The Big One

*Originally published in 2005 at an awesome, and now defunct, e-lit site called The Rose and Thorn.

Mark feels earthquakes before they get here. My first earthquake happened on a Saturday and all that day he’d been acting weird. He kept saying, "Isn’t today a weird day?" But no one thought anything about it because Mark always acted weird, thinking about things in ways the rest of us didn’t.

There were five of us playing cards at his house that night, on the floor since Mark and his roommate Clyde had no table. Mark had been in and out of the game, disappearing into his bedroom for long stretches. "Just checking my e-mail," he kept saying.

Around 10:00 pm he asked us if we smelled something and then the whole room started shaking real slow back and forth. "Woah, shit," said this guy John I was dating at the time, "Shit!" Maybe not my first earthquake – I’d been in LA two months by then –but the first one I really felt. I remember thinking it was slower than I’d imagined, but scarier too, the ground moving under us that way.

Mark took charge like he’d been preparing. He’d lived in LA longer than anyone there. He ordered, "Everybody stand in the doorway, quick!" This skinny guy in unmatched sweatshirt and sweatpants, his hair messy like he was always between naps.

We squeezed in the patio doorway, all laughing and sort of freaking out. Mark ended up behind me and I felt his arm across my belly. Nothing sexy or anything. I thought how nice it was for him to do that, like he was protecting me.

I didn't see Mark for half a year after that; not until he called me last week. I had only known him through my girlfriend Kerry, and she moved back to Maryland last spring. So that was me between May and October, still new to LA, my best friend gone, no job, watching cable in my Beverlywood studio apartment. Then Mark calls, "Angela? This is Mark. Remember me? Kerry’s friend."

I went over that night, happy just to get out of my building, some fall in the air, long pants and my red hoodie. I picked up a twelve pack and we hung out and watched Survivor and then the Emmy’s. His roommate Clyde had an advertising gig, had to get up early. So Mark and I hung some more, talking a little. I wouldn’t even have brought it up, but we’d smoked a little weed and had the beers and I was sort of delirious because I’d been sitting in my apartment for four months thinking that that might be the rest of my life – that loneliness – and Mark was so cool to call me and invite me over and everything, and I wanted to be his friend so I said, "Remember that earthquake?"
He smiled, watching the Emmy’s, and didn’t look at me to say, "I made that happen."
I smiled too, though I wasn’t sure why. I kept looking at him and he kept not looking back, so I turned back to the TV – an elegant older woman thanking her agent – and ten minutes may have passed before Mark said, "Want to see something? Give me that newspaper." It was on a milk crate they used for an end table, by an overflowing ashtray and the last of my fifth beer.

“Clyde hates it when I do this shit," Mark said. He opened the paper the same way my dad used to in the morning, jerking the sides so it folded back on itself. He scanned this page then the next until he found what he was looking for. "Honest Youngster Rewarded for Returning Lost Wallet," he read.

I felt dumb, smiling like I had been for so long. I think I felt a little scared too, something in Mark’s eyes. "What does Clyde hate?" I asked.
"He doesn’t hate it. He just doesn’t believe in it. Come sit by me."
I thought then that he wanted to hook up, and that was okay. I’ve always liked him I guess, even though he’s a slob. I moved from the bean bag to the couch. Not right next to him but close enough, and still smiling. I thought I must look shitty, bloodshot eyes and beer breath, my hair smelling of smoke. He didn’t seem to notice.

Mark started breathing deep in and out, like a skin diver about to go under. The paper sat in his lap and I saw the article, a thumbnail photo of an older dude and a little boy, the older dude holding a wallet out, both smiling.
I said, "Cute," just to have something to say.

Mark kept breathing, sucking and blowing through puffed cheeks, the breeze ruffling newsprint. I laughed but I was wondering if I should just go, if this was some weird joke he liked to play on friendless girls.

His final exhalation was different from the rest, impossibly deep like he blew all the breath out of himself. He leaned forward over the paper and stayed awhile like that, airless, spent. Then he inhaled the article about the boy returning the wallet.

He inhaled the words right off the newspaper. They shifted at first, a’s and e’s and d’s and c’s, then they dislodged – lifting and streaming through the air, sliding into his mouth. One long breath was all it took, Mark’s lips pursed like a flutist. The headline went last, its larger letters seeming to weigh more. When they’d disappeared Mark sat up and smiled.
I said, "What the fuck did you just do?"

Then all at once I knew everything in the article, that the Kid’s name was Esteban Rodriguez. That he found the wallet between the seats at the Nickelodeon on Wilshire. That it belonged to Chuck Martin, a producer at USA Networks, and Chuck gave Esteban a $200 reward upon its return. Esteban planned to spend $30 on roller blades, and put the rest in his college fund, which made his mother proud but in no way surprised her.

I knew all this the way you know the backstory of a dream – seeing some of it, remembering the rest. The whole of the Esteban and Chuck’s shared experience enfolded me for awhile, enwrapped me, and it all came out of mark, radiating from within him like rays from a film projector.
He didn’t stop smiling once the whole time.
"What the fuck did you just do?" I repeated. There were lights at the edges of my vision, little electric tadpoles swimming.
Mark said, "Hey are you…?"
I said, "What the—" And passed out.

* * *

"Will you do it again for me?"

We were in bed. Not that same night. That same night Mark brought me around with cool water on my forehead and drove me home in my car and walked back alone. Two nights later I came over uninvited and kissed him in the doorway and asked only whether Clyde was home. He said no. Two hours after that I asked, "Will you do it again for me?" Maybe three hours.

He asked what I meant and I poked him in the shoulder and said, "You know." He kept smiling.
"I can’t just do it."
"Why not? Does it hurt?"
"No, but the more I do it the realer it gets."
"Show me again."
He mock sighed, like I was a pain but not really. "With what?"

I jumped out of bed and started searching – naked – through the sediment of clothes, DVD’s, books and magazines covering his room. Mark watched and I didn’t mind.

"Here!" I shouted. It was a thin trade paperback. I tossed it in bed beside him and jumped in after, pulling the covers up and giggling at the chill. Mark put his one hand on my belly, laughing with me. He picked up the book with his other, and said, "I don’t know about this."
“Why not?”
He fanned the pages, “You ever read this?”
“No, but I’ve read about it.”

He smiled and rolled his eyes. The book cover featured some sort of formless impressionist painting along with the title and author, White Jazz by James Ellroy. “Well,” Mark sighed, starting to take deeper and deeper breaths, “What the hell…”

Two days later, after Mark inhaled the last of the LA Quartet, we were left to deal with the fact that Ellroy’s stuff was almost too pure. It kept us from sleeping or eating, kept us strung out on violence and plot, chewing our tongues and looking paranoid over our shoulders. It was all we could do Friday night to tiptoe into Clyde’s room and grab his copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Strange Pilgrims so we could come down to Light is Like Water, holding each other amidst the lush, foreign English.

The next day we got into Stephen King’s early work – Christine, Salem’s Lot, then Cujo for the two-dollar matinee thrill of it. Clyde moved out the next morning. He left a note, something about the dog barking he couldn’t take anymore, the tire tracks in the kitchen and gunshot holes in the walls. Mark considered inhaling Clyde’s note, but wasn’t sure how handwriting would go down.

That was last week.

Now all the books in the house have blank pages. There are letters on the floor, letters on the walls and ceiling. Sometimes Mark shows off, blowing sentences, paragraphs, entire chapters onto windows, counters, the TV screen. We’ve spent eons in Lippman’s Baltimore, LeHane’s Boston, Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. We’ve been up Twain’s Mississippi and down Dubus’ Merrimack, Mark and me. I’d been so lonely by myself. It’s amazing what one more person can do.

Mark snorts Hunter S. Thompson to keep us awake. It makes me crazy. He makes me crazy. Seems like five minutes pass and now the sun’s coming up, the two of us just talking and talking all night. He searches the apartment for unused books but there’s nothing left. He tries not to seem nervous. He inhales a golf instruction book and the food section from the morning paper. He makes eggs Florentine while I roll putts into a glass on its side, letters in a million fonts sticking to the ball.

Eating eggs, Mark inhales the nutritional information off the side of the Sunny Delight. We see a factory, vats of painful orange liquid. I push my glass away.

"It’s getting more vivid." I say.

"It is, yeah. And now we’re out of words."

He’s joking of course. There’s always more. I laugh until I see that he’s serious, "What do you mean out?"

"Out. There’s nothing left in the house."

"Well we better go to my place, I…" I stop because he’s looking at me, his head tilted just so. "What?"

"We were there three days ago. Don’t you remember? Tom Clancy? Salman Rushdie?”

Shit, I forgot. Submarines and presidents and the Indo-Pak diaspora and I forgot. God, how long have we been at this? What do we do now? I’m trying not to look like I’m freaking out but must be failing because Mark says, "It’s alright, Angie. You’ll be okay without it."

He’s right of course. I’ll be fine, except, "No I won’t."

"There’s always more words. We can’t stay here forever. Let’s just take a few days. Get ourselves together—"

"Borders." I say, never meaning anything so much.

"What?"

"Borders. By the mall. Let’s go to the bookstore."

* * *

Borders Books fronts La Cienega below 3rd Street, but you enter through the parking lot on Blackburn. The first floor is dominated by a wide central staircase leading up to the CD’s and non-fiction and that’s where we start, Musical Biography, Mark inhaling entire books at a time, his capacity at a new high. Soon enough Jerry Garcia, Syd Vicious, Mick Jagger, John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Sun Ra are on stage by the café, Karen Carpenter on drums, Charles Mingus on bass. Shoppers gather to watch, some laughing, some looking around like there might be a camera hidden nearby. Mark can’t stop giggling, letters pouring from his nose like milk. I grab his hand and we head downstairs to Romance, So What echoing after us, louder than anything through the sound system used by Motley Crue on their Theatre of Pain Tour (’85-’86).

We suck up Romance – not just the words now, but the garish covers as well – and a host of Fabios start athletically copulating with large-breasted women in the café. We suck up Mystery and overweight police detectives start grid-searching Calendars. We suck up the Classics, and the Trojan fleet bursts through the 3rd street wall, the Red Sea flooding in after, covering Religion to the top of the shelves.

A Minotaur descends the stairs, holding its ears against the band, which has segued into Midnight Rambler at top volume. It sees a Romance wench and goes into heat, rutting against the cash wrap.

Things get ugly in Military History. Red Coats take the Magazine racks. Vietnam grunts hump through Children’s Literature. Doughboys don masks against a mustard gas attack by the greeting cards, while a Roman Senator gurgles and dies. A Blackhawk helicopter flattens the Sioux nation with rotor wash before a Snitch sends it crashing into Biography. The explosion is barely audible over the band, now simmering below Martin Luther King, shouting his Promised Land speech spoken-word style. Harry Potter zooms by on a broom, knocking Mark to his knees.

Cops in dark blue LAPD uniforms storm the back door. I think Mark inhaled an OJ book in True Crime, but these might be real cops too. Not that all these others aren’t real as well. Just ask the patrons and employees of Borders Books, who see and feel it all along with Mark and me. It’s real because Mark makes it real. And the more he takes in, the realer it becomes. And life is better lived this way; not trapped in a studio apartment watching television but feeling and seeing and living the world’s finest imaginations.

But this noise and confusion is too much, and Mark has my hand and drags me out, past the Imperial Star Destroyer docked by the exit, preparing to fire upon Dora the Explorer and Boots the Monkey who don’t see it coming. Mark is screaming, “It’s too much! Let’s go! It’s too much!!”

Outside I fight him. I push him away and make for the entrance but he has me and won’t let go. He’s stronger then he looks and I’m worn out from days awake and he shoves me into the car and I bang my head on the door jamb and he locks me in and comes around and starts the car and peels out, leaving behind the dross of a million big thinkers.

* * *

I scrape and claw the whole way home. I scream and cry too but Mark just drives, muttering, “It’s too much. Just like last time. Too much…”

He parks outside his apartment, where I know there are no words, and comes around to get me but I won’t let him drag me inside. Instead I shake him off and march ahead. The world feels barren. The air tastes thin and the night’s black looks grey. Inside I huddle in the bean bag, chin on knees. I try not to think of the words and what’s probably still happening at the bookstore. Or maybe it’s not happening at all. Maybe it fades without Mark. Or maybe it lives forever, all that creation loose in the streets.

Not having it hurts, a physical pain in my side. I’m nauseous and exhausted and furious with Mark for taking it all away.

I tell him so, shouting, “Fuck you!”

He shakes his head and mutters, “Look at yourself,” like I’m embarrassing.
I throw an ashtray at him, the one from the end table. It doesn’t even come close.

He has me by the shoulders suddenly, his face in mine, “LOOK AT YOURSELF!” They stop me, his eyes. There’s a loose t on his chin. “You think I don’t feel the same way?! It can’t be like that though. Not in public. People can’t take it.”

“But I need it.” I put all the pleading I know into the words, “I. Need. It.”

He lets me go, sits back. “I do too.”

Mark walks back into his bedroom then returns a minute later. What’s in his hand blots out everything else, like the stains on your eyes when you’ve looked too long at the sun.

“Oh my god is that—”

It’s a book.

I searched the house hours ago, top to bottom, and found nothing. He must have had it hidden.

I start to babble but he says, “Shhhhhhh.

“Come sit next to me.”

I do. On the couch.

It’s a big book. He lays it across both our laps. The cover shows a wide prairie below a razor blue horizon. The book is called California’s Geology.

“Promised myself I’d never pick this up again,” he says. “But I could never throw it away either.”

He flutters the pages which are thick and make a noise like birds. I see words in dense columns; graphs, charts and photographs. Some pages are already blank from where Mark has done his work.

He finds his place. He knows it from the feel, just where he wants to go. He cracks it wide, the spine creaking. Artwork spans both pages, a cutaway earth in all its colorful stratum. Emblazoned across the top in two inch high letters: EARTHQUAKES: CAUSE AND CONSEQUENCE.

I gasp. Mark is breathing deep, in and out.

I put my arm around his neck. I put my hand against his chest. I feel the breath leave him, then come rushing back in. The pages flutter again and it’s not just some of the letters now, it’s every word and image the book has to offer. I feel them rush into him. I feel them turn him on inside. I feel them shine through.

The ground begins to move beneath us and I can’t help but laugh.

It feels so familiar.

It feels like the big one.