was not a swift process. Even seven years on from the earthquake that reshaped the county, the signs of damage remain, etched into the architecture. Scaffolding shrouds the clock tower, concealing the process of repair. There are grad students who’ve never known it as anything other than tilted, a silent, solemn, broken giant watching over their daily lives. They stop as they cross the quad, looking at the sheets around the tower, and feel an obscure sense of loss, like something they thought would never change is changing, and maybe not for the better.
(The other grad students, and the faculty, also stop, also look at the tower, but their feelings are different. They are consumed by relief, like the world is finally returning to normal. Fixing a clock can’t raise the dead or turn back time, but it’s still a symbol of a recovery that has been a long time in coming.)
Roger walks down the broken stone pathways connecting the new library to the quad and tries, as he always does, not to notice how much around him is not what it was on the day he first came to tour the campus, a wide-eyed, hopeful freshman. The faces of the buildings are almost uniformly different. The older, more rigid trees are gone, their roots torn from soil during the great shaking. Even the pathways have changed. Most of them are made from the same artfully cracked stone that greeted him on the first day he set foot on campus, innocent and ignorant of what was to come. It was dug up and re-placed after the quake, creating a small sense of continuity in a world that seemed suddenly devoid of it. He keeps his eyes on the path. If he does that devotedly enough, he can almost pretend that nothing’s changed.
UC Berkeley didn’t close its doors, not for a day: barely for an hour. The campus and city were in ruins, but there were things to be done, memorials to be held, rooms to be searched, and so the campus remained a hive of activity, blazing with flashlights and ringing with voices, until the rescue crews had come and helped to move the rubble away. After that, it seemed best to just . . . keep going. Classes were held in open spaces and on the quad, anywhere that wasn’t likely to collapse. Students whose work had been destroyed were helped to recreate it by willing professors and eager grad students. When the state had forgiven a semester’s tuition as part of their disaster response, the survival of the school had been guaranteed. Berkeley students were among the most loyal in the world.
But not all of them. Some had transferred; mostly computer science majors who needed an actual computer lab to finish their degrees, heading for UC Santa Cruz or Stanford with apologies on their lips and the future in their eyes. Some had dropped out, traumatized by the events of that terrible, earth-shaking afternoon. Others had simply walked away. Like Dodger. One moment she’d been there, and then she’d been gone, packing up whatever of her things had survived the quake and vanishing, presumably heading back down the coast to her parents’ house, but really, this was Dodger. Who knows where she ended up?
Roger has never tried to find her, not then, and not now. What they made between them . . . no. No matter how much he misses her, some things can never be allowed.
He walks across campus to Telegraph, which has been similarly sea-changed. Some of the old buildings are gone, new structures in their place; others remain in skeletal form, piles of rubble that have yet to be bought by new owners, cleared away and replaced by something shiny and new, something that’s never felt the ground shake beneath it, never felt the need to fall. Some of the old businesses managed to ride out the earthquake, protected by rebuilt foundations and quirks of geography: Rasputin Records is still there, as is Moe’s Books. He can’t remember the low buildings on the left side of the street clearly enough to know whether the Fat Slice is original or rebuilt. They use the same recipes they always have. He supposes that’s as good as having the original masonry. Maybe better.
(On some level he’ll always be glad, and guilty about his gladness, that the city where he and Dodger were finally together, finally allowed to be friends and siblings and everything they should have been for