Orientation (16 page)

Forty-five minutes later, in the thinning light of late afternoon, she sat hidden in her office. She was on the floor, with her knees to her chest, in a far corner of the file-box labyrinth. There were occasional knocks on the door from potential well-wishers, which Clarissa Snow ignored. She was listening for the Claims Unit stragglers to just go home, her ear attuned only to the inevitable sound of an empty office—the enormous quietudes of Friday that roll through the corridors and lap into the conference rooms and cubicles like a submerging tide. And then she could slip away, slip down the stairwell and outside and into the din and clamor of the evening exodus, leaving behind a tin of cookies that she would never taste, flowers that would be dead by Monday, and a tightly taped box heavy with Clarissa Snow’s best work.

The sun was gone, and a cold wind gusted, sending trash into whirlpools on the pavement. As she walked along, Clarissa Snow set herself to the task of tearing up the going-away card. It was filled with signatures, black with names and phone numbers and congenial exhortations: “Let’s do lunch!” and “Come visit!” and “Give me a call!”—forays into a world of easy acquaintance that Clarissa Snow (alas!) would never make. She tore the card into bits thoroughly and well, but left in her wake a confetti trail. It fluttered and capered behind her as she bobbed and weaved through the rush hour teem, racing for her bus. And to the momentary amusement of passersby racing for their own buses, Clarissa Snow looked like a woman in flight, like a fugitive pursued by a tiny, relentless parade that, no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t shake.

III.

Winter came and went. Weeks of heavy rains, sheeting down concrete slopes and declivities, gushing in cataracts from gutters, sputtering from downspouts and roiling into storm drains—all of it subsided, then ceased. The sewers now sang with the rush of winter runoff, and the city, having hunkered down for the rains, seemed now to lay itself out to dry, its sidewalks steaming contentedly in the sun.

Spring was here, and progress was abloom in the Municipal Clerk’s Office. A major project was under way; it was called the Conversion, and it was exactly that—the conversion of all records into a computerized database management system. Birth and death, marriage and divorce, the purchase and sale of home and property, the licensing of business entities and the bankruptcies of same—the paper trail of perfidious Fortune’s sway over the lives of the inhabitants of the city would be represented as coded entries on a data field screen, tagged and cross-indexed for easy access and retrieval.

Clarissa Snow was assigned to this project, which was expected to last through the summer. The job was a plum, and Clarissa Snow—having gotten Mrs. D. out of many a job pickle—was now reaping a bounty of plums. Life in the Agency had tempered her into a loyal and hardworking employee. Her evaluations were impeccable, and her reputation was beyond reproach. She had moved into an echelon of temporary service attained by few, which conferred upon her the Agency’s most coveted emblems of appreciation: the Exceptional Performance Pin and the assurance of permanent temporary employment.

Her workday in the Municipal Clerk’s Office began at 8:00 a.m. This was her routine. A doughnut, an orange, and a cup of coffee at her desk accompanied her review of the contents of her in-box, which contained the previous day’s Data Entry Error Run (her error stats down, always down) and the current day’s Municipal Records Register Inventory. Then she was off, inventory in hand, to pull her Registers for the day. They were kept in an abandoned conference room next to the Conversion Manager’s office and were stacked everywhere: on the table and the chairs, on the floor, on the wide sill along the window. Entering the dim, silent room, Clarissa Snow always felt for a moment as if she were interrupting a secret meeting. The Registers were narrow books half a yard long, with brown leather covers. Some of them had become dark and stiff and webbed with cracks, while others had been worn to a dull gold. She ran her hand over the pebbled surface of one Register, along the fissured length of another. Something stirred inside her. If she lingered, she would have imagined things about these books: that their covers, for instance, felt like maps coming to tactile life, their topographies—puckered and stubbly with age—emerging beneath her fingers; or that they looked like tiny church doors, the weathered portals to miniature cathedrals. If she lingered, she would have wondered about who filled these pages with their crabbed entries, about the lives of clerks long gone who scrivened day after day in witness to the transactions of others long gone. But Clarissa Snow did not linger. She logged out two Registers and returned to her desk.

Morning break was signaled by the appearance of the Database Systems Coordinator, who stopped by on his way to the kitchenette, his head hovering like a benevolent planet just above Clarissa Snow’s cubicle partition. A twenty-second stroll to the lunchroom together, empty mugs aloft; idle chat while waiting for coffee to brew, about the Conversion—its glitches and bugs, its progress and its promise; the preparation of their coffees with creamers and sweeteners; and the return stroll to Clarissa Snow’s desk, whereupon the Database Systems Coordinator, a kind and shaggy-haired bear of a man, thanked her and trudged off to his own desk. This was morning break.

She took lunch at 1:00 p.m., a late lunch to avoid the crowds. She had discovered, at the top of a multistoried parking structure, an abandoned rooftop park. There were untrimmed trees and a weed-spattered lawn. Moldy concrete benches surrounded a scummed-over pond that once contained fish. Skinny pigeons lurched about. No one else ever came here. This was her respite. Fifteen minutes to get to the park and fifteen minutes to get back to work left her with a half hour. She spread a newspaper on a bench and sat on it. She ate her bag lunch: sliced pineapple rounds, a handful of green olives, a bran cupcake, a can of vegetable juice. She closed her eyes. She listened to the rumble of cars moving beneath her and the rustle and whisper of neglected trees, still damp with rain.

She was back at work by 2:00 p.m. And upon her return every afternoon, she found sitting in the geographic center of her desktop a piece of candy, a foil-wrapped chocolate coin. (Computer monitor and keyboard were attached to an insectlike ergonomic device that suspended them in the air next to her chair. Her desktop, save for an in-box and a yellow legal pad and the day’s Registers stacked neatly, was thus blissfully bare. There was no phone.) Sometimes, while settling in for the afternoon’s labors, she unwrapped and ate the coin. But because chocolate held no power over her—it was merely sticky, then chalky, in her mouth, and hard to swallow—she more often than not tossed the coin into her bag and forgot about it. The mystery of the chocolate coin—Who left it? Why her?—niggled at Clarissa Snow for only the first few days of its appearance; thereafter, the regularity of its appearance on her desktop slipped easily into the regularities of her afternoon routine.

And what can be said about the rest of Clarissa Snow’s afternoon? In-box: the Conversion Timeline Update and the Key Entry Rate Run (her entry rate stats up, always up). Afternoon break: nibbling on a handful of pearl onions in a far corner of the lunchroom; thumbing through a magazine, a monthly that delineated the success stories of small-business entrepreneurs; and acknowledging the halting hello of the Database Systems Coordinator, the kind and hovering largeness of him blotting out the light whenever he came upon her. Bathroom break; watercooler break; a run to the Supplies Cabinet for a fresh legal pad. And then quitting time: returning and logging her Registers and, while exiting the database and shutting down the computer, making her mental assessment of the day’s work—
a
good
day’s work,
she thought. She was delayed by chitchat with the Conversion Manager while dropping off her Register Inventory for the next day’s Timeline Update, and then she was gone, zooming down the stairwell and outside to race for the 5:17 express.

She maneuvered expertly through the crowds and soon found a spot in the curbside boarding line for her bus. And as she ransacked her bag for correct change—the line was moving briskly—a shadow fell upon her and a desperate wheezing sound caused her to look up and into the stricken face of the Database Systems Coordinator. He was gasping for air. But he was also trying to speak to her, struggling with a hem and haw that—combined with his struggle for oxygen—made what he was trying to say unintelligible to Clarissa Snow. She caught something about how fast she walks, then gleaned a question of some sort, something about tomorrow’s lunch hour. But she was stepping up and into the bus, and its engine was revving for departure. Impulsively, Clarissa Snow reached into the bottom of her bag and then out through the closing doors, and—by way of apology for her distraction and haste, for her inability to understand—poured into this man’s massive and gentle hands a rain of coins. Gold- and silver-foiled bullion spilled around his feet as the doors shut on him and the bus roared away from the curb where he stood. Until finally he turned his head away from the receding bus, stooped heavily to pick up the litter of sweets on the pavement, and lumbered homeward, unwrapping and eating along the way each and every one of his unheeded offerings.

The 5:17 express was crammed, as usual—a stew of human heat, dank and thick and close, and Clarissa Snow loved it. She loved to ride the bus, to feel its pitch and roll beneath her feet and the vibrations of its aggrieved engine thrumming into her leg bones; to hear the swell and lull of muted conversations around her, their cadences broken by the exhilarating punch of laughter. Riding the bus, she felt immersed in the world, felt its press and push and jostle, its gentle and yielding weight sliding past and around and against her body. For this is what she loved most of all—the simple touch of another, random and intimate and essential. For no one is alone on a bus. The lowering sun flashed between high-rises, and the light that flickered in the grimy bus windows was harsh. She stood swaying blissfully against her fellow commuters and closed her eyes to the light that strobed in the windows all around her—sheets of light flipping, flipping like the pages of a dozen golden books that she would never read.

Whoever you are! motion and reflection are especially for you,

The divine ship sails the divine sea for you.

—Walt Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth”

Shakers

They are called P-waves. They are the primary waves, the first and the fastest, moving at up to six miles per second, near top speed through the fold and furl of basalt layer and slowing when they hit the granite massifs, the slabs of continent borne upon magmatic flows inside the earth’s crust. P-waves are sound waves that move through solid rock and compress and dilate the solid rock they move through, coming at you peristaltic and slinky-like, radiating upward and outward from the seismic event. S-waves follow four to twelve seconds later, depending on where you are from the epicenter. L-waves follow soon after. These last are the slowpokes, the long-period surface waves that arrive like laggards in the seismic sequence, languid and weary, but powerful enough to do all the damage you will read and hear about when it is all over. But the P-waves come first.

When they hit, rats and snakes hightail it out of their burrows. Ants break single-file ranks and scatter blind, and flies roil off garbage bins in shimmering clouds. On the Point Reyes Peninsula, milk cows bust out of feed sheds and bolt for open pasture. Inside aquariums in dentist offices and Chinese restaurants and third-grade classrooms, fish huddle in the corners of their tanks, still as photos of huddled fish. Inside houses built on the alluvial soils of the Sacramento Delta, cockroaches swarm from behind walls, pouring like cornflakes out of kitchen cabinetry and rising in tides from beneath sinks and tubs and shower stalls. Crows go mute. Squirrels play possum. Cats awaken from naps. Dogs guilty of nothing peer guiltily at their masters. Pigeons and starlings clatter fretfully on the eaves and cornices of buildings, then rise en masse and wheel away in spectacular roller-coaster swoops. Pet-shop parakeets attempt the same maneuver in their cages. In the San Francisco Zoo, every single Adélie penguin dives and swims around and around their Plexiglas grotto, seeking the safety of what they believe to be open ocean. Big cats stop pacing, tortoises drop and tuck, elephants get antsy as pee-prone toddlers. The chimps on Monkey Island go ape-shit. Horses everywhere go mulish and nippy. Implacable cattle get skittish as deer. And a lone jogger on a fire trail on Mount Diablo gets lucky, for the starving cougar stalking her gets spooked by the subsonic pulse that rolls under its paw pads, and breaks off the hunt and heads for the hills, bounding silent and unseen up a hidden defile and leaving behind only a shudder of knotweed grass burnished amber by the waning light of an Indian summer dusk.

Subsonic pulses register in measuring devices throughout the state—in boreholes surrounding sag ponds in Big Pines and Lost Lake; in austere concrete vaults strung along abandoned railway through Donner Pass and on the peripheries of rest stops along Highway 99 through the San Joaquin Valley; and inside an array of seemingly derelict, rust-pocked, and listing corrugated-steel shacks smack in the middle of nowhere. Subsonic pulses register in instruments in firehouses, transformer substations, and the watershed property surrounding every dam in the state. In university labs and USGS offices, ink styli twitch against seismograph drums, unnoticed for now. In field stations, in Latrobe and Bear Valley and Mercey Hot Springs, the pulses are registering inside wideband seismometers, flat steel cylinders painted green and bolted onto bedrock outcrops, squat and solid as toads. In Colusa, in Cloverdale and Coalinga and Arbuckle, pulses are registering inside sleek steel-cased tubes stashed down sixty-meter boreholes. Pulses are registering in tubular, yam-size instruments embedded in grabens and scarps and streambeds in fault zones everywhere. The devices are called geophones, and their urethane casings are pumpkin orange, and there are hundreds of them pimpling vistas everywhere, from Cape Mendocino and across the geologic fretworks of the Carrizo Plain and down to the crusted shorelines of the Salton Sea, near marshes where migrating gulls think they are starfish and try to eat them.