The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  He tells me his name. I nod and tell him mine.

  “I know who you are,” he says. “Most everyone here, you see, they know who you are.”

  This makes me wince, though he’s turned away and doesn’t seem to notice.

  He is pointing toward a table near the fountain. I can see my newspaper, three or four of them, stacked on the table’s lower shelf.

  “I enjoy what you write,” he says.

  I remember that, from years ago, before I came here. People enjoy what I write. They like me because of what I put in print.

  I ask, “How do you know this can actually be stopped?”

  He smiles some. Shakes his head slightly. “Good question.” He leans to the side. His motions are remarkably slow, methodical. “Because we don’t know for sure, do we?”

  I’m staring at my hands for a moment. Seeing if they move as slowly as his. After a minute, I think to ask, “What do you trade with the scavengers? To get them to bring you these plants.”

  His hand reaches out to his armrest, grabs it as if he’s going to stand. But he doesn’t. “Gardens,” he says. “I help them build gardens of their own.”

  I shake my head. In silent surprise. That there could be a garden like this. That this man can even help people create gardens of their own.

  “They are really quite beautiful,” he says.

  His arms, I realize, his cheek and neck, are all scarred. Deeply. From his time as a scavenger.

  I touch the tree trunk before I go. He watches me do it and it seems like a much too personal, even intimate act. But still I need to touch it. The bark is rough but slightly soft, water in the surface of the bark, the tree growing now, right in front of me.

  “Come back some time,” he says. “Any time.”

  And again I think I’ve spoken out loud, but in a moment I realize I haven’t. “I will,” I think I’ve said. But I’m already out the door.

  • • •

  I’m looking across acres of cars and trucks and buses and farm equipment, all spread out in the collected order of this junkyard in the industrial zone. The newer cars are parked farther away, I can see that with my binoculars, and the oldest vehicles are nearest me.

  A half a mile by a half a mile, the junkyard is lower than the rest of the industrial zone. And the ground is covered in water. Six inches of it. From a levee that is leaking or has collapsed completely. It happened recently, the cars, the thousands of vehicles, all now looking like they are simply floating on the surface of a sea.

  • • •

  The scavengers are within a few blocks of where people here still live. They have reached one of the once grand boulevards that runs from downtown to a group of some of the North End’s oldest neighborhoods. I can see this from my windows, the clean swath of buildings that have been scavenged already, leading toward the wide avenue, gray and still. Block after block of houses are in the scavengers’ current path.

  It’s not clear which direction the scavengers will go when they reach the avenue. The decisions about direction, about which area will be scavenged next, have always seemed so fluid and unclear. No one person is in charge of the scavengers. Instead, the value of what they find has always seemed to define the direction in which they move, as they quickly survey a house or building, sometimes passing over it just by looking at it, sometimes exploring that building for minutes or an hour before deciding it is not worth the time.

  The scavengers will not touch a property where someone lives. There is no mentality of the angry mob. They are guided instead by the barely spoken decisions of a few hundred different people, those choices drawing the brokers who buy the items, the vendors who sell them food and water, the scavenging concentrated as the group slowly edges forward.

  But now, if they move across the avenue, they will be scavenging a neighborhood dotted with current residents. It would represent a major change, a disruption of the landscape where people have chosen to continue to live. A neighborhood would then be altered even more, making it even more uninhabitable.

  “Scavenging an occupied neighborhood,” the gardener says to me, “would confirm a fate that, now, goes unspoken. That the neighborhood will never come back to life.”

  I write about this in the paper.

  Within a few days, people are leaving letters at the office. They have written to say that the scavengers should not come across the avenue. Six letters in total, each short, but all signed at the bottom. Most have street addresses in or near the neighborhood, but then others are from addresses far away from the scavenging. They are people who know that, someday, the scavengers could move toward them.

  I print the letters in the paper. More letters follow the next week. All say the scavengers should turn away.

  Within a few weeks I can see it, the swath of distorted cleanliness, it is turning, southward, away from the avenue and the neighborhood. Instead it moves along the highway wall.

  Some of the scavengers probably live there, I realize, in the neighborhood they’ve avoided.

  But also there is the fact that the scavengers are people who simply need and want to work. Who’ve found some purpose and sense of place.

  Their point is not to destroy, they’ve now said. It’s not to ruin. Or to even harm.

  • • •

  I’m in the office, the press running in the basement underneath me as I file my notes in pale yellow folders. My notes from that week’s stories. I pull the pages out of my notebook, staple them together, put them in the file folder with my typed copy of the story about a house along one of the canals. I put the negatives from the photos in the folder too. Everything related to that story is in one place. That way my notes are easier to find. And there’s the continuity. I have made something, even just a file, with facts and numbers and a history of a building, a house, a week in the life of the few people who now live in the North End.

  The notes, the photos, the newspapers themselves, printed and distributed and archived here at the office and archived carefully at the library, I think of myself as leaving these things for someone else to someday find.

  • • •

  There is so little noise here. Mostly, when I walk the neighborhoods or the industrial zone or among the buildings near my hotel, I am the only sound I hear.

  But in a neighborhood near downtown, I find a brick building taking up half the block. The building buzzes. It’s a mechanical sound, I realize, as I get closer to it. A steady, arrhythmic drone.

  WATER PUMP NO. I.

  A name is cut into the stone about the doors.

  Inside, there are pumps, massive black pipes leading out of and then into the concrete floor.

  “Hello.”

  An old woman, sixty, is standing up from a green desk near one of the pumps.

  I shake my head. “Sorry.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s okay.”

  I look around. “This brings water to the North End?”

  She nods. “It comes up from the massive aquifer beneath us. For going on eighty years.”

  I take my notebook from my pocket. “Can I write this down?”

  She points to her desk. A newspaper, an article of mine. “Yes.”

  No one pays her to still work here. Yet she’s worked here for three decades. Lives in her family house just a few blocks away.

  “I don’t need very much,” she says. “And really, the station, it runs itself.”

  “The water seems so clean,” I say.

  “I guess it is. I don’t know.” She smiles some. “I just make sure it’s pumped up from the ground.”

  She lives alone. Her husband passed. No children. A sister left long ago.

  She smiles again, more this time.

  I take her picture.

  “It’s a good life, I think,” she says. She looks around. “I read. I listen to music. At night, I sleep very well.”

  • • •

  There is an abandoned airport here that I sometimes visit. It’s far away, nearly eig
ht miles from my building, on the outer edge of the oldest parts of the industrial zone. I ride my bike there, a simple black bike that I found years ago and that I don’t often use.

  Most days, I would rather walk.

  Most days, I do not go very far.

  Most days, the speed of traveling even by bike is unnecessary and almost upsetting. A reminder, in the wind pressing at my face and whipping past my ears, of the pace of a life I used to live. Driving fast through neighborhoods, seeming to run from my car to my office door, from a grocery store to the parking lot to the driveway to the kitchen, crashing into the house, the rest of them crashing in there too, all of us in constant motion, bouncing off each other as we hugged and said hello and pushed one another lightly but with purpose toward the next event of another day, homework and dinner and baths and sports, the rapid dance of the well-meaning and disconnected, beyond conscious, beyond aware, simply moving forward still, keep on moving forward, toward your next task and your next activity.

  The wind, on the bike, is cold across my face and eyes.

  I’ve decided that this week I’ll write about the airport.

  I ride up the long ramp leading to what was once the departure area. Signs for Terminal A and Terminal B, directions for parking, commands to stop or not to stop, the brand names of airlines now faded and peeling from metal signs stretched above the road.

  There are doors missing near the center of Terminal B and I ride through them into the building. It’s a vast and empty place. Blue counters where passengers once checked in, black conveyor belts where luggage once disappeared into the bowels of this facility, rope lines still cordoning off an impending rush of passengers, ready to corral them into simple mazes.

  Enter Here.

  This airport was closed a decade before the North End was itself abandoned. A bigger, brighter airport was built in the South End, justified through so many promises of new uses for the old airport.

  Nothing happened.

  The airport has been partially stripped of items. Most of this was done when the airport was first closed. The TV monitors were removed. The stores and restaurants were emptied of goods and cash registers and kitchen equipment. Since then, not much else has changed. There are chairs and tables in the empty food court. Rows of seats at each gate.

  I ride toward the security checkpoint, passing through a dusty metal detector. The floors of the airport seem to have been formed from the densest bedrock, as if the airport had been built on stone that has always been here, that was simply buffed and polished into a floor.

  The children once ran along concourses like this. Late for a flight or excited to have arrived. Six of us, our own tour group we joked, with six suitcases and six backpacks and a multitude of soft and special items, a favorite blanket or a favorite bear, brought along on this trip for comfort, a necessity, a mobile connection between some new destination and our home.

  I glide now, coasting on the bike.

  We always loved to travel.

  A security guard walks along the end of the concourse, in blue and black uniform, a hat, black shoes, a gun and flashlight on his belt.

  I have seen him here before. Have spoken to him one time, for an article in the paper. “I have worked at this airport for many decades. I worked here when this place was new. Worked here when the city built the new airport to the south. Worked here when this airport was shut down but still a crew of twenty watched over and maintained the place. Worked here when, one day, no one else showed up. When the power no longer came on. When the street on which I live saw its last neighbor pack up and leave in his small car. I have always worked here in this airport. I have decided that I always will.”

  He raises a hand in my direction now, but makes no motion to come toward me. He turns to a door along the concourse, pushes it, disappears out of my view.

  EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  I ride to the very end of the concourse, where the walls push out into a circle and the ceiling rises even higher, vaulting upward, like a church or concert hall. I circle the room, slowly, staring up at the tall and unnecessary space. A grand reflection of our want to travel, an epic celebration of routine departure and arrival.

  I circle again. Circle once more.

  After a few minutes, I stop my bike along the wall, push open a door, carry my bike down a flight of stairs to ground level. On the tarmac outside, I start riding again. The smoothest concrete.

  The airport was in near perfect condition when it was closed. There were complaints of an outdated baggage system, of a need for updates to the lighting. But these were really just excuses, thin justifications for the fundamental desire to have a new airport, one closer to the South End. To save twenty minutes in a car. To prevent people from having to drive through the rapid decay in the north.

  This happened many times here. The central train station was demolished then replaced with a massive parking lot. Retail was abandoned downtown for a vast mall on the edge of the South End, a mall that was left vacant just a few decades later as a newer mall was built even farther to the south. The trolleys were torn up with funding from automakers who wanted more room for their ever larger cars. The roads themselves built wider, separating neighborhoods as crosswalks were removed to help the traffic move even faster, the roads getting so wide that the cost to maintain and repair them grew beyond anyone’s expectation or ability. Parks removed to make way for strip malls and highway on-ramps, the biggest of the parks cut through with the highway and the overpass near the community center, the south side of the park turned into strip centers, the north littered with thin, cheap houses of one size. Neighborhoods dominated by brick buildings and corner stores and baseball in the street were wiped away and replaced by vast and anonymous apartments. Grand homes torn down to make way for low duplexes with few windows and no porches. Schools left half empty as more and more people moved away, willing to spend tax money only on the new schools that they built, not the once-great schools they left behind. The wealth of a whole city drawn south, where billions could be spent on the new as the old was left to survive on a fraction of those dollars. And the city government that allowed all this to happen, that made decisions that drove more and more people away, some members of that government ended up in jail for their corruption. But most people in the government simply moved south with the masses, their abuse and their ineptitude never acknowledged or documented.

  As I ride, I am in my mind writing this all up for the paper.

  It’s not a story I’ve written before. Even though all of us here know it to be true.

  I near the airport’s tall control tower, fifteen stories high, a concrete cylinder topped by a white circular structure, like a 1950s UFO with antennae and dishes atop it. I climb the stairs to the top room in the control tower, looking out over the whole airport. The spider web extensions of the terminal and its concourses. The accordion draped tunnels used to empty passengers from the planes. The massive hangars where aircraft were once maintained and repaired.

  Like all of the North End, the airport was built on land claimed many decades ago from the bay, the land made available by a massive extension of the levees and canals. I find binoculars in a cabinet. I look out from the tower to the north and can see the far edge of Runway 1.

  There is water, spread out, covering half of Runway 1. And covering all of Runway 2.

  And beyond the runways, there is only water.

  This is new. This is recent. Another few square miles have been reclaimed. The failure of the levees spreads. The destruction, it moves south.

  But really, I’m still only thinking about how we always loved to travel.

  CHAPTER 6

  The commission meets. Empty talk of fixing things. Fixing this. Making the North End right.

  Empty talk of leveling things. Destroying things. Flattening this city to the ground.

  Fifteen people sit in the audience, silent, listening to the words.

  “Why are we even here?” one of the commissioners asks
. He is getting angry, animated. It is cartoonish for him to do that here, in a place where people live in a self-imposed quiet and calm. He shakes his head repeatedly. He throws his hands up in the air. I wonder if he will stand, throw a fit, angrily march off the low stage.

  I try to describe his actions in my notebook.

  “Why don’t we shut down the places where these people still live?” this commissioner asks. “Cut the power and water, as we did in the bad neighborhoods in the South End?”

  I find that I am angry. At first I don’t even know what the feeling is. A weight on my chest and a desire to stand. A need to move. To yell. To say something to these commissioners.

  “That,” he continues, “that, we know now, was the smartest thing we did in the south. Now let’s do it here.”

  And then I picture the woman and her boy. I remember her story. And I know that what I feel is anger.

  The commissioner wags a thick finger at the crowd. He shakes his bald head from side to side.

  The people in the crowd all stare.

  I find I want to yell at him. But I only take my notes. Different notes than usual. Where I write down every single word. Wanting suddenly to be sure I put each of his words into the newspaper. So that everyone can read each word he says.

  “Can I speak for a moment?” one of the commissioners says to the animated man. She is leaning back in her chair, staring at him. Again she’s in a suit, again with her hair pulled tight to her scalp, once again the nondescript vision of a business executive. It’s unclear to me how old she is. She could be fifty. She could be thirty.

  The first commissioner throws his hands up, lurches back in his chair. “Fine. We’ve obviously got all night.”

  “We are here,” she says, and I see her tap a finger on the table, “because the court has ruled that this is our place to oversee. That, quite clearly, is the reason you are here, albeit against your will. And against your wishes.” She pauses, staring at him. “And because you are forced to do this, because you haven’t chosen it, you speak at every meeting about destruction. Tearing down what’s left here. Driving off the few residents who remain. You speak of this not for any reason other than this: you want your responsibility to go away.”