XXXIII. FAST-FORWARD
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That was a shocker, they agreed over coffee at Café Mitwelt later the same day.
Geryon couldn’t decide which was more odd—
to be sitting across the table from a grown-up Herakles or to hear himself using
expressions like “a shocker.”
And what about this young man with black eyebrows who sat on Herakles’ left.
They do have a language, Ancash was saying.
Herakles had explained that he and Ancash were traveling around South America
together recording volcanoes.
It’s for a movie, Herakles added. A nature film? Not exactly. A documentary
on Emily Dickinson.
Of course, said Geryon. He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.
“On My Volcano Grows the Grass,”
Herakles went on, is one of her poems. Yes I know, said Geryon, I like that poem,
I like the way she
refuses to rhyme sod with God. Ancash meanwhile was taking a tape recorder
out of his pocket.
He slipped a tape into it and offered the earphones to Geryon. Listen to this, he said.
It’s Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines.
We were there last winter. Geryon put the earphones on. Heard a hoarse animal
spraying pain from the back of its throat.
Then heavy irregular bumping sounds like tractor tires rolling downhill.
Herakles was watching.
Do you hear the rain? he said. Rain? Geryon adjusted the earphones. The sound
was hot as a color inside.
It was monsoon season, said Herakles, volcanic ash and fire were mixing in midair
with the rain. We saw villagers
racing downhill and a black wall of hot mud behind them twenty meters high,
that’s what you hear on the tape.
It sort of rustles as it moves because it’s full of boiling chunks of solid rock.
Geryon listened to the boiling rocks.
He also heard broken sounds like glassware snapping which he realized were
human cries and then gunshots.
Gunshots? he asked. They had to send the army in, said Herakles. Even with
lava coming down the hills at
ninety kilometers some people didn’t want to leave their homes—Oh here
listen, Ancash interrupted.
He was fast-forwarding the tape then restarted it. Listen to this. Geryon listened.
Heard again the ripe animal growl.
But then came some solid thuds like melons hitting the ground. He looked at Ancash.
Up high the air gets so hot it burns
the wings off birds—they just fall. Ancash stopped. He and Geryon were looking
straight into each other’s eyes.
At the word wings something passed between them like a vibration.
Ancash was fast-forwarding again.
About here—I think, yes—is the part from Japan. Listen it’s a tsunami—
a hundred kilometers from crest to crest
when it hit the beach. We saw fishing boats carried inland as far as the next village.
Geryon listened to water destroying
a beach in Japan. Ancash was talking of continental plates. It’s worst at the edges
of ocean trenches, where one
continental plate sinks under another. Aftershocks can go on for years.
I know, said Geryon. Herakles’ gaze
on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising. Beg your pardon? said Ancash.
But Geryon was taking the earphones off
and reaching for the belt of his coat. Got to go. The effort it took to pull himself
away from Herakles’ eyes
could have been measured on the scale devised by Richter. Call us
we’re at the City Hotel, said Herakles.
The Richter scale has neither a minimum nor a maximum threshold.
Everything depends on
the sensitivity of the seismograph. Sure okay, said Geryon, and threw himself
out the door.