(40) Shannon Frost Greenstein: It Was Actually the Fire
“Tell me the story, Grandpop.”
David sighed. Always it was the same while vacationing with his family. He loved his grandchildren as if they were his own, but he never did learn to tolerate the sheer repetition of childhood.
“Are you sure you don’t want another story, scout?” David asked wearily. “I told you that one last night.”
“Nooooo,” whined his grandson. “I want to hear it again.”
The evening was cool, and a gentle breeze rustled the curtains in the bedroom. Looking at the determination in the child’s eyes, David knew bedtime would stretch on indefinitely until he gave in.
“Fine,” he sighed, already mentally enjoying a bourbon on the rocks downstairs in the Lounge. “I’ll tell you the story.”
The little boy settled back on the pillows, satisfied, as David took a breath.
“It was the spring of 1906,” he started, “and I had just moved to San Francisco…”
***
“Myer, let’s go!”
The raucous laughter of their other friends nearly drowned out David’s call, but Myer nonetheless kissed his girl goodbye and trotted over to the train.
“We’re off, cats!” someone shouted as the men boarded and the whistle blew. Excitement traveled through the group like a current, bawdy jokes and exclamations punctuating their chatter. The train chewed through the landscape while the miles disappeared behind the caboose and the call of a shiny future called “California” grew ever more tantalizing.
It had always been David’s dream to see the West Coast, and never before had he been so close. He knew no one in California; his pockets were empty except for the address of a boarding house on Powell Street. But David had his friends, and he had two suitcases safely housing his best designs, and he felt absolutely no qualms about this cross-country move.
“You and me, right, Dave?”
Myer leaned across the aisle, offering a hand to his best friend, and David grinned and shook.
“You and me,” he agreed, clasping his future roommate’s fingers. “San Francisco won’t know what hit it.”
***
“I already know that part, Grandpop,” the little boy complained, and David nodded.
“I know, but that’s where the story starts,” he reminded his grandson. “It’s important to remember, because of what happened the next day.”
“When you were sad, right?” the child questioned.
“That’s right,” David agreed. “All day, things felt strange. It was like there was a raincloud hanging over us. We weren’t excited and happy anymore. No one wanted to go out and explore or find a billiards game.”
“So what did you do?”
David shrugged.
“We stayed inside. We slept. Some fellows read some books. We just weren’t in the mood to go have fun. And no one could figure out why,” he answered.
“Because the earthquake was coming, right?” the child said eagerly.
“Yes, but we didn’t know that,” David responded.
He drew a breath, preparing to launch into the next act, dredging up the memories he had for years buried in his subconsciousness like a Method actor. It was only after his own son was born that David could start to think about San Francisco; it had taken most of a lifetime to come to terms with it. It was something he never thought he’d be repeating ad nauseum for the grandchildren he never thought he’d live to have.
“That was April 17th,” David continued. “We kept on at the boarding house all day. And then, that night, we went to sleep…”
***
Myer was screaming.
David awoke in an instant, the shot of adrenaline to his endocrine system rocketing him out of bed with a pounding heart.
“It’s a cyclone!” Myer shouted.
Disoriented in the dark, David searched for an explanation as to why the dishes on the mantel were falling; why the pictures were smashing upon the floor.
The house wobbled like the hand of God was shaking its foundation, and David stumbled to the open window in his underwear.
“I’ll close it!” he yelled to Myer, plaster raining down on his head, and then watched as the three tenements across the street crumbled down into nothingness.
David knew then, somewhere deep in his lizard brain, that his life was in danger; he knew, as he watched buildings collapse and dust rise and wreckage fly, that it was an earthquake. His rational mind refused to accept this knowledge, however, and thus David stood at the window with his mouth agape. He stared at the empty space where edifices once stood; he stared at the pile of rubble where people once lived.
Glasses shattered and furniture fell and pieces of the ceiling plummeted to the floor, but it took Myer shouting his name to jerk David from his stupor.
“Dave, you’ll be crushed!”
David sprinted back across the room, hearing the screams of the other boarders, and threw himself across his roommate’s mattress.
“Dave, stay here, so in case we die, we die near one another!”
Myer’s voice wavered; there were tears behind the request.
David’s brain was consumed with thoughts of his parents, filled with notions of their grief. He pictured his mother receiving the news of his death; he saw her crumple from sheer loss and blinked away wetness from his own eyes.
Then came Myer’s request, however; and upon hearing the word “die”, David surprised himself by starting to laugh. Even as the remnants of tears dripped from his cheeks, David laughed, and as the world continued to break down, he laughed all the harder.
“Die be hanged, we will live!” David exclaimed. “We’re not ready to die yet!”
David felt suddenly euphoric with clarity. He felt invincible; he felt ready to face mortality itself. It was the will to survive made incarnate, evolutionary biology kicking in at the exact right time, neurotransmitters on overdrive to protect their human host from harm. It felt like power, actually, and just as David delivered this proclamation about his intention to live…the shaking stopped.
***
“Then what happened?” his grandson asked, sounding not-at-all ready for sleep. The child’s eyes were wide, despite hearing the story countless times before, despite it always ending the same way.
David shrugged. Talking about 1906 exhausted him, despite telling the story countless times before, despite it always ending the same way.
“They demolished buildings with dynamite to make a firebreak, so we heard a lot of explosions.”
For the sake of his grandson, David always recounted this next part of the story vaguely, in a mild tone of voice. The boy was only 7, after all; he didn’t yet need to know how bad things in this life can actually get.
“And what else??” the child demanded, never satisfied with his grandfather’s chronicle, always thirsty for more details. David occasionally suspected his grandson requested this story simply to ward off sleep, and he thought longingly of the bourbon downstairs.
“In the beginning, everyone was worried we would run out of food. We were all gathering as much food as we could. The army even came to help.”
…the city was rioting…
“And your house collapsed but you weren’t hurt, right?” his grandson confirmed.
“That’s right,” David concurred, recalling the terror of the aftershocks.
…there were bodies in the street. Some of them were dead, but some were just screaming. Mothers were wailing over their dead children. Someone was begging for help in Yiddish. We brought the wounded in ash carts to the hospital, but the hospital was flat…
“And the whole city was gone, right?? the boy child asked with all the relish of a safe, privileged childhood.
“It was actually the fire,” David explained, “that did all the damage. There were so many, and they burned for three whole days because all the water mains were broken...”
***
Myer squinted through the fine layer of grit coating his eyeglasses.
“What’s that?” he asked David.
Smoke was rising in billows, the sky smothering under a blanket of ash. Everywhere, fires were springing up; everywhere, fires were spreading.
Dave craned his neck to look in the direction Myer was pointing.
At first, they were small, isolated to the piles of rubble that were once hotels and businesses and churches. Then they spread to other hotels and businesses and churches. Broken gas mains nourished the flames; broken water mains thwarted all efforts to contain them.
“What do you see?” he asked. David’s eyes were stinging in the acrid air. The white noise of human agony, that Greek chorus of pain they had been hearing since the quake, was now accompanied by the crackling of the fire as it ate. These two rackets resonated in his fingertips and his back teeth, a melody and a harmony filling him up until there was no room for rational thought; until he felt the stirrings of madness.
Myer was still squinting into the distance, Union Square laid out before them, detritus strewed haphazardly to every compass point. There were guns in every direction: Army; Navy; police; armed vigilantes. The looting had started early as the initial shock passed and fear of hunger spread. The troops had shown up shortly after, claiming permission from Mayor Schmitz to shoot all criminals on sight. Martial law was slowly returning order to the streets, but what harm was there left to do? Everything the earthquake hadn’t destroyed was burning.
“It’s a person,” Myer said vaguely to David, his gaze firmly upon the husk of the Union League building. “It’s a man.”
It was a man, David realized, finally seeing what Myer was seeing, a body drifting in the drafts off the surface of the flames. It was hung from the scaffolding which still stood by the crumpled walls; a warning to the ground below.
“I see it,” David said quietly, averting his gaze.
Myer was still staring at the corpse, its eyes bulging, its face a ghastly gray. David knew he should feel shock and horror. He knew this was an atrocity. But they had seen so much death, and there was so much fear, and the world was turned upside down. David, frankly, felt desensitized to the horror of it all; he was just numb.
“Let’s go, buddy,” David said to Myer, pulling lightly on his arm. Myer followed him meekly, turning back after a moment like Lot’s wife witnessing the destruction of Sodom.
“Should we…tell someone?” he asked. “Should we get a soldier?”
“It probably was the soldiers,” David explained patiently. “The man was a thief.”
This was said coldly, and with certainty; inside, David felt nothing at all. “C’mon…we need to find some food.”
He tugged gently on his friend once again, and they resumed trudging through the ankle-high debris, having nowhere else to go but forward.
***
“And now,” David said, “it’s time to go to sleep.”
He always skipped the part about the man hanging from the scaffolding when he told this story to his eager grandson.
Time had healed many of the wounds from the 1906 quake, both the bodily injuries and the psychological scars. But David had never been able to forget that body rotating slowly on its noose; now, when he thought about it, he felt a great deal.
The bourbon was good for that, too, though.
“But…” protested the boy. “But what about sleeping in the park? I want to hear…”
“That’s enough,” David said resolutely. “It’s bedtime. I’ll tell you about the tents some other time.”
Reluctantly, the child lay back against his pillow. David caressed the boy’s hair for a moment and made sure the blanket was tucked in tight. Then he switched off the light, grateful as always for the time with his family, grateful as always that the children were in bed.
David descended the stairs towards the Lounge and the drink he had earned, grateful as always to be alive.
THE END
Shannon Frost Greenstein (she/her) resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and persnickety cats. She is the author of These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things (Really Serious Literature, 2022) and Correspondence to Nowhere (Nonfiction, Bone & Ink Press, 2022). Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter.
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