The lecture is boring and I have already leaned over and whispered into Leon's ear that I think so. But he has more patience than I, and I can tell by the way he scowls toward the stage that he is annoyed with me for being so restless. I am petulantly folding my arms, preparing to pout my way through the rest of "Chaos, String Theory and the Little Known Universe" when the room begins to shudder. At first a great groan comes up and I think for an instant that I may have missed an important comment from one of the panelists. But then the vibration quickens and there is a chattering and a tinkling and before I think about it I look at Leon and say "earthquake" as if to confirm the obvious. This is in the moment before action, when everyone freezes to see if it is worth standing up or taking cover. One doesn't want to seem panicky. Calm during earthquakes is a great indicator of one's place in this state. It's like a fancy zip code, a discreet measurement of one's belongingness.

The crowd realizes the seriousness of this particular quake all at once and like a giant wave, it rises and begins to head for the aisles. There are screams, many nervous hooting noises, some swearing. The scientists on stage are ripping the lavaliere mikes from their lapels and jogging awkwardly into the wings. Leon and I are just standing up, frozen in a forward crouch, when a loud, cacophonous chiming causes me to look up and see the enormous, sparkling chandelier detach itself from the domed ceiling of the auditorium and fall as if it is being pulled earthward by something much stronger than gravity. I feel fear for the first time in the last seven seconds and then I feel as if my arm is being ripped from its socket as the edge of the chandelier grates down the side of it and lands, with a deafening, shattering crash, on my boyfriend's head. He disappears into the shards of crystal and glass, one tweed arm emerging limply from the mess.

My arm burns in a numb, painless way and then I scramble over the seats behind me, hiking up my skirt and crawling like Jackie Kennedy did in Dallas, landing on my chin in the aisle and then pushing myself up and running toward the exit. The room is still shaking; we will find out later that the earthquake lasted a little over twenty seconds, a lifetime.

People are really screaming now, throwing elbows and falling down in their hurry to get out of the theater. Pieces of gilded plaster are falling from the balcony, the little fingers of cherubs raining down in a pelting, golden cloud.

I have reached the foyer when the shaking stops but it takes me and everyone else a few seconds to realize it. When we do, there is an edgy slowing down. We are like rabbits taking a rest, all twitching jaws and tensed muscles. Then a deep voice booms from the crowd asking us to please remain calm and exit the building in an orderly fashion. People are still streaming in from the auditorium and the foyer is thick with the dusty members of the scientific community and their dates.

I can't get my lower jaw to stop bouncing up and down. I feel like a rabid dog, like I might start growling and drooling and acting dangerous. But I don't. I stand where I am, stepping from foot to foot and trying not to bite my tongue. I don't exit the foyer. I can't. Outside the glass doors I can see red lights reflected in the wet street. Sirens wail from all over the city, hundreds of scurrying bodies are running down the sidewalk. So much for earthquake weather I think, watching the drizzle hurl itself into the headlights of stopped cars.

Leon is dead, I'm sure of it, but I can't quite do anything about it at the moment. I am aware in a buzzing, peripheral kind of way that this is going to end up being the worst thing that has ever happened to me, that I will suffer and never fully recover, but at the moment I am too busy keeping myself from acting like a rabid dog to begin mourning. I see the limp, tweed-wrapped arm over and over again, the one I have slept against for seven years, ever since I graduated and it became more or less okay for me to do so, and each time, I shake my head, physically knocking the image away.

Dr. Paul Wolof, one of Leon's colleagues, a new guy recently transferred from the University of Indiana, approaches and takes my elbow. His fingers are moist and tentative against my skin. I notice him slowly, his weak chin and his pale face and his damp, ash-colored hair.

"Are you all right?" he asks, and it is only then that I realize that other people are starting to calm down. I see a woman smiling and rolling her eyes, and I get the impression she is making fun of herself for being so scared. The residents of San Francisco are quick to out-blasé one another and as I look around, the crowd begins to look more and more like a cocktail party, like one of those horrible department socials I sometimes go to with Leon, the ones full of scientists who make me ashamed of being a sculptor, whose very presence makes the words "textile art" sound frivolous and West Coasty, on par with astrology or the raw food movement.

I look at Dr. Wolof, my jaw still chattering away and say, "Leon's dead."

He blanches and frowns. The general mood in the foyer is that everything has turned out just fine. "He was crushed by the chandelier, the big one in the middle."

Dr. Wolof lets go of my arm and rushes away, jogging back into the auditorium. I like that he's done that. It seems manly and capable. Maybe I had him pegged all wrong I think as I watch his blue oxford bob away from me.

When he is gone I turn my attention back to the big glass front doors. People are leaving now and because the doors are open, the sounds of the city's sirens are louder. The air is cold and damp. Traffic goes nowhere.

Some people have the constitution for things like this, some dormant and untapped source of strength. But I don't. I have nothing that hasn't already been tapped; I use every bit of inner strength I have just to get through regular life and I have no reserves for emergency situations. Which, I realize, is part of the reason I am still with Leon about two years after he has lost interest in me and started having an affair with one of his graduate students, a girl named Beverly who is from Cut Bank, Montana, and has, I've been told, an amazing mind for solar physics.

The foyer, which moments ago was full of warm, panicky bodies, is starting to empty. But I stay where I am, rocking from foot to foot and waiting for Dr. Wolof to come back. I can't bring myself to leave because of my aforementioned lack of inner strength and because Leon had the car keys and I don't even know if driving is a possibility. The Golden Gate Bridge could have fallen down for all I know. It's due for something like that.

Plus, there's the question of the house, which is built on a hill prone to losing great chunks of itself in the rainy season. The house could be a pile of matchsticks at the bottom of the ravine, and if it is, I don't want to know it just yet. So I am paralyzed, stuck in the foyer bobbing around like a sandpiper.

Dr. Wolof jogs in from the auditorium. He is frowning and breathing heavily and when he reaches me he frowns so hard his eyebrows touch in the middle.

"He's not in there," he says, taking long, catch-up breaths.

"He's under the chandelier. The big one in the center."

"Could someone have already gotten him out?' he asks me. He is trying to look sympathetic but I can tell he is beginning to regret coming to my aid.

"No. It just happened. I was standing right next to him and then…boom. I ran."

"Well, he's not there now."

"Look for his arm. Only his arm is sticking out. The rest of him is under all that crystal."

Dr. Wolof sucks his lips into his mouth and then lets out a big puff of air. His breath is minty fresh. "Look, Rosie," he says. "He's just not there. I looked. I'll take you back in there if you want."

My heart does a little contraction of nervousness. I don't want to go back in there, to witness the scene of that previous horror. I don't want to look at Leon's limp arm again. I shake my head.

He sighs again. "Here, let me take you home."

"I'm scared it fell down. We're on a hill, you know, a steep one. I have this feeling it just tumbled down the ravine."

"Why don't I take you back to my house then and we can see about Leon. We can call the hospitals, see if someone got him there without you seeing it."

I let myself be led out the glass front doors because despite his appearance, I am fully convinced of Dr. Wolof's competence.

We are walking up the street. There are no lights on except what is coming from the stopped cars. People have gotten out and are directing traffic. More inner strength types. It's misting heavily and tiny beads of moisture collect on my face and on the fibers of my sweater.

"Did you know Wolof is an African language?" I say, as we hurry up the street, heads bent down.

"Yes. West Atlantic subfamily of the Niger-Congo language family. Spoken mostly in Senegal but also in Gambia," he says, without taking his eyes off the cracked and buckled sidewalk.

"I used to know how to say ‘I'm really stoned' in Wolof, but I forget now."

Dr. Wolof glances at me and his eyebrows jump together briefly. "Can you say anything in Wolof?" I ask.

"No. I've never been to West Africa."

I trip over a chunk of cement and Dr. Wolof catches me by the elbow and prevents me from falling. He lets go again and we say nothing for a while.

We've gone two long blocks in search of his car when I say, "Where do you live? Maybe we should walk."

He looks around, jingling the keys in his pocket and noticing for the first time that driving will be impossible; no one is going anywhere and people have abandoned their cars in the middle of Van Ness Avenue.

"You're probably right, but it's a hike."

I shrug. Walking feels good. My jaw is back under my command and I am able to take deep breaths. We cross the street and head east. North Beach, I think. Maybe Nob Hill.

When we cross Polk Street there are people clustered outside the bars, drinks still in their hands. Huge transvestites in sparkling hot pants and platform shoes lean against buildings smoking cigarettes and sipping from martini glasses. Everyone is outside, lit by the glow of headlights and brake lights and the flickering emergency fluorescents of a few of the buildings. A man with a thick black moustache runs up to me and thrusts a bottle of champagne at me. I accept it and take a great, fizzing gulp. "Fuckin-A" he says, grinning.

We have passed Polk Street and are heading uphill into the dark residential streets when I say, "Where have you been?"

Dr. Wolof stops. "What?"

I stop too and face him, breathing hard. "You said you had never been to West Africa, so where have you been?"

His eyebrows are really doing their thing now. "Why are you asking me this now? This is a state of emergency. Your…um, your partner may be dead. I think you need to focus a little."

"Do you know a woman named Beverly? Have you ever had her as a student?"

He blushes and then shakes his head. "I know who she is."

"She's really smart, huh?"

"She has gained some notoriety within the department for having an exceptional mind for conceptual physics."

I make a mental note. Conceptual, not solar.

"Leon says I have emotional intelligence. That's a physicist's way of telling you you're dumb. It's a euphemism. It's like Special Ed." A long fire engine passes us, wailing along with its many counterparts throughout the city. They are like whales communicating in a strange language across vast distances. We stop talking and I plug my ears with my index fingers.

When the fire engine is gone I say, "It is true that I never passed physics, even with Leon as my teacher. In some ways, I don't even want to know how things work. I think the mystery is more poetic. Although, I'm not a Luddite. I mean I hope they discover a cure for cancer and I like email and everything. It's just that—."

"Rosie!" Dr. Wolof says sharply. But when I look up, I can tell he's embarrassed to have shouted. He clears his throat. "Let's keep walking. It's still a ways away."

We trudge up the hill, through the mist, without speaking. People are standing outside the gates to their buildings talking to one another and exchanging stories. No one seems to be panicked or hurt and I find their presence extremely calming. If it is still possible to stand outside on the sidewalk and shoot the shit with the neighbor, then there is a chance life can get back to normal. Maybe my house is even still standing. Maybe Leon is alive, although I find this very hard to believe.

Dr. Wolof lives on the border between Chinatown and North Beach in a building that houses both a bank and a donut shop on the ground floor. The windows of both are broken but no one is inside. A security guard is standing outside sipping milk from one of those mini cartons. Dr. Wolof asks him if the building is safe and the security guard shrugs and says, "It's an at-your-own-risk situation at this point."

Dr. Wolof fumbles with his keys and we enter the dark building. "No elevator, I guess," he says. We make our way up the stairs, holding tight to the cold, metal banister. It is the kind of dark our eyes will never adjust to. No light at all. "This must be what a black hole feels like," I say. I hear one of those puffs of air that sometimes stands in for a laugh come out of his nose.

We walk up four invisible floors and then enter a hallway and feel our way down the wall until he finds his door, fumbles again with the keys and opens it into his apartment, which seems absolutely brilliant compared to the hallway.

"Have a seat. I'll find some candles."

"They don't recommend that," I say, sitting down on the couch and surveying the room. "The worst thing about the 1906 quake wasn't the shaking, but the fires afterwards."

He pauses and then goes into the kitchen, leaving me in the living room, which is nothing special, neither messy nor particularly neat. The furniture doesn't match but neither is it sloppy or cheap. There is a brown, tweedy couch, a lamp with a red ceramic base sitting on the side table, some stained, beige throw pillows. The coffee table is littered with opened bills and a coffee cup and the walls, under the corner windows, are lined with books. I strain from my seat on the couch to see what they are but I can't read the spines in this light. Dr. Wolof comes back with a flashlight that shines a dim circle of yellow onto the hardwood floor. He uses it to locate the phone book and then sits down across from me in a leather chair and balances the phone on his knees. "We should start with General," he says, brushing the thin phone book pages quickly.

My nose is running from the cold and every time I sniffle Dr. Wolof looks at me to make sure I haven't started crying. I want to tell him he doesn't have to worry. I feel as hollow and stone-faced as a doll. It's shock, I presume. Outside the city is still filled with sound of wailing.

I watch as he dials the number of San Francisco General and then goes through a series of prompts, impatiently pressing buttons and sighing. I don't know what news I want to hear and although Leon was crushed by the chandelier right before my eyes, I am starting to doubt my understanding of the events preceding this moment. It's difficult now to even remember what the earthquake felt like, to believe that it was real and that the earth, the whole humming city, was shuddering and shaking beneath us less than an hour ago.

"Hi," I hear Dr. Wolof say. "I'm searching for a missing person. Leon Rummel. He was at the Herbst Theater." Dr. Wolof says "uh-huh" a couple of times and then starts snapping his fingers at me and pointing behind me. He wants a pen and I get him one from the jar over on the telephone table in the hall. He scribbles a number on the cover of the phone book and hangs up. "They don't know anything. We're supposed to call a central emergency number. It sounded pretty hectic down there. I wish the electricity was on; I want to see what's happening."

I remember the wind-up radio I bought for Leon's last birthday. We kept it under the bed in case of the big one and now, if the house is still standing, it is still there, waiting for someone to finally put it to its proper use. This makes me sad. I don't want Leon to be dead. Even if he ends up leaving me for Beverly, I at least want him to be alive.

Dr. Wolof dials the emergency number and waits through another series of prompts. He waits a bit more and then pushes a button and an instrumental version of "What if God Was One of Us" comes through the tiny speaker on his phone. We're on hold.

He puts the receiver back in its cradle and the music continues to fill the dark space between us. We are amazingly alone in his small apartment, five stories above a disaster that will go down in history, that my future children will someday learn about in school. Outside there are still occasional shouts and a few people honking their horns, trying in vain to get traffic moving.

"What if we were the last two people alive in the whole city, walking through the ruins like some visiting archeologist, like Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes?"

Dr. Wolof plants his hands on his knees and pushes himself up. "Do you want some crackers and cheese? I've been starving all night."

I shrug and nod at the same time. Whatever. Dr. Wolof is sick of me, I can tell. I can hear myself sounding weird. "Detached" is how Leon explains these moods, but I can't help it. I feel physically incapable of focusing, or making an effort towards understanding this for what it is. I really do want Dr. Wolof to imagine Planet of the Apes with me, stepping through the ruins of restaurants we know, and libraries, and the halls of the university, but he won't. He will only do the right thing, sit quietly through instrumental versions of early ‘90s pop hits until he gets the information he is after. Like Leon, Dr. Wolof is patient.

He comes back with a box of Wheat Thins and a hunk of cheddar with the plastic wrapping pulled back to expose the orange rectangle. "There's some wine, too," he says, setting the cutting board down on the coffee table between us and heading back into the kitchen.

He comes back with the wine and two glasses held upside down between his fingers. It's a waiter's trick and I try for a second to imagine Dr. Wolof as a waiter, all smiles and winking pleasantries. This is difficult because I don't recall ever having seen Dr. Wolof smile. He pours us each a glass and then he sits back down in his chair facing me.

"You're a sculptor, right?"

I sip my wine and nod into the glass.

"What sort of things do you do?"

"Textiles. I embroider maps of fictitious human migration patterns onto quilts."

He nods again and then the room shudders and by the time I am on my feet, it stops. My heart bangs against my breastbone like a desperate prisoner.

"Aftershock," Dr. Wolof says. "They can go on for days."

My feet and hands go immediately cold and my jaw starts up again. I begin breathing like a horse, big loud puffs through my nose.

"I don't want to be here," I say, turning in place. "What if the building comes down?"

"What about Leon? We should wait to get some information. I think we're pretty safe in here."

But I am suddenly convinced that we are the only two people left in the building, that the security guard downstairs was a half-wit, shrugging and slurping his milk as we entered what was sure to become our tomb.

"I'm leaving," I say. "I'll walk to the hospital."

"But, which one? We need to find out where he is first."

"All of them. I don't care. I'm leaving." I stand up and Dr. Wolof follows me, grabbing his coat and sighing. I have become his burden to bear, a big, nervous, chattering conceptual artist who he has to look out for. I do not envy his position.

We make our way back down the pitch-black stairs, temporarily blinded, feeling our way with our feet and hands.

The street is emptier than before and the security guard, the man on whose conscience our deaths would have rested, is nowhere to be seen. It's dark outside, still drizzling. I have no idea where the nearest hospital is. Once I get on the street, though, I immediately start to feel better. I am of the opinion that should something big like a telephone pole or a building come crashing down, I will be able to jump out of harm's way.

Dr. Wolof hands me my coat, which he has been carrying this whole time and says, "St. Francis is the closest, so we should probably start there." We start west, walking up the slick, dark sidewalk toward the hospital.

There is a yellow glow silhouetting the buildings. It reminds me of the way the setting sun looks sometimes through heavy fog, when you can see no source for the light but only the effect of its presence in its lasting, persistent radiance. We walk toward it like two people in a renaissance painting.

Leon was just shy of forty when I started college. He was one of those men liberated by advancing age and his newfound sexuality gleamed from his bearded face, shining in his nearsighted eyes like a flame. He was a bachelor. Not one of those rogues who can't settle down, but a man accustomed to the life of a shy, smart academic for whom the trappings of mating—dancing, wit, an interest in wine and food and music—holds no allure. I was twenty, equally liberated by my newfound freedom, by the absence of my mother's watchful Seventh-Day Adventist eye, and by a budding feminism that allowed me to stop shaving my legs and make shocking, naïve comments about sex to much older men.

I spent a lot of time in Leon's office the first semester of my junior year. At first we leaned toward one another while he helped me to understand some fairly simplistic physical property like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which I memorized—the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known—but never truly understood. I was his worst student, a flaky artist struggling to fulfill a university requirement, just the sort of student professors complain about at cocktail parties, a student with no real interest or enthusiasm for the subject. He disapproved of my carelessness with facts.

But he was magnetized by the ways in which I was careless with myself, brushing up against him and talking too easily and holding his gaze. All of which made me an easy target for his experimentation with his new self. I was like human training wheels, helping to steady his clumsy flirting and awkward passes.

We went on our first date shortly after the midterm, which I flunked—Yugoslavian film and Chinese food three towns over, where we were unlikely to run into any of his colleagues. If I were on that same date today I would be nervous, eager to make a good impression. I might drink too much wine or chirp along endlessly about my art. But, at the time, I was drunk with the sense of myself as attractive, thrilled to be in the company of an older man who thought me so, and who I mistakenly assumed was in the possession of a long and illustrious romantic past. And because of this, our mutual surprise and intoxication with ourselves in this particular situation, we started sleeping together, supporting one another's exhilarating new self-images.

I moved into his rickety old redwood house the June I graduated and shortly after, he began to take me out to public places within the vicinity of the university and shortly after that, to department functions, where I was introduced as his girlfriend and where I first started to lose confidence in my own charms.

The St. Francis hospital is as loud and clamorous as a television hospital. Bloodied people on metal gurneys in the hallway chat with one another, happy to be the ones who can wait. Nurses rush around, stethoscopes bouncing against their breasts as they trot. Dr. Wolof approaches the front desk, where other anxious people are leaning, demanding answers. The computers are down. There is no complete list of patients. They've had over 100 admitted since the earthquake, many of them for serious injuries. They tell us, the whole group of us, to calm down to have a seat, to wait until they know more.

"We're looking for a missing person," Dr. Wolof says when he manages to catch a nurse as she moves past him behind the counter. "We just want to know if he's here."

"Call the number," she says, nodding in the direction of a handmade sign taped to the wall which lists the same emergency number Dr. Wolof was referred to back at his apartment. Technically, we are still on hold with that number; its canned music is still filling the stillness of Dr. Wolof's living room.

"This was a bad idea," he says to me as we walk away from the counter, back through the crowded waiting room. "We should have stayed at my place; we can't possibly check the hospitals this way."

"He's not here, anyway," I say, taking Dr. Wolof's hand and leading him through the throng of people and back out to the wet sidewalk.

We walk down the block and stop at an idling car with the sound of the radio news blaring. There are four men sitting in the car and a small group of other people gathered around, leaning into the windows to hear better. The newscaster is telling us that the electricity is out in over 350,000 homes. As he says it, a helicopter thrut, thrut, thruts over us and on cue, we all look up, watching it pass. The news goes on to tell us about traffic jams, hospital reports on the numbers of injured, the buildings that have already been deemed uninhabitable. We squint and strain as a picture of the damage emerges in our minds. We hear of off-ramps crumbling and each picture ourselves exiting at that very street, our cars falling in a tumble of concrete and rebar. But soon I grow impatient. They have nothing new to tell us and simply keep reporting what we already know in an endless loop of confusion and calamity.

I watch Dr. Wolof as he cocks his head toward the radio and realize this was a stupid idea. He was right; we should have waited in the apartment for the emergency number to pick up. I can't remember why I was so scared, so completely convinced of our peril, but now I want to go back there. I don't want to go to another hospital like the St. Francis, filled with the strain and anxious stink of trauma. I want to take my chances in an abandoned apartment building, serenaded by the Muzak version of pop rock. I want to finish my wine and watch as Dr. Wolof takes care of me.

I grab his arm again and when he turns to me I say, "Can I call you Paul?"

He looks at me surprised; he hadn't realized I'd been calling him anything else. "Of course."

"Let's go back to your place, Paul," I say. It sounds like a proposition but I don't linger long enough to get his response. I just start walking. He, of course, follows me.

We zigzag our way back up and over Nob Hill. We see an apartment building down on one knee, lopsided and sad looking. The entrance to the building has disappeared under the splintered wood and crumbled stucco. We steer away from it, heading left another block and then straight ahead, down a stairway. I continue this way, veering north toward the ink-black bay and then east, where Oakland glows dimly in the night. Our route reminds me of one of my quilts, meandering and illogical, what one critic called "whimsical". Paul follows me, resigned to my wanderings. My route will takes us twice as long, but it is helping me. All this walking in the cool, dark night is helping me to forget the sight of Leon and his one inept arm emerging from under the chandelier.

When we arrive back at Paul's dark apartment building, my watch says it is eleven fifteen, a little less than three hours since the earthquake. The city is quieter now. Although sirens are still constant, they are distant. Paul's block feels like one of those futuristic disaster movie sets, deserted and dark. I expect ragged people with Mohawks and heavy black eye makeup to creep out of the corners at any minute. We stop outside the entrance and look at one another.

We stand for a little longer, listening and watching, taking it in like archeologists.

"Look," I say, pointing to where dark brown water and then a panicky, flopping fish have bubbled out of the gutter.

"What happened to Leon?" he asks, ignoring me and the fish.

I look at him, straight into his worried brown eyes, and open my mouth like I'm gasping for air. My mind scrabbles against the moment, straining to find purchase, a starting place from which I can look back on this night with a good, clear view.

Paul blinks back at me, waiting.

I am suddenly terrified again, dizzy with the awful suspicion that I have gotten it all wrong, that the chandelier never fell on him, that Leon ran away from me just in time to save himself. "I was trying to understand it. I was trying to understand your little known universe. But—" I start. I am interrupted by a great groaning and creaking across the street.

We both turn and look as a building, home to a real estate office specializing in buildings of its kind, falls in on itself as if it is being sucked down by some enormous underground mouth. A cloud of dust lifts and then rumbles towards us, billowing into the wet night. I can see Paul in my peripheral vision. "Rosie!" he says sharply as if he is trying to wake me up. And then the cloud reaches us, a blast of warm grit and chunks of cement the size of pebbles and he is swallowed up. He disappears but continues to say my name. His disembodied voice repeats it like a ghost and I am tempted to find him, to grasp his hand until the cloud settles. Instead I close my watering eyes and cover my face until the pebbles hit me more softly and then I begin to run, first north and then west, zigzagging my way through the dark city, past abandoned cars and confused dogs and shop windows containing tangles of fallen mannequins. There is no one else here but me and if I keep running I will make it home to the redwood house on the side of the ravine by dawn, in time to straighten up before Leon's return.