I put my sunglasses on. The light calmed. I scanned the bridge. There were only a few specks and dots of stopped cars on it. Then, north, in the distance—something? A smudge on the skyline. It was very faint but it looked like smoke. I strained my eyes into the haze. Yes, it was smoke.
My heart shivered. I took the sunglasses off and rubbed them on my sleeve. My eyes narrowed against the strong light. After a moment I looked again. The smoke was definitely there. I walked up and down the balcony, peering intently. No, it wasn’t a mirage.
Down and down and down the flights of stairs and back into the car. How would I get to the bridge from here? I drove along the wrong street, reversed, turned left, got lost. At one point I found myself dutifully obeying a one-way-street sign and looking for an alternative way. Eventually I reached the motorway and zoomed down to the bridge. There were two articulated trucks on the motorway, one of which had trundled down and jack-knifed across three lanes. I dodged them and sped up and across the bridge, crossing to the southbound lane to avoid the toll barriers. Coming down into Northcote I could no longer see the smoke; I slowed down, then decided to stay with the main road north. Yes, there it was again, a blue-grey haze towards Glenfield. I turned off to the left past the golf course and went down Archers Road. Now the smell of burning, pungent, penetrated the car. I was getting lost in a maze of suburban streets, going down a no-exit road and seeing the car reflected in the blank panes of ranch slider doors from vacant houses. I stopped, checked my loaded guns, reversed, U-turned across dry lawns; then halfway down the next street, jammed on the brakes, hard.
It looked as if a mass of rubbish had been strewn across the road, over the gardens and trees, and even on the roofs of the houses.
I took the rifle and cautiously got out of the car, locking the door. The burning smell was very strong. From behind the houses there came a crackling noise, suddenly, into the quiet. I walked along the side of the road. A pale-orange object which was lodged mysteriously in a broken tree proved to be a battered suitcase.
The rubbish everywhere was a compound of torn clothing, papers, odd shoes and shredded material; plastic bags and cups, personal effects. I stared at it. There were more suitcases. Going into the smoky gloom I found my way down a drive and emerged into what had been back gardens. An enormous burned scar ran across the ground. The houses in the next street were in ruins, just smouldering remnants, collapsed and buckled roofing iron and mangled carports, masses of brick here and there; black stumps of trees still glowing with hot charcoal. White ashes lifted in the slight breeze. Heaps of incinerated houses, huts and garages had been hurled all over the place. Skeletal cars, everything burned from them, were lying haphazardly around, some overturned.
I clambered cautiously over hot acrid remains of objects which had become indecipherable. Melted tarseal stuck to my shoes. The stench in places was particularly stinging, and my eyes were soon streaming with tears. Coughing and sweating, I stumbled as quickly as I could over more ashes, broken concrete and drainpipes, until I emerged on the other side of the smoke. It hung in a cloud across several streets. Further down, a fire was still burning, slowly, making loud snapping noises. Even out of the range of the burned and wrecked area, houses had been partly demolished and domestic wreckage flung across lawns. One house had been sliced in half and stood open in cross-section to the dull sunlight; a living room with pictures on the wall, a television set, a brass lamp with a turquoise shade, imitation-leather lounge suite; and purple curtains waving in the slight movement of air. I walked past. A tartan slipper and the door of a refrigerator were lying across some ripped cushions on the grass verge, the innards of the cushions spilling out amongst shards of broken glass and the decaying remnants of food, eggshells, oranges. At the end of a long scar across the lawn there was a metal object embedded inside the caved-in wooden wall of the next house. I went down the drive and crunched over the broken glass of the windows and doors. The house had been partly knocked off its foundations, and the front door was leaning to the left, its glass panels shattered. I climbed in. There was a smell of plaster, dust, fibreglass pink insulation disembowelled from the ceiling, and a rubbery, oily machine odour. Wedged into the centre of the ruined house, blocking the hallway and kitchen, were the huge black tyres and hydraulic mechanisms of an aircraft’s landing gear. One set of wheels, at any rate. The metal struts were buckled in places, otherwise scarcely damaged. They had thrust into the house at speed, locked in a senseless rigidity. The pink fibreglass hung down from the ceiling in tendrils with ripped corrugated iron and long, dead, cobweb filth. I looked in the nearest bedroom, just to check, but of course there were no people. My shoe crunched a small object: a glass ornament, one of several knocked from the dressing table. It had been a swan, the glass streaky white like petrified milk, translucent; I had broken its neck.
I went back outside. The smoke across the street parted and I could see the great tail fin of the crashed plane looming out of the debris, unburned, the Maori logo of Air New Zealand on the side like a brand on a shark fin. Everything else was charred, an empty carcase in pieces. I only walked far enough down what had been the street to discern part of a starboard wing and a massive engine, crushed and mottled with dark patterns of fire, still hot, wobbling the air with heat; then I turned and made my way up the street and across and back to my car. My eyes were acid from the reek of burned plastic, vinyl and styrofoam. The sharpness scalded my sinuses and throat. I put the rifle in the car and stood wiping my eyes. All the time I was thinking of this plane, yesterday, coming down at dawn from thirty thousand feet, from—where? Los Angeles? Tahiti? Singapore?—suddenly empty, spiralling down, metal and petrol, across the spread of deserted streets and houses.
And I’d thought I was driving towards some part of the answer, that I might begin to understand, to detect a pattern.
I could scarcely see the wreckage as I stood there, the heat blotting illusions into the air, my eyes watering. God, this couldn’t have any meaning, it was too insane.
I suddenly felt irrelevant and weak. The sun behind the smoke was dull orange, and it made the light very strange with a faded muddy pallor. I stared at the sky. The physiological mechanisms of weeping were operating on my face. I had not given way to the real reaction for a long time. Hardly ever, in fact.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The research centre, where I normally worked, was closed as usual for the weekend. I locked the car and walked to the main doors of the windowless concrete block, my rifle in one hand, the keys in the other. I had no specific reason for coming here, except that the centre was near Albany, a short drive north from Glenfield. And I felt uneasy about going back into the city or to my flat at Takapuna. Perhaps this building would be a secure place for the night. I felt defensive at the prospect of nightfall.