties. A large earthquake has occurred off the coast. A tsunami is possible. Move immediately to high ground or inland, away from the shore. Do not wait. Do not go to the beach to watch. Follow the instructions of local officials. The first waves may arrive within minutes.

And underneath, the same in Spanish. He read that too, de inmediato, no espere, los primeros minutos, because it gave his eyes something to do that was not the window.

He pressed the button on the side and the screaming stopped.

Not outside. Outside, from the pier and the beach and the road and the whole city behind the dust, a thousand phones were still wailing the same two notes out of time with each other. In the car it was quiet enough to hear Theo breathe. He held the phone out. Theo read it and did not take it.

“Within minutes,” said Theo.

“May. It says may.”

“It says within minutes, Freddie.”

“I know what it says.”

---

Down on the beach a siren started, lower and slower than the phones, a long whooping rise and fall, from the lifeguard’s blue hut. The lifeguard was out on the sand in red shorts with a loudhailer, running towards the water and back, pointing at the bluff with his whole arm, his voice coming up flat and metallic under the siren.

Off the beach. Off the beach now. Go up. Go up.

The two surfers were coming in, flat on their boards, paddling with both arms faster than he had known anybody could paddle. They caught the white water of a wave and stood and ran out of the shallows, and one of them dropped his board on the sand and left it, and they ran up the beach towards the stairs.

The woman with the mat had gone. The man with the dog had gone. There was the lifeguard and a surfboard on the sand and the long wet line of the water’s edge, and no gulls.

He looked at the water’s edge. It looked the same. He did not know what he was looking for.

---

On the pier everybody was going.

From the top of the wheel he could see all of it, like a game from the top of the bleachers. A long stream of people back along the crooked boards towards the land: the fishermen and the woman from the shell shop and the man from the coffee place still in his apron and families who had come early for the carousel, some running, some walking very fast, some helping people who could do neither. Two men had the old fisherman in the cap between them with an arm over each shoulder, his feet hardly touching the boards.

At the foot of the wheel Kimura had the class.

She was small, in the middle of them, and not shouting; nobody round her was looking at her the way you look at somebody shouting. She had both arms out low, the way you herd chickens, and she was moving all fifty-six of them back along the pier in a clump, and in front of them Mr Ferrante, one arm still round Lucía, was leading, and Señora Ruiz went at the side with the plastic folder held against her chest in both arms like a baby.

Priya stopped and turned and looked up at the blue car with her hand over her eyes. Kimura put a hand on her back and turned her round again, gently, and Priya went.

Marcus was near the front, beside Felix, and Felix had hold of the back of Marcus’s T-shirt in his fist, the way you hold a younger brother in a crowd, and Marcus was walking on his own feet at the speed of everybody else.

“Marcus,” said Frederick, aloud, and Theo looked at him. “He’s there. Felix has got him.”

Theo was looking at the foot of the wheel.

Mr Abernathy had not gone. He stood by the gate in the brown jacket exactly where he had stood when the shaking stopped, head back, looking up. Beside him, very large and pink in the Delaware sweatshirt, Brannigan was speaking into a radio. Beside them both, on his knees in front of a grey steel box at the base of the wheel’s great leg, with its lid open and his keys on the boards, was the man with the ponytail.

Kimura had stopped at the edge of the clump and turned and was saying something to Mr Abernathy. He did not turn his head. She said it again. He shook his head once, still looking up, the way he shook it in homeroom when somebody asked whether the roll could be called a minute late. She looked at him one second more and went after the class, fast, with her arms out.

“He’s not going,” said Theo. “Why isn’t he going? It says within minutes.”

Frederick looked down at the small brown figure at the foot of the wheel.

“Because we’re his. Two of his homeroom are on the wheel. He counted us on. He’s not going till he’s counted us off.”

---

He did the sum.

It started on its own, the way the stairs had, and he let it. The clock in the corner of Theo’s screen said nine forty-four. Nine forty-one it had started. The shaking had gone on two minutes, perhaps more. The alert a minute after it stopped.

The first waves may arrive within minutes.

Nobody knew how many minutes. May, because they did not know; within minutes, because they were frightened. He could hear it in the shape of the words, the way he knew the six-fourteen from Richmond was late before the board said so. But the shaking had come from the north, down the coast, from beyond Malibu. If the sea did anything it would do it there first and have to come down the coast to get here, and Malibu alone was twenty miles.

So not within minutes. Not here. A quarter of an hour, perhaps. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. He held on to the not-knowing very carefully, like a glass too full.

The rest he knew by heart. A quarter of a mile back along the boards, with the bend in them now. Down the ramp. A quarter of a mile of sand to the foot of the stairs. Eleven steps to the footbridge, if it was still there, if the road under it was not full of the bluff. Then ninety-eight, sixteen and a landing and sixteen and a landing and seventeen, with fifty-six people and a teacher and a woman with a folder of forms, and a staircase is a queue.

Seven minutes for the class if they ran. Ten if they did not. Twelve if the footbridge was down.

And for the blue car.

The motor had stopped. There were perhaps thirty cars on the wheel, most of them empty, and theirs was at the very top, as far from the gate as a car could be. To bring it down the wheel would have to turn halfway round. He did not know how long that took by hand. It had never been on any timetable.

---

“Freddie,” said Theo. “Talk to me.”

Theo was sitting on the floor with his back against the bench and his knees up, not shaking now, very still, looking at him the way he looked in geometry when he had decided to understand something by force.

“You’re doing the sum. I can see you. Tell me what it says.”

“It’s all right.”

“Don’t. Don’t do the it’s all right. You did that the whole of October. Tell me what it says.”

So he told him, low and quickly, in order, the way he would have read his father the trains: the north and the coast and twenty miles, the quarter of an hour that might be half an hour, seven minutes for the class and ten and twelve, the wheel halfway round, and that nobody knew how long that took by hand, and that it was nine forty-five.

Theo listened without moving.

“Okay,” he said, when it was done. He nodded slowly, once, as if checking an answer against the back of the book. “So they’ve got time. If they go now, and they’re going now. Kimura’s got them.” He looked down at the clump, small, nearly at the land end now. “So they’re okay.”

“Yes.”

“And Abernathy’s not going till we’re down. And Brannigan’s not going till we’re down. And Castellanos is stuck under us. And the guy with the ponytail’s doing something.”

“Yes.”

“So it’s just us.”

Frederick did not answer.

“Okay,” said Theo again. Then, very quietly, to the floor: “I’m really glad it’s you.”

Frederick looked at him.

“In the car. If it was going to be anybody.” He almost laughed. “Marcus would’ve been sick on me by now.”

---

There was a jolt.

A single hard jerk up through the wheel and the hinge, and the car swung, and Theo grabbed the bench and Frederick grabbed Theo, and for one second he thought it’s starting again and went cold from the inside out.

It was the wheel. It had moved. A long slow pull, like a train leaving a platform so gently that you know only because the platform has begun to slide. The sky in the window slid. The top of the empty red car ahead slid down past the glass, an inch, and stopped. And slid again.

He looked down.

At the open steel box the man with the ponytail had a long steel handle in his hands, like the starting handle of an old car, fitted into something inside, and he was turning it, round and round, leaning his whole weight on the downstroke and pulling it up again, and each turn moved the wheel the width of a finger, perhaps less. Brannigan was on his knees beside him with both big hands on the handle under the other man’s, and they were turning it together, the man with the ponytail and the very large pink protection officer in the Delaware sweatshirt, at the foot of a Ferris wheel at the end of a broken pier, with the phones still screaming on the shore.

Mr Abernathy stood beside them with his head back, looking up at the blue car, and his lips were moving. He had done it on the coach and at the airport and at the gate and at the foot of the wheel a quarter of an hour ago.

He was counting.

The wheel moved another inch. Below them in the green car Castellanos sat very upright with his hands on his knees, looking not at them now but past them, at the sky, waiting, the way he waited at the side of every room.

Nine forty-six.

The wheel moved another inch.