“Then let me go in it.”
“You?”
“You show me how to sail it. I’ll go.”
“You can’t go. You told me yourself. The people here live on the edge of madness. You’re the only thing keeping them from killing each other.”
“Then you go.”
Emil looks around his brother’s room, sees traces of the sacks of food that he brought—stray grains of escaped rice, a black patch on the floor where a handful of ground coffee was spilt. He scratches behind his ear.
“Tell you the truth, Nacho, I’m thinking of going anyway. Just I wasn’t planning on the wild goose chase and the hero’s return. I like to roam. Even in a storm, I’m not really looking for a port. There’s a lot out there. Places. People. Here there’s a tower and too much water.”
“And a woman.”
“I’ve never stayed anywhere for a woman. Even a good one.”
“We need food, brother. We can’t get out. Help us. Or teach us how to build a boat. We’ll do it ourselves.”
“No. Take too long. And you don’t have the tools. I’ll do it. I’ll leave today. Go over all the old places. The warehouses. Pantries. Kitchens. I’m doing it for you, not them. I never had your zeal, you know that. Or our father’s. That ‘man of the people’ stuff. It wasn’t me and it still isn’t. But I’ll do it.”
He doesn’t look back before he vaults out of the gap where a window should be, onto the rain-slick stairwell and into his boat.
“What do I tell Maria?” shouts Nacho.
“Tell her I’ve gone to get some food.”
“The truth. Why didn’t I think of that?”
The day Emil leaves, the weather turns cold. The nonstop hiss of the rain becomes a clatter, and eight hundred faces peer out of the window openings of the tower to see hailstones as big as tennis balls rattling off the outer walls. In the briny water below, a pattern of rings appears, detonating into circles again and again.
Meanwhile, the hail raps on the roof of Emil’s boat as he steers between two high rises on Salamurhaaja Street. He docks under a stairwell off Boondoggle Avenue, throwing a rope with a hook around the metal banister. He is moving fast, reaching for the bucket first and then the hand pump because he already knows he’s been hit and there’s a hole in his boat and if it’s big, the thing will sink.
“He could have said goodbye,” says Maria, applying lipstick in front of a mirror. Outside, the hailstones have given way to a blustery sleet.
“He didn’t know how to,” says Nacho, at the doorway of Maria’s salon. “He’s better at action than words. He’s trying to find food for us all.”
“Men always have to be the heroes, right?”
Nacho shrugs. He has other things on his mind. Besides thinking about how the walk up five flights of stairs on his muletas nearly killed him and now he has to go back down, he reimagines the people he saw on his way up. In each window he saw the faces of damnificados. He saw their hollow eyes. The lethargy. He has seen it before. This is what happens when people begin to starve.
The night passes. Nacho wakes. Groggy. Something is different. He hears the call to prayer. The muezzin’s throaty tenor rises and breaks open the silence. Allahu akbar! God is great! In a voice that could raise the dead. Land of bandy legs, crooked teeth, chain-smokers, roundbellies. The voice pauses and comes again. A flock of birds reels in telepathy, hangs on a curve to the right, to the left, ducks under a bridge out of sight. The city, too, is waking. Cranes everywhere, half-finished high-rises, metal skeletons. Minarets like gold-nibbed fountain pens fifty feet high, the domes of the mosques gigantic upturned soup bowls. Everything half under water.
Silence.
The rain has stopped.
Nacho goes to his window and sees an azure sky. He looks down and sees that the murky water has begun to subside. From upstairs, the voice of Harry the baker, a grubby baritone, jaunty tune, words indecipherable except for the high note on ‘rain’ which sounds like raeeeeeeeen.
Over the next twenty-four hours, the water recedes yet more until the earth is again visible. Weeds erupt from fields of sodden trash. Tide marks stain the buildings. Layers of silt clog the roads. The people, like animals awakening from a long hibernation, begin to walk the streets again, seeing the world anew, with fresh eyes. Miracles abound. A family of damnificados has survived in an attic on Beggarcat Street, living off a supply of tinned ravioli. When the rains abate, the parents walk out pushing a shopping cart lined with blankets. Inside it, two skeletal children are woken by the burst of sunlight.
A pit bull emerges from a bodega. It survived by climbing onto the outside of the building, and during the heaviest rains kept its nose above the water, and gripped the wooden slats of the roof to stop being swept away. It caught a bird in its massive jaws, gnawed the thing to death, and lived off it for a week, crushing the bones between its teeth.
A flower long believed extinct blooms from a shallow mound of mud, announcing itself in a shock of red and yellow.
But just as the damnificados prepare gleefully to escape the tower in search of food and water, news comes that there are crocodiles in the atrium.
“Saw ’em wiv me own eyes,” says Harry the baker to a throng gathered on the stairwell of the first floor.
“How many?” asks Raincoat.
“Two.”
“Big ’uns?”
“Large.”
“Then we need guns.”
The twins emerge from nowhere carrying broom handles sharpened by the carpenter from Blutig.
Hans turns to his brother. “Ready for some fun?”
“Ja, ja,” says Dieter. “Wo sind sie?”
“In the atrium somewhere.”
They climb down the steps gingerly and look around. There in the corner of the room, two fat crocs, eight foot nose to tail, leathery beasts the color of mud. Crouching, languid. Hans and Dieter jump down the final steps, wielding their sticks like swords. The boys are rangy, lined with lean muscle on their skinny shoulders, bare-chested and sweating in the heat. They wear jeans cut off at the knees and no shoes. All the better for maneuvering around a pair of rain-drenched beasts twice their size.
“Hallo, meine Damen!” says Dieter, and begins a quickstep around them. He prods one of them in the side. The animal stirs.
“They’re twins!” he announces to Hans, laughing.
One of the crocs raises its head.
“Jump on its back!” says Hans.
“You jump on its back!”
“Go for the eyes!”
“You go for the eyes!”
They do a sideways shuffle as the crocodile swaggers into their orbit. As it moves, its thick tail waves side to side.
Nacho appears at the staircase.
“What the hell!” he says. “Get out of there!”
The twins pause and reluctantly walk to the stairwell. Nacho leans on his crutches, disbelieving.
“What were you planning?” he says. “Kill them with broomsticks?”
Hans looks at him. “We have to get them out of the atrium if we want to leave the building.”
“No,” says Nacho. “Where will they go?”
“We don’t know.”
“Exactly. You want two crocodiles on the loose?”
“So what do we do? Tranquillize them like we did with those dogs?”
“They were wolves,” says Dieter.
Nacho scratches at his unkempt hair. “Incapacitate them.”
Hans turns to his brother. “Was bedeutet das Wort?”
“Ich weiss nicht. What does this word mean?”
Nacho has already turned to the people crowding behind him. “Does anyone have a tranquillizer gun?”
Raincoat says, “This ain’t a fuckin safari. Tranquillizer gun my ass. Put some holes in the fuckers. Kill them and sell the skins. I’ll do it. Who’s got a gun?”
Just then the crocodiles trundle over the debris blocking the atrium doorway and walk into the sunlight, shoulders rotating like a big cat’s
as their tails wallop the trash behind them. The twins scramble down from the stairwell to follow them, but in the wreckage of the ground floor they lose the beasts.
“Hey, where did they go?”
“What?” says Raincoat. “You lost two crocodiles.”
The animals have slid underground, noses foraging in the mulch. They won’t be seen again for eight months, and when they are seen, no one will come for them with sharpened sticks and teenage bravado.
Across the city the nightmare unfolds. When water goes down, something else comes up. In Favelada and the surrounding zones, dead bodies are found floating. Looters emerge, stealing food and water wherever they can until some of them morph into armed gangs, and a black market opens up. The police officers who did not escape the city join the gangs, ripping off their badges, stockpiling their ammunition.
In Minhas, hundreds of miners and their families walk across a bridge at the edge of the city to escape their gutted homes, but are turned back by armed militias wearing hoods and jackboots. An outbreak of typhoid occurs in Agua Suja. Six die of hepatitis A in Fellahin. In Balaal, there are reports of tuberculosis. In Favelada, four teenage sisters succumb to malaria. The hospitals are helpless. Their first floors are flooded, and on the second floor stacks of bodies pile up, crammed into operating rooms or doctors’ offices. The stench draws the rats, who spring through the windows and grow fat on bloated corpses. Disease spreads.
Eventually, teams of workers, along with the army, come to clean up the city. They bring bulldozers and other heavy equipment, clattering and banging all day long. Half the streets are closed—sealed off with orange tape and traffic cones—while the cleanup takes place. Trucks arrive full of chemicals to wash away the stink of the sewer that now occupies the city. Families begin to return, sweeping piles of debris from their porches, nosing around their homes like strangers, picking up broken remains, digging through the muck to find some old photo or toy.
Also as the water recedes, a mystery is gradually revealed that brings crowds in their hundreds. At the city gates, five giant stone heads become visible. At first, all that can be seen are the gently curving tops of the five heads. But the water goes down, and over days the features of carved faces become exposed. First, the foreheads, then the unmistakable hollows of eyes. Short noses protruding. Mouths in the rictus grin of a Greek kouros. Finally, the rounded chins. Something between Easter Island moai and statues of the Buddha’s head, each four meters high and each weighing twenty tons. They have been placed there, blocking off the street between the giant iron gates of the city. The heads are arranged in a gentle semicircle but facing in alternate directions, three facing outward, two facing in.
While the inhabitants look on, astounded, the city’s archaeologists and anthropologists are brought in to examine the heads. They take samples of the rock and consult textbooks and ancient writings. Then the city authorities decree that the heads must be moved to unblock the streets, but it’s no use; there’s no machinery to do it. The only machines big enough have been sold off for illegal profit or broken down for spare parts—engines, loaders, hydraulic winches.
An archaeologist from Kotemoyoye pronounces, “Three of the heads are watching for enemies beyond the city walls and two are watching for internal enemies. This tells us there are invaders waiting, and traitors among us.”
Another says, “They were placed there by living gods.”
Footage from surveillance cameras is acquired by the investigators. They play it back again and again, sitting in darkened rooms, watching every movement at the city gates, but nothing shows how the heads arrived. It is as if they appeared by magic. Or took root on the streets under the water and carved themselves.
“It would’ve taken five hundred men twenty days working day and night to bring the stones from the river. And that’s assuming they were brought here by some kind of enormous boat,” says the archaeologist from Kotemoyoye.
But there is no enormous boat, and there aren’t five hundred men who melted into thin air once the deed was done under the flood water.
“They were brought here by aliens! Extraterrestrials!” says a journalist. “This is not the work of human hands.”
“It’s a message from God,” says a priest.
The type of stone remains unidentified, a substance malleable enough to be carved but strong enough to survive unscathed underwater for two weeks. They look all over, at the granophyre rocks in Minhas, the disused porphyry quarry in Dieux Morts, the charnockite mountains north of Blutig, the scoria surrounding Agua Suja. Nothing matches. They go further afield, testing quartzes, pumices, phonolites, troctolites, hacking up the mountain rocks of Zaurituak and Mrtva Zemlja, drilling into the basalt beds of Nista Zivote, the obsidian mines of Hajja Xejn. Nothing.
Soon the reporters and the cartoonists get to work. In a newspaper called The Hour, the heads are turned into caricatures of local politicians, with the caption: ‘the government: five heads, no brain.’ Then the stones are taken over by a group called the Cincocabezas, a posse of damnificados who take up residence on top of the rocks, shouting slogans and waving anti-government banners. They build fires on the heads, perform satanic rituals, slaughter goats. It takes the army four minutes to blast them away with water cannons. The damnificados topple and slide off the heads, somersaulting like harlequins.
Meanwhile, in Favelada the denizens of the tower wend their way to an End of Flood street party close to the city gates. The women are dressed to the nines, hair dyed with henna and indigo, eyes lined with crushed galena and burnt almond powder, toenails painted strawberry red, waists wrapped in multicolored silks. The men’s faces, too, have been scrubbed clean and among them walk damnificado cowboys in fraying Stetsons and mismatched boots, dreadlocked elders, sicarios with knives in their belts, mad-eyed swamp-men in patchwork dungarees.
A band has set up on the corner of Hadassah Street on a makeshift stage of pallets and crates: a singer, two guitarists and a phalanx of percussionists crouched over or holding found objects: upturned trash cans, plastic bottles half filled with gravel, tin buckets, and a timpani of pigskin stretched over a copper bowl. The young singer gyrates, whirls. She is lithe as a cat. Her kohlrimmed eyes scan the audience as she waves a hand bangled at the wrist like a Romany medium. Her voice—amplified by the microphone she holds in her other hand—dominates above the bass and the percussion, her mouth wide and red. She sings in many languages, always culminating in a Turkish chorus that brings the crowd to a frenzy, and four drag queens from Fellahin come flouncing out of nowhere and perform a line dance so perfect they look like mechanized puppets.
Up on a second-story window ledge, the twins, shirtless, are doing a dance routine side by side, their faces contorted in concentration. Nacho looks on from his seat on the edge of a wall, the Chinaman below him watching the people like a nightclub bouncer.
A song finishes and a roar goes up. The singer says something in Arabic, pauses for a subdued cheer, then switches to Turkish. More cheers. She grins and raises her arms, lifts her head to the sky and closes her eyes like a child swallowing rain. Then she lets out an unworldly note—an ahhhh at top C, somewhere between a scream and the sustained plaint of an opera diva. The note resolves into a sequence, sliding down the arpeggio as the percussionists ram home the beat. They are themselves damnificados, men in rags, taut jaws, loose white shirts or none at all. They are made of wiry muscle tissue with veins like ropes.
The twins move in perfect unison, moonwalking, shrugging, krumping, turfing, freestyling in telepathy, their faces coordinated in mock pain or joy or wonder. Below them at street level, Maria the beauty queen and her girls are dancing in a tight circle, arms rising and falling, feet twisting in their cork-lined heels.
Whole families dance together on the edge of the melee, holding hands, the parents, with gap-toothed smiles, encouraging the children.
The band goes on well into the night, the singer now draped in strips of black chiffon. She sings a solo while the b
and members stand like statues, silhouetted in the fading light. The song speaks of the dead, and when she is finished the transfixed crowd roars once again before the guitar begins anew.
Nacho turns to the Chinaman.
“I want to see the stone heads,” he says. “We’re about a mile away from the city gates. Come with me.”
As the Chinaman helps Nacho off the wall, a voice calls to them above the music.
“Where are you going?”
It’s Don Felipe, the priest.
“What are you doing here?” asks Nacho.
“The same as you. Watching. I asked you a question.”
“We’re going to the city gates.” Nacho has to shout it. “I want to see the stone heads.”
“Can I join you?”
“Yes. Come on.”
The priest leads them to a rickshaw driver, and says, “We can go with Ahmed,” but Ahmed takes one look at the size of the Chinaman and waves his finger from side to side. They walk instead.
They pass dozens of gutted shacks still damp with mold side by side with the daunting skyscrapers that line the city like sentinels. In every corner, piles of debris—rocks and stones, planks of wood—clog the spaces. Wild dogs prowl. Though the water has receded, the city has an eerie sense of displacement, things out of joint: doors no longer fit their hinges, trees stand at unnatural angles, electricity pylons cough up bunches of random wire. On every wall there are horizontal marks where the water reached and stayed for a while, leaving its brown imprint, before it found new levels, like the rings of a tree commemorating itself.
The stone heads come into view and Nacho stops, lets out a small gasp, and tries to get the measure of them, to see their size. The Chinaman stops, too, frowns.
“My God,” says Nacho.
The priest raises an eyebrow.
“Or your gods,” he says. “People are worshipping here. That’s what I heard. Laying out little shrines, like pagans. Look.”
They walk closer, Nacho on his wooden muletas.
At the foot of the stones, small fires are burning. Groups of sitting damnificados glow by the lights of the flames, and it reminds Nacho of the day they got into the tower. He remembers the bloodshot eyes of his comrades, sleeping children slung over shoulders, the looks of fear when the wolf emerged. The wolf—like him, like the Chinaman—a freak of nature, something gone wrong in the genes, out there alone in a crowd.
Damnificados Page 7
