Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  The minister and others talk. The doctor can’t hear them. But suddenly the small group is worried. As if something is about to happen. Something imminent. Danger.

  The doctor, without meaning to, turns, looks over his shoulder, up into the sky. Fearing there’s another storm.

  There isn’t.

  One of the men in the group has stepped away. The doctor’s wife taps the man’s arm. Asks him, “What is happening?”

  The man looks at her. It seems to take a moment for him to understand the question. Repeating it to himself. He holds a camera. He looks down at it. Shifts it from one hand to the other. Looks up at the doctor. Then the wife. In another moment, the man says, “The highway. All this area. But especially the highway. It was built below sea level.”

  The doctor looks down to the highway. Water is pooling everywhere. A few inches of it.

  “That’s not rain?” the doctor asks.

  The man with the camera looks up at the sky. Seeming to consider the question. He turns to the doctor. Stares a moment. “No,” he says finally. “I thought you’d heard. The highway’s flooding.”

  Then the man raises his camera. And takes a picture of them both.

  The storm did not kill anyone in the North End.

  But it did hit a levee. Breaching it. A levee near the highway. Which leaks now. More and more. Water that soon is slowly rising from the sewers underneath the highway. Near the overpass, the people on the highway have only just begun to notice the water pooling beneath all the cars and trucks and people.

  And in some places, in lower points in that trench, especially near the on-ramps, the water there is already a few feet deep.

  Everyone on the highway has begun to realize the water is rising.

  The woman, the investor, sitting now in the backseat of this stranger’s car, looks out the window and, even in her numbed and distant state, knows that this is not just rain.

  “Something’s wrong,” she says.

  Six inches. Here next to the overpass.

  The man in front of her turns in his seat. Looks at her.

  “The water,” she says. “That’s not just rain.”

  People are walking this way. From the east and west. She rolls down her window. “Why are you coming this way?” she asks.

  A man answers her without stopping. “Because back there,” he says, voice fading as he keeps walking, “the water there is even deeper.”

  The restaurant manager looks at the woman. Once again, she leans her head out the window. Looking down.

  He opens his door. Looking down too. Water. Deep. It almost reaches the bottom of the car.

  “We need to go,” he says.

  She looks around. He does too. The walls of the highway. No on-ramp, no exit, for miles either way.

  She asks him in a minute, “Where?”

  He shakes his head. Says, “I don’t know.” He’s opening the door. “But we have to go.”

  And still, these many hours later, no one has come to help.

  When he sees a massive ladder drop down from the overpass, the father thinks he’s reached a point of perpetual madness. Shared unintentionally with his children. Holding them as they cry. All three of them curled up together in the backseat of the car.

  The water has been rising.

  He’s been trying to come up with a plan.

  Realizing, once again, that the three of them are on their own.

  “Okay,” he says quietly. “Okay. I’m sorry. But you have to listen now. We have to go. We have to get out of here.”

  He opens the door to the car. Water laps against the bottom of the door frame. He looks over to the ladder that’s been dropped from the overpass to the surface of the road.

  “Okay,” he says softly. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

  The children cry.

  “I know,” their father says. “I know.”

  He holds them once again. Looking over at that ladder.

  “It’s time,” he whispers. “Come on. Because now we’re going to climb.”

  Men and women in trucks come from what people call the North End. Bringing ladders. The former carousel operator watches this. A huge metal ladder is lowered to the surface of the highway. Soon more ladders follow. Some are clearly taken from fire stations; others are three sections long, used by painters and repairmen to climb to the roofs of tall houses and tall buildings. Still other people are beginning to lash smaller ladders together. The people have rope and wire and soon they begin to carefully slide the ladders over the rail along the overpass, lowering them to the people below.

  He has seen a lot of things. This is one of the strangest.

  The former carousel operator moves closer to the people working.

  A woman turns to him. She’s scarred deeply across her throat. On her wrists, there are bracelets. Twenty or thirty of them. He sees they are made of simple objects. Electrical wire. A thin strip of aluminum, brightly painted, torn carefully from a drink can. Leather strings tied with knots. A lace of sorts, wrapped round and round her forearm.

  She says, in a moment, “Help us.”

  But he can only stare.

  The water rises. It’s above her knees. Her son sits on the hood of the car. Staring around.

  The woman tries again to wake her husband. He sits in the passenger seat. Water in the car. Up to his waist now.

  “Please,” she says to her husband. “Come on. Please. Wake up.”

  She decides to pull him out. Awkwardly. Jerking his body some as she struggles to move him. She worries she is only hurting him more. But she can’t leave him in this water for much longer.

  People move to the west, wading through the water, others hopping from the top of one vehicle to another. Near her, people are beginning to exit a bus, their bodies sinking into the slowly moving water, their legs and waists now covered.

  She’s able finally to get her husband from his seat. He floats mostly, as she holds his head above the water. Still unconscious.

  Her son sits on the hood of the car.

  “We have to go,” the mother says.

  Her son slides off the hood. Water up to his thighs. He’s tiny. Just a skeleton. There is so little left of him. “Let me get dad’s arm,” he says.

  And so they leave, following the group west, as they pull her husband, his father, the man whose legs float limply in the rising water.

  More ladders come. More rope.

  How could these people have all these things?

  His wife is about to help the people unload the trucks. Anything. She will help.

  The doctor kisses her.

  “People are hurt,” she says. “Help them.”

  He looks down at the surface of the highway.

  So far, only four of the ladders are long enough to reach the people below. The other ladders are still being combined. Tied together safely.

  But the four ladders that reach the surface, no one has yet started to climb them.

  The people who scavenge the North End are themselves a kind of community. They live together. Work together. Work that changes them.

  Or maybe they are people who wanted to be changed. Who wanted the purpose of brutal work and a shared community.

  Hundreds of them.

  When they saw what was happening on the highway, it was clear to all of them what they would do.

  Ladders. As many ladders as they could find or make.

  The woman, once an investor, follows the man she’s met. She doesn’t know his name. She forgot to ask. But now they move through water above their waists. Sometimes they can get on top of vehicles, hop from one car to the next. Mostly, though, they slosh through the cold and fetid water, moving with a growing crowd.

  She is about to jump from the roof of a car to a truck next to it. The man she’s with has stopped. He points to the space between the vehicles.

  Cattle pass. Released or broken free of a transport trailer. They move between the cars and trucks. Walking west.

  S
he can only stare.

  Behind him, he sees chickens. On the tops of cars. There are pigs now, among the cattle. Swimming. The water’s too deep for them to walk.

  Rain still falls. On his face.

  The woman next to him points toward the west.

  He looks as, in a moment, she says, “Ladders.”

  Still no one has climbed. The father and his children reach the base of the first ladder. The man touches the rung in front of him. The ladder shakes. He looks up to the top. Sixty feet. A terrifying climb.

  “Daddy,” his son says. “I can’t do that.”

  His daughter stares up too.

  “Yes,” the father says. “You can. You will. We all three will.”

  The father climbs as close as he can to his children. But still they are alone. Above him. Both screaming for him to help. The first ones, he has realized. They are the first ones to climb these ladders.

  He stands watching these people assembling the ladders. Tying ropes to them. Safety lines.

  But the former carousel operator can’t find a way to help.

  They near the overpass, still pulling her husband through the water. Soaked, mother and son and father; the rain falls steadily, and there’s a current to the water now. Chickens float past them. Some are flapping wildly, most have already died.

  There are bodies too. Of so many other people.

  They float inside their cars.

  The doctor goes to the minister, the man from the steps of the church. “I can help,” he says. “I’m a doctor.”

  The minister smiles. Lightly grabs both of the doctor’s shoulders. “Wonderful.”

  It’s minutes later that the doctor realizes the minister spoke to him in Spanish.

  Scavengers have already begun to set up tents. Huge tents. Military. From an abandoned depot here. The minister takes the doctor into one of them. “There are injured people,” the minister says. “Tell us what to do.”

  On the overpass, his wife works on the ropes. Tying them together. Attaching ropes every ten feet along the surface of the ladders.

  Safety lines. One after another. She ties as quickly as she can.

  Still no one has come from the South End to help. No ambulances. No firefighters. No police. No one.

  Word reaches the overpass that the chaos in the South End has only begun to grow.

  The woman stands in the ad hoc line. Moving toward the base of one of the ladders. The man is still with her. She keeps meaning to ask his name.

  She looks at him now. He’s turned to her. “Thank you,” she says.

  He nods. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

  In another moment, she begins to climb.

  He makes sure she gets started on the ladder. Upward. Just two or three people can get on a ladder at one time. So he sees her rising. She’s midway up before he also starts.

  The ladder bounces and shakes as he climbs too now, the bouncing soon seeming uncontrollable. He hates heights. But the horror that he sees as he gets higher, the horror of the hours spent on this abandoned highway, all that numbs his fear of being thirty feet, now forty feet up; each step he is higher up in the air.

  Destroyed cars. A gathering of hundreds of people. More making their way to these ladders. Dead people, bodies, everywhere.

  Some part of him thinks he should cry. Because his mother died. Because he lives alone. Because he barely knows his brother. Because his life is not what he wants.

  All reasons he should cry.

  But the man just climbs.

  The woman has reached the top. People help her over the rail.

  Some part of him wonders if she’ll be there when he gets to the top.

  “Keep climbing,” the father says, repeating himself, speaking to his children. “Slowly. Don’t worry. One foot. One hand. One foot. One hand.”

  Which they do. Again and again. Even as they scream. Above him. Alone. The only sound is their screaming.

  The former carousel operator watches people reach the railing of the overpass. Climbing up from below. People up here help them. They help them over the rail, and they help them get to one of the tents that’ve been set up, and there are people now bringing food and water.

  He stands. People moving all around him. But still he can only stand. Watching the others help.

  She and her son place the body on the roof of a pickup truck. Tall enough, she hopes, that the water won’t wash him away.

  Although that doesn’t really matter.

  Somewhere, during the walk, he stopped breathing.

  Her son cries.

  She does too.

  We have to climb, she thinks.

  But for now, she’ll just stand with her son and cry.

  The doctor goes from person to person. There are broken bones. Gashes across arms and faces.

  But mostly there is confusion. Desperation. Shock.

  How could that have happened?

  His wife ties ropes. Attaches them to ladders. Helps as they are lowered to the surface.

  He sees her, on the other end of the overpass. Working. For a moment, he has stepped outside the tent. Washing his hands and face. Breathing and closing his eyes. Drinking water from a mug, water so cold and it’s bright almost, different than anything he’s ever tasted.

  He drinks from it again.

  He feels like he should drink this for the rest of his whole life.

  A wall of people, it seems, all climbing up from the highway. Attackers assaulting a castle. Or the nearly drowned now rescued from the ocean, steadily scaling the side of a ship.

  On the surface of the highway, hundreds more still wait. Standing on cars and trucks. Shuffling in place. Looking up at the people climbing. Looking down at the water rising.

  She sits under a blanket. On this overpass. People all around her. Sitting or lying down. Some walk; she sees others run when they get to the surface of this overpass; she sees some of them look around, afraid, and they run.

  She can’t imagine what they fear up here, the former investor. Her fear was left on the highway. It poured from her as she climbed.

  She hadn’t been afraid in many years. Since she was a child. But as she climbed, she remembered fear.

  She drinks some sort of coffee. Looks around.

  Who are all these people?

  She assumes she could walk south. To her hotel. Shower. Fly out. Or just drive away. Return to her silent office overlooking the city.

  All she has to do is stand. And walk.

  Other analysts and employees can be hired. Not what she wants. But it is true.

  She drinks once more from the coffee. A woman near her, covered in jewelry made of wire and glass, helps lower another ladder over the side.

  She drinks again from her coffee.

  The man who helped her is gone. She wants to thank him. Wants to know his name. Thinks that he should know her name too.

  The restaurant manager looks to the north. To the city that’s been abandoned. The North End. He grew up in the south. Grew up fearing the North End. Grew up being told it was dangerous and blighted and that what happened there was deserved.

  He pictures video of a house on fire, a man who lived there pulling his wife and children from the embers. Dead. That, he was told, was the North End.

  Now, though, he sees that people keep coming from the North End to this overpass. Bringing food. Bringing blankets. A group of scarred and weathered people ride in the back of an old pickup truck, passing him; one raises her hand. Inside the truck, there are more tarps and rope and tents.

  This is not what he knew of the North End.

  He wonders where that woman went. Hoping that she is fine.

  They sit underneath a blanket on the overpass. The three of them. His children lean into his sides.

  The kids have eaten bread and soup. Handed to them by a woman; a man handed them the blanket.

  He takes a drink of water. Then another. Gives his children some. “Drink more.”

  It is not enough
to survive.

  He pulls his children close. They smile some.

  They lean into his sides.

  They will do more than just survive.

  He walks. Along the highway. Behind him, he can hear all those people gathered on that overpass, helping the ones who keep climbing up from the highway. He walks faster, his backpack bounces against his arms.

  Ahead of him, he hears the chaos. Sirens in the South End. There are people screaming. But beyond that, there are other places.

  Why? he tries to remember. Why did I leave my three friends behind?

  What, he wonders, is the girl maybe doing now?

  He smells smoke, and even in the night there are black plumes rising from neighborhoods around him, and above his head as he walks and thinks about the girl and his three friends, he can see the glow of fire in the clouds.

  On the overpass, the son lets his mother hold him.

  More loss than they can comprehend. More horrors than they can speak aloud. More sadness than they will ever want to think about or remember.

  But the son lets his mother hold him.

  Soaked and cold, and a woman gives them blankets as a young boy hands them some sort of drink. It steams.

  They thank the woman. Thank the boy.

  She holds her son. There’s so little left. His thinness embodies all that’s wrong. The mother feels every single bone.

  Memories, childhood, games in the yard, her husband playing hide-and-seek, a father who always threw a ball, to this son and to his older brother.

  “I wish everything had been different,” the mother says. “I’m sorry about all that’s happened. I am just so sorry.”

  And still the son lets his mother hold him.

  The doctor has been moving throughout the tents. Helping people with their injuries.

  “No one comes to help,” his wife says. They stand together for a minute.