Right of Thirst Read Online Free PDF Page A

time. It was only another party, after all, and I was only another young man. But I think I realized right then that I had a chance to become someone else.

CHAPTER FIVE
    I’d seen the announcement in the local paper. The lecture attracted me, and I must have been doing better that night, and I hadn’t drunk too much wine, because I shaved, and dressed, and got into my car, and drove the thirty minutes to the university campus just past the hospital. The first of the summer classes were in session, the students were out in the warm evening, and the air was full of honeysuckle from the flower beds along the old brick building where the lecture was held. I’d been to lectures there before, and I knew that many in the audience would be my age or older. The college kids had better things to do on a Saturday night.
    The hall in the basement was half full. I took my place high up by the projectionist’s booth, and looked down at the podium below me, hoping for a few minutes’ respite. The talks were held weekly, on a wide variety of subjects.
    The speaker stood waiting. He was in his early forties, trimly muscled, lean as a long-distance runner, with well-cut salt-and-pepper hair, a black T-shirt, loose tan cargo pants, and an erect, military air. He wore rubber sandals with burnt orange straps. He looked tanned, sternly athletic, and impatient, as if he had work to do.
    He tapped the microphone a few times to make sure it was on.
    â€œLet’s turn down the lights,” he said, after a minute or two, “and get started. First slide, please.”
    The projectionist, an elderly gray-haired woman who I knew volunteered her time, turned down the overhead lights from inside her booth, and lit up the podium where the man stood. An image appeared behind him on the screen—an emerald green valley, deep between snow-covered mountains. A village stood in the center of the valley; mud homes, an orchard, with trees rising above the brown walls. Around the village, a ring of delicately terraced fields.
    â€œMy name is Scott Coles,” the man began. “I’m going to talk to you tonight about an earthquake.
    â€œThis village was over three hundred years old,” he said, pointing to the screen. “It hardly changed at all during that time. The people there have much more in common with the ancient past than they do with the present.”
    He paused.
    â€œNext slide, please.”
    There was a click from the projectionist’s booth behind me.
    It was a photograph of a damaged Japanese city. Sheets of broken glass, whole structures moved off their foundations, tangles of black wire coiling everywhere, though many of the office blocks seemed intact. The photograph must have been taken shortly after a rain, because there were puddles on the black asphalt streets, which were strangely empty, and the glass sparkled and shone.
    â€œThis is what a big earthquake will do to modern steel buildings,” he said. “Next slide.”
    It was the mountain valley again. The fields remained, but the village itself was gone. The whole of it was a low pile of earth and stones, like a burial mound. Only the trees in the orchard were undamaged, though the walls around them lay in pieces at their feet. No human figures were visible.
    â€œThis is what a big earthquake will do to a mountain village made of mud-brick and stones,” he said, pausing for effect.
    â€œIt happened early in the morning,” he said, “when everyone was asleep. More than one hundred and fifty people were buried here. Only a handful escaped, and most of them were injured. They tried to dig out the survivors. But they had no tools. It was cold. They used their hands. By the time help arrived, pretty much everyone trapped in the rubble was dead. Imagine what that must have been like.”
    He paused again.
    â€œThere were hundreds of villages like this,” he said. “And now they’re all tombs. Tens of