The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  Let yourself forget.

  I don’t, though. I haven’t yet.

  Instead I stare out at the sky, at the layered and rippling clouds barely lit by the few lights below me and the clouds so slowly shifting in their shape and distant colors, moving south, rolling steadily to the south.

  I take a sip. Stare.

  I think only about how much they would have loved this part of being here.

  • • •

  In the morning, I find a dead man.

  There is a playground along the base of my building. In the daytime, I can see it, from above, if I lean out my open window, face into the wind, feeling very much like I am about to fall. From that view it looks like merely the schematic of a playground, the swing set and monkey bars and a winding brick path circling through the structures, the path lined intermittently by black park benches and a stone water fountain.

  The boy is down there playing, his mother sitting on the ground nearby.

  Even from this twentieth floor, I can see that the trees and bushes are all dead. Branches black and shiny, a few dry leaves still clinging to spindly twigs. The grass on the ground is brown and dry and frozen in place. From above it only looks like the drawings of a plan, the intention of greenery within a representation of a park.

  The boy swings, doubling his body over to swing back, kicking his legs out to push forward, again and again until finally he jumps off, floating, spinning his arms for balance, landing and he’s already at a run, heading to the monkey bars where he climbs to the very top, standing, balancing, still, and now he slides down the iron pole to the ground and then to the seesaw where his mother waits.

  Then he does it all once more.

  With my binoculars I can see that she is barely smiling. Watching the boy. Never taking her eyes off of him.

  There’s a brick wall around much of the playground. I assume that the wind does not blow so much in there. That it is almost warm.

  It’s now that I see the body. On the ground. Outside the walled playground. Not far from where the boy is playing. A man, sprawled forward, one hand reaching out, face pressed down into the pale ground.

  It’s as if he died trying to reach the playground just thirty feet away.

  There are sometimes dead people in the houses here in the North End. But not dead people in the streets. Not dead people on the ground.

  The boy still plays, the woman watching him, both of them on the other side of the brick wall. If I close my eyes, I can hear the boy as he screams, laughing, the steel hinges of the swing a creaking squeal that lifts upward even through the wind.

  I will go down when they have left. I will find the minister and get him to help me with the body. I will write an article in the paper. I will write that there has been a death. I will take a picture of his face.

  I will document everything I see.

  But for now I only know that I find myself watching that boy play. How he runs and jumps from slide to swing, how he crawls across the ground and leaps up onto the seesaw with his mother, screaming as he laughs and it’s impossible for me to look away. Or to even move.

  • • •

  I am standing near the playground, looking down at the dead man at my feet.

  Only after the woman and the boy left, the two of them walking out the entrance on the other side from where the body lies, in a minute disappearing from my view, only then did I go downstairs.

  The body lies on its chest on what used to be a grassy field. It’s dry, pale dirt now, and looking close the dirt seems almost to move, grains of dust and tiny pebbles rattling in the cold wind that blows steadily across everything near me.

  There are small pebbles driven into the dead man’s hands from when he fell. Blood, almost black now, is spread across the side of his head and ear, the pale dirt turned purple in a wide circle where the blood has soaked into the ground. It looks like he hit his head when he fell.

  I stand over him, staring down. The silence of the North End can be total.

  I know I will have to touch him.

  This is what you do. You make sure the body’s dead.

  But instead I am thinking about them.

  There were the six of us. Our own ruckus, we would say. Our own party wherever we were.

  Four children, eight, nine, nine, and ten years old. Two boys, two girls, and I hear them now, in my mind. I hear them playing, each sound of them bouncing toys off the walls, and the sound of a board game being spread across a large wooden table, and the sound of laser beams and gunfire as they chase each other out the door. I hear each step across the upstairs floor. Each roar as they come inside from the backyard.

  I hear each of their separate voices. The way they say their words. The way one pauses after each sentence, how another races as she speaks.

  And I hear the sound of smoke detectors, all of them at once, as if the fire was nowhere and then everywhere in just a second.

  In truth that fire spread. Even though we didn’t hear it. Didn’t know it till it was everywhere.

  Of course that fire spread. Of course it took some time.

  We just didn’t know it.

  We managed to fail to realize.

  I managed. I failed. I only realized when the fire was already everywhere.

  Because from the couch, where I had fallen asleep, I knew suddenly that the rest of the house was completely wrapped in flames.

  I close my eyes again. Still standing over that dead body.

  The dust on the ground blows lightly, rattling in place.

  I am haunted by the echoes of violence, a constant sense that there is a nearby place where everyone, right now, is screaming.

  I open my eyes. Lean down. Press my hand against the back of this man’s body.

  It’s hard and still. Dead.

  I’ll burn down a house tonight. I know that this must happen. And as I watch that house begin to burn, I will as always find myself counting slowly.

  The seconds the fire takes to spread from room to room.

  The seconds it would take to get out of there and not die.

  CHAPTER 3

  A smell like sulfur blows through the windows of my room. It’s been blowing since yesterday, the smell having risen as I walked from the newspaper to the library, and a full day later it hasn’t dissipated at all.

  It’s a week since I found the body.

  The funeral is today. The article in the paper came out a few days ago. A dead man was found near the center of the North End.

  The picture of his bloated, misshapen face runs three inches by four inches on the cover.

  His eyes, in black and white, stare vacantly upward and away.

  It is the minister who tells me that the cause of death is not clear.

  “Heart attack,” he says, almost to himself. “Tripped and hit his head. Maybe someone pushed him down,” he says, glancing at me with a slight, strange smile. “Who knows?”

  We are standing in the basement of the church. The body lies on a wooden table, a white sheet pulled over it.

  “Sometimes,” the minister says, “I can figure out the cause of death for certain.”

  I ask him in a moment, “How?”

  The minister glances at me. He has a density to him, the minister. The thickness of his chest, his slightly shortened arms and legs. I realize for the first time that he’s Hispanic. That he is roughly my age. I’d thought he was much older.

  He is looking down at the body. “I was a mortician,” he says. In a moment he says, “I still am.”

  The fluorescent light overhead reflects pale, cold blue off the sheet covering the body. The minister’s profile is pale as well, his skin turned almost green. He keeps his black hair cut close to his head, wears a black sweater and black pants.

  “You’re not a minister,” I think to say.

  He shakes his head. Smiles slightly. “Not by training.”

  The two of us are quite sure the dead man is not from the North End. The minister knows many people here
. Knows the scavengers and brokers and vendors near the corner store. He comes to most commission meetings and he gets around the North End.

  “Making myself available,” he says, still looking down at the body. “That’s what I do. And I’ve never seen this man.”

  I realize the minister acts like he knows me, yet we’ve only spoken when he’s dropped a notice of a service at the paper. But, I guess, this is just his way.

  Now, on the steps of the church, a crowd has gathered quietly for the funeral. Two hundred or more. Most of them have come alone, though there are some people who arrive together. There are a few couples, older people, who help each other up the steps. Some of the crowd is fresh from scavenging, twenty men and women with their clothes and hands and faces turned chalky white from the work they’ve been doing that morning and the previous day. Their eyes all shine, wet, their lips a bright and unnatural red, shining too, and a few have jewelry they’ve scavenged tight around their wrists and forearms and throats. Nomadic or warlike or cannibals or saints, they stand together to witness the funeral rites.

  I see a man next to me has a folded newspaper in one hand, tucked carefully under his arm. He glances at me. “That’s quite a picture,” he says quietly.

  I put my cold hands in my jacket pockets, rubbing the fingers slowly against the wool, warming them.

  “Yes,” I think to say.

  He pats my shoulder. Walks away.

  The minister begins the service as he always does, singing, alone, a hymn that I don’t recognize. He doesn’t hold a book or a sheet of paper. He knows the song by heart.

  • • •

  I am walking to my hotel after the funeral. I pause at the low hill where I found the body, where the ground was scuffed and disrupted. But already the wind has spread dirt and dust over the tracks of my shoes, the minister’s boots, the thin ruts from the dead man’s heels that were formed as we dragged the body to the church, so that now there’s no sign anyone had ever been here.

  The woman and the boy are behind the brick wall, the boy squealing as he swings in the playground. For a second I can see his feet above the wall, his head then popping up with each back swing. His eyes are closed and his feet are high and he leans farther back with every swing, pumping himself even higher.

  Then he sees me and he’s quiet. He only watches me with each swing above the wall.

  But still he keeps swinging higher.

  When I walk into the playground, the woman is already slowing him down, quickly, grabbing at his shoes and the chains of the swing. She turns to see me and though she is still slowing down his swinging, I can see that her shoulders lower. Relaxing some.

  “Hello,” I say. I’m standing at the edge of the playground. Safe distance.

  She stands very straight. Ready, it seems, and again I think that she does not blink. “Hello,” she says.

  The wind is not as strong inside the playground and it’s warmer than outside the walls, so that for a moment it almost feels like there is sunlight shining.

  “They found a dead body near here,” I say. “They found it a few days ago.”

  The boy is off the swing now, ready to run to the monkey bars, but the woman reaches for his hand. He stands in place.

  I say, “I thought that you should know this.”

  She’s forty feet away from me on the other side of the playground, but I can see how very focused she is.

  “Do you know who he was?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “No one knows.”

  She nods slowly. Looks down at the boy. He stands still, staring over at me. I think that if she lets go of his hand, he’ll simply go back to swinging, unfazed completely by the conversation about a dead man.

  Unfazed completely by the desolate landscape where he plays.

  “There’s a photo of the man,” I say. “In the paper.”

  She nods, letting go of the boy’s small hand.

  “You took the photo?” she asks.

  I find that I’m biting my lip. “Yes,” I say.

  “Thank you for letting me know,” she says.

  I nod.

  “We should go,” the woman says. To me, I guess, but also to the boy.

  “We should go,” she says again, head turned slightly, speaking now to the boy alone.

  But he can’t hear her. He’s already swinging again.

  • • •

  The smell of sulfur stays with us for weeks. This happens. Sulfur or chlorine or a rotten egg scent that blows across the North End for hours or even days. Most times, it’s impossible to see the source of the smell. The wind inevitably finds a source of chemicals in the industrial zone—a door to a shed broken open in a storm, a rusting valve on a huge tank finally splitting along a weld. Sometimes I can even see the source of the smell from my windows, a haze of dust or gas that rises up from the rows of sinking factories.

  I write about the sulfur smell and its possible sources in the paper.

  The North End was not sealed up and left carefully preserved. Its many parts, its buildings and factories and roads and neighborhoods, were neglected, forgotten, and finally abandoned. A succession of deferred or unidentified blame, each act of desertion setting the stage for the next failure and departure.

  I type alone in the office.

  Everywhere, I can still smell whatever chemical has broken free of its source. And for the first time, I realize the scent must reach the South End. Must leave people there thinking that this place and anyone who would live here are all as diseased and decrepit as the smell that drifts, day after day, through the gray, cold sky above us.

  • • •

  After a few minutes of staring at the shiny metal sheet spread across the ground, I realize I’ve lost track of time. I’m in a vast series of warehouses and factory buildings, wood and iron beams, tall broken windows reaching four and five stories high. Once, engines were built in the acre after acre of manufacturing space that I’ve been walking through and somewhere in my mind I am confused by how such a space, such an assimilation of facilities and equipment, could be devoted only to one component of a vehicle that would be completed in yet another set of buildings, the engines shipped from here to there via rail lines and roads and canals throughout the industrial zone.

  The sheet of metal across the ground is oddly shaped, round and elongated, a hundred feet across. I throw a rock at the slick metal surface and immediately it sinks, a surprising and hallucinogenic experience that for a moment leaves me thinking that all of this is an extended dream, a sleeping memory of throwing rocks through impossible sheets of silver, the metal warping sickly as it slowly absorbs my throw.

  But I realize that the sheet on the ground isn’t hard metal. It’s mercury. A pool of shiny liquid of unknown origin and depth, collected here on accident or on purpose, the unwanted by-product of one process of the creation of car engines over so many years.

  I look around for a stick. I find an old broom handle and step closer to the pool. I put the handle into the liquid to see how deep the pool is. The handle sinks till my hand nearly touches the surface, five feet at least, and I let loose the handle. It sinks and soon it’s gone, the surface wrapping around it, consuming it, and I can’t help but wonder what else is inside that mercury.

  I take a few pictures of the pool. Light reflects off the long, far edge for just a moment as I take the picture. I find a long two-by-four piece of lumber to slide carefully into the slick substance, nine or ten feet it goes and does not touch a bottom and I tie the top end of the heavy piece of wood to a rusted beam nearby. The end of the two-by-four sticks up a foot or so, as if frozen in concrete or molten steel, and I take a picture of that as well.

  One more story for the paper. One more history of economic boom and eventual decline. The decline of a company that made engines for which there was no longer any demand. The decline of people who could not manage the wasted by-products of industrial success. A pool of mercury. Vats of a tan and creamy substance frozen in thick swirl
s. Abandoned engine blocks too many for me to count, ten by ten by ten is a thousand and the piles I find far exceed any quick measurement I can make. Roads and rail lines and canals all leading not just to the factory, not just through these vast and interconnected buildings, but that once linked this place to the farthest reaches of the world.

  This place, this industrial quadrant of the massive North End now dead, fed products of every type to a world that has forgotten their source. That remembers this place only as a distant symbol of a fall from grace. The grace of wealth and progress and mass production, bringing jobs and growth and security to a once booming population.

  I finish my notes. Sitting still alongside the pool of mercury.

  I’ll type it all up as I’ve sketched it out. Add facts and figures and the history.

  People seem to read what I write. They take the paper from the racks. They sometimes even seem to nod toward me when I see them on the streets.

  I leave the warehouse, heading out between two massive buildings, a narrow space, dirt between the huge metal walls. The path lets out onto a canal. The water is still and in another city it’d be murky with algae and other unidentifiable substances. But not in the North End. Even in their decrepit state, these canals are part of a system that circulates in new water from the bay to the north, keeping the water here from stagnating but taking with it unknown quantities and types of chemicals and pollution, toxins seeping down from the limitless factories around me.

  Why do I stay?

  I stand on the edge of the wooden wall that borders the canal.

  The same answer comes to me, the one I always have.

  I don’t have anywhere else I want to be.

  It’s some time later before I leave.

  At dusk that night, staring out from my hotel room windows into the wind and the cloudy, gray sky, I still find myself thinking about that canal at the engine factory. One of so many canals I pass by and cross over each day. But now I’m wondering if I could find a boat that works. That would take me from the factory to the north, through the denser and denser series of canals and levees and bridges that were built up there, passing houseboats and old businesses and many neighborhoods until finally I reach the bay.