The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  Maxwell nodded.

  “I have a boy around your age,” said the pharmacist as he handed Maxwell the medicine.

  Later that night, Thomas’ fever subsided and he slept soundly. To pass the time, Adel and Maxwell played solitaire, told jokes, and talked about their families. Adel’s little sister made fake silver bracelets out of paper. His parents had once been factory workers, but they were laid off after the Panic. Now they were something else, something he couldn’t quite figure out anymore. When Maxwell told Adel that his father was the Last Pirate of the New World, he shrugged and said he’d heard stranger things. In the morning, when Maxwell woke, the brothers from Germany were gone.

  * * *

  It was around this time, as the train sped north under clouds streaked with flashes of heat lightning, that Maxwell remembered his mother’s manuscript A Model Earth. One morning, after his father had rushed off to buy replacement typewriter ribbon while his mother slept, Maxwell found the pages on the kitchen table and read them in one long sitting. Later, after the manuscript had been destroyed and his mother had died, the figure of the Dominicana, who, he imagined, had the same beautiful, almond-shaped face of his mother, blurred, twisted, and faded away into something remote and unrecognizable, a disfigured shadow, a fragment of a fragment, a parallel universe.

  * * *

  In North Platte, the train stopped for a crew change and Maxwell hopped off. He was hungry and worn-out. The sky was blue and the train yard was empty. On the outskirts of the train yard, he saw tents and a group of men in tattered clothes. A few of the men played dice, others took turns shaving in front of a mirror tied to a tree branch, and still others sat in a semicircle, eating soup from tin cans. Maxwell watched the men for a long time and he imagined that they were the sad ghosts of a retreating army. At some point, a man about sixty with a beard approached him.

  “Don’t go into town, son,” he said, squinting in the sun. “The rat people who live there chased away the Negroes a few years ago. Better to get back riding the rails.”

  “But I’ve never met any rat people before,” said Maxwell, and they both laughed.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Chicago,” said Maxwell, “but I think I’m lost.”

  The old man picked up a stick and drew a few directional symbols into the dirt.

  “Well,” he said, “you can find an Illinois Central in Omaha, straight to Chicago. But listen, son, if I were younger, like you, I’d head west instead of east. I’d head all the way west and barrel right into the Sierra Nevada and pilfer it for all its worth. I’d dress in a suit of gold and live in its rocky veins and drown in its rivers.”

  * * *

  In Omaha, at night, while waiting for an Illinois Central freight, Maxwell took out the final letter his father had sent to him and read it again and again. Meet me at the Jonava in July, his father had written at the end, very carefully, thought Maxwell, because the letters were facing forward, as if trudging into a risky crosswind that could scatter them like particles of ash across the flat Nebraskan plains.

  * * *

  Somewhere in Iowa three older boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen, hopped the train with him. One of the boys was shoeless and had dried blood on his face. He looked like he had been in a fight the night before but had forgotten about it. Another boy handed Maxwell a long stick of beef jerky, but for the most part they kept to themselves. Occasionally, the train passed a solitary prairie house or a solitary town. Some of those towns were completely dark, like black holes, and above others there were fireworks, at first aflame against the black sky, then falling, sickly and dim, into the fields. At some point, while watching the fireworks, the older boy with dried blood on his face said, “Happy birthday, shithole.”

  On the third day of traveling, just before dawn, the train reached a river and turned south along its shore into the downtown of an enormous city, where the lights of a thousand and one buildings—warehouses, factories, stone mansions, and skyscrapers—quaked faintly like faraway constellations. In one of those buildings, thought Maxwell, was his father. At some point, the train blew a sharp whistle and pulled into a busy train yard just north of a tall brick building with an even taller clock tower. The time was 5:03 a.m.

  When the train came to a full stop, a bullman and a police officer were waiting for them. The bullman was short and broad backed. He wore black overalls and his expression was ambitious, even happy. I’ve been waiting all day for this shit, it seemed to say. The police officer, regardless of the humidity, wore a thin black wool coat over his uniform. He was tall and blond; his expression was bony, impassive. In fact, Maxwell sensed that he wasn’t even thinking at all. Then the three older boys from Iowa hopped off and ran full speed into the train yard, each in a separate direction and each running in his own way, like dusky fugitives who had long ago arranged a secret place to meet up and plan their next futile crime.

  Maxwell watched them run away with a sense of betrayal, realizing much too late that they had used him as a red herring. When the bullman climbed into the boxcar and lunged at him, he felt anger, of course, but stronger than anger was shock. Half-stunned, he managed to shove the bullman. Then, as the bullman fell over backward into the train yard, and the police officer pulled a long black truncheon from under his wool coat, Maxwell slid the boxcar door shut. When they manage to open it, he thought, I’ll take off like the others. Yet, some seconds later, he heard something like a bark that he only later understood was a kind of laugh, and the boxcar door locking shut. Then there was total darkness. Maxwell took out his flashlight, and in the dust trapped by the white beam he too saw irrefutable proof, as those ancient Greeks liked to say, of the paramˉanu.

  LOST CITY

  October 2005

  We have plowed the sea, said Javier quite out of the blue or possibly as a continuation of things already said. Then, without explaining what it was he was trying to say, he looked in the rearview mirror at the shrinking city and then at the highway stretching out into the southern distance ahead of them and added, I-57, right?

  * * *

  That morning, as they passed Champaign Urbana and then Humboldt in an old black Cadillac borrowed from Romário, they discussed Adana Moreau and her life, about which, like the lives of those Chilean “disappeared” during the brutal Pinochet regime, next to nothing was known. Then they speculated again about the whereabouts of Maxwell Moreau and about the motives that might have compelled him to either evacuate or stay in New Orleans during those last days before the Storm.

  For six weeks, as Javier and Saul planned the trip to New Orleans, they searched countless online Missing Persons boards, forums, and lists for news about Maxwell Moreau, but he wasn’t mentioned anywhere. They also left countless posts, but nobody responded. An area of disaster, Javier explained a few miles outside of Champaign Urbana, takes on an attracting force for all those people who benefit from historical uncertainty, and an expelling force for many others, especially for those who are cheated or forgotten and end up as displaced, as desplazados.

  I think I understand what you mean, Saul then said to Javier, that I should prepare for the possibility that we might not find Maxwell Moreau. That he might even be dead. I’ve read reports that bodies are still being found every day, he added, but they both already knew what those reports contained. Javier nodded several times, without saying anything, and Saul was abruptly aware of the futility of their search.

  Then, almost without thinking, Saul said, what did you mean earlier when you said, “We have plowed the sea”? I’ve never heard it before, but it still reminds me of something my grandfather might say.

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say it, said Javier, but it does sound like him, doesn’t it? It’s rumored to be Simón Bolivar’s last words. I think I first saw it in a newspaper in Peru or maybe on one of those walls in the outskirts of Quito that are plastered with cheap revolutionary slogans and old indige
nous proverbs, walls at war with one another come to think of it; in any case, it’s something I find myself repeating when I close my eyes or when I can’t afford to blink, when looking for someone who has left behind only a few traces or maybe none at all.

  * * *

  In Effingham, they stopped for breakfast at a small diner on Avenue of Mid-America. Saul ordered a ham and cheese omelet and a cup of coffee. Javier ordered a corn beef sandwich, fries, and a cup of coffee. Javier talked about his job at the Chicago Tribune, which was, in his opinion, going well and about one of his coworkers, a half white, half Guatemalan reporter in her twenties who had learned Spanish not from her parents, who were told by a white 1st grade teacher to stop speaking to their children in Spanish, but by watching old movies on Univision after they had gone to bed. Then Saul talked about his favorite childhood movie, Godzilla, and its unknown actresses, cities in flame, overcrowded hospitals, and irradiated children, a movie that in 1954 had made Japanese WWII veterans leave the theater before they were caught weeping.

  * * *

  After breakfast they got back in the car and sped south down I-57. They passed Mount Vernon, West Frankfort, and Future City. Just after Future City they crossed a bridge over the Mississippi River. At some point, Saul fell asleep and dreamed of an elevator building itself, slowly, straight out into space. When he opened his eyes, the sun was bright and they were on another bridge crossing the Mississippi River again. They gazed at the tall trees that lined the muddy riverbank and beyond that, to the southeast, the yellow-burned paper skyline of Memphis. To the northeast was an enormous bronze and glass-glazed pyramid. The pyramid looked outlandishly foreign on the banks of the Mississippi River yet at the same time furiously (even a little desperately) American, a copy of a copy of a copy.

  Saul then thought of the ancient city of Memphis. The Memphis submerged under sand and stone. The Memphis undeniably wiped from the “slate of time” as his grandfather might say. Then, unexpectedly and all at once, he was struck with the memory of his grandfather telling him that his parents had once gone to Egypt. They had taken a flight from Tel Aviv to Cairo in 1971 or 1972. This happened before I was born, so it didn’t happen to me, he thought as the car sped through half-empty streets, I didn’t see anything, I didn’t walk through the arid cranial streets of Cairo with them, I didn’t travel with them down lonely desert roads in a white taxi to visit the clustered and interminable pyramids surrounding Cairo, I didn’t listen to my parents' voices as they haggled in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar for those scraps of black Egyptian linen with which I had at some point after their deaths wrapped those five photographs before placing them in a small wooden school box. Did any of that even happen? he then thought. The trip to Egypt? His grandfather’s telling of the trip? In what version of the past had his parents taken a flight from Tel Aviv to Cairo in 1971 or 1972? In what permutations of the past were they now being arranged as shadows or ghosts? He would never know. There was no one left to ask.

  Some minutes later, they pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart. They purchased flashlights, jugs of distilled water, dehydrated food, a single burner propane stove, snacks, two first aid kits, an emergency hand crank radio, two coolers, a camping lantern, antiseptic cream, and water boots. The supplies were for those residents of New Orleans who were starting to trickle back into the city.

  For the first time in my life, Javier said as he picked up a package of three flashlights, I’m not going somewhere for the disaster but for the recovery, at which point he fell silent.

  * * *

  Since the National Guard was enforcing a sunset curfew in New Orleans, they decided to spend the night in Memphis. As Javier drove to the Sheraton Memphis Downtown Hotel, Saul called Maxwell Moreau’s number. The landline was still dead. Since the Storm he had called it three or four times a day, but it was always dead.

  After checking into the hotel, they wandered the city on foot, talking nonstop. In the course of nearly two hours, observed Saul, Javier repeated the words piranha twice, the word earthquake three times, the word misinformation three times, the words Lago Agrio oil field four times, the words Ryszard Kapuæ´sci´nski twice and the words George W. Bush five times.

  Without meaning to, they ended up in front of Sun Studio, an unremarkable two-story brick building, where, so the building advertised, rock & roll had been born. We don’t have to take a tour, said Javier, I just want to see it. For a few minutes, they stood under a giant yellow guitar fastened to the side of the building and watched as couples in elegant faux-cowboy boots passed by. Later, as they drank beer and ate catfish, hushpuppies, and coleslaw in a crowded restaurant, Javier admitted to Saul that even though he had only been away for ten years, the United States was unrecognizable to him. Maybe, it was the fake pyramid or the big box store (the colors too bright or somehow wrong), or the giant guitar or the lonely prisons along the side of the highway. Or maybe it was something else entirely. He didn’t know.

  Once, while in a small dive bar in Quito, he met an Ecuadorian ecologist who had studied in Boston and they started trading notes about the United States. I don’t remember anything I told him, said Javier, probably something stupid about pleasure or capitalism, but I do remember exactly what he told me. According to the Ecuadorian ecologist, the United States was, in fact, a hysterical reality show that took place entirely in a giant marble room where four hundred naked and oiled billionaires took turns fucking each other over and over again, sometimes with deep, green-eyed affection and other times as a form of earth-shattering vengeance, but always against a grotesque altar of iron and gold. And no matter how much your people suffer, he told me, they can’t keep their eyes off them. Your country, your empire, is going to entertain itself to death.

  Saul said it was a little different for him. Something Kafkaesque had happened to him, but that was a cheap way to put it. In any case, at some point, something hornet-like had burrowed under his skin so quietly and so slowly that he hadn’t even noticed until one morning he woke up, looked in the mirror, and saw that he was an American.

  * * *

  They passed Crystal Spring, Bogue Chitto, and Amite City. The sun was white and volatile, like camphor. At one in the afternoon, they passed Ponchatoula. Then the highway began to climb before turning into a series of long bridges that shot straight through a half submerged, half wild landscape full of waterways and dark green islets and swamps with colossus cypress trees broken like toothpicks and shacks in various stages of ruin. On the half-sunken tin roof of one shack, an egret stood motionless, its spear-like beak aimed at something below the still surface of the water, its hesitance and vulnerability constituting a state of grace. To the south, power lines ran through the swamplands and parallel to a rail line, where it was possible to make out the silver flash of an Amtrak train. At some point, they merged onto I-10 and joined the flatbed trucks and work vans and emergency vehicles all heading east, toward the swaying, rippling city of New Orleans, like a procession of sad caravans.

  * * *

  They did not look back at the combat-armed National Guardsman who waved them through the checkpoint with an impatient, even skeptical, flick of his hand, nor did they look in the rearview mirror at the deserted street blanketed in greenish-yellow film or the long snake-like roots of fallen oaks or the magnolia trees stripped of their flesh like skeletons wandering a wasteland as dreamed by Bosch, nor did they every so often gaze up at the white ballistic sun shining through the dusty car windows; instead they stared wordlessly ahead as the car teetered and swerved among potholes and piles of debris. They passed rows of abandoned cars that looked like strange and shattered undersea vessels run aground, and they saw rows of homes that were now just ruins casting shadows of their own destruction before them, fractured shadows creeping imperceptibly toward sidewalks and streets filled with bulging, sickening refrigerators and flood-soaked furniture and shattered porcelain and rusty pipes and rusty bicycles and drywall covered in black mold and
dark green mold and clothes and CDs and DVDs and television sets and moldy curtains and moldy rugs and shoes and children’s toys, cracked and peeling, painstakingly abandoned during those last hours before the Storm.

  And yet, thought Saul, fairly shaken, there were no people. He felt as if he were seeing things in a daydream or in a half-awakened state; there were no people at all, only streets and streets of desolation. Javier, however, radiated enviable calm, his hands resting carefully on the wheel, his lips turned slightly outward like he was about to smile or say something conclusive, his eyes fixed on the road ahead and shining with the serene intensity of an explorer. Then, suddenly, he slammed on the brakes, and right in the center of South Telemachus Street or what remained of South Telemachus Street, they finally saw a person—a man walking a dog and holding a machete. As he passed the Cadillac, he raised the weapon with a vigilant and hermit-like air, somewhat startled by the sudden presence of others. Then, as he continued to walk, he turned to face them, smiled, raised the machete higher still, and then waved it back and forth, back and forth, as if to say bienvenidos to the end of the world. A few moments later, the man and the dog disappeared back into the ruins of the city.

  * * *

  We made a mistake coming here, said Saul to Javier as he stood paralyzed by the sight of Maxwell Moreau’s two-story cottage on 209 South Telemachus Street—the address Victoria Ortiz had given Javier in mid-July—to which Javier responded by placing a hand on his shoulder, saying, it’s too late for that, pana, and heading up the five steps to the front porch. Before following him, Saul blinked, closed his mouth, and held his breath for a few seconds to shut out the swarming flies and the smell of rot enveloping the neighborhood like a toxic fog that had drifted in from another dimension.