Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  The mother sees him. Her son. She hasn’t lost him. Even over the fence. Through the crowd. She will not lose him now.

  The boy runs. All he wants to do is run. He does not know where he will go. He does not know what he wants. He does not know even where he is.

  He just wants to run.

  As a boy, he hated carnivals. He hated circuses. He hated anything like a fair.

  His mother knows this. Thinks this. As she chases her son across the crowded, asphalt parking lot.

  Near a ride on the edge of this small carnival, a crowd has gathered. Thicker than what should be.

  The boy slams into someone in the crowd, then another person. He thinks he can push through them. Just push everyone aside.

  But there are too many people.

  In a sense, he’s now trapped. Among people all standing still. Pushing together. Moving toward something he can’t see.

  The boy now wants to scream. So he does. But no one hears. The music is too loud.

  The boy now wants to hit something. So he does. But no one even responds. Everyone just assumes his blows are a part of the motion of the crowd.

  And he’s unable, after all, to hit anything very hard. Weakened. Fading. Wisp.

  His movement forward is impossible. He only slides, between people so focused on pushing forward that he can only find small spaces in the gaps between the bodies.

  The mother pushes too. Forward. Hard. All her strength. Shoving every person who can be moved.

  When the boy, the son, slides out between so many people, he thinks that he is free. But he isn’t. He’s standing at the center of the crowd. Above two people. Teenage boys. Barely men. One bends over the other. Kneeling. But his arms reach forward, frozen. Suspended somehow. His hands made lame.

  On the ground, the other boy, a black kid, he stares blankly toward the sky. His mouth overflows with liquid, white and tinged with blood, and his lower jaw is clamped shut. Jammed against his teeth and lips.

  He stares. Blankly. Upward.

  Dead.

  The boy knows this. Even barefoot. Thin. Standing still on the wet asphalt. The man on the ground is dead.

  Across from the son, here in the center of this ad hoc mass of bystanders, the boy looks at his mother.

  His mother steps forward, over the dead body. As if it were not there.

  It’s not that she doesn’t care.

  She just needs to get ahold of her own dying, broken son.

  No animals either. They’ve all gone. Not just the dogs and cats. But the birds who lived here or just passed through. Squirrels in the park. Nothing.

  All of them have fled this place.

  The carousel operator looks down at his friend. Kneeling over him. It’s so loud here. So many people stand around him.

  Everyone he knows seems eventually to die.

  Around him, the crowd keeps pushing inward.

  But he doesn’t care.

  He doesn’t care even when a woman, he can’t understand what she’s doing, she just steps over his dead friend. The epileptic. He barely knew the guy’s whole name.

  The kid stands. He looks up at the sky. Rain falls. His face is wet. More wet even than his shirt and jeans and hands.

  He raises them. His hands. Rinsing the epileptic’s saliva from his fingers, the blood from his thumbs. He sees bite marks, his blood, or his friend’s, from when he tried to pull open the epileptic’s mouth, all washing away in the light and steady rain.

  The kid looks upward now. There’s nothing to see. Just the lights of the carnival. Hung from poles and rides around him. Light reflecting vaguely off the clouds that hang above them.

  He thinks that he should scream. He thinks that he should hit someone. He thinks that he would like to drive faster than he’s driven before.

  But he has no ability to do these things.

  None at all.

  Why, he wonders, does everyone always die?

  He does not hit anyone as he pushes through the crowd. He just moves through them as they part. His tent and backpack are tucked away in a compartment in the center of the revolving carousel. He steps up onto the ride. It carries him around as he walks forward. Months later, and he’s still not used to this.

  He gets his stuff. He hits the stop button on the carousel.

  And now he’ll leave. It’s time. To go somewhere else. Find some other job. Find some other place.

  Maybe he’ll call the girl. If he can find her. Maybe it’s time to call.

  Maybe he could go back. Just to see her.

  He’s soaking wet. Like he’s been all his life. He is soaking wet. Without a plan. But he’ll leave here. He’ll go somewhere else.

  That’s what he’s meant to do.

  Once awarded for its architecture, the city is now actively forgotten.

  A failure no one wants to admit.

  To acknowledge it would mean something no one is willing to define.

  As they pass through the hotel lobby on the way to the black SUV, the woman sees the boy. He’s a young man. She knows this. Sixteen. Eighteen. Somewhere in that range.

  He sits alone in the hotel bar.

  Even now he is so beautiful.

  She wants to tour the North End in their vehicle. Now, after the helicopter trip was cut short. But she also wants very much for the boy to come to her.

  He sees her across the lobby. Stares. Looks down. Now looks up again.

  He does not know what to do.

  She doesn’t blame him.

  But she wants him to be with her. A line she’ll cross. She’s decided. So she waves to him. Waves him over. He’ll ride with them.

  He’s a line she’ll cross. Her choice. It’s already done.

  Along the highway wall, in the neighborhood cut through a park, scavengers hunt the small, poorly made homes for metals. Sometimes glass of certain types. Unbroken. The people who buy these common treasures, they want the glass in perfect form.

  She holds her son. This is something different. Something not allowed. For so many years.

  Her husband drives. She sits in the backseat. Her son rests his head. In his mother’s lap. What’s happening, the mother can’t quite understand.

  She leans forward without disturbing the boy. Reaches out her hand. Touches her husband’s arm.

  She’s not done so in many years.

  Along an avenue in the North End, a man is walking. He carries an old and heavy camera. It uses film.

  Periodically he stops. Before a factory. A school. An old home.

  He snaps a picture. Pauses. Then he snaps one more.

  He gets into his car. After hugging his brother one last time. He’ll come back. In a week. For the funeral. Their mother wanted to be buried in the North End. He can’t quite focus on that yet. But she wanted to be buried in the old cemetery there. Where her family’s buried. All of them. Going back more than a hundred years.

  People forget all kinds of things. Ignore them. Relegate it to the other. The different. It’s not mine.

  Poverty. Clear stupidity. A lack of food. Limited water.

  Utter prejudice. Violent sexism. Disgust for learning. A rejection of the intellectual.

  This city is not alone.

  In truth, some few say what otherwise goes unsaid.

  This city was just the first to fall.

  His kids stare toward the crowd of people. Standing under the lights of the carnival. He touches their shoulders. Touches his daughter, then his son. Let’s go. “It’s time for dinner,” he says, watching the crowd across the parking lot.

  That’s not good, he thinks, looking at the crowd. But it’s not an event for him to know.

  “It’s time,” he says. They need to drive. Meet his mother at her favorite restaurant. Miles from here. “Come on,” he says, as his kids both lean into him; his boy holds his leg, his daughter holds his hand. Smiling some. Up at him. He says to them, “It’s now time.”

  The storms over the city, when they come, each time there’s a se
nse that they grow bigger, taller, more severe. It’d be hard to know for certain. There is no comparison. These storms, over a city that’s been abandoned, are hard to quantify. Measure. Or even comprehend.

  Some nights, when she can, they both sit and watch a movie. She doesn’t watch the television. And does not let her boy.

  But sometimes she allows a movie.

  Quiet movies. Animation.

  Some are set in wooded places. Others in ancient cities. Others are in the clouds.

  But what matters is the quiet.

  They sit in silence. She and her boy. Her boy in her lap. She holds him. As they watch. Scenes unfolding over so much time.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Highway

  The first vehicle to wreck on the sunken highway is a large truck pulling two trailers with canvas sides. The trailers are empty, light, and in the wind and rain that’s pressing into this man-made trench, the trailers become a set of sails, wobbling separately, yanking against each other, but then the wind builds, the rain as well, and the canvas sides bow inward, purely concave surfaces catching the wind in all its force, both trailers tilting, twin sailboats listing beautifully.

  A storm has come. As if launched from a weapon meant to harm.

  Storms come often here. Rising off the water to the north. Lightning in them. Small tornadoes.

  But this is a storm that casts total shadows. In some places, there’s no longer light.

  The leading edge of the wind has reached the western end of the highway trench. The trailers tip first, falling over, pulling the truck onto its side as well. The noise would be horrific, except the rain and wind strip every other sound away.

  The trailers and the truck are splayed across the four westbound lanes of the highway, looking, from a distance, like a child’s toy left in the gutter.

  This is where it starts.

  The first car to reach the scene is going seventy, maybe seventy-five, when it hits a trailer.

  Another car had been following the first car very closely, using it as a guide through the heavy rain, a bad strategy made tragic as it slams into the cab of the truck.

  Seventy to zero, in just a millisecond.

  The first car held only a single driver, a man, twenty, on his way to work.

  The second car held a driver and three passengers. Father at the wheel, daughter and two friends late for practice in the back.

  The truck driver had survived his crash, but was killed by the second car.

  The third car hits a trailer, careening through the aluminum roof, but stopped immediately by the truck’s heavy, steel frame.

  Another two people have died.

  A pickup truck approaches the scene at full speed, even in this rain, but through the haze of the storm the driver somehow sees the wreck ahead. He veers left, toward the shoulder, the truck beginning to spin then slide in the mess of long untended debris along the highway shoulder. The truck flips soon, twice, then again.

  Another driver dead.

  More cars come through the rain, undaunted by what seems like just another storm. Some even rushing to escape this part of the highway, where sometimes water builds up, slowing the traffic to a crawl. Four cars seem to fear this possibility, driving faster as the storm descends, a pack of sorts trying to get far from here before things become worse. The first car, driver panicking, manages to weave her way through the wreckage, threading the needle, her driver-side mirror is clipped; it flies off, hits a car behind her. But the other three cars all crash, two sliding sideways as they wildly brake; one hits the end of a trailer, bounces off into the shoulder, then slams into the concrete wall of this highway trench.

  Airbags, screaming.

  But everyone in that car is fine.

  The other car, also sliding, hits another vehicle. The car is now rolling backward, the front seats breaking on impact, hurling both people into the backseat where they crush the passengers.

  The next car never sees a thing. The driver hits one of the trailers at full speed.

  And the storm has only begun to arrive. The force of it is still north of here. Building. Moving south, as all the storms here do now. Adding to itself. Gathering rain. Gathering wind. Gathering debris from the ground.

  In a sense, all that’s hit the highway so far is the air and rain that the storm itself pushes out of its way.

  The storm moves over neighborhoods and factories abandoned so long ago in the North End. Levees break. Canals are flooded, combining with other canals a block away.

  But there are so few people in the North End, that, so far, no one there has died. No one’s even injured.

  On the highway, there are fifteen dead. Another thirty injured. Almost forty vehicles wrecked so far.

  And the wind only rises.

  And the rain blinds everyone it touches. West of the city. And east. Even the streetlights lining this highway are of little use, mere pinpoints of light in the violence of the rain and clouds, stars almost, rendered tiny by the storm. The mass of cars and trucks and buses minutes ago had only been traveling through the usual gray dark and constant rain. But now, the storm has reached the full length of the trench. Rain and wind flood over the walls. Darkness. Gusts that snap cars left and right. A violence so far beyond what seemed possible just moments ago.

  The crashes are now happening along this entire stretch of sunken highway. The wreckage of the vehicles grows, loosely gathered piles of steel and tires and glass.

  And humans. There are injured people everywhere.

  Now a semi pulling a tanker filled with chemicals hits the first pileup to the west. The driver had slowed, going forty, or is it thirty; the storm had made him cautious. But he has too much momentum to consider stopping. The cab of the truck hits two cars, killing both drivers who’d until then survived their wrecks. The tanker, sliding outward, to the left, whipping around, breaking free of the cab, moving backward through the vehicles all stopped across eight lanes of this highway.

  When the tanker tumbles over, the seals on the tank are broken and a mist releases, upward, straight up, in defiance of the wind.

  Yet whatever chemical it is that escapes repels all water, so that the rain that falls, now falls elsewhere, outside the cone of escaping mist that rises from this stretch of highway. The mist is yellow, it sheds water, and for cars not far away, most stopped, some wrecked, others that are only just slowing down, the mist is visible, even with the rain and wind and darkness of the arriving storm.

  Cars still wreck, a few more people die, but now, at this end of the highway, everyone has begun to slow.

  Brake lights glow from cars and trucks and semis, the vehicles themselves barely visible in the rain, but their lights send a warning to those that follow, sudden and brilliant harbingers of what most people on the highway think is a simple wreck ahead.

  A mile to the east, the rain breaks for a few minutes. It has the perverse effect of leading cars there to speed up, even though they are able to see the lighted trail of stopping vehicles ahead of them.

  This is just the rain we’ve had for years.

  Another wave of crashing starts. As the cars enter the descending, darkened clouds that continue to reach down into this concrete trench. A few drivers see the lights of the cars stopped ahead of them. But it’s too late.

  And others are distracted by the sight of a yellow, rising cone some quarter mile away, distinct and unknown in the otherwise gray, enveloping storm.

  What is that?

  And for them it’s too late also.

  Twenty cars and trucks have slammed into each other in this new wave. Another twenty will soon follow.

  Ten more dead. Three more children.

  The screaming is unbearable. But few hear it. The storm, the cars themselves, all of it is just too loud.

  And the light, the light of streetlights above the highway and headlights on all these cars and the taillights, all lit red, and the light of buildings and homes in the two cities created by this highway, the storm ha
s progressively absorbed and defeated all this light.

  Now, many cars, when they wreck, their inhabitants die in darkness.

  The wrecks have begun to occur in an almost controlled slow motion. Cars for miles have decelerated, many have already stopped. Yet throughout the line of vehicles, cars and trucks keep hitting one another. Distracted by the traffic, or the tall and glowing streetlights that now flicker again then go dark, leaving the sunken highway in an even darker abyss, or the drivers are distracted by the cone of yellow mist that rises just ahead of them, or they’re distracted by the violence of a tornado that hops from one side of the highway to the other, lifting, suspended above the heads of hundreds and hundreds of people who watch, screaming, but the tornado only jumps, one side to another; the trench in this moment saved everyone underneath that cyclone, because here there are only wrecks, cars careening, trucks that slide across the median; it’s total madness here. The impossible come true.

  When they take her boy from her, they do so while she’s working.

  Her whole neighborhood has been condemned. County government. They want everyone here to move. The area deemed a slum. Filled only with the dangerous and the poor.

  This is how the South End works.

  Anyone left in the houses is sent away.

  The elderly are offered vouchers for a shelter. And rides in a run-down bus.

  The children are taken under protective care.

  It will be weeks before she sees him.

  CHAPTER 19

  Storm

  In the Gulf, the oil rigs still bleed. Two million gallons, oil pouring from the seabed every day.

  But also natural gas escapes. Rising from the wreckage of the rigs once used to mine them. One, a well far down in the water, its rig collapsed days after the hurricane. The gas keeps rising, hurling itself through the water’s surface, blurring the horizon and the sky.

  Now lightning hits the plume, the gas igniting as if it were a bomb.