City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  On Monday, although nobody knew it yet, the water had only just begun to rise; it would keep rising until that Thursday, from more than a dozen breaks in the levee system, which let water gush and roll in from Lake Pontchartrain to fill up the bowl of New Orleans. On Monday, in many areas, you could still walk outside in the early afternoon and think that you had made it through once again, toughed it out one more time and emerged victorious into the eerie calm, the walk through the quiet, dripping, leaf-strewn streets with the downed power lines and enormous tree limbs blocking the way, walking around in the silence, inspecting the destruction, knowing it would be cleaned up again within a few days. And then, late that day, or the next, the surprise at the water making its way up the street like the tide coming in on the shallows, the leading edge filling the holes in the streets with eddying water, advancing perhaps a foot every twenty seconds, and fifteen minutes later the whole block flooded to the tops of the curbs, then the bottom step up to your house, and then farther and higher, depending upon how far you were from the break that was sending all that water, and how high the land in your neighborhood was.

  Some went to sleep in a dry neighborhood Monday night and awoke on Tuesday to find their living room under five feet of water. Caught unaware, many of those left alive looked out their windows upon a totally altered landscape. Others—postal workers, teachers, retirees, amputees, grandmothers and mothers and war veterans—paddled to stay afloat in their living rooms, their heads two feet from the ceiling, holding on to their floating furniture, in the darkened, dank interior, the restless bobbling sound of the water lapping at their walls, their curtains billowing underwater like seaweed, the pictures still hanging, submerged, on the wall, toys floating next to their head, and maybe their cat with its eyes wide and its claws dug into the side of the floating, upended sofa. Some people made it out to the roof; some hung on until rescue boats came, and some never did make it out at all.

  After the rasping and shrieking wind, the objects slamming into houses, now the silence, the absence of all the subliminal sounds that ordinarily populated the landscape. Streets empty of cars, trees empty of birds, all air-conditioning units still, no radios, no televisions, everything still except for car alarms that had been triggered, and house alarms, spooling out idiotically under the midday sun…Later there would be helicopters passing over, and rescue boats, then, again, long stretches of silence. The people who were trapped in their attics, or on their roofs, had no idea of the scope of what had happened, nor, for that matter, did people who were able to be out and around.

  Around the country, by contrast, those watching the scene unfold on television were immersed in constant information. Terse, professionally concerned announcers conveyed the barely credible facts, directed the traffic of information and speculation, introduced the color reporting, the on-the-spot interviews. CNN, FOX, the gravely serious anchors, the familiar faces—Anderson Cooper, Brian Williams, Nancy Grace, Larry King—the harried, urgent-sounding correspondents, increasingly disbelieving as the scope of what had happened was revealed in images that shifted rapidly from one place to another, point of view bouncing from one to another like pinballs pinging, everything bathed in the incessant double message of the media—urgency and detachment, emergency and control, constant feed and ever-increasing hunger. The media emitted a processed discontinuity, whereas the people in New Orleans experienced an unprocessed continuity, a broken narrative in which they were forced to either sink or, somehow, swim.

  But from outside it was the greatest live, real-time spectacle since the attacks of September 11, 2001, or perhaps the O. J. Simpson trial. An epic story, unfolding in real time, does not come along all that often, and when it does the fascination of it is absolute. Like white blood cells streaming toward an infection, broadcasters, print journalists, photographers, bloggers, flooded into New Orleans and began pumping out information, filtered and unfiltered. The news media’s attempts to piece together birds’ nests of sense and coherence out of the twigs and scraps and shards of disconnected information was itself a drama.

  Until the power went out in Jackson, Craig and Alice watched the televised news along with everyone else in the lobby of the Best Host Inn. The roof of the designated “shelter of last resort,” the New Orleans Superdome, where twenty thousand people had gone for shelter, had started tearing off from the wind, and rain was coming in. Cameras showed people getting up and moving haltingly down their rows of molded plastic seats, falling raindrops shining in the camera lights, moving to a dry corner of the Dome, people who had camped on the Astroturf taking their bedrolls and walking to a position under what remained of the roof. Because the people in other parts of New Orleans had no idea of this, a steady stream of people seeking refuge continued to arrive there from homes that were flooding in Gentilly, in Broadmoor, in the Upper Ninth Ward, Central City and elsewhere. But viewers in the rest of the country on Monday did not yet know the extent of the flooding.

  From the news reports on Monday, Craig and Alice knew they were not going back to New Orleans that night, and perhaps not for several days. They agreed that they should move on to Oxford, where the hotel had kept their reservation for them, which they found out in one call from an office phone that one of the desk people let them use. Late Monday afternoon they headed out for the three-hour drive to Oxford.

  After Jackson, Oxford was an almost miraculous oasis of comfort. The sidewalks of the courthouse square were swarming that Monday night with evacuees from New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Early that evening it still looked, from out of town, as if most of New Orleans might have escaped the worst, although everyone knew by then that the towns along the Gulf Coast—Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi, Pass Christian—had been hit by powerful winds and a tidal surge that had wiped out hundreds of beautiful homes along the shore, along with the stores, and the casinos, and the causeway connecting the towns. So the crowd lacked the usual transitory nervous elation that is a by-product of having evaded disaster, the gaiety, fueled by the knowledge that your home would be there when you got back, that there would be a little cleanup to do, but that life would be going on as usual. Instead, for the Gulf Coast evacuees, there was a somber quality, as if they had gathered for a wake. And by the end of the evening, things began to turn ominous in the news from New Orleans as well.

  The breaches in the levees were now widely reported, and they were more numerous, bigger, and more widespread than had been apparent earlier in the day, and it was clear that the city was beginning to fill with water from Lake Pontchartrain. Efforts were under way to stanch the breaches with giant sandbags dropped from Coast Guard helicopters, especially at the 17th Street Canal, which threatened to flood many of the most populous and historic parts of the city. More than one commentator observed with some wonder that the president of the United States was still on vacation at his Texas ranch, and wondered aloud why he had not cut short his siesta, given the magnitude of what had happened.

  The storm itself had been devastating, but the truly crippling disaster for the city was the flooding, and it quickly became apparent that that aspect had been a man-made disaster. As the news of the levee breaches began to sink in, announcers began to make comments to the effect that large parts of New Orleans might end up being uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. On Tuesday morning at their hotel in Oxford, Craig and Alice began the process of making calls, like tens of thousands of others, to figure out a place where they might stay for a little bit longer, to use as a base until they could get back to the city.

  Their family network, such as it was, was scattered across the upper Midwest. Craig’s father was dead and his mother lived in a tiny apartment in Minneapolis, so there was no help there. Craig initially lobbied for heading back down to Baton Rouge, but the city had been swamped with evacuees, and their friends Pam and Mike’s house was already filled with Bobby and Jen and, now, another couple. They definitely did not have room for four more people there. The last alternative was Alice�
�s parents.

  Craig braced himself for Alice’s call. A lot of the tense side of her personality came straight from her mother. Her parents lived just outside of Birmingham, Michigan, although they said they were from Birmingham proper; their social anxiety was palpable and constant. The first time Craig had visited there with Alice, her father had driven them to dinner by a circuitous route that, Alice later admitted to Craig, was almost three times as long as a much more direct and perfectly pleasant ride just because it went through a more affluent area. Visits home tended to draw out Alice’s worst anxieties. The tension between her and her mother, who had grown up very modestly in Ypsilanti and had married a not-spectacularly-successful lawyer with his own class hang-ups, was heavy enough to sink a boat.

  Alice made the call. Her mother’s first words were that she never understood why Alice would want to live down there in the first place. When Alice indicated they would likely need a place to stay for a while, she hemmed and hawed, saying, “Well…these are such tight quarters…” (“Tight quarters?” Craig said after the call. “They have five bedrooms.” At that, Alice quickly became defensive and said, “Well, they just got the Akita, and they are redoing one of the rooms; it’s not like they live in a mansion,” and Craig kicked himself mentally for not remembering that, no matter how much Alice complained, she would find a way to explain or rationalize her mother’s responses if he joined in.)

  Her mother suggested that Alice call Uncle Gus, her father’s older half-brother, who lived outside Chicago. He and his wife, Jean, lived in a gritty old Czech/Polish suburb west of the city, and Alice’s mother said she thought they had a whole new room that they had just redone. After her mother gave her Uncle Gus’s phone number, Alice’s father got on the phone and said, “Hi, princess. Thought you’d get a kick out of hearing that John Leland finally shook down the settlement money on that Harvey case I told you about last time you were up here. Is Craig keeping you warm?”

  Stupefied, Alice said, “Dad…Are you aware of what’s going on down here? Have you looked at a TV set? We don’t even know if we have a house left.”

  “Yes, dear, I do in fact watch the news, and I would like you to keep in mind that the rest of the world has not stopped existing. Of course we have been worried about you. I just thought you might like a little relief and a reminder that life goes on. My advice is to loosen up just a tad, dear.”

  When Alice got off the phone she was almost shaking with rage.

  12

  Midday on Tuesday, and SJ probably should have taken a break. Using the strip of weatherboard for an oar, he paddled the dinghy down what had once been Reynes Street.

  Silence. Or not silence but an alteration in the aural wallpaper—the usual distant cars, radios, air conditioners, replaced by a dense, barely translucent stillness, punctuated only by discrete signs of action—a voice, in the distance, or a boat motor, the occasional ratcheting helicopter overhead or, twice that day in two different locations, a bubbling churning that was more felt than heard, churning, boiling water caused by a ruptured gas pipe under the thick surface. One careless match or cigarette flicked away and the oil and gasoline that drifted and spread here and there in dark multicolor on the water would ignite and those gas bubbles would become geysers of flame.

  This, now, was New Orleans.

  He had put on his old army-issue green fatigue all-weather hat to keep the sun off, but the heat and exertion were extreme, and the water in his jug was gone. Through the morning he had paddled around the lake that had been his neighborhood all his life, finding people, helping them into his dinghy, carefully, carefully, and depositing them back at the Claiborne Bridge, where the word was that trucks were coming on the other side of the canal, or buses. Across Claiborne Avenue in the Holy Cross neighborhood, the destruction was less complete; many of the houses had at least stayed in place, although most of the single-story dwellings were flooded to the roofline.

  He had done the same the previous afternoon after dropping Lucy off, until finally, exhausted, he had gone back to his house to get some sleep. Today, Tuesday, there were more boats—motorboats, rowboats, neighborhood people like himself, outsiders, some police and marshals, and the first helicopters. All of them were busy nonstop. Some of them appeared to be kids, or hunters—red-faced Cajun boys in duck-hunting outfits, who had gotten there God knew how. As they passed SJ pointed them toward places where he knew people to be stuck. His hands were getting badly blistered and raw, but he didn’t stop.

  The farther he got from the actual levee break, the more people there were to rescue. In some areas, the water was up only to porch level. Twice he encountered old couples, in their seventies, sitting with suitcases, dressed nicely and waiting for the buses they had been told would come to get them in case of emergency. Those he picked up SJ would ask if they had their ID and necessary medicines. Those he passed when his boat was full waved weakly and smiled, maybe nodded. They had learned patience and endurance over a lifetime, along with gratitude for any small sign of progress, any tiny ray of light through the dark.

  Late in the morning another dinghy had approached him, rowed by two young men in white tank tops and blue jeans cut off at the calf, bright boxers bunched over their waistbands, and one of them called out, “Mista J…”

  As the boat approached, SJ saw that it was Tyrell, the young man he had seen after so many years on Saturday at the block party, with Wesley. The young man had a vague smile on his face, a stunned expression overall. “We been steady picking up people Mista J.”

  “Is your family allright,” SJ asked. “Your mama?”

  “She didn’t make it, Mista J,” the young man said, smiling slightly, and frowning simultaneously, looking SJ in the face. “She didn’t make it.” Smiling slightly more now, and his eyes suddenly larger with tears. “We going to see about Danny cousin over by Holy Cross. Your house okay, Mista J?” The other young man was not paying attention, looking around, scanning.

  SJ hardly knew how to answer. He was able to do no more than shake his head.

  Tyrell smiled again, and shrugged—the dissociation, which would become one of the most common facts of human interaction in days to come—and the two young men headed off to their fates, and SJ continued looking for people.

  Inside himself, SJ was locked down as well as he could be. He was needed, as long as his hands held up on the oar and he didn’t overheat. Piecing together what all this meant was for later. He had shifted into a mode of pure action, and he knew from experience that he would pay for it eventually. He still, for example, had dreams involving a baby he had seen in a village after an action during his time in Vietnam, facedown with its back open like a geode, seething with maggots. Seeing it, he had felt himself starting to go, to lose his grip, and he forced himself to push it down, put it away; there was no alternative at that time to his being able to function. But the image did not disappear merely for being submerged, any more than what was under these flood waters had stopped existing just because it was hidden.

  After the first two people he saw floating facedown, he had wrapped up the part of himself that would react, the way you would tape up a sprained ankle so you could walk on it. He was needed. But spreading like a bruise under that tight bandage were all the questions he could not yet face directly, the facts that could not be carried, the meaning of the extinguished lives floating like garbage, discarded, unneeded. And why had this flooding happened, what had caused the levee break that had trapped and drowned people in the homes they had acquired through a lifetime of work and struggle?

  As the day wore on, former Specialist Four Williams wondered where the military was—the Marines, the Army, Airborne—there was nobody, except for some Coast Guard helicopters. No sign of transport at the overpass where he had been dropping people off. The levee had broken at dawn the previous morning. Here it was the middle of the next day, T plus 30 at least, and they had had no reinforcements, no help, he meant…He had lived through Hurricane Betsy, but this was
something else. Hurricane Betsy was something to get through. This was the end of something. For many people he passed, it had already meant the end of everything.

  He probably should have and would have taken a rest under ordinary circumstances. But the degree and the extent of the need around him was overwhelming, and he kept on as long as he could, through the long, nameless reaches of the afternoon. Around six p.m., after dropping two women off at the bridge, he found himself about to get out of the dinghy and lie down on the asphalt roadway as it rose on its incline out of the floodwaters. And he knew then that he needed to stop, and he paddled back to his house with what was left of his energy, secured the dinghy fore and aft as well as he could to the gutter, and hauled himself up by the sheet, barely able to, out of the dinghy and onto his roof.

  For a moment he looked down and thought about trying to pull the dinghy up out of the water and onto the roof somehow; he was afraid that it might be stolen while he was asleep. But it was hard to pull even a lightweight boat up out of the water, and he was as tired as he had ever been in his life. He made sure the boat was secure one more time, then he dragged himself inside, through the window.

  Night. Tired as he was, he had trouble getting to sleep. Voices in the distance reflected oddly off of water, sounded closer than they were, sometimes almost as if they were in the room with him. Shouts, weeping, even low, monosyllabic conversations. The day’s images had been too strong to leave at the door and too relentless, and all that machinery was hard to shut down. Past and present mingled, and the future was all over with. He lay on his bed because he was physically exhausted, but it was better when he was moving. When he lay still it all seemed to swarm around his head like bees because there was nothing to shoo it away.