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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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i HAIT It here
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Seven is supposed to be a lucky number, but not for me. Because 7.0 is the magnitude of the earthquake that happened on Tuesday. I’m in the nursing college, in what should be the bottom floor of a five-story building. But through all the rubble I can see the sky, which means most of the 200 people in the building are dead.
My next class started at 5:00, but I was taking a break in the basement stairwell, listening to the news on my portable radio; it’s the only reason I’m still alive. When the shaking started, I stood in the doorway into the basement hall. I heard a couple of students behind me, and as I turned towards them the roof behind me collapsed in. I got scared, so I crawled underneath the hollow beneath the concrete stairs and covered my face. I heard metal bend and timbers snap, and the wet crack of sheering dry wall. I knew something collapsed overhead, and I held every breath, thinking it would be the last one, and not wanting to die on an exhale; an instinct I’d never known told me I didn’t want my last experience to be, “I can’t breathe.” I didn’t move for a while after. Every time I thought it was finally safe, I heard the groan of wood, or the scrape of metal on concrete. Eventually I willed myself to put a hand out from under the stairs, but just as it reached the cold stone floor, an aftershock caused my hand to tremble violently, and I pulled it back to my relative safety under the stairs. After the first shock, I got up. I realized that the shaking would likely continue, but that I couldn’t stay there forever. And I had remembered the two students in the hall. The door swung inward, so it wasn’t blocked, but immediately beyond the doorway rubble was piled at least waist high. There was a small cavity, where the ceiling had only partially caved in, so that ten feet down the hall was still accessible; beyond that was a wall of rubble. I climbed onto the pile of mangled boards, trying to rebuild the hall in my mind, to figure out where the two students had been standing in the moment before they disappeared beneath debris. When I thought I had the spot, I started to dig. The going was slow, not least of which because I had to be careful not to poke myself with any nails, because I knew it would be some time before I could get a tetanus shot down here. Eventually I got to within a few inches of the floor; I realized they must not have been there. I hoped they’d managed to get inside one of the classrooms, and maybe beneath desks, because the alternative was that they were smashed so flat beneath the rubble that there was no possibility they were alive. But I started to wonder if maybe I was just trying to be lazy, because I didn’t want to have to dig anymore; maybe I was wrong about where they were, and I just needed to keep searching. It was at that moment that the next aftershock began, and I heard the large, horrible creak of a heavy wooden beam overhead. I looked up, and saw it, nearly as wide as me, stuck over a span of uncollapsed floor, keeping an avalanche of material suspended precariously just a few feet above me. And I was close enough to see a crack halfway through the beam, widening as it bowed down towards me. I ran over the rubble towards the safety of my doorway, and slammed the door behind me as the rubble crashed down behind me. Through the small slit window in the door I could see that the hall was now completely blocked; all I could do was hope those two students had gotten into one of the rooms. There were several more aftershocks following that, but they all seemed less potent. Parts of the upper floor stairwell collapsed during the first quake, cutting off travel about halfway up to the first floor, but the aftershocks didn’t disrupt the dam at all. Every few hours I turned on the radio. The Red Cross is estimating 50,000 dead; the government says about 200,000, though they’re probably inflating their numbers to increase international aid efforts- which even if their estimates were correct, would help push the toll down closer to the Red Cross number. Or maybe I’m deluding myself, because I don’t want to become part of the larger number. It seems like people are pledging lots of money and aid, but a lot of people are upset because it’s not getting to them fast enough; of course, our infrastructure was haphazard even before the earthquake destroyed the capital. Frankly, it all seems too far away; I can see the sky brighten and darken, but the surface, the world, it’s something I’m not a part of, right now. My mind wanders to my apartment, my bed, all my belongings- most likely crushed flat; I’m secretly happy I didn’t adopt that dog that made my eyes water. But it’s dissociated acceptance, like in a dream where you’re falling and suddenly you begin to float instead, where you feel relieved, but the danger never was very real to begin with. I’ve heard the prison collapsed after catching fire, that most of the inmates fled into the city. I imagine chaos and fear as criminals rule the streets, but the radio doesn’t reflect that, which is almost a pity, because in this hole I could use nearly any distraction. I suppose I should be thankful that I can see the sky, that I can tell how long I’ve been here. But I suspect if I didn’t have a skylight I’d just sleep more; at this rate, I’m almost equally in danger of being bored to death as I am to die from exhaustion, dehydration or disease. Of course, perhaps I’ll simply die any moment, when the debris stuck in the stairwell overhead finally breaks free. But what bothers me most is not that I’m stuck here, in this time-sensitive mousetrap, waiting for it to spring, but that I’m not out there. I’d decided to go to the nursing school because I wanted to be useful. I couldn’t drive out the gangs, or clean up the corruption, or revitalize our infrastructure, but at least as a nurse I could help people. And now, in what might be my country’s moment of greatest need, I’m stuck in a hole in the ground. I’m not fully accredited, but I could dress wounds, assist in basic triage- but instead I’m stuck down here, alone, with no one at all to help. Even if I had a paper cut or a scrape I’d have felt a little more useful. And maybe I shouldn’t be complaining, because unlike a lot of people I’m not dead yet. But stuck here, I’m not really alive yet, either. And the waiting, the waiting is almost as deadly. |
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