The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  It’s been hours since the storm hit the North End, and the storm hit here at speed, on us and gone in twenty minutes or less.

  But it seems to have stopped moving when it reached the South End. As if settling into place.

  I look away from the storm. I’m still standing atop this staircase.

  Along the far side of this flattened building, I see a trench has been cut, twenty feet wide and a hundred feet long, tapering down into the earth. The hard-packed ground of the industrial zone, the lifeless gray surface I have walked along so many days over these past years, it’s been cut open, deeply, and the earth below is red and brown and orange.

  The woman and her boy lie down inside the trench.

  They are a quarter mile from where they were lifted off the ground.

  I climb down the stairs quickly, then make my way across the debris. The trench is deeper than I’d thought, ten feet or more, and the dirt down here is soft and damp. Not slick, though, or muddy. The dirt here is light and somehow fluffy, so much so that I am conscious of how it feels as I slide down the side of the trench.

  The woman is on her back. Her eyes are closed.

  The boy is next to her. The side of his small body is pressed against her. His eyes are open. He stares at me, unblinking and not moving. His face is bleeding from his nose. His mouth and forehead are covered in dirt.

  I can’t move.

  “Please,” he says quietly. “Help.”

  • • •

  More than five thousand people are killed by the storm. All in the South End.

  The minister tells me this. Little news about the South End is usually discussed here in the north. The people who do watch TV, they don’t talk about what they see.

  But this is something different.

  I’m here at the church with the woman and her boy. The boy, though bloodied across the face, is fine. The woman has a broken arm. A concussion. Many bruises and cuts. But she is conscious now.

  “She should probably go to a hospital in the South End,” the minister says.

  We’re outside the small room where the mother and her boy are lying on two small beds. Priests’ quarters, I assume. Very spare but functional, with two beds and two dressers and two wooden chairs near a stained-glass window.

  It takes me a moment to form an answer for the minister. I say to him, “I don’t think she’d want to.”

  “I figured that,” he says. “But I thought I should say it anyway.”

  “And probably she’d just be stuck in a hallway in some hospital,” I say. “Given what you said happened. They’ve got a lot worse to deal with down there.”

  I replay what I’ve said to him and the words seem correct, seems clearly to be an accurate and practical thing to say. But it seems like someone else must have said this. Or that it’s something I’ve been told to say.

  Like everyone here, when the minister is not moving, he is so very still.

  It’s nighttime, half a day since the storm hit. The woman was able to walk from the industrial zone, leaning on my arm, limping some, and it was slow going, a long walk, where she did not once speak.

  The boy walked ahead of us, only sometimes looking back. I told him we needed to get to the church downtown. He nodded and didn’t speak again.

  “She’s from the paper,” the minister says to me now. We’re standing in the hallway. “Right? The one the police are looking for?”

  It’s a moment before I say, “Yes.”

  He crosses his arms high across his chest. “She knows they’re looking for her?” he asks quietly.

  “Yes,” I say again.

  He nods. “Okay,” he says. Nods again. In a minute, he says, “The article didn’t mention a boy.”

  “No,” I say. “The police never mentioned her boy.”

  “None of that’s my issue,” the minister says. He leans to his left, looks into the room. He turns back to me. “I think they’re sleeping now. You can stay here too if you want.”

  It takes me a long moment to think about what he’s said.

  He says, “There’s another room. A few of them. Just pick one.”

  I say quietly, “Oh.” I rub my hands on my jacket. “No. No, thank you.” I am looking at my hands, filthy and covered in blood in some places. “Am I bleeding?” I ask the minister.

  He tilts his head back slightly, looking my face up and down. “Not anymore,” he says.

  I nod.

  “Five thousand people,” the minister says.

  “I’ll come back in the morning,” I say. “You know. Check on them.”

  “Think of it,” the minister says. “Think of all those people.”

  But I’m already down the hall.

  • • •

  I document the destruction from the storm in an article for the paper. I try to be as thorough as I can, identifying not just the areas in the North End that were hit, but the buildings and structures that were destroyed. I find addresses, I find the names of companies that once occupied the buildings. I include more photos than I usually do. Five of them across two pages. The flattened buildings. The still standing staircase in the wreckage of that warehouse. The shiny car sitting on top of the corner of that brick building. A view of the storm as it dominated the horizon to the south.

  The article and pictures take up most of the eight pages of that week’s paper.

  After the paper has gone to press, I realize I didn’t mention that the storm moved on to kill some five thousand people in the South End. To do major damage there as well.

  But I then remember that they have their own newspapers down there and it seems to me that’s for them to report.

  The woman and her boy had already left the church when I went to check on them the morning after the storm. The minister said that she thanked him and offered him money. He declined. “And that boy,” the minister said to me. “He’s an odd one. I don’t think he ever said a word. But he never once stopped watching me.”

  • • •

  Rainwater still drips through the walls and ceilings of the buildings, days since the storm passed through here.

  Inside, some buildings bulge inward, the plaster walls swelling as if bruised, wide swaths of ceiling tiles bending downward, dripping at the corners, and ceilings have collapsed in an explosion of tile and wooden beams and soft plaster and rotted wire.

  As if a bomb was dropped inside here. But still this is only rain.

  From the outside, the walls at the base of tall apartment buildings and massive churches bow outward, soaked through with the weight of so many years of this rain, the buildings seem to be sinking in upon themselves, the first floors absorbing the water and weight and the slowly descending flow of matter from the floors above still soaked with all that rain, the buildings left to melt, steadily, down upon themselves, until someday each structure will finally begin to burst.

  • • •

  I stand in the bell tower of an old church along the avenue leading through the oldest neighborhoods in the North End. There’s a frozen beauty to these ancient neighborhoods. The brick homes lit red even in this pale and colorless sunrise. The outlines of once ornate and elaborate gardens just discernible in the patterns of the dry, dead branches and the tall black tree trunks, trees that, even from this tower, shine slightly in their slick and atrophied state.

  I hold my hands over my ears. The air-raid sirens spin once more to their peaking and horrific volume.

  One of them was long ago installed atop this old, stone tower.

  There was a beauty here.

  I close my eyes. My chest shakes with the noise and there’s a feeling that I can’t breathe and I think that if I move, if I run away, the siren scream will only grow.

  It was beautiful.

  • • •

  I am making my way through houses not far from my hotel when I knock an old phone off the receiver.

  They’d never heard that sound. Their world, the kids’, was one of cell phones and touch screens, brigh
t and shiny objects not attached to plaster walls. The dial tone was a mysterious sound emanating from the old red phone mounted to the kitchen wall when we moved into our house in the North End.

  But they loved that house. The wide hallways and the heavy staircase and the deeply cracked wooden floors and the yard itself was an adventure, with so many places to hide and so many places to run and so many trees on which to build a swing.

  They would, each of them, periodically pick up that wall phone. To hear the dial tone. They would listen to it, together, all four of them leaning close, and the simple sound of it made them giggle and shake their heads and laugh.

  I blink.

  I reach out to the phone receiver that I’ve knocked from its metal cradle.

  But I can’t touch it.

  I can only walk away.

  Can only set the fire.

  Still hearing that distant dial tone, in my mind, as I watch the house now burn.

  • • •

  I hear the woman and the boy.

  I’ve woken up on the couch in the library. Staring into the high atrium. Light from the tall windows spreads down across the room. It feels like sunlight here, for a moment, as I’m still waking up. But there’s no warmth to the light, gray and pale, and I can see my breath as I exhale.

  It’s really the boy I hear, the speed of his steps. The stops and starts. The soundtrack to his movement.

  Small explosions, a jet pack or a rocket ship, the artificial pop of a laser beam or gun.

  I sit up. Fold the blankets. Put them in their cabinet.

  The boy comes around a corner, backpack on, hurling himself onto the ground, then somersaulting into a crouched, hidden position behind a massive set of shelves.

  He sees me now and stands straight up. Staring and quiet.

  I say in a moment, “How are you?”

  He has his mother’s black eyes and the ability not to seem to ever blink.

  In a moment, the woman comes around the corner, quickly, looking for the boy.

  She sees me and the fear leaves her face. “Sorry,” she says.

  “It’s the absence of sound,” I say. “When you hear the child, then the sound disappears.”

  She mouths a word, Yes, I think, but I can’t be sure.

  Her hair is not pulled back, is instead pushed behind her ears and she isn’t wearing her heavy jacket. There’s a person in there, I think, an observation without wonder or surprise or any form of curiosity.

  “I should thank you,” she says. “For saving me. For saving both of us in that storm.”

  I shake my head lightly. I’m not sure what I should say. In a moment, I say, “I thought that dock would protect us. I’m sorry that it didn’t.”

  She shakes her head. “There was nowhere better to go.”

  I find myself nodding. “I suppose,” I say.

  “The minister too,” she says. “Your friend, he was very nice to us.”

  I say, “I’m not sure that he’s my friend.”

  She glances at me. “Okay.”

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

  The air in the atrium is very still. Shadows float across the tables, variations in the gray sky above us moving, layers of clouds pushed, slowly, to the south.

  She says, “I was never a person who feared the worst.” She looks toward the ground. “But that changed.”

  “And yet you’ve come here,” I say.

  “Everyone here says there is no crime. They say it’s very safe.”

  She looks up toward the high ceiling. A moment of wonder, I think, unexpected, seeing the high atrium and the tall windows and the signs of the zodiac formed by hand-painted stars and she sees the way the light—even as cold and gray as the sky is—she sees the wonder in the way the light spills down across the walls, and shelves, and us.

  I say, “But it can’t feel very safe to you.”

  It’s a moment before she looks back at me. “No,” she says. “No, it doesn’t.”

  The boy, he is still standing, looking at me.

  “The police came again,” I say to her. “Asking questions about the body.”

  She nods. She pushes hair from her face. “I wanted to find your article,” she says, pointing toward the stacks of newspapers on the shelf. “About the body.”

  I tell her which stack the paper is on.

  She stands still, though, only looking toward the papers. It’s a full minute. Silence. Her not moving, and when she does finally go to the stacks of papers, bending down to the paper that shows the picture of the man, she doesn’t stand. She stays crouched down. Her back to me and to the boy.

  The boy looks at the paper she holds. Then looks back at me. I lean to the side, putting my hand against a shelf, and the boy’s hand seems to lift then and he lowers his shoulder to let his bag slip down, just an inch or two, his other arm sliding up the side of the backpack to the zipper, and although he stops moving when I stop moving, there’s still a fixation, on me, very deep inside his flat black eyes.

  It’s more than a fixation.

  I say out loud, “I asked the police if they’d heard anything about that missing woman.” I pause. “They said no.”

  “And they won’t ever,” the woman says, still crouching and turned away from me.

  I watch the boy. The backpack now dangles from just one shoulder. The thing in his eyes grows sharper and more focused.

  “Okay,” I say. “That’s okay with me.”

  “This was supposed to be a place where we could hide,” the woman says. “Right? A place where we’d be safe?”

  I say, “The police told me that the missing woman, she was reported to them by a boyfriend.”

  The boy stares at me.

  I say, “But apparently that person lied.”

  The woman is standing now, staring up at the high atrium again.

  “He wasn’t a friend,” I hear the woman say.

  The thing in the boy’s eyes, I’d thought maybe it was fear. I move my hand again. Testing. I lift my hand from the shelf, put it in my pocket, staring at the boy, staring at his eyes.

  The woman is looking down. At the picture. Shaking her head. Seeming to whisper something.

  The thing in the boy’s eyes isn’t fear.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  The thing in his eyes is violence.

  “For me,” I say. “It’s all okay.”

  I’m certain that if I move again the boy will try to hurt me.

  “Yes,” I hear the woman say. “It has to be.”

  I’m certain that if he tries to hurt me, he will definitely succeed.

  “This can be a safe place for you,” I say to her, though I’m still looking right at the boy.

  “Yes,” I hear her say now. “Yes it can. It can be very safe.”

  I don’t move.

  And in a moment, the boy turns away, to his mother, lifting the backpack onto both his shoulders. He walks to his mother and touches her arm. She turns to him. Takes his hand.

  She blinks. Rubs her hand across her face. I think she says something to me, maybe she says thank you, but I can’t really tell. I’m lost to staying still. Lost to my motionlessness.

  The woman saw nothing the boy just did.

  Even when they’ve gone, I stand there, very still.

  I know that boy would have hurt me. Maybe killed me.

  I know he’d have beaten me in the head with something in his backpack.

  And I know the woman would not have had any way to stop him.

  In a minute, I move my hand from my pocket. I lean back against a table behind me.

  And as I look up at the daylight, staring at the cold, pale color of another endlessly dying day, I know one more thing.

  The one thing is this.

  I know I would not have wanted the boy to hurt me.

  Which was not clear to me before this moment. Before I stood here in this light staring at a child who would have hurt me without hesitation.

>   The light from the windows is unbroken and relentless and I try to remember how many years it’s been since I’ve seen the sun.

  But what I know is something else. What I know is that I have realized that, truly, I do not want to die.

  • • •

  I find myself touching everything in my cold hotel room. Each object and every item. The couch and chairs and tables. The lamps and the bulbs within them. The blankets folded and stacked squarely on the shelves. My clothes stacked on the other shelves, pants and socks and shirts and shoes.

  I’ve done this all before.

  It starts when I am looking for something, for a pencil this time but it could have been anything. Not finding the pencil leads me to want to see what else I might have lost.

  I touch the frying pan and the pot next to it and the lids for each and the fork and knife and spoon and plate.

  I lift some items, feeling their weight and texture. Other items I only barely brush my fingers against, checking them off, noting their presence and existence.

  There aren’t many objects that I now own.

  None of them are ever missing.

  At some point I’ll realize what I’m doing, tell myself that I should stop. But then I remember that it’s not as if I have something else to do.

  I touch each cushion on the couch. The pillows stacked on top of blankets. The album of photographs I never open. The small box of things I retrieved from the house in which we lived, one box, that’s all I wanted.

  I tell myself it’s strange to touch these things this way, here alone in this hotel high above an empty city.

  But then I remember that I’ve always done this. I’ve been this way since before they died.

  • • •

  The bright, cold light still shines on the outer wall of the otherwise darkened church. A small church, two hundred years old, and the light shines down on the small graveyard where I stand. Air-raid sirens sound, cycling up and down from their various points throughout the North End, at midnight this time, the sound echoing through the air for longer than ever before, twenty minutes now, and I wonder if maybe this time the sirens won’t ever stop.

  There are headstones here and small tombs raised above the ground.

  The church is on a hill, one of the few high areas in the north or south, once an area of elevation above the bay, an overlook before the water was contained and these many square miles of land were created for the city.