Above the Ether

by Eric Barnes

  He shakes his head.

  “How is that possible?” she asks.

  He shakes his head again.

  “We’re supposed to fear that place,” she says, nodding toward the North End.

  “Do you?” he asks her.

  “No,” she says.

  He leans close to her. He can smell her hair.

  She kisses him.

  “There are people to help,” she says.

  He kisses her. “Yes,” he says. “Please you go and help them.”

  On the highway, what’s left behind are the carcasses. Of the livestock released or broken free. And of the people who could not escape.

  What caused this is not easily determined. Beyond the storm. The wrecks. The broken levee. And the horror.

  On the highway are vehicles and refuse, and there is so much water, from the sky and from the sewers and from the bay to the north.

  Around them is a fractured city, two cities now, separated by a highway, one gone and one in descent, and no one here is able to see either for what they are.

  On the overpass, so many people, lost and broken and helped, each one now staggered, whether fleeing from a North End they’ve been told to fear or sitting in silence among so many other refugees from the storm or veering slowly toward that ruined city to the north, drawn to it; it’s impossible, but that empty place does draw them forward.

  But what caused this? This chaos, this abandonment, this destruction of people and place. Isn’t there an answer? Shouldn’t there be one? How can there not be a simple way of making sense of the insane?

  Her boy lives.

  But he’s not the same.

  He is silent now. Often, he just stares.

  He wants with all his being to protect his mother.

  At night, he reads. Quietly. She finds books for him in the abandoned library.

  There’s something he knows that she can’t change. Can’t eliminate.

  She can only hold him tight.

  EPILOGUE

  A baseball game now ends. Somewhere. It ends soon after it begins. The weather. Wind. A storm too violent.

  All of you, please go home.

  He wonders about his children. The two of them. Held close.

  Sorrow he can’t comprehend. Does not experience. They are on their own.

  He wants that to not be true. But there’s nothing he can do to change it.

  Your mother died.

  Mom is dead.

  Sweeties, she’s no longer with us.

  They don’t cry now. They just sit. Here under these rough blankets. On an overpass. Near this city.

  He won’t stay here. They will leave. Find a place. A new home. With sunlight. Green trees. The hope of a life that is not so hard.

  She stares at a group of people all equally scarred across their bodies. They repaired and replaced the ladders for hours as she sat here.

  One has filaments of silver wrapped around her neck. Its creation must have involved a hundred passes. Round and round.

  There are more of them. Thirty. They hardly talk. But they stand together.

  She looks down at her clothes. A suit. She paid many thousands of dollars for it. Her shoes cost even more.

  She stands too now. Walks over to the group of people. They don’t speak. So quiet.

  “Where is it,” she asks them, “that all of you now live?”

  The former restaurant manager helps load ropes and tools and gear into a pickup truck.

  Someone nods to him.

  He has nowhere to go. This is obvious. But still it is so sad.

  Everyone fades away.

  On the highway, in the crashing that he witnessed, he told himself his life would change. Become different. A life of substance.

  He’s aware that he’s not alone. That hundreds and thousands on the highway likely also made a commitment of this type.

  But he walks to the front of the pickup now. Taps on the driver’s door. “What,” he asks the man, “can I do to help?”

  The former carousel operator finds a phone that works. In an office building. Nearby the sirens wail. They have not stopped in hours.

  He’s gone through many buildings. Here in the wreckage of the storm where it hit what’s called the South End. Looking for a phone that works.

  This one does. The building’s lights are out. The front door and windows are broken. But the phone still works.

  He doesn’t know the girl’s number. But he calls his dad.

  “Tell me,” his father says through the phone, tired, his dad has just woken up, “tell me all that you’ve chosen to do.”

  The kid listens. Thinks. But cannot respond.

  He watched once as his father beat a man bloody in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. He watched once as his father coaxed a woman to leave her date in some dark and crappy bar. He watched once as his father threatened him, with consequences clear and violent, if he did not stand now and go to school.

  “Has anyone ever called?” the kid asks his father.

  There’s silence. Then motion. His father moves, shifting on the couch or in his bed.

  “There’s one thing,” he hears his father say. “Here it is. One thing. A number. From some girl.”

  Her son eats more food. As they sit together in this tent.

  The mother drinks more water. It’s no small thing. The water. It’s as if she’s been served a potion, or maybe it’s a tonic?

  “What do we do?” her son asks.

  The mother holds him. Lightly. Arm across the bones of her son’s thin back.

  “He took us down a hole,” her husband once said to her, speaking of their older child, as they sat on their front porch after their boy died; whether it was a fight or they cried or her husband talked to himself, she can’t remember. “And at first it seemed like going down that hole with him would help. We would follow him and protect him. Save him. Make him better. But the farther down the hole we went, the more sick everyone in the house became. We weren’t chasing him. He was pulling us, downward, closer and closer to the illness. And so our youngest son let go, he stopped along that descent. And then I was next. I let go. I stepped off of that dark and awful path. I feel a guilt about this that I will never overcome. But I did it. I let go. To save myself. And yet you didn’t. You never let go. You held on to him. All the way down to the bottom of that hole he had created. Created unintentionally. But you stayed there with him. It’s the greatest and best and most selfless thing you could ever do. But now you’re stuck there. All alone.”

  She rubs her hand across her son’s back.

  She’ll cry more. Later. Her husband died. She will cry more.

  But now she holds her son. As best she can. Without breaking him. Sweet, sweet boy. He’ll break if she holds him closer.

  “We sit,” the mother says, answering her son. Kisses him. Lightly. On the head. “We just sit.”

  The doctor holds his wife.

  Although, as it’s always been, it is she who holds her husband.

  She whispers to him. Words that now soak into him. He absorbs each one.

  For a moment, it’s as if he’s heard every sound she’s ever made. Felt all of her movements. Smelled each scent that she now has.

  He kisses her near the ear.

  “Why?” she asks.

  They sit together near the overpass. Soon, he’ll return to help the wounded. Soon, she’ll return to helping the many others still in need.

  What she went through before he met her, he must now imagine. Not by choice. It’s necessity. He must picture it. To love her is to understand.

  “Why?” she asks again.

  He has no answer. Or none that he will share.

  And so he only kisses her.

  They are the last to emerge from one of the vehicles on the highway. A bus, the front door opens. They swim through the filthy water, strewn with bodies, debris, and livestock. Ten girls, they swim to a ladder. Climb up to the overpass, one after another. No screaming, no n
oise; they clearly show no fear. Beautiful, each of them, girls maybe fifteen at most, in their dresses. Each dress white. Each dress the same. Soon they reach the overpass, gather together. The man who leads them looks around. At the others on the overpass. At the girls who’ve climbed ahead of him.

  He sees the faces of these strangers. Staring now at him.

  In a moment, he nods. Then turns. Walks south. Away from here.

  The girls look around the overpass. Then look at each other.

  It’s another few minutes before all begin to smile.

  Out in the Gulf, a crew on a barge closes off another well. There’s confirmation from the technician. It is announced on the loudspeakers above the deck.

  The crew packs up its gear in silence, each person only looking down at the new work orders in their hands. They climb into boats that take them across the Gulf, the water thick with oil, coating the sides of the boat as it lurches heavily through thick waves, taking the crew to another rig, still bleeding; there are so many more that they must fix.

  The minister sweeps the broad steps leading up to the cathedral. Turning again and again to welcome people from the overpass. People who come to pray.

  He has always loved the church.

  He simply had long periods when he would not let it love him back.

  The woman sits near the tent. Watching her young son. Still he works. Going from person to person. Bringing blankets. Food and water. Whatever anyone wants or needs.

  A kindness in him unbroken.

  The man walks through the front doors of the hotel. He holds the camera in one hand. With the other he slowly pushes the hair out of his dim eyes.

  Rainwater covers the floor.

  He starts to walk toward the staircase that leads up to his room. Twenty floors above.

  Today, though, he lets himself walk the long way across the lobby.

  Much has happened. Since he sat here alone with her.

  Normally, he doesn’t walk this way. Under the atrium.

  But today he does. After the storm.

  Much has happened.

  He pauses. Looks up. Floor after floor, metal railings; they rise up, seeming to bend slightly toward the top.

  Once lit dimly.

  Once a place he sat for hours.

  Much has happened. Since he sat here alone with her. Since they later had a family, living together in this city.

  Happiness. Darkness. All that seemed possible.

  He sits alone. On the rotted sofa. Looking around. Looking up. Calculating.

  All that was lost.

  He sets his camera on a table. He pulls a small notebook from his pocket. Turns pages. Looks at the handwriting. Inky black. Letters forming words. A structure only he can follow. Words spilt out, one after another, across page after page after page.

  The city dies. Like it has for years.

  The city dies. And most just watch its collapse.

  Cities die. These places that have gathered people in the millions.

  How do they die? What happens? Why do so many people hate this place?

  Your place.

  Mine.

  There is hatred.

  There’s abuse.

  There are the decisions people make. To destroy and to neglect and to remove, removing people and attention and care.

  Cities abandoned. Even those that are still inhabited. Cities can be abandoned.

  Because there’s a will to stay. Or to run away.

  It’s a choice.

  So come now. Listen.

  As the city cries your name.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to thank Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli for all of her support, as well as Cal Barksdale at Arcade Publishing. Thanks so much to you both. The author also wishes to thank all the writers who were kind enough to read and support The City Where We Once Lived. Much thanks also to all of the bartenders who tolerated that guy at the end of the bar with his head down, wearing earphones, taking up space for hours and hours and hours, especially everyone at the Beauty Shop, Sweet Grass Next Door, Second Line, and, for more hours than should ever be counted, Alchemy.

  And, also, thanks to Nora. Always.