The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  “There you go.”

  He played with the buttons on her blouse. “Where?”

  There was no point answering that. Tomorrow they would be somewhere else; she and Troy had agreed. They would take her car and drive north. Thinking about the malls they’d stop at to buy new clothes, the bleach smell of fast-food restrooms, the thin motel towels made her sick, but it had to be done. The boys needed to be gone. Tyrone leaned against her leg, pressing his thumbnail into the decking. He had let her bathe him, but he wouldn’t look at her now. He didn’t trust her, and she didn’t blame him. In his position, she wouldn’t trust a goddamn thing.

  She scooted Willy off her lap and held her arms out to Tyrone. “Let me do you now, honey.”

  The boy shot his legs out, but he kept looking at the floor. On the wood, he had carved a row of angles, like roofs without houses. She squeezed Neosporin onto his sores and gently rubbed it in.

  Sitting on the magnolia’s fallen trunk, Troy poured a can into a pot on the grill, and the liquid hissed and sputtered. Neither boy had asked about their mother. Presumably, they’d seen it all before. Presumably, they understood, though Cora could not really say that she did. She did and she did not. While the little boys were in their bath, Troy had pulled her into the hall, apologizing. After the death of Reyna’s daughter—SIDS, the coroner said—she’d taken pills, and when that didn’t work, she tried a razor, then a knife. He couldn’t manage her if she got like that again, he said. Not and take care of the boys. He didn’t say: not and take care of Cora too. It had already been hard enough—getting her to get help, getting her to take her medicine—but she had eventually gotten well enough to go to school, get her nursing degree, take a job at Charity. Still, when Tyrone was born, he had called family services. They’d told him there wasn’t much they could do beyond sending a social worker out once to check up, and so he’d tried to let it go. He’d tried to be a good uncle to them.

  Cora started another roll of gauze, holding the end gently against Tyrone’s shin, while her other hand circled. Help gets you fucked. It was true, Cora thought. Everything Reyna had said was true. When you were at the bottom of your hole, they came and took away what agency you had left. They called you weak. They dragged you from your house. They inserted tubes and instruments into your body. They gave you pills that took away your reality and replaced it with their own. Yes, help was a disrespect. Help was a fucking, and this time she had been complicit. More than that, she had been glad to see Reyna grow smaller as they drove away. She would have been glad to see Reyna completely disappear.

  When they had gotten back to Esplanade, there was the graffiti X on the siding, the door kicked in, boot tracks on the floor. If they hadn’t been out, the patrols would have dragged them out, pushed them out at gunpoint. Maybe locked them up, especially if Reyna had still been with them, acting like that. They were lucky—they could leave tomorrow on their own accord. The rescuers would carry on without her, and that was probably for the best. Earlier that afternoon, she’d pried an old man’s fingers off the arms of his rocking chair, and when a woman had begged her to turn the pirogue around so that she could go back for her wedding album, Cora had kept rowing. She had been high on helping them. Each person she found felt like a missing piece of herself, but now she understood that they each belonged only to themselves.

  She should look out for herself now as everyone was always begging her to do. She should pack her things, get on the road, have a Frosty and some onion rings, stand naked in front of an air conditioner. She imagined a hotel shower, the water stripping the dirt from her skin. Her body wanted those things—rest, pleasure. She and her body were one. Accept that the world is telling you the truth, Dr. Nemetz would say. The truth was that the city was flooded. The truth was that the government would rescue the people who were still out there. The truth was Troy and these boys needed her help, and she needed to accept that and go.

  In the yard, Willy was running naked around the stalks of the tiki torches. Troy looked up at the tree, at the knotted moss and the ropes of smoke that dangled into the sky like the promise of escape. Cora rubbed Neosporin on Tyrone’s other leg as Tyrone watched his brother run.

  Three Days after Landfall

  September 1

  Tyrone was sitting up in bed, his wet eyes shining in the near-dawn darkness, when she heard it: a rustle of leaves, a scrabbling like the sound of an animal’s claws on slippery ground. She reached for Troy, but he was no longer in the big bed, where they’d all fallen asleep together in a hot pile. Willy still lay curled beside her, thumb in his sleeping mouth.

  “Where’s your uncle?” Cora asked Tyrone, but he didn’t speak, didn’t move.

  Twigs were breaking inside the house. Something was in the magnolia—an animal, a burglar. Tyrone’s eyes were fixed on the door of the bedroom, which was open onto the pitch-black hall. Wind rushed in, a smell of ozone. For a second, the scrabbling died, and they heard only the clattering of the leaves.

  “It’s nothing.” She patted Tyrone’s arm as she got out of bed. “Wind just blew the door open.”

  The air licked her skin with its rough tongue, and Cora waited with her hand on the edge of the door. Somewhere in the house there were footsteps.

  “Troy?” she called out.

  The footsteps stopped, but Troy didn’t answer. She wanted to retreat to the bedroom to wait with the children—if it was a looter, they would be safe hiding under the bed in the dark. They would simply let the person take what he wanted and go away. But the person was not opening drawers, not picking up any of the heavy, valuable things scattered around the house. He was walking slowly, trying to get his bearings. Cora went into the hall, closing the door behind her.

  The footsteps were coming across the lower floor—barefoot and light. She wanted to call out again, but her mouth wouldn’t open. Instead she flew to the back of the house, threw open the door to the gallery, and then she was in the open air, under a heavy blanket of stars, her feet tearing off the tin floor as she ran. Down in the garden, Troy was going into the shed, where the axes were. There was no time to yell down.

  In her father’s studio, magnolia branches thrust up through the broken floorboards and against the toppled sculptures. She shimmied around the walls and ran into the attic. Her heart was beating against her neck. For a second, she closed her eyes, her hands on the warm metal door. Forty-five right, twenty-five left, twenty-three right. She felt around for the bullets in the bottom of the safe. Open the breech, load the magazine, close the breech. She checked the safety and, clutching the duck gun by the barrel, went back down and through the studio and along the gallery under the stars.

  Inside the house, there was screaming—a cacophony of shouts and high-pitched yells that would not resolve into words. At the head of the stairs, Cora stopped. The door to her bedroom was open now, and Troy was blockading it with his body as he struggled against someone whose face Cora could not see, someone who was trying to get into the bedroom, where Tyrone lay on the white sheets, oddly still. Outlined in the moonlit window above him, Willy stood and wailed.

  Her father’s voice was in her ears: Cradle the shotgun, lock it into your shoulder, remove the safety.

  The axe blade gleamed at Troy’s thigh.

  This was a nightmare then. How else could everything she’d feared be coming true. The smaller figure, whose bald head shone featureless in the dark, was grappling with Troy, who had stopped fighting back, who only stood with his arms and legs pinned into the doorway as if he were a wall. He seemed to think he could protect the little boys from the terror that was coming at them, but there was no safety here: only screaming, only sobbing, someone yelling no, someone with a curdled voice yelling Let me in. Safety was impossible here, on this side of the rain.

  Remove the safety.

  “Mama! Mama!” Willy was screaming, silhouetted against the moon, but his mother was gone, and the axe was in the hand of the other person now, who struggled and kicked, trying to push
past Troy. Troy didn’t move.

  Remove the safety.

  “Stop!” Cora yelled, but they could not hear her through their own shouting.

  Remove the safety.

  “Stop!”

  Nothing changed.

  There was only one way out. Open the breech. To leave this place, this hell on the far side of the rain, you had to break through the sky.

  She pointed the gun at the ceiling, pulled the trigger.

  In the light of the blast, Cora saw Reyna’s face turn to her as the axe fell from her hand. All the voices stopped, and beyond the explosion’s echo, all she heard was plaster falling around them like hail. Troy groaned and grabbed his arm, and Reyna collapsed to her knees, then slumped forward, her newly shaved head cradled in her hands.

  “Mama!” Willy yelled, and Tyrone flipped on the lantern beside the bed. Troy slammed the door to their room, shutting the boys in, before he dove upon his sister, picked her up by the armpits and threw her against the wall. Her head hit the top stair before she began to tumble, heavily, from one step to the next.

  Troy staggered backwards against the door, his face blank with shock. He clapped a hand over his forearm, where he was bleeding from a constellation of tiny wounds.

  “Oh God.” He staggered towards the stairs where Reyna sat slumped, her head bent on her chest, her eyes closed, her lashes heavy against her cheeks. She looked like she was sleeping. But you could not sleep in a nightmare.

  “Oh God, what have we done?”

  Tyrone pushed the door open a crack, the hinges creaking, and Cora realized that she was still holding the gun, her finger still on the trigger. She crouched and laid it on the floor as Tyrone left the bedroom and moved past her. At the head of the stairs he stopped and stood, looking down through the banister rails at his mother. Reyna’s mouth hung open as if she were sleeping. But you could not sleep in a nightmare, because where would you go in your dreams?

  “She was just trying to come to get us,” Tyrone said. “She was just trying to be with us. She was just coming to be with us, Uncle Troy.”

  Willy had come out into the hall now, holding the lantern up to illuminate his full moon face, and Cora went to him, gathered him into her arms.

  “You’re so scared of her,” Tyrone said, his face pressed into the balusters. “Why do you have to be so scared?”

  Cora carried Willy to the stairs. As they descended, Troy came to the banister, put his bloodied hands on Tyrone’s shoulders. Blood ran in long rivulets from the wounds on his arm, fell with a soft tap tap on the floor. Cora could hear them all breathing: Troy’s heavy exhalations and Tyrone’s quick, panicked pants. Willy sobbed quietly against her shoulder as she tried to take deep breaths. But only once they had come beside Reyna and sat beside her on the stair, only after Willy had reached out and pressed his small hand against his mother’s smooth brow, could Cora hear Reyna’s lungs filling, emptying—a crackling breath like the sound of the wind.

  “Mama?” Willy said, running his thumb up the ridges beneath her razor-scraped scalp where her skull had once been delicate and unformed.

  “She’s alright,” Cora said, “She’s just sleeping.”

  But you could not sleep inside a nightmare; you’d only go deeper down.

  A SLIVER OF the moon nested in the rooftops of the Quarter, and Cora pointed it out to Tyrone, who still had not closed his eyes. They had been sitting in the portico for hours it seemed like, waiting for Troy to come back. Long enough now that their fear had evaporated in the night air. Willy slept draped around her neck, and Cora’s breathing now matched the little boy’s, her heartbeat slowed from its frenzy. Every so often, Tyrone’s long lashes would droop over his cheeks and his body would relax against her, but he always woke with a start the second he began to drift away. Now his eyes followed her finger to find the moon.

  “To wane,” Cora said. “That’s the word for the way the moon gets smaller.”

  Tyrone nodded and coughed roughly, rubbing his long throat.

  “Tomorrow, it’ll be gone I think.” Tomorrow, as they drove north, the earth would float right in front of the sun, and the moon would be invisible against the vault of the sky. “They used to believe the moon caused madness, you know.”

  Tyrone dropped his eyes from her finger, craned his close-cropped head to look again down the empty street for the Jeep.

  “But it doesn’t—” She stroked Willy’s narrow back. “The moon’s got nothing to do with it. Just the tides. It pulls up on the ocean. ‘Madness,’ even—that’s a stupid word. What your mama has is just a disease, something wrong with her head. Something broken we can fix. That we’re figuring out how to fix.”

  Tyrone’s dark eyes blinked in the lantern light.

  “Even the scary things she does, that’s not her doing them,” Cora continued. “That’s the broken part. The malfunction.”

  Tyrone set his jaw, and as the sinews in his cheeks tensed, she saw what he would look like in a few years, as he became a teenager, a young man. He would need someone to help him learn softness. Teach him to believe in the lies you had to believe if you wanted to live.

  “You were so scared of her,” he said. “So scared.”

  “You don’t have to worry.” She adjusted Willy on her shoulder and reached over to touch Tyrone’s shoulder, but he pulled away. “You’re safe now. Your Uncle Troy and I are going to take you and Willy away from here, and when your mama is well again, she’ll join us.”

  “Not you.”

  She tried to remember what had happened—the screaming in the dark, the grappling, his mother’s hand on the axe. She had been right to stop it, hadn’t she? But a boy’s mother is his mother is his mother is his mother.

  “Okay.”

  “Not you.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  The boy nodded, a sharp jerk of his chin, and his shoulders relaxed as they had when he’d watched Troy carrying Reyna’s unconscious body out to the Jeep, her eyes closed as if she were asleep. Tyrone had worked himself out of Cora’s arms by the time Troy reached the bottom of the stairs. He leaned over the banister and Troy looked up at him, hitching his sister’s body higher in his arms. I’m going to get her in the right hands this time, buddy. You just wait for me, you hear.

  After the door was closed and locked behind him, Cora had packed the bags, filled them with everything that mattered—some clothes, her diaries, a toothbrush. The boy was probably right, though; she had no business going with them. Out there in the daylight, her wrongness would show.

  Tyrone stood up and walked down to the sidewalk. Between the trunks of the oaks, a set of headlights strobed. Help gets you fucked, Reyna said, speaking truth. Troy parked the Jeep in front of the house.

  “She’s gonna be all right,” Troy said as he came across the sidewalk, the engine still running, the duck gun under his arm. “Got her to the medics, and in the morning they’re going to bring her to the hospital in Lake Charles, make sure she gets all the right kind of care. I gave them her history. Names of the doctors and all that.”

  Cora avoided his face. Weighted with the sleeping child, she stood up and descended the steps. She freed a hand to open the back door of the Jeep and laid Willy down on the seat, kissing him lightly on his sweaty forehead. Troy went into the house and came out again carrying the bags, but Tyrone was waiting, hanging from the column at the corner of the portico, holding his backpack across his chest. Troy opened the hatch, and Cora grabbed her bag from him.

  “I can’t go with you,” she said.

  Troy tensed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not coming,” she said loudly, then lowered her voice. “You’ve got to try to understand. Their mother—”

  He looked to Tyrone then back at her, shaking his head. “This is not about her.”

  “It is, though, Troy. It is all about her. All about them.”

  “What kind of man do you think I am, going to take your car and leave you here by yo
urself? You are out of your damn mind.”

  She was not out of her mind, however. This was not what madness felt like—her heart beating steadily, solidly, inside her chest, the moon tethered in the sky. She would stay and he would go, and everyone would be fine. He and the little boys belonged on the highway, and Tyrone was right, she did not belong with them.

  “I won’t come, I’m sorry.”

  Troy buried his nose in her hair. “Please, baby. Let me look out for you.” And as his lips moved against her scalp, she wanted to let him.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve got to look out for myself.”

  He walked past her into the vestibule and came out again with the gun, put it into her hands. “You keep this with you then.”

  She tried to give the gun back, but he wouldn’t take it. “If something goes wrong, if there’s an emergency, I’ll go to Mrs. Randsell at Augie’s house. Madge’s old car is still there. We’ll be alright.”

  “If there’s an emergency.” He shook his head. “Like this isn’t an emergency already.”

  “I’ll go if I need help. If I get scared. I promise,” she said as she turned away from him.

  “I guess you’re a grown woman,” Troy said. “I guess I can’t stop you.”

  Tyrone plodded down off the portico and, without looking at her, settled into the front seat of the car.

  She watched her Jeep until the galleries of Royal Street had swallowed it, kept watching as the leaves went still on the trees and the mark of the tires evaporated from the street, and then she stood up and went back inside the house.

  Cora shut the door behind her and climbed the stairs. On each step, little drops of blood glistened. She set her bag down and pulled a T-shirt out of it, wiping as she climbed. At the top of the stairs, on the ceiling between her room and her parents’, birdshot had pocked the plaster, and a small puddle of blood was soaking into the rug. She lay her T-shirt down over it. The white cloth gathered red. From the back of the house she heard ticking, like the sound of a dog’s feet on wood.