The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  No one goes down to the highway, even now as the water recedes. I have a thought that there should be owners looking for lost items and insurance adjusters readying claims. There should be reporters documenting what happened. Emergency workers retrieving the dead bodies I can see and those that I cannot.

  But there’s no one.

  I ask a scavenger why they do not go down to the highway to gather things from the wealth of items in the miles of deserted cars and trailers. But it’s a place of no interest to them, the scavenger tells me. She’s working at the guardhouse. “It’s an awful, haunted place,” she says, looking down at the highway. There is thin, knotted rope around her neck. She stands taller than me, it seems, but then I realize she is on her toes. I don’t know why. “All those dead animals,” she says, “men dead, women killed, children who drowned in their seats. The highway is diseased and decrepit and it will to us always be a place of decay and abandonment and death.”

  • • •

  There are more people here now, in the North End. People from the highway who went north not south. And people who have made their way across the overpass since the storm, escaping the violence and disorder in the South End. They come to the guardhouse on foot mostly, some pulling carts filled with their belongings or pushing wheelbarrows filled too and some even pull red wagons stacked high with bags and food and water.

  A few people an hour. Not a tide. Not an exodus. But, every day for two weeks now, they have arrived in the North End.

  I’ve come to the gardener’s courtyard. It is greener than I remember, maybe greener than it ever was, the tree in the center seeming taller and fuller and the leaves so brightly fertile that it feels like they are growing, now, as I watch them.

  I find the commissioner is here, not the gardener.

  “He’s gone to talk to the scavengers,” she says to me. She is sitting in one of the chairs near the table, a blanket across her lap. There are newspapers on the table, I see my photographs on a page, but there are papers from elsewhere too.

  I don’t want to get close enough to see even a headline.

  I’m sitting near her, the water in the fountain pouring quietly nearby, the water rolling lightly onto itself.

  “The scavengers are planning to burn down that neighborhood soon,” she says. “The one they’ve scavenged and cut off.”

  I nod and we are quiet. Flowers have bloomed, growing high enough that I can’t see from this side of the courtyard to the other.

  It’s a minute before I realize something’s different about the commissioner. She is usually fast to talk, to ask questions. To try to get information from me and everyone.

  But now she sits in the chair, cross-legged under the blanket, and I realize she looks different somehow, her hair down across her shoulders and she leans back as she sits and she wears a man’s jacket. The gardener’s, it must be, and it’s another minute when I realize that she’s been here since the storm.

  “There are people crossing the overpass,” I think to say. “From the South End. Escaping, it seems.”

  She stares down at her hands in her lap. Nodding slightly. “I’m sure they are,” she says. “The South End is coming apart. The chaos, the violence, it was something I’d never thought I would see.” She looks up at me. “It’s dying there. In a way that can’t be undone.”

  Some part of me does wonder if, were I a different person, the commissioner would have come to stay with me.

  But the thought is distant. A question, not an emotion.

  “I thought I could come here to the North End to help,” she says. “I thought the South End had something, much, to offer you here.”

  I reach down to pick up a leaf, green, that’s blown from the tree. “The South End has been dying for many, many years,” I say.

  She nods. She has blue eyes and is quite beautiful. More so now, here, in this courtyard and without the questions and the need to find a solution.

  But that too is not an emotion. Only a thought that comes to me. Like how I wonder also if, in another place, I would have gone to her.

  The gardener arrives and he pats me on the shoulder and sits down near the commissioner and smiles at her, only slightly, and begins to talk about the scavengers, their plans for the neighborhood, but I’m not able to listen. Because I am having more than a thought now. I am having a feeling that rises in my chest, to my neck and jaw.

  Happiness, in this moment.

  Happiness, for this man and woman.

  • • •

  Things have started to change. The pace of things. The pace of life here in the North End.

  Weeks go by and those weeks now seem like days.

  A small outdoor market opens near the church, across from the corner store, selling vegetables and bread and meat and cheese. Food of a type and quality we’ve never had here. It is run by a scavenger whose left leg and left arm are cut off. “Lost them in some house,” he tells me. “Tangled in the cables that lifted the walls from their foundation.”

  He has a prosthetic arm and leg, though, and makes his way around his market with relative ease.

  Most of the food he sells is grown here in the North End, he says. They’ve been expanding their gardens as quickly as they can. Even the dairy products come from animals that a group of scavengers are raising. Only the meat comes from elsewhere. “But we have a plan for that too,” he says to me.

  The corner store closes within a week.

  It had never occurred to me that food could be grown here. I had only just begun to accept the presence of trees and plants and flowers.

  “Don’t the animals, the cows,” I ask him, “don’t they try to get away?”

  “They did,” the scavenger says and he has the monotone voice all of them have and he stares right at me as he speaks. “Until we put them near a garden. Let them move among the plants. That’s what calmed them down. Being among the living.”

  A young man shows up at the paper, standing in the doorway as I work on an article. “I can write,” he says to me after a moment. “I can help.”

  The office manager turns back to her typewriter.

  It’s a few moments before I nod, then I tell him to come back the next day with a story.

  He does. A story about new people moving into the neighborhoods along the grand boulevard. Refugees from the storm have taken over some of the oldest houses.

  The reporter, he comes back every day now, with stories about people who are new here. About where they are from and where they’ve now chosen to live.

  He cleans up the office as well. “Can I clear out these files?” he asks me, standing next to a set of file cabinets filled with old advertising contracts and accounting records. After a moment, we say he can.

  He cleans the windows and scrubs the blinds and wipes down the desks and tables and chairs, carefully, slowly, using cloths he rinses every ten minutes or so.

  It’s hard not to be surprised by the care he shows for what he does.

  The gardener tells me that more people come to him now, asking for help with planting things, and soon he sets up in a vacant building near the church. It’s an old brick building, one story high, with no roof anymore so that when you pass through the front door you enter a space filled with shrubs and flowers and trees and the tools to plant those things. But you don’t realize you’re still outside until you look up and see the sky.

  The woman and her boy work here. The woman, the gardener tells me, has an instinctive understanding of vegetables and fruits and flowers especially. “It’s quite remarkable,” he says.

  The boy works with her, moving quickly to stock and restock shelves, to bring plants in from the back of the building where they are dropped off by scavengers. He pushes a cart filled with plants, he carries bags filled with seeds, he organizes shovels in piles that are grouped by type and size.

  The woman smiles some as she watches him, then turns back to helping to load plants onto the cart of a person who’s asking her for help. She tel
ls this person about spacing the plants apart, about watering, about digging holes of the right depth.

  She sees me near the front of the building, writing quickly in my notebook, and she smiles some to me as well, raises a hand, then turns back to her customer.

  I write this all up for the paper. The gardener’s store and the new market nearby and the scavengers’ plans for more food.

  The paper is bigger, now sixteen pages to accommodate the other reporter’s stories and the number of photos I like to run, and the papers, we print more of them now, but still all of them are picked up within days.

  I see them, these people who read the paper, watching them from the windows in my hotel room, high above it all.

  It’s much later that I realize I forgot to wave back to the woman.

  • • •

  I’m in the small boat from the warehouse. Once again heading out into the canals, this time to check on the flooding and the state of the levees. The gardener has come with me. He sits on the wooden seat in front of me.

  We leave little wake as we move through the canals and into areas flooded by breaks in the levees. I see the airport control tower ahead of us to the west and, in twenty minutes, we have reached what was once Runway 2. The water has covered another half mile of the airport. I see small waves lapping silently against the base of the control tower.

  We turn back east, toward neighborhoods north of downtown that have now been flooded.

  The gardener suggests going farther north. But I shake my head. “We can’t go that far,” I say. I’m picturing the neighborhood where I lived. Maybe the gardener is too, because he nods.

  In a moment, I say, “It’s just more of this.”

  There is a broken levee only a mile from downtown. A few square blocks of three- and four-story buildings are now flooded up to the middle of their second floor windows.

  “The water gets closer,” the gardener says, as much to himself as to me.

  We move along one of the original canals, heading again toward downtown. I can see my building just blocks away. There are houseboats, three old wooden houseboats, lined up along the canal. Although they are old, they haven’t been here till now. Then we see people. Coming out the door on the back of the first of the houseboats, a bright blue house with lights on inside, and the other two houseboats are painted bright green and bright yellow and other people come out from those houseboats as well.

  The gardener points toward them and I realize he wants to speak to them. I turn the boat that way and soon we slowly pull up alongside the first of the houseboats.

  A man, younger than us, leans down as we approach and I realize he’s ready to help us tie up. The gardener tosses him a line, in a moment reaches up as the man helps him onto the houseboat. I kill the engine, nodding slowly as the man now helps me up too.

  There are eight of them, living in these houseboats. There is handshaking and they offer up their names and they ask how long we have been here. Where we live. What brought us here.

  The gardener answers. He smiles some, nods, asks questions too.

  An unexpected normalcy, the pleasantries of greeting newfound neighbors.

  I’m standing behind the gardener.

  “It seemed, at this point, that a houseboat was the safest choice to make,” one of the men says, smiling widely, nodding toward the north. “What with the levees breaking not far from here.”

  They are from the South End. “She and I were in the storm,” the smiling man says, though his smile does fade some as he speaks. “We climbed out of the hellhole on the highway and decided right then, that night, that we would go north. Found this houseboat. Made contact with our friends who were still in the south and soon we were all here.”

  His wife is looking at me as he speaks. “You were there,” she says, eyes bright and she steps forward, holding me, a hug, and I’m slow to raise my arms. “You were there,” she says again.

  I’m in her arms and it’s not clear to me why.

  Her husband, smiling again, slaps my shoulder. “Yes, yes,” he says. “Goddamn. You were there at the top of that ladder. You helped us over the rail. Goddamn.”

  “He was there the entire time,” the gardener says. “Seventy-two hours.”

  I look from the gardener to the people around me. The woman kisses the side of my face, damp and warm and I’m frozen in the moment. She is wiping her eyes.

  In a minute, I say, “Anyone could have been at the top of that ladder.” I’m still looking around at them. “There were lots of people there.”

  The gardener starts to talk, about that night, and I still feel where she pressed her lips against my face, how she pressed herself against me, and it’s been many years since I’ve felt another person near me.

  Two children appear on the roof above us, leaning their faces over the edge and peering down at us. The woman, she absently reaches her hands toward the children on the roof. The boy jumps and she catches him, staggered only slightly by his leap, then she swings him down to the floor. The boy runs inside. The girl, though, stays up top, still leaning her head over the edge. Peering down at the group, particularly the gardener and me.

  I’m staring, I realize. And I’m silent. The others are all still talking, I hear the sound of voices, but I am only staring. At where that boy disappeared into the houseboat.

  My eyes drift up to the girl still watching all of us below.

  I suppose I remember helping these four over the guardrail. Four faces among thousands who climbed, desperately, upward on those ladders, wet and filthy and falling down as they reached the overpass, so many would fall down, gather themselves, their wife or husband and the children around them, thousands, each one staring upward as they climbed and these people were among them and in some way I remember each person I helped even as each person became one in the mass of movement and salvation that occurred in those hours.

  The girl is staring at me from the roof, crouching now, on her feet. She nods at me and I don’t know why but I lift my arms, instinct, as she jumps to me. She grips me tightly as I catch her, then taps my shoulder, and I release, all of it is one motion, and the memory of lifting and catching and tossing children for those years is back on me at once.

  The gardener holds my arm as I turn away, stepping down into the boat, sitting now, staring at the rope tied from this boat to the houseboat, it’s slack then moments later it goes tight, slack again, then tight, and I sit there, silently, I mostly close my eyes, until a few minutes later the gardener has gotten in the boat, started the engine, and then we turn and leave.

  • • •

  More people move into the neighborhoods along the boulevard leading from downtown to the old neighborhoods.

  More houseboats are reclaimed. Groups of three and four people, all now living along the canals in and around downtown.

  More people make their way to the market downtown, to the vendors set up at tables nearby. Tables that are now stacked with more goods for these people who’ve come to the North End, more vendors who sell clothing and hardware and supplies that could be found in many of the abandoned homes.

  A vacant lot near the market downtown is being turned into a park. Scavengers help the people who are clearing the land of refuse, then begin to plant and shape and form a park with benches and brick walkways.

  I stand watching this in the street, making notes in my small notebook.

  Walking back from the newspaper toward my hotel, I hear something, sound, just a half block from the downtown corner where the market is and the church.

  The sound isn’t loud, but it is steady and it takes a minute for me to realize it is music.

  There is a bar, maybe, or is it a restaurant, set up between the brick walls of two buildings. Yellow lights like Christmas lights are strung in the air and there are tables, some wooden and others metal and chairs of every kind, hard wooden chairs and low deck chairs and a couch and a love seat and an ottoman and beach chairs that sit just a few inches off the ground
and there is even a chair still attached to a school desk, in which the minister now sits.

  He’s one of fifteen people here.

  The minister offers to get me a drink. I say no, but sit with him and the people nearby.

  “He’s the writer,” the minister says, introducing me. “For the paper.”

  And people, five of them, they nod and say hello.

  I have my notebook out and ask one of them about what they left behind in the South End. He shakes his head, confused. He says in a moment, “No, I didn’t come from the South End. I came from hundreds of miles from here. Trapped on that highway in the storm. But the city I left, we left,” he says, touching the hand of the man next to him, “it seems that it will be abandoned next.”

  He drinks from a coffee mug. Others drink from glasses of all sizes. A man behind a makeshift bar made in part from the hood of a car comes over, pouring some sort of whiskey into all of their drinks. The minister pays him money.

  “The rats,” the man in front of me continues. “The roaches. The animals that left this place, they didn’t all just die. They went to other places. Like the city we are from. Huge packs of dogs. Feral cats. The failed efforts of the city to wipe them out with poison, so many dead animals that they had to leave carcasses in piles on corners and overflowing from dumpsters and still the animals roamed the street.”

  “What you have in rain,” the man’s friend is now saying, “others have in heat and drought. Rivers turned to creeks or dried up completely. Lakes emptied of water, now dead valleys or dry plains. Uncontrollable fires and not just in the forests. Whole neighborhoods destroyed on the edges of big cities. Hillsides that should have never been occupied, even before the drought began, finally the fires could not be stopped, so that now those hillside neighborhoods are turned black and white, burned flat to the ground, they look like the landscape of some moon.”