The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

  He stares down at the table. There’s a moment where it seems like he will argue with her. He looks out at the room. At the few straggling people who sit and watch the commission talk.

  In a moment, he only nods.

  There is no one here he needs to impress. No one here he needs to deceive. Even he must see this now. He leans back in his chair. He sighs and closes his eyes.

  “And so,” the woman says, “I think what you need is to be quiet. Because there is no money, none, to do these things you talk about. Tearing down buildings, cutting power and water and gas lines. Even putting up a for sale sign to sell off every parcel in the North End. Even if we wanted to do these things, and I do not, even then there is no money to pay for these things to happen.”

  Eventually, he nods his head again.

  “Two thousand people live here,” she says. “Maybe there is something we can do to help them. Because that is the other reason we should be here—maybe, possibly, we can help.”

  Still I want to yell. To stand and yell. But I am only sitting, writing in my notebook as quickly as I can.

  Why this commissioner thinks his effort to clear people of their homes will help is unclear. Instead, all evidence is that the commission has, for decades now, failed and failed and failed.

  There is a newspaper rack near the door to the community center. As they leave at the end of the meeting, only one of the commissioners picks up a paper. The woman. She holds the paper in her hands, skims the front page, then turns to where I am still sitting, finishing my notes. She walks over.

  She puts her hand out and introduces herself. I stand slowly, then shake her hand. It is smooth and warm. So rare for me to be near anyone, let alone touch someone in any way.

  “Obviously,” she says, “I’m new to this commission.”

  I hadn’t noticed that she is new, even though I’ve come to every meeting for years. How many of these people are new? How often have old commissioners dropped away? They are interchangeable to me. There has never been a difference between them.

  I nod, though. As if acknowledging what she’s said.

  “Do you have time to talk about this place?” she asks me.

  I stare for a moment. The normalcy of interaction is almost unknown to me. She doesn’t understand this.

  “Time,” I say. “When?” I ask.

  “Now?” she asks.

  She seems taller than me, though I know she isn’t. But she stands on high-heeled shoes and her hair is pulled tightly up and away from her face.

  I look down at my notebook. I notice my camera on a chair and pick it up.

  “Another time,” I say. “Yes. I can talk.”

  “Okay,” she says. “When?”

  I put my notebook in my pocket. It takes a moment for me to speak. “When,” I repeat.

  “Do you have a phone number or email?” she asks. “A way to get in touch.”

  I look around the room. It takes a moment.

  “It’d be best,” I say, “for us to meet.”

  She gets her phone from her purse. “Where?” she asks.

  I say, “At the paper. At the offices of the paper.”

  “I will be there tomorrow morning,” she says and puts her hand out to me again.

  I take it, warm fingers, the oddity of this convention, touching to say hello and to say good-bye, the strange but accepted intimacy of a glancing, routine connection.

  “In the afternoon,” I say.

  She nods. “Thank you,” she says and turns to leave.

  And I am suddenly exhausted, foggy with a need to sleep, unsure that I can even walk, walk all the way to my hotel. But I go outside and the air is cold and the wind blows sharply in the night and as I walk I stay awake, even with the fog all across my mind. Too much talking, too much touching. So many questions from another person, a strain on my mind and voice and my ability to respond as if this all were normal. As if this place were normal.

  As if I were normal too.

  It’s a full hour of walking before I’m able to escape the circling exhaustion. To emerge from the hazy, fading warmth and now begin to focus on the house, the basement, the fire I now start, burning down this home again.

  • • •

  The commissioner comes to the office on time. I’m alone and the door is propped open, letting cold air pour into the room, sometimes rattling the papers on my desk.

  She looks around the dimly lit office. Ten empty desks where reporters and editors and salespeople once sat. Framed covers of old papers on the walls. Dark, metal file cabinets lining the room, one holding my story notes, the many others filled with old story files, accounting records, ancient advertising orders.

  The office manager is already gone. The press does not run today. And so we’re here alone.

  The commissioner sits in a wooden chair across from my desk and begins to ask me questions. She speaks quickly and, for this place, almost loudly. She operates at a much different speed than anyone I’ve dealt with in years and it’s hard for me to keep up with her. For the most part, she is interested in facts about the North End. How we live. How we eat. What people do with their time. She has a vague understanding of these things, it seems. But the details aren’t clear at all.

  “How do you have money?” she asks.

  “Many people work as scavengers,” I say. “Brokers buy the things they gather. Vendors sell food and other items from tables set up downtown.”

  “And you,” she says. “How do you make money?”

  “I’m paid to run the paper,” I say.

  “By whom?”

  I am sliding my finger along the edge of my desk, absently, thinking about my answer. “By whoever owns this paper.”

  This slows her down a moment and she pauses, looking around the room. She turns back to me. “Why do you live here?” she asks.

  “I grew up here,” I say.

  “That’s not an answer,” she says.

  “I know,” I say.

  She moves her head, maybe in agreement, I’m not sure. Her fingernails shine in the dim light.

  “What would you like to see happen here?” she asks me.

  I have to think about what she’s asking. “I’m not really sure,” I finally say. “It’s not something that I think about.”

  “But you write about this place every week.”

  “I write about how things are. How things were. I guess people find that interesting.”

  She moves her head again, not nodding, not disagreeing. Her hair is black, uniform in color and in the way it is pressed against her scalp.

  “If I could bring one thing to this place,” she asks, “what would you want that thing to be?”

  It’s a very confusing question for me and I find myself having to break apart her phrases, each word, before I can answer. “I don’t want anything,” I say. “I don’t need anything.”

  “What would other people want? The other people living here.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

  Her face changes, her eyes getting smaller, and I realize that I’m frustrating her.

  “I’m not trying to be difficult,” I say.

  “I guess that your choice to continue to live here, to live this way, it’s just something too personal to discuss.”

  I find that I’m biting my upper lip. I tap my hand on the table, a sign of agreement, I think. I’m not sure that I agree with her. But I think that I should give her that impression.

  She presses her hands against her knees. It seems like she’s about to leave.

  I don’t like that I have frustrated her.

  “I think,” I say, pausing, “I think that what most people here would like are very basic things.”

  She leans back in her chair. “Like what?”

  “Like better food. Different food. I think they’d like the streetlights to work wherever people live. I think they’d like for outsiders to stay away.”

  She smiles slightly and it seems strange to me. I di
dn’t think she is a person who smiles. “I’ll be sure to remember that,” she says.

  I shake my head. “No, not you. By outsiders I mean bad people. Sometimes, bad people come through here. Teenagers. Gangs. People looking for trouble. That’s what I mean, what anyone here means by an outsider.”

  The words, the thoughts, the effort to answer her questions, it wears me out. My eyes feel heavy with sleep.

  But she keeps on asking. And I keep trying to answer. We talk about electricity. We talk more about the food. We talk again about how people make money and where they spend it. We talk about the overpass staying open and about how little the commission has done.

  “Truly,” I hear myself say, “they have done absolutely nothing.”

  It’s dark outside by the time we’ve finished talking. My eyes feel like they are half-closed and I want very much to put my head down. I have not answered so many questions, have not talked for so long, in many, many years.

  “Thank you,” she says, standing.

  From the open door, I can hear the rain falling onto the street and sidewalk, quietly. There’s no wind in the cold air tonight, so it’s as if I can hear every drop around me.

  I remember one more thing to tell her. “And the levees are breaking to the north,” I say. “People want the levees fixed. Or else we’ll all be underwater.”

  She stares at me. Silent. She says finally, “What do you mean?”

  “If enough levees break,” I say, “then the North End will be flooded.”

  She looks down at her notes, then back at me. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Only so many levees can break,” I say, “before all the rest will give way too.”

  “How many is too many?”

  “I don’t know,” I say to her. “But each one that breaks puts more pressure on the rest.”

  She stares at me. “An hour we’ve spent talking about how people live here, how small improvements might be made in their lives, and only now do you tell me that the entire North End could be washed away.”

  I can’t tell if she is angry at me or just surprised. I’ve lost that sort of ability to read people’s tone and their expressions. I say to her, “Most days, even people here don’t think about the levees. They think only about the day before them.”

  Soon she stands in the doorway to the street, looking out into the dark. I sit at my desk, watching her. The air blows into the office, colder now and rattling the papers in the rack near the door.

  She turns back toward me. I’m slow to realize that she is nervous about going outside.

  I get up and go to the door, standing next to her and looking out at the street.

  “I know I shouldn’t be afraid,” she says quietly. “Everyone here says there is no crime. But in the South End, they tell you this place is more dangerous than anywhere in the world.”

  In a moment, she adds, “I parked around the corner. I didn’t quite know where I was going.”

  I say to her, “I’ll walk with you.”

  I close the door behind me, then walk next to her. We turn a corner and she points toward her black car parked halfway down the block. I hear noise, though, and turn to look down the street. A white car is moving slowly, music thumping, the underside of the car lit up neon blue.

  “There isn’t crime here,” I say to her, watching the white car slow at the intersection, then gun its engine as it makes a U-turn. “But those people,” I say, “they aren’t from here.”

  Two kids, in layers of T-shirts and their arms tattooed and faces pierced across their noses and mouths and eyes, they pull up in front of us. The kid in the passenger’s seat is closest to us. He says, “Where are you two going?”

  I say to him, “Nowhere.”

  The kid has his hand on the car door, as if ready to open it at any moment. “No, really,” he says. “Where are you two going?”

  The other kid, the driver, he is laughing.

  “Nowhere,” I say, staring at them.

  Their car is pointed away from the office. I push the commissioner, suddenly, and she is moving as I pull her arm. I hear the car’s engine behind us and hope that they’ve pulled forward, to turn around, hope that no one has gotten out of the car. We turn the corner, running, crashing against the office door, now inside, slamming the door shut and locking it. Turning off all the lights.

  I can see through the dingy window the car turning onto this street, driving slowly. But it doesn’t stop in front of the building.

  In a moment, though, I can see the shadow of one of the kids getting out of the car.

  He keeps walking. Along the street toward the office.

  I don’t want him to find us, but I also keep thinking that I don’t want him to know about this office. To know where to find me when this is done.

  “Follow me,” I say to the commissioner, and we make our way through the office, to the stairway leading down to the pressroom. There’s only one light on in the pressroom.

  We stand for a minute.

  She presses her hands together, hard, so that her fingers bend. “I hate to be afraid,” she says.

  “We’ll leave through the alley,” I say. “Give them a minute to move on.”

  She still presses her hands together. I see her teeth are pressed tightly together. She is trying to get rid of her fear.

  We can hear one of the kids, maybe both, banging on the front door upstairs, the glass rattling. They move on, though, and I can hear them banging on the doors of buildings next to us, soon breaking windows as they move down the street.

  “I hate to be afraid,” she says again. “It seems so weak. Unnecessary.”

  The noise upstairs, from outside, has stopped. I am breathing hard. Then I realize this. Hear myself breathing. And so I close my eyes. One more breath. Calm.

  I say to her, “It doesn’t seem unnecessary.”

  From a closet near the tool chest, I pull out a broken axe handle, heavy and smooth, like an old baseball bat. “We leave now,” I say.

  She is looking at the handle. She moves in place, oddly, and I realize she is stepping out of her high-heeled shoes.

  We head up the back staircase to the small loading dock. There is a small door at the end of the big garage. I listen at the door, then open it and we go out into the very dark alley. The door locks behind us.

  We get to the end of the alley, a dark street, with streetlights all out. We walk close to the buildings, turning right, then right again to come out on the street where the commissioner’s car is parked. The teenagers and their white car are gone.

  We move quickly, not quite a run. She gets her keys out as we reach her car.

  The white car pulls around the corner.

  “Go,” I say to her.

  “Get in,” she says, as she slides into the front seat.

  I shake my head, turn away. “Go,” I say. I push her door closed. I am yelling now, a voice so unfamiliar and loud and coming from a place I no longer know or recognize. “Go now.”

  Along the building next to me there are loose cinder blocks in a pile. I walk to them and pick one up, heavy, the surface so rough that it feels like it will cut my hand.

  The commissioner’s car has started but she’s hesitating to leave.

  As the white car comes down the road, I begin walking toward it, the cinder block heavy but I step faster, turning slightly, building momentum as I move into the street in front of the white car, hurling the cinder block upward, less throwing it at the white car than just lifting the block up into the air so that the car drives right into it.

  It crashes through the windshield.

  The car stops, the driver screaming, the passenger screaming too, both covered in tiny shards of glass. I have the broken axe handle in my other hand. I bust out the driver’s side window, move to the back of the car and bust out the rear window too.

  The kids are screaming at me, screaming, “Stop,” but I am on the passenger side, swinging at another window, breaking it in an explosion of tiny
shards of glass.

  I see, for a moment, the commissioner in her black car across the street, still not driving away. Staring at me from her seat.

  But I turn back to the white car.

  The passenger is writhing in place. The driver is holding his arm. I can see the cinder block next to the gear shift. The passenger keeps writhing and then I see it, silver, a gun in the passenger’s hand, and I shove the heavy handle straight at the side of the passenger’s head, the blunt end smashing against his ear. He grabs his head, dropping the gun, and I lean my head into the car, the driver moaning and the passenger gagging like he might vomit and I pick up the gun.

  It’s heavy. It feels like it will fall over.

  I don’t know if the gun’s safety is on so I just pull the trigger, aiming at the dashboard. The shot is loud, ringing, a flash of light and the gun jerks back, far enough to hit the roof. I almost drop the gun. My head is still in the car and I’m not far from the passenger. Both of them have turned their heads away, bending over, the passenger covering his head with both his hands. The driver is holding one hand over his head, the other hand still pointing down, lame and bleeding, broken by the cinder block I threw at the car.

  “Go away,” I say to them, loudly I think, but my ears are ringing so it’s hard to know.

  They are both still bent over, away from me, not looking.

  “Throw your gun out the window,” I say to the driver, and he does, quickly. “And now go away. Like I said. Go away.”

  I pull my head out of the car. The passenger is still leaning over. The driver takes a moment before he allows himself to look my way, briefly, then he turns, to the steering wheel, realizing the car is still running. He starts to drive, the car moving slowly down the street, turning at the corner.

  The commissioner is still in her car. Staring at me.

  I walk over to the other gun, pick it up. I don’t know much about guns, so it takes me a moment to find the safety on both of them. I look around and see a sewer drain along the curb. I drop both guns in the drain, hearing them rattle as they fall down into that sewer.

  The commissioner is still staring. Her window is open. She is saying something, but it’s quiet because of the ringing in my ears or because of her car’s engine or because she’s not speaking loud enough.