by Eric Nguyen
* * *
—
A loud scream like a battle cry wakes Ben up.
But he’s not in Paris anymore. He’s back in New Orleans, back in Versailles and the house of his childhood, and nothing is out of place. Except the water.
He’s in his room and water is gushing in through the windows. The water is brown and smells like the bayou. It brings in twigs and branches and leaves; it brings in trash—plastic bags, candy bar wrappers, cigarette packs. Before he can think of what to do, he’s knocked over and is underwater. He gets up and pushes through to the door, and there, gripping the frame, he’s able to steady himself. The water’s already up to his waist.
Then, again, the piercing scream. He wades through to the hallway, holding the wall along the way. The wallpaper’s peeling. The hung pictures are falling down.
“Hello?” he yells back. “Is anyone there? Mẹ? T?”
He gets to the kitchen, and there the water’s bursting through the window, too. But no one’s there. Suddenly, the sink explodes with a deafening blow and more water spews up.
The apartment steadily fills with water as he tries to walk to his mother’s room. That’s where the scream must be coming from, he thinks. He can’t tell if it’s a woman’s voice or a man’s (Maybe it’s both, he thinks, two people screaming in unison), but he’s sure that’s where the scream is coming from.
He grips on to the wall and part of it gives. He slips as a wave pushes him back and his body plunges in.
No, he thinks. No.
He holds his breath.
Everything under is brown, murky. He tries to get back up, but the water is heavy. He waves his arms, his legs. He must move, he thinks. He tries harder, but it’s useless. He feels himself sinking deeper. His heart quickens. He needs to stay alive, he tells himself. He needs to get up. Why can’t he get up? He wants to scream—he feels like he needs to scream—but he can’t.
And somehow, the scream—the other scream in the other room—gets louder. It’s like someone is turning up the volume, and it’s all he can hear, this scream.
Sorry, he wants to say, sorry I can’t get to you.
And he opens his eyes, and the sun is still shining.
He’s in Paris again. He’s in the park, lying on a bench under the shade of a tree. Ben feels sweat on his forehead, the beams of sun baking his skin. He stands up and is amazed at the ordinariness of the day. A woman walks her dog. A man talks loudly on his phone. A group of runners jogs by. Like it’s any other day.
* * *
—
Vinh knocks on another house door. A car is in the driveway, though under a fallen tree. Someone has to be home. But would they let them in?
“We have to get to the Best Western. Near Touro,” Hương tells Vinh. “Tuấn’s there.” She dials his number and no one picks up. It lets her leave a message, but she doesn't.
“He’s safe,” says Vinh. “He’s found shelter. That’s what we need to know. We’ll meet him in the morning.”
“But—” Hương says.
“We’re in no condition,” says Vinh.
Then the door opens. It’s a silhouette that greets them.
“Who’s that?” It’s a teenage boy. Even in the dark, Vinh can see the boy’s wearing baggy clothes and that his posture is hunched.
“Our car, it crash,” says Vinh, pointing out into the road, though the car is nowhere to be seen. They’ve walked a long way. “Can we please come in, please?” He squeezes his grip harder around Hương’s hand. She looks at the flooded street. She imagines Tuấn in a hotel room, sitting away from the window, calling her but not getting through.
If only, she thinks, if only I can be sure. If only I can hear his voice.
“Please,” Vinh repeats.
“Marshall, let them in,” says a woman’s voice, “before the water comes.”
The boy’s stance relaxes and the door opens. Vinh and Hương walk in. In the darkness, Vinh sees a short Black woman holding a flashlight. There is also another child, smaller, a girl.
“Come in!” the woman says. She waves her flashlight to see their faces. “Chinese!” she says. She sounds delighted. The flashlight shines on the stairs. “We’re staying up there,” she says, “if floodwater comes higher.”
Vinh pulls Hương in. The teenage boy closes the door, delicately.
* * *
—
When the water is up to their knees, they hop off the bike and begin running. They’re running as fast as they can, but it feels like they’re going nowhere. The water is pushing them back; the raindrops are like BB gun pellets.
But with enough walking, the water subsides and they see in the distance a row of streetlights and houses. The electricity is a sign of safety. They stare at it as they trudge through. A mailbox floats by. A pink flamingo lawn ornament covered in mud goes after it.
Addy falls down and Tuấn comes and pulls her up. She’s breathing hard.
“Stay with me,” he says.
Even exhausted, she is beautiful. When she nods, he stands her up, and, arm in arm, they walk against the water’s current, against the wind. Everything is cold. Everything is freezing.
Tuấn thinks that if he survives, he’ll have a cold for a week. If he survives the cold, he will ask Addy to marry him. It seems like a fair idea.
After several more minutes of walking, they notice the water leveling off. Addy falls down to her knees again. Tuấn kneels down beside her.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “Babe?”
“I’m all right,” she says, “just exhausted.” She leans on his shoulder, panting.
“We should rest,” he says, pulling her up. He tries to think. Where exactly are they? He needs to call his mother, tell her their change of plans. “There’re houses up there. You see the lights?”
* * *
—
No one sleeps. Not the woman, not her son, not her daughter, not Hương, not Vinh. They pace the attic. They look out the window. They pace some more. The kids play card games and make shadow puppets with the flashlight until the mother tells them to stop wasting the batteries.
The woman turns on the radio. The radio is saying the same things over and over again: stay inside, get to higher ground, pray for New Orleans, pray. When she has had enough, the woman turns it off.
Hương thinks about Tuấn. She tries to call him, but nothing goes through, not even text messages. But it doesn’t stop her from trying several more times. She leaves a voicemail, hoping it will reach him eventually. Her mind turns to Bình. She wonders if she should call him, too, though she knows he’s in Paris. She’s thankful he’s not here, thankful he’s safe from all this.
She looks out the window: a black night now that the electricity everywhere is gone. She can’t see a thing outside.
She paces around the room, the worry in her restless. She watches the kids, the boy and the girl. They’re lying down now. The boy is playing with cards by himself. The girl has a small doll, which she rocks gently.
“Your kids,” says Hương. “So good! So quiet!”
“That’s because they’re stuck in the house with me,” says the woman. She claps her hands and laughs. She’s a good mother, Hương thinks.
“I have two sons,” says Hương. “They’re away.”
The woman’s face becomes concerned. “Are they out there?”
A car alarms goes off. Lightning flashes in the sky.
“They’re somewhere,” Hương says. “They’re somewhere.”
The woman shakes her head, comes over, and gives Hương a hug.
* * *
—
They find a house with a wraparound porch and three floors. Because the lights are still on, they are sure they will be let in. After several knocks and a ring of the doorbell, a man in a red satin robe gr
eets them.
“The storm,” says Addy. “There’s a flood down there.”
“Can we stay for the night?” asks Tuấn.
“Well, come on in!” answers the man. He has a high-pitched voice, a girlish manner. “You two look like drowned rats!”
Inside the house, they stay on the top floor. “Just in case,” the man says.
The man lives by himself here, has lived here all his life. Sometimes alone, sometimes not. He shows them a picture of his lover, who died in the eighties.
“When they announced the evacuation, I couldn’t leave,” the man says. “I just couldn’t! I have roots here. I’m a pretty flower. You can’t just pluck me out. I’m too pretty!” the man says. He laughs, and his laughter is so infectious, Tuấn and Addy laugh, too.
Together, they watch the news. The water is rising, it says, and it will continue to rise.
They’ve found safety, Tuấn thinks. They’re not out there. They’ll find his mother and Vinh in the morning. He hopes they’ve at least gotten out of New Orleans East. The bayou would’ve flooded by now. And those trees would have fallen in this wind. He knows the destruction of Versailles is possible, but he doesn’t want to think about it.
He calls his mother. It goes to voicemail.
“Ma,” he goes. “We’re on Coliseum Street at a nice man’s house. There’s barely flooding here. Give me a call when you get this, okay, Ma?”
They watch the news until it’s just repeating itself. There’s no new information. They’re all just waiting for it to be over.
“What will stop the water? What will get it to stop?” they all ponder aloud.
“Sebastian said we’d float,” mumbles Addy, more to herself than to anyone.
“Well, he’s got it wrong,” says the man. “New Orleans is more like a…more like a…” He twirls his hands in the air, trying to find a word. “It’s more like a bathtub,” he says.
* * *
—
The city is like a bathtub. The winds are the hands of a housewife. The water a mixture of tap and cleaning detergent. The housewife scrubs and scrubs. She is sure not to miss a spot. She wants to make sure no one forgets her name when she is gone and how good a housewife she was. She is bitter.
* * *
—
In the morning, there is a loud explosion. It shakes the house, sloshes the floodwaters, moves the earth.
“What was that?” asks the woman. She opens the window. Then she closes it and runs to the stairs.
“Water!” she yells. “There’s water in the house!”
Vinh runs to the stairs and sees water gushing in so fast it turns white. He sees a table floating like a raft. Then a vase. Then a floor lamp.
“The window,” says Hương. She walks over and opens it. For a second, Vinh thinks she’s going to swim away. When she lifts up a leg, he runs to her. Then he realizes she’s climbing.
Half of her body disappears from view, and then her legs are gone, too. The girl is next to go up, aided by her brother. He goes up after. Vinh tries to help the woman up, but she wants him to go up first. He obliges and she comes after.
The air on the roof is icy. Vinh looks out and sees all the water, all brown, all flowing like they’re in a river, but instead of rocks, there are cars and rooftops.
All of a sudden, Hương screams, “God, oh, God!”
The kids turn her way. The woman gasps and pulls her children toward her.
Hương points out into the distance, not ten feet away from the house. Vinh turns his head, and, to his surprise, there’s a body.
The body is a man’s, from what Vinh can tell. Dead for a while, probably. The body wears jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. There are no shoes and no socks. For some reason, Vinh thinks he must’ve had a hat.
The body floats facedown and continues moving with the current until its shirt tangles with the branches of a tree and stops. From the tree branch, it sways. Vinh imagines lungs full of water, lungs full of mud.
* * *
—
Ben walks up the stairs with a tote bag of groceries. He tells himself he should’ve brought two bags to divide the weight. He’s bought more than he should have, but at least they’ll be stocked for a couple of weeks. He stops after the second flight, takes a breather. He wishes they didn’t live on the top floor in an apartment building with no elevator.
When he gets home, he drops the bag in the front hallway and changes to sweatpants and a T-shirt.
He turns on the TV and begins unpacking. He’ll cook something simple tonight, he thinks. Maybe pasta with chicken. For dessert, fresh fruit. He puts on a pot of water, salts it. Preheats the oven.
On TV, a cartoon plays, something with badly drawn animals. He surfs the channels and sees a familiar talk show, something that looks like a British mystery, and a kids’ show with puppets. Then he stops on the news. The first thing he notices is that it’s New Orleans. Before he sees the text, he knows it’s the city of his youth. The surprise, though, comes when he realizes it’s flooding. No, not flooding—New Orleans is drowning.
He drops a metal pan. The sound of it crashing to the floor doesn’t take him away from the screen, where muddy brown water fills the city as far as the eye can see as people stand on top of houses and cars. The camera zooms in to a woman waving her arms. The clip switches to a video of a strong wind blowing against a tree at night. The tree bends and bends and finally snaps, colliding with a car. A boat evacuates a building. A helicopter hovers over a home.
Ben’s heart drops. He sits down. He feels himself getting hot and itchy. He gets back up and opens a window. He turns up the volume and sits back down. The images of New Orleans are replaced with a video of the mayor at a press conference.
“The City of New Orleans,” he says, before his words are translated by a French newscaster. Un ouragan, the newscaster says. Catégorie cinq. Inondation. État d’urgence. Levées. The video returns to collapsed houses and buildings and overturned cars and floating trash islands. People stand in lines and cry, hugging pillows, as if the floodwater hit their homes while they were asleep. Un désastre complet, says the newscaster.
Ben’s hands shake; his entire body is shivering.
And what of his mother? And his brother? There are no reports of New Orleans East, of Versailles.
He feels cold all of a sudden and walks over to close the window. It shuts suddenly and the windowpane startles him with his reflection.
The oven rings and the pot has boiled over. He turns it off and lowers the volume on the TV. He rummages through the kitchen drawers for an address book. They play the video of the tree and car again. They play the one with the boat and the people climbing off of roofs, holding plastic grocery bags of their belongings. It looks like it could be a different city, a different country, but it’s not. It’s New Orleans.
He picks up his phone and misdials the number several times until he finally gets it right. The phone rings and rings.
* * *
—
When the rain stops, the sun comes out. Water still flows in the streets, but it doesn’t look like anything more than what a heavy thunderstorm would bring. Tuấn and Addy thank the man for his help. He gives them cookies. They thank him again and leave.
Tuấn and Addy walk for several minutes.
“I thought I was going to die,” Addy says.
“It’s times like these that we realize how short life is,” he says.
Because of the debris—fallen trees and electric lines—they take the long way back—up through the Lower Garden District then east toward home. They are walking on an overpass as Tuấn checks his phone. The signal bar lights up the screen. It dings when it receives two voice messages, one from his mother and another from his brother. He’s about to press Play when he hears Addy gasp.
“Look!”
she says. “Look!”
Tuấn follows her finger and his heart stops when he sees it’s all rooftops and people small as ants. “Where’s the city?” he wants to ask. “Where’s New Orleans?”
The people are waving their hands. They are waving their hands and they are yelling.
* * *
—
They yell and wave their arms for help. But Hương doesn’t move. She stays seated on the roof, watching the dead body stuck in the tree. It waves with the current, but it’s stuck.
The others, including Vinh, are on their feet. The children tried to spell out HELP with their clothes but had only enough for HE. Now they jump up and down, hands in the air, reaching for the skies. They’ve seen two helicopters in the last hour, but neither has stopped.
“They’re ignoring us,” says the girl. “They don’t like us.”
“We just have to try harder. Jump higher. Scream louder,” says her brother.
When they see another helicopter, the two kids try to jump higher, try to wave their arms faster.
“Help!” they yell. “Help! Help! Help!”
“Maybe they don’t know we’re alive,” the girl says. “Maybe that’s the problem.” She takes in a lungful of air and lets it out: “We’re alive! Help us! We’re alive!”
The brother follows. “Help us!” they both scream. “We’re alive! Help us! We’re alive! Help us!”
The helicopter seems to float in the air, then it starts to descend. The kids get excited.
“Finally,” the girl says, and does a little dance. The sound of the blades spinning makes everything hard to hear.
“Hương, it’s here!” yells Vinh. “It’s over, Hương. It’s all over.”
The helicopter hovers over the house. They let out a rescue basket as a man talks through a megaphone.
