Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  And so a fire burns brightly from the sea.

  As they descend the on-ramp to the highway, she asks, “If we succeed in this investment, how many people will have lost their homes?”

  An analyst taps on her calculator. “At least twenty thousand.”

  Another says, “And if we top fifty, the returns will exceed the Gulf.”

  The boy sits in the front seat. With the driver.

  The analysts did not ask anything when the boy came over to their table. They introduced themselves. And that is all.

  “Then it’s worth it,” the woman says.

  The SUV begins to shake. Then begins to roll. The woman looks up. The roof now seems to bend. Twisting inward. Toward their heads.

  She wonders about the boy.

  The doctor and his wife retreat to the church. The huge cathedral. The storm that comes, it’s a black wall of motion, holding lightning, tornadoes, worse. He does not know that this cathedral will be safe. But it was the closest building to where they stood.

  One half of the sanctuary is lit. The other is in darkness.

  Chandeliers shake above their heads. Stained glass windows lose their color, as the little light outside of here is overtaken by the storm.

  “We should go to the basement,” says his wife.

  And so they run.

  The car in front of him lights up red. He thinks he notices much too late. Veering right. Into the shoulder. The road here is covered with debris. Bottles and rocks and tires; ahead of him he sees a helmet. His car slides. Forward. Past cars on his left already stopped, wrecked, a chain reaction pileup.

  And just this morning, his mother died.

  He stands at the rail bordering the highway. Looking down into it. Turning his head slowly. Left, then right. Trying to see where he could enter. Hitch a ride. In which direction, he has not yet decided.

  The former carousel operator looks up. The noise of the cars and trucks below him is such that there’s nothing else he can hear. But he feels it. Then sees it. A black wall just a mile away. Coming toward him. All of them.

  He has to remind himself.

  You are not alone.

  When the car shakes, then jumps, seemingly lifted from the road, the mother grabs her son. His arm. The closest thing that she can hold.

  Beneath her fingers, the boy’s arm is rough as sandpaper. With scars and cuts healed poorly. Some bleed lightly now. Triggered by her touch.

  The mother cries here in the backseat. But then she’s been crying for some time. Crying quietly. As her son sleeps silently against her thigh.

  The car slides, sideways. Her husband pulls the wheel left. Now right. The car shoots into the shoulder.

  “What?” the mother asks. Very quietly.

  Her husband answers. But she can’t quite hear him. She can’t even see him.

  On the highway, day has turned to night.

  There’s a lesson somewhere. About bad things. They happen. To good people.

  He can’t articulate this. He doesn’t try. Doesn’t want to. Doesn’t need to.

  But as the cars ahead of him all begin to slide, veering left and right, their red taillights blurring even more than the rain could have caused, he thinks only that he will live today. And he knows his kids will too.

  That’s what he thinks. Very clearly. A truth he knows.

  This is something my son and daughter will survive.

  No effort is made to stop the fires burning in the Gulf. That is a mere problem. Elsewhere, there are dangers. Disease along a coastline without clean water or steady power. Injuries to tens of thousands. Oil that still leaks, pouring constantly from those more than twenty wells damaged in the storm, thick layers of crude already washing over beaches and marshes and islands many hundreds of miles away.

  The SUV rolls again. No one in the back is buckled. The investor hears the airbags trigger in the front seat even as she feels herself slam into another person. She can’t tell who. It’s only darkness here, and the noise of the car’s steel body scraping across concrete drowns out most everyone else’s screaming.

  They find a room in the cathedral’s basement. Priests’ quarters once. Two beds. A small table. A wooden chair. A dim light on the table. A bulb in the ceiling overhead.

  They sit. Close together on a bare mattress.

  Outside, above them, the storm seems certain to wipe out everything it will touch. The noise of it, thunder and wind and now the storm carries so much debris, large objects, all of it crashing against itself, against the sky, against the city in its path. Even in the basement, the air is wet and heavy. A weight that moves across them. Soon surrounds them. They can feel it, a storm with a presence almost like that of a person reaching down to touch the two of them in this small room.

  The restaurant manager is stuck on the shoulder of the highway. Beside him, through the blur of the rain and darkness, cars slam into one another. Not that they move quickly. But cars behind him, trucks too, they keep slamming into the pileup, pushing all the vehicles together, like bumper cars at the fair.

  His car hasn’t been hit. There are cars behind him in the shoulder. Cars ahead. But he has not been touched.

  The former carousel operator is being pelted with debris. Even before the wall of black clouds reaches the highway. Bits of things, he does not know what, are flying into his face. Against his hands. He squints, staring into the wind. Across the highway, just a quarter mile away now, the wall of black moves forward. Fast. There’s lightning deep inside it. And a tornado springs out from the clouds.

  It disappears. Reappears a moment later.

  The debris gets bigger. Shingles now, pieces of boards, dead branches, shards of tile and pottery.

  He sees shells. He thinks maybe he sees bone.

  Finally, he has to turn away. Leaning down. Hiding from the storm behind the wall along the highway. He lays out flat. Covering his head.

  And the debris hitting the wall beside him, flying over his head, continues to get bigger. Stronger. Closer.

  Their car is hit, from behind. She holds her son.

  “Get down,” she hears her husband say. She can see him only intermittently. When car lights shine at them. She sees her husband then. And around her she sees the wreckage. Buses crashed. Huge semis turned onto their sides. Cars pointed in all directions.

  Then it’s dark again.

  “Get down,” he repeats.

  She does. Pushing her son onto the floor. Her son doesn’t fight her. The mom lays down, across the backseat. Her son holds her hand. “What’s happening?” he asks.

  His mom says only, in the total darkness, “I don’t know.”

  Their car is hit again.

  The father steers the car to the far left side of the highway. Scraping it along the wall. He’s gotten in front of a truck. The big cab of a semi that’s on its side. He backs the car up against it.

  Tucked in here. Against the wall and semi.

  He turns to look into the backseat. Headlights from the vehicles around them shine at angles through their car. The kids stare at their father.

  “We’re fine,” he says. Reaching back. Holding their hands. Touching their knees. He’d like to get back there with them. But he knows he shouldn’t. He’d like to curl up with them both, hold them, anything to protect them. But he shouldn’t. He should sit. Right where he is. And wait for the crashing to stop.

  In the Gulf, one oil rig is gotten under control. Hundreds of people working day and night finally stop the fire. It took them nearly two weeks. But they’ve stopped the oil leak. The well is sealed.

  On barges out in the Gulf, under stars and a moon so bright it’s like they could light the whole world on their own, the workers stand and cheer.

  The abuse starts in foster care. From a foster parent. Before the woman can get her boy back. She’s allowed only visitations. Until she proves herself to be fit and able. Proves she has a place to live that is of an adequate, appropriate standard.

  The abuse starts. She
can see it. In her boy. How he changes. Quiet. He won’t talk.

  During a visit, the woman simply takes her boy and leaves. Running with her son. A backpack for him. Another for herself. They run. Across the overpass. The only place that she can think to go. They’ll hide there. Flee. To the city that’s been abandoned.

  CHAPTER 20

  Ladders

  Thousands of people emerge from their cars.

  Slowly.

  It rains still, but some light has returned. The normal gray. The constant dim.

  To the south, the storm still grinds above the South End.

  But in the highway trench, no one can see what’s happening.

  Instead people just stand next to their cars. Looking around.

  The quiet is real. It’s not just a reflection of the blankness in their minds. The highway is quiet. For the first time, surely, since it was long ago constructed.

  No cars drive. Few engines run.

  People continue to emerge from their cars. Standing. Looking numbly and emptily around.

  In the SUV, the woman stares at the others. Dead faces. Five of them.

  Driver. Three analysts.

  The boy.

  The restaurant manager stands. Next to his car. It’s untouched. And he is fine.

  But around him, every car is wrecked in some way. Rear-ended. Dented. Turned sideways. Turned completely over.

  He begins to realize there is a sound nearby. A muffled sound.

  People. In their vehicles. All around him. He hears them as they wail.

  His kids stare at him. In the mirror.

  He stares back.

  It isn’t real.

  This isn’t real.

  “Daddy,” his daughter now says quietly. With a broken, final desperation. “Daddy, where is Mom?”

  He stands at the rail, looking down at the cars and trucks and people on the highway. The kid, a former carousel operator, is a mile or more from any on-ramp leading down into that trench. But there’s an overpass. A block away. He starts walking there. He doesn’t know why.

  In no sense does he know what he should do.

  Mostly he wonders when someone will come to help those people.

  Her husband bleeds. From his head.

  And he won’t wake. She’s tried. Even though he breathes, he won’t wake.

  Her son still lies on the floor of the backseat. Eyes open. Staring up. Toward the top of the car. Her son now looks at his mother. Staring.

  Her son says, “It’s hard to explain what’s happened.”

  The mother just barely smiles. Looking down at him. “I know, sweetie,” she says. “I know.”

  The doctor and his wife walk out onto the steps of the cathedral. A light rain falls. The streets seem messy in a way they weren’t before. Dirt. And shingles. Unidentifiable debris.

  But otherwise, the North End looks the same.

  They see people walking. Some quickly. All headed somewhere. South.

  His wife asks a woman where they’re going.

  “The highway,” she says. Next to her stands a young boy. He looks up at the wife. Then looks at the doctor. The doctor smiles at him.

  But the boy still only stares. Takes his mother’s hand. And continues to lead her toward the highway.

  People gather on the one overpass crossing the trench. People from the North End. Residents. There are ten of them. Later there are twenty. Looking over the rail. One even sits on the railing of the overpass, bare feet dangling above the highway.

  Below, on the surface of the highway, people have mostly gotten back into their vehicles. It’s raining. Cold.

  Everyone waits for help to come.

  They’ve waited for a few hours.

  The trail of stopped and damaged vehicles goes miles in each direction. Not that all are wrecked. But all of them are stuck now. In the shoulders of the highway or along the narrow median, or they are stuck in the middle lanes jammed in between so many other cars. There’s no way anyone can drive. Not until many, many vehicles are somehow pushed aside.

  Hours pass.

  On car radios people hear of the massive destruction the storm has caused in the South End. The storm sped over the North End and the highway, touching it lightly by comparison to what it would then do in the South End. There, the storm slowed, lowered, let loose multiple tornadoes. No one has a firm count. A wind insane, a weight those million people felt, every one of them, the storm held a weight each person knows now and will not ever forget.

  In the South End, there is chaos.

  Power out. Fires. Flooding. Looting of stores and office buildings. An unleashing of pent-up anger. Anger at the way things have always been. The unfairness of this city. Poor districts, rich ones. White districts, brown. Anger among those who were relegated to the flood zones. Isolated there since the moment this place was formed. Now flooded disproportionately. Their homes, their schools, their businesses bore the brunt of it. Anger now expressed through destruction, the tearing down of anything that withstood the storm. Anything that represents the unfairness inherent here.

  News reports are intermittent. The TV and radio stations lost power too. Satellites disabled. Antennae knocked down. Fiber connections completely severed.

  A city in chaos. With no plan for how to respond.

  She stays in the car with the dead people who once worked for her. Until finally she realizes she doesn’t want to be here. The car is on its side. Dead people all around her. One leg touches her arm.

  She doesn’t want to be here.

  The woman climbs over the boy, dead, his face so still and hard, and she barely recognizes it.

  She escapes out the broken windshield. Now standing on the highway. Looking around at the others standing here too.

  She’d been in the SUV for many hours. Some of the time, she closed her eyes. She may have slept. Waking and then looking carefully at each face. But mostly, she stared forward. Replaying each moment of the wreck. The SUV hit something. Flipped. In the car, people began to hit each other. Slamming against the ceiling. Seats. Against each other once again. Then other cars hit them. Three or four or five of them. She had soon lost count.

  Now, standing on the highway, she’s still not right. She knows that much.

  She turns, turns again. The on-ramp they’d used to get onto this highway is a few miles back.

  She decides to walk.

  What she needs is help.

  The restaurant manager sits in his car. Rain falls on his window. Lightly. The wipers periodically wash it away.

  He sits. He’s slept unintentionally. Many more hours pass.

  Around him, people have gotten back into their cars. Ahead of him, he sees people gathered on the overpass.

  The wailing stopped eventually. From the people in cars around him. They’re all silent now. He doesn’t know how many found a way to contain their pain. Or how many simply wailed until they died.

  The radio broadcasts are intermittent. But he knows the storm did major damage in the South End. And so he wonders about his brother. His cell phone won’t work. He checks often. Still no signal.

  Although he’s not sure his brother would even think to update him.

  A woman is walking past his car. Pausing every three or four steps. Hesitating.

  He rolls down his window. She’s paused again. Right next to his car.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  It’s a moment, then she turns to him. Some part of him realizes that she’s beautiful. It’s fact, not attraction. He’s not of a mind to be attracted. It’s simply that she’s so very beautiful.

  She’s looking at him. “I can’t remember,” she says. “I can’t remember which way I was meaning to walk.”

  “Do you want to sit?” he says. “Just sit. For a minute.”

  She stares at him. In another moment, he sees her nod. She opens the back door of his car. And soon she sits down in silence.

  He climbs into the backseat with his kids. As he did what seems like mo
nths ago. On that hill overlooking the delta.

  “Your mother,” he says, holding both their hands. Looking at them. “Sweeties. Mom died.”

  He stands at the far end of the overpass. Looking down at the destruction. It’s been hours now. A few people have left their cars. Started walking. But no one has come to help.

  For a time he sits. The rain is not heavy, just enough to make his face wet. His hands wet.

  He does not know where he will go.

  He could stay here, right here on this overpass, and no one would ever care. Not one other person. All these millions of people, he’s realized, as he’s traveled across the country. All of them have their own lives.

  He understands none of them. He likes none of them. He is a friend to no one, anywhere, at all.

  She gets out of the car. Her son sleeps. Her husband will not wake. The bleeding’s stopped. And he breathes. But he won’t wake up.

  She looks around. Why doesn’t anyone come to help?

  A few other people stand. Here on the highway. It’s been hours now. Overnight. No one has come. Nothing.

  She wonders if they should begin to walk.

  She looks up at the sky. Rain touches her face. Rain that’s harder now. Steady.

  What do I do?

  From the car, her son says, “Mom, are you okay?”

  And she smiles. She has to. Despite it all. There’s her son.

  “Mom, come back to the car.”

  She’s about to get in. Still looking down. Still smiling.

  But she realizes that her toes are wet. Her shoes are submerged.

  She sees it. All across the highway.

  The water is already a few inches deep.

  The doctor and his wife stand on the overpass. Thirty people here. All seem to be from the North End. They see the man who’d been sweeping church steps. The minister, people call him. He sits on the rail, bare feet dangling above the highway.