Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  Without the focus on driving, his fear is rising. Through all his body.

  The radio, volume low, explains how the water has come up creeks and rivers and it has crossed the flat, dead landscape, and it comes up the roads and it comes up the canals that were cut decades ago through the earth to ship cotton and beans from here down to the Gulf.

  He sees a church, on a hill, the highest point he’s seen since morning. One story, white wooden siding turned a greenish-gray with mold and decay.

  The traffic has stopped moving.

  On the radio, there’s panic suppressed by the volume control. The near silent litany of a growing destruction. A city. More towns. The water is just three or four feet high. But that’s all it takes to knock out whole stores. Whole factories. Whole blocks of homes and apartments and people.

  The water is twenty miles behind them.

  “The church,” his daughter says. She’s pointing toward the hill.

  He looks at her in the mirror. He says soon, “We’ll be okay.”

  “We should go up there,” his son says.

  “We’ll be okay,” the father says again.

  “Daddy,” his daughter says, “we hear the radio too.”

  PART 1

  All That They Can See

  They sit down, just the two of them, but not next to each other. Instead, they sit at a right angle on two big sofas in the lobby of a hotel, beneath an atrium of iron railings and yellow light that reaches nearly twenty stories above their heads.

  They sit with a distance between them, automatically, a habit. But, already, he’s begun to smile. As she talks. As he listens. Already he knows that he could listen, as she talks, all night.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Father

  The dandelions grow everywhere.

  Along cracks in the sidewalk and in the mortar of brick walls, and one after another the dandelions grow from gaps in the shingles on every house of every street for mile after mile. Buildings twenty and thirty and fifty stories high have roofs covered in young, green dandelions, dandelion stems growing from every windowsill, every terrace, every architectural outcropping otherwise unnoticed and forgotten.

  There were signs the previous spring. Dandelions that couldn’t be killed by any herbicide. Yet no one thought much of it. They were just an annoying number of dandelions in a lawn. Dandelions in the broken concrete of a driveway. Dandelions that homeowners and yardmen and work crews could easily pull free and toss away.

  But now there are more than anyone can imagine. Like cicadas, people say. Maybe some years are worse than others.

  The dandelions sprawl like cobwebs across whatever surface they’ve attached to, some are ten or twelve inches across, no flowers yet, no stem.

  And still nothing will kill them. They can only be pulled from their place, carefully, with the roots intact, or else they will continue to spread across this city.

  The car radio tells of the destruction to the south. Estimates of deaths are in the thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Video, they say, shows the water simply pushing forward, in some places racing at twenty or thirty miles an hour. In other places, the water barely seems to move. Yet everywhere, its force continues to take down homes and buildings, turn trucks on their sides, push groups of cars from the surfaces of roads and the highway.

  On another station, he hears baseball.

  He’s managed to edge the car to the side of the road. To a short dirt path leading up to the church.

  He hears on yet another station that soon the water will lose its force. The wave, they say, will begin to slow. Any minute now.

  Of course it will.

  The small cemetery beside the church seems to be very slowly descending down the hill toward the farmland, a movement many decades in the making as the tombstones all began to tilt, eastward, and the stone plaques in the ground shifted, eastern edges lifting upward, western edges subsumed by the dirt and grass and moss.

  There’s a sign in front of the church. A message. Many letters are missing. But the scripture is still easily read.

  HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE

  FOR THE VISION TO BE FULFILLED?

  —DANIEL 8:13

  They’ve parked next to the cemetery, the kids sitting in the front seat next to him. Both of them pressed into the passenger seat, looking down at the rows of cars no longer moving on the highway at the foot of this hill.

  They’ve been parked up here for just ten minutes.

  His daughter holds the phone in her hand. She keeps hoping she’ll get a signal.

  “There are so many people calling each other,” her brother says. “That’s all it is. Just too many people trying to call.”

  He touches the boy’s head. Then her head. Dark brown hand on their black hair. Warm.

  They are seven and eight years old.

  “Can either of you sleep?” the father asks. “You should sleep.”

  The boy, who’s older, shakes his head. The girl does too.

  “Okay,” the father says softly. “Okay.”

  The wipers sweep water from the windshield. He’s left the baseball game on the radio for now, the sound of a crowd simply talking and yelling and jeering at the batter, the announcer noting each step of each motion of the hitter and the pitcher and the runners on first and third.

  Echoes of normalcy.

  “Daddy,” the boy says, pointing out the side window, south, where they’ve come from and where cars are lined up on the highway for as far as they can see.

  The father finds the switch, pressing it, rolling the passenger window down to see better through the rain.

  His son says, “People.”

  And he’s right. Far away. Through the water in the air and the dimness of the sky and the blur of the near madness of a scene that’s without context or reference for the father or his children, he sees what he thinks is at most an imagined nightmare, dark fears of the paranoid come suddenly true.

  People, far away, are climbing onto the roofs of their cars.

  Men and women and many children, all move forward, from roof top to roof top, even as the cars underneath them begin to shift, as if the earth below all of them were steadily giving way.

  But really, it’s the water. It pushes against vehicles, rocking them against each other, beginning to lift whole cars and whole trucks from the surface of the road.

  And on the radio, the crowd cheers and cheers and cheers.

  Still the dandelions grow.

  In the grooves along the roofs of cars parked on city streets. In the benches of bus stop shelters lined with ads for joint relief and more efficient personal hygiene. Dandelions grow amid the flowers and shrubs of elaborately contained landscaping in front of corporate headquarters, iconic steel towers, vast buildings made seemingly of one single sheet of glass.

  The blades at the base of the dandelions grow tightly against whatever surface the roots have penetrated, the green blades jagged, rough, like weapons set out to defend against attack.

  More cars lift, moving slowly but unnaturally, side to side and up and down, and some turn over, sluggishly, as if each were bubbling up against the heat of unseen flames somewhere underneath them. Solid rock turned methodically to red-hot molten lava.

  But this is water. Pushing through and against the cars and trucks all stopped on the highway.

  People climb from the cars ahead of the motion, running across rooftops and flatbeds and some jump down from the vehicles, trying to run between the cars or trying to run along any space on the shoulder of the highway still not covered by cars or trucks.

  He watches. From the front seat. His kids next to him.

  He thinks he should tell his children to look away.

  Ahead of the water, some drivers turn their cars from the highway, trying to escape the gridlock by heading into the muddy land around them. The cars stop moving almost instantly, their front bumpers seeming to dive into the mud that the rain and approaching water have turned into a deep, thick trap that catche
s every car.

  He thinks he should tell his children to turn their heads.

  People stumble and fall as they run across the roofs. People carry children. People carry old men, they drag old women, one man holds a dog and a cat and some other animal unidentified, and now the man falls, forward, hitting his head as his body slams out of view. People jump from the roofs to the road and some try to run along the otherwise clear, seemingly safe path that the muddy, dead farmland seems to offer. But they stop moving immediately, sinking knee deep, their children sinking to their waists, caught within a few steps by ground impossibly wet, all of them now only able to sway in place, swinging their arms, wildly geasping for help as the water from the south finally reaches them.

  The father thinks he should tell his children to cover their eyes.

  The water moves in a surge three or four feet high. Spread out across the farmland, pushing the cars and trucks from the relative height of the highway, a leveling force that keeps moving north. It rains still, hard, and so the only noise he and his children can hear in the car is the sound of the wipers on the windshield and the sound of the rain rattling hard on the metal roof of their car and somewhere, probably, they can hear the sound of their hearts, beating wildly, pounding, throbbing in their ears as the wave of water keeps pushing vehicles from the road and covering the people stuck in the land along the side of this dead highway, and the water sucks men and women from their windows and sometimes rises even higher, a swelling wave that pulls people from the roofs, because now the water has a force beyond its reach, a force gravitational that draws everything and everyone toward it.

  He thinks he should grab them, his children, and hide them from all of this.

  But he finds that he can’t move. Can’t blink.

  He can’t even speak.

  In some places in the city, crews of two and three and four will move through an area—the landscaped plaza in front of an office building, the once ornate corner park near the art museum—and methodically remove the dandelions. Black garbage bags are filled. The men and women lean over, like day laborers in a field of produce, rapidly pulling dandelions from the crevices to which they’ve adhered.

  In some places, it’s obvious how many dandelions are missed. Left behind by a crew paid low wages for a job the landowners don’t respect. Or missed because the dandelions have so easily found hidden places in which to grow.

  Under rocks. Beneath other plants. In the dark recesses behind a bench.

  Yet even when the dandelions have been pulled away with the greatest care, often some piece of root is left behind. Barely visible. But enough for that dandelion to, within a few days, easily regenerate, growing again, propagating once more across the surface of this city.

  A few cars have managed to pull up this hillside to the church. Seven or eight of them. Other people run across the gravel road, then up the hill, tripping and sliding but still making their way forward. Away from the highway. Away from the water.

  More people try to cross the farmland to the hillside. But these people skip the road, taking instead the straightest line from where they were to the promise of higher ground.

  And now they are stuck. Thirty people trying to cross the farmland. The mud holds their legs. Their arms wave wildly, but without effect. The water soon surrounds them as they flail and, he’s sure, all of them have started to scream.

  He’s gotten out of the car. To see better around him. The people who’ve made it to this hill are gathered in the small church cemetery. They stand on gravestones in the ground, or on tombstones that tipped over many decades ago, tombstones barely big enough to hold the feet of a man or woman. It’s an overlook of sorts, the people all staring down at the chaos of the water and the endlessly flat land and the vehicles left in the spreading destruction.

  Everyone stands on a tombstone. No one, it seems, wants to stand on the actual ground. As if this dirt too will soon turn into the mud that traps the people below.

  Forty people on this hill. Maybe more. They watch.

  But they hear nothing. The rain is just so loud.

  The gravel road from this hill to the highway is gone now, the water pushed it away, and instead a river runs between their hill and the tops of destroyed vehicles along the highway, and there are fifty or sixty people up here now, in front of the church, looking back down at the water rushing and the cars being pushed left and right and turned onto their sides, and the people down there, those who try to swim, they are immediately overtaken by water filled with debris of a kind that won’t allow kicking or arm movement; instead the swimmers are knocked unconscious or just pulled down, under, and already they are gone from view.

  Other people, just a few, still stand on car roofs, balancing in place as their vehicle rocks and shakes and turns. Their arms are out. They are light on their feet. All of them are alone. Each one seeming to dance, bodies swaying to a song no one else could possibly hear.

  And no matter how many dandelions are pulled up, there’s a realization that this city was, some months ago, covered in tiny seeds that no one ever saw.

  No warning went out. No alerts were raised.

  Instead, without ever being noticed, some millions or billions of these seeds silently landed across the city.

  Sooner than seems possible, the scene below the hillside begins to look as if it has always been this way. It is merely a lake, with a current moving slowly north, cut through with a ribbon-thin junkyard of cars and trucks, a bus, small vans.

  Still people stand on the tombstones. Looking down.

  The water hasn’t risen further. It doesn’t climb the hillside.

  But it’s impossible to say that anyone feels safe.

  They simply know they are alive. They simply know they are, for now, protected.

  The man is soaked. He starts to realize this. He feels cold first. Then feels water. Every part of him is wet. He thinks he should get back into his car. He turns to move, but his foot doesn’t follow, stuck in the mud near the cemetery, and with his mouth open he emits a silent scream, a reaction so quick and so horrified that the motion of screaming is faster than his ability to make a sound, his hands now dropping to the ground, pulling on his calf, so hard that his foot comes out of his shoe.

  His foot lifts easily. The shoe does too.

  This is just mud.

  Normal mud.

  Nothing more.

  He leans over. Head near his knees. Eyes closing tightly. Trying to breathe.

  What in the hell do we do now?

  In a minute, he stands up straight. Looking around. The rain falling, maybe harder than before. Near him, people still stand in the cemetery. But some also look around. At each other. At the church beside them.

  Some move toward each other. Hugging. Touching hands.

  Some move toward the church. The door is locked. But it’s broken open very soon. Slowly, people move inside. Away from the rain. And from the highway down below them.

  The father still stands next to his car. There is water as far as he can see, miles south and miles east and miles now to the north. Dark water, so heavy with mud that it has almost turned black, with a surface disturbed everywhere by branches and stray auto parts and the arm of a sofa and the leg of a chair and in too many places he can easily see the half sunken shape of a child.

  There’s no sense anyone can do anything to help the few people on the roofs of the remaining vehicles. They sit on the roofs. Or stand with legs stiff. One lies down, on her back, only staring up into the rain.

  He gets back into his car. Turns the heat up. The kids stare at him.

  “Daddy,” his daughter says. “Have you checked the phone?”

  The stems of the dandelions grow upward, six inches, ten inches; there are some nearly two feet tall. And then they bloom, one morning, in the heat of this city’s constantly rising summer, the bright flowers color this massive and abused place in a brilliant, unmatchable yellow. Far more dandelions than had even been noticed, the blooms s
pringing out from places impossibly high, impossibly hidden.

  A city coated in blooms.

  Days later, when the yellow flowers turn to white seeds, a billion perfectly round heads of fluff suddenly cover the city, the seeds releasing, and soon this place is enveloped in clouds of white dandelion seeds flying through the air. People wear surgical masks across their mouths, goggles over their eyes, they trudge slowly through the dandelion release, fighting their way forward as if a snowstorm has descended upon them.

  The clouds blow lightly, down streets, over parks, against the tall clock tower and the huge art museum. The seeds stick everywhere, to people and to cars and to buses making their way up another crowded avenue, the buses’ advertisements and logos and even the bus number and bus route all are obscured by the white layers of seeds.

  And still more dandelions emerge. From places unseen.

  Still more dandelions release their white and delicate clouds.

  And already it’s impossible to imagine how many more dandelions will follow these.

  Traded banter and jokes they shouldn’t share. All of it revealing slightly more than they know it should. Even as each line, each joke, each moment is hidden in teasing and in stories and in inappropriate comments too funny to be bad.

  She lifts her foot toward him. “See?” she says, smiling, punch line to a joke only the two of them could decipher. “Shoes.”

  The atrium of the hotel, when either of them looks up into it, seems to bend, slightly, a house of mirrors maybe, ultimately vanishing upward, far beyond anything they can see.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Investor

  The homeless teenagers sleep along Third Avenue, exactly one block from the nicest parts of downtown. Their bodies, lying asleep next to each other, inadvertently form an unofficial border that neither they nor the police will cross. An unspoken bargain with city leaders and law enforcement.