The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  The sound is very loud. Rising then falling then rising to nearly a scream.

  I picture people in the South End, hearing these sirens spinning up to their horrific pitch. The warning cries from a deadened place, an empty place, an area of waste and abandonment and danger.

  The sirens seem always to get louder. Each fall in the sound followed by a rising wail even louder than the one I remember from a moment ago.

  And so I can only stand still at my open window. Hands over both my ears. Pressing hard now, harder, closing my eyes, whispering to myself, It’s almost over. Soon. It is almost over.

  • • •

  A scavenger hangs from the rafters of a house, the sides of the home already stripped away, another scavenger scaling the boom of a crane as, below him, scavengers move from the roof of one house to the roof of another, crossing a series of narrow boards they’ve stretched from chimney to chimney, the boards bouncing heavily as the scavengers make their way through the air.

  Tightrope walkers in the sky.

  Meanwhile, I take pictures. I make notes.

  Loud music plays from a flatbed truck nearby, tall speakers set up on the back of the open, wooden bed of a big truck. Nearby stand huge barrels of water and pallets stacked with meat and cheese and bread. Blocks of each. The scavengers carefully cut off slices for themselves.

  The music grinds, loudly, no words at all.

  It’s been so long since I’ve heard music.

  The scavengers are stripping down homes in the last neighborhood built in the North End. Thin, cheap homes built on the vast remnants of a park that was flattened after being cut in half by the highway trench.

  A precursor, this neighborhood, to the vast and faceless subdivisions that would sprawl across the South End.

  When the North End started to collapse, these, the new homes, were the first to be abandoned.

  As they work, scavengers nod in my direction. But none speak to me. And I don’t speak to them.

  Men and women and brown and white, they are one age it seems. I can’t tell. As marked up as they are by the work they do, stained and scratched and cut. Dirty, maybe filthy, but now it’s a choice they’ve clearly made, the outer sign to the rest of us, bleeding manifestations of the purpose they have found.

  • • •

  In the morning, I stand at my windows with my binoculars, trying to find the canal I saw in the industrial zone a week ago. I can see the engine plant that I’d been inside. But the buildings hide the canal.

  I will need to do research at the library. Need to check the maps. Read the histories of the development of the port to the north and the waterways connecting the port to the industrial zone and all the neighborhoods in between.

  I don’t know why, but I want to use the canal to find my way from the industrial zone to the bay.

  Maybe it’s one of those things you only understand when it’s done.

  I picture myself as a child, when I went to the park along that bay, a small amusement park and a very small zoo and a place for picnics and a beach where people swam. All those places are now gone. Replaced some twenty years ago by a port that was meant to ship goods around the world. But in truth those goods were hardly wanted by the time the port was finally finished. The tall cranes and shiny rail lines were barely ever used.

  Before then, I rode a roller coaster there. I learned to dive. I ate cotton candy and walked along the cages where elephants and giraffes wandered among hay and rocks and the halfhearted efforts at making a lifelike habitat for them. I didn’t think that then, of course.

  I just thought the animals always seemed so tired.

  I only took my own kids to the zoo once. The new zoo, built after they were born. The one down in the South End, with realistic landscapes and much more space in which the animals could roam. They went, the kids did, with their school and with their friends and they went with their mother. But I only took them to the zoo one time. I found it much too hard to look at all the captive animals. Trapped in those friendly, unreal habitats. Staring blankly into space. Looking no less tired and worn and fearful than the broken beasts I’d seen so many years ago, when I was a kid myself.

  • • •

  I hear a car drive past me, but I’m staring forward, walking toward the corner store.

  I hear the car drive past me again. I turn and a very old, very large car painted yellow and green has stopped. A woman, in the passenger seat, is pointing forward, then backward.

  I stare.

  She seems to argue with the driver, a man, then in a moment she just slightly opens her window.

  “How?” I hear her say, but her other words are lost.

  I shake my head. I don’t understand.

  She lowers the window another inch. “How, sir, how do we get out of here?”

  They have surely been lost for hours. Here in the center of the North End. But they are only two turns and one mile from the overpass they mistakenly crossed. It’s the middle of the day. The signs pointing to the South End are all still displayed along these roads. But in the confusion born of their fear of this place, these people couldn’t see the signs. Or didn’t believe that the signs could ever be right.

  I tell this woman where to go, what street will take them home.

  The man guns the engine. The woman stares ahead, pointing frantically forward with both her hands.

  The people of the South End fear us. I’m not entirely sure why. But they do.

  Even the commissioners, their disdain for us, it too comes from fear.

  Fear of the unknown. Fear of our choices. Fear of how we live.

  • • •

  I see the woman and her boy at the playground, where they sit on the ground near one of the walls.

  They are eating. Her backpack is spread out in front of them and I can see a few opened cans of food, a bottle of water that they share. A small towel she uses as a napkin.

  She turns herself toward me when she sees me. I raise my hand slightly, begin to turn away.

  “You don’t have to go,” she says.

  In a moment, I sit down near them, on the end of the slide. The boy still eats, sitting now so that he faces me. The woman is putting away her food.

  I have always found it hard to watch people as they eat. I don’t know why. It seems so very personal, a private and visceral necessity, to be taken care of quickly and alone.

  I look around the playground. Dead shrubs, yellow grass. Two small trees so thin and dry they don’t even move in the wind.

  The woman sits with her knees up. Leans her chin on her hands. Her hair falls forward but she doesn’t move it from her face.

  “Go play,” the woman says quietly to her boy. He doesn’t move. She leans back, hair falling from her face and she stares at him, says to him this time, “Go play right now.”

  And he does.

  Still watching him, she says, “I should go find that newspaper.”

  I’m not sure what she means. In a moment, I say, “Which one?”

  “The one with the picture,” she says. “The picture of the dead man.”

  I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I feel the fog of tiredness come over me. The weight of conversation, of navigating her words and mine, it takes all the energy I have.

  I close my eyes. When I open them, she’s watching me.

  “It’s so lifeless here,” she says, turning away. “I’m still not used to it.”

  My hands move slowly toward my face. I rub my eyes, think I should shave soon. I say to her, “I’m not sure I’m used to it here yet either.”

  She sits cross-legged now. “Maybe,” she says, staring down at a dry leaf in her hands, pulling lightly on its edges, small tears along the veins of its delicate, small structure. “Maybe I know that man.”

  Again I shake my head. “He’s dead now,” I say. “That’s all.”

  She turns to watch her boy on the swing, still absently pulling the leaf apart. Her fingers move slowly, ca
refully, across the leaf. She glances at me. Then nods.

  I realize I find it easier to talk when I’m looking at the boy swing, steadily, forward then back. There’s a clarity that comes to me. I see my words quite simply. I talk without the fog or exhaustion weighing on me.

  Moments pass. She stares toward her boy. She shakes her head. “Maybe,” she says. “Yes.”

  Then she stands, walks to her boy. She nods back toward me, a slight wave, as she leaves.

  • • •

  As I do every week, I take the paste-up boards down to the basement and put them in a worn old wooden tray.

  The pressman nods.

  The press is made up of five tall printing units, each twelve feet high, with a large roll of paper underneath every one of them. The paper is strung from unit to unit, through rollers and metal drums, precise steel cylinders lined with metal plates, each one holding an impression of the words I wrote and the photos I took. The old pressman only uses two of the units in a given week. This creates eight pages, wide broadsheet pages folded neatly as they come off the end of the press. Each week, the pressman alternates the units he uses, so that no one unit wears out faster than the others. As the units start up, the pressman moves quickly, to the folding apparatus at the end of the line, to the finished papers steadily stacking on a small conveyor belt at the end of the press. The pressman twists small dials to adjust the ink, to lay more black on the page where there are photos, to cut the ink back where there is just text. He moves quickly, staring sometimes through the bottoms of his bifocal glasses, hopping up onto the side of a unit, reaching far into the rolling wheels, where his fingers, his hand, could easily be crushed.

  He bounces lightly from one unit to another.

  It’s a skill, not a job. A craft, not a repetition.

  When I first came back to the North End, I sometimes noticed these newspapers in the racks. It was months before I realized that the racks would sometimes be empty, then full again. I’d assumed the racks were unused and abandoned. Filled one last time before the city and the newspaper were abandoned. But soon I picked up a copy of the paper. And it was only a few days old.

  The paper listed the location of the office.

  A few weeks later, I went to the address. The office manager was there, along with a very old man who was the paper’s only reporter and editor. The editor and the office manager both stared blankly up at me. In a moment, I said to them, “I can write.” They both continued to stare. “I mean, I can write for a newspaper.”

  The office manager turned back to her big typewriter.

  I thought this was her way of telling me to go away.

  But the editor said to me, “Okay. Come back next week with a story.”

  I did, every week. The editor and I, we didn’t talk much. I just handed him a story, typed on a typewriter I’d found and hauled to the same hotel room where I still live. After a few months, I went to the office and he’d left a letter on his desk. It was addressed to me. “I am going away now,” he wrote. “I hope you’ll keep the paper going.” Then he listed, on the next page, what needed to be done every week to produce the paper.

  There was also a tan envelope containing a small amount of money, the same amount the office manager still brings to me.

  A few months later, I asked the office manager where the editor had gone.

  She stared at me a moment. With a look of something like surprise. She said, “He went off to die.”

  It takes just twenty minutes to run the seven hundred newspapers we put out every week. I sit on the basement steps. Watching the pressman work. He stacks the papers into bundles of twenty-five and fifty as they come off the end of the line. Then he uses a heavy steel cart to roll them toward the far end of the basement, where there’s a large wooden elevator that lifts them up to ground level. The pressman will load the papers in his old truck then, and leave to stock the racks still left out around the North End.

  He cuts the power to the press. He lifts the lever to open the doors to the elevator. Glances back at me.

  I raise my hand. Thanks.

  Every week. The paper has been published many thousands of times. We keep this going. We don’t know what would happen if ever we had to stop.

  • • •

  The rain turns heavy before I realize what is happening. The noise of it, of the rain turned steady and solid and so thick I can barely see, it covers the sound of the thunder and the wind and the roar of small tornadoes forming just behind us.

  We are not near a place that can possibly be safe.

  We’re on the edge of the industrial zone, along the bank of a canal, the woman and the boy and me, and the storm has come upon us impossibly fast.

  I don’t know why the woman and the boy were out this way. I hadn’t gotten a chance to ask. We had only said hello. Only barely nodded to each other when the boy pointed to the sky behind me.

  We turn, the woman and me, see the black clouds pushing toward us, a thick and monstrous mass so tall it seems to reach too far into the air, blinking with lightning and swirling down to the ground not far from us.

  The three of us are running. It’s not clear where. But we run.

  There are tall warehouses everywhere ahead of us, wooden and flimsy and with the wind already reaching us, the walls of the warehouses have begun to shake and bend.

  I lead us right, running fast with the woman and boy next to me, yelling, “I know, I know where to go.”

  At the end of the warehouse, there is another canal and leading out to the canal is an old, heavy dock.

  “Underneath,” I yell, although the wind is so hard now that I can barely hear myself. “Get underneath,” I yell.

  The woman and boy scramble down on their knees and then their stomachs and they crawl underneath the dock. I follow them, sliding along the dirt and scraping my leg against one of the heavy support beams.

  We sit now, in the dirt, the two of them huddled together across from me. The boards above us are thick and the crossbeams a foot or more wide, the whole structure bolted to thick wooden pilings that have been driven into the ground.

  The sound of the storm is everything now, screaming so loud that it’s all I can hear.

  Sticks and dirt blow under the side of the dock and large objects begin to slam into the top of the dock, unidentified objects that hit so hard that the structure shakes even harder and the sound is even louder.

  The boy has crawled into his mother’s lap and she leans over him, holding him, face pressed against his neck, covering as much of him as she can.

  There is movement in the noise now, a horrifying motion as even under the dock we can feel the wind shift and the air change and now there is a tornado, right on us, and it is louder now, painful, and the dock shakes harder than could ever seem possible.

  I see the boy is screaming. I see the mother screaming. But all I hear is the noise of that wind swirling so fast on top of us and beginning to lift the water from the canal, the surface of the water bending upward as if the domed head of a monster were emerging just ten feet away and still that water lifts, bending upward until it breaks, spraying up into the air lit bright by constant lightning.

  The boards above us disappear now, pulled away as if they had never been attached, and I watch the woman and her boy flying upward, together, the boy still digging into his mother’s lap and the mother still covering him with all her body and both of them with mouths wide and open, screaming, silently, into the roar.

  • • •

  I walk the industrial zone, looking for the woman and her boy. I’ve been searching for a few hours.

  The damage from the storm is immense. Buildings cut in half. Tall smokestacks knocked to the ground. A massive knife, more than one it seems, cut through this place, opening fissures through the densely gray and abandoned landscape. Dark brick walls are turned bright red where sections cracked and fell into large piles. Wooden walls knocked down to reveal brightly blue containers. A yellow car, old but polished
clean and shiny, rests atop the edge of a very tall, brown building.

  The car is left there, gently it seems, so that anyone passing by can see it.

  It rains lightly, intermittent drops on my hands and face. The sky is bright now, white, the clouds one uninterrupted sheet so high up in the sky.

  I really don’t know where or how to look for the woman and her boy. I just keep walking through the refuse that’s been created by the storm.

  I turn a corner and see another warehouse that’s been flattened. A massive building, wooden, only its distant ends to my left and right still stand, more than three or four blocks away. The rest is flat, steel beams crushed and twisted, wooden siding fragmented into shards. I feel small. All of the building is pressed down upon itself, except for a staircase still standing in the middle of the destruction.

  It takes me a few minutes to climb over the debris and reach the stairs. They’re built of steel beams and concrete steps and somehow they’ve survived, completely stable and intact. I climb slowly up the steps, four stories high. They don’t shake or sway or move at all.

  I can see far from here, able now to see the whole of the flattened path of destruction through the industrial zone. It’s a path that ends, remarkably, at the edge of the oldest neighborhoods. The path is like a runway, the storm lifting up at the last moment, avoiding the old neighborhoods where many of the few people in the North End still live.

  And now I can also see the storm, directly south of here, a wide black blot on the near horizon, purple in places, almost blue, but in its center it is black and flashing white and if I stare I can see it moving, can see how the very surface of it swirls and speeds and shakes with the rain falling from it and the wind blowing through it and with the debris it still lifts from the ground.

  The tornadoes, surely, are still deep inside those clouds.

  Here, though, it’s silent. The rain is light enough that it makes no noise.

  And so I can hear, from the South End, very far away, the faint sounds of the air-raid sirens, an echoing, distant wailing that rises and falls and rises, again, once more.

  I touch my ear with my hand.