The Quaking
Spenser feels it building, somewhere at the far edges of perception. Under the edges. Hot stones and sunless granite ready to break, eager to shear and snap. The unseen world charged with a desperate energy older than human reckoning.
It isn’t fear, not quite. At first he thinks it’s a primal sensation, something encoded in genomes and deep time. But then Spenser realizes that what he feels in the darkness of his bedroom is actually a product of modernity, or maybe he means civilization. It’s dread. Tectonic dread. A distinctly urban strain of tectonic dread.
Faultlines. Shifting mantles. Continental crust. Subduction. Fissures. Ruptures. Rubble. Dust.
It doesn’t always come at night, but the dread is fuller – meatier – in the dark. In his bed, on his back, eyes open. 3, 2, 1, now. 3, 2, 1, now. 3, 2, 1, now. Eyes closed. 3, 2, 1, now. He thinks that if he gets the timing right then it will somehow lessen the absolute shock of it all and he will be able to bridge the rift even as it comes into being, sync with the future that starts 3, 2, 1, now.
You won’t believe this, but I knew it was coming. I called it. Not in the gas-powered generator and storm cellar of freeze-dried tenderloin doomsday-prepper kind of way, but I was laying in bed thinking, Here it comes I just know it, 3, 2, 1, now, there’s been all this activity along the Ring of Fire, the Aleutian Trench lighting up like crazy, Kodiak got rocked and down south that big one in Oaxaca. And I was laying there thinking this and then it happened just as I finished the countdown. 3, 2, 1, now. What are the odds? I called it, swear to God.
Grainy aerial footage from the local traffic helicopter, steam or toxic gas seeping from the rippled pavement. This the dreadful scene in Spenser’s mind. His chest feels airy, his heart untethered. Dazed commuters exiting their cars, phones out, dowsing for signal. Ever skyward, our despair, away from the unfaithful earth. Nervous to abandon their cars on the impassable freeway and so they move hesitantly, following one small crowd and then another, tiny murmurations of confusion. Spenser’s eyelids folding deep purples into the blackness of the room each time he opens or closes his eyes. Cut to street level, the steady shot of the tottering brownstone belted with saggy yellow police tape — we’re live on the scene and it could crumble at any moment. 3, 2, 1, now. 3, 2, 1, now.
How to explain this shameful longing?
The problem is that Spenser can’t quite weave himself into the future foretold, can’t quite picture himself stumbling about with the herd of drivers, or emerging from the screaming lobby of an apartment complex, splashing bottled water on his face to wash away the pulverized drywall. If it doesn’t happen 3, 2, 1, now, then where will he be when it hits? And who will he become in the ruinous ever after? He thinks about words like scavenger and bandit, but they don’t seem to provide any clarity even if he likes how they sound wordlessly in his head.
In the dark, Spenser dreamily conjuring, trying to find his place amidst the disaster that refuses to come.
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