The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  It’s on us.

  The storm has weight, pressing down on us with rain so thick that I am within seconds soaked through to the skin. Lightning strikes nearby, a blast that blinds me and leaves me deaf for a moment so that all I know is the wall, behind me, that I’ve pressed myself against in a world where otherwise my ears only ring and my eyes are white with light.

  Debris now, I feel it crashing down near us before I can see it or even hear it, but when I can, there are objects falling, the boards from a fence and a tire and dirt and so many shingles, black and green and some are made of tile, the shingles seem suddenly to be the very source of the storm, dancing among the wind, swirling in every direction, till finally they slam into the wall at our backs.

  I drop to the ground, debris exploding against the wall, the wounded woman trying to cover her face but with her arms broken she can’t, and so I crawl to her, cover her with my body, her face is in my stomach and she uses her bare arms to grasp at my legs and still the objects slam endlessly into that wall.

  I’ve never been in a car wreck or a plane wreck or an earthquake or tsunami. But this must be the same. The ground shakes and I shake and the wall behind us seems to bend against a wind thick with rain and objects turned horrendously violent.

  I see the minister near me. He covers a wounded person, like I do, he covers the person with his body, his own hands and arms over his head.

  The other wounded people are near my feet. Pressed against one another. Covering each other where they can.

  The two scavengers are still standing. Against the wall. Hands at their faces, the rings of pipe and wire on their fingers and their forearms wrapped in aluminum and leather, arms they hold up toward the wind and the rain and the monstrous force pressing onto us, but, still, the two of them stare out, up, directly into the storm.

  This goes on for some time.

  When it’s done, it ends as quickly as it started, the storm moving south still, we can see it, and we stand, soaked and bleeding and covered in dirt and rain and pieces of debris so varied I can’t identify it at all.

  We move away from the wall, the four of us who can stand. We see the storm where it has crossed into the South End.

  On the overpass, the black van is turned over. The driver’s door is open. I see a man in the driver’s seat, another in the passenger’s. Their eyes are wide open but they don’t move and we don’t move and it’s only when the minister walks forward that I follow him.

  But there’s another noise now. A sound I can hear as the storm continues to move farther away. It’s the sound of car engines. But there is no driving, no roar.

  What I hear is the absence of that highway roar.

  I go to the side of the overpass, then look down.

  Cars, hundreds and thousands of them. Four lanes each way, filled with vehicles that don’t move. Jackknifed tractor trailers. Trucks slammed into buses. Cars that are wrecked or simply stuck in place.

  People have begun to emerge from their vehicles. Standing. Looking around.

  Some scream. Some wail. Some hold their bloodied heads in their hands. Some are waving their arms, frantically, to other cars and people around them.

  There is water too. On the highway. Collected there. Covering the bottoms of tires and the soles of the shoes of people standing dumbly and injured beside their wrecked cars, and the water makes it look as if everything is sinking, descending into the rainwater that has collected in that deep and wide trench.

  Behind me, on the overpass, I see that the minister has reached the van. I watch him. He checks on the men in the front seat. Goes to the back. Yanks on the door till it opens. There is moaning inside, loud enough that I can hear it. The minister enters to help.

  I turn back to the highway. Staring down. The two scavengers are next to me. Staring down as well. We are so far away, it seems. We watch from a distance I can’t quite measure.

  A woman below us, just one among the thousands of cars and trucks and people all down there, this one woman sees us and now she’s screaming, cupping her hands and screaming.

  “Please don’t,” I hear her yell, but there’s no volume up here where the sound reaches us. It’s more of a whisper. A pleading. “Please,” her voice says. “Please don’t hurt us.”

  CHAPTER 10

  We watch the people in their vehicles down on the surface of the highway, all of them stuck in place still, a few hours after the storm. It rains lightly and it is very cold, though I think the wind probably doesn’t reach down into the trench formed by the high walls. Most cars are idling, the engines creating a low, rumbling sound, the smell of exhaust strong and fragrant and dizzying as it rises up to us.

  It is so strange for the highway to be this quiet.

  The closest ramps to and from the highway are a few miles in either direction from this overpass. Most people sit in their cars, waiting for the traffic to begin to move. But I have seen a few people walking. Some going west, others walking east, their feet sloshing through the inch of standing water on the surface of the road.

  But otherwise there is no motion down there.

  I’m standing on the overpass with the minister and gardener. Others from the North End have come too.

  “I’m not sure what we could do from up here,” the minister says. He’s sitting on the guardrail, his short legs and small feet dangling over the cars and trucks on the highway. “Doesn’t it seem like help will come at any moment?” he asks.

  I say, “It seems like it would have to.”

  The gardener says in a moment, “You would think.”

  We’ve already put the wounded people from the attack into the back of a scavenger’s pickup truck. A scavenger and the minister took them to a hospital not far away in the South End, but then returned with them just half an hour later.

  “There were already too many wounded people at the hospital,” the minister says. “From the storm.”

  And so instead they put the wounded in the community center, near the overpass. Others from the North End have arrived and some have begun to tend to them.

  Four of the masked men died in the van. Most of the rest were hurt badly. They too were offered a ride in one of the scavenger’s trucks. But the masked men hurried off instead, wounded but living, leaving behind the four dead men in the van.

  The minister and two scavengers loaded the bodies into the back of the truck, then took them to the morgue.

  The van, the masked men’s van, is turned upright by the scavengers, twenty of them, who then proceed to strip it down to nothing but its steel frame. It takes them just thirty minutes.

  A wonder of motion and purpose and skill.

  There are now no wheels, no windows, no side panels, no seats or interior finish at all. The scavengers slide the skeletal steel frame to the south end of the overpass, then hoist it, with their hands, onto a block of concrete.

  A pedestal.

  One scavenger smiles, slightly, as the group returns from the monument they’ve created.

  A reminder. And a warning.

  And, by the next morning, we’ve already rebuilt our guardhouse and barriers and protections at the overpass.

  But that same morning, nearly twenty-four hours since the storm hit, there is no change on the highway. The hundreds and thousands of vehicles are still motionless below us. Except now, fewer cars are idling. And a few more people are walking, sloshing through the water on the surface of the highway.

  Water that is, clearly, a few inches deeper.

  I’ve been at the overpass for an hour, again watching the highway with the minister and the gardener. Taking notes, taking pictures.

  The minister is sitting on the guardrail, again his small feet dangling from the overpass.

  “It did seem like, by now, help would have come,” the gardener says.

  Other people from the North End are here. The guards at the overpass, scavengers, others. Thirty or so people. Many of them staring down.

  A communal helplessness.
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  Not disinterest. Not disdain. But we seem to have been placed here as nothing more than accidental observers.

  “Why isn’t the water draining?” the minister asks.

  “Sea level,” I say. “The highway is far below sea level.”

  “Built that way?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “But the water should be pumping out. The highway, in its way, is an engineering wonder.”

  The minister’s dark eyes follow the trail of vehicles.

  “From the newspaper,” he says, part question, absently, to himself. “You wrote that in the paper.”

  The gardener says, “Maybe the power to the pumps went out in the storm.”

  I have a feeling of heat on my neck. I say, “Maybe another levee broke in the storm.” It’s a minute, and I say, “One that’s maybe now releasing water into the highway.”

  The minister says, a moment later, “Could all of them be flooded?”

  It’s as if he is going to say more. But there’s a shared stupidity among us. A sense of waking from a dulled and empty sleep.

  “I mean, flooded,” the minister says. His feet continue dangling above the scene below. “I mean,” he says, and still there’s that sense that we are all waking up, “I mean, could all of them drown?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. I lean forward against the rail, then back. Look from the minister to the gardener. I say, “It seems impossible.”

  The gardener smiles slightly, barely glancing at me, but it’s a sick and distorted smile. “Of course it does,” he says.

  “How far below sea water are they?” the minister asks.

  “Many, many feet,” I say. “It’s a tunnel, really, an open air tunnel.”

  The minister says, “They should start to walk.”

  The gardener is leaning forward now, looking down over the guardrail. He cups his hands to his mouth. He yells, “Why did you come back?” He’s pointing at a man and boy now, the two of them sitting on the hood of a car. The gardener yells again, “Why did you come back?”

  They don’t answer. They seem not to hear.

  The gardener turns to us. “I saw him walking last night,” he says. “With that boy. Going east. Coming from the west. But now they’re back.”

  The gardener cups his hands to his mouth again and, once more, yells down to the man.

  The man looks up after a moment. He yells but we can’t hear him. The gardener shakes his head. The man yells again. And this time we can hear it. It’s a quiet sound, barely audible through the low rumble of the idling engines and the wind that blows past us and as I hear this man’s words I’m awake, I realize, now I am awake.

  “Because of the water,” the man has yelled. “The water, in each direction, it’s too high to walk.”

  The minister swings his legs back over the guardrail, landing on the overpass, heading now to a group of scavengers near the newly rebuilt guardhouse.

  And I realize that, once more, it is raining. It rains so much here, so hard, that it often goes unnoticed. But it is raining. It hasn’t stopped since the storm.

  “My oh my,” the gardener says and another time if I’d heard that I’d have thought it was a joke, his joke, an effort to make light. But it is not. “My oh my,” he says again, quietly, almost whispering. “My oh my.”

  Within ten minutes, scavengers have brought two ladders that they drop down to the highway. It’s sixty feet from the overpass to the surface of the road. The ladders all have three sections and some seem to have come from fire stations or fire trucks. The scavengers use heavy rope to secure the tops of the ladders to the guardrail on the overpass.

  No one on the highway moves toward the ladders. They stare at them. Some people roll down their windows and lean their heads out, staring, and other people just sit in their cars, pointing at the ladders. Talking. They discuss.

  A man and his two children step forward, the man helping his daughter, then his son, onto the ladder, then following them close behind. They climb for a few minutes, the ladder bouncing lightly but steadily with each step, the children pausing often, motionless as they speak back to their father, the man talking, coaxing, and then they climb again and even from the guardrail I can see that the boy’s eyes are closed and the girl’s hands shake wildly and the three of them are now fifty feet in the air and at the top of the ladder is the minister, smiling. Talking. “It’s okay,” he says. “Almost there. It’s okay.”

  Others have moved closer to the base of the ladders.

  Another child gets on a ladder, a woman behind him. A man behind her. They climb.

  And soon people by the hundreds are lined up at the ladders.

  And soon it is clear that the water on the surface of the highway is rising faster. Nearly a foot deep. Covering feet and ankles and the bottoms of tires and the bottom rungs of the ladders themselves.

  A levee must have broken. Somewhere far from here. But the water from that levee is bleeding into this trench

  The scavengers bring more ladders. Drop them down to the highway surface, secured at the top by ropes tied to the guardrail on the overpass, and how it’s possible the scavengers could have so many ladders is a question only the people down below would ask.

  Ropes are run down the center of the ladders, tied tight to the top rung and the bottom, and makeshift climbing harnesses are dropped to the people waiting and not all the people use them but some do strap themselves into the harnesses, then clip themselves to the safety lines.

  Ten, then fifteen, now twenty ladders are in place. They form a wall almost, a nearly continuous surface on which the people climb, three or four at a time, spread out across the length of ladders that bow and bounce with the weight of so many people climbing up them. It’s as if a fort or castle is being stormed by invaders. And the scavengers, in their worn clothing and hair stained gray and their skin that’s white with paint and gypsum, they stand at the top of the ladders, defenders awaiting the soldiers who’ve mounted their attack.

  Except these aren’t soldiers or invaders. They are just survivors. And when they finally reach the overpass, grasping at the guardrail as they reach the top, it’s clear these are not just survivors, they are refugees, who the scavengers and others from the North End must help from the ladders, talking to them about where to put their hands on the guardrail, where to step, holding the refugees by the hand, and others they lift, screaming, as they can’t get themselves free of the ladders, and others they have to help stand up as they fall forward over the guardrail, sprawled out onto the surface of the overpass.

  Some refugees hug the people who’ve helped them, weeping, arms wrapped tight around a tall and weathered person from the North End. Other refugees only nod. Still others turn quickly and run away, fearing what might happen even as they are saved by people from a place that they’ve long ago learned to fear.

  The scavengers and others from the North End just nod. Help each person stand up straight. Point them toward the south.

  And the refugees keep climbing. Gathered in a massive group on the highway floor. Pressing inward toward the ladders.

  And the water, it still rises. I see a man who’s submerged nearly to his knees. I see people lifting children to the hoods and roofs of cars.

  And I see that more and more people are coming from the east and west. The water there is getting higher, even higher than it is here.

  Many more people from the North End have gathered at the overpass. A kitchen of sorts is set up under a tent. People make soup and they make coffee and at first they serve this just to the refugees who’ve made it out of the highway. But soon brokers arrive, the brokers who buy from the scavengers most days, and with them they’ve brought huge boxes of containers of all sizes. Soup and coffee and water is put into the containers and taken to the guardrail and put into wooden crates that are lowered to the highway.

  More brokers arrive, their panel vans loaded with loaves of bread and cases of water and blankets and tarps to use on the overpass and to dro
p to the surface and the brokers also bring more rope, it seems there cannot be enough rope, as a group of scavengers sits in a large circle making harnesses, making safety lines knotted every three feet for grip, making large nets from the rope that are then used to wrap the food and water and blankets that are, again and again, dropped down to the highway.

  There are the disabled and elderly among the people down there and they’ve moved to the north side of the highway and it’s soon that the scavengers, not far from the highway, have built a kind of cage, a steel basket they’ve welded together in the street using the pipes and gear in the back of their trucks and now that cage drops down from a winch and boom they’ve set up, in a few minutes the cage rises up with an old man in a wheelchair, then an old woman too pale and weak to even walk and again that basket is dropped back down to the surface.

  There are buses I can see in both directions from the overpass. Passengers are unloading into the rain and water. Cars unload. Motor homes. A school bus, bright yellow, the students file out, two by two, holding hands, the teachers at the front and back of the line, there’s a decency in the crowd as the students are allowed to make their way to the very front of the mass of people.

  The climbing has been going on for hours.

  There are animals then, moving among the cars and people. Livestock released or broken free from massive trailers, so that chickens and pigs and cows move aimlessly between the vehicles, the cattle in water up to their bellies and the pigs have their snouts up in the air and the chickens hop from roof to roof and it’s not long before I see a man on a horse, riding slowly from the east, taller than anyone who walks this way and he does not stop at the overpass, does not even seem to notice the ladders or the people massed on them or around them, instead he only rides steadily forward, searching, I assume, for another way to get free, and it seems now to me that all has broken down in this timeless scene of desperation and escape, all who are on the highway living on the edge of a madness or chaos they can barely recognize as, still, the refugees only push slowly toward those ladders.