Page 79 of Middlegame

Something in the stacks falls with a clatter. Roger freezes in the act of replacing a book on the shelf, cocking his head to the side and considering the noise. Nothing audibly smashed; it wasn’t students sneaking beer into the rare books aisle again. It hadn’t been a meaty sound, either, so no one is passing out back there or otherwise getting up to mischief. The number of people who think library sex is a good idea never fails to astound him. Sure, he’d tried it a few times back in his undergrad days, but it had only taken one paper cut in an unfortunate place to make him realize that going back to his room was a much better solution.

“Kids,” he says finally, shaking his head and smiling. Somewhere along the way, people who were his peers when he arrived on campus have become “kids,” needing supervision, unworthy of being trusted with the rarer books in the school collection. He’s found himself incapable of finding undergrads attractive recently, his mind calculating how long it’s been since they graduated high school and dismissing them as too young for anything but getting himself into trouble. That’s probably a good thing—he knows a lot of junior faculty who’ve had issues with dating students—but it still feels like one more step toward an adulthood he’s not quite sure how to handle. Growing up was something that was supposed to happen to other people. Not to him. Never to him.

Roger sets the rest of his books down on the cart and walks, hands in his pockets, toward the sound. He’s one of the younger professors in the UC Berkeley Linguistics department, and many of the students find him more relatable than his peers. If someone is in dishabille back there, they may feel more comfortable with him being the one to point out that the library isn’t the place for such activities. And if it’s another damn squirrel, he can always open a window.

The floor doesn’t creak beneath his feet; the walls don’t breathe as they settle. The main library at UC Berkeley is only five years old, bright and clean and new, without that smell of dust and time that eventually ensnares every good library. Parents look at the school’s facilities and smile, picturing their precious children being taught in beautiful spaces, learning beautiful things, without needing to worry about black mold or falling masonry. Students like he was look at those same spaces and frown, thinking of ivy-shrouded walls, mysterious reading nooks, and the power of time. He wishes he had a way of telling them that they can be part of transforming this new place into an old one, that sometimes being the one who etches the lines in the façade is as important as choosing something already weathered and worn. But it’s just a feeling, and he knows that if he were ever to articulate it, he would frighten people, so he says nothing.

Roger Middleton has grown up to be what people always thought he’d be: a college professor in khaki slacks and patched jackets, with an easy smile and a rangy walk that can take him from one side of campus to the other in under twenty minutes. Like many of the survivors of the big quake, he prefers his feet to other forms of transportation: bicycles aren’t dependable on cracking concrete, cars can’t swerve fast enough to avoid falling objects, but feet, ah, feet will see you to safety if there’s any possible way. He rents half a duplex off-campus, and every room is filled floor to ceiling with books, except the room where he sleeps. There, although there are books on the floor and books on the bed, there’s nothing on the walls that could possibly fall. Instead, the room contains several pieces of low furniture: two desks, a dresser, a bedside table.

There are three pictures on the bedside table. One of himself and his parents; one of himself and his current girlfriend; one of a girl with eyes like his, looking warily at the camera, as if she fears it might be getting ready to attack her. He keeps the picture to remind himself that he can never see her again; that together, they’re a danger to themselves and others. But he misses her. Even if he no longer hears her voice in his head when he’s going to sleep, even if he’s almost forgotten what it is to see the color red reflected through her eyes, he misses her. He supposes he always will. He hopes somehow that will be enough to pay for what they did, for the terrible space they made together, however little they intended to.

Roger steps around the corner, and there’s the source of the sound: a pile of books on the carpet, dislodged from their shelf by some quirk of the way they’d been stacked. Students are notorious for shoving books in any which way, and sometimes that creates unstable piles which inevitably collapse, replaying the earthquake in pages and volumes. This collapse happened in the Applied Mathematics section. Roger sighs, and stoops, and begins picking them up.

He has three books in his arms when he finds Dodger’s face staring at him from the floor. He grimaces and picks that book up as well, turning it over to reveal the title. You + Me: The Math of Social Networking, it proclaims, with her name below it in smaller but equally bold lettering. He wonders what color it is, if it’s as bright and candy-colored as he thinks. He wonders if she had any input on the cover design. She never finished her degree, but then, she didn’t need to; not in this brave new world of computers and startups and TED talks and people looking, always looking for the next big thing. She’s been doing her math in the real world since he came back to school three weeks after the quake and found her gone, leaving only a note stuffed into his mailbox.

ROGER—

GUESS IT’S YOUR TURN. IT’S ONLY FAIR. I DID IT LAST TIME. CALL IF YOU EVER NEED ME. I LOVE YOU.

YOUR SISTER.

She hadn’t bothered to leave a number, and that was like her, too: she assumed that even if he didn’t want to talk to her in the space they made between them, he’d know, or at least be able to find out, how to call. He doesn’t know if she was right about that. He’s never tried. Every time he thinks about it, he feels the ground shift beneath his feet, hears the masonry crashing around them, and remembers that it was their fault. They’re dangerous together. They shouldn’t be—all the laws of physics and nature and simple linear reality tell him they can’t be—but they are. He can’t risk it. No matter how much he wants to, no matter how much he loves her, he can’t risk it.

He puts her book back where it belongs, surrounding it with the other books in its category, and hopes, not for the first time, that she’s happy wherever she is. That she understands that he didn’t run away to save himself this time. He did it to save the world.

The rebuilding of the UC Berkeley campus 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 their entire lives, fell down before he walked away from her. He got a fresh start. He hopes she got the same.)

He walks down to Derby, turns, and heads into the residential neighborhoods concealed behind the commercial veneer, tucked oh-so-neatly out of the public eye, where tourists and visiting parents never see them. This is the part of Berkeley where the rebuilding is the most visible, because this is the part of Berkeley that has, for the most part, refused to change. The people who live here cherish their Victorian homes, which now stand shrouded in scaffolding, being restored to life one shingle and piece of careful wiring at a time. There was an entire street that chose to go without electricity for three weeks because of the chance one of their houses could catch fire; when they were rewired by a team of electricians, they celebrated with a block party that lit up the sky for miles around. The rents here are low, if you can find someone who’s willing to trust their renovated darling to a stranger.

Roger’s duplex occupies the ground floor of one of those Victorians, although “floor” is a bit of a misnomer, since he only has half of one: they walk around the holes, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, and sometimes he pretends to be a tightrope walker and sometimes he just wishes he could go to the bathroom without worrying about winding up in the basement.

There’s an ancient orange cat curled up in a box on the porch, one paw covering half of his face. Roger pauses to bend and give him a gentle pat, using the motion as an excuse to check that old Bill is still breathing. No one knows how old the cat actually is, but he’s lived longer than any outdoor cat Roger’s ever known, and he’s steeling himself against the day the good old fellow’s heart gives up and lets him slip quietly away.

Old Bill’s side rises and falls in a shallow but steady rhythm. One more day for the best cat in Berkeley, then; one more night for the best cat in the world. When Roger looks up, the front door is open, and Erin is smiling at him.

He smiles back.

“Good day at school?” she asks, reaching down to grasp the lapels of his jacket and pull him to his feet. He comes without resistance. It’s best not to fight when a beautiful woman wants him to do something, he’s found. It makes things more pleasant for everyone.

“Pretty good,” he says, and leans in, and kisses her—a gesture she returns with enthusiasm. When he leans away again, she’s smiling. So is he. “How’s the congregation?”

“Congregating,” she says deadpan, before laughing at her own joke.

Erin is the only one of the three people who shared Dodger’s off-campus apartment to remain at UC Berkeley. Candace was killed trying to shield a group of preschoolers from debris. Dodger vanished. Erin remained. She waited outside the apartment, clutching old Bill, until the shaking stopped. Then she put down the cat and went to see what she could do to help. She turned out to be surprisingly good with her hands, citing a family history of construction and medical work. Roger ran into her three days later, outside one of the triage tents. Awkward, he’d asked how she was doing. She’d told him about Candace, about the way their apartment had shaken and crumbled in on itself, about going back to dig clothes from the rubble. He’d asked if she wanted to come back to his place, which was still standing, even if there was no running water.