Nine Forty-One

It began as a noise, and it came from the north.

So low at first that he felt it rather than heard it, in the bench under him and the soles of his feet, a hum like the note an organ makes before anybody has touched the keys. He thought it was the wheel, the man with the ponytail starting the motor to bring them down. Then it was louder, and it was not a hum. It came down the coast out of a perfectly clear blue morning, from the mountains, from Malibu and beyond, a long grinding thunder with no gaps in it, closer and closer.

It sounded like a train coming. A freight. And it doesn’t stop.

“Freddie,” said Theo.

It came across the bay, and it came under them.

---

The car swung.

All at once, hard, outwards, so that the floor tipped and he was thrown against the window on his shoulder and Theo came across from the other bench into him, and the hinge above screamed like a gate in a storm, and then the car swung back harder and they went the other way together into the other window and the bench came up and hit him in the back.

He got hold of something, a bar, the edge of the bench, with both hands, in the open, with everything he had, and Theo had his arm, and the car went out and back, out and back, swinging at the top of the wheel like a bell, and the window went sky, sea, sky.

Under the swinging there was the other thing. The whole wheel was shaking, a fast hard rattling that came up through the steel from the pier and through the hinge and the bench into his teeth, so that they clattered in his head and he could not stop them. And under the rattling, slower, enormous, the wheel leaned. Towards the land, a long slow terrible lean, the bluff and the city and the mountains tipping in the window like a picture knocked crooked on a wall. Then back towards the sea, and the whole blue floor of it came up in the window, tilted, bright.

It’s going to go over.

It did not go over. It leaned back, and forward, and the roar went on and the car swung, and it did not stop.

He had thought an earthquake was a moment, the way a door slams. It went on. He counted, because he did not know what else to do, one, two, under his breath in the roaring. He got to thirty. He got to sixty. Somewhere after that the numbers stopped meaning anything, and it had not stopped.

You don’t know how long a minute and a half is until the ground is doing that. It’s a year.

It was longer than a year.

---

The car swung out so far that he was looking straight down past its side, past the cars below, green and red and yellow, all swinging, at the pier.

The pier was moving like a snake.

The long wooden street of it, back from the wheel to the land, with the arcade and the carousel and the coffee place and the clock on its green post, was going in waves. He watched one come from the land, a long ripple through the boards and the buildings and the rails, as if somebody had picked up the end of a carpet and shaken it, and the buildings lurched as it went under them and came back, and the rail along the side went in and out like a ribbon. Everybody on it was down. The men who had been fishing were flat on the boards holding on, and a rod went over the side, end over end into the sea, and a chair, and a bucket. The heap by the gate at the foot of the wheel was Ellicott, holding on to each other and the gate and the boards. Somebody was screaming, long and high, under the roar.

He looked for faces. They were too small, and they were all moving.

Beyond the pier, the bluff let go.

The long yellow cliff under the park, the whole length of Ocean Avenue, began to come down in pieces. North of the stairs a great slab of yellow earth with the ice plant still on it and a palm tree on top slid down the face of the cliff, slowly, almost gently, the palm tree riding it upright like a mast, into the road and onto the cars, and burst into a cloud. Then another piece. Another. All along the bluff the cliff was sliding into the road in long yellow curtains, and the dust rose from all of them in one rolling yellow-brown wall that climbed the face of the cliff, past the park, past the palm trees, over the top, until he could not see the hotel, or the tower, or the window on the fourth floor at the end.

Through a gap in the dust, for a moment, he saw the stairs. The zigzag, the six flights, still there on the face of the cliff with the earth coming down on either side of them.

Still there.

The dust closed over them.

---

The lights went out.

He had not known there were lights on the wheel in daylight. There were, all round the rim and along every spoke, white and red and gold, and they went out together with a sound like a breath, and the wheel was only steel, and far below, under the roar, the motor gave a long grinding groan and stopped.

When the car swung out he could see straight down into the green one. Castellanos was on his feet, braced across it with one hand flat on each window like a man holding a door shut in a gale, head tipped back, looking up at them, his mouth open, shouting the same thing over and over, and the roar took every word.

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on.

He held on.

---

It stopped.

Not the way it had started. It got less, very slowly, the rattling slower and the lean smaller and the roar going down into a growl and then a rumble like a train going away into a tunnel, and then a trembling in the steel and the hinge and the bench, as though the wheel were cold, and then, after a long time, nothing.

The car was still swinging, less each time, creaking. He and Theo were on the floor between the benches in a heap, his arm round the bar and Theo’s hands still on his arm. The little window at the top of the door was open. Theo’s hat was gone.

“Theo.”

Theo was looking at him very close, white, eyes enormous, mouth a little open, breathing short and hard and very fast.

“Theo. Are you hurt?”

“No.” He did not let go of Frederick’s arm. “No. I don’t think. Are you?”

“No.”

“You’re bleeding.”

He put his free hand to his face and it came away red, from above his left eye, where he must have hit the window. He looked at the blood on his fingers and felt nothing.

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s blood,” said Theo, and his voice cracked, and he let go at last and put both hands over his face and sat on the floor of the blue car with his knees up, and shook. Not crying. Shaking, all over, hard, the way the wheel had. Frederick sat against him, shoulder to shoulder, and waited.

The car creaked, and was still.

---

It was quiet. He could hear Theo breathing, and his own heart, and the hinge above them settling with tiny ticks like a car engine switched off. No music on the pier. No motor. No traffic on the road under the bluff. No gulls.

He got up onto his knees, holding the bench, and looked out.

The dust was still rising along the bluff and drifting out over the road and the beach towards the sea, slowly, like smoke, and he could not see the park or the hotel through it. North along the coast towards Malibu there was more, a brown haze lying on the whole shore as far as he could see, and in the middle of it, very far away, where the coast curved out of sight, a column, grey, going straight up into the clear sky, very slowly, very tall.

The pier was still there. It had a bend in it a third of the way from the land, long and shallow, as if it had been pushed sideways in the middle and had not come back. Part of the carousel roof was gone. A long stretch of rail on one side was simply not there. The clock on its green post leaned like a man asleep on his feet, and he could not see its face.

The people were getting up.

All along the boards, slowly, the way you get up after falling off a bicycle, one hand and then the other, looking round, finding each other. Some of the men who had been fishing were getting up, and some were not, and somebody was kneeling by one who was not. At the foot of the wheel the heap was coming apart into separate people, standing, holding each other, looking up at the cars. At the blue car at the top.

Mr Abernathy, by the brown jacket, at the foot of the wheel with his head back, not moving. Mr Ferrante beside him with his arm round Lucía. At the gate, one hand on the gate and one flat on the steel leg of the wheel as though feeling it for a pulse, the man with the ponytail.

“Theo. Look. They’re getting up. I can see Mr Abernathy.”

Theo took his hands from his face.

“Mr Ferrante. Lucía. Priya, I think. That’s Priya’s bag.” He could not see Marcus. He did not say so. “They’re looking at us.”

Theo got onto his knees beside him and looked a long time: the bend in the pier, the dust where the hotel had been, the haze to the north, the grey column. Then straight down at the green car, swinging gently, with Castellanos sitting on its bench now, hands on his knees, looking up at them with an expression Frederick had never seen on his face and did not at first recognise. Relief.

Castellanos raised one hand, palm out. Stay.

Frederick raised his back.

“Freddie,” said Theo, very quietly, not taking his eyes off the bluff. “Is the hotel still there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is the sign still there? At the top of the stairs?”

“I don’t know.”

“The one with the wave on it. With the arrow. The one you read.” He swallowed. “The one I said didn’t mean anything.”

From very far below, from the pier and the beach and the road under the bluff and the whole of the waking city, from every pocket and bag and hand of everybody getting up off the ground in Santa Monica, all at the same moment, as though somebody had thrown a switch on the coast, there came a long rising scream, two harsh electronic notes over and over, from a thousand telephones.

In the pocket of Theo’s shorts, against Frederick’s leg, Theo’s phone began to scream too.