 The
Last Hours of Pompeii
Marc Nieson
1st Place Prizewinner
And then the ground
becomes sky. Just like that. This great grey column of rage
mushrooming before our eyes. The streets riddled and swimming with
rubble. Glimpses of neighbors scrambling past with pillows overhead and
children under arm. Everything reduced to the next breath. The next
blink. Quick, run for your lives. The sky is falling, the sky is
falling!
Actually, it’s only a digital recreation, but as my daughter and I
sit on the couch watching this video on volcanoes it all seems real
enough. Certainly to Amanda, who’s still shy of six. Me, I’m shifting
in my seat for other reasons.
“Should I shut this off,” I say. “Amanda, honey?”
Without turning, she waves me off with a wrist flick. Her eyes
stay riveted to the screen — all 21 inches wide of scattering togas and
sandals, the panic spreading throughout downtown Pompeii, the very air
collapsing on itself. Cut to an overhead of Vesuvius itself, bubbling.
*
We found this tape at the library. Every other Friday now I pick up
Amanda at school and we stop off at the local branch on our way back to
my apartment. Within minutes she’ll choose enough videos to get us
through the weekend. No more Dr. Seuss or Disney though, just these
nature tapes. There’s a whole series in circulation. Mammals and
Skeletons, Rainforests and Butterflies, The Oceans, The Planets,
Spiders, Sharks ... you name it, they’ve got it. From the insides of
anthills to the furthest known star.
So far, we’ve gone through a good dozen. And who can blame her? Each video is more exotic and high-tech than the last, tumbling through
a virtual encyclopedia of facts and findings, crossing continents and
centuries at the speed of light. One after another she soaks them up
like pancake syrup. Then we’ll go out, say to the playground, where
she’ll spontaneously start spouting excerpts to pure strangers. Verbatim.
“Icebergs can be the size of Belgium.”
“Scorpions are tenacious predators.”
“The hardest rock of all is the diamond.”
“Ducks never get wet. They have a gland.”
Of course she doesn’t understand the half of what she’s saying to
these people, but it’s amazing nonetheless. I’ll just shrug, though
inside I’m preening. And not that I’m one of those parents who’s
certain their kindergartner is the next Einstein. It’s just nice to feel
noticed with her again.
Only
now, she’s hooked on these natural disaster tapes. Hurricanes and
Earthquakes, Tornadoes, Tsunamis. Blizzards and Droughts and Exploding
Nebulae. Who knew there were so many ways Mother Nature could blindside
us?
On the
TV today, yet more devastation — a runaway landslide crumbling row after
row of houses somewhere in Colombia. The footage jumps, hand-held and
grainy, but the narrator’s voice doesn’t skip a beat — flat as a
newscaster’s delivering the day’s worst headlines.
“Honey, why don’t we put on the Muppets. We haven’t watched them
forever.”
“Dad, shhhh.”
OK. At
least she blinked. The screen blinks too, cutting to a lush green
hillside of palm trees and offshore breezes, the sunlight startling. I
recognize the island even before the ukulele fades in. Amanda glances
my way.
“Hey
Dad. Isn’t that Hawaii?”
I nod
and leave it at that. She knows her mother and I honeymooned there,
just up the road from Kona. I still remember that hiss of surf sifting
in through the hotel windows. Tropical soaps in the shower and colored
cocktails big as vases. Everything we touched was salty, intoxicating.
Second
day out, I fell asleep on the beach and nearly burnt to a crisp. My
skin turned tangerine then started shedding off in chunks thick as
peel. Not that it slowed us down any. Kristine said my body was like
fire and she was dying to be consumed by its flames. This was how we
were actually talking. Like stupid teenagers drunk on stolen fifths of
rum, crashing against each other till we were bruised. I could swear we
were reverting to some previous evolutionary form. Something before
limbs and lungs, uncaringly tossed with the currents and melting into
one another. Here was love at its most pure, I thought.
Onscreen, magma is bubbling forth from a seabed now. Underwater
it looks so harmless, like budding heads of cauliflower. Cut to an
image of the earth as if seen from the moon. Its spin slows to a halt,
revealing a breadth of blue ocean. Ring of Fire, says the voice-over,
and the globe lights up with a jagged necklace strung like red Christmas
bulbs round the Pacific. Like some giant stitched wound.
Mount St. Helens, 1980.
Mount Pelée, 1902.
Krakatoa, 1883.
Tambora, 1815.
When they start scrolling casualty counts, I gauge Amanda for
reactions. Part of me knows I should shut this off immediately, only
now some scientist is being lowered by rope into a dormant crater. She’s all rigged with carabiners and a red climbing helmet. I’ve lost
track of which volcano we’re seeing. They’re speaking Italian, I think.
“Dad, is she going inside that volcano?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s what it looks like.”
We
both stare on as she reaches bottom and inserts thin sensors into the
hissing ground. Checking temperatures and taking samples, says the
calming voice-over. Meanwhile, sulfur vapors swirl up her legs.
“That’s crazy,” says Amanda, but her tone too is more confirming
now than alarmed. She inches forward on the couch cushion. “Volcanology, it’s a dangerous business,” she says, and looks my way. She’s testing out a new quote, heard not five minutes ago. I wink then
rest my palm against her back and can feel her steady breathing. She
doesn’t squirm away either, and what I’m thinking is how come I never
finished that shelf in her room. How come we kept putting off that trip
to Disneyworld. How come I’m only now noticing the new pair of sneakers
on her feet.
I did buy this television for her, though. The VHS is built right
into the bottom, so it’s like putting a slice of bread into the
toaster. Amanda can do it all by herself, adjust the tracking,
everything. Where did she learn to do that?
The salesman, he tried his best to steer me toward the newer
models. “This one’ll be history in a few months,” he said. “DVD,
that’s your future. Believe me, I’m trying to do you a favor here.” And
then he put his twenty-something hand on my shoulder.
I nearly hit him. I mean, somewhere I’ve got 8-tracks that are
older than him. But that’s not the point. The thing is, I had
thought it out, I was looking ahead. I figured it’d be years
before our library could upgrade — as it is their funding’s getting
slashed left and right. And besides, what about my whole collection of
bootlegged Turner classics? Granted the lion’s share are still in
Kristine’s basement, but still. Something in this apartment has to be
invested in the past. All its other furniture had to be purchased so
fast — plastics and pressboard, all of it pure crap, but believe me my
back was to the wall. It was hard enough finding a two-bedroom in the
same school district. Last weekend, I stripped down all the baseboard
in Amanda’s room. We’d tried painting her radiator together, her
favorite color even, but she didn’t have the attention span. At least
for some things.
Some Sundays I’ll wake up and she’s already on the couch, empty
cereal bowl in her lap, credits rolling. She’ll glance up at me in my
bathrobe like I’m some movie extra who’s mistakenly stumbled onto the
main set. On the pillow beside her squats the remote. Don’t blink, I
think. Any minute she’ll point it at you and press eject.
*
Sometimes at night I’ll drive by the house. Mostly, this was during
those first few months; I force myself not to do it much anymore. I
park down the block a ways, just past dark. Sometimes I bring
binoculars. The little things, that’s what I was supposedly incapable
of recognizing. The intimacies. Hopeless as a stone, was how Kristine
once put it. So most nights I try to arrive in time to catch her turn
on Amanda’s nightlight. That tiny glimmer just before the curtains
close.
Once, I got to watch a full ten minutes of her folding laundry. It must’ve been at least two loads, since there were both darks and
whites. I distinctly noted an old dishtowel of ours too, its pattern of
tulips. She flattened it against her chest then stepped out of view,
probably to go drain the tub or something. She was always doing at
least two things at once. Covering ground. Meanwhile, Amanda came
bounding into the room, all wet-haired and bouncing on the bed, and
probably toppling that freshly folded pile because when Kristine
returned she just stood there with her hands on her hips, that wry smile
of hers slowly spreading into forgiveness.
I
remember on the last night of our honeymoon, we roused ourselves from
the sheets at 3 AM to climb Kilauea. It was the first time we’d even
left the hotel grounds. En route, our guide parked the bus near this
newly hardened plain, where you could literally glimpse the blush of
magma flowing beneath your feet. Kristine was thrilled, but I have to
admit it made me a little nervous.
Later,
the crags turned sharp and steep and soon we were climbing single file
like goats, with only our flashlights to cut the dark. Finally we
crested the summit and it was like seeing double, the rising sun
mirrored in the fiery crater below. I felt dizzy, ill almost — the
earth’s skin thin and puckered, the ledge not to be trusted. Kristine
stood beside me though, her hand in mine, her eyes utterly blue and
bottomless.
Heading back down the mountain we got separated from the group. Perhaps it was intentional. I don’t know, everything about that day
seems impossible to me now. On the ground were these little pockets of
flowers among the black and ropey rock; colors I couldn’t even have
imagined during our ascent. Neither of us said a word. We found a
relatively flat patch and collapsed into each other, only this time not
hungry or huffing. Just soft and barely moving. More like children
cuddling close.
That’s where we later figured Amanda was conceived.
*
It kills me, her saying she’s too big for my lap anymore. Or how
sometimes she’ll hesitate at my front door. Let’s not even start on the
holidays. Everything seems so big and overwhelming now. The span of a
place mat. A section of couch.
The camera’s tracking again, through narrow alleyways of Roman
ruins. Uh-oh, they’re back in Pompeii.
“Dad, what’s perserved mean?”
“Preserve, honey. Well, it sort of means to save or keep
the same. They’re talking about how the lava totally buried that city,
leaving things just the way they were.”
It’s me who looks away first.
“Kind of like that tiny snowman we put in the fridge, remember?”
We made him during that last flurry in February. Scooped up from
the sidewalk out front. He’s still in the freezer, propped up between
bags of peas and fish sticks.
“Oh yeah. I keep forgetting to bring him home,” she says.
I turn back to the screen. On the ground are what look like
groveling mud statues, which in fact are skeletons they’ve
plastered-over to approximate victims caught in the throes of death. Some they’ve left au naturale, jagged bone points poking up from the
dirt.
“Um, honey? Why don’t we take a break. Want some jello?”
“SHHH!”
I know, I should say something. About her tone, if nothing else. But the truth is it’s me who needs the break. Amanda’s profile is calm
as a cameo’s. To her these bones just happen to be human remains, no
different from the dinosaur fossils they dug up on another tape. And
that’s the saving grace of these videos, and partly why I let her watch
on. Everything is presented as placid and forthright as could be —
maggots and cocoons, forestry, physics — all mere facts and data. In a
way, I guess science is becoming a second skin for Amanda, offering
watertight evidence and proofs, a world without doubts.
And yet, with
these disaster tapes I can sense something else entering the picture. Amanda hasn’t yet formed the questions, but their edges are starting to
buckle on her brow: Why Mexico? Why Armenia? Why then and not today? Why them, why us? She’s somehow trying to process it all at once.
Just last evening she asked, “What kills the most people?”
We were walking down the frozen food aisle, looking for her
favorite waffles. I glanced down at her in the rattling shopping cart,
a tiny tremor along the part in her hair. I was thinking earthquakes or
viruses? War, cancer? Ignorance? Regret? I was thinking, here’s your
chance. She’s giving you a window.
“I don’t know, Amanda. That’s a tough one,” I said.
*
Whatever you might think, I’m not doing this on purpose. Believe me,
two weekends a month. Hours really, when you come right down to it, yet
here I am at a total loss with her. We sit on this couch. We watch the
volcanoes. Iceland and Tokyo. Santoríni and San Francisco. Martinique. All the world over, like some sick parade.
Helicopters plucking victims from the flames. Pyroclastic flows overtaking SUVs
fleeing at 80 mph. How can you possibly know where or when? How can you
shield yourselves from the unimaginable?
Quite frankly, I’ve been having these dreams. I’m sure it’s these
damn videos. We’ll be on a hike, Amanda and me, in a dense wood or
crossing some bridge, or else I’m merely in the bathroom shaving while
she’s playing in the next room. Wherever it is, though, she’ll suddenly
start falling. Over a cliff’s edge, through a window, the sidewalk
spontaneously yawning open, whatever, but I’m always one step behind. Her fingertips just out of my reach as she plummets. Classic Freudian
stuff I’m sure, but that doesn’t stop me from jolting up in the dark
gasping. Sometimes before I even know what I’m doing I’ve dialed 911.
“It’s my daughter. She’s not breathing.”
“How long, sir?”
“I don’t know. A minute, two?”
And then like some idiot I’ll snap to and realize it’s only
Wednesday.
“Have you checked for an obstruction? Sir? Sir, we’ll need your
home address.”
And what I want to say is, it’s gone. Our mailbox, the swing set,
the entire cul-de-sac, swept away in a curtain of fire and ash. Nearby
lakes pushed up two hundred feet. Whole forests bent at the knee. Nothing left but the scorched and the weary. Calderas of the night.
In 1902, all but 2 of 29,000 inhabitants were killed in St.
Pierre.
The cockroach has remained unchanged for 320 million years.
Humans blink 17,000 times per day, almost a half -hour.
Did you know polar bears have double layers of fur?
If I could just place myself into the scheme of things again. The
natural order and course of events. Kingdom, phylum, class . . . rock
or mineral, invertebrate? I’m not a moron. I mean, the point is I have
at least a layman’s inkling of chaos and fractals. Deep down I know
I’ll survive the divorce, it’s just the way it’s been unfolding, this
daily expanding and contraction. What I need to know is how long. Or,
more to the point, how it’s all going to play out, even if not
happily-ever-after. I mean, in Cinderella the glass slipper always
falls, but it never breaks. Somebody picks it up, some body retrieves
it. I mean the point is . . . What is the point, that’s my
point.
But Amanda. I look at her and I know. I know where and who she
comes from. I know the when and the how, I now can even sense the why. What I need to do is shut the TV. What I need to do is talk to her
about love. About what’s enduring.
Across the room leans a wedding album on the bookshelf. Kristine
has the original; I pieced together this one from a shoebox of proofs
I’d uncovered during the move. I know, it sounds pathetic but I made
the album for Amanda not me. For a while she explored its glossy pages
often, her favorite the close-up of our clasped hands and new wedding
bands. Some nights she’d choose it for her bedtime story, and we’d flip
through the pages and I’d tell her all about the ceremony and our
friends, about Hawaii. Sometimes, though, she’d get confused.
“You and Mommy went to kill a whale?”
“N-no, honey. To Kilauea. It’s a mountain, a volcano.”
Somewhere I’ve got photos of Pompeii, too. I was there once,
though that was years before Kristine and I ever met, and evidently
before any of these shiny videos. All I can recall seeing there were
half-unearthed walls and dusty frescoes. That and these mangy mutts,
wandering around the ruins with their tongues hanging out. Everywhere
else in Italy were cats — in the Coliseum, the Forum, the alleys of
Venice — strays you could count by the dozen, but in Pompeii, only
dogs. At the time I figured they were the ghosts of scorched souls
caught in purgatory, you know, something mystical. Years later, though,
someone told me it’s just because cats are too smart. Pompeii’s out in
the middle of nowhere, with no people or refuse, and hence no rodents. Only dogs are dumb enough to keep scratching at the dust.
*
OK, so maybe the evidence is right in front of me. Maybe, in a
biological sense, all fathers are expendable. Maybe a scientific survey
of couples would prove that the more time you spend together doesn’t
necessarily breed intimacy, but familiarity. And you grow so familiar
that you forget to look at one another, or else when you do, you’re so
fucking familiar that you can see every fault rise up to the surface
like bone spurs and pus and before you know it you’re fuming at each
other, noxious and insufferable. Before you know it, one of you is out
on the sidewalk, stranded. So here’s my point: how could I not have
seen it coming, let alone averted it.
On the screen, they’ve brought in a specialist. From Austria or
somewhere — I can’t place the accent. Under his arm he’s cradling a
cardboard box and trekking along a remnant side street in Pompeii. Inside the box, more bones of course, but it’s what he’s doing with them
that’s of note. With the help of an ever-present colleague — his wife,
or so the tape claims — they’re returning a pair of skeletons to the
exact place and positions of their demise. What’s so special about
these specimens is that they weren’t found out in the streets scrambling
to escape, but lying calmly in one of the more fortified inner chambers
of the approaching ruins. Clearly a patrician’s dwelling, says the
voice-over.
Cut to the interior where the two scientists proceed to lay out
each bone in full articulation onto some sort of straw bedding. The
sequence is time-lapsed, filmed from overhead so that it resembles a
crime scene. Soon the two skeletons lay perpendicular to one another,
one far smaller than the other — a grandfather and grandson. The wife
scientist attests to this last fact, citing some prior analysis of the
bones’ DNA. Ultimately, however, what they’re trying to demonstrate
here has less to do with the skeletons themselves than with the precise
sequence of events on that fateful day in August of 79 A.D.
In all probability, says the voice-over, these two victims
survived Vesuvius’ initial eruptions and had taken refuge in this
anteroom hoping to wait out the rain of pumice and flame only to be
quietly suffocated by unseen gases. Later, perhaps only moments, came
the horrid pyroclastic surge, racing downhill and tearing less fortunate
neighbors limb from limb, burying them and their whole city like a vault
in time.
OK fine, I think. I can buy that. But what I can’t get past is
these two skeletons’ final pose itself — the wisps of their fingertips
forever reaching out for each other. “There’s no way to predict the
future without looking at the processes of the past,” says this
specialist.
And then the video stages a re-enactment of the moment — a
close-up of two fleshed hands in slow motion, one wrinkled and one small
amidst the smoke, aching to touch.
OK, that’s it.
“That’s it,” I say aloud, and before I even know it have wrenched
the remote from Amanda’s hand and punched stop. “That’s it, goddamn it
. . . Goddamnit . . .”
The screen’s gone black, and somehow I’m standing over her now
too, with all of it stuck in my throat. Call it rage, call it
confusion. Call it something, because my daughter’s eyes are huge and
trembling. Mostly I want to tell her that everything will be alright. That Daddy’s here and once-upon-a-time and happily-ever-after. To tell
her I’m so, so sorry, but it’s too late for all that now. The clock is
ticking, the voice-over said. Seismic activity already confirmed and
all physical data pointing to a huge underground rock plugging the main
chamber of Vesuvius. An obstruction, which all but guarantees the next
eruption will bring cataclysm, some experts predicting the worst in over
400 years. The question is no longer if, they say, but when.
And this is what pains me most — the foregone conclusion of it
all. As if they knew for sure what goes on beneath the surface of
things. As if they could draw a clear line between what is extinct and
what might still only be dormant. As if there weren’t even a trickle of
hope.
“Water,” I finally say, swallowing.
“Huh?”
“Floods Amanda, that’s what kills the most people. I just
remembered, from that other video.”
She squints my way, her little brain sifting through its library
of tapes, replaying cutaways to swollen arroyos and raging monsoons, the
imperceptible melting of icecaps swallowing continents by the inch. And
me, I’m thinking it’s true. Despite everything, people drown all the
time. From lack of air, conversation. They asphyxiate from within.
I’m thinking, this is how it will be.
Amanda nods. “That’s right, not fire but water,” she says,
regaining all the conviction of a voice-over. Her gaze, as steady and
blue and silent as her mother’s.
Then, without blinking, she turns back to the television.
“Push play, Dad.”
I stare at the waiting screen, my reflection already ghost-like,
my finger poised over the remote. Yes, my finger. My hand.
“D – A – D?!”
And what I’m wondering is what if it really were a question of
hours? Mere minutes left for us to breathe? I try and imagine it. Can
actually feel the first tremors thundering from below, the tongue and
groove of the floor shattering open with prisms of light, the ceiling
falling like eggshells. And again, that utter abandon in Amanda’s
eyeballs. Would she reach for me then? Would she run for the door? Or
would she, in those strangled last seconds, be clinging to some remnant
of what we did once have, howsoever fleetingly. The waiting dinner
table, all set for three with lit candlesticks? Or our line of snow
boots dripping beside the front door? Or even that whiff of fresh
laundry rising from the basement among our crinkle of newspapers and
Saturday morning cartoons? Yes, despite all outer signs to the
contrary, some tiny gesture that could survive in stone.
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