She rubbed her face with her shoulder and she pressed on. When she turned to look back she could not see the old man nor her son. Then someone was calling her name. She saw a man with burnt-looking eyes pushing towards her, his skin yellow. She knew his slouched shoulders, his big soft empty hands. Her daughter's swimming instructor. He was dressed in a dusty black shirt and he had dark eyes as if he had not slept and when he touched her she shuddered as though she had not been touched in a very long time.
Anna Mercia? he said. Jesus. He looked at her arm.
Hey, a man behind him hissed. Hey. He fastened a claw on the instructor's wrist. You got to get in line like everyone else. You can't just budge in. Hey.
He glanced back for only a moment. But when he turned again towards her his face looked strangled and all at once something heavy turned over inside of her.
Anna, he started to say.
You found her, she said abruptly. Her voice sounded thick.
He nodded.
She's inside.
He nodded again but he did not seem able to say anything more.
She understood and yet she did not understand. Then she felt stunned and light-headed and she looked at her trembling legs as if they were not her legs. The instructor gripped her good arm. Deep in the black slough of his eyes some grey weeds adrift like leeched hair.
I'm sorry, he said. I'm so sorry.
She tried to say,
You cannot be sorry, you cannot know what it is
to be sorry, you cannot
, but her voice gave out and she could not get her breath. Then something like a half-strangled sob came out and he drew her to him and her soft face was mashed up against his chest and the thumb of her good hand was at her own throat as if to stopper the words back up. He held her wrist and then her legs gave out and he stumbled to hold her up. She could feel the blood in her skull.
You don't want to go in there, he was saying. Anna Mercia? Look at me. I can ID her for you.
How did she look? she whispered.
Jesus.
Joshua.
Yes?
How did she look?
The instructor swallowed and blinked and looked away.
She was still shaking her head foolishly and then she started to cry. My little girl, she said. O my little girl.
He pulled himself free after a time and lifted her to her feet and she just stood breathing, very quietly breathing, just very quietly gulping air. A lady in the crowd turned and looked at her and then glanced away in embarrassment. Across the street she saw an old woman in a lawn chair get to her feet and fold shut her chair and go into her house. The crows on the telephone lines plunged off flapping then lifted and circled and cried.
A white van passed and the crowd parted slowly. The mesh gates at the far end were unchained and rolled wide and the van went in. She wiped her eyes angrily. The grey light felt scrubbed and raw.
She could hear the steady clack of typewriters behind the iron gates. There were folding tables set up in rows just beyond the entrance and the crowd swelled up against the gate chain and then fell back. A man in a red shirt unpinned the chain and counted through twenty visitants and refastened the chain and his eyes roved the crowd as he spoke into a radio. She watched this, feeling gutted. What had been her heart now just darkness and heat.
Then the man waved them past and they were in.
It was a small ballpark in a small suburb. She had been here before. A softball game in the late summer dusk, hot dogs and mustard and beer in big plastic cups. Her daughter asleep in her lap. The air was afire with the stink of disinfectant now and under this a steady sickening sweetness. She knew that smell.
They were led past a sign reading Sanitary Carpet and they stood in a row upon a swath of tarps spread out on the asphalt behind the locked and shuttered concession booth. A small wooden sign for the ladies' toilets creaked in the wind.
The instructor pointed to a line of tables along the fence with computers set up to a generator. Over there they should have a record of her on file, he said. Go to the Identified Table. He furrowed his brow slightly. If you need anything.
Yes. Thanks.
I mean it.
Yes.
If I don't see you again.
It's okay.
He looked like he might hug her and she turned aside and then he did not. He returned to his place in the line as volunteers in white coveralls and white haircaps and bearing whirring disinfectant units strapped to their shoulders made their way among them. They handed out face masks and thin plastic gloves. The tanks tilted and slouched as they moved and were slung crosswise from hip to shoulder, the steel cylinders vibrating fiercely.
A man gestured for her to raise her good arm. He wrapped her sling in a clear plastic bag and tied it off under her armpit. She slid the cloth mask over her mouth and stood with her legs wide as a volunteer with brown eyes approached. His voice was muffled through his mask.
It's the Formol, he said. Shut your eyes.
She shut her eyes.
As he sprayed, her skin felt chilled and though she held her breath the sharp peppery stink of the chemicals made her choke. When he tapped her shoulder she nodded blindly and he waved her through and as she left she could see him rubbing the toe of his boot across the place where she'd stood as if to erase her passing.
Her bloodied hand had clouded up the inside of its glove and she stood a moment regarding it and then looked up. Her skin was grey in the slats of shadow where she stood below the bleachers. She walked to the ramp. Past the folding tables where typists filled in the brown cards of the dead she pushed into the crowds that lined the edge of the field then stood and shielded her eyes.
The first thing she saw were the gulls. Circling and alighting and slapping back into the air. The smell was brutal even where she stood. She saw rows of low mounded tarps amid bags of ice and these she knew were the dead. There were figures walking the rows slowly, stopping and staring and then going on. At the far fence under a tarpaulin tied to the batters' cages she could see an area marked Remains and she thought of the bodies there poured out, dumped in, zippered up in the black bags and then she remembered suddenly waking in that field of the dead after the quake and she turned and made her way under the bleachers.
She went to the tables the instructor had indicated and stood in line. When she reached the front a man with a thin white moustache and spectacles gestured her near. A stack of papers in a manila folder at his elbow, a pencil behind one ear. Sad brown eyes. He was wearing a shirt with silver tassels in a fringe across the pockets and she looked at them uncomprehending.
He glanced at his computer screen then back at her and he nodded. His voice was high, thin, scratchy. Yes? he said.
I'm looking for my daughter. I was told if I came here.
Yes. She's been identified?
She nodded.
Last name?
Clarke.
I'm sorry?
Clarke. With an e.
He typed with the first two fingers of either hand and studied the screen and after a minute he dropped his chin and looked at her over his spectacles. It's not here. Would she be under another name?
She shook her head. Kat? Katherine? With a k.
I'm sorry. Do you have her identification number?
Her what?
ID number.
She stared at him foolishly. I was just told she was here, she said. A friend, he knows Kat, he saw her in here. I don't know. She's sixteen. She's an inch shorter than me. Her hair isâ
But the man had shut his eyes and he was shaking his head. He removed his eyeglasses, held them in one hand, rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Mrs Clarke, he said unhappily. Please understand. There's hundreds of bodies here. When we ID them we give them a number and then we file them according to that number.
I know.
Without that number there's only one way to find her.
You can't look it up?
It's not here. I don't see her name here.
She nodded but did not understand.
Listen, he said. I need a name or a number. Something that'll come up here. You start one of two places. If she's here, that is. It seems everyone's getting told conflicting accounts and I imagine you're no different. But if your daughter is here she'll be in either Identified or Unidentified. Did your friend identify her?
Yes. He was sure.
But did he report it. I mean, to someone here.
She was afraid she might start to cry again.
The man leaned forward. Mrs Clarke? Mrs Clarke. Listen to me. Without that number there's just no way of knowing.
She swallowed.
Mrs Clarke?
Just give me a minute. Please.
Okay.
After a moment she murmured, Can't you check again? Maybe it's spelled differently.
He folded his hands in front of him. We could be here all day, he said. If you really want to find your daughter you need to go out there yourself. It's the only way to be sure. I amâ
I know. You're sorry. Everyone's sorry.
He watched her with his sad eyes.
Then she was on the field. She was walking out onto the turf feeling hushed and strange with her mask itching at the corners of her mouth. There were papers blowing across the field and trash in the wires of the fence and everywhere she looked she saw the lonely seekers of the dead. She could hear hammers at work behind the dugouts where stacks of unpainted coffins leaned, pale and hastily cut, and under that the cries of the grieving calling across the field. All of this she heard muted and dim as if through water.
Where she walked the grass lay trampled in little yellow clumps and as she passed a cordon a volunteer in tennis shoes who had been studying a clipboard looked up and nodded to her. Twin steel chairs marked the Unidentified section, a rope tied to one and looped in the grass. On the pitcher's mound a wooden sign had been nailed to a post and two soldiers stood beside it in the dirt, their rifles lowered. They wore very white cloth masks over their mouths.
She went past them. Past them and into the bodies.
All at once she could hear no sound except her breathing. Her ankles were cold where she walked. Many of the coverings had been kicked aside and left in crumpled heaps and she walked with her eyes to the ground and she did not look at the dead. She did not see a naked woman with blonde hair, heavy breasts flattened, her pubis shaved. There was no long red incision seared across her abdomen. Nor did she see a little boy with his bruised eyes open, his blue lips upturned in an eerie grin. Nor an old lady whose seamed face looked peaceful, unblemished, without a mark on her, as if she were only dreaming. Her body below the sternum was not mangled, was not horribly pulped. Nor a boy with his legs crushed holding a baseball glove to his chest. Nor a man with a swollen belly, the flesh gone soft as molasses. Nor another with his throat torn out and a newspaper stuffed in the wound. Nor a plump girl in pink pajamas, her cheeks pocked with acne. Nor two brothers in yellow sweaters, their faces dirtied, blood in their ears and hair. Nor a baby gone grey in the face with its black tongue poking between its lips nor a man with no hands nor a naked boy in sunglasses nor did all of their faces in the late clarity of that day seem to her peculiarly beautiful. She did not see these dead nor did she see across the rows a crow hop off a boy's chest with something in its beak and she did not see one of the soldiers walk towards it and it did not flap lazily away. She swallowed in the cold light.
She went on. The blue canvas sheets rustled where she stepped in close to see the faces. The creased tarps in the dirt underfoot reflected a weird blue light back up over all. She began to notice very small details. The prickled dandelion weeds in the grass. A bottle cap. The ants forming their tiny black script over the dead, cold in the grey light. When she looked up she saw in the outfield an elderly couple, the man in his good grey vest, the wife leaning into his arm. She stood watching as they murmured and paused and their voices carried across to her indistinct. He stooped to read some face and nodded to his wife and then they strolled on.
What was this world. What was this true world. She started to cough and turned aside and saw a man in a threadbare undershirt stained yellow with sweat or grime and he was kneeling next to a body. A boy in thick boots and a heavy fireman's jacket was fumigating the bodies and she watched the spray lift and blow awry the coverings. The boy stooped and adjusted the settings on the cylinder strapped to his back and kicked back up the tarps and moved on.
The small man in the stained shirt was calling out across the corpses. No one paid him any mind. His skin was so white, his unshaven face hard with long grievances. There seemed no fairness in it. He called out again and she heard no word in his cry. The clouds were mottled and suffused with a fierce light as if some luminous world hung obscured above. She crouched on an open tarp and tucked her chin against her collarbone and her legs felt thick with sorrow.
He was still calling and at last the two soldiers on the pitcher's mound looked at each other then wandered slowly over. The small man gestured loosely.
How much for a coffin?
What?
How much for a coffin.
Did you find someone?
How much do the coffins cost?
I think the caskets are free, aren't they? The first soldier looked at his companion and his companion shrugged. They give you one right away. Just go over there. Right over there. He pointed to the stacked coffins behind the dugout.
The small man stood with his head lowered.
What is it?
I can't lift her all that way.
The soldiers looked at each other and then one of them set his rifle butt into the grass and leaned on the barrel. He looked down. They got volunteers to help with that, he said.
We're just supposed to guard the bodies. Make sure no one steals anything.
The second soldier folded his arms. Anyways it doesn't matter. You got to get a death certificate first before you can remove anyone. You got a D.C.?