The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  Maxwell Moreau’s two-story cottage was painted a light but vibrant blue. The narrow front yard was tangled with dying grass and dying exotic plants and a somehow still-thriving banana tree. At some point after the Storm, someone had spray-painted a large X with an indecipherable array of numbers and letters on the façade. The front door was half-ajar. Inside, the walls were marked with green waterlines and blooming with black mold and peeling as though suffering from leprosy. The hardwood flooring was caked in mud and warped. On one side of the living room was a moldy couch, overturned chairs, and a flaking coffee table made from old railway ties. On the other side of the living room there was a huge hole in the wall, through which long vines, like tentacles, had entered the house.

  He did not go into the kitchen. From the threshold he could see a small rotting kitchen table set for one and a green glass vase holding the stems of dead flowers, a sad still life, thought Saul, that touched him deeply because of the loss it radiated.

  Upstairs there was a sparse office with a floor lamp, an old bookcase stacked with used books, and an ornate oak desk in front of a boarded window. On the floor of the office were notebooks full of indecipherable (at least to Saul) equations and diagrams and a photograph of a group of young men and women in a desert, tired and happy, dressed in beige and red shirts and with large backpacks placed at their feet like they had just ended a long trek. Although the desert was unfamiliar and the people in the photograph strangers, Saul suddenly longed to join them. On the back of the photo, in pen, someone (in all likelihood Maxwell Moreau) had written Atacama Desert, 1999.

  Javier called to him from a balcony off the bedroom. On the balcony was a pile of dirty clothes, a sleeping bag, a red folding chair, half-empty jugs of water, canned food, and a single propane stove. I checked each room, said Javier, and even the attic. Thankfully, there are no bodies in the house and it looks like he camped out on the balcony after the Storm. Don’t worry, pana, maybe he left at some point and is still planning on coming back.

  Of course, thought Saul somberly as he stared down into the ruins of South Telemachus Street, there were other possibilities: maybe he hadn’t survived the Storm and someone had already removed his body, or maybe he had escaped to Houston or Atlanta and then took a connecting flight to Santiago or Madrid or any of the other vast old cities across the Atlantic Ocean that Maxwell Moreau had visited throughout his life, biding his time until he could return (if he could even return), his once immaculate gray and black hair now unkempt, with only a notebook full of equations to his name, like one of those 16th century astronomers condemned by the Holy Roman Empire and exiled to spend the rest of his years in the dark green and ice-blue forests of Denmark or in one of those ancient frontier villages in Lithuania, places diffused by rain and snow and clouds like ground glass, in other words, fractured, impossible places to study the stars. Or maybe it wasn’t like any of that at all, thought Saul. Maybe Maxwell Moreau was just simply visiting someone, maybe an old German physicist living in Berlin or Vienna who would chuckle at the sight of his long-lost friend as he walked through the arrival gates.

  * * *

  In the office, they wrote a note with their contact information and placed it on the oak desk in the hopes that Maxwell Moreau would return and find it. Afterward, they went for a walk around the neighborhood, half expecting to see a tall theoretical physicist emerging from the ruins of the city. They walked through a twisting maze of streets blocked by debris and wreckage, passing one-story shotgun homes and vacant lots out of which every so often there rose half-stripped oak trees and abandoned dogs, half-feral and shy, hurrying under homes or down old railway tracks.

  At some point, near the banks of a low-lying bayou which ran through the neighborhood, they came across the wreckage of a red helicopter. At the end of the bayou, there was an empty post office, a flatbed truck full of scrap metal, a blue tent, and three black sleeping bags. On one of the sleeping bags was a high school literature textbook, its cover full of random words of poetry in cursive and illustrations of old men with white beards, suggesting ridiculously, thought Saul, that literature had somehow only emerged from the fog of the Renaissance. Pickers, said Javier, who probably just arrived here from who knows where to rummage through the remains.

  Javier picked up the book, opened its cover, and read a name on the inside. Rosa Salinas, he said, at which point Saul envisioned a picker named Rosa Salinas defiantly hitchhiking through the swampy fields of Louisiana, bowed by the happy weight of a literature textbook stuffed into her backpack.

  Farther south, near a red pickup truck parked in the middle of the street, they came across a small group of workers who were cooking vegetables and chicken on a portable grill, the smoke hazing across the street. Javier spoke to them in Spanish for a few minutes. Later, as they walked back down South Telemachus Street, Javier told Saul that the workers were undocumented Hondurans and that they had already been in the city for a few weeks. They found work gutting and repairing homes. The money was good, but the city was not what they had expected. What had they expected? asked Saul. An American city, said Javier.

  * * *

  On South Telemachus Street, on the dilapidated front porch of a half-gutted sea-green shotgun house, they saw a bald man in his seventies wearing cargo pants, work goggles, and a half-mask respirator. The man, who waved the moment he saw them walking by, lost no time taking off his goggles and pulling the half-mask respirator down to his neck before introducing himself. Aaron Douglas, he said with a smile. Wasn’t there a painter named Aaron Douglas? asked Javier, careful to step around a pile of moldy drywall. Right, the bald man said, a distant ancestor and one of my mom’s favorite artists. Javier then introduced himself as a reporter from the Chicago Tribune and explained that they were looking for a friend who lived nearby, a retired theoretical physicist, and then he gave the bald man Maxwell Moreau’s description and address.

  And you thought you’d find him back here? said the bald man. There’s nobody else on this entire block except me, a few stray dogs, and those fool kids with M-16s driving around in National Guard Humvees. He said, I’m sorry, truly sorry you came all this way, but there are a lot of missing people these days. I wish I knew him so I’d have something to tell you. I wish I knew the fate of everybody on this godforsaken street, he then added with a tone of sadness.

  * * *

  Javier pulled out a small digital recorder. He then said, is this okay? The bald man looked at them with a thoughtful curious smile, and then he said, that’s fine, I could use a break anyway. It took Saul a moment to understand that Javier was implying that the bald man tell his story of the Storm. There was nothing Saul could do to change the topic or stop it. So he waited and watched them in silence, listening at first to the noises that seemed then so unexpected on that otherwise terribly silent street: a song playing on a distant radio, the low grumbling of a tractor nearby, a solitary bird of paradise trilling from an exposed roof beam.

  Aaron Douglas shared his story. He was from New Orleans and had worked for a long time as a bartender, first in run-of-the-mill neighborhood joints, and then, when his kids were a bit older, at a few lavish restaurants in the French Quarter, until he decided to go back to school to be a lawyer, which had been his original idea all along. After law school, he served as a public defender with some success for nearly two decades before retiring in late 2001. His wife, Eulalie, was originally from a small town in Kansas and had taught music in an elementary school for some thirty years before retiring in 1998. For the most part, they could be found in New Orleans, but sometimes they spent their summers in Seattle with their daughter and grandkids. But this summer they hadn’t gone anywhere, at least not until they were forced to leave the city by gunpoint. Yes, they stayed. They were holdouts. They found safety in a neighbor’s second-story duplex.

  The Flood was like a slow-motion nuclear bomb. You could feel the end from a mile away. Afterward, when it
was clear the city was destroyed and had started to drain, soldiers started showing up in Humvees right through the water, pointing guns at people, making those who had stayed leave their homes. A boy, nineteen or twenty, with a cleanly shaved head pointed an M-16 at him, then his wife, and told them they had to evacuate within three hours. Instead of food, water, medical attention, and buses, they sent soldiers. Like in Baghdad. Because the American government only knows how to respond to a crisis in one way, whether in Baghdad or New Orleans.

  Still, they were more fortunate than others. A lot of people died here, he said, and many more are still forced to live like refugees in their own damn country. Refugees. That’s what all the major television networks said about us. Refugees. Tax-paying citizens, black folks, refugees. They couldn’t say it enough.

  We plan on staying with friends in Baton Rouge, said Aaron Douglas, but as soon as this house is ready we’re moving back. You know at first, I didn’t want to return, I wanted to stay in Seattle where we have family and where we could start over. Why the hell return to any of this? But my wife wanted to. She said we didn’t have a choice. We fought for weeks and weeks about it, he said—isolated in his own words—and I came to finally remember and understand one singular fact about my wife: she was a little girl during the Dust Bowl. Her earliest memories are of vast clouds of dust, horizons of dust, dust in her eyes and layers of dust under her small fingernails, in the lining of her mouth and nostrils, and even in her dreams. Dust that brought hunger and dust that even took her baby sister’s life one August morning. Something like that happens to you as a child and it becomes almost impossible to separate yourself from the event. It lives and breathes in your bones and blood, and you live in its memory, if that makes any sense to you, Javier. My wife’s family eventually left Kansas and they never returned because there was nothing to return to. Sure, my family suffered through a few hurricanes, but the city always endured. Maybe this time it won’t. I don’t know. None of that matters right now. What matters is that I finally came to understand that my wife would never be chased out of another home for as long as she lives.

  * * *

  When they got back to the car, Javier said he had to meet up with a colleague. They drove to a bar called Molly’s in the French Quarter. The bar was long, dark. On the bar and at each table, there were candles burning. There were six other people, none of whom, thought Saul, were Maxwell Moreau. On a bar stool near the front doors, Javier saw his colleague. They shook hands and then he introduced himself to Saul.

  The photojournalist’s name was Roberto Herrera and he was originally from Santa Fe, but hadn’t been back in some time. For the foreseeable future, he would be staying in New Orleans. It was a welcome change of pace. His previous assignment had been to follow troops fighting insurgents in the Euphrates River valley in Iraq. The photojournalist’s face was thin and long, his short black beard giving him a serious look, yet he was dressed like a tourist who was taking a hiatus from a very serious life.

  Over beers, Javier and Roberto talked about a colleague of theirs who was stuck in an impossible situation in Mosul. When they were all finished, they went outside and unloaded the supplies from the Cadillac to Roberto’s jeep parked out front. Afterward, the photojournalist took out a cigarette and handed one to Javier, who lit it with a small lighter. Saul couldn’t remember just then if Javier smoked or not. When the photojournalist tried to hand one to Saul, he shook his head and said, no thank you. Then the photojournalist lit a cigarette and blew smoke rings, bluish nimbuses that dissolved in the fading yellow light of that long colonial street. I have to quit this shit, he said to Saul and raised his hand in a gesture of surrender. Then at some point Javier told Roberto that they should get going if they were going to drop off the supplies and get a little work done before the curfew. They both got into the jeep and Javier said, alright, pana, we’ll be back in a few hours, then we’ll call it a day. The jeep sped down the street and Saul spent a few seconds gazing after it, thinking the whole time that he should’ve taken the cigarette from the photojournalist, then, later, as he sat at the candlelit bar reading an old, yellowed copy of the Times-Picayune, the words, at times, floating weightlessly above the pages like a hologram of granulated ash, thinking that it actually didn’t matter one way or another.

  * * *

  A few hours later, just after sunset and the city-wide curfew, Javier returned alone and they drove to their hotel in the Lower Garden District through streets flanked by old Hellenistic buildings, most of which were empty and dark, but a few of which were lit with red or pale yellow light bulbs on the front porch or lit dimly inside with candles behind half-parted window curtains, as if it were another century, the 16th or the 22nd century, a sclerotic century, burning at its edges, encased rib cage–like in disaster.

  The hotel, Javier explained as he drove, really wasn’t a hotel at all, but a large Victorian home owned by a famous music producer whom the photojournalist had put Javier in contact with and who had temporarily converted the building into a type of communal space for volunteers and journalists.

  They took a small clean room on the second floor equipped with two air mattresses. A second-story balcony was accessible by a door painted green and purple. Javier stretched out on the air mattress nearest the balcony and closed his eyes.

  Saul took a very cold shower. In a small shaving mirror in the shower he caught a glimpse of himself and noticed that there were semicircles under his eyes and that he had black stubble. I don’t look like myself, he thought. His gaze was, at any rate, strained, surprised, and slightly helpless, as if he had not quite yet grasped that something elemental, something quantum, like the direction of wind, had changed since his grandfather’s death.

  What other probabilities and selves run in my veins? he thought.

  Later, as he dried off—the rotting smell of the city still clinging to him—he thought of those other versions of himself: one who had presumably died with his parents on bus 311 traveling to Tel Aviv, one who still lived in Israel and corresponded with his American grandfather through postcards, another who was a solitary but otherwise untroubled hotel concierge in a foreign country, and yet another who hadn’t listened to Javier when, some weeks earlier, he had convinced him that they should come to this half-drowned city in a futile search for Maxwell Moreau. Maybe, he then thought, those still-living Sauls also sometimes think of me. Maybe not. By the time he returned to the room, Javier was already fast asleep.

  * * *

  A muffled noise woke Saul and he saw a flicker of movement—the movement of a floating ember—and realized that Javier was smoking just beyond the threshold of the balcony door. What time is it? he asked, yawning. Javier turned around, a little surprised, and said, shit, pana, sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you. It’s okay, he said, what time is it? It’s 2:00 a.m. or maybe 3:00 a.m., I don’t know. Saul got out of bed and went to the porch to join Javier. I woke up to take a piss and couldn’t fall back asleep, said Javier. For some reason, I was just lying there in bed and I was struck with the strange urgency to call your grandfather and ask him something about his World War II book. On Dreams and Tombs, said Saul without much surprise, especially now that he knew his grandfather and Javier had shared a close-knit—even collaborative—friendship. Yes, that one, he said and fixed his eyes on Saul. Anyway, he continued, I suppose it’s quite a normal thing to want to do, especially in the middle of the night. To call the dead? said Saul and he smiled a little to tease Javier and to help ease his mind. He then made a corresponding gesture with his hand to indicate that he would like to take a drag from Javier’s cigarette. Javier handed him the cigarette. Saul leaned against the porch, one elbow propped on the railing, and took a small drag.

  It’s really quite a normal thing to want to do, he thought, in the middle of the night or even during the day, in fact, he too sometimes wanted to call the dead, his parents for one, whose voices he could never remember, voices as foreign to him n
ow as a sprawling city in the desert. And, yes, he also sometimes wanted to call his grandfather, whose impatient gravel-like voice had filled his childhood like a long soliloquy.

  After a short silence, he said, what did you want to ask him?

  I wanted to ask him about the Sicilian soldier he interviewed for the book, said Javier, do you remember him? I wanted to ask him how he got that Sicilian soldier to talk about the war. The soldier had kept silent his entire life about the war. He didn’t share any details with his wife, his siblings, his children, though we end up telling our children so little, even now I spend my days and nights thinking about what to tell Maya and what not to tell her, pana, there are far too many consequences for even the smallest things you tell or don’t tell your kids. He served in Sicily in the Italian 6th Army under Alfredo Guzzoni and then later immigrated to the States, first to Cleveland, then Chicago, and telling anyone anything would’ve risked rebuke or even implication, especially from Americans who had served or lost loved ones during the war, it would’ve risked friendships and jobs, even though in the end he had done so little during the war—he admitted to killing a British soldier, if I remember correctly, but he wasn’t a war criminal by any stretch of the imagination—and was by then an American citizen anyway.

  Still, his silence was completely understandable. You can’t blame him. I’ve met people like that Sicilian soldier all over Latin America, he said.

  The streetlight flickered and the air began to buzz, like a swarm of insects was surrounding the house. It’s been doing that all night, said Javier.