The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  The other four adults around me all smile, drinking some sort of liquor the owner of this place has served us in mugs and wide, low jars.

  We’re outside, the ceiling having fallen and been cleared away and only heavy wooden beams cover us, the beams strung with small yellow lights in all directions, and above that is the sky just hinting at a sunless daybreak.

  My face and hands are dirty, I realize, only because I see these other people dusted and streaked even after we all tried to wash ourselves before leaving the neighborhood.

  The fire was loud and rolling and the heat drove most everyone a block away from the flames and even when we left, after the neighborhood had been leveled to the flat, blackened ground, still the heat reached a few blocks away.

  I drink. We all do. The four of them laugh and talk about the fire we started and the possibilities of what can come next.

  “I have a plan,” the gardener is saying, smiling. “For all of the North End.”

  He is rolling out a map on the top of the table, using people’s drinks to hold down the sheet, two feet by two feet, showing all of the North End. He begins to draw on it, roughly, creating large areas of green ink.

  “Parks,” he says, still smiling, almost laughing. “More room for farms. And over here,” he says, carefully holding the pen with the short nubs of his missing fingers, now drawing on the industrial zone, quickly covering it in green, “here we’ll put a forest.”

  The commissioner touches the map near the gardener’s hand. “A forest?”

  The gardener is laughing again. “A small one, yes.”

  The minister finishes his drink, turns and waves at the bartender. Another. “So are we doing this next week?” the minister asks.

  “Well,” says the gardener, looking around the table, “let’s just see how far we get.”

  The commissioner kisses him on the side of the face.

  The minister sips from his new drink.

  I wonder, somewhere in my mind, how much of this can happen.

  “What is that?” the woman asks absently, as the gardener draws a series of sticklike markings in the industrial zone.

  “Yes,” the gardener says, “right. Those are windmills.”

  The minister’s eyes get wide. He takes another drink.

  “You know,” the gardener says, “for power.”

  The minister shrugs. “Oh, right,” he says, nodding rapidly. “Of course. ‘For power.’”

  “At some point,” the woman asks, “won’t some of these things have to be paid for? The people doing the work. Doesn’t there have to be money?”

  The gardener is smiling again, again on the verge of laughing. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve got a plan for that too.” He looks around at each of us, then says, simply, “Taxes.”

  He is laughing almost wildly now. The commissioner holds his hand as she laughs too. The woman smiles as she watches them. The minister finishes his drink, waves to the bartender for another as, silently and repeatedly, he mouths the word taxes, and the wildness in the gardener’s laugh is the drinking and the wiry exhaustion of being up all night and it’s the neighborhood we’ve burned down and the vision he’s laid out matter-of-factly for us, and all of it, here, at this hour with these drinks with these people in front of me, I wonder if it’s possible that the gardener’s plan will come true.

  It doesn’t seem possible. But I know what I want. I want this to come true.

  “Once more,” the woman says to me quietly, “I see you smile.”

  I nod some and feel myself smiling, then stopping, and I sip from a new drink. “I suppose,” I say, not sure what other words to speak.

  “What about an amusement park?” the minister asks loudly. “Or a roller coaster? Do your plans contemplate that?”

  The gardener smiles at him.

  “Or a zoo?” the minister continues. “Personally, I’d love to be in charge of the zoo.”

  I drink again, a third drink probably or maybe it’s a fourth and now I laugh at the prospect of the minister running a zoo, laughing like the gardener is and the commissioner is and the woman near me too.

  The minister says, “Maybe the scavengers can find us a hippo.”

  I drink again, in the laughter of these people around me, drinking now and leaning back and above us the sky is turning brighter with daylight above those clouds, but for a moment it’s different, here under the old wooden beams above my head and the hundreds of yellow lights strung everywhere around me and it’s as if I can see sunlight, finally, there is a sunrise now, it was inevitable I suppose that these clouds would finally break and maybe now we’ll be a place that doesn’t always have rain and doesn’t always have clouds because there is sunlight, here, above me where I sit, and at some point all had to lift and all had to change, like words on a page that I can write and rewrite as I drink again, near the end, where all of this has been written in a manuscript in my hotel high above the ground where I sit, a manuscript, a book, and outside those finished pages everyone is still alive, she is and they are, all of them once more running in from the backyard, crashing into a house that is not underwater, that has never been burned, the girls Ellie and Carmen and boys Cole and Sam too, blue eyes and brown eyes and blond hair and brown, and Nora is here, in the house, our house where we always have been, only the darkness in my thoughts manifested on the page keeps them from being real, real to the touch and real in their sounds, their laughing giggling eruptions of sound as they climb onto me again, cling now to me as I hold her, each day, again, because as I look up at that sunlight and drink here in this chair, I know where they are now, exiled from me or me exiled from them, as it’s my choice to stay here, it always has been, to live in these ruins apart from my life that goes on, it’s only written this way, by me, my choice, their deaths only something I have put into words, nightmares on a page from which you inevitably awake, leaving behind my fault and my blame and a turn of plot too sad and dramatic and awful to be real.

  “What happened?” she asks and past her head I see now a calendar on the wall. The date, today’s date. Clearly visible to me.

  The others are here. Also staring at me. “What happened?” she asks.

  And next to the wall I see the water, as always, seeping down through the cracks in the mortar and bricks, this building like all of them bleeding endlessly with rain, the same rain that falls lightly on my face and my arms and my hand where it holds that drink.

  “Tell me,” she says, leaning forward, and the boy is awake now, still curled into a ball, but staring up at me like all of them stare, though the boy doesn’t blink, instead simply knows, and understands, and the sunlight I see is only a yellow bulb on a string, suspended so delicately above his small, fragile body.

  “Tell me. What happened?”

  And this is why I can’t sleep more than an hour and can’t be among people and can’t drink any more than the one drink I allow. Because it takes me somewhere else, a place where I’m forced to use names I’ve created, fictional representations of the people who died.

  That’s how I know this moment is real, here in the rain under another gray sunrise over this place where I live. I still can’t say their names.

  EPILOGUE

  We thought there was something in the ground that was killing us. But what’s killing us is ourselves.

  The minister tells me this. The gardener agrees.

  I write this in my notebook. Even though I’m not sure it’s true.

  Water, icy, I drink it from the tap, rinse my face and push it through my hair into my scalp.

  The office manager doesn’t come to work one day. I see her near the market. I see her headed toward the neighborhoods to the east. We nod when we see each other. But there’s no need to speak.

  The new reporter, the young man, he begins to do the work she did. To enter my stories and his own into the Linotype machine. To find paper and office supplies in buildings nearby.

  I’m not sure how to pay him. He says he doesn’t care
. But after a week I realize that there is money in a bank account down in the South End. My account. I can’t go there to get it. But the minister volunteers to help me. And so, each week, I now put a small amount of money in an envelope for the reporter, leaving it on his desk, and money for the pressman, I leave it on the heavy wooden cart down in the basement.

  They thank me, both of them, each week.

  I never once thanked the office manager.

  The reporter goes through the file cabinet filled with my notes and files. He asks if he can use them and it’s a moment, I have to stop and think if he’s asked me this before, then I tell him that yes, of course he can.

  Standing at the windowsill of my hotel room, I find a spider web. I touch it, very lightly, and the motion spreads through the thin white strands immediately, the tiny spider in the corner clenching, retreating, then in a moment stretching out its legs again.

  I see birds, half a mile away, released suddenly from the aviary, a small mass of flying bodies lifting up into the sky.

  The minister has started sprinkling seeds on the debris and abandoned vehicles down on the highway. Plants grow in places, from the hoods of red cars and the broken windows of huge trucks and from the pale and sunken carcasses of cattle. Passersby in their vehicles all stare at these plants and if they were able to go faster I think that they would, but instead their cars crawl forward, stopping and starting and to walk would be faster I’m sure.

  I hold a dead frog in my hands. Found in my playground. Among the ivy near the wall.

  I bury it. Quickly. Not ready to tell the gardener. Or anyone.

  In the library, I wake up in the atrium, and there are other people here, working, reading, some just wander, and I realize I can’t sleep here anymore.

  I load the boat with an extra can of gas. A set of blankets. Water and food. I’m headed north. I can see the first of the windmills in the industrial zone as I pass, tall and white and turning steadily in the wind that does never seem to end here. The scavenging has moved into the factories nearby. They hold a wealth of materials, mercury and iron and copper and even gold, in small amounts that, once accumulated, have tremendous value.

  The brokers tell me that their buyers wonder where all these things could possibly be found.

  The woman and her boy are with me in the boat. The boy rides in the bow, leaning over the edge, dragging his small fingers across the surface of the water.

  We cross through broken levees. Follow the bare outlines of canals. We pass through neighborhoods flooded to the second story windows. It’s a full hour before I can hear the sound of the bay. The low waves, the sea smell, a sense that the horizon has finally emptied of all its distant objects.

  The neighborhoods here are almost completely washed away. Few houses or buildings still stand, the street signs bend down to the surface of the water, or are submerged completely. Streetlights and old trees are all pushed at an angle, worn down by the water and constant low waves, everything losing its fight with the tide.

  The dark bay stretches off as far as I can see, disappearing where it joins the equally gray clouds at the horizon.

  The tall cranes at the port still reach high up into the air. They were built on high ground. But one crane is bent sideways, sinking toward the warehouses and stacks of containers that all drift slightly to the side.

  The zoo is still here, and the small amusement park too.

  I’d thought they’d been torn down. But they remain, half flooded, at the far end of the port.

  A huge ice-cream cone sticking out of the water. The metal arms and seats of a Ferris wheel whose base is lost to the waves. The wooden scaffolding of a small roller coaster now sagging down upon itself. The concrete walls between each animal’s cage, cages filled with water that flows easily through the rusted bars along the front.

  She tells me her boy has never been to a zoo.

  I tell her I have always hated the zoo.

  He stares from the bow, his chin on the edge of the boat.

  We circle the zoo again.

  Circle again.

  We spend nearly an hour only circling.

  Still I live with the box of things I don’t touch. And the photo album I can’t open.

  I look down toward the people moving toward the market and the church.

  My world is not theirs and theirs is not mine.

  But I go down there, for just one drink, that’s still all I can have.

  And if I’m down there walking and I hear the sound of music and people behind me, I’ll find myself walking into the dark and unlit streets that lead home, and I’ll think that I have to move. Farther north. Away from all of this. Finding a new place to live. Another city that’s been abandoned. A place like this once was, the city where I’ve lived for the six years since they died. My place. My purgatory. It can continue.

  I am crippled, really. By what happened to them in the fire. But maybe even more so by how I have chosen to live since they died.

  I don’t move on, though. Instead I stay here. Alone in this building. I see the church and market and the playground, my playground, once more blooming again. I go down there sometimes and live among those people. I find I can write better in a place that is loud. And now, sometimes, they even come here. To my hotel room, the six of us, a gardener and a commissioner, a minister and mother and with her there’s her boy, all broken, shattered people, standing here, silent, as we look out at our city through these tall and open windows.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli for her commitment to and belief in this book. Thanks so very much. Thanks to Maxim Brown and Cal Barksdale at Arcade Publishing, and a special thanks to Emily St. John Mandel, who’s always been so supportive of the author’s writing, and Minna Zallman Proctor, editor of the Literary Review, who has published so many of the author’s short stories, including “Why I Stay,” parts of which made their way into this novel. Thanks also to the journals Mud Season Review and District Lit, which also published short stories that appear, in part, in this book.