The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  • • •

  The commissioner is asking me about the flooding to the north. She has read my article about the broken levees and the miles of flooding I found in the boat. She has come to the newspaper’s office.

  I tell her the things I wrote about, how I made my way from canals through broken levees and across so many flooded neighborhoods. And although she read the article, she continues to ask questions.

  “The water reached to the second floor windows?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “How could it reach that high?” she says. “The North End wasn’t built that far below sea level.”

  “That area, all of it, is particularly low,” I say. “I looked it up on old survey maps. But also the water levels in the bay, I would guess that they have risen.”

  It’s a moment, then she nods. She sits in an old wooden chair on the other side of my desk. She wears a skirt, boots, a heavy sweater. She carries a black bag that she has set near her on the floor.

  I think again, as I did when I first met her, that I can’t figure out how old she is. She could be fifty. She could be forty.

  I wonder, for a moment, if she is pretty. But I know that I can’t tell. That part of me is sunk down somewhere, buried. Covered up.

  But I notice she has blue eyes. A fact. She has blue eyes.

  “As you know,” she says, “there is very little will to help the North End and the people who live here.”

  I say to her, “There is no will to help.” I am sitting back in my desk chair. Leaning to the left. I’m not bothered by talking to her, but I am exhausted by it. As always, it drains me fully.

  “I have begun looking for someone to assess the levees,” she says. “But there’s a very deep lack of interest in the problem. As you can imagine. And there are people who would welcome the breaking of the levees,” she says. “That’s why I haven’t mentioned it to the commission. Some of them, they’d want to blow them up. Flood the North End. Be done with this place.”

  I am not sure what to say.

  She says, “The way you write about these things has changed.”

  I lean farther to the side.

  “You’re making a case now,” she says. “You’re calling for action. Why?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  It’s a while, maybe a minute, before she says, “I’ve read your books. From before. I read them.”

  I shake my head. I’m not sure why. It’s like I’m trying to shake off what she has just said.

  “I enjoyed them,” she says.

  I push my hand along the edge of my desk, very slowly.

  “Are you still writing?” she asks.

  “I write for the paper,” I say, quickly, more quickly than I’d meant.

  “I mean another book,” she says. She is leaning forward slightly.

  I remember this conversation, repeated many times, before they died. Friends and neighbors and family all asking what I was writing. What I was working on. What my next book would be.

  It was never a comfortable conversation. It felt like I was offering inappropriate details of my life, details too secret to mention aloud.

  “What are you working on?” she would ask, my wife, and I would shrug and shake my head and even with her I struggled to answer.

  The commissioner says again, “Your writing in the paper. You’re making a case. A very good case.”

  I shake my head.

  “Was it seeing the water covering the airport?” she asks. “The water covering the neighborhoods?” She pauses, then says. “Your old neighborhood.”

  I shake my head. Can’t answer. Say after a moment, “I don’t know.”

  She shifts in her chair. Leaning forward. Toward my desk. “The death of things,” she says, “the way the trees die and the grass dies and the animals all go elsewhere, it is spreading across the South End. It’s spreading very rapidly.”

  “Yes,” I say, because I need to say something. “That would make sense.”

  “And with all the people who were killed by that storm,” she says, “maybe people will begin to take these things more seriously.”

  Her hands, the nails shining, rest on the edge of my desk.

  I’m thinking about what she said about the commissioners blowing up the levees. It’s happened. In other cities long ago. It could happen again.

  “I think the people in the South End,” I say, “the commissioners, everyone, they should remember that the South End is below sea level too.”

  She stares.

  I’ve read a lot about these things. During my days sitting in the library.

  “People in the south forget that,” I say. “You’re so far from the bay.”

  She looks around, oddly, as if to see if anyone else is hearing this.

  “The South End wasn’t built below sea level,” I say. “But now that sea levels are higher, the South End is very much at risk.”

  It takes a moment for her to talk again. “I didn’t realize this.”

  “If they even know about the water,” I say, “people in the South End assume it’s far away.”

  She sits back in her chair. I wonder how old she is. I wonder if she’s pretty. I wonder why she comes here. I wonder why she seems to care.

  “There are no levees in the South End,” I say, and a tiredness overwhelms me, so that it’s like I’m listening to myself talk. “No canals to capture the overflow, to channel the water back to the bay. If the water ever reaches this downtown, then the highway will become a river. And eventually the streets of the South End will run with water for miles and miles and miles.”

  She stares.

  I’m not sure what else to say. I hope she’ll let me sleep soon. Lie down. Close my eyes. And sleep.

  “I didn’t know,” she says. “I’m not sure anyone does.”

  She has blue eyes.

  “Our problems are theirs,” I say, and I do close my eyes now, as if to sleep, and rising, rising from this room, asleep now, hearing myself say, “There’s only so long for them to deny this.”

  She has blue eyes.

  • • •

  Still the sound of my own voice disturbs me. But this is not really new. In the year before they died, I talked less and less. Eventually the sound of my own voice began to surprise me, even bother me.

  And so I talked even less.

  I wrote at night, sleeping in the afternoon, waking up sometimes at eight or nine, writing in a small office on the first floor of our house till three or four o’clock in the morning.

  Some days I did not see them. Other days I’d wake as they left for school and I’d see them tumbling out to the car where she waited, ready to drive, looking back at the house where I was still lying on the old couch in my office.

  Something had gone wrong. With me and with writing and with how it was that I was living. I walked at night, after working, wandering the increasingly abandoned neighborhood. Streets with lights all out. Streets still populated by those few people committed to staying.

  I could not find a way to focus again on the family. I no longer wanted to visit new places. No longer wanted to travel. Some days I spent an hour touching every item in my office. Wandering the room and letting my hands touch everything.

  But I told myself this would pass. I told myself once I finished the book, I’d be myself again.

  I hardly saw the children. They crashed into me when they saw me. Climbed on my back and on my lap and made themselves as close to me as they could, pressing, it’s just how they were.

  It’s not that I didn’t like it. It’s not that I didn’t love them. But my attention was somewhere else.

  She would do a similar thing. Hold my hand, wrap her arms around me from the front or side or back. Hold me tight a moment. Ask how the work was going.

  She had blue eyes, my wife. Palest blue and shining.

  She was beautiful, my wife.

  But my attention was somewhere else.

  I slept through the
day and worked into the night, thinking always about that book. Thinking about it as I walked the North End, as I lay on that old couch. Thinking about the words I’d write. The scenes that I’d create.

  A book about this place. The North End. A book about life in an abandoned city and a man who chose to stay here.

  Who will be the narrator? What will he do and think and say?

  She had blue eyes, my wife.

  I’d forgotten that. But I remember it now, alone, in this hotel room. Under blankets. On this couch.

  I remember those eyes. I remember her voice. I remember what it meant to touch her.

  I slept on that couch for months.

  I lost track of the kids. Of her. Of the house itself.

  I left her alone to parent them, to keep track of them, to handle everything they did.

  My memories of the dinner table, before that last year when I disappeared, are loud and there is laughing and we felt a kind of joy, together, all six of us, laughing still at that round table.

  She had blue eyes. I’d forgotten that. Because my other memory of her eyes is empty, her eyes burned out as she lay on the ground in front of the house. On the curb and she was as broken and black as the rest of them. But she was still alive. Still breathing. Whispering. Whispering my name and whispering that she was sorry. Sorry.

  Sorry.

  And then she died.

  The story that was told, in papers and on TV, in the South End and beyond, was that all of them burned in our house. That no fire trucks or police or ambulances ever came. That this death was caused by the very place where we chose to live.

  But sometimes, at night, I would light houses on fire. Back then, before all of them had died. I did it to see what it would look like. To learn how it was done. This would be in the book. A narrator, alone, in a city that has been abandoned.

  I told no one that I did this. I just took notes as the houses burned.

  Took notes as I started the fires in the basements of those dark, forgotten homes.

  Took notes as I lit a mix of boards and gasoline in a bucket. Notes on how the shadows played on the basement walls and wooden beams. Took notes as the fire in that bucket died.

  And then I headed upstairs from my basement. In our house. To write for another thirty minutes. In my office. Before I went to sleep.

  Waking up an hour later, and the first floor was engulfed in flames.

  Flames that were already up the stairs. In the halls. In their rooms.

  Flames that I had started.

  A fire that I had caused.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 9

  I’ve been awake nearly an hour before I realize the power is out in my hotel room. I only notice when I try to heat some water and the starter on the stove will not spark.

  The gas is not out, though, and the water runs, and so I use a match to light the gas, then make tea and soup, drinking it with a piece of bread I’ve toasted above the burner.

  It is morning, daylight, so I can’t see from my windows whether any other buildings have lost power.

  I wonder if the commission has finally cut the electricity to the North End.

  The power gives us choices. And yet any day it could be cut off.

  I stand at my open window. The plant, the gardener’s plant, is on a table near me and I touch it, absently, with my hand.

  It’s a few minutes before I see a traffic light turning red. The green and yellow bulbs are out and so, every few minutes, the light simply turns red, then minutes later it goes dark.

  I watch as that light goes through its cycle, left to imagine the minutes when it is green, the moment when it is yellow. An imagined backdrop of normalcy and routine. How many green lights had I watched before I came to this hotel? How many red lights had I sat watching as the kids talked in the backseat, my wife in the front seat next to me?

  Moments I can picture, dreamlike in how I remember nothing that was said.

  I stand at my open windows. A lamp near me suddenly turns on.

  The power, for whatever reason, it has returned to my building.

  But I am only crying.

  And I am only thinking about how I cry all the time. In my hotel room. Walking down the street. Sitting at my desk as I write an article for the paper. Lying on the couch after trying to work in the old library.

  My breathing breaks and tears come and it goes on this way for minutes.

  I am not always particularly conscious of this happening.

  I do not think about it all that much.

  But, for a moment, I picture all that crying.

  Crying as I lie under the heavy blankets on my couch, still cold and wet from a shower.

  Crying as I look out at the flooded airport in the North End.

  Crying in front of each house, as I sit and watch it burn.

  I try to stop myself now. I hold both my eyes, pressing against them with my bare hands.

  But it’s morning. And I am always much weaker when I’ve just woken up.

  • • •

  The press begins to roll in the basement beneath my office. The floor shakes and there is the distant sound of machinery in motion.

  Twenty minutes and it’s done. I hear the press shut down. I hear the lift that brings the papers up from the darkened basement. I hear the pressman, once again, driving away to deliver the papers.

  Soon I’ll turn the lights off. Leave. Walk back to the hotel.

  But for now I just sit still.

  • • •

  The minister and I are in my playground. He is drinking from a glass of what he says is bourbon. “Do you want any?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “No, thank you.”

  Still I allow myself just the one drink, at night, alone at the windows in my room.

  It begins to rain, very lightly, the drops touching my hands and face. We are both sitting on one of the park benches.

  “I remember once giving a woman money after sex,” he says now, looking toward the pond and trees around it. “Not paying for it. Although I would have. I mean, I’d done that before. More than once. But this time, the woman I was with, I just knew she needed money.”

  I don’t know what has started this thought for him. Maybe the bourbon, I think. Maybe the rain.

  “I am starting to replant the courtyard behind the church,” the minister says. “With the help of the gardener.”

  I find myself tapping my hand lightly on the arm of the bench, affirmation, though I don’t think he needs that.

  The minister fills his side of the bench, yet his bare feet barely touch the ground and his arms, I realize, are short as well.

  Bare feet, even in this cold and wet.

  He is nodding, to himself, I think. “I’ve done things I would rather not remember,” he says, “So in my mind I am constantly changing the subject, trying to keep myself from remembering.”

  His feet swing, the soles just touching the grass underneath us, a silent metronome to his talking.

  “I paid her that money,” he says, his small fingers wrapping around his glass as he lifts it to his lips. “Just twenty dollars. And she began to cry.” He sips again. “But the thing is, she took it. She took that money. Put it in the pocket of her long dress. We had sex other times. But I never handed her money again. Instead, I left money on a table, wrinkled up, like it had fallen from my wallet, so that it looked forgotten, looked like I wouldn’t notice that she left with it each time.”

  Rain touches my hands, lightly, and I look up, squinting, and can see each drop as it falls toward my cheeks.

  “Don’t you think,” I ask, “that the lie was as much for you as for her?”

  It’s a moment, but he smiles some. Barely. He says quietly, “Yes. I’d never thought about it that way. But yes.”

  When there’s no wind you can hear even the faint drops landing on the leaves of the garden around us.

  “There are much worse things I have done,” he says. “To others. To myself.”

/>   In a moment, I ask him, “Where did you do those things?”

  He is still looking away from me, toward the plants growing along the base of the stone benches along the wall. “Back there,” he says. “In the South End.”

  It’s a long while before I respond. “But not here,” I say. “You haven’t done them here.”

  His feet swing. He smiles slightly again. “That’s right,” he says.

  There’s a smell to a rain like this. Something warm and close and not bad at all.

  “Why haven’t you written about the gardener?” the minister asks me. “Or about this playground or the other gardens he has helped the scavengers plant for themselves?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s quite remarkable,” he says. “What the gardener has been able to do. I would think it’s worth a story.”

  And of course he’s right. And I don’t know why I haven’t done this.

  We are quiet for some time. The rain falls so lightly that my hands are barely wet and the water hasn’t reached through my hair to my scalp. I drink from my coffee and the minister sips from his bourbon and I watch his feet swing, slowly, evenly, brushing drops of water from the blades of grass.

  He shrugs, as if responding to something I’ve said. He smiles again. “I don’t really know why I moved myself into that church,” he says. “Of all places, a church. But I grew up going to church. I grew up believing a place like that had meaning. I grew up believing a place like that brought out the good in people.”

  I press my finger against the arm of the bench, the finger sliding, the beads of water collecting on the skin and fingernail.

  “I guess,” he says, pushing his hand across his eyes, “I guess I grew up believing in the idea of redemption.”

  My finger is wet to the knuckle with the collected beads of rain. Water that is so clear. It’s surprising, really, that the water here would be so clean and clear.

  I raise my hand, touch the water to my tongue.

  “Write an article about the gardener,” the minister says. He’s looking from the pond to the paths to the ivy crawling so very slowly up the red brick walls. He wipes his eyes again. “There’s hope in this,” he says. “There really is. People should know. Everyone needs to know.”