The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  • • •

  On the third floor of a small building, I find an old photo studio. There are cameras and many lenses and large hooded strobe lights on tripods and tall, curtained backdrops in white and black and green. There is a darkroom too, much bigger than the one at the newspaper, and in the darkroom is a large vault, its shelves filled with boxes of film. Hundreds of small, tightly sealed containers. Far more film than I’ve used in all my years at the paper.

  It’s a while, many minutes, before I go ahead and take some boxes. Five boxes, then another five, I put them in the pocket of my coat.

  I find various lenses that will fit my camera. I take two of those as well.

  And within days, I’m taking more pictures than before. Of people near the corner store. Of commissioners at the table during their meetings. Of the view from the open windows of my room as the fog moves across the surface of the many roofs below me.

  • • •

  The scavengers strip the homes down to bare studs in what seems like minutes. Others they strip down all the way to ground level, leaving only the flat, concrete outline of a home.

  The scavengers work on twenty houses at a time and even then there are ten or twenty people working on each house.

  There are more scavengers, this means. They are gathering more workers.

  I’m taking notes for a story about what direction the scavengers are moving. I’ve written these stories every few weeks since I started at the paper. But it has been many months since I’ve come to see them work. Usually, I just watch them from my window.

  Music plays, loudly, from a set of speakers set up on the back of a truck. Speakers six feet tall, four of them, so that the music is as loud as a concert, booming and grinding, and it’s a few minutes before I’ll realize that, like the last time I was here, the music has no voices, no words.

  Brokers in their panel vans catalog what they load into their trucks.

  Scavengers move, quickly, into the front doors and windows of the homes.

  I keep a map of the areas where the scavengers have worked. I run it with the stories I write. The scavenged area now covers most of the southwestern corner of this place, forming a wide finger wrapping its way around the oldest neighborhoods and the grand boulevard and slowly approaching the overpass.

  I came here today because, looking at my map, I realized the scavengers are moving with purpose through the newest neighborhoods in the North End. The square mile of cheap homes that were built when the vast urban park was cut in half by the highway.

  These houses are indistinguishable from one another, the landscaping around them barren, barren even before everything died.

  Soon, all these new homes will have been scavenged.

  I don’t know how this decision was made. I’m not even sure who to ask. For now, though, I am only taking pictures as they work. A scavenger emerges from a hole in a roof. He pulls the ends of a group of cables behind him, then throws them, one by one, to another scavenger suspended above the roof on the hook of a crane. The cables are attached to the hook and the first scavenger slides down the roof, then drops to the ground in front of the house. As he walks away, the crane begins to tighten the cables and, in a moment, the house collapses in on itself, the cables pulling in on the four corners of the structure, on the load-bearing walls in the interior of the home, on the beams in the roof, and with a crashing barely louder than the music from the speakers, the house is flattened onto itself.

  When the cables are detached from the remnants of the home, a scavenger on a bulldozer comes to the pile of materials and begins to push all of it back from the street, shoving the wood siding and the roof across the backyard until it is pressed up against the house behind it.

  They do this another ten times while I watch, methodically moving down one side of the street.

  I begin to realize they’ve done this nearly a hundred times already. I am walking back along the areas where the scavengers have already been. Along one side of the street, they’ve flattened a row of houses, then pushed them through the backyard onto the neighboring house. In a few places there are low, cheap strip centers of two or three abandoned stores. These are flattened too, so that a line of flattened homes and buildings winds its way around the area that’s been scavenged.

  A border, it seems, that starts a few miles from the overpass.

  They’re not just scavenging. They’re clearing this place.

  “Why?” I ask a scavenger when I’ve made my way back to where they work. He drinks water from a spigot on a barrel on the back of a truck, his lips wet and his mouth wet but the rest of his face is covered in dry, black dirt.

  The truck sells food, too, and another ten scavengers are here eating and drinking water. They all watch me.

  The scavenger says, in a moment, “A few months ago we decided there wasn’t much else worth scavenging in this area. And it certainly isn’t worth keeping.”

  I write this down in my notebook.

  The music is not as loud here, but it still grinds on from the truck a few blocks away.

  I have watched the scavengers work many times. How they skip one house then choose another, how they turn away from one street, moving south instead of crossing an avenue or a canal. It has always seemed unplanned, the almost accidental decision to pick one house over another, the collected group then moving in a new direction.

  I hold my map of the scavenged areas out to the man with the dirty face.

  “Where will the line of flattened homes go?” I ask.

  He looks at the map for a moment. He drinks again from the spigot. Then he points to the overpass. “To where these neighborhoods, the new ones, they end there at the overpass. That’s where we’re going.”

  I nod. But I’m still confused. “So you’ll have outlined the area that, you say, isn’t worth scavenging anymore?”

  He nods. Another scavenger has come up next to him, a woman covered in a white, fluffy powder, insulation from an attic maybe, and only her mouth and nose and eyes aren’t covered in the fluff, having been covered by a mask she now holds in her hand. She takes a drink of water before speaking.

  “You’re the writer,” she says to me.

  I nod. We stare. It’s a moment before I look around at the rows of demolished houses. I ask her, “Why?”

  She stares at me for a moment, then says, “It’s the gardener’s idea.”

  “To do what?” I ask her.

  “To cut off this whole neighborhood,” she says, looking at the map and tracing its outline with a long finger covered in fluff.

  “And then what?” I ask.

  She turns to me again and now she smiles, her eyes bright and her lips bright and even in her alien form, nearly every surface of her covered in the dusty white fluff, even still there’s a hard and surprising beauty to her.

  “Then,” she says, “we burn the entire neighborhood to the ground.”

  • • •

  I’m walking through yards and open lots and courtyards that the gardener has helped scavengers to plant. I had not imagined anything this big or complex. But there are twenty of these elaborate gardens in a small section of one of the oldest neighborhoods. Streets I don’t go down because for years, as I’ve walked, I’ve stayed clear of houses that might be occupied, stayed clear of so many of the few other people who are here in the North End.

  There are front yards green with shrubs and grass and small trees growing upward. There are open lots lined with wooden benches and long boxes in which row after row of small plants are growing. There are small parks repopulated with chairs and tables and flowering vines and arbors strung with plants and small trees lining the pathways.

  It’s overwhelming. The effort it took. The normalcy it has created.

  As we walk, the gardener answers my questions about the universities where he studied and about the places where he did research on plant life around the world. Some of this he’s told me before, in his courtyard mostly, but with fewer details. Fewe
r names.

  Now, though, I take notes as he talks, then ask him more questions, simple ones, about what trees and vines he’s brought here and about why it is possible that some plants will grow when everything else has died.

  “It’s a matter of shifting the plant life to meet this new environment we are in,” he says. “The changes in soil and temperature and weather patterns and light.” As he speaks, he walks quickly, I realize. His hands move faster and his talking is faster than when I first met him in his courtyard. “This has long happened, these shifts. The transporting of seeds by birds or other animals. The introduction of new species via hurricanes or tsunamis or even forest fires and flooded rivers. What we’re doing is making the same changes that nature has always made.”

  We walk through a series of connected backyards, which together form a space as green and overgrown as the gardener’s courtyard.

  I take notes. I ask questions. “So you’re saying this is all a normal process?”

  He smiles. He says in a moment, “Does anything about this place seem normal?” He shakes his head. “No. This is not normal. It’s simply a response to something that absolutely did not have to happen.”

  I write, quickly, my words and letters scrawled across the pages, indecipherable markings that only I can read.

  “Could the entire North End be replanted?” I ask.

  He thinks about this for a while. “There’s no reason it couldn’t. But I’m not sure there’s the will to make that happen.”

  We pass through a large iron gate covered in more ivy.

  “And understand,” he says, “that everything we now plant, if it is neglected the way we neglected and abused this place in the past, then it will also eventually die.” He turns to me, smiling only vaguely. “And know that the climate, the weather, the way it is changing, that may inevitably kill these new plants as well.”

  The tip of my pencil scratches across the paper. Blunt lead dragging across the dry, bleached fibers.

  I stop to take a picture of the diagonal brick paths leading to a park on a corner. There are small trees. Wooden benches.

  “These plants here,” the gardener says to me, still with that slight smile as he runs his brown hand along a swath of tall, flowering grass, “in India, where these are from, people long thought of them as weeds.”

  I turn to a new page in my notebook. I can hear the sound of the pencil on the paper and once more, for a moment, I have a sense that it’s not the words I write but the sounds of the pencil, the shape of the markings, that I am here to create.

  And the notes I take, the sound of the pencil, all cover my surprise and confusion that I’ve never seen any of this before. It’s as if it took till now, till I wrote this all down, for me to understand this place is real.

  The aura of so much that is growing and alive. The shock that I have never seen this.

  “When you wrote,” the gardener now asks, “what did you like about it?”

  The question makes me wince, very suddenly, but I don’t think that he sees me. Even though he is looking right at me. The question, about writing, reminds me of another time, when people would ask that sort of thing. What do you write? When do you write? How do you know what you’ll write about?

  In a moment, he says, “It’s okay. You don’t have to answer.”

  It’s apparently been some time since he asked the question.

  I’m still writing in my notebook. But I stop. Shake my head. “I can answer,” I say. “It’s just that it seems so long ago.”

  We walk again, along a stone fence bordering a house.

  “What were you working on?” he asks. “Before,” he says.

  It takes a while for me to answer.

  “A book,” I say. I say, “A book about this place. The way it has become. And a man who lives here.”

  “Why?” he asks.

  We’re in the backyard of a brick house, where nothing around me looks dead. Scavengers, two of them, sit on the back porch, watching us. The gardener raises his hand to them.

  “I lived here then,” I say. “We did. We watched as this place finally died.” I stare up for a moment, toward the sky. Gray and the clouds are low today, solid, that indistinct layer, uniform, flat. “It was a setting,” I say. “A place where anything might happen. Where people would have had to make a choice to stay.”

  I’ve stopped walking.

  “Are you still writing?” he asks.

  In a moment, I shake my head. No.

  “Did you keep it?” he asks. “Do you still have what you’d written?”

  I’m staring up. It’s a moment before I nod.

  “How would you end it?” I hear the gardener ask.

  I shake my head. Standing still and staring up and speaking to the sky. “I really don’t know.”

  • • •

  Portraits on the wall stretch nearly from the floor to the ceiling. They are photos, life-size, eight portraits lining the walls, a woman and her daughter, a man and his son, some in green fields, some in bright playgrounds, others standing by a swimming pool or a shiny yellow school bus.

  I’ve found my way into a doctor’s office. A pediatrician.

  The people in the photos smile perfectly. The parents hold the hands of their brightly lit children. The children laugh, in their eyes, as they stare into the camera.

  The floor of this room is littered with trash and pieces of broken furniture and empty boxes of medical supplies thrown everywhere.

  The lights turn off. I’m left in darkness, my eyes still flashing with the memory of light, the suddenness of the darkness seeming almost to have created a noise, my ears for a moment ringing with an echo of the room going black.

  I see a window then, with faint glimmers of light coming through the glass. I walk to it, slowly, hands forward, and with each step I carefully test where my foot will go.

  The noise, if it is a noise, still rings in my ears.

  At the window, the glass is cold and there is very little light outside. No streetlights. No traffic lights. No buildings or homes. The only light is the glow from the South End.

  The power to the whole North End is out.

  It seems unlikely this has happened by accident. The commission, it seems, has finally shut us down.

  And then the lights blink on, blinding and white, and I have to sit down on the floor and close my eyes tight, cover them with my hands, and when I do open them, barely, the people are there again, all of them, life-size, eight parents and their children all smiling and holding hands, standing against the walls above a floor thick with debris, and all of their faces stare down at me.

  • • •

  Something bad is happening at the overpass. I feel it before it happens. The minister, he does too.

  We’ve been talking about the power. About how it went out the night before and whether it was an accident or a plan. “If it was an accident,” the minister says to me, yelling as he leans close to my ear because of the deafening sound of the cars underneath us, “it was a happy one for the commission.”

  There are two scavengers here, along with the minister and me.

  But now the minister and I both turn toward the guardhouse on the overpass. Despite the noise of the cars, there’s a sound, it seems, or the absence of sound, or a disruption of some kind that leads the two of us to turn and see a black van pulling forward from the South End, moving slowly toward the gate, and it’s only a moment before men, dressed in black and with masks over their faces and carrying blond baseball bats in one or both of their hands, ten of them pile out of the back of the van, now headed toward the guardhouse and the assembled people there.

  Those who don’t run are beaten badly.

  The ten men are taking their bats to the guardhouse and the barrier and the chairs where people were sitting. The ten of them pound on it all, busting everything into pieces. The minister and I and the scavengers drag away the five wounded people. There are bloodied faces and broken arms, and the people we’ve
dragged away are moaning or yelling, at least their faces show they are, because still at the overpass it’s too loud to hear anything but the cars.

  The men in masks do their work in the deafening silence created by the traffic.

  They move quickly but with a purpose. A plan. They’ve been sent here with a plan.

  Soon they are burning everything they see.

  We watch them, the minister and me and the two scavengers all standing above the five wounded people on the ground. We’re barely half a block away. If the men cross to us, I’m not sure how we’d fight them off. Not with the injured people on the ground. Not with those bats. Not with the rage they carry and the freedom their anonymity gives them.

  For minutes, we can only watch them.

  Their anger and violence, it clearly spawns in them a kind of joy.

  That a storm can cast shadows on a landscape without sunlight is surprising, disturbing, even breathtaking as I turn to see the wall of black clouds approaching us fast.

  Lit with lightning and filled with rain, thick and swirling sheets of rain, the storm rides on a base of dirt and debris and rainwater spraying back up from the ground.

  It’s a minute before the roar of the traffic is overwhelmed by the rising sound of the storm.

  The men in masks, one sees the storm now, stopping where the group had begun to move from the overpass toward the four of us and the wounded people at our feet. Another man drops his bat. Still another man turns and runs. Soon all of them are running. Toward the van that brought them here.

  But there is no way to find safety.

  The minister is dragging a wounded person toward the high concrete wall that lines the highway. I drag another, by the leg, quickly and roughly and I see this person screaming as she slides across the street and up a curb and I stop dragging her only when we’re both pressed against the high concrete wall.

  The scavengers pull the other three, two by their arms, one by his leg, and now the nine of us are turned to face the storm coming onto us as we press back against the wall, the wounded lying down and the rest of us standing, backs flat against the concrete, and the air is shaking with the storm that’s so high, a wall itself that goes straight up, erasing my building from sight, and the other downtown buildings are gone and even the homes on the ground just a few blocks away are disappearing from view as the mass of wind and rain and lightning approaches.