City of Refuge

by Tom Piazza

  He could do no more that day. His hands were shot, but then his entire body was shot, arms, back, shoulders, legs. He lay throbbing in a darkness he had not known for thirty-five years, since patrols in the jungle. Somewhere well after dark a wailing started—impossible to tell where or how far away—a woman’s voice, weeping, sobbing, saying indistinct words. The sound spoke of pain that would not heal, a scar that would bleed without ceasing. He lay on his sheets wet with sweat, in a darkness beyond darkness, and the weeping didn’t stop, and it was unendurable to hear.

  Finally SJ sat up, stood slowly, blindly and, crouching, felt his way to the rear window, which was open for what little breeze was available. He shouted, “Where are you?”

  Weeping stopped.

  Again he spoke into the dark: “Are you allright?” A moment later, he wondered if he had in fact spoken the words.

  The voice in the dark began weeping again, then SJ heard it say, “No…No…oh no…” and the sound could not be escaped and it demanded an accounting of an absent God. What do you do, SJ? Jump out of a dark window into an invisible lake full of sharp edges some invisible distance below, swim who knew where in the dark…? Of course not. Of course not. He turned back in the direction of the bed, tripping but not falling over a chair. He found the bed with his searching hands, felt along it to the right place and sat down, tried to breathe deliberately, and finally lay down again and fell into a fitful sleep that gave him no rest.

  Glaring wobbling light awakened him, morning yes, reflected light on ceiling from the jittery water, voices in the distance, sleep draining out of him…The ratcheting sound was a helicopter, undeniably—but how? Then this was home again, and everything came back quickly. He sat up in the impossible heat. This was Wednesday; shouting. Helicopter blades fade. His whole self hurt.

  He put one leg then another over the side of the bed, stood, steadied himself, stood. Pounding heart suddenly; ran to the front window to look and the boat was gone.

  He pulled on his shorts and climbed out onto the sloped roof once he was sure he had his balance, scooted down crabwise to see if the boat had perhaps just come undone at one end and drifted to one side. Voices in the distance; a motorboat maybe five blocks away. No dinghy; the shredded end of one line hung down where someone had cut it loose with a knife. Would he have even been able to use it; hands so sore. And then something caught his eye in peripheral vision, noticed down and to the left, and he looked, focused, and there were two of them floating facedown. One was naked, its bottom presented to the sky for care that would not be forthcoming, and the other with a diaper unfastened at one hip, floating loose, filth spilling out of it, an umbilicus of shit, bumping up against the gutter, lazily, like any other garbage in the water, two brown babies out there just like any other garbage, and SJ started shaking, his whole body, as if in the worst of fever, muscles contracting, squeezing his bones as if to crack them; he shook, racked with spasms, even when he tried to look away, and he didn’t stop even after the motorboat with the two policemen came and helped him off the roof.

  13

  They took him to the Convention Center, eventually, a large, modern complex just uptown from the French Quarter and backed up against the river; it had been opened the day before, Tuesday, to warehouse the overflow of people who were no longer being allowed into the Superdome.

  All day Sunday and Monday and Tuesday citizens streamed toward the Superdome from around the city. The Superdome was a product of the mid-1970s, designed for football games, concerts and other epic indoor events. It had concentric stacked, ringed halls, concession stands, box seats and sky boxes and media rooms, and it was a center point of civic pride, certainly among the business leaders, and certainly to the fans who loved the New Orleans Saints with a tragic love, since the Saints traditionally made a weak showing. It sat in the middle of what was called the Central Business District, much of which had been constructed on the bulldozed site of one of the roughest areas of the city in the early years of the twentieth century, an area where the legendary Buddy Bolden had played jazz in the Eagle Tavern and Louis Armstrong was born to a prostitute in Jane Alley. All that was gone now, replaced by parking lots and skyscrapers and hotels, and in the middle of it, the Superdome. The Superdome had been designated the shelter of last resort in case of a major hurricane, as well, stocked with food and water adequate for a day or two of city-wide inconvenience until basic services could be reestablished.

  Beginning Sunday, most of those who stayed in the city walked there and stood on line for hours to gain entry. Once inside, they camped in seats, they camped in hallways, and in the upper-level seats, and on the Astroturf where the New Orleans Saints had played the previous Friday night. The atmosphere on Sunday was tense, as it always is before a large storm, but it also contained an undercurrent of festivity; New Orleanians knew what to do with interruptions of business as usual, and few of them really believed in their heart of hearts that after all the false alarms this could really be as bad as the worst projections had it.

  On Monday morning, large parts of the roof blew off in the astonishing wind. When the storm had passed and electricity was out, more people came, and as the flooding filled the city even more came, wading through the water in the surrounding streets, and by late Monday the facility was overwhelmed; when the crowd edged toward 30,000, on Tuesday, the authorities, in disarray themselves and worried about a complete breakdown of order, began routing people to the Convention Center, which had no provisions at all—no water, no food, no toilet paper, no medical personnel. Inside, the Convention Center was impossibly hot, airless and dark; its cavernous exhibition rooms and dark halls served primarily as a giant bathroom where people squatted in corners and then cleaned up as well as they could.

  Hundreds preferred to camp on the sidewalks in front as the long and incomprehensible days of that week went by—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—and no help arrived. Afternoons melted into sundown, then the long night amid the moans and curses and weeping of everyone around you, then sunrise again and still no food, and no information, no news, no visit from any representative of a coordinated authority to give you the comfort of what to expect or the sense that anyone even knew you were there or cared, in the brutal, stunning heat, as people suffered all around, and you wondered how long you could last after your blood pressure medicine ran out, or your insulin, or your oxygen…

  Everything was on overload, and what would be the use of trying to construct a sequential story when, as one day went by, and then another, and another, time itself was perverted, turned into a garbage dump under the hot blue sky. The drawers had been pulled out of every dresser and the contents dumped on the floor; every narrative was twisted and mocked, torn out of any context and flung down next to the grandmother of someone else’s narrative; elderly people in open-backed hospital gowns, ripped out of their own story and set down with their IVs in wheelchairs in the middle of the street, hungry, deposited by someone who left to save themselves, not even wished good luck, madness dragging at the cuffs of your pants, dragging like devils in the pit, hissing at you, beckoning, the palsy in that old lady’s face, the old man with a plaid short-sleeve shirt and a green suitcase. You can’t construct a sequential narrative; the parts don’t fit together; characters are in the wrong place; Prince Hamlet plays the sitar on a cooler full of body parts, Santa Claus has lice, Rosa Parks is having a heart attack on the curb and Mister Rogers blows Paul Robeson for a cigarette and the Andrews Sisters and the Supremes lift their skirts in a darkened corner and hope for the best. Oh yes, they have lice, too. What are they trying to tell us? Why have they all been placed together in this narrative? What do they all have in common? If the Depression didn’t reveal it, or the Holocaust, or the photographs of Emmett Till, or Goya’s Caprichos, why should these mismatched socks, this salvage, mean anything now? Why should it make any sense? Don’t you know garbage when you see it? And, no, you can’t leave, because your mother, your own mother—yes, her in the wheelcha
ir, there, look at her, the one with the large stain under her, and the bedsores forming from being in her own fluids for a day and a half—is senile and frightened, and at least here there are other people around. And besides, if you could see far enough up in the sky, that little flashing sliver, that is Air Force One; the president of the United States is up there looking out the window at the pretty designs made by the water—That’s the Mississippi River? That sorta squiggle there?—wondering what he is supposed to do and if he will have time for a nap and an hour with the video games before having to face the cameras again and say something to make it sound as if there is still a narrative in place.

  If you are in it you don’t see the news coverage, the anchorman, the commercials for Dodge trucks, any more than Job saw God and Satan make their wager at his expense. The mind cannot process all the disjunction, the endless din echoing in the Superdome halls and the sour itch in your clothes, the booming echoes overhead in the Dome, with its patch of sky visible, the intolerable hallways clogged with people sitting on the floor, waiting for the bathrooms, through the endless stretch of ruptured time, on lines that wind off into the gloomlight as if following the curve of the rings of hell, but a perverted inferno, set up by the guilty for the innocent. The mind goes on overload and only scraps adhere, like rags caught on sticks and flapping in the wind—a baby’s bib, let’s say, white with yellow piping around the edges and a Teddy bear printed on it, crumpled and left on the floor in the sweltering, darkened toilet stall, barely visible next to your foot, caked with feces among the paper towels and fouled underwear, amid which you squat over the bowl full to overflowing with a sickening stew, laced with blood, that made you retch to look at it, let alone to smell it, trying to position your legs so that you can add to its contents without touching what is already there, a shirt over your shoulder that you will use to clean yourself afterward and leave on the floor with the rest of it, and this is the shelter provided you, the emblem of the quality of thought and caring devoted to your fate, and you will remember that bib, it is your new flag, and where is the baby it had belonged to?

  And, outside, the lines of people waiting to take your place once you are finished, or the rest of them camped out in the generator-lit halls dark as twilight, sprawled against the cinder-block walls next to water fountains that do not work, overweight women in tight blouses, frail old women in hairnets, uptown men trying to read by the dim light, children in their last disposable diaper, long since full, running a toy truck along the floor in fierce concentration among the bags and garbage, the heat like a poisonous liquid and the stink like a throbbing, deafening noise you can’t escape, and more are camped two feet away, and even more past them, and on down the hall as it makes its curve into the hellish twilight gloom, or through the passageways that lead out into the stands and cantilever into the cerulean realms of the artificial sky, the great wounded vault of the Superdome, sleeping, feeding, staring into space, unaware of the flooding, the levee breaks, the Dome and the entire city and maybe the entire nation a ship without a pilot, battered and headed for disaster.

  In the midst of it, with up and right and green and there and down and left and here and red jabbering incoherently, you did what you could until help arrived, whether you led a child by the hand through the ruined streets, or endured the blazing sidewalk heat in the crowd outside the Convention Center, or sat trapped in a wheelchair in your living room, abandoned by the nurse, as the water crept up around your ankles, and then your knees, praying, knowing that God never sent you nothing that you couldn’t handle, so it must have been someone else sent all that water that rose mercilessly past your lips and nose (they found you later, out of your wheelchair, under your refrigerator, which had floated and come to rest on top of you), or squatted with hundreds of others in the red haze of afternoon amid the other garbage by the side of the empty interstate, waiting for a helicopter, or a bus, or a truck, waiting for passage up and out to some city of refuge waiting on a strange horizon.

  II

  14

  They pulled in just after seven-thirty on Wednesday evening, the sky a deepening blue behind the silhouetted trees. They had exited the expressway west of the city and followed Uncle Gus’s directions through a progressively aging exurban landscape, the rusting entrails of the nation, with Chicago itself little more than a muted glow against the darkened eastern sky. Initially they drove along the broad commercial strips, the shining neon arteries of chain restaurants and motels and auto equipment stores, then the directions took them through the older, two-story brick downtown areas of several towns, until they began to have to keep an eye out for Wabash Avenue, where they would make a left and go up the small hill, making another left on Saginaw, onto a street of close-together single-family homes built in the 1920s, most of them two-story wood-frame houses with an additional floor up top for a finished attic, and almost all with a wooden porch out front.

  Craig had met Gus and Jean ten years before, at the wedding, and he had not seen them since. He remembered Gus as resembling his idea of a teamster, a short man with a lined face and a graying crew cut, wearing a rough gray herringbone jacket and a dark blue cloth tie. Jean didn’t say much. Craig was unaccountably anxious, now, about arriving at their house for this indeterminate stay. Alice, at least, seemed relaxed; he could easily imagine what the emotional climate in the car would have been had they been about to stay with her parents in Michigan.

  A driveway consisting of two pebbly parallel cement ribbons ran through the inclined alley along the right side of the house, but Craig parked on the street at curbside and sat for several long moments behind the wheel. Alice immediately set about getting Annie and Malcolm out of the car. After a minute, Craig pitched in, while also taking in what he could of the working-class neighborhood, and the house he was getting ready to enter for the first time.

  Alice’s Aunt Jean, a thin woman with short, steel-gray hair and wearing an apron, greeted them at the door, hugging Alice as they squeezed in through the front vestibule. Gus waited just inside the living room and shook Craig’s hand as he entered. Craig noted the same crew cut, all gray now, plaid flannel shirt. The house smelled of cooking. Craig greeted Gus as “Mr. Brunner.”

  “Feel free to call me Uncle Gus,” the older man said to Craig. “I’ve been called worse.”

  “We have been watching and praying for you,” Jean said. “It’s just terrible what happened to all those people.” The small living room was snug with upholstered furniture, fringed lamps, wall-to-wall carpeting. At the far end, an old television set in an oversized maple console; facing it, a couch and a chair with an antique lace antimacassar.

  Jean gave Craig a hug, too, and then turned a wide-eyed enthusiasm loose on Annie and Malcolm; Annie was polite but shy, and Malcolm showed Jean his Smurf pillow. “Which one of the Seven Dwarfs is that?” Aunt Jean said, bending down toward Malcolm. Craig watched Alice hug her uncle and say, “It’s great to see you two.” Gus hugged her back, and Jean said, “You must all be exhausted. You can just go right upstairs if you want; Gus’ll get you settled. I have some boiled beef and cabbage in the kitchen; it’s ready when you are.” Looking at the kids, she stooped down slightly and said, “I’ll bet you two are hungry.” Annie nodded dutifully and Malcolm hugged the Smurf pillow.

  Gus walked outside with Craig to help with the suitcases, and Craig felt around in his mind for a way to make conversation, anxious at the same time to get to a computer and see what he could find out about where the flood water was uptown. “How long have you lived in this house?” he managed to ask.

  “Forty-five years next March,” Gus said. “The house is right about eighty years old. Almost as old as me.”

  “You’re not eighty,” Craig said, stopping in his tracks, genuinely surprised.

  “No, you’re right; I’m not.” The older man gave Craig a comradely clap on the shoulder. “Just wanted to see if you’d give me an argument.” He hoisted one of the heavy suitcases out of the trunk.

/>   Inside, Gus led his four guests up the stairs. “We’ve done a little remodeling since you’ve been here, Allie,” Gus said. “It’s a climb. Hope you’re in shape, Craig!”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me!” Craig said, in what he hoped was a hearty voice. “I’ve been doing my aerobics.” He wondered if the man knew what aerobics were.

  They slogged up the carpeted stairs to the second floor, following the landing around to the left. The walls were hung with studio portraits of their two sons in college graduation robes, and smiling with their families. At the end of the second-floor landing, a table with a vase of cloth flowers. They made the turn and Gus led them up a narrower staircase to the newly finished attic where they were to stay. At the top of the stairs, Uncle Gus halted the caravan momentarily to feel for the light switch.

  “Here she is,” he said.

  Craig followed his two children and his wife into the fluorescent-lit converted attic and stood beside them, taking it in. The room was the size of a large tent, with bright white, bare walls. Craig could stand upright in the middle of the room, where fluorescent light panels formed the flat apogee of the ceiling, but on either side of the panels the ceiling sloped sharply down toward the eaves, where Gus and Jean had put two small cots for the kids under the small dormers, one on either end of the room. The head of the grown-ups’ bed was up against the bare wall opposite the door, a double bed with a light green chenille spread on it and a slight body-size depression in the middle. A small round wooden table next to it, supporting an empty green ceramic bud vase. The only light in the room seemed to be the overhead fluorescent panels.