The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  I walk around to the passenger side, to the kid who has only now begun to stand, still smiling, but in a way that is not so happy, his confusion taking all joy from the expression he’d painted on his face.

  I hit him in the mouth and he falls back against the car. I hit him in the chest, in the neck, in the ear. I hit him three times in the ear, his head thudding against the side of the glowing neon car.

  The driver has slumped over, blood all across his ear and neck. His mouth moves like he is screaming. But he’s silent.

  The kids in the backseat are still sitting, almost motionless, only wiping slowly at the glass and liquid and the blood from their friend, all of it sprayed across their faces.

  So far I haven’t seen a gun.

  The kid outside the car has fallen to the ground. I lean over him. “Why do you come here?” I ask him.

  He is holding his neck. Gagging.

  I hit him, very hard, directly in his nose. It breaks and there’s blood pouring over his wet and open mouth.

  “Why do you come here?” I ask again.

  One of the kids from the backseat pushes open his door. I slam it closed, hard, catching his hand in the frame. He screams. I slam the door on it again.

  I have decided there won’t be a gun.

  I kneel down, leaning over the kid on the ground. I ask him one more time, “Why do you come here?”

  He’s trying to talk. He spits blood.

  “Because,” he says, gagging on the words and blood and gagging because of whatever I have done to his neck and throat, “because there’s nothing else to do.”

  Even now, we are subject to the failings of the South End. First their combined decision to give up on this place where we still choose to live. Then their collective effort to forget us. And now the weakness of the community they’ve built as a replacement to the North End leaves these kids with no purpose and no value, pushing them across the overpass not to explore but to cause trouble. To finally wreak havoc on anyone they find.

  I hit the kid with the side of my fist, swinging down like I hold a hammer, hitting him in the eye, hitting him as hard as I think I can.

  “Aimless,” I say. “Lost.”

  He’s writhing on the ground, holding his hands across his very bloody face, screaming into his palm.

  I stand up and kick him in the side, very hard, the point of my shoe driving into the soft part under his ribs.

  It’s not that I have ever been taught how to fight. It’s not that I have trained for this. It’s not that I am very strong.

  I simply have a willingness to hurt this person who’s done something wrong.

  I have simply lost the ability to experience anything that feels like fear.

  The kid has turned onto his stomach. He’s trying to crawl away. I kick him very hard in his ribs again, high, near his armpit, and he can’t crawl now. He just curls up, on his side, barely covering his face with one of his arms.

  I see the kid’s friends in the backseat, leaning away. Not trying to get out of the car. Not moving at all where they sit.

  I see the gardener across the street, standing close to the doorway of a building.

  I see the minister next to him.

  I see the driver sitting up in his seat, blood all across his face. He turns to me, sees me kick his friend again. But I’m staring at the driver.

  What will he do?

  I pull his friend from the ground, lean him into the passenger seat. Push him in. He grabs at the seat.

  I watch the driver. But now his hands only move toward the wheel.

  The music, it’s still thumping.

  The neon lights are still glowing.

  The car, it is still running.

  Around me, people staring.

  The driver, eyes outlined in blood, his head already swelling, he is staring right at me.

  That is fear.

  I shove the heavy car door closed.

  That is fear.

  The car moves forward, slowly, then faster, and then it turns away from here.

  That is fear.

  • • •

  Three scavengers in a large, old pickup truck deliver plants to me at the playground. I stand and watch as their truck stops.

  There are two men and a woman. Thin, wiry people who carry whole pallets of plants in their long arms, and the scavengers are so thin you’d think they’d topple over with the weight. Yet they lift the pallets with little effort.

  They nod to me, each one of them, and I nod too, pointing toward the playground where I’d like the plants to be dropped.

  Two of them are deeply scarred, one across the neck, the other across her cheek and nose. Scavenging is brutal work, men and women climbing on their hands and knees into attics and crawl spaces, narrow places where they are forced to slither forward, all the while pulling free the copper wiring, copper pipes, tin plating, aluminum linings along the hidden joists and beams and stanchions of the infrastructure of a home or building. Urban miners in dark spaces, wrenching free these precious metals for reuse, the value calculated on the weight of what is found, not the effort put forth to find it. Cut up and covered in their filth, bruised and sweating and exhausted, scavengers emerge from the structures they strip down, take a drink of water, then head into the next abandoned home on the street.

  “Thank you,” I say to the scavengers. The woman among them has put the last of the large trees just inside the tall brick wall.

  “You’re the writer,” says the tallest of the scavengers. He’s smoking a cigarette now and the others light up too.

  I think to nod.

  We’re standing on the dusty slope outside the playground. A few feet from where, long ago it seems, I found that body. Their truck isn’t running and the wind is hardly blowing today and so it’s silent here when no one speaks.

  “You’ve got quite a capacity for violence, I hear,” says the woman. “I hear I should stay a step removed from you.”

  She isn’t smiling, but she isn’t at all bothered either. There’s no taunt, no awe, I’m not sure there’s even respect. She’s making what she thinks is a simple statement of fact.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “These kids who are coming over,” one of the men says, pausing to drink water from a large and filthy plastic bottle, “it’s not okay. They should be stopped.”

  His hands are gray and dry and scuffed, like old concrete from a broken sidewalk.

  I don’t know how to respond to him.

  The three of them stand staring at me, the only motion their mouths and lungs slowly working on the cigarettes. Their faces are pale and nearly gray, their hair covered in streaks of paint and plaster, and their clothes are as colorless as the landscape that surrounds us. Their eyes seem wetter than is possible, but it’s only the contrast with the pallor of their faces.

  The jewelry they all wear, that I’ve seen on these scavengers so many times all these years, I realize now as I stand so close to them, they wear the jewelry of found objects, brass pipe fittings on their wrists and old coins bent to grasp the lobes of their ears.

  The three scavengers are all fifteen feet apart and they’ve not spoken to one another since they arrived. Yet their appearance, the way they stand and stare, I think for a moment that I’m watching a family portrait, a snapshot moment of these three siblings taking a break from their day and life of work.

  “Do I owe you money for this?” I think to ask.

  The woman shakes her head. “The gardener handles that.”

  Still I’m standing, watching them. It seems like they’ll say more.

  “The brokers will take anything we scavenge,” the woman now says in her monotone voice. “I’ve sold them a box of lighters. I’ve sold them stacks of bright white dresses. I’ve sold them boxes full of books and paper. They set a value for anything we bring. Because they know someone who will buy it. People like that, with that gift, they know where to sell anything. And so they know where to buy anything as well.”


  She takes a long drag off her cigarette, squatting down as she sucks the cigarette to the filter, then pressing the nearly dead ember against the ground. She stands, then reaches into the back of the pickup, dropping the cigarette butt in a bucket. The two men will do the same in a moment.

  I realize these people won’t litter on this dead field.

  “If you need help,” the woman says, “we’ll help you.”

  “I can get all this planted,” I say. “But thank you.”

  One of the men shakes his head very slightly. “No. With the kids. We mean with the kids. If we can help you, you just ask.”

  And for another long minute, we four stand there, two minutes now, maybe more, the three of them still staring straight at me.

  • • •

  To live here has always seemed to be a choice to exist among the dry and dead plants around me. That I can make another choice, that the gardener has done so and that he has even helped others make gardens themselves, it’s an idea so foreign and unknown. Even more impossible than the choice people make to read newspapers from outside of here, to watch television or hear the radio, to even cross the overpass and then return.

  The gardener’s plant stands on a low table near the couch, the leaves at eye level as I lie here every night. In another minute, I reach out from under the blanket and I lightly touch the leaves. They are smooth. I touch the stems, oddly soft, covered in the faintest hairs. All of it wet in its way. Filled with water. The plant is living. The gardener said we desire this, seek out life and he is right, I think, he is right, I think, although I’ve already fallen asleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  I am making my way through the basement of an old theater when I realize I am lost. It’s completely dark, no windows or lights, and even when I turn on my flashlight, I can’t figure out which of the many doors will lead me out of here.

  This doesn’t worry me. I only think of it as a fact. You’re lost.

  As I flash the beam along the wall, I see a water fountain and a tall machine that once sold canned drinks and a cigarette vending machine, its front door broken open.

  There’s an ATM too, the front door also broken and all the money removed. But when I touch the ATM’s screen, it lights up.

  WELCOME.

  In a minute, I pull out my wallet. Filled still with my driver’s license and a health insurance card and a debit card.

  The plastic remnants of my modern life.

  I put the debit card in the ATM. Push buttons by memory, the rote maneuverings of a thousand days past. The machine manages to connect. It finds my account. It shows me my balance.

  I stare.

  A number that once had meaning for me. A number I watched and tended to and worried about and lamented.

  And it’s a number that reminds me there is another life I could lead. There is another life I once had.

  That life still waits.

  I push the cancel button and soon the screen goes dark and, once more, I try to find the right way out of here.

  • • •

  We are sitting in chairs facing the garden I have planted. The gardener comes by now, periodically, to see how I am doing. I found these iron chairs and a small table behind an old restaurant not far from here.

  “I’m pretty good at all this,” the gardener says. “Plants, trees.” He smiles slightly. “Sorry. But I am. I am really pretty good at this.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  We sit. I’ve found heavy, wool blankets that I keep in the closet just inside the door to the building and we both have them draped over our laps and knees.

  He asks me, “You didn’t know about the death of things, did you?”

  I shake my head.

  “It is so bad here,” he says, “so decayed and ruined, that it’s hard to think of anywhere else. Hard to imagine that somewhere else could be dying too.”

  I watch the leaves on the vines shake slightly. Wind. All the plants, the branches, they move just barely and for a moment it’s almost dizzying, unbalanced, to see so much movement in the world around me. My life, what I see, is normally so very still.

  I close my eyes. “I pictured other cities dying,” I say, and when I open my eyes I’m not dizzy anymore. “But not the trees. Not the animals. I just pictured the cities themselves.”

  I notice in a moment that he’s nodding. “Does it make you wonder why you’re here?” he asks. “Does it change things in any way?”

  I’m not sure what he means. I’m looking at him.

  “To know the death of things happens elsewhere,” he says. “To know storms like the ones we have also kill thousands all over the world. Does it affect your reasons for being here?”

  I think about this for a long time. Staring into the leaves and small branches and the vines already growing into the creases and cracks of the brick wall. I think about the gardener’s question, repeat it to myself. It seems important. It is important.

  Does it make you wonder why you’re here?

  And even as I repeat that question, again, repeated in the silence of the two of us sitting outside here, I can’t think of an answer. I can’t think about what that question means. I can’t think about what he’s asked.

  I just know the question is important.

  I turn to him. I shake my head. My shoulders rise. I start to say something but I’m not sure what.

  The gardener is pointing toward a cluster of low, nearly purple shrubs. He tells me their name and where they are from and how at some point tall flowers, white and pink, will rise on thin and golden stems. “Quite beautiful,” he says.

  We sit that way for some time. He tells me about the things I’ve planted. He’s brought coffee in a container and we drink it, hot, it scalds my mouth, but I feel the warmth in my chest and then my stomach.

  The gardener is quiet awhile. The sky is dimmer and it’s late in the day.

  I turn to him. Steam from my mouth as I think to ask the words, “Why are you here?”

  “I came to help,” he says, which he has said to me before. “But it was too late.”

  I shake my head. “What I mean is, why do you stay?”

  He nods, slowly. Looks toward the plantings all along the wall. “The trees will eventually offer shade,” he says. He smiles slightly. “Not that there’s any sun.”

  “Why do you stay?” I ask again.

  He leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. “Because there’s nothing left for me back there.”

  I picture us in our chairs, two men, unshaven, both in heavy blazers over sweaters, one with a scarf, one with gloves, sitting near the only patch of green as far as the eye can see, and are they thirty years old or fifty, no one would be able to tell.

  “They died?” I hear myself ask.

  His forehead sinks to his hands. It’s a minute before he responds. Before he even moves. He shakes his head just slightly, still holding it in his hands. “She did.”

  • • •

  I finally find a small boat in the industrial zone. It’s suspended in the air, a set of pulleys holding it a few feet above the ground, the ropes attached to steel tracks overhead. The boat is just ten feet long, but there’s a small outboard motor on the back of it.

  The tracks overhead lead thirty feet to a set of large doors at the back of the warehouse. The large latch on the doors is rusted and I have to kick the doors a few times to shake loose the handle and pin. The doors swing open onto a canal.

  Still water, dark, the banks lined with rotting beams that surely once seemed heavy and impenetrable and permanent.

  It takes me a few minutes to figure out how to work the ropes and pulleys holding the boat in the air. But I’m finally able to slide the pulleys along the track, positioning the boat at the edge of the canal. I carefully pull another line loose and the boat slowly angles down, stern first, into the water.

  The water is silent, heavy as it spreads, ripples escaping as the boat gently enters the canal.

  I reach down and pic
k up the five-gallon gas tank attached to the outboard. It’s empty. But there are eight big drums of gasoline lined up along the wall. All seem full. One has a pump and hose and spigot attached to it. I fill the red tank, then put it back in the boat.

  I step down from the top of the canal wall into the boat. The movement of the boat is slow, side to side, I take a moment. Breathe and close my eyes, and soon the boat is still.

  Under one of the seats, there is a compartment with plastic containers of oil in it. I pour one into the red gas tank, shake it slowly to mix the oil and gas, then connect the fuel line to the engine. In another minute, I prime the engine, then pull on the starter. The engine does not respond at first, but I keep working at it, pulling the cord another ten times, then five more, then five more, then ten. I give the motor a break periodically. Prime it again.

  Finally, smoke begins to puff out with each pull, and then the motor starts up, more smoke, blowing almost steadily, and the noise is a loud, rattling bang, over and over and over.

  I sit back, adjusting the choke and the throttle. I’m breathing hard from the effort, my breath just visible as it blows out in front of me.

  After a few minutes the engine settles down, the smoke subsiding and the sound quieting. I put the engine in gear and move forward, slowly, pushing the handle to turn the boat, pointing it up the canal.

  The canal is sixty feet wide here and lined by buildings, warehouses mostly, but also the walls of old factories and steel shipping containers stacked two and three high. But in some places there is nothing lining the canal, so I can see the tops of the buildings downtown. I see my building eventually, the hotel coming in and out of view as I make my way along the canal.

  I come to a place where the canal splits. I slow the boat, look back at my building, getting my bearings. Then I turn left.

  I’m going north. Wanting to see how many of the levees have broken.

  In places the canal is nearly blocked by debris. A sunken truck, trees that have fallen partway into the water, utility poles that have fallen from one side to the other and that I have to duck underneath to get past.