The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

I see the police car turn onto the main boulevard when it’s still a mile away. There aren’t many cars here anyway, but this one is brightly white, the blue and yellow lights flashing, even though it drives very slowly as it makes its way downtown.

  Car 4043, painted on the roof.

  Some of the traffic lights still work, but the car moves steadily forward, ignoring them. The car crosses the small bridges over the canals, moving straight toward this building it seems, and I wonder for a moment if the police are trying to find me.

  I don’t think they’d have any reason to do so.

  I watch them stop below my building, staring down at them through my binoculars as I lean my head partway out my open window. It’s cold today, but not blowing hard. Even as high as I am, I can hear their radios, indistinct words buzzing out from the open car windows.

  As they get out of the car and look around at the empty downtown, it’s clear they had no idea that this all is here. They keep looking up, turning their heads, talking to one another across the roof of the car.

  One is shaking his head.

  Disbelief.

  The other officer, a woman, is trying to use her cell phone. She presses buttons, holds the phone to her ear, then in a moment stares at it in her hand. It won’t work here, but it will take her some time to realize.

  I decide I should go down and talk to them.

  When I push open the front door of my building a few minutes later, both police officers jerk their bodies, turning around to me, hands on their holstered guns.

  I raise my hand. “It’s all right,” I say, and immediately I try to think of the last time I have spoken.

  It’s hard to imagine what I look like to them. My hair is long and I don’t shave often. I’m wearing a wool blazer and a sweater underneath it and weathered jeans stained in many places. I look as if I’m a tired and worn college professor standing now as the sole survivor of a plague.

  “It’s all right,” I say again, and as I walk forward they keep their hands on their guns.

  It hurts my throat a bit to talk. Mostly I notice my lips and tongue, like they are new to me.

  The officers are both so very young-looking. Fit, broad-chested, the man’s hair closely cut and the woman’s jaw seems tightly drawn. Sculpted.

  No one here is young or well-groomed and if we’re fit it’s only in the sense that we are able to continue to survive.

  The radio from the car continues to emit the buzzing drone of digitized voices. I see the cell phone in the female officer’s hand. I point at it. “That won’t work here,” I say.

  She glances at it. “Why?”

  I point up. “The towers have all failed,” I say. “Years ago.”

  It’s been a full week since I have spoken. I remember the last words I said. To the person at the corner store. “Thank you,” I said.

  We stand here, the police officers and me, outside my building, staring at each other. The woman glances around, as if expecting other people to come out and speak to her.

  “Do you need help?” the male officer asks me.

  I shake my head. “No,” I say. It’s a moment before I think to say, “But I assume you do.”

  It has started to rain, very slightly, heavy but erratic drops hitting us here and there, as if a person in one of the buildings above us is throwing down small handfuls of water.

  “Someone is missing,” the female officer says. “A woman. She’s gone missing. And her family thinks she might have come here.”

  “To this building?”

  “To the North End,” the man says.

  “It’s a big area,” I say.

  He nods. It’s clear they had no idea how big an area this is.

  “Have you ever been over here?” I ask.

  They shake their heads.

  “It’s a big area,” I say again.

  We’re silent. It seems as if they are unsure what to do or say. The script they usually follow in a missing persons case has unexpectedly slipped away from them.

  “There’s a newspaper here,” I say. “If you have a photo, they will run it.”

  “Who reads the newspaper?” the woman asks.

  “People who live here,” I say.

  “How many people live here?” she asks.

  “Maybe a couple thousand,” I say.

  They both look around slowly. As if trying to see some of the other people I’ve mentioned. Wondering, I’m sure, if they are even now being watched.

  Probably they are. Me as well.

  “Why do you live here?” the male officer asks me, then raises a hand, shakes his head. He didn’t mean to ask that out loud. It’s just what’s on his mind.

  “This is where I grew up,” I say.

  “But why live here now?” the woman asks.

  I think about this for a moment. “Do you want to give me some information about this missing woman?” I ask. “They’ll put that in the newspaper too.”

  The woman reaches inside the car and pulls out a piece of paper. I step forward and she hands it to me. There’s a black and white photo of a woman who’s been crying and a brief description of her. It says she’s forty. It gives her name and where she is from in the South End.

  There’s no explanation of why she is missing. No mention of why she might be here.

  “Can we get your name and number in case we have more questions?” the male officer asks me.

  I give him a name, not mine. “I don’t have a phone,” I say.

  As they are getting in the car, the woman says to me, “Are you sure you don’t need help?”

  I shake my head.

  She’s still staring at me, from the mirror, as they drive away.

  • • •

  From a room on the other side of my building, I can see the South End at night. The glow of streetlights and homes and buildings and cars, shining upward, reflecting against the clouds, lighting them up with a dull, cold gray.

  It’s a view I only stumble on, not a view I want to see.

  A million people living as if they had not abandoned this place where I still live.

  • • •

  I leave the missing woman’s photo and description on a table in my hotel room. It’s a week before I take it to the paper.

  We move slowly here.

  The police did not say she is in danger. They didn’t say she is a murderer or a thief. They only said that she is missing. That her family wants her found.

  Probably I only asked for the information because I work at the newspaper. Strangely, the paper still functions. It is only eight pages, printed once a week. I write every word and take every picture.

  I do finally run the photo, after another week has passed, along with a short article noting that the woman is missing. That maybe she has come to the North End.

  I wake up a few days later and find myself thinking that, as much as anything, I’ve run the article to give her a warning. They are looking for you. They know you might be here.

  Maybe this woman wants a head start. Maybe she deserves it.

  I’ve always assumed that lots of people here don’t want ever to be found.

  There are three of us who work at the newspaper. There is the old pressman in the basement who prints the paper and puts it out in the racks and boxes we still have around the North End. And the office manager who comes every day, but doesn’t stay for more than a few hours. She is an older woman, probably fifty-five, though she often looks much younger.

  Everyone in the North End seems to be a similar age. The people who are younger have aged from being here. The people who are older, maybe there’s a way in which this place makes them seem healthier than otherwise they might be. They walk where they go. There is not the kind of food that would make you heavy or unhealthy.

  There are, however, no children. I haven’t seen a child since I arrived.

  The office manager brings me my pay, every week, a small amount of cash in a stiff, gray envelope. It’s not clear to me where she gets the mo
ney. But she also brings me things that make the office function, paper and pens and notebooks and folders. She brings these items in a brown paper bag that does not look like it came from a store. The pens don’t look new. The paper is just a small stack, fifty or a hundred sheets, loose, not in a wrapper.

  She brings black and white film for the camera, too, never more than one roll. I take pictures sparingly. We only get the chemicals to develop the film every few months, when the pressman goes to the South End to get the press supplies and the big rolls of paper we use for printing.

  I take one picture every week of an old building or home in the area. I write a history of that structure, spending hours at the abandoned library researching the history of the building, its former tenants, its architecture, the history of the neighborhood where the house or building stands.

  I write another article that covers some event that once happened in the North End. The opening of the port or the groundbreaking of a factory. Again I research it, both in the library and in the paper’s archives.

  This paper has been printed for over one hundred and fifty years.

  I also write about the meeting, twice a month, of a commission who has responsibility for this area. The city government was disbanded, the area unincorporated nearly ten years ago. But we still fall in a county. The commission has so far been unable to let go of their responsibility for the North End, although they’ve tried to do so many times. The commission members meet in an old community center near the last overpass across the highway. They come in cars. They park close to the building. They talk for exactly an hour, spending very little of that time discussing what should be done for the North End.

  Nothing that they talk about is ever acted on.

  I’m not sure who owns this paper. Maybe the same family has owned it since it was first founded. There’s no explanation in the paper. No owner who is listed.

  For the most part, though, it seems this paper is like most everything in the North End—it is no longer owned by anyone.

  And yet the newspaper is picked up and read by people who live here. I watch people take a paper from one of our old and beat-up racks or boxes. I see people outside our office, watching them through the dim and yellowed glass along the front of the building, taking a minute to read the front page of the paper they’ve picked up, then slowly walking away. There are three more boxes I can see from up in my hotel room and I’ve many times watched people take papers from each of those boxes too.

  Always when people pick up a copy of the paper, they pause, standing still as they skim the front page for a moment. Every time.

  It’s as if they are looking for a specific thing. Maybe looking for some answer that, every week, the paper doesn’t have. Or a next step they and everyone should take. A step that I have no idea how to find, articulate, or define.

  • • •

  From my room I stand watching the scavenging of buildings and homes and factories along the southern edges of the North End. Very slowly and methodically, the buildings and homes are being stripped of everything by the scavengers. Pipes are pulled from the basements. Aluminum gutters are pulled from the sides of buildings and homes. Copper wire is pulled from inside the walls.

  As the North End began its final collapse—after the city government dissolved and services like schools and the police and the fire department were officially ended—heavy equipment was moved out of some factories, furniture was put on moving trucks, fire engines and police cars were, for the most part, driven away from their stations.

  But, in the end, so much was left behind. People leaving their homes took only what they could afford to move. Some had the money to hire full moving services who could pack up and transport their things. But many could afford only to move what they could fit in their own car.

  The scavengers, they don’t come from other places. They live here. They are us.

  We are slowly dismantling the remnants of our city.

  The scavengers pile up what they find in the streets where they are working. Men and women arrive, driving beat-up panel vans and offering money for what has been scavenged. Some days there are two trucks, some days five or six. These brokers for the items sell these things to junkyards and other buyers in the South End. The brokers, all of them, also still live here in the north.

  The scavenging is terrible and hard, slow work, and the people who do it—some days fifty of them, some days a hundred or two hundred—they are covered in filth when they leave these structures, hair and faces and shoulders turned gray from the dust, their hands blackened and bloodied even through their gloves.

  Every few weeks, I go and watch them. Making notes for an article I will write for the paper. Taking pictures of the scavengers as they enter and leave a home or office or factory.

  They look like miners emerging from a coal mine. Or firefighters leaving a burned-out home.

  From the windows in my room, I can see where the scavengers have been. They’ve disrupted the landscape along the southwestern corner of this place, turning the edges of houses a barren white where the gutters have been pulled away. Leaving square, white spaces on the roofs of stores where the heating and air conditioning units have been pulled from their mounts.

  They’ve scavenged whole neighborhoods. Entire factories and warehouses. A square mile or more and still they slowly move forward and how far they will go and what direction they’ll take next is not clear.

  There is, though, no longer any scavenging from the various abandoned stores throughout the North End. There was looting once. In the early days. But now, in the stores, people only take what they know they need.

  I suppose there was a time when someone might have said that the things we take are not ours. But no one thinks that way anymore.

  What we take we’ve clearly earned.

  • • •

  I type quickly on the typewriter, the sounds loud and steady, and sometimes as I sit here alone in this office finishing my stories, for a moment I’ll think it is the sound of the typewriter that I’m creating, not the words in the stories themselves.

  • • •

  There aren’t many ways to earn money here besides scavenging. It’s hard for anyone to make or sell anything that the rest of us can’t get for free.

  But there are people who sell cooked food from a table set up near the corner store. Restaurants, in a way, without anywhere to sit.

  None of it is very good.

  People sell liquor, mostly liquor they seem to have found, a stray assortment of half-filled bottles, though a couple people sell harsh, homemade liquor from a still. The same with cigarettes, sold mostly in small bundles of three or five or ten, no thought given to the consistency of brands. They sell coffee, half-filled bags and cans they’ve found, sometimes sold as is, other times mixed together and sold in brown lunch sacks taped tightly into small and heavy blocks.

  The vendors sell these things from their tables on the sidewalks near the corner store.

  I can remember walking through cities many years ago, and always there was some man or woman on a street selling their paintings, their necklaces, drawings or bracelets they’d made. But here there is none of that.

  Periodically, people set up a table of items of some distinction, items from homes but items that you wouldn’t easily find. Books and music they’ve gathered. Fine cloth and containers of beads.

  Not much of it sells. And the few valuables that the scavengers do find, electronics or tools or silver, are sold to the brokers in their panel vans.

  Often, though, the scavengers seem to keep the jewelry they find. They wear many rings and bracelets and necklaces, so much jewelry that no one item is distinguishable from the rest.

  The spoils of their work.

  The vendors who sell things near the corner store only do so intermittently. They sell for a few days a week or a few days a month. Then they take what they make at their table and go to the corner store or to another table and spend that money on something
else.

  The small economy of the last survivors.

  Many people, though, it’s unclear how they make money. Maybe they simply have savings from when there was a city here. I’ve heard that some people regularly cross the overpass to the South End. They could get money from a bank there and return. It does not take much money to live here now. It would not take much in savings to survive in this place forever.

  These are, also, the things I write about for the paper. The progress of the scavenging. The offerings of the vaguely functioning economy on the streets near the corner store. I let people know what food is for sale. I let people know what’s being sold at the tables.

  I never cross over to the South End.

  • • •

  I come upon the missing woman because, as is often the case, I can’t manage to get warm.

  Often, at night, I find myself wanting another blanket near my feet, a second pair of gloves on my bare hands. I am looking for blankets today. Searching through apartments in a building a few blocks from mine.

  I wander down the long hallway, shoes kicking up dust from the wooden floors. There is trash in the hallway, a few broken chairs.

  When I go looking for things in the apartments or houses, I have to make sure I’m not taking from someone who still lives here. It can be hard to know for sure, as most people live in such a bare and minimal way. An inhabited home can look like a home abandoned a decade or more ago. And so I have learned to look for simple signs. Food is the most obvious. Cleanliness another. An ordered space, a tidy room. A lack of dust and random debris. The few times I’ve accidentally gone into a house or apartment that was still being used, I saw some sign immediately. Two chairs pulled up to a clean table, the table cleared of everything except for a stack of napkins, a salt and pepper shaker, all arranged neatly together. A few books stacked carefully on a side table near a fireplace. The windows on the outside wiped clear of the gray and oily grime that otherwise coats this place.

  These are the smallest signs of order, surprising in this place of forgotten chaos and disrepair. But these signs of some human need stand out, the base instinct to make sense of our surroundings, to create order in the devolving world in which we live.