One Amazing Thing (2 page)

But the phone would not cooperate. no service, the small, lighted square declared.

The man with the ear studs looked over and offered her a sympathetic grimace. “My phone has the same problem,” he said. “That’s the trouble with these downtown buildings. Maybe if you walk around the room, you’ll find a spot where it works.”

Phone to her ear, Uma took a few steps forward. It felt good to stretch her legs. She watched the woman emerge from Mr. Mangalam’s office, shaking out the creases of her sari, looking like she had bitten into something sour. Uncharitably, Uma hoped that Mr. Mangalam had rebuked her for making so many people wait for so many unnecessary hours. The phone gave a small burp against her ear, but before she could check if it was working, the rumble rose through the floor. This time there was no mistaking its intention. It was as though a giant had placed his mouth against the building’s foundation and roared. The floor buckled, throwing Uma to the ground. The giant took the building in both his hands and shook it. A chair flew across the room toward Uma. She raised her left arm to shield herself. The chair crashed into her wrist and a pain worse than anything she had known surged through her arm. People were screaming. Feet ran by her, then ran back again. She tried to wedge herself beneath one of the chairs, as she had been taught long ago in grade school, but only her head and shoulders would fit. The cell phone was still in her other hand, pressed against her ear. Was that
Ramon’s voice asking her to leave a message, or was it just her need to hear him?

Above her, the ceiling collapsed in an explosion of plaster. Beams broke apart with the sound of gigantic bones snapping. A light fixture shattered. For a moment, before the electricity failed, she saw the glowing filaments of the naked bulb. Rubble fell through the blackness, burying her legs. Her arm was on fire. She cradled it against her chest. (A useless gesture, when she would probably die in the next minutes.) Was that the sound of running water? Was the basement they were in flooding? She thought she heard a beep, the machine ready to record her voice.
Ramon,
she cried, her mouth full of dust. She thought of his long, meticulous fingers, how they could fix anything she broke. She thought of the small red moles on his chest, just above the left nipple. She wanted to say something important and consoling, something for him to remember her by. But she could think of nothing, and then her phone went dead.

T
he dark was full of women’s voices, keening in a language he did not know, so that at first he thought he was back in the war. The thought sucked the air from his lungs and left him choking. There was dirt on his tongue, shards under his fingertips. He smelled burning. He moved his hands over his face, over the uneven bones of his head, the stubble coming in already, the scar over his eyebrow that told him nothing. But when he touched the small, prickly stones in his ears, he remembered who he was.

I am Cameron,
he said to himself. With the words, the world as it was formed around him: piles of rubble, shapes that might be broken furniture. Some of the shapes moaned. The voices—no, it was only one voice—fell into an inexorable rhythm, repeating a name over and over. After a while he was able to think past the droning. He checked his pants pockets. The right one held his inhaler. He pulled it out and shook it carefully. There were maybe five doses left. He saw in his mind the tidy cabinet in his bathroom, the new bottle waiting on the second shelf. He pushed away regret and anger, which for him had always been mixed together, and focused on positiveness the way the holy man would have, if he’d been stuck
here. If Cameron was careful, five doses could last him for days. They would be out of here long before that.

His keys were in his left pocket. A mini-flashlight was strung through the chain. He stood and passed the pencil-thin ray over the room. A different part of his brain clicked into being, the part that weighed situations and decided what needed to be done. He welcomed it.

One part of the ceiling had collapsed. People would have to be kept as far as possible from that area in case more followed. Some folks were huddled under furniture along a wall. They could remain there for the moment. He searched for flames. Nothing. His mind must have conjured the burning smell from memory. He sniffed for the acrid odor that would signal a broken gas pipe and was satisfied that there were none nearby. Somewhere he could hear water falling in an uneven rhythm, starting and stopping and starting again, but the floor was dry. There were two figures at the door that led to the passage, trying to pull it open.

He sprang forward with a yell, shocking the weeper into silence. “Hey!” he shouted, though he knew noise was unsafe. “Stop! Don’t open it! That’s dangerous!” He sprinted as fast as he could through the rubble and grabbed their shoulders. The older man allowed himself to be pulled away, but the younger one flung him off with a curse and wrenched at the handle again.

A splinter of rage jabbed Cameron’s chest, but he tried to keep his voice calm. “The door may be what’s holding up this part of the room. If you open it suddenly, something else might collapse. Also, there may be a pile of rubble pressing against the door from the outside. If it’s dislodged, who knows what could happen. We will try to open it—but we have to figure out how to do it right.”

Something glistened on the young man’s cheekbone. In the inadequate light, Cameron couldn’t tell if it was blood or tears. But
there was no mistaking the fury in his shoulders and arms, the lowered angle of his head. He came at Cameron, propelled by compressed fear. Cameron had seen men like him before. They could hurt you something serious. He stepped to the side and brought the edge of his hand down on the base of the man’s skull—but carefully. Such a blow could snap the neck vertebrae. The men he had faced elsewhere would have known to twist away, to block with an upraised elbow. But this boy—that’s how Cameron suddenly thought of him, a boy younger than his son would have been, had he lived—took the full force of the blow and fell facedown on the floor and stayed there. In the shadows someone whimpered, then stopped abruptly, as though a palm had been clapped over a mouth. Cameron massaged his hand. He was out of shape. He had let himself go intentionally, hoping never again to have to do things like what he had just done.

“I’m sorry I had to hit him,” he called into the semidarkness. “He wouldn’t listen.” He repressed the urge to add,
I am not a violent man
. A declaration like that would only spook them further. He held up his hands to show that they held nothing except the minuscule flashlight. “Please don’t be afraid of me,” he said. He wanted to tell them what he’d seen in Mexico, where he’d gone to help after an earthquake in one of his attempts at expiation. People who had been too impatient and had tried to dig themselves out of the rubble often died as more debris collapsed on them, while people who had stayed put—sometimes without food and water for a week or more—were finally, miraculously rescued. But it was too much to try to explain, and the memory of all the mangled bodies he hadn’t been able to save were too painful. He merely said, “If he’d yanked that door open like he was aiming to, he could have killed us all.”

Silence pressed upon him, unconvinced, unforgiving. Finally,
from underneath a chair, a woman’s voice asked, “So did you kill him instead?”

Cameron let out the breath he’d been holding unawares and said, “Not at all! He’s stirring already. See for yourself. You can come out from under your chair. It seems safe enough.”

“I can’t move too well,” the woman said. “I think I’ve broken my arm. Can you help me?”

He felt a loosening in his shoulder blades at the last words, the corners of his mouth quirking up. Who would have thought he would find anything to smile about in a time like this? He stepped forward.

“I’ll sure give it a try,” he said.

MALATHI GRIPPED THE EDGE OF THE CUSTOMER-SERVICE COUNTER
with her left hand, carefully avoiding the broken glass that littered it, and raised herself surreptitiously off the floor, just enough to check on what the black man was doing. She needed to fix her sari, which had fallen off her shoulder, but her right hand was pressed tightly against her mouth, mashing her lips against her teeth, and she dared not relax it. Because then she wouldn’t be able to keep in the cry that was also a supplication—
Krishna Krishna Krishna
—but most of all a prayer for forgiveness, for she might have been the reason the earthquake had happened. And if the black man heard her, he might decide to turn around and walk toward her. Who knew what he would do then?

When her relatives in India—aunties, grandmothers, spinster cousins—heard that she was coming to America, they had shuddered—with horror or envy, Malathi wasn’t sure which—and warned her to stay away from black men, who were dangerous. (And they had been right, hadn’t they? Look how he ran up to the
door and attacked that poor Indian boy, who was half his size. For the moment Malathi forgot that the auntie brigade, ecumenical in their distrust of the male species, had gone on to caution her to stay away from white men, who were lecherous, and Indian American men, who were sly.)

No one, however, had thought to caution her about earthquakes. Where she came from, when people said
America,
many images flashed in their heads. But an earthquake was not one of them.

Malathi had followed the aunties’ advice—partly because there was not much opportunity to do otherwise, and partly because she had other plans. She shared a tiny apartment with three other women who had been hired by the consulate and brought over from India around the same time. They spent all their spare time together, riding the bus to work and parting only at the elevator (the others worked upstairs in Tourism), walking to Patel Brothers Spice House to buy sambar powder and avakaya pickle, watching Bollywood movies on a secondhand DVD player, oiling one another’s hair at night as they discussed hopes and plans. The other women wanted to get married. From their salaries, which had sounded lavish when translated into rupees but were meager when you had to pay for everything in dollars, they put money aside each month for their dowries, for even though dowries had been officially banned in India, everyone knew that without one you had no chance of landing a halfway decent man.

But Malathi, who had noted how her two sisters were ordered around by their husbands, had no intention of following in their foolish footsteps. She had set her heart on something different. When she had saved enough money, she was going back—though not to her hometown of Coimbatore—to open a beauty shop. At night she clutched her lumpy pillow, closed her eyes, and was transported to it: the brass bells on the double doors (curtained for privacy) that
tinkled as clients came in, the deliciously air-conditioned room walled with shining mirrors, the aproned employees who greeted her with polite, folded hands, the capacious swivel chairs where women could get their eyebrows threaded or their hair put up in elaborate lacquered buns for weddings or relax while their faces were massaged with a soothing yogurt and sandalwood paste.

Then Mr. Mangalam had arrived at the visa office and derailed her.

Malathi’s roommates agreed that Mr. Mangalam was the best-looking man at the consulate. With his swashbuckling mustache, designer sunglasses, and a surprisingly disarming smile, he looked much younger than his age (which, Malathi had surreptitiously dipped into his file to discover, was forty-five). He was the only middle-aged man she knew without a paunch and ear hairs. But alas, these gifts that Nature had heaped on Mr. Mangalam were of no use to her, because there already existed a Mrs. Mangalam, smiling elegantly from the framed photo on his desk. (The photo frames had been provided by the consulate to all its officers, with strict instructions to fill and display them. It would make the Americans who came to the office feel more comfortable, they were told, since Americans believed that the presence of a smiling family on a man’s table was proof of his moral stability.)

Malathi, a practical young woman, had decided to write Mr. Mangalam off. This, however, turned out to be harder than she had expected, for he seemed to have taken a liking to her. Malathi, who harbored no illusions about her looks (dark skin, round cheeks, snub nose) was mystified by this development. But there it was. He smiled at her as he passed by the customer-service window in the morning. The days it was her turn to brew tea for the office, he praised the taste and asked for an extra cup. When, to celebrate Tamil New Year, he brought in a box of Maisoorpak, it was to her he offered the
first diamond-shaped sweet. On occasions when she stepped into his office to consult him about an applicant’s papers, he requested her to sit, as polite as though she were a client. Sometimes he asked how she was planning to spend the weekend. When she said she had no plans, he looked wistful, as though he would have liked to invite her to go someplace with him—the Naz 8 Cinema, maybe, where the latest Shahrukh Khan mega-hit was playing, or Madras Mahal, which made the crispiest dosas but was too expensive for her to afford.

Could anyone blame her, then, for visiting his office a little more often than was necessary? For accepting, once in a while, a spoonful of the silvered betel nuts he kept in his top drawer? For listening when he told her how lonely he was, so far from home, just like herself? For allowing his fingers to close over hers when she handed him a form? In idle moments it was her habit to doodle on scraps of paper. One day she found herself writing, amid vines and floral flourishes,
Malathi Mangalam
. It was schoolgirlish. Dangerous. Symptomatic of an inner tectonic shift that disconcerted her. She tore the paper into tiny pieces and threw them away. Still, she couldn’t help but think the syllables had a fine ring, and sometimes at night, instead of visualizing her beloved beauty shop, she whispered them into her pillow.

Today, Mr. Mangalam had pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

Malathi had to admit that the action, though it surprised her, was not totally unexpected. Hadn’t he, just yesterday, placed in her palm a small golden cardboard box? She had opened it to find four white chocolates, each shaped like a shell and tucked into its own nest. Try one, he urged. When she shook her head bashfully, he took one out, ran it over her lips, and pushed it into her mouth. The crust had been crunchy, but the inside—it was the softest, sweetest
thing she’d ever tasted. Guilt and elation had filled her throat as she swallowed it.

That same guilty elation had made her scalp tingle as he pressed his lips against her mouth. If he had groped or grabbed, she would have pushed him away. But he was gentle; he murmured respectfully as he nuzzled her ear. (Oh, how deliciously his mustache tickled her cheek!) Though Malathi had never been kissed before, thanks to the romantic movies she’d grown up on, she knew what to do. She lowered shy eyes and leaned into his chest, letting her lips brush his jaw even as a worrisome thought pricked her: by dallying with a married man, she was piling up bad karma. When he drew in his breath with a little shudder, a strange power surged through her. But then her glance fell on Mrs. Mangalam’s photo, which sat next to a small sandalwood statue of Lord Ganapathi. For the first time she noticed that Mrs. Mangalam’s shoulder-length hair was exquisitely styled—obviously from a tiptop-quality beauty salon. She displayed on her right hand (which was artfully positioned under her chin) three beautiful diamond rings. Had the man whose face was currently buried in Malathi’s throat given them to her? Mrs. Mangalam smiled sanguinely at Malathi—sanguinely, and with some pity. The smile indicated two things: first, that she was the kind of woman Malathi could never hope to become; and second, that no matter what follies her husband was indulging in right now, ultimately he would return to her.

That smile had made Malathi untangle herself from Mr. Mangalam. When he bowed over her hand to plant a kiss on the inside of her wrist, she had snatched her hand back. Ignoring his queries as to what was wrong, she had fixed her sari and her expression and hurried out of the office.

Before she had taken ten steps, the wheel of karma began rolling, and retribution struck in the form of the earthquake.

IN THE SPARSE GLOW OF THE MINI-FLASHLIGHT, MALATHI SAW
the black man holding someone by the elbow, pulling her to the center of the room. It was the Indian girl—though could one really call her Indian, brought up as she had clearly been in decadent Western ways? From the first, Malathi had disliked her because of her hip-hugging jeans, the thick college book she carried, as if to advertise her intelligence, and her American impatience. But now when the man grasped her arm and the girl gave a yelp of pain, Malathi couldn’t stop herself from sending out an answering cry. She regretted it immediately, because the man let go of the girl and started walking toward her. She ducked under the counter, though without much hope. The glass that normally sequestered her from the people who came into the visa office had shattered in the quake. It would be easy for him to lean over and grab her.