The Angel Esmeralda - By Don DeLillo Page 0,21

thoughtful, before throwing off the blanket. The moment burst around her. She rushed to the door and opened it, half aware of rattling lampshades and something wet. She gripped the edges of the door frame and faced into the room. Things were jumping up and down. She formed the categorical thought, This one is the biggest yet. The room was more or less a blur. There was a sense that it was on the verge of splintering. She felt the effect in her legs this time, a kind of hollowing out, a soft surrender to some illness. It was hard to believe, hard to believe it was lasting so long. She pushed her hands against the door frame, searching for a calmness in herself. She could almost see a picture of her mind, a vague gray oval, floating over the room. The shaking would not stop. There was an anger in it, a hammering demand. Her face showed the crumpled effort of a heavy lifter. It wasn’t easy to know what was happening around her. She couldn’t see things in the normal way. She could only see herself, bright-skinned, waiting for the room to fold over her.

Then it ended and she pulled some clothes over her pajamas and took the stairway down. She moved fast. She ran across the small lobby, brushing past a man lighting a cigarette at the door. People were coming into the street. She went half a block and stopped at the edge of a large group. She was breathing hard and her arms hung limp. Her first clear thought was that she’d have to go back inside sooner or later. She listened to the voices fall around her. She wanted to hear someone say this very thing, that the cruelty existed in time, that they were all unprotected in the drive of time. She told a woman she thought a water pipe had broken in her flat and the woman closed her eyes and rocked her heavy head. When will it all end? She told the woman she’d forgotten to grab her tote bag on her way out the door despite days of careful planning and she tried to give the story a rueful nuance, make it funny and faintly self-mocking. There must be something funny we can cling to. They stood there rocking their heads.

All up and down the street there were people lighting cigarettes. It was eight days since the first tremor, eight days and one hour.

She walked most of the night. At three a.m. she stopped in the square in front of the Olympic Stadium. There were parked cars and scores of people and she studied the faces and stood listening. Traffic moved slowly past. There was a curious double mood, a lonely reflectiveness at the center of all the talk, a sense that people were half absent from the eager seeking of company. She started walking again.

Eating breakfast in her flat at nine o’clock she felt the first sizable aftershock. The room leaned heavily. She rose from the table, eyes wet, and opened the door and crouched there, holding a buttered roll.

Wrong. The last one was not the biggest on the Richter. It was only six point two.

And she found out it hadn’t lasted longer than the others. This was a mass illusion, according to the word at school.

And the water she’d seen or felt had not come from a broken pipe but from a toppled drinking glass on the table by the sofa.

And why did they keep occurring at night?

And where was the English Boy?

The drinking glass was intact but her paperback book on plant life was wet and furrowed.

She took the stairs up and down.

She kept the tote bag ready at the door.

She was deprived of sentiments, pretensions, expectations, textures.

The pitiless thing was time, threat of advancing time.

She was deprived of presumptions, persuasions, complications, lies, every braided arrangement that made it possible to live.

Stay out of movies and crowded halls. She was down to categories of sound, to self-admonishments and endless inner scrutinies.

She paused, alone, to listen.

She pictured her sensible exit from the room.

She looked for something in people’s faces that might tell her their experience was just like hers, down to the smallest strangest turn of thought.

There must be something funny in this somewhere that we can use to get us through the night.

She heard everything.

She took catnaps at school.

She was deprived of the city itself. We could be anywhere, any lost corner of Ohio.

She dreamed of a