The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

by Michael Zapata

  * * *

  Later, after the Storm had passed just east of the city and after a few hours of much-needed sleep, Maxwell went for a walk. The light drizzle of warm rain that had veiled the city that late morning had cleared, and the day was incredibly peaceful, as is often the case after storms, a cloudless day, pale yellow, the vault of a smoke-blue sky like a bell jar suspended over the city.

  As he walked, first along Canal Street and then along North Cortez Street, he took deep breaths and the sharp, pleasant smell of a thousand busted-open oak trees hummed through the warren of his sinuses. Power lines sagged sad and low, and debris littered the street. The roofs and siding of some houses had been peeled back, like giant butterfly wings, but most of the houses looked more or less intact, including his own. Occasionally, he saw someone else wandering the neighborhood, like him, a sleepwalker, and they stopped to chat about how they had survived the Storm.

  So, as the worst of it appeared to be over, he thought of other things as he walked. He thought about the Atacama Desert, about the eleven dimensions of M-theory, about the film The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel, a psychological horror film he had first seen in 1981, fifteen years after its release, six years after Franco’s death, in a small theater in Madrid.

  But, at some point, he felt water coursing over his ankles, then his shins, and he headed directly back to South Telemachus Street. He knocked on Antoine’s door, but no one answered.

  Maxwell’s house was airless and stifling hot, like a tomb, so he gathered his supplies and took them to the balcony. He turned on his battery-powered radio and twisted the dial, but there was no signal, just static, like the hollow roar of the ocean. Then he tried calling Ms. Zora, but the signal was busy. Likewise, the Internet was down. The water on South Telemachus Street rose and rose. At some point, he rechecked his camping gear and food supplies. He made pasta on his camping stove, but by the time it was ready he wasn’t hungry.

  * * *

  The following morning, Maxwell woke to Antoine’s voice. Traveler, you still here? he heard, distantly, as if through a pinhole. He was drenched in sweat and his sleeping bag was bunched up under him. It was dawn or just past dawn now, he couldn’t tell. Still, the sun was flaring. South Telemachus Street was a long, dark river, maybe seven feet deep. The water smelled like putrid fruit. The air around his house was hot, apoplectic. He stood up slowly.

  There you are, Traveler, said Antoine, you had me worried for a minute. Listen, he said, the levees breached, the water’s still rising, it’s toxic, you have to stay up there.

  Antoine was standing on the bow of a fifteen-foot Sea Ray. He wore a faded Hawaiian shirt and a bright orange life vest. Between his bare feet was a .22 rifle. In the Sea Ray with Antoine were seven other people: an elderly woman with two young kids, one holding a little shaking dog on her lap, an elderly man wrapped in a mint-green bedsheet, a middle-aged couple, and an adolescent girl wearing a Batman backpack who was contemplating Maxwell with a faraway look. In fact, all of Antoine’s passengers sat lost in thought. In turn, Maxwell stood on his balcony gazing at the strangers’ faces, which were like something out of a Goya painting, lucid, if dazed, survivors of a grotesque thing. They did not seem like strangers to him at all.

  You good, Traveler? said Antoine. Maxwell thought for a few seconds. Yes, I’m good, he said slowly, like he was a time traveler recently arrived in a city about which nothing was known for sure. Nobody’s coming, said Antoine, no Army, no Navy, no other boats except a few others in the neighborhood like mine, no buses, no nada. In other words, Traveler, Homeland ain’t secure and we’re on our own, so after I check on some addresses I’m coming back for you.

  Antoine took the helm of his boat, started the engine, and turned on the CD player. Maxwell watched as the Sea Ray headed toward Canal Street, the tender, liquescent sounds of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” drifting over the flooded ruins of New Orleans.

  * * *

  That morning, after Maxwell cooked oatmeal, he grabbed a flashlight and went halfway down his stairs into his dark and flooded house. At some point in the night, the front door had busted open and a large section of wall had collapsed. Bobbing hypnotically on the stagnant water were gasoline cans, a mattress (not his), a shower curtain, a teakettle, wooden dining room chairs (his), a package of chips, Ziploc containers, and a painting of a cactus he had purchased at a secondhand art store. Over the surface of the water floated clouds of fine ochre dust. Ah, yes, he said to himself slowly, the paramˉanu. Through the dust, dragonflies swarmed like little helicopters. He followed them with the beam of his flashlight for a while.

  * * *

  Later, Maxwell was finally able to find a working radio station, WWL-AM. He listened as others trapped in the city called in to give advice or plead for help. One man explained rather calmly that when the water came he had escaped to his attic and busted through the roof with an ax. Another caller couldn’t speak or rather her words were unintelligible behind deep sobs. Yet another woman called to tell the broadcaster that she was stuck in an elm tree. Where are you? the broadcaster asked. The woman shouted an address on North Roman Street, corner of Egania. Where the hell is everybody? she asked. Send somebody! Please. There are fucking rats in the tree. Please don’t let me die. Stay with us, the broadcaster said, hold tight to that tree. Stay with us, he said again when there was no response. I’m not going to make it, said the woman, finally, her voice trailing off into a thin, static-like haze, I’m tired, I’m so tired. Some seconds later, the phone call ended and Maxwell switched off the radio.

  Still, for a long while after—even weeks later—he thought about that woman in the elm tree, about unreality, about dying or rather a type of isolation that, at least initially, resembled dying, about a sky-gray amphitheater like an enormous medieval crypt.

  * * *

  Antoine returned in his Sea Ray just after dusk. Without the glare from streetlights or houses, the ink-black sky was now fiery and all-consumed with stars and constellations.

  I’ve never seen so many stars in my life, Traveler, said Antoine with a deep sigh.

  Maxwell, who was out on his balcony, squinted and looked to the star Beta Aquarii, a rare yellow supergiant some six hundred light-years away, yet, that night, visible to the naked eye. Maxwell pointed and said, look.

  What am I looking at? said Antoine.

  Beta Aquarii, said Maxwell, in the constellation of Aquarius.

  The water-bearer? said Antoine.

  That’s the one, said Maxwell, the flood-bearer, the avatar of the apocalypse.

  Well, Traveler, at least the apocalypse is pretty, said Antoine and they both laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  Just before dawn, Maxwell settled himself in the back of the boat and Antoine explained that they were headed to the embankment of Bayou St. John on Moss Street, where people were gathering to be taken out of the city. On South Telemachus Street, Antoine navigated the Sea Ray with mathematical, pirate-like precision between submerged cars, mammoth elm tree branches, and floating debris, all the while singing along to the lyrics of Israel Vibration’s “Ambush” playing on the CD player: I’m just a buffalo soldier/survival is my game.

  In the distance, on another street (or rather, another tributary) Maxwell made out the silhouette of the Lindy Boggs Hospital, like the silhouette of a half-submerged castle. He saw nearly vertical electrical poles that looked like the masts of 18th century sunken ships. He saw two boys, no more than twelve or thirteen, paddling in a white, floating refrigerator with its top pulled off. When the boys waved at them as they passed in the Sea Ray, he thought vaguely of a postapocalyptic Mark Twain novel never written or written and never found. On Canal Street, he saw a corpse facedown in the water, bloated, unrecognizable, and trapped in the branches of a fallen tree among newspaper advertisements for secondhand sales, black plastic garbage bags, and tubes of toothpaste. He thought about looking away, bu
t he didn’t look away. He felt obligated to something or someone, maybe the victim. Maybe they had known each other or had passed each other more than once on Canal Street. He saw a dawning pink sky that led to nowhere, but through which, at great heights, soared helicopters like carrion fowl.

  * * *

  On South Cortez Street, near the embankment, they passed a one-story shotgun house with the word HELP spray-painted in red on a bedsheet hung from the roof. On the roof, there was a middle-aged woman wearing a blue head scarf, a toddler grasping the legs of the woman, a skinny, shirtless teenage boy, and an elderly woman holding the head of a bald, female mannequin like it was a floating device.

  City’s on fire, said Antoine.

  Then he steered the Sea Ray toward the roof and called up to the family. With Antoine’s help, the family climbed down into the boat, one after the other, first the toddler, then the elderly woman, then the middle-aged woman followed by the teenage boy, after which there was a brief and immobile silence, like they’d all just been struck by lightning, whether a beautiful or incredibly terrible bolt of white lightning, Maxwell couldn’t tell. A silence that was nevertheless broken when Antoine said that he could get them out of the city. For a moment, the family looked at each other, still wordless, before finally saying, thank you, my God, thank you, their tones ranging from relief to humor to sorrow. Then the elderly woman looked directly into Maxwell’s eyes, slipped the bald female mannequin head silently into the water, and started to weep.

  As Antoine steered the Sea Ray away from the roof, Maxwell watched the mannequin head bobbing senselessly in the water, like she was, in turn, watching the boat leave, craning her neck, rising above the flat toxic water on tiptoe, unblinking in her synthetic gaze, until the boat disappeared from view.

  * * *

  When they arrived at the embankment, Antoine turned off the engine and then raised it out of the water. He got out of the Sea Ray and stood, shin deep, in the rippling water by the stern. He then led his five passengers onto the thin strip of dry land where there was a crowd of fifty or so people sitting in lawn chairs or standing in a long line behind a camouflage-toned Army Blackhawk helicopter. They stood cautiously on the embankment and looked out over the city, at the water endlessly stretching in every direction, at the boats coming in one by one, at the people wading through the water carrying garbage bags full of possessions, at the slender plume of black smoke rising from a nearby burning building, at the empty skyscrapers in the distance. There was a small crowd gathered around a radio tuned to WWL-AM and the family joined them.

  At some point, Antoine handed Maxwell two bottles of ice water and an Army MRE lunch. Maxwell smiled and said, thank you. Antoine nodded silently and then waded through the shin-deep water back to his Sea Ray. Before climbing aboard, he turned around and looked at Maxwell. His forehead, his neck, his arms shone in the fierce calcitic daylight, touched by a burning, joyful madness. He smiled and called out to Maxwell. See you in a parallel universe, Traveler, he said.

  Some hours later, Maxwell boarded the deafening Army Blackhawk helicopter with four others. Once they were above the city, he saw that the floodwaters reflected the light of the blue sky and the white clouds, so it seemed as if the city was floating in midair, like a cityship.

  * * *

  A few days later I arrived here, said Maxwell and he glanced at the highway beyond the parking lot of the Quality Suites motel, and added with a smile, when I emailed Victoria to tell her what happened, she came right away.

  * * *

  After Maxwell wrote down his contact information for Saul, they all said goodbye and walked to Romário’s Cadillac, and when Saul looked back Maxwell was already immersed in the manuscript. They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.

  They arrived in New Orleans around 10:00 p.m. and Javier parked the car in front of Ms. Zora’s bookstore. She thanked them for keeping Saul’s grandfather’s word to deliver the manuscript to Maxwell. I can tell you boys that it means the world to him, she said. And Saul suddenly saw the Hebrew letters for world, letters which resembled wisps of smoke. It was the same word he remembered just then that his parents had once taught him how to write on a blank page as white as the sands of an ancient desert in the Torah. עזלם, he had written, during those last days together in Tel Aviv.

  Ms. Zora suddenly seemed very tired, but this too only lasted a moment, and she hugged Javier and Saul and thanked them again. Before saying goodbye, they asked her what she was going to do now. Ms. Zora shrugged her shoulders and said, you never know. Then she sprang up the porch steps with her son. Come back anytime, she said before closing the door behind her.

  * * *

  As Saul and Javier walked to the French Quarter, they shared a cigarette, both lost in thought. When they reached the cathedral, they sat facing it on the steps leading into Jackson Square. After a short silence, Saul said, I still don’t understand why he never told me about A Model Earth.

  I was wondering the same thing, pana, said Javier, maybe he finished writing it down again before you arrived to Chicago, or maybe he was unsure if he would ever be able to finish. Or he could’ve finished it during that brief resurgence the dying often feel hours or days before their death. But no matter how much we think we know, we end up knowing so little of our parents and even less of our grandparents, most lives are forgotten as soon as they’ve occurred. After a few years, a few decades, a century, most lives are unknown, he said in a tone of sadness that surprised Saul, after which they both fell silent again.

  And yet, said Javier some seconds later, in spite of all that, your grandfather spent his life recording other people’s stories. I don’t think A Model Earth would have been any different to him. He wanted to ensure that Adana Moreau’s story wouldn’t be lost again to time.

  I remember one night when I called him from Quito, continued Javier, and we somehow got to talking about how Quito had been the final Incan city and Atahualpa, the final sovereign emperor of the Incan Empire just before the Spanish conquest. I don’t remember his or my exact words, but I do remember that I told him that far too much of the history of the Incas had been forgotten, concealed, and erased. It was all a great loss. But he told me that I was only half-right. He said that the history of the Incas and those they conquered, the Cañaris and Quitus-Caras, for example, should be perceptible everywhere I went in Quito—in the labyrinthine streets, in the endless markets, in the garbage bins, in the dirt, in the music, in the eyes, in the florid multiplicity of languages and DNA, a DNA, he reminded me, that I too shared. Incan history breathed, and I breathed too because of it. At some point, he said that maybe in a way we were both right, that “history casts itself across our existence like a shadow of another world.”

  Last night, said Saul, you told me there was little or no point in thinking about Earths in parallel universes because it denies our existence on this one or even erases it completely, as if by thinking of those other, inaccessible Earths we would only be transformed into fictions. And in some ways, I think you’re right, this branch of reality, this Earth, is the only one we experience and know. But, continued Saul, it’s only by thinking of all those other Earths, of all my other branches of reality—the realities I’ve abandoned or inextricably erased, like Sol Marías, or the realities I’ve pursued aimlessly or half-heartedly, or even the vast majority of realities in which I have little control of anything at all—that I can make any decisions in this one. I think, he said slowly, that the fundamental elegant variability of the multiverse, as Maxwell Moreau might say, finally forces me to now make choices I would otherwise never consider or even imagine. Does that make any sense? he asked and fell silent.

  Yes, pana, I think it does, said Javier.

  In other words, said Saul, I’v
e decided that I’m going to stay here for a while and see what I can do to help Victoria and Maxwell, and others, too. Yeah? said Javier, now smiling, and he looked at Saul, his gaze lucent. He took out a cigarette but didn’t light it. I was waiting for you to say something, pana, he said and they both laughed.

  * * *

  On the walk back to the car, Javier received a text message from the photojournalist that said they should meet him at Café Brazil. By the time they arrived a large crowd had gathered, a musty and disheveled crowd mottled with dirt and dust and gray fibers of drywall and yellow stains of sweat, a crowd composed, thought Saul, of those who were returning home and those who had never left.

  They found the photojournalist at the bar and together ordered a round of whiskey. Occasionally, the electricity flickered on or off and the room went dark. When this happened, people cheered or groaned. Javier and Saul listened as the photojournalist talked about a woman he interviewed some days earlier but hadn’t photographed. She had lost her child in the Storm. As she told her story, she wept into her palms.

  Her face was the same face he saw no matter where he was on the planet, whether in Santa Fe, the steppes of Mongolia, the Euphrates River, or New Orleans, it was the same exact face, the same sorrowful, thinking face as etched by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz in dark chalk on brown Ingres paper, a dark-hatched face turned down toward the dirt, to the earth, to the abyss beyond the edges of the paper, in other words, the face of a mother, the face of slow love and slow grief.

  Javier asked why he hadn’t photographed the woman. Roberto didn’t know.