The Memory Police: Chapter 21  Summary & Analysis

Don hides under the old man’s couch, trembling. The narrator searches for the old man among the debris and finds him underneath a fallen dish cabinet, his face bloody. The narrator tries lifting the cabinet, but it won’t move. The old man tells her to leave him and get out quickly, because a tsunami will surely follow the earthquake. But the narrator will not leave. She figures out a way to life the heavy cabinet while the old man crawls out, inch by inch. The boat shifts beneath them. The narrator bleeds from her hands but keeps holding the cabinet. The old man at last struggles out from under the cabinet, and he, the narrator, and Don flee the ship.

The narrator and the old man make it safely off the ferry and keep running until they reach the ruins of the library. The old man says he is fine, but the narrator worries about the blood coming from his ear. They hear a rumbling, and a huge wave starts heading for land. The sea smashes up the houses on the coastline and covers the boat. When the wave is gone, Don howls, and this seems to set the world back into motion.

When the narrator and the old man turn to look at each other, they realize that they are in bad shape: their clothes are torn, there’s dust in their hair, and the old man has lost both of his shoes. Somehow, though, he is holding the music box, which is unscathed. The narrator asks him why he brought it, but the old man doesn’t know—he must have unconsciously put it in his pocket without realizing. The ship is completely destroyed, along with anything the old man had onboard.

The neighborhood is damaged from the tsunami—the buildings are crumbled, and there are fires burning. It starts to snow as emergency vehicles and the Memory Police’s trucks drive through the town. The old man and the narrator hurry to the narrator’s house, which appears fine from the outside but is damaged on the inside. They rush to the office and try to life the trap door, but they cannot.

The old man calls down to R, who knocks from his side and says he’s there. Even with R pushing and the old man pulling, the door won’t move—the tsunami must have warped it, says R, whose voice sounds faint and distant. R says that the ventilation is not working and that the electricity is out. The narrator panics, saying that if they can’t get him out, he could starve to death. She tells him that they’ll find a way to get it open.

The narrator goes across the street to get tools, and the old man is able to pry the trapdoor open. The narrator borrowed the tools from the ex-hatmaker. He’d offered to come help, so she had to lie to him, telling him that the old man had broken out in a rash and was too proud to see anyone else. With the door open, the old man and the narrator rush down to check on R, whose hair is covered in splinters. In the secret room, in the darkness and among the rubble of R’s things scattered on the floor, the three hold hands and stare at one another. They feel like this is the only way to assure themselves they’d all survived.