The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  The roar of the wind seemed to diminish when she opened the door onto the screen porch. Now that she could see the sideways rain, the magnolia tree bending like a penitent, sound and reality matched. If she could be inside it, blowing with it, she thought, maybe the wind would go quiet — if she didn’t resist, if she let the wind flatten her, if they all stopped trying to hold themselves up straight, if they became the storm. She put her hands flat on the screen. The rain stuck her like hypodermics.

  Troy had stopped inside the door. He was zipping up his pants.

  The wind howled down, driving leaves and branches and plastic bags like hell-bent ghosts. She pressed into the screen, straining it, and the cold needles pierced her, and the wind pushed the wire mesh into her breasts and her thighs. Under the arches of her bare feet, the porch floor shifted as Troy came up behind her. Dry hands closed around her upper arms.

  “Got the idea, baby? We got to go in.”

  She forced her fingers into the screen’s tiny holes.

  “Cora, come on.”

  His hands came up under her arms and pulled her back as if he thought he could separate her from the storm. His body was tight against her back—the warm dry skin of his chest, his hard pelvis, his cock, the cables of his legs. She strained forward, and when the middle bar of the screen snapped, she fell sideways, the wind holding her almost upright, almost airborne. She landed palms down in the grass, and Troy, holding her hair in his fist, fell next to her. The wind was throwing things at them—branches and shingles that flapped and veered, bottles that skittered along the ground—as Cora pushed up on her stinging hands and tried to stand. Maybe the wind would throw her too, she thought, but Troy had ahold of her hair, and his other hand grabbed her shoulder and pulled her down under the porch.

  Behind the old brick piers, the world seemed to snap shut. The sound of the storm seemed to be hers, now, something her body made. The sound of blood rushing through her veins. The roar of her nerves firing. Troy hung over her. Rainwater rolled over his brow. She reached up to touch his cheek. Fingertips on water on skin. His hand flashed up, grabbed her, and the world opened, the storm rushed in.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, girl?” His hand held her wrist. “Jesus. We should’ve got you out of here. I should’ve known.”

  But here they were, weren’t they. Crouched in the dirt. Below sea level. Underground. At the edge of the chain wall, rain drove in, and she wanted to be out there in it again. She struggled against his hand on her wrist.

  “Stop it!” he yelled, his hand tight as a vise.

  Above them, the house swayed, creaking, and again she thought of a ship, thousands of bodies crushed together in a lightless hold for the six weeks it took to cross the sea. She stopped struggling and pulled Troy into her. She would at least have the pleasure of his body against hers if that was what they were in for. The moisture between his skin and hers had warmed, and she felt cold, suddenly, as if all the blood had left her.

  Troy looked to where rain crashed over the chain wall in waves. “I didn’t know you were so drunk, Cora. I should’ve locked you in.”

  She tasted vomit at the back of her throat, swallowed. “I’m cold,” she said.

  He let her go, his fingers moving to the buttons of his shirt, but Cora didn’t want the clammy fabric against her, she wanted his body. She pushed her head into him, tried to wrap her arms around him again, but he only hovered over her in the dark. One hand on the ground to steady herself, she put a hand on his neck where she could feel his blood pulsing. A thin slick of water moved across the backs of her thighs. She worked her hand down Troy’s body, tracing the riverine muscle that wrapped around his side and rushed down under the waistband of his jeans. Her head tilted up, she licked at the water running down his chest, until he lowered himself onto her carefully. Just heavy enough to hold her down.

  “You are out of your fucking mind,” he said, and his lips were so close to hers, but then a loud pop like the crack of a whip ripped through the howling of the wind, and his hands lifted up off her, and she pushed back away from him along the ground as the house quaked, thundering with the impact of something huge and hard.

  The house above them crackled and groaned as if it might founder. Troy was out in the rain already, calling for her, but she had crawled away behind one of the piers, and she did not answer, and when the house keeled again and thundered, amplifying the voice of the storm, Troy’s eyes flashed white, and he ran away through the rain.

  SHE WOKE IN water. A cool brown lake that stretched around her as far as she could see, beyond the house’s piers and the porch steps and out over the side yard, where it lapped against the bricks edging the rose bed and glowed with a woozy sunlight that had something wrong with it, that was coming down more strongly than it should. Somewhere beyond, dogs howled in chorus, and the sound made the water riffle and the hot air shudder between the surface of the flood and the subflooring above her. Footsteps passed over her, and a shudder ran down her spine: someone walking over her grave. She sat up straight, water sucking at her skin.

  The water was only about four inches deep, but there shouldn’t have been standing water at all. It never flooded here, not if the pumps were working. Esplanade was a ridge, the portage Bienville’s Indian guide had led him down, showing him the best way to bring small craft from the gulf into the river. It had always been high ground. She pitched forward onto her hands and knees and crawled out, floor joists scraping her back. Out in the open, she stood, surveyed. The water seemed to go on and on.

  There was something very wrong with the light. The water, placid, rippled against the trunks of the crepe myrtles along the sidewalk, against the piers, a sheet of water printed with the brilliant sky that reached beyond the fence posts, across the streets, as if she’d awakened on a new world cloaked in glass. On Esplanade, a car tore past, and the wave it made climbed over the tops of her feet, then continued along the backyard, under the house, rode over the wobbling reflections of the parlor windows, and then was gulped up into the bright sun of the side yard. That was what was wrong. All the shade was gone. The wind had picked the magnolia up and thrown it down, bashed its green head through her parents’ roof. That explained the deafening crack, the dream she’d had of the earth breaking open, of falling down through rushing water, falling and falling without end.

  “WE’VE BEEN TRYING, honey. All day—your phone, the house phone, Troy’s phone. I even called next door, to see if the Maestres were in, but nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing until now.”

  She looked up the stairs at the shuttered windows, the blue light now coming through the slats. It was seven o’clock, maybe eight. It would be dark soon.

  “But the magnolia—” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. The doors are closed now, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Sweetheart, sweetheart, it’s alright,” her father said again. On his end of the line she heard a truck go by, the sound of suburban crickets. “It’s no big deal—we’ve got insurance. Wind damage. They’re crying about wind damage on the TV, like that’s the worst that could happen. Who cares about the goddamned windows at the Hyatt? Anyway, we’ll be home tomorrow. All that’s important is that you’re okay. You feel safe now? You’ve found the flashlights?”

  “Yes,” she said, except that Troy was still collecting—stalking around, opening all the drawers and armoires. The dining room table was a thicket of lanterns, matchbooks, candlesticks. She’d been watching him pace all day—trying Reyna’s phone, his aunts’, his cousins’, while he moved back and forth between the broken kitchen and the safe part of the house, dragging coolers full of food and hampers of plates and Mardi Gras cups. Except when he’d needed her help moving a buffet to barricade the kitchen door, she’d just sat on the steps and watched him, the towel around her shoulders he had put there that morning. So worried about his sister and her kids. As if he hadn’t abandoned her under the house at the height of the storm.

  “Sweetheart, listen, we’
ll be back as early as we can get there tomorrow. Maybe noon, one o’clock if I can get your mother in the car early and we get lucky with the traffic. But meanwhile, why not see if Troy will let you put him up an extra night, just so you’ll feel safe. You can put out all the candles, pretend like it’s the 1800s, have a good old time.”

  “Okay.”

  He seemed like he didn’t want to hang up. They were out to dinner with Aunt Zizi and Uncle Vin and her cousin Kevin. Her mother had apparently drunk too much gin and puked on the side of the road.

  “We ran into Uncle Augie on the way up,” he said. “Shared notes. His mother’s an old mule just like you—wouldn’t evacuate—and so now she’s all alone at her house in Metairie without power, which is no good when you’re an old person. Your mother and I were thinking maybe you could go check up on her?”

  Troy had come into the dining room again and stood there, punching something into his cellphone. Without the sound of his feet, the house was quiet as a closed mouth—no refrigerator hum, light-buzz, air-duct rumble.

  “Look, I know she’s a nasty old witch—the last time I saw her she waved an empty water pitcher at me like I was the help—but can you just check on her? You’ve been to that house with your mother. Maybe bring some water with you, food, whatnot. You gassed up the Jeep?”

  Her father just kept talking. She could see him, turning to the window of the restaurant, holding his finger up to ask her mother to wait just one more minute. He was still in the former world, air-conditioned, clean.

  “Honey, I remember Betsy—water came through the seams in the doors. But after it was over we stood up, dried ourselves off—”

  Carefully, quietly, she put the phone back in its cradle, while he went on talking.

  “What happened?” Troy said. “Line cut out?”

  Yes, she thought. The lines cut, the bridges blown, the boats burned, the ladder pulled up between this world and the world of the living.

  “I can’t get anything to go through. Not even texts. Nothing. Not even to you, apparently.” He came towards her, into the stair hall, and she moved up, a couple steps farther away from him. “I told you I was sorry. I’m sorry I left you there. But you weren’t listening to sense, and I got afraid the house was going to come down on top of us both.”

  She remembered falling through the rain, and with her eyes closed, fingertips against her eyelids, she felt like she was still falling. She opened her eyes and watched Troy’s biceps twitch as he took a box of matches in his hand, slid out the little paper drawer, selected a match, struck it. His neck was something made of meat. She shook her head to set it straight. No, she would visualize that the storm was over, the house intact, her parents on their way home.

  “Look, Cora,” Troy was saying as he put the lit candle on the newel post. “I think I better—I got to go see about Reyna. She’s not—I don’t trust her to keep it together in a situation like this. And I got to see about my house too. I don’t want to leave you, but you understand. I need to go see if the roof’s off or something, see about my nephews. You’ll be alright,” Troy said. “You’ve got plenty food. You’ve got water. The power’ll be back on soon, and we’ll all go back to normal.”

  She almost laughed. As if normal was a place on a map—a place you could go back to. No, as soon as you left, the rope was cut, the boats burned, and time rushed in like a river in flood. Home was a place beyond the rain and the long night. There was no way back. Not unless you were willing to swim, and from what she’d heard, the current was strong, the waves high and crested with fire, salty as tears.

  SOMETIME AFTER DARK, the front door rattled, then knocked against the jamb. In the bathtub, sunk to her neck in tepid water, Cora stayed still. If she could just be totally quiet, the man outside would give up and go away. All she had to do was pretend she didn’t exist—or that the world didn’t. She had already taken the batteries out of the radio, and the phone had ceased to ring. Her parents would be back tomorrow, and the man outside would leave if she just held her breath. With each knock, the water shuddered. What if he was the government—mandatory meant mandatory—and would break the doors down and drag her, naked, out of the city? What if he never went away?

  As slowly as she could, she peeled herself from the water. There was no change in the knocking. She placed her feet in the bath mat’s soundless pile. She wrapped herself in a towel, picked up the emergency lantern, turned it off.

  She had learned the sight lines of the house when she was thirteen, the first time her parents left her home alone. The closed shutters made it easier—the leaded window in the front door was the only unblinkered one in the house, and from it, you could see no higher than the landing of the front stairs. To see who was at the door, she could creep halfway down the back stairs and, from the twelfth step, bend over and look down the hall to the front door.

  Out in the city, alarms were going off, sirens sounding above the growl of generators. She shimmied along the hall from the bathroom towards her bedroom. Downstairs, the man was kicking the door. The wood fibers cracked. She thought about the duck gun in the attic. Open the breech, load the magazine, close the breech. At the stairhead, the prisms on the chandelier touched one another, tinkling. Cradle the gun, lock into your shoulder, remove the safety. She lifted her foot over her bedroom’s threshold and landed lightly on the rug. Ready. No clean clothes—the armoire door would creak. Aim. But if she shot someone, she would never stop seeing him, lying bloodied in the vestibule. Fire.

  As she pulled the damp shirt over her head, the man began to yell a word that sounded like her name.

  She remembered herself. She was a capable, twenty-eight-year-old woman in good health standing on the second floor of a locked house just hours after a hurricane. Her neighbors’ roofs had caved in, she imagined, their windows had blown out. Some of them had been caught in the storm and hurt, and here she was hiding like a coward, doing nothing to help. The man was yelling, though. He seemed angry. Walking heavily down the front stairs, she showed herself.

  Between the leaded glass and the screen of the vestibule doors, Troy was pacing like an animal in a cage. Cora hesitated a minute longer before opening the door.

  “Goddamn it, Cora—” The outer air rushed towards her, hot as breath.

  “I’m sorry.” Her body still barred the entrance. “I was scared. I didn’t know it was you.”

  “It’s flooded,” he said, spreading his hands away from his pants that were wet up to the middle of his thighs. “My house, your house, the whole neighborhood—I didn’t even get to Reyna’s. And it keeps getting higher, like it’s still coming in somewhere—not just rain, it can’t be. The levee’s breached. I hear them saying it’s in the Ninth too, and Lakeview, and St. Bernard. Ten feet deep some places, some places more. It’s coming up through the manhole covers. I need your Jeep, Cora. As soon as it’s light out. We need to go find them—”

  She backed away from him, from the city, from the heat. The flood had come. She could still bar the doors, give Troy the keys, and wait here, high up on this ridge until the city had drained and it was safe to venture out again. But if she stayed inside, the flood would find her. She could feel it rising, snaking its way through the sewers. She could feel it bubbling up in her throat.

  One Day after Landfall

  August 30

  On Martin Luther King, they stopped the Jeep and got out into the early morning damp. Up ahead, in front of Calliope, a tree had fallen, a tangle of power lines and rough-barked limbs frozen at tortured angles. Two men in wifebeaters stood on the corner, leaning against the chain-link, and Cora glanced back at the Jeep and the pirogue they’d stolen from the Maestres’ garage strapped to the top of it. They would have to walk from here.

  Last night, Cora had kept dreaming the same dream. She was floating in the middle of a river as wide as an ocean, watching the muddy banks. A wind stirred, and dead oak leaves eddied towards the water in a tumbling gust that changed into a murmuration of clamoring birds.
She woke, fell back asleep, and the beach was there again, but this time the birds had transformed into a horde of people rushing towards the waves. Men and women, little boys and girls in Carnival clothes and masks reached out their hands to her, but she stood paralyzed in the prow of her rudderless boat, and every tear that fell from her face made the flood rise higher.

  She didn’t need Dr. Nemetz to explain that one.

  After the last dream, she’d rolled over on the mattress and taken Troy’s phone from his nightstand, found Reyna’s number in his recents, pressed send an uncountable number of times, listening to the alarm sound of the failed phone line as she drifted off again. Half-asleep, she felt a hot pressure in her lungs as if she were diving under water, her webbed feet pushing her towards the muddy riverbed, her feathers pressed to her sides. She needed to find something before she could rise again, surface with it held in her beak. A faceless woman and her children climbed out of the water through the hole they’d chopped in their roof with an enormous axe, but then they fell, floating limply towards the riverbed, facedown.

  When she finally elbowed Troy to wake him, he just rolled over, growling. She’d come close to hyperventilating, waiting for the dawn. Breathe through your nose, deep down. Think about the task in pieces: what’s your first step?

  So far, they hadn’t seen the water. All through the Quarter and down Tchoupitoulas, Annunciation, Melpomene, she’d had to maneuver the Jeep around branches and torn wires that basked like snakes on the asphalt, but the streets had been dry. Even here in Central City there was no water, but the men at the chain-link still looked at the pirogue, the Jeep, with desire. Troy nodded at the men. One nodded back. The other, a bandana tied tightly around his head, just threaded his fingers through the links of the fence and kept looking.

  Between the brick buildings, the grass was spongy with rain. The paths that led up to the doorways had been broken up in places by weeds, and devil vine reached up towards the railings on the porches. Two women sat on a stoop, fanning themselves with magazines. It seemed no one was talking, no radios playing here on the other side of the rain.