The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  What I’d do there I don’t know.

  But I keep picturing it, imagining this, until I’ve fallen asleep.

  • • •

  Police come to the newspaper office, some weeks after the body was found. It is the same pair of officers who came to the North End about the missing woman.

  They walk through the front door with a great deal of noise. Their belts rattle with gear, an array of guns and flashlights and clubs. The radios on their belts are connected by wires to handsets that are attached to their shoulders. The officers seem bigger than anyone who lives here. It’s not just the heavy vests under their blue shirts. Even their hands, the features of their faces, their height, it all seems larger and, now, unnatural.

  The office manager is already gone when they arrive.

  I don’t stand when the police enter. But I wonder, a few minutes later, if I should have.

  They ask questions about the body I found. One holds a copy of the article I wrote. The other holds a copy of the picture I took.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?” the male officer asks.

  It takes me a moment to find an answer. “I think I assumed you wouldn’t respond.”

  The woman nods. “I didn’t want to,” she says.

  The other says, “But we would have. It’s a dead person. That still matters. It’s a dead person. Whose death is unexplained.”

  I find myself looking from one of them to the other. Waiting.

  The female officer says, “You’re the guy we talked to about that missing woman.”

  I try to think of something to say. But I can only nod.

  “Did you give us this name?” she asks, pointing at my name in the newspaper.

  I nod again, even though that’s a lie. I’d given them a fake name.

  “Where’s the body?” the man asks, now taking notes.

  “I helped take it to the church,” I say. “The minister. He held a funeral. Then took the body away.”

  They both look up from their notes. Staring at me.

  “It’s how we respond to a death here,” I say.

  Still listening, the woman lets her head fall slightly to the side.

  Disbelief.

  I say in a moment, “I’m sure the minister will tell you where he took the body. There’s nothing anyone is trying to hide.”

  Again they both are making notes in their small pads of paper. The pads make their hands look even bigger than they are, oversized, almost grotesque.

  I ask, “And did anyone ever find that woman?”

  The male officer shakes his head. “She’s still missing.”

  “What’s her story?” I hear myself ask.

  “She’s just missing,” he says. “The family reported it.”

  “Parents?” I ask. “A husband?”

  The man says, “Family. Just some family.”

  But the woman speaks up now. “A friend called us, actually. Some man. As far as we know, she has no family.”

  I am blinking. Not sure what else to do.

  “Has anyone seen her?” she asks. “You ran her picture in this paper, right?”

  I blink again. I push my hand across my face. “I ran it,” I say. Standing now. Beginning to turn away. “But there was no response.”

  • • •

  As I walk along the dark streets at night, only every few weeks do I see an old car drive past me. There simply aren’t very many cars that drive here. Those that do always seem to have a very weak and tired engine, the miscolored wheels rolling slowly, the doors rusted and the trunk tied shut with rope, the face of the person in the driver’s seat lost completely to the shadows on the windows.

  • • •

  Storms come like hurricanes, but they are shorter, more sudden, lasting only half an hour or less, with wind blowing rain sideways so hard that the drops hurt your face, and thunder bursts come frantically, and bright lightning strikes so close you can smell the ozone burn of the explosion.

  I watch these storms from my building. Standing as close to the open windows of the hotel as I can. The wooden floor and windowsills have bubbled up from so much water spraying on them.

  Small tornadoes spawn within the storms and I see them touching down, to the north, black cones inverted and now bending, lifting water from the canals and levees, water spraying out and water lifting upward, funneling and spraying into the air, and eventually the rain is so thick and blowing so hard that I won’t be able to see more than twenty feet out my windows.

  And the sound is like a jet engine.

  And the building sways beneath me.

  And I wonder if the walls around me might begin to crack, to crumble, to fall away into the storm.

  The rain thins and I see another small tornado, this one over the industrial zone, floating above the warehouses and old factories, throwing water outward from the cone but not touching anything on the ground. Moving slowly, bending, twisting thinly, thinner, seeming ready to spin itself to nothing before suddenly it shifts, stabbing downward, growing thick again, and now the destruction will begin. Long pieces of wood and wide sheets of metal and it’s impossible to understand the size of the area being damaged until you see an old pickup truck being thrown upward, out, like a child’s toy flicked away, and the roofs of factories are split open, bursting upward, a ceaseless hammering, a relentless cutting through the guts of an already dead and disintegrating zone.

  And then the tornado disappears. Sixty seconds and it’s gone, dissipating in the rain that has already weakened, as the wind now blows without violence or intent, and in ten minutes the storm has passed, low and darkened clouds moving toward the horizon, clouds still black and purple and the deepest blue, shedding rain in wide streaks of silver, flashing with silent lightning strikes, moving fast, and now gone.

  The tornadoes do the worst damage.

  Releasing unknown and unmeasured chemicals from factories and large warehouses.

  Ripping houses off the ground.

  Crumbling the stone walls of the oldest canals.

  Blowing down the power lines.

  Weakening and breaking the levees.

  Yet there are so few people here that no one has ever been hurt or killed. The math in that sense simply doesn’t work. There are two hundred thousand empty homes here. The tornadoes are not likely to find one of the few that is still occupied.

  This would not be the case if the North End had not died.

  And it’s in that moment that I remember what I’ve long forgotten, that these storms aren’t just hitting here. They hit the South End, they hit east of here and west. They hit everywhere, everyone.

  It’s been this way for years.

  • • •

  A massive train emerges from the fog, the headlight on the engine pointing directly at me. I blink. Take a breath. But I know already that this train isn’t moving. The fog has simply drifted away, revealing a locomotive I hadn’t seen.

  I stand on the second floor of a small building in the industrial zone. The fog came in as I walked and soon I was lost and so an hour ago I climbed up to the second floor of this building, laid down on a hard, vinyl couch, and slept.

  The fog is breaking now, like smoke dissipating, and I see so many trains, a rail yard, lines of boxcars and tank cars and more locomotives facing me.

  On the wall a calendar says January 1981.

  I turn back to the lines of boxcars strung together, one after another now once again disappearing into the thick and dense fog that has only broken temporarily, that now is covering the train cars and train tracks and locomotives, all of it, everything I can see outside this small room.

  So I lie back down and sleep.

  • • •

  I watch the woman and the boy roam the playground below my windows. They’ve been playing for almost half an hour before the woman sits down in one of the swings. She is still, though. Not moving. I think she’s watching the boy as he runs to the monkey bars and starts to climb. But I realize she is not. I c
an see she’s staring down. Toward her feet in the dirt below the swing. And she stays that way for some time. Fifteen minutes. Now it’s twenty.

  The boy keeps circling, climbing, running quickly, then swinging again.

  He watches his mother, looks her way very often, but he never goes to where she’s sitting.

  Now I realize that she’s crying. That she’s been crying since she sat down. The way her shoulders move. The way she holds her face.

  I can see now that she wipes her eyes.

  “I could ask her,” I say very quietly to myself, and I hadn’t meant to speak out loud.

  I could ask her.

  It seems like it would be very hard to ask. I wonder how the boy would respond, wonder what he might say or do.

  And I’m not sure why I’d ask. Why I even had the thought.

  I watch the woman as she stares toward the dead vines along the ground. She’s been down there for more than an hour.

  She reaches forward. She touches the dry, brown leaves of some shrub that once grew there.

  “Nice,” I say, quietly, into the wind that blows against me from outside the building. “You’d be doing something nice.”

  I watch the woman as she kneels down. She touches the low rows of dead plants, the leaves gray and white and brown. Even from this distance, I can see each dead leaf she touches, each leaf disintegrating in her hands, the plant turned to dust, blowing away, and soon the boy crouches down beside his mother, reaches out, and now he is also touching those same dead leaves.

  • • •

  If they turned the power off, it would change our lives completely. Turning our narrow, spare existence into something more difficult and barren. The power gives us the lights. It keeps the water pumping. It keeps the streets from falling into utter darkness, a darkness that might be lost to crime and fear and violence. Because we wonder if it is the power that keeps this place from turning bad. Are there people living here who, without light and heat and water, might finally go insane?

  I write this all up for the paper.

  For many people, the power is what keeps them connected to the rest of the world. The flickering blue scenes I see through dark and curtained windows. The shadows of people sitting in front of their TVs.

  My own choice is to stay completely unaware, disconnected entirely from anything outside this place. But other people who live here, they have made a different choice. They stay here for different reasons.

  I have to remind myself of that. Because it seems sometimes that we live here as if we’ve chosen to be together. A tired, silent mass of survivors and the forgotten. But in truth we are more disparate. Varied forms of living, discrete choices for why we stay.

  Not everyone here sleeps with their tall windows open to the wet and freezing night.

  Not everyone here sleeps in their clothes, sprawled out on a heavy couch right near those same tall windows.

  Not everyone here denies themselves all connection to the outside world.

  Not everyone here stays so silent and alone.

  I stand at my windows, thinking about this, freezing in the wind.

  I sip from my one drink. I pull the blanket closer.

  It doesn’t ever get warm here. That ended too, like the city itself. Near the time when the city was already inevitably going to be abandoned, the weather never turned warm in the spring. There were days warmer than winter. But summer did not come.

  That didn’t happen only here. All kinds of places no longer have a summer. And other places, now, they no longer have a winter.

  A change evolutionary in scope, played out in a very few years. Gradually, then suddenly.

  When it rains here, I wonder what could be in those drops. What sort of chemicals are falling all across this city, across my building, across my hands as I stretch them out into this cold and constant rain?

  • • •

  I type my stories on an old typewriter. Then I put them in a tray on the office manager’s green desk. She retypes my stories into the old Linotype machine, which lets her print them out on waxy paper that I glue to the wooden paste-up boards. The old boards are twenty inches wide by forty inches tall and have worn blue grids printed on them. I paste onto the boards the waxy paper articles and the just as waxy headlines and the black and white photos I have taken then developed in the old darkroom in the basement. The pressman turns the boards into metal plates he attaches to the press.

  Everything is black and white. The print quality is very good. This was once a new and magnificent way to create a paper. It’s not as if the process changed. All that changed was people found newer, faster ways to make a newspaper.

  • • •

  In the gutter along a street, I see the pages of a newspaper, twisted and damp and peeling apart. I walk toward the pages, to pick them up and throw them away.

  The North End has very little trash and litter. Seeing even a newspaper in the gutter is a disruption of the landscape, the North End having been washed down by the years of rain and storms. Whatever trash was left in the streets during the final, dying years of this city was long ago blown away.

  Yet there is a sense that, actually, the weather that has cleaned this place is managing to, very carefully, strip the city down, eating away at its buildings and homes and structures, methodically reclaiming the skyline, the streets, the land.

  The paper I’ve found in the gutter isn’t a copy of our newspaper. I’ve just realized this. The paper is from the South End. I see the year and month. It’s only a few days old. I think to drop it. Want to leave it here. But already I’ve seen the headlines, scanned them, absorbed them for what they are.

  CITY BUDGET IN THE RED.

  A HORRIFIC MURDER IN THE NIGHT.

  FURTHER DOUBTS ON WHETHER THIS CHANGE IN CLIMATE IS FOR REAL.

  Rain drips down my forehead. The paper is soaked through. I’ve stopped reading. Folding the paper on itself, again and then again, as small as I can make it.

  The news as it has been for years and years and years. No change in the world outside this place. No reason to learn more about anywhere but here.

  I’ll carry the paper home. Throw it away in my small kitchen.

  Or burn it. Use it. In the basement of a home I’ll once more light on fire.

  CHAPTER 4

  Office lights flicker on. Whole floors of tall buildings suddenly lit up throughout the night, triggered by timers whose schedule is long out of sync with any purpose at all.

  There is a mural covering the first five floors of the building in front of me. Painted figures of Greek gods, naked or bearded or weeping or aflame, all at the crest of a wave of water and cloud.

  Lights shine bright on the mural, these lights too connected to the timer that just now lit the floors of the building above me.

  Granite chimeras reach out from the corners of the building, unidentifiable beasts standing guard on every floor, one after another reaching to the chrome spire some twenty stories in the sky.

  A bank building. Next to an insurance headquarters. Next to tall edifices built to house the management of car companies, shipping conglomerates, oil companies, a stock exchange, more banks.

  Twenty buildings. Now empty.

  So much effort. So much work. The money and time and desire to build great structures, to create grand environments in which to work and live.

  The timer triggers again. In the silence of the North End, I hear the click, loud, echoing into the night, and the building and the mural and my hands stretched out at my sides and the breath from my mouth blowing white into the air, all once again go dark.

  • • •

  I walk to the newspaper’s office. I walk the old neighborhoods to the south. I walk the industrial zone to the west. I make my way through buildings near the hotel where I live.

  I wander through the tenth floor of a building near downtown, crossing through the long abandoned offices of a company I can’t identify.

  I make my way to the industrial zone, t
hrough factory floors still lined with the machinery of mass production, heavy tools and automated arms and the means of making such sophisticated items, parts and pieces and accessories that I again cannot decipher until I’ve researched them in the library.

  I make my way to my office, where I write a story for the paper.

  I make my way to an empty neighborhood, where I light a house on fire.

  I make my way to my hotel room, where I lie down in the dark, alone up here in the coldest air, blowing steadily tonight. Pushing hard against my arms and hands and face. Heat rises from any gaps I allow into my heavy covers, escaping near my feet, escaping from the smallest space near my hand and chin and face, and I have to shift now, slowly, carefully twisting the covers tight to seal off the loss of heat.

  I see my breath blow white.

  And with my fingers numb and my face cold I’ve been asleep and now awake, all night, waking up, then asleep, waking every hour, like I do every night, the way it’s been since I came back here. Asleep then waking up.

  Asleep, then waking up.

  I might think of the woman and the boy when I do wake up. Might think about the commission or the paper or an article I will write.

  I will inevitably think about those things.

  But those things are still like dreams. Distant memories I can’t define, lacking shape or definition. Someone else’s story. Someone else’s pain.

  All that’s real when I wake up is everything I remember about the people I have lost.

  Mostly, I wake up crying.

  • • •

  An air-raid siren wails from a horn atop a building across from mine. In a moment, a siren in the industrial zone joins the wailing too, then another from the neighborhoods stretching south, then more than I can manage to follow.

  This happens roughly once a week. Preprogrammed civil defense tests that have continued automatically for so many years.