Hypothermia

authorities they were now organized into assigned groups and distributed throughout the gigantic subterranean sports complex. The ground floor, with its swimming pools under glass domes, was off-limits. The huge volunteer dumped me into a human river flowing downstairs to the lower levels. I asked a number of people if they knew the whereabouts of the kids from the nursery school, but nobody had news.
    I left the spiral stairway on the first floor below ground level and went looking for the gymnasiums. Large tribes of young people seated in big circles were playing cards or talking and shouting to one another. One group told me they had seen a woman with a bunch of little kids on the basketball courts on the fourth floor, two more flights down.
    As soon as I got back into the river of people heading downstairs, I noticed that the lower levels were much warmer: the electricity must have been knocked out; what little power we still had was thanks to the university’s generator. That explained why there was no air conditioning. The crowd advanced slowly, like a mob of sleepwalkers.
    The basketball courts filled an immense cavern. All the times I had made the walk to the nursery school, I’d never imagined that such a space existed beneath my feet. Students were camped out in groups, reading, sleeping, or doing homework. A volunteer signaled to me, index finger raised to his lips, that it was forbidden to make noise there. I couldn’t imagine that they would try to keep children there, under such conditions, so I kept moving.
    In the hallway I ran into a Korean professor of economics I knew, an acquaintance from some of the Fathers’ Nights at the nursery school. He was leading his son by the hand so I latched onto his coattails and asked him where the other kids were. At first he looked disconcerted, as if staring at me from inside a thick bubble. Then he seemed to recognize me. In one great rush he began to give me a scattered account of how a falling tree had smashed the hood of his car. He and his kid had waited quietly inside until the storm passed and then run to the school, which by then had had its doors ripped off and windows shattered, and was missing part of its roof. He kept saying that he didn’t know what he was going to do: he had just bought a house, and his insurance wouldn’t pay for the car because he hadn’t gotten any coverage for Acts of God. It took some effort to snap him out of it so that he could give me some more pertinent details: everyone at the school had been evacuated, they were in the women’s locker room down on the lowest level. It was pretty dark down there, he said, and really hot, so he was looking for someplace to buy his son a cold drink.
    I headed downstairs, leaving him to his monologue about the irrationality of a culture that attributes natural phenomena to God, as if he were chief clerk in charge of the weather. Past the fifth level it grew noticeably darker: only a few lights were on, and the red emergency lights gave the place a twilight atmosphere. The heat was so intense that there were only a few students still moving around.
    As I stepped off the spiral stairway on the seventh level I discovered all the university students—male and female—stripped down to their underwear, seated on benches, and chatting away as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Down here there was no adult supervision. The sheen of their bare shoulders, stomachs, and legs made me realize that I was completely soaked in sweat.
    I hurried to one of the locker rooms, bolting through the door with all the violence of my mounting desperation. Inside, the dense, acrid air reeked with a purely human decay. As I moved along the hallway leading to the lockers and showers, I thought it was an absolute disgrace to have banished the nursery children down here; they should have been upstairs where there was fresh air. The light, too, was awful, with only those sinister red emergency lights glowing on the tiles.
    I reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner, but instead of children and their teachers I found dozens of naked bodies, all intertwined, pulsing and grinding together on the floor and benches, and even propped up next to the lockers. Like some divine beast gestating and multiplying, it writhed and flowed in slow motion, some part of each body gripping and being gripped by the hands, mouth, sex, or ass of another. Their pale torsos in the red light reminded me of the tin