The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  And still it rains.

  And still the water rises.

  And still no one from the south has come to help.

  In the evening, the streetlights turn on, flooding the highway in a coldly green and barren glow.

  The rungs of ladders break and the people on them scream and the people above the break manage to get to the top and the ones below, saved by the safety lines strung along the full length of the ladders, they are forced to return to the bottom. The broken ladder is pulled up and a new one is immediately dropped down to the highway, the scavengers taking the broken ladder to yet another workspace they’ve established, mending or discarding the broken sections they’ve just salvaged.

  I see the office manager and the garbage man, both in the community center, two of many tending to the wounded on their cots.

  I see the pressman and the woman from the water pumping station, two of many loading food and water into a crate, then helping to lower it down to the highway.

  I see the gardener helping to build more tents near the overpass.

  I see the minister, still, at the top of the ladders, I don’t think he’s left the guardrail yet, instead he’s been talking endlessly to the people who climb away from the surface. “You’re almost there,” he says, again, once more. “It’s okay. You’re almost there.”

  I see the commissioner arrive. Running from the South End and looking down at the rows of ladders and the mass of vehicles and the people all making their way toward the overpass.

  The gardener goes to her. “When will help come?” he asks.

  She stares at him. He touches her arm, pulls on it lightly, but still she only stares.

  “Help,” he says. “When will help come?”

  Her face is wet with rain but she is crying, I realize, I can see that she is crying. She stares at the gardener, shaking her head. Only shaking her head.

  No one will come.

  The minister has been watching her. He turns to me and there’s a low, bad smile on his face. A smile of sadness and despair and probably disgust and he turns back to the guardrail, moving from one ladder to the next. “You’re almost there,” he says, to the people climbing. “You’ll be fine. You’re almost there.”

  I mostly help as people climb over the guardrail or help the frail emerge from the steel basket on the winch. But I take time to move among everyone on the overpass. To take notes in my notebook. To take pictures with my camera.

  “Document this,” the gardener has said to me. “You really must document what is happening.”

  I take photos of faces as they climb up the ladders. Photos of the scavengers. Of the people who cook. The livestock between the cars. The men and women who’ve come to help. I load new film into the camera, more often than ever before pulling the plastic rolls from a knapsack, one filled with the film I found in the studio some weeks ago.

  People fall from the ladders to the highway surface. A few have done so in the twenty-four hours we’ve been doing this. They’ve not worn a harness and their hand slips from a rung and they fall to the ground and die.

  There are screams when this happens. Family and friends go to the body where they’ve fallen. The crowd moves away. And, soon, the family and friends do too.

  There is, really, nothing else they can do.

  Because still the water rises.

  Still, people climb.

  There are forty ladders now. The water is nearly four feet deep. The animals swim east or west. The people on the highway make their way through the water, hundreds of them from both directions, slowly approaching the crowd at the ladders.

  People from the North End still converge on the overpass, helping people over the rail, helping people in the tents, helping the scavengers with their ropes and cages and winches.

  And at some point in the night, some sixty hours since the storm first hit, I realize that it’s not just that no one from the South End has come to help. I realize that no one, from anywhere, has come to help.

  A fight breaks out at the base of a ladder. There is screaming there, and pushing, two men shoving their way to the front of a group. I watch a scavenger see this happen. She steps up onto the guardrail above the fighting, leans over as if she’s going to dive but instead grabs the side of the ladder, swinging around to its underside, where she begins to slide, down, past the people still climbing on the top side of the ladder, and the scavenger slows just barely at each of the sections where the ladders meet, and when she nears the bottom she lets go, landing now on top of one of the men pushing forward.

  He falls. She kicks him in the head. She turns to the other man who’d been pushing forward. She hits him in the face. Hard. One punch. He falls too and she kicks him in the head also.

  The mass of people steps back. But only slightly. They are packed so close together. The scavenger watches the two men where they lie on the hood of a car.

  Then the scavenger grabs hold of the underside of the ladder, climbs upward, two rungs at a time, it takes her twenty seconds to reach the overpass again.

  Soon the crowd moves forward, over the men she knocked down, the bodies pushed into the water by the collected movement of the people.

  Fog descends. It spreads across the overpass into the trench, the cars and trucks and the people and animals all soon disappearing and there is a moan that becomes nearly a scream as the people on the highway can no longer see the walls of the trench or the people around them or the ladders they need and the overpass above them that they want so badly to reach.

  For a few minutes, the tops of the ladders are empty. The climbing has stopped. But then the people begin to emerge from the fog, rising to the top of the ladders, now even more panicked and wide-eyed than those who preceded them, looking back into the thick mist, shaking as they try so hard to stand, grasping the hands of anyone on the overpass who can help, the gardener is there and the minister and the commissioner too, the commissioner as panicked and wild-eyed as the people she helps over the rail. Not one of us in the North End, after all, has so recently lost so much.

  And hours later, when the fog dissipates, it’s clear that the water is deeper. Five feet now. And rising still.

  I take more pictures. I pull more people over the guardrail. I hand out water and coffee and food as men and women and their children finally stand, dumbly, on top of the overpass.

  I move through the medical tents where people lie out on cots, their heads bloodied and arms broken and some spit blood into containers at their sides, many injured from the wrecks that happened in the storm so long ago. People from the North End move among them, offering water and food and whatever medical attention they can. The minister comes through, helping with the injuries; he was a mortician once and is now the best medical help we have.

  And now I see the woman and her boy. They go from cot to cot offering blankets and water and I’m frozen, crouching, camera in my hands, knowing the two of them left many months ago, they aren’t here anymore. But I can see them. Near me. And I wonder for a moment if I’ve only imagined their absence.

  The boy runs into me, as I stand from kneeling, putting my camera away. The boy looks up, sees me and there is panic in his eyes as he pulls away and then he looks at me again and, for a moment, there is something like a smile. I touch his head. Before I know what I’d meant to do.

  “How are you?” I ask.

  He only stares up at me. Eyes dark. Blinking. It’s a long moment, stillness in the fray of so much motion and worry and suffering around me, but now he pats my hand. Then points to his mother. Behind him. She stands near a set of cots filled with a mother and father and their many, many children.

  I stare toward her. The room is loud, filled with the noise of motion and moans and the cries of people in pain.

  I turn to look down at the boy. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Looks around the room. Then he pats my leg, lightly, and he moves on to get fresh blankets for the new people who have entered the tent.

  The wo
man is watching her boy, as he goes to help others around us.

  She glances at me. I hear her voice. “There was nowhere to go,” she says, staring right at me. “Nowhere better to be.”

  I am back at the guardrail. Taking pictures. Then helping a man and a woman over the rail.

  There are people from other places who climb up those ladders. People not from the South End. Some get to the top and look north, with a fear similar to what they’d felt on the highway. “That’s the North End, right?” I hear a man say. “My god,” he says, “what if they come down here,” he says, pausing. “And see what you are doing?”

  The minister smiles at him. “Welcome,” he says. “Welcome to the North End.”

  But some of the refugees turn north, not south when they’ve reached the overpass. Scavengers point them the other way. “That’s the South End,” they say. “Don’t you want to go south?” But these few refugees shake their heads, point north. “No,” they say. “No. There’s nothing in the south. Nothing for me. I want to go north.”

  The brokers bring more tents, large military tents that they set up on the north side of the overpass, in the remnants of a park across from the community center. The tents are meant for the people passing through, people who don’t live anywhere near here, for whom the South End is not home.

  The water has covered the windshields of cars. And still people are coming. Fewer now, but those who do must jump from vehicle to vehicle or simply swim in the spaces between the cars, even though the animals now, the cattle and chickens and pigs, they fill the spaces between the vehicles with their wild movements, their panicked noises, so that it is safer to move from rooftop to rooftop, bypassing the livestock who will very soon drown.

  I see a woman on a ladder with a baby stuffed into a backpack on her chest, the baby’s head sticking out, looking around in wonder and confusion. I see people moving toward the crates and nets that, still, drop food and supplies to the highway, to a flatbed truck where the supplies are stacked before being given away, and now a man tells his children, four of them, to get into the net to be raised to the overpass, and they cry and they scream but they get into the net, bundled up, smashed together, their faces pressed against the ropes as all four are now raised to the surface.

  Air-raid sirens lift, screaming across the North End, and for a moment the people on the highway stop in place, look around, thinking this is the moment when help has finally come.

  But of course it is not. Instead the sirens are again only sounding off on their own schedule, as always disconnected from the reality of the scene.

  There’s a current to the water now. It flows, quickly, from east to west. The cattle stand still, the water pressing against their chests and snouts, the small cows already beginning to fall. The pigs can’t fight it anymore and, soon, all turn with the current and sink. Chickens float toward the overpass, from the east, a body floats with them, a woman or a man and those few hundred people still left on the highway step slowly aside, letting the body pass, silent, and when it’s gone the people all move forward once more, waiting their turn to climb up those ladders.

  CHAPTER 11

  A week later, the cars and trucks and buses still lie ruined and abandoned in water three feet high. It peaked at six feet. Now it’s a liquid junkyard strewn with empty crates that once held food and water, with shreds of rope and crates and safety lines, with the still-swollen carcasses of dead cattle and pigs and chickens.

  The ladders are all gone. The winches and tents that had been set up on the overpass, they’re all gone too. The scavengers and brokers have taken their gear back to wherever it is they store their things.

  The quiet on the overpass is still jarring. The absence of that solid, seemingly unbreakable sound of traffic.

  I lean over the rail, looking down, taking a photo of a man’s body bent horribly across the roof of a car, one of at least ten bodies I can see, and I feel like the sound of the highway will return any moment, rising up from below, as if the sound were disconnected from the traffic that once passed.

  But it doesn’t.

  • • •

  I am looking through my photos of the night with the ladders. I used nearly twenty rolls of film. Now I stand at one of the big wooden layout tables in the office. Photos, hundreds of them, are spread out across this table and another next to it.

  The rows of ladders strung down from the overpass. The scavengers in their circles building more ladders to replace those that had broken. The sparks from the welding gear as large baskets were being built. The winches to drop the baskets to the surface. The stripped-down frame of that black van now placed on its pedestal at the southern end of the overpass. The stretchers and cots in the tents where the injured had lain. The faces of broken, frightened people emerging from the fog.

  I’ve been sorting through the photos for hours. Trying to narrow them down to just the ten or so that will fit in the paper.

  I see the pressman is near me, at the other table, looking over the photos. I’m not sure how long he’s been there. I glance at the old clock on the wall. I’m an hour late getting him pages for the paper.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  I’ve never seen the pressman up here in the office.

  He’s a white-haired, small and strong man wearing reading glasses. He shakes his head lightly.

  Not a problem.

  Still he looks at all the photos. I’ve arranged them in groups of eight or ten. Trying to find some order to the photos. Some are sorted chronologically. Some are focused on the types of people—scavengers versus the refugees, those who work and those who run to the south. There are scenes of night and of day. Images of the highway chaos and the loosely ordered kitchens and medical tents and sleeping areas built on and near the overpass.

  I say to him, “Trying to figure out which photos to run.”

  He touches the pictures lightly, at the edges, shifting them slightly, gently. Studying each one.

  He says after a minute, “Why do you need to choose?” He turns to me. He pushes his glasses onto his forehead with thick, worn fingers stained gray with ink. “We should run them all.”

  There are extra paste-up boards in large bins along the wall. I’ve never put together a paper bigger than eight pages, but the pressman now sets up the boards for a forty-page edition. We begin to place the photos on the boards, the pressman pulling a razor blade from a drawer and cropping photos on a mat, his hands moving quickly, cutting in perfect lines without a guide, turning the photos three times, three cuts, and then placing that photo on the board. The office manager is at the table now, next to him, and she begins to glue the photos to the boards and I am still grouping photos together, eight or ten to a page, and as I see the pressman and office manager work, I realize I don’t need to worry about any sense of order.

  The order is there, in the madness of the scenes these photos have captured.

  We don’t finish the boards till midnight, the three of us then carrying them down to the pressroom and the pressman first converts the boards to film, then to metal plates that he wraps around the press drums, and the office manager and me, we help some, where we can, but this is the pressman’s work.

  He has the press set up and running in less than an hour, all five units now turning in sync, the paper pulling through the rollers, and soon papers of forty pages are coming off the end of the line. Pages that include a photo of the office manager, I realize, and of the pressman, each of their faces like the hundreds of others, all racing through the rollers on the press before being folded and cut and turned into a newspaper.

  He prints twice as many copies as usual. The office manager and I help him load the papers into the delivery truck, then ride with him around town, daylight breaking behind the thick layer of seamless clouds, all of us loading the news boxes, there are nearly fifty of them across the North End, and the office manager and I sit together with the pressman in the front seat of the truck as we drive through the city.

>   The three of us hardly talk all night, even as we put the last of the papers into the last of the boxes.

  All the papers will be picked up within a day. We print again, a second edition, more copies this time.

  All those are picked up as well.

  I see people reading the paper. Standing in front of the corner store. Sitting on the steps of the church downtown.

  I had time only to write a single story, about the storm and the aftermath on the highway. It runs across most of the front page. But the rest of the paper is photos. Uncaptioned, all black and white, that’s what people are looking at, slowly turning the pages, the photos, page after page after page.

  • • •

  The minister tells me that the storm caused massive damage across the South End. Hundreds killed. Power cut to most of the area. Within an hour of the storm moving out of the South End, looting began, bands of kids and adults attacking shopping centers, restaurants, car dealerships, a school. Police chased and fought them, using water cannons and helicopters and SWAT teams in full attack gear. Looters were killed. Police were shot. Even a commissioner was beaten to death. As many people were killed after the storm as during. The conflict went on for two nights and days.

  “It was a civil war almost,” the minister says to me. “A full battle between armed and opposing forces.”

  More than a week later, the South End remains under curfew, with a massive police presence on the streets and with store owners and security guards camped out in the wreckage of their buildings.

  “It’s martial law, I suppose,” the gardener says. “It’s their only response.”

  We stand, the three of us, at the guardrail on the overpass.

  The water on the highway has receded another foot. Now the tires of cars are visible again, though still the water must be at least a foot deep. The highway’s engineering, its water pumps and drainage system, seem to be working. At the height of the flood, the water reached throughout the highway trench that borders the North End. In some places, the water covered everything, even the roofs of the cars and tops of the pickup trucks, the water flowing as if it were in a canal.