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asphalt; the only way forward was to scramble over it all. An entire lamppost had been plucked from the ground and coiled like a corkscrew around the trunk of an oak tree. The image of that hideously twisted metal is burned into my memory, I fear, forever.
    The street leading to the nursery school’s front entrance was blocked by cars crushed by fallen trees. I was clambering over the debris when I felt someone grip my shoulder. It was a policewoman in full riot gear. She shouted at me that the whole area was off limits. I realized then that I’d managed to tune out the hellish racket of sirens and hammering combined with the sound of the wind, which was starting to pick up again now. I pulled away from the woman without answering, but only made it a few yards before she caught me again. I told her my kids had been inside when the tornado hit. Everybody was very worried, she said, but she could not, unfortunately, let me through. I asked if she’d heard about any victims. She said there were some casualties but didn’t know how many or if any were from the school. The children and teachers had all been evacuated to the sports complex. This time I escaped by scrambling over the roof of a car, but in a few moments she collared me again, twisting my right arm up behind my back. She threatened to arrest me if I tried running again, and in that case I certainly wouldn’t find out about my children any time soon. She frog-marched me away and turned me over to a volunteer with a blond crew cut who weighed at least 450 pounds. Without releasing my arm he more or less carried me into the gymnasium. I remember scanning the scene in desperation and noticing that the whole roof had been peeled off the daycare building. My last sight of the emergency zone was two firefighters cutting open a car to remove the passengers, their only available light cast by the spinning beacons on nearby rescue vehicles.
    Gringos are an obedient sort of people: in full compliance with the 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