The City Where We Once Lived

by Barnes Eric;

• • •

  The playground blooms one morning. There’s a force to it, in the suddenness with which it happens and the color that reveals itself and the sheer volume of the flowers themselves. I see it first from my windows, leaning out, and it has transformed the place I look at every day.

  The gardener has a box of frogs. “The scavengers,” he says, smiling. “They can get me anything.”

  He puts the frogs in various green spaces, his courtyard and my playground and a few of the places the scavengers have built. He says, “We’ll see if they can even live.”

  I see more houseboats reclaimed from farther north, pulled closer to downtown, lashed to houseboats that are already lit and repainted and occupied again.

  The population of the North End, it has grown by a thousand or more.

  Through the dim window of an abandoned store near the church, I see an old calendar on the wall. December 2009.

  “I assume they come here for the same reasons we did,” the minister says to me. Along the wall behind him, bright yellow flowers, tiny and in the hundreds, have bloomed in a swath reaching up at a slow angle from the ground to twenty feet high. “To make a life for themselves,” he says.

  “What kind of life?” I ask.

  He shrugs. He sips tea. “Maybe something quiet. Maybe something satisfying and simple.”

  When the air-raid sirens go off the next day, I realize there are fewer of them. Someone has disconnected some of the sirens.

  “Strangely,” the minister says as we walk through his growing garden behind the church, “I have become my best self here.”

  In another week, when the sirens go off, only three sirens scream out. I look toward the bell tower near my hotel, where a siren had until now screamed out all of these years. I see a man standing there.

  It’s the minister.

  I see him smile.

  Traffic barely crawls along the two cleared lanes of the highway. The minister and I stand at the guardrail. Watching as the vehicles move in fits and starts and how could it be that anyone would need or want to drive through there?

  “I wake up,” the minister says now, as he sits on the steps of his church, “and look forward to the day.”

  Only one siren goes off, near the library, I can barely hear it from where I walk.

  “What is it,” the minister asks, sitting with me in my playground, “that I find so pleasant about this place?”

  And in another week, I realize, the sound of the sirens is gone completely.

  • • •

  I’ve found a record player in the library, hidden in a cabinet I’d never noticed near the library’s collection of old albums. The albums are all classical or old jazz.

  It’s been a very long time since I’ve chosen to listen to music.

  I bring the record player back to my hotel room. Plug it into a socket along the base of the walls. I’ve brought a few albums, ten maybe, the first ones I saw.

  The music starts from the wide black speaker in the front of the record player and it does not seem right. But I did not ever listen much to classical music and combined with not having listened to music for so long, I think I’m just not hearing the sounds the right way.

  Soon, though, I realize the record player is turning backward, the needle arm moving out toward the edge of the record, not in toward the center. I adjust the knob that controls the speed of the turntable, but the player still turns the wrong way. At full volume, the music makes for a mess of noise, the record screeching and nearly howling from the speaker. But when I’ve turned the volume down, still trying to figure out what is wrong, I realize that the sound now fills the space. I reset the needle to the inside of the album. The sound comes quietly. Simple, long notes, faint beats coming without rhythm or expectation, all of it very quietly echoing out into the room.

  A lifting and falling of sounds. All of which fills the silence.

  I see the box of things from the house. A small box, wooden, sitting atop a photo album. I touch it with the palm of my hand. Don’t open it. Don’t move it. But I press my palm against the box for a full minute, feel the rough texture of the wood, the sound from the record filling the silence.

  The box and photo album sit on top of a stack of paper. The manuscript. About this place.

  The music lifts then falls and at some point I’ll have to restart the record.

  Because, still, I do so hate the silence.

  • • •

  The minister and commissioner tell me that the South End is still under curfew from the storm. The commission has not met in months. Every day, people cross the overpass to the North End. Walking alone, coming sometimes in a car, a whole family of four making their way with their suitcases and whatever they’ve fit into their backpacks.

  “The breakdown,” a woman says, her children leaning close to her legs, her husband resting a hand on her shoulder. “A total breakdown. Among the police. Among neighbors. Everyone is coming apart.”

  The commissioner meets them, all of them she can, and tells them about the North End.

  “I don’t know how long we’ll stay,” the husband says to the commissioner. “We have family far west of here. We just need time to regroup. Then we’ll go to them.”

  I stand near them, writing this all up for the paper.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the commissioner says. “You stay as long as you want.”

  “Is it safe here?” the man asks. “Will we be safe?”

  The commissioner leans down and talks now to the children. “All of you,” she says, “will be safe.”

  • • •

  I watch the boy swing out over the water of the canal, then back again on his rope swing.

  The woman and I sit in the courtyard, green with ivy and grass and plants not yet ready to flower.

  “Someone told me who you are,” she says.

  I turn to her.

  “The fire,” she says, slowly. Pausing. Her brown hair is pushed off her face and her eyes blink as she stares at me. “I remember,” she says, “I remember it was on the news. Five people killed in a house in the North End. Video, from a news helicopter, of the house still burning. Of bodies laid out on the street and a small crowd nearby and the man, the father and husband, leaning over those bodies. And no police ever came. No ambulance or firefighters.” She’s quiet. I hold a small, waxy leaf. “And I saw that video,” she says slowly, “and I thought what everyone thought, that the North End was the most frightening place I could imagine.” She turns to me. “A barren, abandoned city where people were left to die.”

  I’m watching her. She moves her hand to her face, then away. She looks up at the sky before turning back to me.

  I’m replaying what she’s said. I know it is true. Know that people saw the stories. Know that, even now, it’s a memory in people’s minds of a horror incomprehensible.

  But I’ve never spoken to anyone about it.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m just not sure what else to say.”

  Never. Never once.

  It’s a long while that we don’t speak.

  “And when you saw that man leaning over those bodies,” I say, slowly, staring past her at the grass, long grass, that grows a foot or more high along the base of a brick wall, moving slowly in the very light wind here in the courtyard and wet, I’m sure, from the lightest rain that falls. “When you saw that man, what did you think of him?”

  She doesn’t answer for a minute. The boy swings out over the water, again, twisting some as he does, his eyes closed and if he pushes his legs or leans his body to continue the motion of the swing, I can’t see it, and instead it seems that the dead tree gently swings him back and forth in a steady, endless arc, toward us then back out over the water in the canal.

  She says to me, “I wondered, how he could have possibly thought something so horrible as that wouldn’t happen?”

  It’s a moment, longer, I’m not sure, before I find myself oddly smiling. “No one,” I say, then pause. “
I’ve always known people would think that. I know I thought that. But no one has ever said it to me.”

  She looks away, toward her boy. “I’m sorry.”

  I shake my head. “No. Don’t be. There’s no reason to be sorry for saying that.”

  The boy swings. My hand, laid out on the table, the palm is damp with rain.

  “I’ve never seen you smile,” she says.

  “In my mind,” I say, “there is always the fire and the desperation of that moment when I realized what was happening, and the screaming, my screams, because their screams were already done, but my screams are always somewhere in my mind.” I close my hand on the rain. “And so no, I don’t often smile.”

  The boy swings. Eyes closed. Head back in the wind. The branch of that slick, black tree swaying back and forth.

  She says in a moment, “You should. You have to. You have to know it’s not your fault. Even,” she says, leaning toward me, blinking, “even if it is. Even then, there has to be forgiveness. Of yourself. Of what happened. Of anything you have done or didn’t do. There’s no other way for you to live.”

  • • •

  The scavengers have been building small farms for the past year or more. In greenhouses hidden behind the many homes they’ve scavenged, they’ve planted rows of all sorts of vegetables and fruit. They have chickens too, in large open pens made by linking together the backyards of stripped-down homes, and there are cattle there and dairy cows from which they bottle milk and make cheese.

  “It’s amazing,” I say, quietly, as I walk through one of the greenhouses.

  The gardener is with me, and around me there are scavengers tending the plants.

  “It’s about to become even more remarkable than this,” he says, smiling at me. Outside one of the greenhouses, there is a group of twenty of the teenagers, the homeless kids who arrived here weeks ago.

  “We’re going to create a farm,” the gardener says. “A full-sized farm, a hundred times larger than these greenhouses and pens.”

  I look at the kids. A scavenger is talking to them, staring upward as she speaks. She’s telling them how hard something will be. “You will be more tired than ever before in your life. And then you’ll work some more.”

  The gardener and I keep walking. “The aviary,” I say. “It’s a remarkable place.”

  “Yes,” says the gardener. “I saw it when I was still a scavenger. It made me realize so much is possible.”

  The heat in the next greenhouse we pass through, this one filled with tomato plants, squash, vegetables I can’t identify, the heat is overwhelming.

  “At some point,” the gardener says as we step outside, pointing upward, the hand with the missing fingers reaching toward the clouds above us, “they plan to release some of the birds.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  He smiles slightly. “To see if they will stay.”

  We come out from behind a scavenged house. Across the wide street is the row of flattened houses. The outline of the neighborhood the scavengers plan to burn.

  In a moment, I turn to the gardener.

  He smiles wider. He seems like he is about to giggle. He nods. “We’re going to turn that neighborhood into a farm.”

  • • •

  I look at the new people who’ve come to the North End, seeing them on the street or seeing them answer questions as I interview them, or seeing them as I watch from my room in the hotel, and I wonder. There must be bad people among them. There must be, somewhere, a history of darkness, wrong, even just a deep sadness. There must be people crossing the overpass who come not for some promise of hope or possibility, but who come here to escape all the bad that they’ve done.

  This must be true.

  Maybe they can make a new life. A new self. A new world in which all is different. All is better.

  But I’m not sure.

  I see one of the police officers near the church. She isn’t in uniform. It becomes clear soon that she now lives here in the North End.

  “There are bad people,” she says, answering my questions as I take notes. “Everywhere. I don’t tell myself otherwise. Even now that I am here. There are bad people. Always.”

  I nod. I thank her. She doesn’t know why and I’m not sure either.

  But I thank her.

  • • •

  We’ve come to the overpass for the start of the fire. Hundreds of people are here, scavengers spread out along the length of the neighborhood, water trucks lined up and two old fire trucks the scavengers found in some warehouse in the industrial zone.

  Other people have simply come to watch. The minister and me, other people I’ve seen in the North End for years. But there are also others who seem new to this place, the way they stand back, look around, nervous and unsure about what is happening.

  Not that the people who have long lived here have ever seen something like this. But we’re beyond a point of being surprised or unsure.

  The preparations for the fire have been elaborately coordinated. It’s not just the long line of flattened homes that will keep the fire from jumping to the old neighborhoods, but also there are firebreaks the scavengers have built every few blocks to keep the flames from spreading faster than they want. Heavy, industrial balloons have been lofted along the side of the neighborhood, measuring the direction and strength of the wind.

  West.

  The fire will be lit here, near the overpass and community center, then move west through the neighborhood.

  The gardener is talking to a scavenger holding a walkie-talkie. The scavenger then talks to others via the same handheld radio.

  The neighborhood was built badly, cheap houses thrown up to replace the massive park that had been here, fields and woods and playgrounds and a large, empty field, a green whose only purpose was its openness, the simplicity of a wide and open green space, all of it once used by thousands of people every day. All of it destroyed by a highway. Cars. Replaced by poorly built homes of little value at all, disconnected from any schools and any jobs and even built without sidewalks in order to save money. This neighborhood was in decline the moment it was created.

  A precursor to the South End.

  And so now we will burn it down.

  I take notes for the paper, standing to the side.

  I notice that the frame of the van at the end of the overpass, the one left there by the scavengers after the storm and the attack at the highway, it has been painted. It is striped with yellow and red and orange and blue and the minister says there’s a smiling face on its front. Pointed toward the South End. “The kids painted it,” he says. “They did quite a good job.”

  There are teenagers here too, the shelter kids, some helping the scavengers, others watching the scene.

  The gardener smiles as he listens to the scavengers on the walkie-talkie. He turns to the minister and me. “We need help lighting the fire.”

  I stare. The gardener smiles and nods and the minister steps forward, his hand on my arm and I’m following the gardener too now, a group of scavengers and vendors and the commissioner is with us.

  The gardener hands out heavy sticks whose ends are wrapped in oil-soaked cloth, torches for each of us that he begins to light, some ten of us from the North End all lighting one another’s torches here under a dark, evening sky, the rain barely falling, I notice it now only because of the hissing around me, drops turned to vapor as they touch the fire I hold near my face.

  We spread out, fifteen feet apart, and move forward, the gardener in the middle of our line as we step up onto the curb and walk over the row of flattened houses and the houses behind await, the collective destruction of the North End continuing again.

  But this time for the better.

  The gardener touches his torch to the window frame of a small house.

  I think maybe he expects the house to ignite. His body leans away from the flame, ready to step back, jump back, even run away.

  We wait.

  I know that what he’s doing wo
n’t work.

  It’s a long moment, minutes maybe, I don’t know for sure, before I step forward. Opening the door of that same house, walking to the center of what seems to be a living room, and then I begin to spread fire in that home, to a chair, to a table, the curtains nearly explode in flames, the carpet now burning toward the bedrooms and as I walk back toward the door through which I had entered, I light the sofa and a chair, the heat from behind me building with the light, yellow and orange and shining red on the walls, and I leave through that front door, outside seeing the rest of them with their torches all staring at me.

  I feel the house I lit behind me, burning bright against the sky.

  A scavenger near me, the wire jewelry around her neck shines bright with the flames, and she smiles some at me, then moves toward the front door of the house in front of her, enters, and now all do the same, because you have to commit to the effort, you have to put yourself at risk, the realization is obvious as this row of small houses sheds ashes and embers that gently alight on the ground all around me, watching houses burn, all of them burning and all of these people emerge, turning around, seeing the fires they’ve started, and like me every time I’ve burned a home to the ground, fifty, a hundred, I don’t know how many times, like me they now stare, there’s nothing to do but to stare, stunned and horrified and awed by what you’ve managed to do.

  It’s been many weeks since I burned down a home. Many weeks since I cried. It’s as if I haven’t had enough time.

  There has to be forgiveness, she says.

  There has to be.

  • • •

  Drinking then. Even me.

  Many people have made their way back toward downtown after the fire. Some sit drinking on the wide steps of the church. Others are in the small park that’s being reclaimed. Others simply sit in the street.

  We sit in the restaurant, the six of us. It’s nearly morning. I sit at a wide, wooden spool turned on its side to form a table. The gardener and commissioner and the minister and the woman are sitting here too. The boy sleeps curled up in a low chair next to his mother.

  The burning of the neighborhood took hours. Even now the entire neighborhood smolders and smokes and burns, groups of scavengers and others moving slowly through the scene like rescuers searching the ruins of a crash site, fire trucks stalking the edges of the neighborhood, ready to respond if the fire tries to jump from where it is allowed to burn.