Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

He nods. “That will be fine.”

  She looks at his application again. Then at him. “Okay. We have to do background checks. Run your work papers. It will take a week or two.”

  He nods. “Everything will check out fine.”

  She looks at him. “I wish I had time to hear your story.”

  He smiles some. “Another day.”

  Outside, in the hallway, he and his wife stand together. Where to go next? There is a college here. Maybe she can work there, she has said. But from what they can tell, this South End is not a place with things like museums. Art galleries. Even the one college here doesn’t have an art or art history department.

  They’ve been exiled to a place unable to embrace their skills.

  As they turn off the hallway toward the elevator, two men stand in an alcove. Near the elevator doors. One is weeping. The men embrace.

  The doctor looks around. He sees a sign for the hospital’s morgue. One of the men, the older one, holds a clipboard. Paperwork.

  Transfer papers for the just deceased.

  He and his wife get on the elevator with the two men.

  The men are clearly brothers. The facial shadows of shared parents.

  The younger one wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

  The elevator doors don’t yet close. The four of them stand and wait.

  “I am very sorry,” the doctor says to the men.

  Both men glance toward him. Nod. Thanks.

  His wife, though, steps toward them. Hugs the older man. Holding him a long moment.

  The elevator doors close. The floor begins to lift. Slowly. The elevator is old, its motions so methodical.

  His wife moves to the next man. The younger of the brothers. Hugs him also. He begins to cry again. Into her shoulder. He can’t stop. He just cries. His whole body shakes. Crying. Long past the time when they’ve arrived on the first floor.

  The abandoned factories hold vast supplies of raw materials, chemicals; there are spare parts. Warehouses stacked fifty feet high with never used tires. Thousands of them. Covered in dust. Left here a decade ago. Factories whose holding tanks are lined with layers of gold, filaments of platinum strung inside clear glass tubes.

  Wealth and value decommissioned, left behind as people and businesses fled this place.

  The woman walks ahead of her husband. Down a faceless street of tiny duplexes. Triplexes. Short apartment buildings just two or three stories high.

  To her left, the highway roars. A sound whose source they cannot see. A constantly rising sound, it drowns out her steps, her breathing; increasingly it drowns out her thoughts.

  She likes it, in her way. No thinking. No worry. No madness.

  She just walks.

  The streetlights above the highway turn everything they see to a faded gray or white.

  Her husband taps her shoulder. She turns quickly. Wants to slap at his hand or face or body. Anything.

  He steps back. Is saying something. She can’t hear the words. The sound of the vehicles is far too loud.

  He points. At a house on this narrow road paralleling the highway.

  It was once a tan house. Gray now. Very small. Built cheaply between two, low concrete apartment buildings. Probably the house was built before the apartments. Only now does it look out of place.

  The small shrubs planted on both sides of the concrete porch are dead. Sticks. Sprouting up and out. A thin plastic bag clings to a branch. It shakes and billows outward, whipping wildly.

  The woman realizes there’s a wind. Rain. She’s soaking wet. Her hair sticks to her forehead. Chin.

  Her husband points to the house again. To a path along the left side of it.

  She goes to the path. A walkway made of small concrete pads, laid intermittently in the mud. They find the back door. She turns the knob. It’s unlocked. She walks into a living room made from a dining room. The house has been cut in half, arbitrarily; the wall that cuts through it divides a window on the wall. On the floor is carpet, low, aquamarine with swirls of texture. The couch is brown. There’s a TV. An old one. Big. It sits heavily on the floor.

  Her son sleeps on the couch.

  And the woman starts to cry.

  She has not cried in years. Not since before her first son died. Not since some trip to another institution in another state. A flight, a rental car, a well-manicured lawn surrounding a low building outside of town. Another meeting with the therapists, case workers, a selection of young men and women who’d exited this program. It changed my life. It will change your son’s.

  It didn’t.

  But it did make her decide that she would never cry again.

  Tell yourself you’d do better.

  Tell yourself you’d find a way.

  Tell yourself the mom’s the problem.

  Tell yourself she makes it worse.

  Tell yourself the dad’s the problem.

  Tell yourself he makes it worse.

  Tell yourself your love for your children and your faith in your spouse would never falter, never change, never exit this landscape that’s been created without warning or invitation. A world unknown. Without empathy. Without care. Stripped of connection. No forgiveness. A world that knows no mercy.

  Live there. Year after year.

  Then tell yourself you could still cry.

  Or tell yourself that if you cried, you could make that crying stop.

  Her son wakes up. Looks at each of them. They stand across from him. In his half of the living room.

  He’s impossibly thin. Arms exposed, as if ejected lamely from the sleeves of his thin and graying T-shirt. Red lines, or are they black, scraped up and down his skin, trajectories only he can follow, cutting paths of pain and blood and failed relief all across his body.

  “Go away,” he says quietly. Still lying there. Prone.

  The father looks around the room again. The mother cries.

  Their son sits up, feet now pressed against the horribly stained and worn-out carpet. “Really,” he says flatly. “You should go away.”

  Although buildings and factories are slowly stripped down to their bare walls, few homes are scavenged in the North End. Only those that stand in the last neighborhood built there. A modern subdivision, nondescript, unlike any other neighborhood in the North End. This subdivision was built after the highway was constructed, the subdivision covering the remnants of a vast park split in half by the straight, deep trench that cut the city in two.

  The scavengers not only strip these homes of the metals they can sell, they also tear the houses down. Flattening them. Then moving on to the house next door. As if clearing the land. Maybe turning it once again into the park that was destroyed.

  Or returning this land to what it had been many hundreds of years ago.

  “Are you looking for something really cheap,” the teenaged girl next to them now says. “I mean, like, free?”

  The doctor and his wife sit in a diner near the hospital. They have been talking about what to do next. A practical, ordered conversation that is incongruous with the love they feel for each other.

  “We have money for a few weeks,” his wife has said. “But only if we are very careful.”

  “There are many jobs, even basic jobs, that we can do,” he has said. “We only need to find shelter. Some time. Then we’ll be fine.”

  Now, they both turn to the teenager in the small booth next to theirs.

  “Sorry,” the teenager says. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  They both shake their heads. His wife smiles lightly. So does he.

  The girl says, “It’s just that you both seem very nice.”

  She has tattoos across her hands and arms and neck. Her nose is pierced with a silver ring. Her lower lip holds a row of thick, black studs. “So if what you want is something cheap,” she says. “Really cheap. Then you just cross the overpass. To the North End. And, well, it’s strange. Hard to explain. But you just pick a place to live.”

  The doctor isn’t following what she�
�s saying. His wife squints. Confused.

  “People say it’s scary there,” the girl says. She’s drinking coffee. She holds a piece of toast that she’s about to eat. “They say it’s dangerous. And I used to think that. But then I went over there.” She stops to butter her toast, slowly unwrapping the fifth or sixth of the foil-wrapped tabs of butter from the bowl on her table, carefully coating her wheat bread in fat.

  The butter is free, the doctor realizes. As is the cream she loads into her third or fourth coffee refill. The jam is free too, and she spreads it thickly across her toast.

  Maximum calories, a very few dollars at a time.

  “I went over there thinking it’d be scary,” the girl says, pausing to chew. The husband notices that she has near perfect manners. “I thought it’d be some sort of crazy thing to do. But it’s not crazy. It’s not even scary. What it is,” she says, pausing, looking for a word, “what it is,” she says again and, for a moment, she closes her eyes, “is quiet.”

  They thank her. Finish breakfast.

  Afterward, they cross the overpass to the North End.

  Entering a city that’s been abandoned.

  They walk. Small backpacks looped over their shoulders.

  She holds his hand.

  He smiles. It will be fine.

  They walk. Along a broad avenue leading past brick homes two stories high. A boulevard, really, lined now with the slick black trunks of trees that somehow died.

  It’s a mile to downtown. Home after home. Brick. Wooden. Gothic. Ornate. Simple. Austere. Beautiful.

  All so beautiful.

  Architects designed these, each one, individually. House after house. Churches made of stone. Lodges adorned with slate. Brick storefronts lined with tiny parapets. More long blocks of homes.

  All empty.

  “I know nothing of this place,” the doctor says.

  “I’m not sure where we are,” his wife says, now in Spanish. She’s spoken English since they got out of the camp. But English wouldn’t convey her meaning.

  Her husband nods.

  It rains. But lightly. As if the rain didn’t fall but was instead spontaneously created, tiny beads of moisture manifesting themselves before their open eyes.

  Downtown, a man carefully sweeps the large set of granite steps leading up to the cathedral. The man sees the two of them. Raises a hand. Hello.

  Then he goes back to sweeping.

  A white van moves slowly down the main avenue they just traversed. The van stops. The driver, an old but clearly strong, deeply healthy man, gets out. He holds newspapers in a bundle. He goes to a metal box on the street corner. Opens the door. Drops the new papers inside.

  The doctor watches this in wonder.

  There’s a bridge across a canal, its stanchions and trusses so ornate and elaborate that you’d think it was meant to cross a grand body of water. But instead it simply crosses a narrow canal.

  There are many of these bridges. They can see four or five of them from where they stand.

  He sees an empty hospital. A boarded-up city hall. A court building lined with columns; its front doors have been removed. Inside, it’s only black. Next to it is a dark museum, then a library, made of stone, soaring four stories tall; on top of it there is a dome.

  Next to the doctor and his wife is a small brick building whose roof is gone except for a set of heavy, horizontal beams on which clear sheets of glass have been carefully placed, a ceiling translucent, beaded with the slight and steady rain. Below this, there are tables of a kind. A giant wooden spool turned on its side. A crate. Another crate. Chairs of many types and heights. It’s a restaurant, and near the back there is sheet metal, maybe it’s the hood of a car, that’s been used to form a bar.

  Lightbulbs hang from single wires. Bright white lights in the otherwise constant gray. The bare heat of the bulbs creates a steam from the drops of rain in the air.

  A few people sit. One raises her hand. Waves.

  “We were banished to this city,” she says to her husband. “But they did not say which side.”

  The doctor and his wife enter the restaurant. Set down their bags. Sit at a table.

  In a minute, a man brings each of them a glass of wine.

  A helicopter passes overhead. The doctor and his wife look up. Through the beams and glass the helicopter is only a blurry image. Yet it’s a disruption. Not just of the silence in this place but the stillness. And the simplicity.

  That there’s even electricity here seems remarkable.

  The doctor’s phone has no signal.

  They sip wine. It’s cheap and served in old glass jars, but it is quite good.

  “What has happened?” he asks his wife.

  But she doesn’t answer. She just looks across their crate, smiles lightly, only a little. But, nonetheless, it is a smile. For him. She says, again in Spanish, “I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

  Storms come here. Quickly, with an intensity whose cause scientists still have not identified. Born of the cloud mass that covers this place, or born of the same source that brought the cloud mass here.

  Lightning, rain that’s total, the air turned liquid as tornadoes begin to spin, wreaking damage all across this empty landscape.

  The storms hit the South End too, of course. Tearing not through abandoned neighborhoods, but through new and populated subdivisions whose inhabitants have increasingly decided to search for other cities where they can live.

  The helicopter sweeps out across the industrial area of the North End. The analysts tell the woman about the history of the factories below them.

  “This was one of the most successful areas of mass production in the world,” the female analyst says. “Many decades ago.”

  The woman nods. “And the South End?” she asks.

  Another analyst nods. He’s wearing jeans. The woman only now notes this. The three analysts are all wearing jeans.

  She wears a suit.

  The analyst who is black still nods. “Some industrial production moved to the South End,” he says. “But not all of what was here. Much of it simply died. Which means that, in a way the people of the South End don’t fully understand, they were dependent upon the North End being a center of industry. Even if the residents moved to the new neighborhoods, they needed the industrial base to remain. But it didn’t. Couldn’t. Because so many people fled.”

  The woman leans toward the window of the helicopter. Looks down. Smokestacks. Sprawling factories. Warehouses that go for hundreds of yards, even as their wooden roofs sink slowly inward, in places bursting downward, soaked through from inattention and this constant rain.

  “So,” the woman says, still looking out the window, “our bet is against the debt of the South End? Municipal debt. But also companies based there that cannot easily move?”

  An analyst says, “Yes.”

  “What about the housing?” the woman asks. They’re crossing over an airport. Abandoned. The covered, cantilevered walkways all leading to planes that won’t ever again arrive. “In the South End,” she says, “there must be a way to bet against the people all living in the shadow of a place like this.”

  The analysts are quiet for a minute. She can hear them whispering.

  In a moment, one of them says, “Housing.” She’s not sure who has spoken. “We have a way to bet against their homes. A location-specific derivative. Built upon residential-dependent retail, property-tax supported debt instruments, and, of course, every home mortgage we can find.”

  Outside the helicopter, they pass the buildings in the business district. Office buildings. Beautiful ones. Built of stone and steel, and one is adorned every few floors with granite chimera, each unique, each looking out on the many buildings around them.

  They pass another office building. Apartment buildings. Next to them is an old hotel. She can see the rooms. Once beautiful.

  In one room, its windows are open. She sees a man is standing there. Looking right back at her.

  “Why
do these people stay?” the woman asks.

  No one answers. The helicopter turns north.

  Far away, near the edge of the gray horizon, black clouds have formed. Rapidly.

  “We’ll have to return to your hotel,” the pilot says over the intercom. “Now.”

  The helicopter begins to bank. But she watches the storm as it continues to form. Seemingly fed by the ceiling of gray clouds above them. But also by the water of the sea, or the bay, or maybe it’s a lake, located to the north. The water is warmer there. Only slightly. But it’s warmer than it has ever been. Warmer than the world seems ready to accept.

  A miracle of engineering, the North End was built on ancient shoreline and wetlands that once flooded throughout the year, a feat manufactured via a series of interconnected levees and canals.

  A city created by a system of tidal management that, over the decades, has been almost completely ignored.

  Levees fail. Canals overflow.

  No one seems to care.

  No one seems to know.

  And yet the water moves slowly forward.

  The boy runs. Very suddenly. He springs up from the couch, barefoot, in T-shirt and jeans. He is running. Past his mother and father. Out the back door. Gone.

  They have to chase him. It’s not a choice. Mother and father, seeing this, their youngest son, his disgusting home.

  Both of them sprint after him. Down the road that parallels the sunken highway. He runs ahead of them. Half a block. Toward lights ahead of them. Brighter even than the streetlights over the highway, these lights are yellow and red and green, glowing against the sky.

  A carnival.

  The boy jumps the fence, men scream at him, his mother follows, over the fence, the husband stops, pays the men. Their admission. He talks fast. Pulls more cash from his open wallet.

  Lights, strung on wires from pole to ride to the top of another pole standing between three rides. Games, some with bottles, some with water, basketball hoops, large rings, plywood stalls adorned with overstuffed bears and overstuffed tigers and overstuffed alligators of four sizes. Music plays. From every ride. Every game. So that each song intercepts another, walls of sound they pass through as they run, constantly crossing the point where one song gives way to the other.