The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  The gun still in her hand, she went down the stairs again. A pale wash of dawn spread across the hall from the cracked-open kitchen door where the buffet had been pushed aside, and she heard the sound of claws again—just the magnolia, she reminded herself, just twigs tapping against the house. Nevertheless, her heart was pounding, her head reeling as she went to the open door.

  A dog, its ears pressed back against its skull, snarled at her from the magnolia’s branches. She jumped back—just one of her father’s unfinished sculptures, fallen from his studio, the dog’s head and raised hackles carved carefully, his lower half ordinary, bark-clad wood. Around it were the downy cones of the magnolia tree, not yet bleeding their bright-red seeds. But the tree’s broken branches shook in the light, casting strange shadows, and she saw Troy holding Reyna’s limp body in his arms, her mud-blackened feet dangling lifelessly at his hip.

  As he carried her out of the house and across the sidewalk, his feet silent in the mud, Reyna lifted her face to Cora, lifted her heavy lashes. Beneath them were bloodied sockets, her eyes plucked out by birds.

  Part THree

  The City of Dis

  Fifty-Six Days after Landfall

  October 24

  Dawn

  Fire had consumed the center of the house. The window Cora had used to climb through on her nightly visitations, the kitchen, and the roof above were nothing now but a black stain that seeped across the siding like blood on cotton. Inside, the ashes smoldered.

  When Cora had rounded the corner and seen the house in flames, it had seemed right. Necessary. She had been glad to watch it burn, and as she watched, as the firemen came with water, her mind repeated Ezekiel: I brought forth a fire from the midst of you; it has devoured you, and I have turned you to ashes on the earth. She remembered the flash at the muzzle, Reyna’s shorn head in her hands. She remembered Reyna singing loud in her lamé dress, punching the river pilot’s car through the intersections. She remembered the photograph of Reyna she’d taken from the apartment at Calliope—a woman obsidian with summer, encircling her babies in her arms. She remembered the first time she’d come here, seen her lying on the floor—Reyna’s face so wrecked that it could have been anyone’s face, could have been Cora’s own—and beside her the gun missing from Esplanade, and in her head she heard a flapping, like a page being flipped: Her long lashes on slack cheeks. Her eyes plucked out by birds. She began to cough, and as she bent down over her legs, she saw that her hands were glowing in the moonlight. Living. Clean.

  She staggered into the street now and turned towards the old portage, let the new roses she’d brought for Reyna fall from her hand. Her throat burned. On the corner ahead, a cypress, its trunk entwined with a chain-link fence, trailed its shrouds over a pool of rain. She crouched beside it, her nightdress hanging over her feet. She plunged her arms into the puddle and cupped the water to drink, but it was so black with mud that her hands disappeared, and she pulled them out of the pool, afraid.

  She passed through the neighborhood and along the walls of the cemetery until she had reached the open gate. As far back as she could see, the little marble houses stood side by side, rain-washed to a high white that glowed against the mud. The black doors of the tombs were locked tight and safe, and there were no windows in them that could be broken, and their roofs were made of stone. She walked until the granite wall ended at a little copse of oaks, shaking clean air from their leaves. Cora pressed herself between the mausoleums and under the heavy branches of the old trees. Before her, a field stretched down to Bayou St. John, and she walked through the broken chain-link gate and across the road, and crept down through the dead grass to the water.

  The black neck of a cormorant cut across the trembling pink surface of the bayou. Near the far bank, two men were fishing from a canoe. She fell on her knees by the chilly water, splashed her hands down. The bird dove. The men turned towards her into the light of the rising sun, which blanked their faces, their features misty as wraiths’.

  One of them whistled. “Hey, lookie here.”

  “What you doing out here before dawn, child?”

  She splashed the water up over her face, over her arms. She was so thirsty. She lifted a mouthful, cupped in her hands.

  “Hey hey! Don’t drink that, girl, you crazy?”

  The men had begun to row towards her, and the water ran through her fingers. Their boat cut a fast wake in the bayou’s surface.

  “You must not be from here. This water’s nasty. It ain’t to drink.”

  “Not unless you’re some kind of raccoon or something—” The men chuckled.

  Her hands sank into the water. Out beyond them, the cormorant resurfaced, dove again.

  “I am the child of earth and starry heaven,” she said, strange words faintly remembered, and yet the men, just feet from her now, pushed their oars forward. The boat halted in the water.

  “What?”

  “I am the child of earth and starry heaven.”

  They pushed the bayou towards her, moved away.

  She brought the water up to her mouth and drank, and it tasted cold and clear. Once upon a time, this bayou had drained the city’s swamps into the lake, and the Choctaws, the Bogue Chittos, the Biloxis, having traversed the lake from the gulf, had rowed the length of it in their birch bark canoes to make portage into the river. She remembered this as clearly as if she had done it herself: the pole in her blistered hands bending as she pushed against the muddy bottom of the channel, the water coursing across her feet as the pirogue knocked against the banks. She had reached for a willow branch, and it brushed her head with its long leaves as she swung up out of the water and hauled the boat ashore. She bent down. She dipped her hands into the water again, drank again. She remembered a drift of leaves rolling across an island that changed to a flock of gulls, a flock of gulls that changed to a horde of people waving dirty cotton flags. She had gathered them up into her skirt, she had rowed them out across the lake and left them on its farther shore.

  Monday

  October 24

  Tess sat in the portico in her bathrobe, watching the shadows move across Esplanade. She had gotten as far as to open the door to the house, but the air that poured out with its dank smell of mildew and dying vegetation made her afraid of what might be waiting for her inside. Yesterday afternoon—Augie’s hands on her, that mist of gin and distraction—seemed like ages ago, though it had been less than twelve hours since she’d come back to the Dobies’ house to find her girls missing from their beds. Cora could not have gone too far from home in twelve hours, not in the state she was in.

  Not that this place was “home” any longer. She ran her hand across the tiles, still as smooth and vibrant as the day she and Joe had set them there, drinking beers and listening to the radio, while Cora played below them on the sidewalk. The thousands of tiny blue and green tesserae spelling out a Minoan sea, its waves and jumping dolphins, would soon pass into other hands, but they had always been meant to outlast her, outlast the house’s four walls, outlast perhaps even the city—Joe studying the pictures of Lycian mosaics after a sun-struck trip to Turkey, Cora only a twisting in Tess’s gut she mistook for bad kebab. We were so happy, she had said to him when they’d last sat there, waiting for Cora to come home with the Maestres’ motorboat trailered behind her Jeep, when she hadn’t come home. Were? he’d asked. But even the question had been a lie. Because of course Joe knew that it was over, just as they knew, as the sun went down on the drained city, that Cora was not coming back—mold on the bread, the kitchen door shoved open against the sideboard, the drawers overturned—and that they would have to leave without her again, and that nothing would ever be the same.

  Tess stood up and went into the house. She paused to lock the vestibule doors then picked up a lantern and snapped it on, illuminating the blooms of yellow and pink mold on the garlanded ceiling. As she skirted the dangling chandelier, the swollen floorboards moaned beneath her feet. Something somewhere rustled. The hair went up on th
e back of her neck.

  “Cora?” Her voice bounced against the high ceiling of the hall.

  The rustling stopped with a thud, followed by a strange, hoarse cry. Somewhere, the hinges of a door were whining.

  “Cora!”

  Tess got no answer. She ran to the kitchen door and unbolted the padlock. In the gash of warming sky, the tree hung its melancholy head. The leaves had been disturbed again—a space had been cleared, big enough for a body, and a sticky smell, like sex and sleep, drifted in the air—but the countertops were clear, the cabinets closed. She took a deep breath, and then she heard it again, the rustle, accompanied by a sound like someone fighting for breath.

  She ran up the front stairs, her heart hammering so hard that she had to wait on the landing for a second while the blood returned to her brain. The rustling was louder here, but the rasping sound had stopped. The latch on Cora’s door had not caught, and the breeze that slipped through the hall made the door move gently on its hinges. She pushed it open.

  The bird came at her in a green flurry, the dark ripping open as lime wings tore through it. A feather touched her cheek, and she heard herself scream, and the bird shrieked back in a voice she recognized as one from the multitude of Quaker parrots that lived in the palm tree. She dropped her hands, and the bird landed in the middle of the floor then hopped onto a pile of boxes at the end of the hall. It lifted its Day-Glo wings, squawked.

  From the doorway, she threw the lantern light around the room. It was empty of any evidence her child had ever lived there. No clothes, no dolls, none of the sentimental treasures she kept arrayed on her mantelpiece, no ribbons or books or trinket boxes. No furniture, even, for Cora to hide behind. She opened the door to her own room, to the closet, to the bathroom where the tub sat empty, to Del’s room. The hole in the roof had gotten bigger; now she could see the sky. She returned to the hallway, where the palm-sized stain on the carpet had faded to a dull brown, and the parrot flew to the banister. She opened the door that led outside onto the upper gallery. From the downed magnolia, out of the broken staves of wood and loose shingles, midges were rising into the fog of early sun, and she realized that this all was only the beginning. Soon, flowering vines would push their claws into the chimneys’ mortar, and roaches would crawl up out of the drains. Mice would chew through the cabinets, and the cats who brawled on the back fence at night would stalk them through the limbs of the fallen tree. As the swamp advanced, nutria would amble out of the reeds, and cypress trees would bow their heads and pull up their knees beside the big Rococo bookcase. Eventually, the lake, then the river, then the Gulf would wash across Joe’s mosaic of the sea, and the mangroves would wind their snaking roots through the floors. Eventually, the lichen-covered walls would tremble as the muskrats moved inside them, and the termites would accomplish their slow work of ruin.

  That would take years, though. It was important to focus on the now. Now, now, now.

  She crept along the hallway past the bird who was still perched, skinny, on the banister, its head cocked, considering an escape through the oculus. She spread her arms and ran at it.

  “Out!” she yelled, and the bird took off, darting towards the open door and the sky.

  Downstairs, she heard rubber soles shuffling across the front porch, keys rustling. She wanted to believe it was Cora, but they were a man’s steps. She picked up a broom and held it across her chest. The padlock clicked, and the chain knocked against the frame of the screen doors. She came halfway down the stairs.

  “Tess—”

  Joe was standing at the edge of the Minoan sea, the sun rising behind him. Just Joe, once again alone. Once again without their missing daughter, just like that night in Houston when they had looked up from their dinner, laughing and naive, at the sound of his truck in the driveway. Vincent had been going on about how porky Zizi’s green beans were, so porky, when Joe came up the front steps, once again alone. He hadn’t called them from the road back from New Orleans to warn her—to say, I couldn’t get in, so that she wouldn’t have kept up hope—and so Tess had run out into the street and away from him, her breasts in their lacy bra banging against her rib cage, sure that when he did open his mouth, he would tell her Cora was dead. She was sure that the looters had come and tied Cora to a kitchen chair. Sure that that was what he was going to say.

  She had stopped under a streetlamp, looked up—the lantern painted green to make it look like oxidized copper—and it was as though something had just imploded, like the grain elevator across the river in ’78 when they’d sat up in bed, thinking the Russians had finally dropped the bomb. As the after-sound of the boom rang in their ears, a silence descended in which you could’ve heard the chaff floating down to earth if you’d known that there was chaff. I couldn’t get in, Joe said finally. And she’d known then that he was a coward. She could see him standing at the entrance to the bridge, requesting passage in his polite, ingratiating way, being denied. She saw him step back into his truck, put a finger to his hat brim, thank them. How could I have trusted you with this? she’d screamed, and the only answer he had for her was her own name.

  “Oh, Tess,” he said once again, standing alone now at the edge of the sea.

  JOE HAD HAD the key in his hand since they left Esplanade, but as he lowered himself into the street, he put it back in his pocket. The front door to Cora’s house yawned inwards, and the screen door gawped, propped open with a cinder block.

  At the curb, beside Cora’s refrigerator and the sofa and mattress he and Tess had hauled out those first days back in the city, stood the rest of Cora’s things: her melamine kitchen table and four mud-painted shaker chairs, boxes of dirty china and CDs, books, pots, and pans. There were six giant garbage bags that must have contained everything else: her mildewed clothes, her floor cushions, dried beans, dish towels, rugs. At the Dobies’ too, Cora had packed a bag—snuck in while Tess and Del were out in the Marigny hunting for her, must have been. She had taken her toothbrush, her folded clothes. But Tess wouldn’t believe that that meant anything. She’d had a patient some years back, Jason Katz, who had packed a suitcase in preparation for hanging himself. Running shoes, Dopp kit, jeans, two clean shirts, four pairs of boxers and four pairs of socks neatly folded into a carry-on he’d set near his front door. Tess had spent months obsessing over whether it was a just-in-case hospital bag or some sort of Egyptian provision for the land of the dead.

  Now, Tess pressed the car door open with her fingers and slid her thighs across the seat.

  He stepped into the street and looked down it. “The Jeep isn’t here either,” he said.

  Smoke threaded the air—a house fire smoldering down the block—and the neighborhood was beginning to wake. Lights went on in upstairs bedrooms and trucks rattled in with their tool chests and sheets of drywall.

  “The Jeep isn’t here,” he said again. “She’s gone somewhere then. Thank God. Thank God.”

  “Doesn’t mean a goddamned thing,” Tess said.

  Clutching the handhold, Tess lowered her slippered feet onto the curb. She looked up at the open door of Cora’s house, coughed.

  He could feel the smoke in his throat too. “Well, shall we go in?”

  Off in the distance, a table saw screamed on, ground to a stop. His feet cracked through the crust of lake mud into the sticky, wet earth underneath. He half expected the mud to creep up his legs, his belly, his back and neck until it had encased even his head, and he knew that if it did, he would wait patiently for it to petrify him, as if he were waiting for a cast to set. The table saw spun, ripped, spun down. He dislodged his feet from the mud, crossed to Tess, held out his hand. But Tess stepped over the pile of Cora’s things without taking it, her robe parting over the blue skin of her thighs. She walked out over the lawn, her head down.

  Her hands opened and closed, opened and closed as they did when she fretted, though fretting was not the word. He took her arm, opened her fist, threaded his fingers between hers. Cora had left every door in the cottag
e open. The floors had been swept clean, but the gray marks of the flood still lodged deep in the wood. An electrical cord dangled from the air conditioner in the window. A poster for the Rebirth Brass Band curled up from the back of the closet door.

  Tess’s hand tensed for a moment, went limp. “The bathroom,” she said. A green feather clung to her robe. “Why is that door closed?”

  Joe squeezed her hand, let go. He took the four necessary steps, turned the knob. From the ceiling hung the Moravian star light. Dead termites clustered in its lowest point.

  Tess’s hands, balled into fists, were pulling her towards the ground. He went behind her, closed his arms around her, held her up.

  “You didn’t want to find her. You didn’t try.”

  Joe shook his head. “I did. I do.”

  “What happened to us?” she said. “Where have we gone?”

  “Nowhere.” He pressed his nose into her hair and breathed its smell of dust and dampness and the summer ghost of her lemongrass shampoo. He wanted nothing but to wrap himself around her, press up against her back, his knees into the crux of her knees, and bury his nose into her neck until there was no space left between them, until she could hear his thoughts. We are nowhere. We haven’t gone.

  PAPIE KEPT CRANING his neck over the wing of the Dobies’ big armchair and squinting at their front door, as if he were waiting for a train. They might as well have been strangers on a subway platform, Del thought, though they weren’t waiting for anything close to the same thing.