The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  Before I leave, I go to the stacks of newspapers near the table where I work and place a copy of the most recent newspaper on the shelf. I do so every week. This paper has been published for one hundred and fifty years. Every copy has gone into the archives of this library. Microfilm and digital versions were also saved here before the library closed, and old printed papers are filed away in the vaults deep down in the basement.

  The recent papers I bring here, I stack them up, organizing each one by date.

  Even now, I need some sense of continuity. A sense of purpose greater than what I’ve done today or yesterday. It’s a human need, I think now. One that even I have not been able to leave completely in the past.

  • • •

  Trash is picked up every other week. One man, in a large garbage truck, still makes his way through the North End. I leave money in an envelope that’s taped to the side of the trash can I put out in front of my hotel. The pressman, he does the same with the trash can from the newspaper. Direct taxation, at a rate undefined but apparently deemed fair. The trash collector has never complained. When I see him driving his truck along the street, he nods toward me. Raises his hand to wave.

  • • •

  In a place that should be overrun with rats and roaches, with stray dogs and feral cats, there are none. I walk along the avenue leading from downtown to the industrial zone wondering what has killed or driven off all animals from the North End.

  Trees, thirty feet tall and black now, are planted in strict order along the avenues and main boulevards leading into and out of downtown. None of them bloom or grow anymore and some have fallen over, tumbling part way, leaning to the side, their massive roots exposed, black now too, and as I walk I touch my hand against each tree. The trunks are smooth, almost slick, as if they’ve been varnished and preserved.

  It’s a vision of a quiet Armageddon, or an emptied wasteland following a chemical attack.

  But this is only the wasteland of abuse and inattention.

  Ahead of me I can see the vast and rusted warehouses and factories of the industrial zone. I’m headed for the plant that once made herbicides and pesticides, the largest of its kind until it closed. The last of the factories to shut down.

  It’s the plant I’m writing about in this week’s paper.

  Some days, when the wind blows hard enough, the dust of old chemicals rises up into the air, thin clouds of it spreading carefully across the buildings and streets and homes of the North End.

  But this is not one of those days.

  I carry my notebook and my old camera and an extra roll of film in my jacket pocket. The old factories, the empty buildings and skyscrapers downtown, the vast neighborhoods of houses built as many as one hundred and fifty years ago, these form some interest for me. I am not entirely sure why.

  Maybe I hope to find some answer in these now emptied places, a solution to the question of how this city, the few people left, me one of them, how is it that we all ended up like this. How it is that we all chose to live here nonetheless.

  Maybe it simply gives me something on which to focus.

  It’s another two miles to the chemical plant. But I can see its faded smokestack, red once but now more gray than colored against the clouds in the sky. I’ll take a few pictures. I’ll write notes about what I see. I’ll head back to the library where I can research more about the factory. I’ll find more articles that were written, these about the costs to clean up the decades of damage the chemicals did to the site itself. Costs that ultimately led the owner to shut that factory down, to bankrupt the company before, in just a few days’ time, he deserted the wreckage he and his family had spent so long creating.

  • • •

  Near my hotel, a flatbed truck drives slowly, eight or ten scavengers riding on the smooth, heavy timbers that line the truck’s open bed. Some sit with their feet dangling over the sides of the wooden platform, others are pushed up against the back of the cab. Their faces are pale white from gypsum dust, their hair streaked with paint of too many colors. The scavengers stare at me, one nodding as they pass, another now standing, leaning her head back and stretching her arms out to the side as she stares straight up into the sky, stretching or praying or asking for help or for forgiveness, no one explains which it is.

  • • •

  I can hear the boy in the library. The noise of children is unmistakable. Even when they are trying to be quiet. Maybe even more so.

  I wake up on the couch in the atrium. It takes a moment to get out from under the blankets, to wake up and focus on the sound of the boy. I walk toward the children’s section of the library.

  It’s very cold today, though not as cold as it was in the morning. Midday now and light comes in through high windows all along the halls and rooms of the building and even though it is not sunny, the light makes the air less harsh and biting.

  The boy is running through the bookshelves in the children’s section. He makes sounds as he runs, quiet explosions and muffled gunshots. He has brown hair like his mother, but his is dense and curly.

  The woman stands up, quickly, her back straight.

  I say to her, “It’s okay.” In a moment, I say, “Sorry.”

  I’m not sure why I’m sorry. My voice sounds very foreign. Maybe a week since I’ve last spoken. Since the minister brought a notice to the paper.

  Yes, leave it there.

  The boy circles around some chairs, coming up next to his mother. He has her eyes, colorless, almost black. He’s watching me.

  It seems like he is less nervous than she is.

  She says, “You mentioned the library.” She pauses. “A couple weeks ago.”

  I nod. “Did you find the paper?” I ask.

  “No.”

  I turn partway. “It’s over here.”

  I realized I have paused. Then I start to walk. It’s another moment before I hear them follow. I glance back. They are both carrying backpacks, his a small one, bright blue and red with a pair of gloves attached to one of the straps and a water bottle tied to the other. The boy wears jeans and small boots like a hiker would wear and a black fleece jacket that is zipped up to below his chin. He moves to the left and right of his mother as we walk, crossing easily underneath tables and looping once or twice around sets of shelves.

  The hallway is relatively free of trash. There is the layer of dust, though, and with the light coming through the high windows, I can see dust in the air, a million brilliant sparkling fragments, each briefly frozen still in the air around us and, for a moment, I forget to breathe.

  “Here,” I say, stopping at the shelves holding the newspapers.

  The woman’s brown hair is pulled off her face, and she wears clothes similar to the boy’s, jeans and boots but with a black wool jacket buttoned up to her chin, and it’s impossible for me to know if she’s distinct looking or attractive or somehow different, because here, in a place so lifeless and cold, the people have all grown nondescript in the always fading light.

  She is scanning the stacks of newspapers.

  “It’s there,” I say, pointing to a lower shelf. “In the middle.”

  She picks it up, the sound of paper rattling, sheets rubbing together as she holds up the newspaper. I move to the other side of a table.

  “Inside,” I say. “Third page.”

  She glances at me.

  “I wrote the story for the paper,” I say. “I write all the stories.”

  She blinks and it seems to me that it’s the first time I’ve seen her blink.

  “I guess it could seem strange,” I think to say out loud, “that I’d know this much about an article. An article about you.”

  I look around for my table and walk to it. I take a drink of water, then another. The boy is watching me from a table near his mother. He sits down in a chair, his backpack on the floor next to him.

  The article is very short and says very little. Just what the police had told me. That there is a woman missing. That she might have come
to the North End.

  In the picture, she looks quite different. Her hair surrounds her face, long and sticking out from her head, and she looks like she has just woken up or is sick or is on drugs. A mug shot, almost, but it’s not.

  In the picture, she is crying.

  She spends a lot of time reading the article. I wonder for a moment if she doesn’t read well. But then I figure that she’s just thinking. About what it means that they are looking for her. About what she might decide to tell me.

  “I don’t need any information,” I say, awkwardly. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She nods, even though she’s still looking at the paper in her hands. She starts to fold it up again.

  “I thought we would be safe here,” she says, quietly, staring toward the boy.

  I can’t help but glance at the boy when she’s said this. He seems unchanged. He knows, it seems, about whatever it is that might make them unsafe. I would have thought she wouldn’t talk this way in front of him.

  But I realize, of course, that it is obvious to him they are in danger. Of course it is.

  “You can be safe here,” I say to her. “This is a place where it is very easy to hide.”

  She is looking at me.

  “I’m sorry I put that article in the paper,” I say. “But I had to. The paper,” I start and can’t quite find a way to say it right. “The paper has to do those things. It has to cover what is happening.”

  She glances toward the table where I had been working. “We shouldn’t be bothering you,” she says. “You’re busy. We’ll go.”

  “And,” I say, “I think I wanted to put the article there as a warning.”

  She watches me as I move along my table, then lean back against the edge. In a moment, she blinks again. “Thank you,” she says. “We should go. Let you work.”

  I shake my head, now responding to what she said before. “It’s not my library,” I say. “It’s still here for everyone.”

  She glances toward the boy and he gathers his backpack, swings it over his shoulder.

  “Thank you,” she says again and they are gone.

  I wait, staring toward the hallway they went down, the light once more catching the million flecks of dust held in the air around me, this time the dust all moving, slightly, a wind I can’t feel, so slowly moving the dust in one direction.

  Then I go over to the shelf of newspapers and move the paper she’d been reading back to its proper pile.

  • • •

  I shower in cold water, in the high-ceilinged bathroom in my hotel. The room is dimly lit, with only a small lamp on the floor near the sink. It’s often like showering in the dark, the cold water sourceless, just a spray, wet and nearly icy all around me.

  I wash myself, every part of my body. My thick hair is tangled some, and it takes effort to wash it, effort to shave off whatever thin beard has grown across my face.

  I don’t feel cleaner after showering, though. I feel only like I’ve done something I’m supposed to do.

  I dry off and dress in clothes I wash in a washer that works in a utility room down the hall.

  It can take me hours to get warm after showering. I will often have to get under the blankets on my couch, fully dressed, under layers of heavy bedding, head covered, hands tucked between my legs, shivering and breathing hard.

  And still I can’t get warm.

  • • •

  Two weeks have gone by and it is time for the commission to meet at the community center near the highway. It takes half an hour to walk there, but still I get there early, taking one of the hard wooden seats in the back of the big room, notebook and pencil in my hands.

  Only seven of the thirteen members of the commission show up. Most of the seven mention more than once how they are under a court order to hold this meeting. It’s another reference to their clear desire not to be here. Not to have this responsibility. Not to want to deal with this doomed area separate from the South End, where they all now live.

  Men and women, black and white and brown, yet they all look the same. Interchangeable public figures making vaguely circular, clearly noncommittal statements. They sit at a long table on a stage at the front of the room. I have to follow the conversation very carefully just to take accurate notes on who says which empty words.

  Fewer than ten people who actually live here are sitting in the audience. Each sitting alone, spread across the two hundred or more chairs. They don’t say anything. There’s a sense of acceptance among the people living here. A resignation to our fate or an embracing of our circumstances, I don’t know for sure.

  In the years since I came back, I’ve heard few people here complain.

  But there was a time when people fought with this commission and with the city council before that. A time when citizens wrote letters and filed lawsuits and held protests at government buildings and yelled from the audience during massive public meetings.

  Asking what would be done. Saying their neighborhoods were being destroyed. Screaming that they were losing everything they had.

  But nothing changed. The end still came.

  Now, no one speaks from the audience. It is, after all, not like we can’t leave. These people on the stage, they have not forced us into staying.

  “I’m sorry, but if we finally convinced the courts to let us turn off the power and the gas and all of the utilities,” says one of the commissioners on the stage at the front of the room, “I’m sure that everyone would then, finally, vacate this area.”

  Another commissioner shakes his head. “I don’t think it will work to turn off the utilities,” he says. He stares out at the people in the seats, looking at us as if we don’t know he’s there. As if he watches us on a video screen or sits behind a one-way mirror. “I don’t think they’ll ever leave,” he says.

  The few people in the audience stare blankly at him. Listening.

  Still I’m not sure why.

  But we do in fact fear that the power will be turned off. No one pays for what they use. Only court orders from many years ago keep the power on. And court orders can be changed.

  And we do also know that the power comes from heavy lines that span the highway, towers that could one day simply crumble and fall over.

  Maybe that is why people listen.

  I take notes for another half an hour. The discussion ranges from the debts the North End incurred to the cost of removing the final overpass to the success the commissioners claim they’ve had in shutting down failed neighborhoods in the South End.

  But there is no money, the commissioners all eventually admit. Even to cut off what does remain.

  There is one commissioner who has not spoken. Her dark hair is pulled back tightly and she wears a gray jacket and white blouse, the nondescript aura of a business executive. “It’s not just that there is no money,” she says now. “There is, among us sitting on the stage and among the people in the South End who have forgotten about this place and among even the people living here, including the few of them sitting in this room, there is not just an absence of money. There is an absence of will. Desire. Need. And without those things,” she says, sitting forward, “this place will not ever change. Accept that. Because without it, this is how life here will always be.”

  • • •

  Sometimes I’ll see beyond the curtained window of a house the bright and shifting glow of a television screen. I’ll see antennas and small dishes on the roofs of homes I walk past.

  It’s strange to me that people here would watch television. Or listen to the radio stations that it’s also possible to pick up. I can’t imagine wanting to be reminded that there is a world outside this place.

  If you wanted to be part of the world, why would you be here?

  Some old phones work, landlines that I hear ringing in a house along a street or in a room somewhere in my building. I hear the sound of alarm clocks too. Randomly going off, a loud and steady beeping emanating out from a darkened home.
>
  I find the ringing quite disturbing. Abrasive in how it intrudes on the isolation of this place. I hate the silence of the North End greatly, but the ringing, I hate that more.

  It’s like the sound of the smoke detectors, a faint and intermittent beep from a house I pass or from a room somewhere in my building. The warning sound of a battery that has finally started to die.

  • • •

  I’ve stopped in front of an old brick hospital after leaving the newspaper’s office, a massive structure just four stories high but covering two city blocks. I don’t enter. I just stand. The hospital was looted heavily when it was closed, addicts and criminals and kids of all ages searching every crevice of every room for any sort of drugs.

  But I don’t enter, don’t go looking at the scene of chaos and destruction. I trust what I’ve been told.

  It is the hospital where they all were born. Where I was born. Where she was too.

  I don’t enter the double doors.

  I don’t move from where I stand.

  I don’t shiver in the wind that blows or the rain that falls across me.

  I just stand as, overhead, near the bottom of the thick blanket of clouds, a large jet flies slowly, silently above me. Visible but too far away to possibly be heard.

  • • •

  Most nights, I allow myself one drink. Late, in the darkness of my hotel room, the living room lit if at all by the distant light of the South End reflecting off the layer of clouds. When the clouds are low enough, it’s as if I live in the sky itself, suspended here, miles above the surface of the world.

  The air blows through the room, windows pulled open from the top and bottom of the frames. I stand at the window with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, knuckles tucked tight under the edges of the wool.

  I see shapes in the clouds. Houses and ships and flowers. Never once the same shape, but each time I look, I see them.

  I sip my way slowly through my drink. Some sort of liquor I’ve bought from one of the vendors near the corner store.

  It would be easy to drink too much here. It would be tempting to drink any time of day. It’s not a struggle to resist this. But it is something about which I do remind myself. That I could lose myself completely. Not just to drinking. I could lose myself to this place. I do not have to work and I do not have to leave this room and I could lie down on this couch with a drink, all day, drink easily, drink steadily, and let myself think of nothing.