Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

In the end, I settled on a field high up in the hills that ring Kobe — a deserted place with a panoramic view of the city and the harbor below. I arrived at exactly four-thirty-one, another coincidence — the time Northridge had exploded, exactly one year before. I parked on a service road, unloaded the trunk and trudged to the center of that field. I set the video camera on a tripod, hooked up the seismograph, lit the lantern, and lay everything else where I could reach it, when the time came.

The hour I spent waiting was one of the most wonderful in my life. All the anxiety of the preceding months left my body; there was no more wondering about how I’d tell the scientific community about this, what their reaction would be. I’d told them, and they hadn’t believed me. The story had made the newspapers, and I’d been dismissed as yet another apocalyptic crank. What people didn’t understand was that I was predicting not destruction but change, a larger picture, the image of a world in a state of solid flux.

And yet, sitting in my camp chair above the city, huddled into the bulk of my thick down coat for warmth, I fell under the spell of a most striking illusion — the permanence of reality, the immutability of matter, and the everlasting nature of all things. It was the stars that did it, I think, the same stars Dad used to study, sneering at your claims that the earth was all there is. I looked up and began to name the constellations — Big Dipper, Little Dipper, and the three sharp points of Orion’s Belt. I remembered Dad telling me that, long after the earth had disappeared into the crucible of the sun, the stars would still be there, that it was just a conceit of yours, this importance of our world.

But now, I began to think the two things weren’t mutually exclusive. My eyes moved from the stars to the lights of the night-wrapped city, to the twinkles of ship-light sparkling from the waters of the harbor, and I started to see how they were connected. I let my eyes go unfocused, and the boundaries disappeared. When I focused them again, I was struck by how solid everything looked, the trees fringing the perimeter of this field, the skyscrapers downtown, the four and five-story residential buildings in the city’s sprawling neighborhoods. I picked up the binoculars and watched as neon signs flashed on and off throughout the city like heartbeats. An elevated highway ran along the lip of the shoreline, and train tracks, empty in the depth of night, cut a swath through the center of town. The night was so still and silent that the city seemed like an inevitability God had set into place, fully formed and complete. Thinking that, I began to doubt myself for the first time …

And that’s when it happened. The first rush was like a stutter, and after that everything moved like a dream. The trees around me began to spasm, and the lights of the city flared as transformers began to blow. Buildings shook and some of them fell. I was thrown, spread-eagle, across the grass — it was like being on the back of a beast, of an elephant running wild. I began to doubt gravity’s existence, to think the earth itself might throw me. With the transformers went the lights, and then the quake shook my lantern to the ground, where it seemed to bounce in several directions at once, casting irregular beams of light across the field before me like a spastic searchlight. Beyond the narrow focus of its glow, the darkness was so thick it was surreal, as all the light in the world had been snuffed out. And yet, through it all, there were the stars …

When the shaking finally ended, the stillness was intense. Not even the whisper of a ghost. From the city below came the screaming of car alarms, a million of them punctuating the horror of the night. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, felt around for my machines. I kept feeling the earth beneath me to make sure it was there. The video camera was still running, although it, too, had fallen, and the lens was dug face first in the dirt. I found the binoculars, turned them in the direction of the darkened city, where I saw the hot spots of newborn fires, and wisps of curling smoke rising to meet the sky. The elevated highway I’d noticed only minutes before had shaken onto its side; I looked at it once, twice, and a third time before I understood what I saw. All over Kobe, buildings were down, some in rubble, others slid akimbo halfway off their foundations. And the people, from this distance, were small as insects, swarming from the ruins into the streets.

I put down the binoculars, and lay out across the grass. It was cold, but my body had gone numb; it didn’t matter anymore. For a moment, the thought flashed across my mind that it had happened as I’d predicted, that I was vindicated, that I was right. But then I remembered that elevated highway, down off its base like a child’s plaything, and I thought less about the people who hadn’t listened to me than those who’d never heard. By now, there were fires big enough to see with the naked eye, and sirens pulsing underneath the car alarms in a sharp and steady refrain. I tried to block the sounds out of my mind, but it was as if the night itself were screaming, and my entire body began to clench. I picked up the binoculars again, but it was too overwhelming. There was no such thing as scientific detachment anymore.

Instead, I found myself doing what my father might have done. I turned away from the earth and looked to the sky.