The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Listen, man. You can have our room,’ said Terry.

  ‘What?’ said the man.

  ‘Our room,’ said Terry. ‘We’ve only been resting for a coupla hours and we’re clearing out soon. Forget them: they’re so rude around here. Take our room.’

  When they arrived at the room Sam was combing his hair so that it sat round his head like a bowl. Delighted to see them, he gave them bottles of water and money out of his pocket. ‘You guys are so kind,’ Aimee said. ‘It’s just unbelievable, all this. And you guys are so kind.’

  ‘That’s awesome, man,’ her husband said. ‘We only have two hundred dollars between us and we wish we could do something for you guys.’

  ‘All we want to do is help,’ Sam said.

  It turned out the young couple had worked together at a bar called the Cajun Cabin in Bourbon Street – ‘the French Quarter’s only authentic Cajun bar and restaurant’ – a place with red-and-white check tablecloths and live music every night. But it was now under six feet of water, as was the Extersteins’ house. ‘It’s completely destroyed,’ Aimee said. ‘I didn’t even have time to get my framed pictures or any of the personal stuff. It’s all just gone for ever now.’

  ‘And when we went back to see if anything was salvageable,’ Cory said, ‘the door had been kicked down and it was obvious the looters had been there. My Xbox was gone. Aimee’s jewellery. Everything.’

  ‘They locked everybody inside the Convention Center,’ Aimee said. ‘It was just crazy down there. It was as if gangs had taken over New Orleans.’ They put the children into one of the beds and then hugged each other in the middle of the room.

  ‘I had to go into the bathroom and do stuff when they hugged,’ Sam said later. ‘It just choked me up to see them upset and it made me feel great to know we’d done something.’

  On the edge of Mississippi, Sam called his girlfriend to tell her what happened back at the motel in Birmingham. ‘We’re finally doing something,’ he said. Even in company, Sam always seemed a little lonely without his cell phone flipped out on his hand. Terry woke up and stared at the car in front. ‘Oh man!’ shouted Sam. ‘I see the whites in the nigger’s eyes! I sees the whites!’

  ‘You’re stoopid,’ said Terry. ‘Some things just ain’t worth get-tin’ upset about.’

  ‘I see the whites, muthafucker!’

  Snapped branches began to appear by the side of the freeway. Then the road signs started to look ragged and the fields blasted. ‘Hurricane territory,’ Terry said.

  The truck seemed to be moving faster as Sam began losing patience with his ex-wife. ‘Listen, young lady. You’re being rude! You’re cutting me off. Listen, you fat pig. You fat fuckin’ pig. I’m losing power here.’

  She wouldn’t accept that Sam was on a mercy mission. She thought he was bragging about what he had done, and she would rather he had gone back home and tended to his own business. ‘Listen to me and shut the fuck up,’ he said. ‘I don’t give a damn fuck what you put up with. You fat little piggy-piggy, stinky little pussy-pussy. Fat pig. Fat pig. Stinky pussy. I’m trying to talk, you fuckin’ pig. I just want to be an American hero. Yes. That’s why I wanted to be in the military. I would love to do something and be a hero.’ He then hung up.

  Terry and Sam talked a lot about the vehicles in front. One of the cars had a bumper sticker that said ‘Yee-ha Is Not a Foreign Policy,’ and Sam laughed at this at first, but then, correcting himself, he began to get excited as Mississippi Interstate 55 filled up with military Humvees. With an increasing number of bent or snapped trees lining the road, the military personnel whizzed past in the afternoon sun, wearing claret berets, designer sunglasses, and chewing gum like teenagers in an ad for American nonchalance. Sam bashed his fist on the steering wheel and whooped. ‘I say praise them all,’ he said. He beeped the truck’s horn and shook Terry. ‘Hey, bitch,’ he said. ‘I wanna flag. Reach out the window and grab the flag off the back of that fire truck.’

  ‘I wouldn’t touch that flag with a two-hundred-foot pole,’ Terry said.

  After giving his partner the finger Sam logged onto the internet, then he reached out and flipped open his phone. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I ain’t got a single bar on my phone. I can’t call out.’

  ‘Great,’ said Terry.

  ‘Fuck you, you black African-American bitch.’

  *

  When Hurricane Katrina grazed New Orleans, people thought the city had got off lightly. Trees were uprooted, some verandahs collapsed in the city’s older districts, shutters were blown into the street, windows were shattered in a number of downtown office blocks, but that first night, people were still drinking hurricane cocktails in Pat O’Brien’s bar in the French Quarter: four ounces of good dark rum added to four ounces of hurricane mix, garnished with an orange slice, a maraschino cherry, and tons of laughter into the night. It was only during the following days that the disaster put a stop to the music: the levees broke, and slowly at first, then very quickly, the bowl-shaped city began to fill up with water and then to drown in its own toxic effluent.

  The worst inundations happened in poor areas. Almost a third of New Orleanians live below the poverty line – 67 per cent of the population is black – and in the most densely populated areas the water, after several days, had flooded the houses past the second floor. Relations between the New Orleans Police Department and the city’s poorest citizens are notoriously bad: last year, according to the columnist Jack Shafer, when 700 blank rounds were fired in one of those neighbourhoods, nobody called the police. New Orleans’s homicide rate is ten times the national average. ‘Unless the government works mightily to reverse migration,’ Shafer wrote, ‘a positive side-effect of the uprooting of thousands of lives will be to deconcentrate one of the worst pockets of ghetto poverty in the United States.’

  As the days passed, the federal and local authorities that had ignored long-standing and much-publicised warnings about deficiencies in New Orleans’s system of levees took up a position that people quickly recognised as having about it the putrid odour of an old wound. Even Fox News, which found nothing particularly strange in the detention policy at Abu Ghraib, faulted George W. Bush for mouthing empty can-doisms while the mainly black people of deluged New Orleans were gasping for breath and water. As the city was plunged into several sorts of darkness, and people without cars or gas or money or health were abandoned for days at the city’s Superdome, the president flew above in Air Force One. His symbolic flypast offered a new perspective to those keen to know what America has become; for those in the filth and lawlessness of the Superdome, or those waiting on roofs for five days with no milk for their babies and no road on which to make good their escape, it was a vision of a president who could send 153,000 troops to the other side of the world at an official cost of $205 billion. That is what people know. They also know that if a category-five hurricane hit, say, the Hamptons, then Air Force One – to say nothing of every helicopter on the Eastern Seaboard, and every public servant – would be requisitioned to save lives.

  Two paramedics, in New Orleans to attend a conference, were caught up in the hurricane. ‘Two days after it hit,’ Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky wrote in a piece that appeared on the web a week or so after the hurricane,

  the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the windows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yoghurt and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90° heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, Pampers and prescriptions and fled the city. Outside Walgreens’ windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much promised aid never materialised and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organised and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily
chasing away the looters … We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.

  Eighty per cent of New Orleans was underwater by the third day. Both the Superdome and the Convention Center were full and hellish, and the buses that were meant to evacuate people didn’t come. Disaster relief became a matter of volunteers. In situations of panic and urban emergency – especially when those situations are comprehensively mismanaged – victims can come to seem like enemies to the authorities. FEMA exists to make sure that never happens, and yet, in New Orleans, this became the dominant theme. And the military, when it finally arrived, only compounded the problem. Any black person in a supermarket was assumed to be a looter. The devastation and chaos caused by the hurricane were understood – by FEMA, the government, the police and the military – as a threat not to life and limb but to law and order. People trying to set up camps on the freeway in order to survive were treated as insurgents.

  Sam and Terry were nervous when they arrived on the fringe of New Orleans. They had seen the reports about roving gangs, so Sam checked his gun and placed the bag around his neck as the truck approached a checkpoint. The state troopers were checking proof of residence and generally policing the traffic. The city was virtually empty by this point, and, off the record, troopers were saying that people remaining in New Orleans were to be treated with suspicion. ‘Hi, gentlemen,’ said Sam. ‘We’ve driven here from North Carolina and we want to help. I’ve got a chainsaw and a generator and plenty of water. Don’t know where the hell to start.’

  ‘Straight on,’ said the cop.

  The smell was immediate, bosky, swamp-like and dark-fumed. ‘You can smell death around here,’ Terry said.

  ‘Look up,’ said Sam. ‘Chinooks everywhere. Look at that, man. Twin blades. Awesome.’ (A lone buzzard flew underneath the choppers.) Everybody kept talking about the trees. They had been damaged or destroyed for hundreds of miles. In New Orleans, they all inclined the same way, in rows, like a cheap painting of Hawaii in the breeze. The truck was covered in love-bugs, and they swarmed outside too. Mating flies, they copulate on the wing, and Sam was having trouble making room for them amid the war-movie excitement and his wish to get things done. ‘I hate these goddamn fuck-bugs,’ he said. He crushed a pair with a paper tissue. ‘Look,’ he said to Terry. ‘They died in each other’s arms. Thought you’d like that.’

  Terry’s greatest concern in life is sex. He says so all the time. In the hour before they arrived at the flooded end of the Jefferson Highway, Terry said the word ‘pussy’ twenty-six times. At one point, waiting for gas, he rolled down the window as a young woman passed with a clipboard. ‘Mmmm. Uh-huh. I like it like that,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said, walking into the gas station.

  ‘I like its ass,’ he said in Sam’s direction, but Sam was on the phone. ‘I’m going in there to see what I can say to her.’ When Terry came back, phone-numberless but not in the least dejected, Sam chucked him a walkie-talkie he got at Wal-Mart and started to speak into the voice-piece.

  ‘Come in,’ said Sam.

  ‘Your mother,’ said Terry.

  ‘Your mother’s dick.’

  ‘And it’s a big one.’

  ‘Your mother’s a crack whore,’ Sam said.

  Over the highway, the McDonald’s giant yellow M was bent like a corkscrew. The power lines were down and the poles lay across the road or had crashed through houses. When their truck reached the first fully flooded area, Sam and Terry fell silent, as if awed by the scene or attending a church service. Sam kept his face close to the wheel as he drove the truck through the water. He stopped when he saw that to go further would mean getting stranded. Ahead of the truck, cars were floating or tipped on their sides against buildings.

  The houses were cheaply built and quick to turn to papier mâché. Yet it was obvious that not all the damage was nature’s work: cars abandoned at the side of the road had back seats covered with clothes still on their hangers with price tags attached. One of them had a pile of unopened CDs on the passenger seat. Terry got out of the truck and walked into the water. He met a guy called Terence who worked for the city’s road crew. He was wading though the water looking for relatives whose house was near the Jefferson Highway. The man’s friend and co-worker was keeping him company. He said to Terry, out of Terence’s earshot, that their supervisor had already been told that Terence’s family were dead. Nobody could face telling him. Sam beckoned a policeman and asked him what was happening. ‘Tell you the truth,’ said the policeman. ‘We don’t know ourselves. We don’t have a clue.’ He said they had pulled some bodies out from under the rubble at the corner of Cicero and Jefferson.

  The boys’ help was refused at most places. They went to the Ochsner Clinic Foundation and were greeted by a crimson-faced FEMA worker who was supervising the building of MASH tents outside the hospital. ‘We have electricity but no water,’ the man said. ‘The hospital’s full to capacity but we’re expecting more injured, so that’s the reason for the MASH tents. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just so confusing.’ Someone else told Terry that in one of the hospitals the patients had been abandoned in their beds as the water rose and the staff were forced to flee. (Forty-five bodies were later found at the Memorial Medical Center.) There still were people in many houses. Sam was growing indignant. He felt he was answering a historic call for volunteers, and now that he was in the embattled zone no one knew how to make use of him. At one point, with a police escort, he drove the truck to the temporary headquarters of the Fire Department. On the way they passed many houses with signs outside saying: ‘You Loot, We Shoot.’ The person in charge at the Fire Department was not encouraging either. ‘We just had a fuckin’ volunteer guy fall out of a fuckin’ tree and land on a chainsaw,’ he said.

  In some of the graveyards the coffins had risen with the tide and popped out of the ground, returning the bones and dust of the dead to the glare of the Louisiana sun. The climate was shot to pieces, yet not so much that the night air could fail to carry the scent of magnolia, or the same breeze now and then to lap prettily on the devastating waters. Every inch of New Orleans was a warning from Faulkner or Carson McCullers. The old, bleached hotels, with rotten water seeping up through their boards and plasterwork, were a series of flashbacks from Tennessee Williams; the floating chandeliers tangled with Spanish moss were Truman Capote’s; and the white-haired survivors, seeking a way out of town with their plastic bags of photo albums, were a tribute to Eudora Welty. It was the week Southern Gothic became a form of social realism, the grotesque and the biblical stepping out to fulfil an old legacy. But the aspect of New Orleans that will remain in the memory is the ghostliness: every citizen an image stranded at the centre of a civil rights mythology, a city of Boo Radleys, visible in half-light behind a series of splintered doors and broken windows, a thread of national prejudice travelling on the becalmed air and stinging the nostrils of those who once felt they truly belonged to the Big Easy.

  Standing at the top of one flooded street, Terry noticed a glinting light at the far end where furniture and cars were floating among the fallen trees and a premature mud of autumn leaves. ‘It’s a terrible smell,’ he said. The light was not a person flashing a torch as first seemed possible. It was the sun glinting off a decapitated traffic sign.

  ‘Everyone’s gone, one way or another,’ said a man who came by with his wife. The man had owned a small post office behind the street. ‘It’s well hidden now,’ he said, ‘which might be lucky.’ New Orleans had become the thing that geological memory knew it to be – a voluminous swamp, a lake of reeds and tangled boughs, except that television sets and teddy bears and living people had got in the way.

  Sam wanted to be pulling people from the water: he saw himself as being part of American heroism, and the chaos he encountered, the lack of direction, left him stranded in doubt about the authorities and about himself. D
epressed, he stayed in the truck as Terry inspected the street.

  ‘Come back!’ Sam shouted as a group of black men suddenly appeared from a house and started walking in his direction. They loitered at the edge of the water and eyed the truck. Terry walked calmly back and when he climbed into the truck he saw that Sam had his gun out and was swearing over the steering wheel. ‘Let’s get the fuck away from here,’ Sam said.

  ‘The natives are restless,’ Terry said, opening a can of cold ravioli and eating it with a plastic spoon.

  The military stopped the truck entering another part of town. ‘There’s a curfew,’ the soldier said. ‘It’s not a good place to be.’

  ‘All right,’ Sam said.

  Further down the road, an old man wearing a hospital wristband was islanded on a grass bank. ‘I need help getting across there,’ he said. But the water stretched out in every direction with cars submerged up past their windscreens. His house was over there, under the water. The Salvation Army office was submerged too. Sam couldn’t do anything, so he tuned his walkietalkie to listen in to the military.

  ‘If civilians want to go in they can go in,’ said the crackly voice. ‘But they should know they’re not getting back here if they don’t have a county resident’s pass. Do you copy?’

  ‘Yip,’ said the second soldier.

  ‘Did you leave a copy of the evacuation route over there?’

  ‘I don’t know where it’s at. The press are renting a boat from a guy over here and using this patch of water to get to people and their houses and stuff. Is that OK?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. Over.’

  Helicopters were grinding away over the flooded Shell Oil Metairie Plant. ‘Life is full of important choices,’ said a sign on the oil plant’s gates. ‘Make safety yours.’ Sam’s head was turned up to the sky and all the helicopter activity. ‘That’s a Huey 204, man,’ he shouted. ‘They haven’t used them since Vietnam. I’m tellin’ ya.’