The first thing I noticed was the silence. Even the birds had stopped singing and there were no idling cars or motorcycle rumblings and there was no music nor were there street vendors anywhere to be found. I could hear our footsteps going that way and some other footsteps coming this way and when the footsteps met we said, “Hey, we’ve got equipment. Do you know where we should go?” And the other footsteps said, “We just came from that street over there but it seems like they’re already full. We heard they might need help at the supermarket—someone that needs to be dug out, maybe?”
And so we headed to the supermarket but midway we found ourselves herded by a megaphone along a median strip towards some other place with the other footsteps behind us, where as we walked we received energy bars and sports drinks and sandwiches from left and right and suddenly it was harder to hold them in our hands along with the shovels and pickaxes and ropes. And I saw the crowd standing along the trees and their faces were expectant as we passed them with our high-vis vests and helmets.
“Soldier, we’ve got ropes, tools and training. Let us through.”
“Alright,” the soldier said, “talk to that guy over by the ambulance. He’ll get you sorted.”
It was just a big pile of nothing. Not even windows or doors or ceilings or floors and it was pink or some kind of red. It was also grey with little bits of twisted metal poking out here and there. Tiny figures were standing at the very top looking busy, making hand signals at other tiny figures, and the much larger figures here on the ground were all looking up, very, very quiet.
“Set up some lines, folks. Those other two civilians brought more rope. Put up a line between the tree here and that rebar there. This is how we’ll lower the people we find.” This is how they’ll lower the bodies they find.
Nobody said anything but we all knew and we all moved with purposeful motion. The ten-or-so soldiers didn’t say anything and the two paramedics didn’t say anything. The single police officer didn’t say anything and the four firemen didn’t say anything. But nothing needed to be said because the silence did all the talking.
The crowd outside the yellow plastic ribbon handed us buckets and we started shoveling the big pile of nothing into them. I shoveled because it was the only thing to do here at the base of mount sisyphus. We shoveled despite the smell of propane. We stopped shoveling when there was a risk of explosion and then we started again when the firemen said so. We shoveled the daylight away and turned it into night and when I looked back behind me the barricade tape was gone and the crowd looked like a concert mob passing white buckets full of red-grey nothing from hand to hand.
And then we dug up the fragments of unknown lives: documents, electronics, notebooks, briefcases, blankets. We dug up a little pastic house. We dug up plushies and teddy bears. We dug out a cradle. A young guy, younger than me but not by much, came to me and said, “Have you found anyone?”
“Not yet, sorry,” I said. “But look over there, in that house. That’s where they’re gathering their personal belongings.”
“Please, man. I’m looking for my girlfriend. I’m looking for my teacher, too.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “As soon as we pull someone out, we’ll let you know.” I barely took any notice of his face or his voice or his eyes because my shovel was idle and it needed to move. Later I knew I shoveled because that’s how I stopped the big pile of red-grey nothing from crushing me, too.
Every now and then the crowd pushed someone out of the way who wasn’t shoveling or passing buckets but was instead feeding off the scene through the searing white light of their phone camera with hungry eyes. We heard a TV reporter cook something up on the spot and weeks later the news segments still had their careful little mistruths to sell detached sobs.
They said they might be pulling someone out soon so One of Us climbed onto the red-grey and talked to the specialist who had been traveling from big pile to big pile carrying a microphone to find the buried voices. The mole-man crawled into the crevices and strained to hear the smallest vibrations rippling from underneath and every time he raised his hand it was the largest crowd I’d ever heard being absolutely quiet.
One of Us climbed back down to where The Rest of Us were still shoveling. “Smells like blood. Smells like the butcher’s.” His eyes didn’t meet ours and we didn’t meet his.
We stumbled back like living dead to where we’d parked the white pickup truck and poured everything onto the empty bed. I jumped back into the driver’s seat and we watched bare streets pass us by, glimmering under the first orange sliver of the morning. She fell asleep on his shoulder and we didn’t talk or listen to the radio.
When I kicked off my shoes and sank into the couch it was past 6 on the clock and white light was already streaming through the windows. Then I cried, cried, cried.