The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  Never have I walked in on anyone. Sometimes I think I know, can sense, when someone is actually near me. When they are behind a gate or door.

  Probably, though, it’s just the odds. There are enough homes and rooms here for the million people who once lived in this city. The chance of walking in on any of the few people left is very, very small.

  I am trying doorknobs as I walk through this apartment building. Most are locked. But the doors that are open, most are for apartments that have already been gone through, years ago it seems, the apartment strewn with boxes and a broken picture and glass shattered across a living room floor. But all of it is covered in dust.

  Whoever damaged this place, they did it back in time.

  The hallway comes to a turn. In the corner, I see water, dripping down from the molding along the ceiling, clear water following a long-stained brown path. It rained hard last night. This is the tenth of fifteen floors. The rainwater, even hours later, still finds its way through the cracks and seams of this old structure. The buildings here bleed water when it rains, perforated as they are by cracks and breaks and holes, the water coming down from the roofs, in some places rushing, in some places dripping, the water for days after the heavy rain still making its way through ceilings and stairwells and the walls themselves.

  I reach out toward the wall, lightly touching the water with the very tips of my pale fingers.

  “Hello,” a voice says, and I jerk in place, step back. Turn my head.

  She says again to me, “Hello.”

  She’s twenty feet away, standing in the hallway on which I was about to turn.

  I nod. In my mind, I answer her. Then I realize I haven’t spoken. I say, “I’m just looking for a blanket.”

  The voice, mine, is once again unfamiliar.

  She nods. “I think I have one.” She has brown hair and her eyes in the dim light seem black, colorless, and the way she moves I think she is probably very strong. “Yes,” she says. “Sure. I can bring you a blanket.”

  I stare at her. It’s a moment and I shake my head. “No, not like that. I can find one. Somewhere else.”

  I take a step backward, toward the hallway I was on.

  It takes me another moment to realize this is the woman the police are looking for.

  She still stands in her hallway, in the middle. Arms at her side. She wears a heavy, black wool coat. Boots. Her brown hair is pulled off her face. As she talks, there are thin wisps of mist.

  For a moment, I’m struck by the fact that it is cold for her here too.

  Again I realize I’ve said something only in my mind. “Thanks,” I say now. “For the blanket. The offer.”

  She nods.

  I say to her, “Do you read the newspaper?”

  She stares. Confused. “What?”

  “Do you read the newspaper?”

  She glances down, then looks over her shoulder. She says, “Not lately.”

  Down the hall, behind her, I see a child stick his face out from a doorway.

  Once more, I step backward.

  “My son,” she says. She’s walking to him, glancing at me over her shoulder. Nervous, protecting. Instinct here, safety. Let nothing bad now happen.

  “There is a newspaper here,” I say. “You should find it. The paper. One from a month ago. It’ll be in the library.”

  She waves her son back into the apartment. But he doesn’t move. The woman turns to me and nods. “Okay.”

  We’re quiet a moment. I’m thinking very slowly. No grounding in what I might say. “They’re looking for you,” I tell her. “Here. In the North End.”

  She seems to gnaw her lip.

  We’re thirty feet apart now. She is standing near the opening to the apartment.

  “The paper is in the library,” I say again. “It doesn’t include much detail. Just says that the police think you are missing.”

  She nods. Gnawing her lip, I think. I hear the water from the molding, behind me, dripping from the ceiling to the floor.

  The boy, maybe eight years old, he stares straight at me. He’s a portrait to me, of a boy staring plainly forward.

  I still can’t seem to think right. Thoughts come to me slowly, shapes turning into words, forming sentences in my mind. I think to shake my head, visibly, so she’ll see me do it. “The police,” I say. “The article. None of it mentioned a child.”

  I step back again, accidentally pressing myself against the wall. The water is already soaking through to my hip and the back of my thigh.

  “I don’t need to have seen you here,” I say, awkwardly. I have to pause. “I’m just looking for a blanket.”

  I turn and leave, walk down the hall.

  I touch the rainwater that still spreads across my leg.

  There are no children in the North End. I’ve never seen a child on the street. I’ve never once seen a sign that one might be here.

  I think to myself that I like this.

  Seeing children would make the emptiness only that much more apparent.

  • • •

  The best way to burn down a house is to light on fire the steps leading up from a darkened basement. It does not take much effort. Usually there’s a gas can or paint thinner in a shed out back or in the basement itself. The basements are often filled with forgotten boxes of books, plastic toys that were never discarded, old wooden cribs covered in dust and basement grime.

  Pile these on top of each other, or just push them close together, and they will burn very easily. The fire will grow steadily in the shallow windows of the basement, soon spreading up the wooden basement stairs, now cutting holes in the floor of the living room and kitchen.

  And once the furniture is burning, the fire will move fast throughout the first and second floors.

  I always check the houses to make sure they do not have natural gas coming into them. Gas like that, when it’s lit, it can go off like a bomb.

  And I don’t want to light off a bomb. I wouldn’t like the suddenness. The anxious waiting for the explosion.

  I don’t like loud noises at all.

  Instead, I want for the fire to, very slowly, build.

  • • •

  There are days when I sleep so much it’s as if I’m very sick, waking every few hours like an ill man with a fever. Turning, shifting on my couch, thinking I will get up. Thinking that I should.

  But I fall back asleep before I’m able to stand. The cold air from the open windows in my living room blows across the thick socks on my feet and I know that I could tuck them under this heavy, rough blanket or that I could stand, pushing my feet and legs free from the couch where I am lying. But again I find myself asleep. The rain falls and some of it sprays on the windowsill, even the table near the wall. I see this through half-open eyes, face pressed heavily against a thick pillow, and the water will sometimes seem to reach as far as me, a stray drop hitting my cheek or my hand as I hold the blanket. Then I’ll realize a drop could not travel that far, or maybe it can and I wonder what will happen in this room if everything gets wet, and again I’ll be asleep, lost in a heavy and circular dream that makes sense only for a moment, when, hours later, I finally wake up, dulled and heavy and confused.

  I wonder for a moment why that woman and the boy came to the North End. But I know that people sometimes pass through here on the way to somewhere else. They have for years. I assume the woman and boy will too.

  Somewhere in the building, a phone is ringing.

  I lie there, listening to it. Ten times, maybe twenty, and then it stops. A wrong number. Or the call of someone who has not been in touch for many, many years.

  • • •

  There is, of course, the question of why it is I choose to stay here. Why I chose to come back to this place at all.

  I can say that I find comfort in the isolation.

  I can say that I find comfort in my removal from the world.

  I can say that I have no idea how long I will stay.

  I can say that I wish none
of this, none of what brought me here, I wish none of it had ever happened.

  I can say there was a family, mine, and all of them are gone.

  CHAPTER 2

  When someone dies in the North End, there is a funeral. Many people attend. It is our only communal act. There are really no other reasons to gather in a crowd.

  There is a church downtown that still has a minister, an older man who I see sometimes near the corner store or near the church itself, where he sweeps the wide steps leading up to the church’s entrance. The minister holds services each Sunday and from my windows I can always see a few people making their way to the church in the morning.

  When there is going to be a funeral, the minister brings a notice to the paper, which I print on the front page. A short announcement listing the name of the person who has died and the time of the funeral service.

  Often, a few hundred people attend, far more than ever go to a Sunday service. Far more than the dead person could have possibly known here.

  There are bibles and hymnals in the long wooden pews of the church, but the minister doesn’t have us open them. He is a small, thick man who stands at the front of the vast sanctuary, the dead body before him enclosed in a very simple casket on the wide altar, the minister reading from notes he himself has written. This is a Catholic church, but he is not a Catholic. His notes, they come from many religions. Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Hindu. He’ll mention Buddha. He’ll mention the Greek gods. Roman.

  The group always sings a hymn we all know from childhood.

  The group always stands at the end of the service, spread out among the pews, silent for a full minute.

  Even here, there is something strange in the unexpected depth of the silence of a crowd.

  The group always follows as the casket is carried out of the large sanctuary. The crowd stands on the steps of the church, watching as the casket is slid into an old hearse, the minister saying a last thought, a prayer of sorts, not specific, speaking toward all of us on the steps. Then he gets in the hearse and drives the body away.

  What he’s said is not important. He emphasizes this. What matters, he says, is the process. The gathering. The continuation of a ritual.

  The group watches the car drive off. It is very quiet. Not silent, people do talk. But not many, and not loudly.

  And then everyone walks away, leaving in many different directions. Returning to their homes or to their scavenging or to the corner store to get that week’s food. A few hundred adults, some very old, some younger than me, half men, half women, white or black or Hispanic or Middle Eastern or Asian. We wander off. Few say good-bye.

  It’s hard not to do the math, to realize that every funeral marks a diminishing of our numbers. Enough of these deaths and, finally, no one will live here at all.

  • • •

  The network of canals and levees that stretches from the bay to the center of the city was world-renowned when it was built many decades ago.

  Now those same levees are slowly collapsing, the water they release steadily pushing toward downtown.

  To build them, city leaders brought in engineers from countries an ocean away to lay out a plan that would allow the North End to grow. Many square miles were reclaimed from the water. The industrial zone expanded massively as barges were now able to unload raw materials directly at the factories where they would be used, manufactured products immediately loaded onto other barges along the docks.

  I write about this, again, for the paper.

  Along the canals, apartments were built. Wooden houseboats gathered in long rows, soon forming tightly knit communities. Bridges were constructed, each more ornate than the next, stone and steel, and some include tall stanchions that still stretch upward in sweeping and unnecessarily grand arches, bridges that were celebrated upon completion for their beauty more than their utility.

  Yet as the city expanded into the suburbs in the South End and began, more and more, to neglect the north, these same bridges and the canals they crossed and the series of levees that made most of the North End possible, all of them began to crumble and decay.

  Ultimately, the repairs to these structures were deemed too expensive to undertake.

  Ultimately, the repairs were part of what drove the last of the city’s leaders to encourage even faster growth in the South End over any commitment to the north.

  That most of the North End was built below sea level did not seem to enter into this decision.

  That those same decaying levees hold back water that could flood many square miles of homes and buildings and factories was, for the most part, entirely ignored.

  The water in all the canals looks very still. But if you get close, leaning down, you see that it moves steadily, circulating through the canals, moving from here near my hotel to the bay far to the north.

  At night now, from my room, I can sometimes hear a levee north of me give way. There is a grinding crash, the rushing sound of water, all of it echoing up into the dark night sky, reaching me where I stand some long seconds later, the millions of gallons of water already having covered fifty more acres of the North End.

  Homes, maybe, or just streets. Maybe a long-abandoned park.

  The newly released water flows unbound until it reaches the next levee, caught there, stopped. The system was built to compensate for storms and rising water and emergency disasters.

  But even as the echoing sound of that newly broken levee dissipates into the night around me, the water that has just been released is already putting greater pressure on the next levee in the system, this levee too some decades past its last round of maintenance or repair.

  Someday, every levee around us could give way. Each collapse of one levee builds pressure on the others, so while the breaks now happen only every few months, they are inevitably becoming more frequent, so that the whole North End could finally be flooded, neighborhoods and roads and stores submerged, only the utility poles and streetlights and tall office buildings rising out of the water, structures that, ultimately, might also be washed away, eroded and knocked down and drowned one by one, until finally this city would only be a footnote to the bay, waves running endlessly across this place where we all lived.

  • • •

  Alone in the vast city library, I often find myself asleep. There are long leather couches in the main reading room, an old, high-ceilinged atrium with tall windows looking out at the downtown buildings nearby. The ceiling arches upward, three or four stories high, covered in tile and gilded molding and paintings of the stars and the gods their patterns form, all of it spread across the apex of that high, domed ceiling.

  It’s cold here. A year ago I finally brought a few blankets from my hotel, which I store in a drawer in a desk near the periodicals. Most days, I need to have the blankets over me even to sit at one of the long tables and take notes from the history texts and bound books of public records.

  Eventually, I find myself lying on the couch in the main reading room, staring up at that high ceiling, wrapped heavily in the wool blankets, using my jacket as a pillow and finally covering my head with my arms as I fall asleep.

  A few sections of the library were trashed at some point. The books pulled off the shelves, cards dumped out of the old card catalog. The kids’ section is the worst of it, books thrown everywhere, graffiti on the murals of farm scenes and fairy princesses and castles with dragons and knights.

  Most of that sort of damage here in the North End happened in the final months before everything collapsed, when people staged a last and unorganized fight against an end we now know to be inevitable. When there were still a few police cars, a city mayor that claimed to be in control, residents angry at the loss of their jobs and their schools and any shred of value in the homes they had long owned. When this place still had the pretense of being governed, then there was something against which to rebel. That’s when a few storefronts were broken, when some looting occurred, when teenagers ran wild through schools and the library,
throwing books and desks against the walls.

  But when the city government collapsed, when everyone finally walked away from responsibility, then the destruction and rebelling all soon came to an end. The angry people loaded up and quickly moved away. The few who did remain, they simply closed their doors in silence. Like animals in the forest going limp in the jaws of a predator. Freeing themselves from a certain death. Wounded maybe. Lame. But alive.

  I wake up on the couch in the library.

  It’s a few more minutes before I push the blankets off me.

  The water still runs in the bathrooms here, and I drink long from the cold, fresh stream that pours brightly into the heavy porcelain sink, thinking again about the chemical plants and factories that I write about each week, the mountains of toxins that were knowingly, openly released over so many decades. Wondering, again, which of those elements might have invaded the water supply. Which might be seeping into it right now.

  I rinse my face with the icy water, trying to wake up. I wet my head to the scalp, pushing the hair away from my face and eyes.

  I look at myself for more than a moment. Maybe because I still feel half asleep. My hair is almost to my shoulders, brown, although there is also gray now, and the lines near the corners of my mouth and the lines under my eyes have all gotten deeper.

  I tell myself I should shave soon.

  Another hour at the desk in the main reading room and I have all the research I need for my article on an herbicide and pesticide plant. Dates of the groundbreaking, statistics on the volume of material produced during peak production. I use my camera to take pictures of a few old photos from the 1930s, portraits of men and women and small children among the piles of dry, dusty chemicals being loaded into railcars and onto barges along the docks on the forgotten bay that borders the far edge of the North End. There are a very few articles about the potential dangers of the chemicals used and produced at the plant. Articles based on the complaints by then neighbors of harsh migraines and constant flu, of kids with asthma, of senior citizens with a dry and endless cough.

  Those articles are from the 1970s. The plant stayed open for another thirty years.