The Logan Notebooks

The West

36 the west I’m sitting on my bed, aVictorian ruffle of pink and yellow, reading To Kill a Mockingbird and I hear it. Like a big rig barreling into the neighborhood. I stand to look out the window, and the street comes rolling like a picnic blanket shaken towards me.Then the ground bucks under me, I grab the bedframe, make my way under a desk like we’d drilled in school. And then it’s over.There’s a tsunami in the toilet, and a fissure through the carport floor.We go outside. Our neighbors come out and sit on the lawn—one, an emt, has her radio, so we learn—the mudfill under the Marina district jellied in the tremors, its mansions sliding into the sea. Part of the Bay Bridge opened like a trapdoor. Candlestick Park, packed with fans raising foam fingers for their two home teams, cracked. People poured forth into the field. And a twokilometer stretch of the Cypress overpass, cakelayers of highway jammed with traffic, smashed down onto itself.That was the first time I felt the strange elation of utter rupture, when something happens that is so scary, it is too much to feel.You sort of float around like a cartoon thought-bubble over your own head, watching other people try to fill theirs with something. Anything, really. ...