The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  I walk closer to her.

  “They’ll come back,” she is saying.

  I shake my head. “No, they won’t.”

  “They’ll come back,” she says.

  “No,” I say again and I put my hand on her door frame and she stares at it. She slowly leans away from me. And there it is, me causing her to be afraid. But I’m able to say to her, “People fear this place. That’s why the commissioners barely step inside. That’s why kids come here looking for trouble. Because everyone believes this place,” I say, “they believe it will somehow kill you.”

  I find myself needing to breathe. My left hand is shaking but I realize this and think about it and, in a moment, I make it stop.

  “What I’ve done,” I say to her, “is made them fear the North End even more. So that they’ll stay away.”

  I start to talk again, but I can see that she doesn’t hear me. Doesn’t hear a word. She knows nothing but her fear. She knows nothing but the memory of a scene she can’t imagine. Nothing but to stare at my hand still pressed against her door.

  • • •

  I remember the woman and her boy in the playground below my building. Air against my face as I look out my hotel window.

  I think that I should ask the gardener what could be planted to make the playground grow.

  It would be nice to have some things that grow.

  “I would like to plant some things,” I say to him a few days later.

  The gardener is sitting in his chair in his courtyard. He has a blanket across his lap, draped down across his legs and feet. His motions are so slow and in the pale light his brown skin looks like clay and I remember that when I first met him I thought he was older than me. But he’s not.

  He smiles some. “What sort of things?”

  I’m sitting too and I also have a blanket across my lap.

  “There’s a playground,” I say. “Near my building. Whatever would work there.”

  He nods and from his table picks up a pencil and notepad. He writes a few things down.

  “It’ll take a few weeks,” he says. “But when they get here, I’ll show you what to do.”

  I thank him.

  “Do you have anything living in your home?” he asks.

  “What do you mean?” I answer.

  “Just that,” he says. “Within your house or your apartment, wherever it is you live, is there anything alive?”

  It takes a moment before I say, “No. Nothing at all.”

  He carefully pulls the blanket from his lap, lays it across the table next to him. He stands and walks across the courtyard. I focus on the sound of the water in the fountain. When he returns, he’s carrying a small plant in a red clay pot.

  He holds it out to me. Two of his fingers are cut off at the knuckle, the scars of the stitches still rough and red. Scavenging.

  I shake my head. “You don’t,” I start to say, fumbling somewhat. “Really. It’s fine.”

  “Take this,” he says. “Water it only weekly. Someday soon, it will bloom. And even the green, just the green leaves, trust me. We want this. Need it. Our desire to find life, to base some part of our experience in the natural world,” he says, now turning his eyes to look up at the sky, “that desire runs very deep, as we seek to find even fleeting, small experiences of the living.”

  And so I take it.

  • • •

  I stand outside the community center near the overpass, finishing my notes after a commission meeting.

  The commissioner who met with me has missed the last two meetings. I assume this is her reaction to the incident with the teenagers. The gardener once asked me, What is your capacity for violence? By her absence, it seems, the commissioner is saying her capacity has been breached.

  I don’t fault her for this. Maybe it says something good about her, that seeing such a thing compels her to stay away.

  The commission meetings are shorter when she’s gone, I realize. Without the group’s conscience in attendance, the commission is left to rapidly dismiss the problems they are charged with solving.

  I write this in my notes.

  Later, when I am typing up my article for the paper, I pause, thinking for a moment about whether to include the comment about the commissioner.

  After a minute, I decide I will.

  The group has always dismissed the South End’s problems, I write. But the commissioner, I write, she forced them to admit their collective weakness and futility.

  • • •

  There are worms in the soil and for a moment I am overwhelmed by a sudden and silent revulsion that makes me pull away. Reddish brown and in places almost purple, the worms writhe in the dirt, twisting themselves away from the surface I expose.

  I’m in the playground below my building, digging up the dead plants along the brick wall. I’ve started with an area thirty feet wide. The plants and trees are slick and hard, but when I put a shovel under them, push down, the dead roots prove weak and shallow.

  In just an hour I’ve already torn most of the old, dead shrubs and trees from the ground. I drag them to a pile outside the walled playground. Then I begin to dig in the middle of the now-cleared bed. I am planting with whatever the gardener has gotten for me. In this first delivery there are two trees just four feet tall that haven’t yet managed to bloom, mere sticks, and a few low shrubs that are full and green, plus a whole pallet of low vines, ivy of a sort, green and white, and some leaves are deeply red.

  I found the shovel and a rake and a few small hand spades, and a wheelbarrow that was in a shed behind a house just a quarter mile from here.

  I’m on my knees, digging with one of the small hand tools, when I turn the gray dirt over and find the worms.

  I lean back, lifting my knees, now squatting on my feet, still wincing some at the sight of the worms, five or more of them, entangled in sticks and one another just below the surface and I squint to think of all the worms beneath me, everywhere, if they’re here they must be everywhere.

  I wipe my hands on my jeans. I reach for a bottle I’ve filled with water. I watch as the worms dig down, twisting themselves into the dirt.

  They’re gone.

  I have to remember that worms are good. That they are necessary. That there was a time when this world was filled with living things.

  I drink water again.

  Then I stick my shovel back into the dirt, digging my hole, and after a few minutes I’ve planted the first of the trees.

  As I dig and clear the old shrubs, I find a stone fountain that has been knocked over. I find a small pond that is filled with dirt and matted leaves. Brick benches connected to the wall. A pathway that leads from benches to the swing set and the monkey bars. All of it had been covered with dead plants and matted leaves and the dirt that has spread everywhere.

  The playground is quite old, the toys all made of heavy steel frames, thick chains on the swing set and the heavy, smoothly worn steel of the monkey bars. The brick is just as old. I don’t know why I know this. But I touch it, run my hand along the rough bricks and the rougher mortar that holds them all together and it’s clear these brick walls are many decades old.

  The way they’re made. Something permanent in their texture and design. Something that conveys the care with which they were so long ago created.

  In my mind I have a rough idea of where the new plants will go, where the trees should grow and how the shrubs and ivy should fill the spaces. I don’t know what the gardener will send me next, what types of plants he knows will grow here. But whatever he sends me will be fine.

  I dig again. Then again. After many hours of this I am too cold to continue. It’s dusk and the light is almost brown in the sky, something that happens periodically, when the cloud cover is oddly thin and spare. A sunset through the clouds, it seems, without bright light and golden sun. But even brown is a change from the otherwise constant gray.

  My jeans and shirt and sweater are wet through to the skin, covered in dirt, and my hands, whi
ch had been hurting from the cold, have gone mostly numb. I gather my shovels and tools and take them inside the building. There’s a closet there, just inside the door, with a mop and bucket in it, and I stack the tools neatly next to them.

  In my hotel room, I heat water on the gas stove in the kitchenette, standing close to the heat that flows from the flame, warming my hands over the burner as the kettle begins to tick and rattle. I lean close to the stove so the heat that’s rising passes my chest, my arms, finally glancing past my face and finally I close my eyes, breathing in warm air, for minutes this goes on, maybe longer.

  Soon I start soup on another burner, the rising heat now doubling on my hands and on my face. I strip off my clothes, wet and stiff with dirt, and I pile them in the corner. It’s odd to see them there, a mess, muddy, out of place in rooms I normally keep in order.

  I want to sleep now. My eyes are blinking shut against my will even as I stand half naked over the heat rising from the stove. But I finish my food first, spooning it into my mouth from the pot, hot soup dripping some with my eyes closed over the burner. My hands sting with pain as they keep thawing and I haven’t been hungry like this in many years and I’m tired, so tired I can barely stand. I finish my food, though, and turn off the burner and after I’ve found my way to the couch, I think to kick off my wet socks and underwear, pulling a blanket over me, now naked, covering my shoulders and legs and sides and I feel myself falling asleep already, falling, dark, and I sleep, still and dreamless and complete, and I sleep straight through till morning.

  • • •

  “Why will those plants grow here when everything else is dead?” I ask the gardener.

  It’s a few days since I started working in the playground. I spent the morning planting the last of the ivy and the vines and have now gone to the gardener’s courtyard on the edge of downtown. We sit in two of his chairs.

  “Whatever has killed all the plant life here,” he says to me, “it doesn’t affect certain species from other places. Those plants, the ones I got for you, most originated in the mountains of northern India. An area where miners have, for decades, dug for gold and other metals. Horrific chemicals are used to separate the gold from the rock. Those chemicals seeped into the mountainside and the groundwater and although originally most trees and shrubs were killed, eventually some life near those mines did find a way to survive.”

  I see him sip from his drink. He has offered me a drink but I’ve said no.

  “And so is the point that life survives,” I say. “It adapts, no matter what?”

  It is very cold today, my breath faintly white and his white too. But as in the playground, the gardener’s courtyard blocks the wind and so, here with a blanket across my lap, I feel almost warm.

  “No,” he says. “Clearly there’s a point at which nothing will come back.”

  He presses back in his chair, stretching his legs out, then crossing them slowly.

  “Had the factories kept pouring toxins on this place,” he says, “then absolutely nothing, no one, would survive.”

  I think about this. Slowly, staring toward the vines climbing up the walls. “So, that the city died, the factories shutting down, in some way that stopped the damage before it got even worse?”

  He stares forward. Rubs the raw tips of his shortened fingers against the arm of his chair.

  “Yes,” he says.

  Always, there is the rain. Light. On my hands and face now.

  “And keep in mind the change in weather,” the gardener says. “The weather has changed dramatically. That is killing the plant life too. Some think that alone is what’s killing everything.”

  I notice newspapers on his table where he normally sits to read. My paper is there, but there are papers from other places too. I realize the gardener stays in touch with the world beyond the North End. It doesn’t surprise me, but I find myself now thinking that the gardener knows so many things about which I’m unaware. The countries that are at war. The politicians who are in charge. The teams that have won. The movies made. The books that have been written since the last time that I read.

  I don’t ask about any of this, though. I have no interest in knowing what’s in those papers.

  The gardener touches his hand to his head, slides his fingers slowly across his brow, barely damp from the light rain.

  “What’s it look like,” I hear myself say, “to see a landscape that’s alive?”

  He says, “It’s been years since I’ve seen a world not scarred in some way.”

  In a moment I ask him, “How long have you been here?”

  He nods. “Just two years now,” he says.

  I think about what he’s said, the timing, and it seems off. “But why years?” I ask. “Since you’ve seen a place not scarred like this?”

  The gardener turns to me. He’s thinking. Trying to understand something. I see him nod to himself. “Even in the South End,” he says. “The areas near the highway are the worst. But it has stretched in some places for a few miles. Trees turned slick and black. Flowers turned brown and dry. The only animals are the cats and dogs kept trapped in homes by their owners but even those animals are restless, sometimes panicked, all wanting desperately to get away.”

  I try to picture what he’s saying, but can’t. It’s hard for me to understand. “It started here and spread?” I ask.

  The gardener looks up at the high, gray sky. He shakes his head. “Not at all.”

  I shake my head as well.

  “Far south of here,” he says, still staring up at the gray sky. “Or a thousand miles west. The trees in entire parks have stopped blooming in the spring,” he says. “Grass will not turn green. The ivy-covered walls of schools and homes and buildings are covered now in a dead, brown tangle of drying leaves and stiffly atrophying vines.”

  I stare at him. I’m confused.

  “Farmland gone white and dead,” he continues, staring up. “Vast stretches of forests that have all turned brown,” he is saying, staring calmly at me now. “The death of things, they call it. It’s happening all over the world.”

  • • •

  The trouble with kids from the South End continues to get worse. Someone is chased near the church, having to run up the stairs and into the sanctuary before the kids will leave. There is drag racing down one of the main avenues leading from the neighborhoods to downtown. People are robbed walking to the corner store where we buy our food, knocked to the ground as the kids take the few things they can find. One person has a broken arm. The others are bloodied across their hands and faces.

  All of it seems to be a kind of aimless, menacing joke, bored kids from the South End increasingly making a game of roaming through the north.

  People write letters to the paper. People show up at the commission meeting to raise their hands and quietly complain.

  Four letters to the paper. Five people raising their hands to ask questions of the commission.

  Small numbers. But in the North End, we are very few.

  The commissioners, they talk in circles.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” says one commissioner, looking out on the thirty people in the room. “But do you really think these kids are only causing trouble here? Pay taxes. Close your broken neighborhoods. Come back to the real world. Maybe then we can talk about help.”

  The commissioner who met with me, she still has not come back.

  I document each incident of trouble in the paper. Writing a long account of the absence of a response from the commission.

  “Why now would we think that the commission would decide to help us?” someone writes in a letter to the editor.

  “When has the commission, or the city council before them, done us any good?” another letter reads.

  “Let us just accept,” someone writes, “that we are entirely alone.”

  I spend hours among the shrubs and trees now growing in the playground. The gardener has had more trees dropped off, along with another type of vine that already wants to gro
w up the mortared grooves in the old, brick walls. There are low shrubs with leaves like tiny diamonds. Low and leafy plants that will someday bloom and rise a foot or more.

  I sit down, on the ground. Soft here, and slightly damp. It has rained recently.

  I look up at the gray, cloudy sky. There is sunlight behind the clouds. Enough to make these plants grow.

  The death of things, the gardener called it.

  Of course it happens in other places, I think. I’d just never thought about it.

  Near the corner store at dusk, with ten or fifteen people buying things from the small vendors nearby, a black car lit underneath with neon, it turns the corner, heads our way.

  I think about the two guns I took from the other kids, then threw into a sewer. It’s not a thought of wishing I had the guns with me. It’s more a memory. A fact. A reminder of what this could involve.

  There are four kids in the car. They look very young. The music thumps and thumps and thumps.

  People turn from where they buy things from the vendors. Some go into the corner store.

  The car moves very slowly toward us. It is lit with neon on the inside too, the kids all glowing, smoke coming from the open windows and I see bottles being passed.

  I can’t quite say what it is I feel. But what I know is that these kids are a disruption to the order that the people in the North End have created. It is quiet here. There is space. How we live, what we do, it is simple. These kids, all of them, are to me becoming a faceless, nameless threat to the North End.

  I can’t say it makes me angry.

  I can’t say that I’m upset.

  But I know I want the threat to stop.

  I walk over to a vendor table. I buy a large glass bottle filled with liquid.

  There are four vendors at their tables. Other people move closer to the corner store. An old man, an old woman, they turn and go into a vacant building.

  The car has stopped in the street. The kid in the passenger seat opens his door. Smiling. Thinking he will stand.

  I turn, holding the bottle by the neck and as I turn I release the bottle, letting it fly the fifteen feet toward the car, through the driver’s open window, hitting the driver in the head, the bottle exploding in the car, glass and liquid spraying across the kids in the back seat.