The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  Critics call these works “disturbing” and disparage their status as art, but I think that means they’re working exactly as art should. If these works disturb us, it’s because in looking at the work, we see ourselves looking at the work, and doing little else. We watch the events on television unfold in total horror, and then do nothing. We turn off the television and go back to our own problems: How will I buy groceries this week? How can I pay the bills? Maybe we’ll go out of our way to post something on Facebook and pat ourselves on the back for it. It’s not enough and we all know it. These works incriminate, indict. They demand that we do more.

  * * *

  Chekov says that art exists to prepare the soul for tenderness, and if this is true, I wonder how it could possibly succeed. I look up from my desk at the news even now as I write this—there is a war, and we have lost it; we are moving toward a future from which there is no escape—and see all the ways in which the world is, without a doubt, “utterly fucked.”

  But what I finally told my students one week after the election—or maybe I’m now telling myself—is that our art has the power to change this, but we must dedicate ourselves to the task of making apparent what our despair has obscured. Where the irrefutable evidence of science has failed, and where the slippery logic and grand rhetoric of public debate fail, and where the cruel and biased vengeance of the judicial system fails and goes on failing, our writing can succeed in unfolding a subtle shift in intellect, a change in perspective, a new way of seeing that is then impossible to unsee.

  I know how hopeless things now seem, but that isn’t a reason to give up. A few years ago, when the writer Rebecca Solnit came to the campus where I worked at the time, she talked about the difference between optimism and hope. “Optimism,” she said, “is when you believe something good will happen, no matter what.” Optimism is blind that way, and maybe even a little bit silly. “But hope,” she said, “is when the odds are stacked against you, when you choose, in spite of these odds, to believe something good can happen.” Hope is powerful that way, radical even. She was paraphrasing Václav Havel, I think, who spent years in prison as a dissident before he was freed and elected president of the country that had condemned him. “Hope is an orientation of the spirit,” he writes. “It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

  * * *

  None of this is to say we don’t need beauty. On the contrary: we need beauty now more than ever before. But I have grown impatient with the beautiful art of galleries and museums, with auctions and collections and commissions, with curators and prizes and award galas. They operate in a world where beautiful things are made and sold and that transaction is final and enough. But what I have learned about being an artist is that for each of us who makes giant mirrored-steel balloon-animal sculptures that sell for a zillion dollars, there are a thousand more in suburban garages and church basements, in pediatric cancer wards and recovery shelters where nearly every hand shudders with the palsy of addiction, under bridges and on street corners with spray cans, in after-school programs and on playgrounds where sometimes a collective hunger unites as a single gut-wrenching wail, and all of them are putting their hands and voices to work each day trying to remake the world.

  I have exactly zero hard evidence to prove that any of us will succeed in this. But I know for certain that what art first unfolded for me unfolds in me still, and it’s what leads me to choose, in spite of the odds, to believe that, yes, we can put something into the world that is greater than what is being taken from it every damn day of our lives. We can make good things happen. Writing can change us, make us better, stronger people whose actions, though they may seem small and inconsequential at the time, can matter, for ourselves and for the world.

  My students left class that week, still wrung out and slouching, and came back slouching the next week, and the next. They watched the news unfolding in total horror and went on feeling there was nothing they could do. And when they did begin writing again, their essays did not rise to the occasion of this particular apocalypse. It was disappointing, I admit. Sometimes young writers come to the page as if there is nothing at stake in the matter, as if they have no skin in the game. Maybe they write to impress those they admire, or to belong, or to be seen. Many will never make the kind of art I’m talking about; they would not wish to risk their reputation or privilege and could not tolerate accusations against their character or craft—not after working so long and so hard to hone it. They would not wish to displease anyone who might possibly be pleased.

  How many tyrannies will they swallow in exactly this way?

  “[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage,” Adrienne Rich once wrote in a letter explaining her decision to reject the National Medal of Arts. “In the end,” she continues, “I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.”

  Nor can we separate art from the power of those who make it, I think. We are not powerless, and the situation, though bleak, is hopeless only if we reject the tools we already have. If there is to be a revolution against this madness, we can write it, build it, lead it into the streets. We may look at the world in despairing horror—as everyone looks—but as artists, we owe it to the world to look again, and to keep looking until we see in ourselves the way the world can be changed. The art we make can remind ourselves and others of all the beauty and justice there still can be.

  THE FLOOD

  For three days and three nights, the rain falls in sheets, in swirls. It falls in gentle showers and falls sideways and is dumped like a bucket all at once. Tornados spin overhead as thunder and lightning rattle the walls and the roof, and families gather in their closets, squeeze together in the bathtub, pull mattresses over their heads.

  The bayous fill, and the water runs into the streets; the streets fill, and the water fills the highways and the underpasses. The water swallows cars and trucks and entire families of people. It swallows fathers and mothers and tiny brand-new babies. The water turns the highway into an ocean; the white peaks of waves crest and crash against the sides of buildings. People wade out of their houses, through the water, toward one another and dry land. They climb to the second floor, and then the third; they scramble to their roofs and wave white T-shirts or towels toward the rescue they believe will come. Cages like open coffins descend from helicopters, and people climb into them, one at a time or as an inseparable group. A mother clings to her children as they ascend from the water toward safety. She never lets them go.

  * * *

  My husband and I watch the rescues on the news. There aren’t enough helicopters for everyone who needs saving, aren’t enough high-water vehicles, or boats, or flashlights, or meals, or warm beds. We watch the water rising in our own neighborhood, filling the streets up to our ankles, our knees, up to our waists. We are trapped here, on the little island of our address. We occupy ourselves and the children in the ways we can: we eat, we drink, we play board games and curl together in the bed. My husband and I take turns going outside to check the water, watch it rising. When we wake on the fourth day of rain, it is still rising.

  We hear that a shelter has opened up the road from us and that supplies there are low. We gather a large backpack full of clothing and towels and blankets, and my husband leaves, trudging through the floodwater, to deliver it. On the way home, he sees an emergency crew attempting a deep-water rescue at one house on a street where all the houses are underwater. He calls two of our neighbors, who pull a canoe from the garage, and the three of them begin knocking on doors. They find people in houses with water up to their waists, people sheltering on the second floor of their houses, people who refuse to come downstairs because they are afraid of being electrocuted by their own submerged a
ppliances. My husband and our neighbors kick down fences and garage doors to find breaker boxes and cut power to the houses. They rescue elderly couples, a woman with more dogs than teeth, people who are in denial about the state of their homes. The hardest thing for so many, he tells me when he returns wet and exhausted, is leaving, letting all the things they have held so tightly go.

  * * *

  While he is out rescuing these neighbors, I am at home with the children. They are bored of playing games, of being indoors and watching the rain. They want to move and squeal and run. I want them to stay very still, to enter a kind of quiet stasis until the storm passes. I search for news, read the weather forecast, imagine worst-case scenarios while they stand on the back of the couches and dive headfirst into deep pools of pillows.

  I have just put on yet another animated movie when there is a break in the rain. The river in the street subsides a little, and the children come outside to splash at the water’s edge. The woman who lives three doors down from us has a son, I learn, about the same age as my son. We make plans for them to play another time, when we aren’t all so focused on staying dry. Another neighbor approaches to tells us that the dam just west of our neighborhood is full to capacity already and that the Army Corps of Engineers has announced it will be releasing water from the reservoir in order to avoid “catastrophic failure.” There is a long silence in which we all try to process the meaning of those words: water, dam, failure. I am still processing when the rain begins falling again, and I shoo my children back inside.

  There are two dams, I learn. One, Addicks Reservoir, which is north of the interstate, began overflowing in the early hours this morning. Officials are calling this an “uncontrolled release.” This has never happened before, not since construction on that reservoir was completed in 1948. The dam nearer to us, Barker Reservoir, still has a few feet to go before it spills over. With more rain ahead of us, that might happen, but it’s not the thing that will keep me up all night, which is a paralyzing terror that the dams will fail, and all of west Houston will drown in a quiet tsunami in our sleep.

  When my husband returns late in the evening, he showers and we scramble around trying to put together emergency bags in case we have to climb onto the roof and wait for our own rescue. We eat dinner and the children lie down for sleep on an air mattress we’ve put on the floor of our bedroom: the mattress will float, I tell myself, so that I too can close my eyes for even a moment to sleep.

  * * *

  On the morning of the fifth day, the water is higher still—it’s over the sidewalks now—and it isn’t clear like rainwater anymore. The water is brown—dirt brown, shit brown, the color of sand or silt or maybe beef stew. And it smells like one might expect fetid floodwater to smell—like sewage, like contagion.

  Officials are saying that we should leave our homes if there is water in the house because the water is a danger—leave if we cannot come and go with ease, that our homes will be monitored, that if we return in a few weeks, we will find everything in one piece. And if we stay? I don’t even want to imagine the wretched surprises this water will have in store for our bodies when the evidence of it recedes.

  In a press conference, a spokesperson from the Army Corps of Engineers admits it has never before released water from the dam while it is still raining, and also that it has very little information about how exactly this will have an impact on communities downstream. It calls for voluntary evacuations to the west of the dam, in the county neighboring ours, and for mandatory evacuations along the Brazos River to our south. It warns us to stay out of the water, which is infested with all manner of disease—E. coli and Staphylococcus at the very least—but also snakes, alligators, and live downed electrical wires, which have claimed the lives of three volunteer rescuers I know of so far. And yet there is no way to stay out of the water, to come or go without entering and submerging up to one’s knees, or waist, or neck.

  For the second day in a row, my husband and our neighbors paddle away from our home through the floodwaters in the canoe, heading to another neighborhood where people are calling out their windows for rescue. Our children are still sleeping—later and more deeply than at any time of nondisaster—and there is little I can think to do. I turn to reading, to research, to learning all I can.

  I discover that decades ago, the two reservoirs were built far outside what were then considered the city limits in order to protect the city itself—the business district downtown, the ship channel, and the refineries and network of pipelines that form the heart of the nation’s oil industry—from the comparatively minor floods that happen in Houston nearly every single time we have a good rain. The reservoirs are normally bone dry, but in the event of rain, they store the water and then release it slowly over a period of many days. Unfortunately, this storm is not like a regular storm, not even like a very unusual storm. It is not like anything Texas has ever seen. Over the past several days, some places in Houston have seen up to 51 inches of rain. If we were in Colorado and this had been a snowstorm, we would be sitting under 750 inches of snow; if you are, like me, slow to calculate, that’s roughly 62.5 feet. There isn’t a city in the world designed to handle that.

  The reservoirs are now completely full—overflowing, in fact—and the engineers are releasing the water as fast as they can in order to save the city: the dam, the infrastructure, the businesses downtown, the ship channel, all of the millions of people who live here. And in order to save these other very important parts of the city, they will be flooding a less important part of the city—my neighborhood and others—“for the near foreseeable future.” My neighbors and I have joked that we should rename ourselves the Venice of the West.

  All of this is to say that I don’t resent the water. Flooding is almost a way of life in this city: the water comes, it floods us, it recedes. Not every disaster is an injustice. I don’t even entirely resent that they’re flooding my neighborhood on purpose. I understand the concept of sacrifice, why some people might be asked to give up something that benefits the group. We do this every day without thinking: we give up a seat on the bus, a place in the checkout line, our time and talents, and sometimes our lives or money.

  A friend posts a photo of the line of cars waiting to drop off donations at the Convention Center in the dry part of town, hundreds of cars long. Heroes appear everywhere: teenagers in canoes rescuing homeless veterans, beer brewers out in their giant trucks plucking people off their roofs, volunteers arriving at their neighbors’ doors with supplies, clothes, helping hands. People are very good at showing up for one another in their times of desperate need. What we are less good at is maintaining that kind of deep, abiding empathy on the scale that will give us any hope of surviving the next storm like this: like how to care for one another equally.

  * * *

  Elsewhere in the world, people argue about whether Game of Thrones has lost its mojo, their favorite kind of shoes. I don’t begrudge anyone this normalcy. I don’t begrudge anyone who is safe, and well fed, and warm. Life goes on, here and elsewhere, despite tragedy, despite disaster, despite devastating loss. Most people I know who are trying to salvage their belongings, or their homes, or their families do not have time or energy to pay attention to what is happening in the rest of the city—or in the country, or the rest of the world—where people go about their days, posting photos of their good hair, and their Labor Day weekend getaways, and, as ever, their favorite cat memes. No doubt these people have already started feeling the effects of what is known as compassion fatigue, which feels like a form of suffering, I suppose—a deficit of emotional energy to expend on other people, their problems, their needs.

  Here, there seems to be almost no end to the need. The city of Beaumont, to our east along the coast, is an island in the floodwaters—no way in or out—and they have no clean water to drink. Did you catch that? Water everywhere and none of it is drinkable. In fact, it’s poison. Before the hurricane, this whole region, devastated as it is, was home to some of this c
ountry’s most dangerously contaminated EPA Superfund sites, and those sites are still here, except now they’re underwater. It’s all mixed together: the water in the dump sites, and the factories, and in our homes. There’s no separating good water from bad. No separating water that might be drinkable from water that drowned a father, a police officer, the bat colony, a family of six, a factory, a Superfund site, the power station, the pretty woman who lived on the first floor of the apartment building. Over the past few days, a chemical plant near the ship channel has been exploding. That’s in the water too. Officials have told us to stay inside, to stand well back, to avoid breathing the air if possible—and for those who are closest to the ship channel, to close the windows and turn off the air-conditioning. We’re all trapped in a state of suspended, horrified grief.

  On social media, I have seen some spirited debate about whether Texas might have deserved this, as if this catastrophe is some kind of cosmic climate karma for having hosted the oil industry all these years, or that the hurricane was delivered to us as cosmic retribution for our state having once elected two compassionless senators who voted against aid for Hurricane Sandy, or that maybe this is God’s way of punishing us for having elected the country’s first lesbian mayor. I don’t believe in some kind of cosmic register that keeps a tally of all our worst misdeeds, but if I did, I would not count that last one among them.