A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

by John Gregory Brown

  Henry was already thirsty; his clothes were already soaked with sweat. He’d hidden for a while in the St. Patrick Cemetery, resting his back against the cool marble of one of the larger family mausoleums. He’d looked over the damage in the cemetery, marble doors to crypts wedged open, stone vases upended, crumbling brick and concrete scattered across the narrow paths between the tombs. Two black wrought-iron gates, Charity Hospital inscribed in the iron trellis above them, had been pulled off their hinges and lay, still latched together, on the ground. Henry figured they marked the section where the indigent and anonymous who’d died at Charity were buried. The headstones inside the gates looked like giant books with tattered covers bleached white in the heat and rain and sun.

  Henry soon realized that no one would be coming after him, that no officers had been dispatched to track him down. He wondered what the officer who’d approached the car had told Marge and Katrell, if he’d simply instructed them to turn around, to head back home, to forget about their drunken idiot of a friend who had wandered off alone.

  What would Marge have told him? That Henry was not a drunken idiot but merely desperate, maybe a little unhinged, that he’d come all this way determined to find someone, an old man he’d seen on the television, an old man he knew who seemed to have wound up in an abandoned store? Okay, so yes, the idea was more than a little crazy, Marge would say—Henry could hear her saying it, could see the sweet knowing smile she’d present to the officer.

  Yeah, well, give me a break, Henry imagined the man telling her. Who’s not alone here? Who’s not crazy? Let’s just hope for his sake he makes it.

  Yes, he was alone. He thought about the commerce he’d once had here—with Amy, with Amy’s friends, with the folks at Endly’s. He thought about the crowded halls at Ben Franklin, the crush of students between classes, his colleagues. He thought about the school building itself. What remained and what was gone? He remembered a Chekhov story he’d once taught, just a few pages long, about a carriage driver whose son had just died. On the evening the man returned to work, neither of his fares—an officer in a greatcoat and then three young men at the conclusion of a night of drinking—would listen when he spoke, when he told them that he had lost his son. No one would attend his grief. And so the story ended with the man alone in the stables speaking to his horse, a ragged old mare, recounting his son’s funeral, his trip to the hospital to retrieve his son’s clothes, the myriad small details that he was desperate for someone to hear.

  Who would listen to all the grief—the loss and sorrow and despair—that needed to be spoken here? He felt the weight of that grief, so much heavier than his own, begin to settle inside him. He had not suffered the way so many thousands of others had suffered. He had not been left behind, had not had to climb to some rooftop, filthy and thirsty and starved, and wait day after day after day to be saved. He had not watched his home get washed away, had not wound up wading through—or, worse, floating facedown in—the oily stink. He did not lose a wife, a child—at least, he did not lose them in the storm. And all he had lost in his life—well, he had been given years, and he still had years now before him to recover, to pay his debts, to ask for forgiveness, to secure some reward.

  He had years before him. He tried to imagine it, these years. He couldn’t.

  Had Marge and Katrell done what they had no doubt been ordered to do—turned around and begun the long trip back to Virginia? What else was there for them to do? There was nowhere they might wait for him, no way to know when he might return. He hoped that they were not frantic with worry, that Katrell had not been overwhelmed by what Henry had done, had not feared what Henry in those first few moments had feared—that the officer would remove his gun from its holster, raise it and aim and fire. He hoped Marge had said to the boy, Oh, he’ll be just fine. That Henry Garrett’s a smart one. We’ll see him back in Virginia before long.

  So this was it, then; he would make his way to Magazine Street, to Endly’s, and then—what? What if he found Tomas Otxoa? What would he do then? He had no idea. He had no car, no way to save him, no way to save himself. Walk with me, he could say, wrapping his arms around the old man, steering him outside. Walk with me until we are too weary to walk any farther. We’ll lie here beside the road, close our eyes until morning, set off again.

  Make a way out of no way.

  How absurd. They wouldn’t even make it out of the city. How was it that he never thought anything through?

  But there would be people in Virginia waiting for them, ready to help: Latangi, Marge, Rusty Campbell, Amy. All the others who’d given money. Imagine their surprise if Henry and Tomas simply appeared, as he had appeared a month ago, tired and dirty but prepared to be saved.

  Henry turned at Carrollton Avenue and headed uptown. Here, in Mid-City, was the neighborhood where his father had been raised. Henry hadn’t known his grandparents—they’d died young, his grandfather before Henry was born, his grandmother when he was three or four—but his father had once shown Henry and Mary the house where he’d grown up, a block off of Bienville Boulevard, a narrow white clapboard shotgun with green shutters, a statue of the Virgin Mary out front and plantain trees around back. About the only thing Henry had known about his grandparents was that his grandfather had worked as an engineer at the Dixie Brewery on Tulane Avenue, that his grandmother had been a secretary there when they met. He’d had no idea what his father’s childhood had been like. Maybe a brewery wasn’t the best place for him to work, his father had once told Henry, shaking his head, but Henry was too young to grasp what his father meant.

  “That’s it,” his father had said when he’d pulled up in front of the house. “That one.” He pointed.

  Henry and Mary waited for whatever story might follow, but their father just sat there in silence, staring at the house. One of the shutters in front was crooked, a few of the slats broken, the green paint chipped; it leaned away from the house.

  “Does it look any different?” Mary finally asked, but their father didn’t answer; he didn’t seem to hear her question.

  Henry watched him take off his glasses and wipe them on his shirt. Then he put the glasses back on, started the car, and drove off. He seemed to have forgotten about Henry and Mary in the backseat.

  They’d looked at each other, bewildered, frightened. Somehow, they understood—from their father’s posture? from the way he drove? maybe just from the silence itself?—not to ask any more questions. Even so, they were children. They could not have known what was going on with their father, what he had been thinking. What memories had seared their way into his head? What clatter and chaos, what confusion and sorrow, had he endured?

  Where had he gone? Henry couldn’t believe that he still didn’t have an answer to this question. Even if he couldn’t answer the thousands upon thousands of other questions he had, shouldn’t he have been provided—offered, granted, delivered—this one answer, just this one?

  He walked and walked, down Carrollton all the way to St. Charles, an hour of walking, maybe two, every familiar block and building made strange by the dirt and dust and stench, by the fallen trees and dangling power lines, by the shells of battered cars, by the thud and shuffle of his own feet, by the empty sky. He began to notice others walking as he walked, block to block, each of them wading through, as Henry waded, the debris scattered across the sidewalk—discarded surgical gloves, smashed water bottles, paper towels, cardboard boxes, broken pipes, upended furniture, rubber boots—as if they were all imprisoned in the same ceaseless dream, the very one he’d started having when the clatter and clamor and chaos began, a wandering phantom or mendicant or nomad or hermit, the whole world in ruins around him.

  Could it be that he’d known, long before the storm, that this moment lay ahead, that so many would find themselves forsaken, left to wander these streets alone? No, he had thought the destruction would be merely his own, not the entire city’s.

  No, not the entire city’s; the palaces on St. Charles Avenue—glorious h
omes with cut-glass windows and stone walls and trellised gardens—appeared to have been spared. The rusty waterlines marking the level to which the water had risen, etched across so many of the ruined houses he’d walked past, were nowhere in evidence here. A few windows were cracked, some trees torn from the ground. Otherwise, these grand houses had been spared. Even so, there might be dead inside them, Henry thought. Maybe there were hermits as well, survivors who had shut themselves away, subsisting on whatever had been stored in the mansions’ bountiful cupboards, drinking wine for lack of water, beer for lack of bread.

  And look, now, just as he’d imagined it: a figure, a young man, unshaven, hair unkempt, clothes gray with filth, emerged from a side door of one of these houses, a rust-colored stone mansion. Henry watched the man step out onto the side lawn, loosen his pants, and unleash a stream of piss into a long boxwood hedge. Did he belong there, Henry wondered, or had he broken in, found no one there, and decided to stay? When he noticed Henry looking, the young man solemnly waved, then headed back inside.

  Henry continued walking. He noticed now that although here too gray dust covered the trees, the streetcar tracks along St. Charles Avenue were inexplicably shiny, almost golden in color, as if the force of the storm had miraculously scrubbed them clean. He thought of the story Tomas Otxoa had told him about the death of Bernardo Belaga, the drunk whom everyone in the town of Tolosa had believed was an idiot. One hot summer day, Tomas told Henry as he closed his eyes and sipped his gin, Bernardo had walked to the outskirts of Tolosa where there was a pig farm, and in the heat of the noon sun Bernardo climbed the metal rungs to the top of a grain silo. From there, he had fallen into the grain below and, buried beneath it, suffocated. The town’s inhabitants lamented Bernardo’s idiocy, certain that he had mistaken the silo for a cistern in which he would bathe and refresh himself, but Tomas said he and his brother, Joaquim, suspected a different explanation. They believed, actually, that only they possessed the truth of Bernardo’s death—that he had been seduced by the golden ocean of grain beneath him, a beauty so bright and shimmering that he felt compelled to immerse himself in it, an immersion so complete that it would, of course, result in his death.

  And Tomas had then opened his eyes, drained the last sip from his tumbler, and smiled sadly at Henry. “This would become one of Joaquim’s best-loved stories. ‘Our Icarus,’ he named it. All Basque children read it in their schools.”

  “That’s an awfully sad story for children,” Henry had said, and Tomas had looked at him, clearly contemplating Henry’s words.

  “Well,” Tomas had finally responded, “are children to be denied their sadness?”

  Yes, Henry thought now, I would spare every child, every single one, even a moment’s sadness. I would spare them every loss, every disappointment, every misfortune, every grief.

  They will all—loss and misfortune and grief—arrive anyway, he thought. They will all arrive unbidden, of their own accord. Why summon them?

  That was what his father had meant, what he had wanted to tell Henry: Don’t go looking for it.

  But he had gone looking, had summoned loss. He’d done exactly what his father had warned him not to do, had let himself succumb to the sorrow, the grief, the clatter and chaos, the awful storm inside him. But he had not summoned this—he had not wished for all this ruin.

  As Henry approached Audubon Park, he spotted a dog wandering toward him down the allée of oaks at the park’s entrance, the first animal he’d seen in the city. The dog was thin, with dark splotches—scabs or sores—scattered across its mangy fur. The dog didn’t seem to see Henry; it moved past him without lifting its head. Henry wondered how it had survived all this time, what food it could have found. He thought about the animals in the park’s zoo. Had they been saved or left to starve—or set free from their cages to roam the park and then head out beyond it, lions and leopards scavenging among the ruins like wolves, feeding on squirrels and rats and, when those were gone, trash? He imagined elephants rumbling down St. Charles, monkeys swinging through the oaks, a lion stepping out to block his path, head held high and furious with hunger—whose line was that? Mohit’s?

  Oh, Latangi. You have lost everything, yes? she had said to him. Now here he was, having lost it all again.

  He turned at Upperline toward the river, toward Magazine Street. He was almost there.

  He had imagined the sort of destruction he’d seen on TV, not simply the storm’s damage—cracked windows and twisted aluminum siding and flooded floors—but damage from looters as well: overturned shelves, broken bottles, pried-open doors. But there had been, of course, nothing to loot at Endly’s, and clearly Henry had not even remembered or bothered to lock the store’s glass doors. He braced himself, took a breath, stepped inside.

  Someone, someone, had been here. Someone had found the broom in back and swept into a small pile the bits of glass from the one window that had cracked, struck by a branch or a stone or a bottle perhaps, some object lifted in the wind and hurled against a corner of the window, a spiderweb of lines running through the glass, the corner fallen away but the rest of the window intact. The broom leaned now against one of the two checkout counters, the toy cash register there as well, its drawer closed. Henry pushed the button that opened the drawer. Mary had a little lamb. There was still money—a few ones, a five, some quarters—in the till. The store’s shelves were undamaged, the floor unflooded, his father’s bass still there, untouched, standing in a corner, leaning there as if waiting to be played. He walked to the middle of the store and first whispered—his voice felt unfamiliar—then called out.

  “Tomas? Tomas?”

  Inside his head, Henry saw him again, saw him peering out through that one cracked window, eyes blank or searching or wet with fear, the cardboard box tight against his chest.

  “Tomas?”

  He did not believe, not really, that there’d be an answer. Even so, he called out again.

  “Tomas?”

  He listened, waited.

  What more, he wondered, can this world have in store for me? What more can I, can anyone, expect?

  Eighteen

  HENRY SAT at the front desk of the Ganesha Motel, head clear for the moment—and for the longest time now—of the clatter and chaos, the wreck and ruin. He did not know where precisely to cast his gratitude: to the heavens, to medicine, to those who had taken him in and cared for him for no other reason than that he had landed here. He looked out to the motel’s parking lot. A year ago, alone and exhausted and undone, he had stopped his car and stepped into this office, and Latangi Chakravarty, in her red and orange sari, fingernails adorned with glitter, feet clad in golden sandals, had greeted him, refused his money, and offered him a room.

  A year ago. And then the accident, the awful death of Marion Hughes, the discovery of Mohit’s poem, the return to New Orleans, all the craziness, the loss and grief, the desperate rush toward—well, finally, ultimately, toward this.

  Three days ago, on the anniversary of Katrina’s landfall, he’d paid his quiet tribute by calling his sister in Baltimore. He’d told Mary he was just checking in, but she’d understood why he’d called, why he’d want to talk to her. Of course she’d understood, and she’d been grateful. She’d already decided to return to New Orleans, to be part of its rebuilding. The art museum there, in City Park, was looking for a new director; the previous one had decided to stay in San Francisco, where she’d gone after the storm to be near her daughter and son-in-law and their children. Mary had gotten the job. In a couple of weeks she’d be leaving Baltimore and moving to New Orleans.

  When she first told Henry that she was going back, she’d asked if he remembered the time they’d ridden their bikes all the way to the park to see the King Tut exhibit, how the street that stretched from the edge of the park to the museum had been painted blue to suggest the Nile, golden-crested waves and golden-scaled fish scattered throughout the blue, golden stars and a golden crescent moon shining there as well as if the night sky
were reflected in the water, and though Henry had not remembered it until that moment, until Mary had described it in such detail to him, he remembered it as she spoke—remembered the thick black wide-seated Schwinn he’d had and Mary’s smaller sleeker red one, tassels on the handlebars, a silver thumb bell perched there too. He remembered crossing Bayou St. John and seeing the old men on the bridge hauling up crab nets, shaking the skittery crabs out into wooden baskets. He remembered their sad dark faces beneath their straw hats, their wide hands as they tied the chicken necks into the nets and lowered them back into the water.

  All the art she’d encountered with their mother, she told Henry, all the canvases on the walls and all the pictures in books and all the galleries into which she’d been led, but it was that one day, riding along that bright blue street as if they were magically pedaling above the water, that she’d truly fallen in love with painting and art and museums, with the magic they were capable of creating.

  “I remember,” Henry told her. “I do.” And it occurred to him that there were probably a million other things to remember from his childhood if he let Mary guide him, if he relied on her memory rather than his own.

  “Maybe you’ll come down once I’m settled in,” Mary said.

  “Sure,” Henry told her, though he wasn’t ready to go back just yet.

  That morning he’d gotten up early and driven into Marimore and gone to breakfast at What a Blessing. He’d wanted to check in on Katrell Sparrow, see how he was doing. Katrell had been hired to help with the early-morning baking each day before school, a job Marge had gotten for him. She’d had some dealings with Maurice Rose, the owner, when one of his employees walked off with the entire contents of the store register. Rose had wanted Judge Martin to go easy on that young man, whose father was a fellow elder at Maurice Rose’s church, and Marge had told him that she’d see to it that Judge Martin fully understood. And Judge Martin had done—as of course everyone did with anything Marge requested—exactly what she’d asked him to do, sentencing the young man to the time he’d served in the county jail directly after they’d caught him and he couldn’t make bail. All the money he’d taken was still stashed in a plastic Food Lion bag in his car trunk. He’d felt too guilty, he told Judge Martin, to spend it.