In the Event
IN THE EVENT of an earthquake , I texted Tony, we’ll meet at the corner of Chinaman’s Vista, across from the café with the rainbow flag .
Jen had asked about our earthquake plan. We didn’t have one. We were new to the city, if it could be called that. Tony described it to friends back home as a huge village. But very densely populated, I added, and not very agrarian.
We had come here escaping separate failures on the opposite coast. Already the escape was working. In this huge urban village, under the dry bright sky, we were beginning to regard our former ambitions as varieties of regional disease, belonging to different climates, different times.
“Firstly,” Jen said, “you need a predetermined meeting point. In case you’re not together and cell service is clogged. Which it’s likely to be. Because, you know, disasters.”
Jen was the kind of person who said things like firstly and because, disasters.
She was a local local, born and raised and stayed. Tony had met Jen a few years ago at an electronic music festival back east and introduced us, thinking we’d get along. She had been traveling for work. Somehow we stayed in touch. We shared interests: she worked as a tech consultant but composed music as a hobby; I made electronic folk songs with acoustic sounds.
“The ideal meeting place,” Jen explained, “is outside, walkable from both your workplaces, and likely free of obstacles.”
“Obstacles?”
“Collapsed buildings, downed power lines, blah blah hazmat, you know.”
Chinaman’s Vista was the first meeting place that came to mind. It was a big grassy field far from the water, on high ground. Cypress trees lined its edges. In their shade, you could sit and watch the well-behaved dogs of well-behaved owners let loose to run around. We had walked past it a number of times on our way from this place or that—the grocery store, the pharmacy, the taqueríaand commented on its charm with surprise, forgetting we’d come across it before. In the event of a significant earthquake, and the aftershocks that typically follow significant earthquakes, I imagined we would be safe there—from falling debris at least—as we searched through the faces of worried strangers for each other.
OTHER FORCES could separate or kill us: landslides, tsunamis, nuclear war. I was aware that we lived on the side of a sparsely vegetated hill, that we were four miles from the ocean, a mile from the bay. To my alarmed texts Tony responded that if North Korea was going to bomb us, this region would be a good target: reachable by missile, home to the richest and fastest-growing industry in the world. Probably they would go for one of the cities south of us, he typed, where the headquarters of the big tech companies were based. nuclear blast wind can travel at > 300 m/s, Tony wrote . Tony knew things like this.
He clarified: meters per second
which gives us
I watched Tony’s avatar think.
approx 3 mins to find shelter after detonation
More likely we’d get some kind of warning x hours before the bomb struck. Jen had a car. She could pick us up, we’d drive north as fast as we could. Jen’s aunt who lived an hour over the bridge had a legit basement, concrete reinforced during the Cold War.
I thought about the active volcano one state away, which, if it erupted, could cover the city in ash. One very large state away, Tony reminded me. But the ash that remained in the air might be so thick it obscured the sun, plunging this usually temperate coast into winter. I thought about the rising ocean, the expanding downtown at sea-level, built on landfill. Tony worked in the expanding downtown. Was Tony a strong swimmer? I asked with two question marks. His response:
don’t worry ’lil chenchen
if i die i’ll die
I WAS LISTENING to an audiobook, on 1.65x speed, about a techno-dystopic future Earth under threat of annihilation from alien attack. The question was whether humans would kill each other first or survive long enough to be shredded in the fast-approaching weaponized supermassive black hole. Another question was whether humans would abandon life on Earth and attempt to continue civilization on spacecraft. Of course there were not enough spacecraft for everyone.
When I started listening, it was at normal 1.0 speed. Each time I returned I switched the speed dial up by 0.05x. It was a gripping book, full of devices for sustaining mystery despite the obvious conclusion. I couldn’t
