I.
I hear on the radio that it is earthquake weather.
Earthquake weather in Los Angeles means hazy and congested, means thick clots of heat, means I stand in the middle of my backyard watching the tree branches dance in the hot breeze.
I remember your hot breath on the back of my neck in the middle of the night, remember slow dancing sock-footed while the salmon burned on the stove, remember wanting to get close enough to fall forward into you, to climb inside of you. Your sharp jaw carves a half circle into my midsection, the soft dip of your upper lip guts me. There is nothing we can do but wait. Dogs bark. My roommate says she can lend me some of her Xanax. My dad says to keep at least a half- tank of gas in my car. People say
it’s earthquake weather when the air crackles with velvety stillness and the sun pours down like hot black coffee, but the truth is, there is no weather below the earth’s surface. We have no way
of knowing.
We don’t know
whose fault it is.
We didn’t listen.
I sleep with
tennis shoes on.
I go to a friend’s
art opening
downtown and
look up the
entire time, an
emergency kit
hidden in my
purse. The hairs
on the back of
my arm stand
at attention. My
roommate and
I crunch anti-
acids like candy.
You wake me
at five in the
morning with your hardness; fuck me facing the bare white wall. We fuck like two people swimming furiously in different directions. I remember looking at you years ago, talking fast about something in a dark bar in San Francisco, and thinking, this man knows everything, and this man loves me. In my dreams, the earth swallows me up and all I can hear is glass shattering. I get very drunk and call you eight times. You do not pick up. LA is a dry rattling cough. LA is that cottony taste in your mouth when you wake up hungover with your phone in your hand. We sit in silence on the 210, the lights downtown winking at us, my stomach slicing into shoelaces of bitterness, tying itself into knots. Your mouth is a long line. I loved you.
I loved you so much I took a pregnancy test in the bathroom
of a Mediterranean restaurant in Berkeley and thought, if I’m pregnant, maybe we’ll keep it. I forget the rest. There’s nothing we can do but wait. The earthquake will unzip California down its dry, knobby spine, tectonic plates rubbing together like rolling your shoulders back after a long day, like saying out loud what you are scared to admit to yourself, like finally: relief.
II.
Nothing happens. The air is violently calm. Every moment
feels big, like it could be the moment right before. My thoughts spiral like tracing thick circles with a black Sharpie. I ignore my dad’s calls. I read that animals can sense an earthquake seconds, minutes, even days before it arrives; dogs howling and running in circles, cats leaping out of windows, ants abandoning their mounds, toads swarming the streets like a biblical plague. Every time my dogs bark, I wonder what they’re trying to tell me. I buy an earthquake kit off of Amazon for thirty dollars and place it outside
my bedroom door ceremoniously. Before a big earthquake, people report hearing a sound like a freight train, a low frequency vibration that rips right through the atmosphere. I forgive you because I don’t want us to be fighting when it happens. Disaster bleaches everything black and white. Some people get headaches
or hear ringing in
their ears just before
an earthquake hits,
their bodies somehow sensitive to stress in the earth’s crust, like when you press your palm against hot concrete and feel it hum.You get so drunk off martinis at the Roosevelt that you fall in the David Hockney pool and the security guard has to fish you out.You get so drunk at my friend Bertie’s wedding that you chain smoke with the caterers during the ceremony and fall asleep on a bench. Sometimes you ask me to leave in the middle of the night, your voice small and sharp, two rocks rubbing together. When
I pretend to be asleep, you sleep in your car. I feel like I am building a case. I feel like I am waiting for a sign. The pop of a starter pistol that tells me to go. Sometimes it is less clear: the long loneliness of your naked back in bed, the record clicking in the background, needing to be flipped over, the clenched jaw of your silence. My left ear starts ringing off and on. I go to the ear doctor and he is shocked by my tears, fumbling to hand me a latex glove to wipe my eyes. He says it could be stress. He says sometimes your mind gets sick like your body.
Later that week I accidentally carve a half moon into my right thumb with a rusty can opener while opening a can of tomatoes for sauce. It all happened very quickly: a fleshy knot of pain, and then I felt too stunned to move. My thumb smeared with blood like a leering, punched-out smile. How can there even be that much blood in a finger? Wrapped in a dishtowel, my thumb throbs like a miniscule heartbeat. In Italy and Japan, people report feeling phantom quakes for weeks after big earthquakes, their minds feverish with landlocked seasickness. Your motor cortex, the corner of your brain that adjusts when you miss a step or make an unpredictable movement, goes haywire, neurons lighting up like kids playing in the street with fireworks. It can’t predict when it will happen again, so it goes into vigilant overdrive searching for signs that it is. Isn’t it better to think the earth is always shifting beneath your feet than to be swallowed up by it again?
The trick to the tomato sauce I was making is to leave it alone. Put one can of tomatoes, a thick block of butter, and half an onion face down in a pan, and leave it alone to simmer for forty-five minutes. Don’t even stir it. This will be hard, especially for someone who presses bruises and pulls hangnails. The first time I made this sauce with you, we got drunk while we waited and ate forkfuls straight out of the pan, spattering red stains all over the white walls. The key to the sauce is to walk away. Leave the room. My sick brain understands the concept of phantom quakes, but some other part of me, stubborn as a toddler, sitting in the basement of my mind watching home movies of the last five years, can’t stop thinking it’s the real thing.
III.
When it finally happens, it will not be as bad as everyone
thought. It will not happen in the middle of the night. It will not happen at the exhausted crescendo of a screaming match. It will not happen when anyone expects it to. Try to remember that there was no way to prevent it, that everyone said it was long overdue. It will happen in the car on the way back from
a friend’s beach house in Redondo. My feet are crusted with sand and the backs of my thighs are prickling spastically, the warning sign of a bad sunburn. Our leftover seafood from lunch is packed in a Styrofoam box in my lap. You will not look at me. I could have sighed and looked out the window. I could have turned on the radio. Instead, I ask you what’s wrong.
We’re inching forward in late Sunday afternoon traffic, sunlight glaring off the asphalt of the freeway. In a pinched voice, you say, I can’t do this anymore. You sound like someone is strangling you. My left ear is ringing. I met you five years ago at a party
in college. I went home with you but wouldn’t let you take off my underwear. I gave you my phone number but didn’t text you back, and then we ran into each other in the street and you walked me home. When I was younger, everything felt like a sign. The whole world, pulsating and neon-lit. The earth was solid beneath my feet. Why couldn’t I leave you? I say this out loud and then repeat it.
I look out the window at the blue smear of ocean. You wipe your eyes behind your sunglasses. I stare hard at the Styrofoam box in my lap, the raised letters that spell out thank you. I feel like I have to do something terrible, like kill someone or keep
a horrible secret, when all I have to do is keep waking up, keep washing my face, keep boiling water for coffee, keep going—just without _you_. When it finally happens, when it all collapses so easily like something sick that had never been strong, what will surprise you the most, standing in the rubble, is the silence. The slow exhale of it, the long black canyon of it, how easily you settle into sadness like a swamp, how shamelessly the world goes on. Maybe I knew I would never leave the room. Maybe
I was waiting for this all along. Wispy streaks of pink muddle the sky as the sun starts to set. It will be weeks before I realize that every ending is a beginning. I sit on my trembling hands. My heart hammers in my ears: a throbbing paper cut, an empty elevator, three baby birds with mouths wide open. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. We fucked it all up. I forget the rest.
