Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

Looking up, she saw the Acropolis bulge outward as if it were being pumped up like a balloon from within. Then a narrow, zigzag crack ran helter-skelter down the brickwork from the top story to the bottom. But the building held. It looked like a big old cypress tree, shaken but not toppled by a violent wind.

Alida wasn’t afraid. She felt as she had the day before, watching the dogfish — she in her world, they in theirs, with a sort of protective glassy film dividing them. Comfortable, now that she was sitting down, she concentrated on making observations, like she was going to have to write an essay on the earthquake. The last one — they’d done a project on it — had been a 6.8, and Seattle had been miles north of its epicenter in Nisqually. This one felt bigger. Much bigger. Alida figured it might even be an 8.0. The Richter Scale was like exponential : a 7.0 was ten times stronger than a 6.0, so an 8.0 would be really, really big.

All of downtown was shivering : the Smith Tower, the office skyscrapers, every building in sight had got the shakes. When she hadn’t been looking, the witch’s-hat top of the Smith Tower had disappeared — hatless, it looked funny, like it was naked. Glass was falling all around her, and every window was flexing in its frame — but how weirdly pliable and stretchy glass turned out to be! Then they reached the breaking point, crazed over, and came floating down into the street in a zillion little pieces, making a sound like churning surf. Several windows were gone from the Acropolis, and in the empty spaces Alida could see people’s stuff — books, bottles, ornaments, CDs, plates and dishes — sailing lazily in air.

Down below ground, the grinding noises were getting louder, the rats really getting their teeth into the job.

From somewhere, she couldn’t tell where, came the long, tumbling thunder of what must be a building coming down. But from where she sat, all she could see was a trembling city, still more or less intact, shivering on the brink of she knew not what. It seemed like not just Seattle but the whole country must be like this, caught in the grip of a delirious rippling and shuddering that wouldn’t stop.

The dog bowl was almost empty now, the sidewalks steadily heaping up with smashed stucco, smashed bricks, smashed tiles, smashed glass. But in the middle of the street it was okay, at least so far, though when Alida felt the ground beneath her moving like it had muscles, it made her think of horseback riding: she was riding the quake, saddle joggling underneath her, holding on.

Amazing that the bottom of Elliott Bay was bared. With the sea gone so far out, how and when would it return?

It came to her, as she saw the Smith Tower go into a kind of slow corkscrew motion, twisting impossibly, defying whatever law of physics ought to govern steel frames, wood, and terra-cotta, that never ever had she been so piercingly conscious of her own singular existence in the world.

A cat — one of Mr. Kawasuki’s — bolted across the road, a yowling streak of stand-on-end orange fur, and its terror roused her from her dreamy detachment. Where was Tad? Had her mom taken shelter safely? This temblor was going on forever. For the first time since the quake began, Alida felt fear, a wrenching twist of ice in her bowels. The chorus of car alarms was joined by a mad band of sirens and whistles, and, from somewhere close by, a thin and lonely cry, like a sheet being torn down the middle, that Alida was shocked to realize was her own.

MINNA, sitting on the patio, was puzzled. She was certain Augie had said the tide was coming in and that’s why he’d be going out in his kayak before dinner. Yet she could see the water withdrawing from the bay, retreating to the cold deeps of Puget Sound. One by one, new turtle-backed sandbanks were surfacing. Either she or Augie must have got it wrong. It was probably her mistake; she got so muddled nowadays, and had never understood the mystery of the tides. Augie had tried more than once to explain the phases of the moon and the force of gravity, but she hadn’t listened properly. Now, watching the sea draining from the land, she felt a little safer in herself, as she always did at low tide; she just wished it would stay that way. She was glad that Augie wouldn’t be kayaking this evening. They could have an early supper of clams in a sauce of shallots, parsley, cream, and cheese, and Minna thought that in a few minutes she’d better start preparing the sauce.

She heard the sudden clatter of Augie’s footsteps coming down the uncarpeted stairs.

“Minna? Minna? Minna! ”

Jiminy crickets! What did he want now?