For All Who Hunger

by Emily M. D. Scott

  Was Maggie less safe without her Love You? Absolutely. She was now a person who knew that some things can be lost, and lost forever. For the first time, she understood that there is no “they” who can give back what we need or want. There’s only us.

  * * *

  —

  Our memories are always in pieces. We don’t need the river Lethe for that. How many stories of my great-grandmother were lost in the decades before I lost that ring? Today, I know nothing of her but her name. There are no scraps of grocery lists bearing her handwriting, no diaries that contain her scribbled worried thoughts or tender dreams. We have forgotten names and faces, most of history, and fragments of our own pasts.

  Still, death is something different in the Christian story than it is in the underworld of the ancient Greek imagination. While the river of forgetfulness dis-members us from ourselves and our stories, death in the Christian context re-members us—puts us back together. In this story, death is not a river where we forget or a land where we are lost, but a table where there is bread: a commonwealth where we are restored. Drink the river to forget; eat the bread and remember.

  Jeff and I believed different things, but we had the same job. We both told ancient stories. We both woke them up, let them breathe again. There was life in the retelling. That’s what our demon friend, creeping up from the basement, caught us in the act of doing that night. Practicing our not-forgetting. Etching into memory the most important thing: that when we draw together around a table and break bread we are at once the most human we will ever be and the most divine. We have lost many things, but at this table we are here, and whole.

  * * *

  When St. Lydia’s moved into 304 Bond Street, I felt this urge to understand the patch of land where our church made its home. I ordered books and did online research, matching street names to the stories I read. Before Dutch settlers landed on the island of Manhattan, the Gowanus was a green marshland, fed by a freshwater spring. The Gowanus Creek, as it came to be called, meandered through wetlands and ponds before making its way out to the sea.

  The Lenape tribe lived along its banks. Then the settlers showed up and started building dams and digging out millponds, extending the canal and constraining its flow. Early letters from Dutch settlers refer to oysters “the size of dinner plates”2 harvested from the estuary.

  By the 1800s the creek had been dug out and widened into a canal and the nearby salt marshes drained. Its banks were steadily lined with tanneries and gas plants, the by-products of which contributed to the now-murky water. By the middle of that century the canal was functionally an open sewer.3

  We’ll never get the Gowanus back. For decades it’s been tied up in government squabbles about how to clean it up and who should cover the expense, but even after cleanup, it will never support plant life and wildlife in the way it once did. Walking by, you can smell the centuries of misuse. We can make affectionate jokes, call it “Venice” with air quotes implied. But the waterway is teeming with the chemical fallout of our sin: a constant reminder of the way we’ve dismembered creation. The creek is gone, and I sometimes wonder if we have nothing to show for ourselves as a culture but slime and toxicity left behind for the poor and cold, gleaming buildings rising up for the rich. Nothing but cranes and empty scaffolding, industrial tarps rattling loose in the wind.

  I search, but can’t find a single image of Gouwane, the Lenape chief after whom scholars believe the canal was named4. He doesn’t appear in any land deeds of the 1600s, but he’s thought to have owned a maize farm south of the Dutch settlement Breuckelen. We took his land and speak his name, but what about his face? Who was he and what did he see when the Dutch arrived, their eyes widening as they took in the fertile land, the estuary teeming with fish?

  We don’t need the river Lethe to forget. We do that all on our own.

  * * *

  —

  That same autumn, as the demons rise from the basement, St. Lydia’s observes All Saints’ Sunday—a day dedicated to those who have died. At Dinner Church I hand out slips of paper the color of autumn leaves, and we write down the names of people we want to remember: a mother, a brother, a mentor, a friend. We hang the names from ribbons strung above the tables where we eat. The saints are with us but gone, remembered and forgotten.

  “God remembers what we forget,” I tell the congregation when I stand up to preach. I believe this means God remembers Gouwane, remembers him and the ones whose names we don’t know—the children who played at his feet, the mother who bore him and nursed him. It means God remembers the name and face of every slave who built the city I now live in. God remembers those whose faces were never captured in photographs. God remembers for us.

  * * *

  Later that year, in the dark of a February night, I’ll travel from one coast to the other after an interminable limbo in Newark Airport, waiting for the skies to clear in Canada. My mother has discovered a lump in her abdomen, a large mass lurking behind one of her kidneys. She showed the bump, pressing out through her belly, to a nurse friend of hers. Working to keep her voice calm, she instructed my mom to go immediately to the hospital. Now we are all waiting to see what it is, what it might be, what it might do to her. We know that it is huge, that it’s been growing for a while, and that if it’s in her kidney, it could be very bad.

  I wait in the airport with the other stranded passengers, circling like a shark around the terminal, past the Hudson News and the Auntie Anne’s pretzel place. We can’t get out, and everyone has a rumpled, sodden look. Parents have relinquished their phones and iPads to their children, who are at this point wide eyed and hopped up on sugar or in various stages of meltdown.

  My mom met with the specialist in Seattle today. She’ll get the results of her scans while my plane flies through the dark. I won’t hear the news until I’ve landed. When we finally board and push back from the gate, I listen to two podcasts and watch a movie, and I’m fine until we begin our descent toward the lights of the city. Then, the verdict is both too close and too far away at once, and I cannot stop myself from curling toward the window and sobbing into my sweatshirt. Spread out below us are tiny houses lined up in rows, lights glowing, private lives lived out at each address. I know in a different way now that my mom won’t be here forever, and I pray a desperate, fevered prayer, God please just give us a few more years. There’s too much I’ll regret if we lose her now.

  Finally on the ground, I fumble with my phone, trying to get a signal and read the email my dad’s sent. The cancer, though advanced, is not renal cancer, and likely hasn’t spread. I collapse back in my seat as the other passengers deplane around me.

  In the terminal I feel light with relief. I wait for my luggage in a heady daze, a loose grin on my face even as tears leak down my cheeks. No one asks if I’m okay, and I’m glad. It’s late and we are the only ones scattered through a deserted baggage claim, waiting for the small possessions we need to finally make our way home.

  When I arrive, there is a tenderness in the house I’ve never experienced. A certain awareness of our fragility, unacknowledged until now. We treat each other like precious objects, like family relics nested in cotton that we must be careful not to lose or break.

  Piled in a wooden chest are brittle books of photographs, sliding loose behind plastic sheets or slipping from their adhesive mounting corners. Ella. Dorothy. Ionne. They gaze out across decades, hair pinned high, dresses trimmed with knotted rosettes and lace pieces. And my great-grandmother Beatrice. Here she is with three little girls (my mother and her sisters) wearing saddle shoes and white socks with the cuffs folded down. They balance together on a beached piece of driftwood. Beatrice kept the primitive cabin where they spent summers fresh and clean with homemade curtains and sweet touches, like wildflowers in a vase, my mother told me.

  In the photographs, she leans against a wagon-wheel gate and smiles, or dips the feet of a grandbaby in
to the waves on the shore. This is the same woman who will slip out of the house as she grieves the husband she loves and walk straight into Vancouver Bay. But here, in these pictures, she is young and smiling in a gingham dress and pearl earrings, as if nothing will ever change.

  * * *

  This will all come later. But tonight on the banks of the Gowanus, a block away from our church, Persephone, wearing a crown of wheat and roses, steps into the arms of Hermes, that cad who manages to tease from her a reluctant smile. The story has never been told quite this way before. Here on our canal we tell it anew, an ancient story rising up from the dust, taking on flesh and bone, reminding us what we believe or don’t believe in. The pair dances together to a ragged waltz, under the polluted spill of streetlight. We lost souls float on our barge, atop centuries of refuse, the oil and shit of the dead slicked around us.

  Charon, devoted but silent, looks on as the one he loves is pulled into the arms of another. We all have our jobs to do. Hers is to dance and his is to row. Ours is to watch, and we do, rocking gently on the foul water, the legacy of my ancestors, as the music plays and Persephone twirls in Hermes’s arms, away from the gaze of a jealous king. This scene will never be played again—not just this way. We are the last to see it: the only ones who will remember this exact, particular moment. She must do this while she can, before she recedes for one more year to that place where all is lost.

  III

  JUSTICE

  We will fight for you instead, side by side with the others,

  with everyone who knows hunger.

  —PABLO NERUDA

  When the waters swell and pour over the walls of the canal, seeping up the streets and back alleyways, I am not there to witness it. At that exact moment, I’m probably dragging my mattress off the bed frame and shoving it close to the brick wall of my studio apartment, as far from the windows as I can get it. It’s Monday, October 29. Hurricane Sandy is making landfall in New York City.

  Outside my apartment, the wind has already picked up. Earlier that day, I checked the flood map the city circulated online, to be sure I don’t need to evacuate. I’m safely in the green zone, but a block away, closer to the canal, the map is orange. The wind batters at the windows with a force that sets my heart racing, and I wonder if the mayor wasn’t wrong. Maybe I should have sought higher ground.

  I make my little nest on the floor, phone clutched in one hand, and tune in to NPR. Sitting alone in my apartment, Brian Lehrer’s voice, familiar and sure, becomes a security blanket. He is there in the studio, into the darkest hours of the early morning, talking with New Yorkers over the phone with the compassion of a priest and the steadiness of an incantation. “You’re out there, and we’re not leaving. We’ll be here all night,” he says at one point, or at least that’s the meaning I glean from his words. Though I’m sure he is surrounded by staff and producers, shuffling papers and wading through phone calls from listeners, I picture him alone in the studio, water rising steadily around the walls of his building.

  Across the East River, sea water is pouring into the footprints of the Twin Towers, spilling through the unfinished museum floors set in their foundations. By 8:00 P.M. the MTA sends out a tweet that the subways are flooding too. The backup power at NYU Langone Medical Center has already gone out. Nurses heave critical patients onto stretchers, carrying them down fifteen flights of darkened stairs by the beams of flashlights to ambulances waiting below, red lights spiraling. They carry IVs behind them and pump respirators by hand. Just across the East River, water surges around the glass building that houses Jane’s Carousel. Still lit, it’s like a beacon in the darkness, horses frozen mid-prance, manes mid-toss. And in my corner of Brooklyn, the polluted waters of the Gowanus swell over their embankment and begin to creep across parking lots. One block west, water seeps into the basements of the Gowanus Houses, and the power snaps off.

  All of this while I drift toward sleep to the sound of Brian Lehrer’s voice on the radio.

  * * *

  Tucked among the reams of pages that make up the Bible, there is a story of a great flood. We often tell it to children. With its description of a towering, pitch-covered ark and an orderly procession of animals filing inside in pairs, the tale is both fantastical and comforting, despite an overtone of doom.

  In the beginning, God’s creation is a great project of categorization: creating an ordered world with fine lines drawn between light and darkness, land and water. God creates a place for everything: for animals to mate and birth and grow and gallop, for insects to creep and fish to spawn, for greenery to push out lush, thick growth. God’s boundaries open up a space for life to proliferate.

  But with the flood, creation is undone. God smudges her hand across the page and blurs away her own charcoal lines. She flings open the windows in the heavens, and the line between the sky and the earth is smeared. Water subsumes the earth. The tape runs backward, toward the void.

  The reason for this destruction? Regret.

  The text tells us that God regrets making the world because it has become so twisted—corrupt and filled with violence. I guess I can understand that. God crumples her paper, and humanity with it, then throws it away, missing the wastepaper basket. All but Noah, his family, and the floating menagerie he’s sawed and hammered into being: a cacophony of brays and screeches, birdsongs and toad croaks. The ark is a microcosm of creation itself, floating upon the deep.

  Noah must have been frightened. The great boat creaks and pitches in the storm. He wonders if his construction job will hold. His wife stares out at the water, which has swallowed everything they knew—the house where their children were birthed, the hearth where she cooked and daydreamed. It has swallowed their parents, their closest friends, the butcher she greeted each morning on the square, the blind woman who stood at the gates and begged. All the world’s animals, snorting, stomping, and trumpeting, are a terrible kind of company when all you wish for are your friends.

  When the waters recede, Noah and his wife find that they can see something they couldn’t see before. They start again. Noah builds a new altar. God hangs a bow in the sky and vows that she will never again undo the world.

  When the waters receded in New York City, we discovered parking lots of taxicabs floating in water and yachts strewn blocks from the shore. Our small section of the world had become disordered. Water isn’t meant to flow up streets. Furniture isn’t supposed to float in houses. Subway tunnels should not be awash with seaweed and starfish. Yet that night, they were. We, like Noah, could see something we couldn’t see before. While some of us weathered the storm comfortable and safe, others were taken by it, and some just barely made it through. For many, there would be no recovery. In the wake of the storm, we saw it clearly: that some of us never had a chance.

  * * *

  In my nest on the floor, I awaken to a bright morning. The wind is gone, and the street eerily quiet. I flick the lights on and off. They’re working, and the refrigerator is still cold. Outside, I bike the soggy streets, strewn with debris and branches. Ancient fallen trees are festooned with yellow caution tape, their roots tipped up, like posh ladies upended with their skirts around their waists. I feel I should avert my eyes. Lower Manhattan is entirely without power, they report on the news. So are Red Hook in Brooklyn and the Rockaways out on the beach—anywhere near the water.

  That night I walk with friends to Atlantic Avenue, a busy four-lane thoroughfare that’s usually dense with traffic. We stare out across the East River at the skyline of Manhattan, eerily dark and silent below Fourteenth Street, like somebody accidentally flipped off the light switch. Tonight, it’s still a novelty.

  * * *

  Two days later it’s Halloween. My friend Mark, who is without power at the Episcopal seminary in Chelsea, crosses the Brooklyn Bridge by bike (the subways are still down) to get a shower and charge his phone in my apartment. He tells me it’s spooky in Lower
Manhattan without the lights. We carve tiny pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns and set them outside for what turns out to be a muted celebration of Halloween. Usually our block is the place to hit, a trove of well-prepared neighbors with good candy, but this year there are just a few trick-or-treaters, looking flattened and ghost-eyed, their parents worn and wrinkled.

  It’s becoming clear that this is a greater disaster than we imagined. Posts on social media have a panicked edge to them. Scrolling through, I see things aren’t good in Red Hook; they’re calling for volunteers. I bike past the genteel brownstones of Cobble Hill and under a highway overpass to volunteer at a Catholic church where the pews are heaped with clothing. It’s hard to know how to help. There are piles and piles of comically unnecessary items—high heels and suit jackets—as if those weathering the storm are urgently preparing for a job interview. Jake came out to volunteer tonight too. Now he’s around the corner wearing hip waders and bailing water out of someone’s basement. Someone instructs me to sort clothes into heavy-duty trash bags, and I start in ineffectually, feeling certain everything will be unpacked and repacked in a different way tomorrow. Every contribution seems flaccid in the face of this great wall of damage, and I tamp down a rising sense of panic. There is too much lost, too much chaos to try to set it all right again.

  “How are you?” I text Jake later that night.

  “This is crazy,” he writes back.

  * * *