“No!” Andres grabs her arm and pulls her out of the apartment. The floor is still wild, jolting them straight up and down as they run toward the stairwell. “We’re on the lake bed!”
Mexico City, the constantly sinking land . . . Do you feel it?
Lore feels it, she hears it, roaring and shattering, and she thinks they’ve done the wrong thing, because in the stairwell it’s like they’re in the throat of some giant beast, already half-swallowed. Andres is crushing her fingers, his other hand between the shoulders of the man in front of him, pushing, shouting, “?Corré, corré!” and the walls are shaking, cracks shooting up below their feet, the stairwell smelling like cigarette smoke and piss and the sulfur of their terror.
“Han visto—”
“Madre de dios—”
“Muévanse, muévanse, ?apúrense!”
They burst out the heavy metal double doors and into a morning of screams and sirens. They run through the noise of the world ending. Finally, Lore gasps, “Stop, I can’t—” She leans on her knees, panting, and turns around: the bottom few stories of their building are intact below top stories that are half-collapsed, rotated sideways. There’s glass everywhere, an angry tangle of steel, and which one was their window? Lore doesn’t know, because it’s gone. Gone, and they were just inside. What if Andres hadn’t known to run? They would both be dead, and how would Fabian have found out? Would he have found out? Or perhaps her body would never be excavated, and she would simply be lost, and when he blamed the bank for sending her so much over these last two years, Raúl, the president, would accept responsibility but secretly he’d be thinking: Wasn’t it Lore’s sick abuela who had made her business trips more frequent, and wasn’t he doing her a favor by letting her extend those trips to take care of her? And they would have a service, and the cuates would heft the weight of an empty coffin, and they would lower it into the traitorous earth and visit a spot she’d never been, never would be, and they’d never know she’d died in a kitchen beside a man she loved who was scrambling eggs for breakfast, and now she’s on her knees, retching, prostrated before the unfathomable wreckage.
“?Cómo . . . cómo?” Lore wipes her mouth. Andres pulls her against him. There are people who don’t seem to know they’re bleeding. Babies with wondering tear-filled eyes. Dust graying their hair, coating their teeth, and Lore feels all the terror of Abraham’s God and none of the mercy of the numinous.
Andres repeats her name. He asks if she can hear him, and finally she nods. His eyes are wild, sweat beading on his forehead. “Penelope and Carlitos,” he gasps. “We need to get to them.”
Andres pulls her to her feet, and they begin to run. Normally it would take a little over an hour to walk from Tlatelolco to Rosana’s house in La Roma. But everywhere they turn the roads are blocked, buried. The city is ashen, covered in cement dust, the air thick with smoke and soot. Some multistory buildings are toppled as if by giant hands. Others seem to have crumbled from the inside out. There are awnings and glass and shattered marquees on the sidewalks, isolated letters like oversize children’s toys. Cars crushed, crumpled hoods peeking out from beneath hunks of concrete. And everywhere, people screaming.
At some point, Lore and Andres pull the glass from their feet, and Lore is shocked by how much they bleed and how little she feels the pain. Andres tears strips of his shirt for makeshift bandages. They can’t speak. They cough with every breath. The city is shrieks and wails and sirens. Everywhere they look, every building that has fallen, Lore thinks, There were people in there. Dizzily she thinks of Teotihuacán, where she and Andres took Penelope and Carlitos early on. The kids had run before them down the Avenue of the Dead, racing to the Pyramid of the Moon as if this were a giant playground. She and Andres had walked quietly, holding hands. The Aztecs had named Teotihuacán—the City of Gods—but it had first been inhabited by farmers and artisans who’d mined obsidian, sharpening the dark rock into blades and trading it across the Americas. They’d been thought to be a peaceful people, a hundred thousand or more who fled mysteriously around 300 BC. But just recently, the remains of 137 bodies had been found in mass graves near the temple. Their beaded shell necklaces had been carved into the shape of human teeth, hands bound behind their backs. Unwilling sacrifices. How much could you ever know about a people who disappeared?
Even in the swell of panic and devastation, news travels fast: Hospital Juárez has fallen. The ambulances were all crushed within the parking garage. Hundreds if not thousands were trapped inside, including the dozens of babies unlucky enough to be born into a world right before its destruction.
Lore looks at Andres, her heart lurching. “Wasn’t Penelope going to—”
“Not until this afternoon,” Andres says, and though his voice is sure, tight, his green eyes turn nearly black with fear. Penelope’s friend Leslie had just had her tonsils out. Penelope was supposed to visit her with mango paletas. “They should still be at home.” He adds, a furious, hissed prayer: “Dios, por favor, let them still be at home. Let them be okay.”
They run when they can, shaking off people who tug at their elbows, grab at their shirts. Lore wants to shut her eyes against the need, against the strange collections of belongings in people’s arms: flowered sheets, twelve-inch TVs, ragged collarless dogs. What can she do? She is powerless, they all are.
They stop only once, when a heavy-breasted woman with a thick unraveling braid thrusts her newborn into Lore’s arms. The woman is weeping, begging Lore to hold her daughter while she looks for her boy, who’d gotten separated from her in the stairwell of their apartment building. And then the woman is shoulder to shoulder with the dozen men digging by hand, a task that seems unbearably futile. A man yells, “?Silencio!” and everyone hushes, straining their ears, and sure enough, there is a high keening cry coming from somewhere, everywhere. Andres says, “Fuck,” and runs to join them, leaving Lore alone with the baby, who can’t be more than three weeks old. The mother in the middle of the cuarentena, the forty-day cocoon in which Lore had felt trapped, literally eaten alive, but now, with the tiny wrapped bundle in her arms, the closed eyes and milk-dreaming lips, she would give anything to be back there, safely in bed with the cuates in her arms and Fabian feeding her freshly buttered tortillas.
“Shh,” Lore says, the swaying bounce returning to her as if no time had passed. The sun is in the baby’s face, and Lore turns slightly to offer her shadow.
“?Silencio!” the man on the highest point of the rubble shouts again.
The cry comes, weaker now, and someone yells, “?Aquí, aquí, miren! ?Ayúdenme!” Andres is on his knees among the rest, and the mother is screaming for them to hurry, please, hurry, and Andres says something to her, and she clasps a hand over her mouth and nods, waiting.
In Lore’s arms, the baby jolts, loosening the thin pink blanket. Her eyes open abruptly, and her face reddens, and she wails. The mother whirls around, and Lore wants to weep for the two patches of wetness forming at the woman’s breasts, and for the way she turns from the baby to the rubble and back again.
Lore waves, shouting, “?Estamos bien!” She puts the baby on her shoulder and pats her back, and the mother touches her heart, tears streaming. She turns back to the wreckage and shouts something Lore can’t hear—that everything is going to be okay, maybe, that Mami is here, he just needs to be brave, and patient, and it will all be okay.