Mysteries Remain

“Days after the quake, a friend returns home to the eeriness of a place that’s undergone incredible violence,” author Emily Perkins writes for an article in the Guardian. “Everything is upended, on its side, fallen all over floor, drawers open as though a poltergeist has torn through it. The atmosphere of that force remains, yet the air is absolutely still. The birds are chirping. A vase of fresh roses stands on a coffee table, not a petal dropped. There are so many mysteries. Some people survived because they got under their desks. Others thank God they were thrown across the room as their desks were crushed. New stories emerge constantly, and at the centre of each is the randomness of this deadly rupture, the contingency of life. The state of buildings can’t be blamed any more than someone’s inability to brace himself in a doorframe. It happened, and how people fared had nothing to do with human action. A friend tells me about a huge tattooed guy she saw sitting in the orthopaedic trauma ward, spending hours trying to fix his cellphone with a tiny screwdriver. ‘You see people right in the centre of their lives just trying to make one thing work,’ she says, ‘so that they can move on to the next thing.’”