*
The earthquake must have gone on at least ten minutes.
Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch still stood above the Mississippi. If the old man had still been alive, Marcy Douglas would have kissed him.
One of the Frenchmen had suffered a heart attack. Everyone else had been so preoccupied during the quake that no one had noticed him until after the arch shivered to the quake’s final tremor. The Frenchman was pale and glabrous and his lips were turning blue. Marcy’s colleague Evan was giving him CPR. The victim’s friends milled around loudly explaining the situation to each other in French.
Hot prairie wind blasted through broken windows, and only partially cleared away the smell of vomit. Several people had come down with motion sickness, including one little boy who had thrown up what looked like an entire bucket of popcorn. The arch did not normally move much— it would sway less than an inch even in the highest wind— but things were obviously different when bedrock was jumping around.
Marcy crawled to the station from which she controlled the tram, and used the telephone to call Richards, her superior, down on the ground level.
“We need to get paramedics up here,” she said. “We’ve got a medical emergency.”
“Good luck,” Richards said. His speech was fast and breathy, as if he’d just run several miles. “There must be hundreds of casualties in town. The ambulance crews will have plenty of people to treat without climbing the Gateway Arch.”
“What should we do?”
“Get your casualty down here. Our generators have kicked in— the trams’ll work. Then get everyone else down to ground level as soon as you can.”
“Can you send some people up to—”
“No. I’m not sending anyone up there!”
“But—”
“Besides, you can’t believe how many people we’ve got hurt down here.”
Marcy replaced the phone receiver, gripped the console, and carefully steered herself to her feet. A powerful wind blew through the shattered windows, flooding the observation deck with heat and dust. She walked with care— it felt as if she were stepping on pillows, expecting the floor to leap at any instant— to where the Frenchman was lying in the midst of a group.
“How’s he doing?” she asked Evan.
Evan was in his late twenties, a white guy who had lived in Missouri all his life. “He’s breathing all right,” he said. “I think he’ll be okay if we can get the parameds here.”
“Richards wants us to get him down on the trams,” Marcy said. “He doesn’t think the parameds will get here for some time.”
Evan pushed his glasses back on his nose. “That’s gonna be tough,” he said. “Can they send us somebody beefy to help carry—”
“Richards says no.” She looked up in alarm. “Stay away from the windows, please!”
One of the children was bellying up to one of the shattered windows. He pointed out into the air. “Busch Stadium fell down!” he said.
Marcy pulled him back from the broken window, but she couldn’t quite resist looking out herself. The view made her heart lurch.
Busch Stadium hadn’t fallen down, exactly, but parts had collapsed, peeling away from the main structure, and the rest was clearly damaged. City Hall looked as if a giant had gone over it with a hammer. Some of the older buildings— brick office buildings and hotels— had collapsed to rubble. There didn’t seem to be a single intact window in the entire city.
Above the shattered cityscape, a few thin columns of smoke were beginning to corkscrew into the sky.
As the strong wind batted at her face Marcy thought about her apartment, the comfortable old brownstone she’d felt lucky to find and be able to afford. It was brick, and she wondered if all her belongings were now buried under piles of rubble.
She was lucky, she thought. She was lucky she was working the swing shift, lucky to be in the most solid structure in all Missouri.
“Marcy,” Evan reminded. “We’re in a hurry.”
Marcy walked to Evan’s station controlling the north tramway and thumbed on the microphone. She took on a breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “we’re sorry about the delay. We have a visitor who has fallen ill, so we ask you will be patient while he is loaded aboard a tram. After he has been sent to ground level, we will start regular boarding, and we’ll get you all to the surface as quickly as possible.”
Evan recruited one of the other Frenchmen to link arms beneath the sick man, forming support beneath his back and knees in a two-man carry. Marcy was relieved that she hadn’t been requested to support half the man’s weight on her skinny frame, but wondered if she should be insulted that she hadn’t even been asked.
The casualty was carried gingerly down the stairs until an aftershock slammed the arch. The French rescuer lost his grip, and the invalid spilled to the metal stairs. His friends clustered around and began shouting at each other in French.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Evan muttered. Marcy shoved her way through the crowd and tried to restore order. Evan and his partner lifted the victim again, shuffled him to the first tram, then laid him inside. Evan, the other Frenchman, and one of the women— the victim’s wife, possibly— got into the tram car with him.
Marcy closed the tram doors and heard the rumble recede as the little train began its long trip to the ground.
“Excuse me?” The speaker was the young Japanese man. He was shy, and his voice was so low that Marcy could barely hear him above the blast of wind. “We are going down elevators?”
“Yes,” Marcy said.
“Is not safe on elevators,” the man said. “Is earthquake.”
A number of the visitors had clustered around to listen to this exchange. “That’s right,” one man said. “We could get stranded.”
“The Gateway Arch has its own emergency power supply,” Marcy said. “I’ve been up here during two power failures in the city, and the emergency power cut in both times, and the people in the trams never even noticed.”
“Is earthquake,” the Japanese man insisted. “Must take stairs.”
“There are over a thousand stairs,” Marcy said. “We’re twice the height of the Statue of Liberty. It’s a long way down.” The man seemed unconvinced, and Marcy wondered if she was at all urging the right thing. There were earthquakes in Japan all the time, and maybe the Japanese man knew what he was talking about.
She summoned as much authority as she could, squared her shoulders, looked at everyone from under the brim of her Smokey Bear hat. “It’s much safer on the trams,” she said, and hoped her voice was steady.
The phone buzzed. She picked it up, heard Evan’s voice.
“We’ve got him down. I’m sending the tram back up.”
“Good. I’m going to need your help to—”
“No way, Marcy. I’m gone.”
Surprise took Marcy by the throat. “What—?” she managed.
“I’ve got a pregnant wife and two small kids in Florissant. That’s my priority. I’ve got to be with them.”
“Evan,” Marcy said. “This is an emergency. We’ve got to get these people to the ground. You can’t leave.”
“The Park Service can sue me. See you later, maybe.”
The telephone clicked off. Marcy felt her skin flush with anger, not simply at Evan’s desertion but at the futility of his decision. Florissant was miles away, right through the inner city, and there was no way Evan could hope to get there across the horrid ruin St. Louis had become. All he had done by running off was to make himself useless, to his family and the tourists and everyone else.
Marcy called Richards’s office, but no one answered. Neither did anyone else. Maybe they’d all run home.
The tram rattled back into the station. Marcy smelled smoke on the wind that was blasting through the observation platform. She opened the tram doors and thumbed on the microphone.
“We will start boarding the tram in a moment,” she said. “Please form a line .. .”
Marcy was somewhat surprised to find that a line was actually formed— two-thirds of her visitors silently took up their places on the stairs.
She turned to look at the remainder. The Japanese couple, who seemed uncertain. A few others. And the elderly woman and her mother, both of whom looked very stubborn indeed.
Marcy approached the group. Licked her lips, tried to sound reasonable and persuasive. “The tram is safe, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve just seen it go down and come up. No one was hurt. No one was stranded.”
The elderly woman’s lips were compressed in a thin line. “I’m not getting into one of those cars again. I want to see the stairs.”
“Ma’am,” Marcy said. An aftershock rumbled up through the soles of her shoes. Just a little tremor, she thought, and decided to ignore it, but she saw her visitors turn pale, saw their eyes grow wide. “Ma’am,” she began again, “there are a lot of those stairs. And I don’t know how safe they are— there could be damage there.”
“Elevator not safe,” the Japanese man said. “Is earthquake.”
The elderly woman’s daughter looked angry. “I’m not sending my mother down in those elevators!” she said. Her voice was nearly a shout. “They weren’t safe the first time!”
Marcy took a step back from this ferocity. She wished she were older and had more authority. She wished she were a football player and could just mash these people into the trams one by one.
“Please keep your voice down, ma’am,” she said. “I don’t want you starting a panic.”
The woman lowered her voice to a hiss. “Then don’t bother my mother!” she snapped.
Marcy backed away again. “I’ll send this group down,” she said. “That should show you it’s safe.”
“Not safe,” the Japanese man repeated. “Earthquake.”
Marcy went to her station and told the passengers to board the trams. None of them looked very happy. At the last second two of them froze, and one of them ran back to the observation platform with panic plain on his face. Marcy knew that she wasn’t going to stop him.
“Please enter the tram, sir,” she told the other. He was a burly older man, dressed in bright shorts and a kind of tam o’ shanter. He carried a disposable Kodak camera, one of those that came in a yellow cardboard wrapper. His face was pale.
Marcy went down the stairs and touched the man on the arm. “Please go in, sir,” she said. She saw that the nearest tram had two women already seated. “Those ladies need someone to look after them, okay?” she said.
“Hm?” he said, surprised. “Why yes, all right.”
He allowed Marcy to lead him to the tram. She seated him between the two women and returned to her station. She closed the doors and set the little train rolling downward.
She picked up the phone and called to let someone know the tram was on its way, but there was no answer. What were they all doing? she wondered.
Or maybe, she thought, they were all dead. The huge concourse and museum beneath the Gateway Arch were below ground level: what if the roof had fallen in? What if a pipe had burst, or the Mississippi found its way in, and the whole place was flooded? What if she was sending the visitors to certain death by drowning?
No. She had been on the phone with people since the quake. The concourse was above the level of the Mississippi even at flood stage. Nothing had happened down on the concourse except that people were very busy dealing with damage to the exhibits and to people.
Marcy turned to her remaining visitors. She counted nine, including the man who had panicked and run rather than board the tram.
She took a deep breath and began to argue. The trams were safe. She’d run them up and down twice and no one had been injured. The power supply to the Gateway Arch had multiple backups and had never failed.
Her heart sank as she spoke. She didn’t convince a one of them.
*
No pencil can paint the distress of the many movers! Men, women and children, barefooted and naked! without money and without food.
Russelville, Kentucky, February 26,1812