The Beginning Of The East - Excerpt

Some buildings leaned over and slowly sank like great ships, their windows flashing the clear, bright sky, tracing huge arcs with their rays of reflected sunlight across the faces of the surrounding buildings: others, touched by some powerfully magic wand, simply disintegrated in mid-air, their firmness all gone, became for a moment hovering forms of dust, shivering mirages of their former beings, and then collapsed into piles of rubble. Whole floors were sliced away, while those above and below remained intact, so that the buildings looked stunted brothers of themselves, the only sign of their past the loops of bent girders sticking out the corners where once there had been a fifth or sixth floor. Top floors became small garbage dumps, dull, colorless masses of broken glass, bent aluminum frames, bricks, rocks, tangles of iron rods, contrasting with the elegant glass and concrete structures that held them high in the air. Brightly painted walls, blue, brown, maroon, green, ochre, yellow, black, red, orange, turquoise, olive, grey, crackled, flaked, peeled, dulled, and aged, pieces of their masonry jutting out or fallen or falling. High up on these expansive and dilapidated cliffs, he saw bathrooms appear suddenly, shining yellow tile work, gold-trimmed shower stall, a bottle of shampoo still balanced on the stall's edge, a coatrack in the corner behind the toilet with its seat left up by the master of the house, a brown bathrobe blowing slightly in the warm breeze as if it were really real and not the doll house miniature it seemed, or he saw until the heave gas from the tanks on top the buildings slowly leaking down ventilators and stairwells and drain pipes found the hot water heaters in the apartments below and with a sudden blue flash of lightning followed by clouds of dust the buildings disappeared with their peaceful and comfortable dollhouse furniture, miniature bookshelves with even tinier books that actually opened, tinware pans, enameled stove, handknit rugs, small portraits and landscapes painted with human hair brushes hanging on the papered walls.