CHAPTER 16

Arrival

Scientists seek funding for further study of the cloud mass. Politicians use its existence to their relative advantage. Those few news reports that still cover what happened discuss this only as a phenomenon unexplained. It started many years ago. There’s not much more to say.

The people who live under the clouds, they have simply found a way to adapt. Or they’ll soon choose to leave.

His daughter sits in the backseat making dandelion bracelets from the weeds she picked at a gas station a few hundred miles behind them. He watches her in the rearview mirror. Carefully bending each stem, interlocking them, the yellow flowers evenly spaced along the natural chain that she’s created.

She’s making four of them.

“I want to keep one for Mom,” she says.

Five days since the buildings collapsed. But still he hasn’t told them.

I’m sorry, but your mother has died.

He drives. Wind pushes hard against the driver’s side of the car. He feels like he’s leaning the car into the wind.

They are heading north. To the city where his parents live.

Back on the highway in the delta, it took ten or twelve hours to navigate the labyrinth of abandoned and destroyed cars. The horror of slowly driving through that maze of abuse numbed all three of them.

Cars and trucks wrecked.

Dried mud and debris covering all that they could see.

Bodies twisted inside and across the vehicles.

He and his kids drove along in silence. Sometimes just a few miles an hour. The smell of rot and chemicals dissipating only after half a day of driving.

Although some part of him wondered if the smell actually faded or he and his children simply grew accustomed to the scent.

Sometimes they’d drive ten minutes, twenty, then realize there was no way through the cars ahead of them. Having to back up to find a different path, in doing so once more witnessing the same row of bodies bent sickly, dirty, in the shoulder of the road.

Finally, they reached the end of the damage. Suddenly, with no hint it was coming, they reached the end of the car wrecks. The northernmost edge of the flood. A hundred and fifty miles from the Gulf.

They kept driving. Unable to stop in a few small cities already overloaded with refugees from the storm. They slept one more night in the car, then finally reached a city not overwhelmed with refugees. The three of them went to a massive store in a strip mall to buy fresh clothes. Then checked into a hotel room across the street. They took turns showering. They washed clothes in the laundry room of the hotel.

“We don’t usually let the guests in here,” the manager said to him. Pausing. Looking him up and down. Seeing his armload of filthy, dirty clothes. Seeing the man’s children standing behind him. Knowing. Knowing where they had been. “But, sure,” the manager said. “Of course.”

Other people, like them, did the same. Buying clothes at the huge store across the street. Using the laundry. Eating full meals in the chain restaurants all around them.

The father and his children passed these other people in the hotel lobby. In the bright, chain restaurants nearby. But no one spoke of what they’d seen. No one did anything more than nod.

An experience still unspeakable.

Finally, late that first night in the hotel, his kids got into bed. Sharing a big queen bed, they curled up tightly, their father reading a book to them for almost an hour. Then they fell asleep, slowly sprawling out, sleeping through the morning, to the afternoon, still sleeping as the sun finally set once more, and he felt for the first time since his daughter was born the need to check on them. Are they sleeping, or have they somehow suddenly died?

He held a finger under his daughter’s nose. Then his son’s. Breath across his fingertips. He touched each of them on their backs. Feeling their hearts beating quietly. Slowly. In the silence of this hotel room.

Crying now.

Safe.

Now he could finally cry.

This went on for some time. Just the sound of his breathing in the otherwise silent room. Rough. Broken. Crying as quietly as he could.

Then he got into his own bed. And slept for hours and hours and hours.

The North End of these twin cities underneath the clouds died many years ago. Inattention. Fiscal abuse. Mismanagement. Fear of change. Broken industries. Polluted land and water and air.

In many ways, the North End of the city was dying long before the clouds enveloped it.

But the South End of the city grew. Flooded with people who fled the decay in the north. Attracted by the promise of safety, low taxes, the aura of normalcy and the new.

They sit side by side, twin cities created by a wide highway dug deeply into the ground. A trench, with walls reaching sixty feet down.

Now, there’s only one overpass left to cross it.

A dislocation and separation made normal by time. And forgetting.

The doctor and his wife sit silently. They ride a bus heading north on the highway. Sitting in seats near the back. One small backpack each in the rack overhead. His wife has a purse. He has a wallet and his papers in his pocket.

That’s all they own. In all the world. Forty years since they were born. This is the sum total of their lives.

She holds his hand. Or he holds hers. It’s not clear how it started. But for a hundred miles now, they’ve held hands.

He wonders, worries, thinks constantly, about what he could do better.

She does too.

The bus’s restroom smells of urine and excrement and the sour byproducts of decomposition.

He wishes it didn’t smell bad. He wishes none of this were so. They worked so hard. Studied for years. Found jobs that made a difference in the lives of people they knew and never met.

His nose again recoils at the scent of the toilet near them. Sometimes, when the air in the bus drifts this way, his wife will cough. Cover her mouth.

There’s a city they’ve been sent to. A city where they are now allowed to live. This was a part of the bargain she made. The price of killing those four men.

He knows she did not like it.

He knows she wants something so much more for both of them.

But, now, he knows what stands in the way. Her history. His. They have to escape their history.

He’s breathless. Broken. Hopeful. Numb.

It changes with every mile.

She holds his hand. He holds hers.

There’s hope in that.

More hope than he can define.

She leans toward him. Says near his ear, the first time she’s spoken in a hundred miles, “What will we do? How will we live? Do you understand what we have done?”

He nods. Instantly. Immediately. Yes.

“Of course,” he says aloud.

Exiled. In trade for freedom. Exiled, to a city where the gangs have no presence. And no interest.

She holds his hand. More tightly than before.

The things she’s done, he doesn’t picture them. The four killings. Her life before they met, now revealed. He does not picture this.

As long as she will hold his hand.

He can see the wall of clouds ahead of them. A storm front stationary, simply awaiting their approach.

Rain begins to spray against the windows next to their seats. The bus is shaking now, lightly, then loudly, its massive length bending some; they can see the passengers in the front of the bus shifting left as he and his wife shift right, the bus seemingly squeezing itself through an opening much too small.

It gets dark outside. As if evening suddenly fell.

She says, looking out the window, “I think we’re almost there.”

The area to the south is known as the South End, a tan, suburban landscape of new and low buildings, massive houses built on winding streets, subdivisions without sidewalks, vast and plain apartment complexes spread across land that’s been bulldozed flat and cleared of trees.

And across the fissure of the highway cut through this place in the North End, is a city once home to more than a million people. A city where now just a few thousand people live, wandering an emptied urban landscape. Miles and miles of a right-angled grid of streets and homes and offices. Gothic hospitals, ornate museums, grand churches, and a cathedral. The few residents walking from place to place within the North End find escape, or they find routine, or is it just that they find silence?

He assembles his carousel in the rain.

As always, they’ve set up in a shopping center parking lot near a highway.

It’s midday. The carnival won’t open for hours. He wanders away from the rides. The rain is not really drops. It’s a mist. A dampness that, if you don’t focus on it, you wonder if it is falling or rising from the ground.

Feels like home. His home. Far to the west of here.

Imagine weeks of this. People don’t understand. Driving cars a hundred miles an hour along roads slick with a mist that’s been falling, blowing, seeping from the trees, for days and weeks and months.

Forty days without sunlight. Sometimes, it’d go fifty.

There was a hopelessness in that rain. A sense that no matter what you did, you would not escape.

He’s standing next to the highway trench, leaning forward on a steel guardrail as he looks down at the eight lanes spread out sixty feet below him. Cars move, small trucks, massive semis en route from places a thousand miles from here, pulling huge boxes, silver tankers, some pull equipment wrapped in canvas and plastic, protected, and the words on trucks and the cargo they pull is indecipherable as the carousel operator leans over the highway wall. Staring down.

Vehicles move east and west.

People, in all of those cars and trucks. This strikes him. A thought. That he’s never had. All these people. Each with their own lives.

He’s never much considered this.

He fled home. He left everything he could behind. But the world he found, the one he lives in, he feels when he feels anything that this life has been created just for him.

It’s not beautiful. It’s in no way perfect. Very little of it does he like. Instead, it’s a life he slowly steps through, scenes fashioned palely from the ether of his solitary experience.

But, still, he managed to escape.

His face and hands, his wrists and neck, they’re coated in the cool, damp mist. His hair too. Water drips past his wide-open eyes.

He stares down into the highway. At the faces. Faces of the drivers he can only barely see.

He feels no anger.

He feels no pain.

He wants nothing to go badly.

He just stares down into the highway. Glimpsing faces. A crew of men heading to a job. Passengers on a bus. Women on cell phones driving semis pulling fuel. Women and their kids in a minivan or SUV. Fathers and their children in cars indistinguishable from one another.

He’d like to never fight again.

He’d like to never inflict damage of any sort.

He’d like for the willingness to harm to dissipate. Disappear.

That he’s never killed a man, the epileptic’s right, it’s more luck than anything.

And as always, he thinks of the girl. Pictures her in the small cabin of an old fishing boat. On sheets printed with cowboys riding ponies, cowgirls riding horses. Sex that wasn’t like anything he’d done in the back of a car or out in the woods.

He wonders where she is now.

He wonders what she does.

It’s been two years. Since he saw her.

He wonders how he could talk to her.

He wonders if she’d answer his call.

He says her name to himself. Then he closes his eyes. The noise from the highway rises wildly past his ears. It’s everything, louder now, with his eyes closed; it nearly dizzies him. He holds tight to the highway rail. He won’t be knocked aside.

But the noise of this highway is as loud as anything that he’s ever heard.

A man still picks up garbage. In an old, municipal dump truck he repaired and maintains himself, he drives through the old neighborhoods in the North End.

He doesn’t call out. Doesn’t honk his horn. Yet, somehow, everyone knows that it is trash day.

In the airport, she follows her analysts as they walk through a tunnel that bypasses normal security. Access to and egress from the private jets that land.

Not that there are any other private jets here. But this is an essential part of the game. Build private entrances for the wealthy in order to exceed their expectations.

The boy, though, is somewhere above her in this airport. She flew him here on a regular jet. An element of secrecy. But he had a seat in first class. He had never flown before. Now he’s a flying god.

The boy has his own room. In the hotel where they all will stay.

He texts her that he’s landed. She texts back. Good.

She’s never before given one of them her actual number.

She and her analysts flew in and she could see the abandoned city from the airplane window. Miles of it. Gray streets, gray buildings, leafless trees leaning to the side. She wonders which of it had come first, the gray across every surface of this place, or the rain and clouds that cover it?

She walks. A big SUV awaits them at the end of the dim tunnel. Black, of course. Tinted windows.

She’d prefer to avoid the silly pretense.

Why highlight that she has more money than millions of people in just the surrounding area? She has more money than all but a few people in her company. She has more money than all but a few thousand—maybe it’s ten thousand, maybe it’s a hundred thousand—people in the world.

Isn’t this just happenstance? Some inexplicable mix of genetics, luck, and timing?

She looks down at her phone. Wonders when the boy will text her back.

A thought she’s not ever had.

She follows the three analysts to the SUV. A man in a black suit opens the door. A small headphone, on a curled wire, hangs from his left ear. Beneath his jacket, she sees his gun.

This makes her smile some. Who, anywhere, would want to do anything to her?

She climbs into the vehicle.

Bags are piled into the back.

The SUV has been modified, made to be a sort of limousine. She and her three analysts sit facing one another.

She doesn’t prefer this to be so. But she’ll manage.

The boy has still not texted her. It makes her feel frustration. Of a kind she has not felt before.

“What do we see first?” she asks her analysts.

One of the analysts, a woman, dark hair and very smart, probably the smartest of the three, says, “We have a helicopter tour scheduled for tomorrow morning.”

The woman presses back against the leather seat. Seat belt in place. That the four of them have buckled up inside this massive vehicle seems to her somehow comical. Even though she doesn’t know how to make a joke of it, she’s sure that everything about this SUV is silly.

“That’s fine,” she says in a moment. “But, at some point, I’d also like to drive through the city. Not just fly above it.”

The female analyst nods. “Of course.”

They are silent. The SUV has started driving. They are facing one another. Something that, in four years, they’ve never quite done before.

The woman’s mind runs through comments she could say out loud. But she doesn’t say them. None of them seem quite right.

She closes her eyes.

She’d rather be cooking dinner for herself tonight. In her own apartment.

But she’ll be eating dinner at the hotel with her analysts. Another chance to face one another.

Only later will she go to the hotel room. A very nice room. Like the rooms she picks in her own city.

But she has clothes there for him. Bras. And panties. And a dress. They wait for him. And for her.

She looks forward to the evening.

But now she opens her eyes. Looks at the two analysts across from her.

They stare.

The analyst beside her stares at her too.

It strikes her suddenly what she should say. “If there’s no money to be made here,” she says, “that’s fine. We’ll have visited this place. Seen something that we’ve never seen.” She pauses. She glances out her window: they’re descending an on-ramp, accelerating as they enter a walled and sunken highway, rain spraying across the outside of the windows. “And then we’ll go back to the office. And find another way to multiply our money.”

Empty schools, with equations still handwritten across chalkboards at the front of the class. Homework assignments listed with their due dates. The portraits of past presidents line the plaster walls.

One day, students were taught to read. The next day, no one came to open the school’s front doors.

They sit in the small, dark bar in the lobby of the hotel. She drinks. He does not. This bothers her very much. Acting more mature. Like he’s more in control. Implying somehow that she’s the problem.

The private detective is running late.

On the walls are photos of the city across the highway. Before it was abandoned by its residents. Black and white, printed five or six feet across, it’s a city of streetcars and big theaters and brightly lit streetlights shining down on broad avenues filled with people.

She takes another drink.

Her husband orders water.

She wants to scream at him.

How can this private detective be so late?

He arrives twenty minutes later. Apologizing, he gets a drink, they sit down in low chairs around an even lower table. He begins to tell the story. The story of their youngest son.

Prostitution, drug addiction, moving from city to city. He has pictures on his computer. Photos of their son entering a drug dealer’s house, random cars under an overpass. Photos of him placed in offering on websites for women and men.

Her husband begins to cry. She just watches the faces move across the screen. Distant shots. Of a person vaguely familiar to her and her husband both.

None of this is real.

She orders another drink.

The detective keeps on talking. Monotone. He must do this often. He seems practiced. Experienced. Numb.

“Your son stays not far from here,” he says.

Her husband looks from the detective to his wife. “We can’t just walk up to his front door,” he says. “Barge in, then what?”

The detective shakes his head. “He doesn’t have a front door. He only has a back door.”

The wife lets her head turn slightly to the side. Staring at the detective. Finding her gin. Why could that possibly matter? To anyone at the table.

The detective continues. “What I recommend,” he says flatly, “is that you arrange for treatment. A place that will accept him. Give consideration to your insurance, his specific needs. Then there is a service you can hire. Transport. It’s a type of service.”

They know full well of transport. Their oldest son, twice, they had to hire a transport service to get him from their home to a distant treatment center. Three people. Very big. Very strong. Seizing him. Wrestling their son to the ground. While the parents and the youngest son watched from the hallway of their home.

She looks at her husband. Sees the face of her dead son.

“What’s the address?” the wife asks.

The detective has it written down. He pulls a paper from a folder. Sets it on the table.

“Will he be there now?” the wife asks.

She’s done transport. Watched it twice. In her home.

Not again.

The detective nods. “It’s still early,” he says to the mother and father. Sipping from his drink. “He hasn’t yet gotten his drugs. And he hasn’t yet gone to work.”

Two men and a woman drive in a pickup truck across the North End. Toward a neighborhood. They now park. Get out. Go into the house. Join others who strip copper tubing from inside the gypsum-covered walls, copper wires from inside ceilings, copper pipes from the water heater and the furnace and the appliances.

Other people do the same. Fifty of them. Stripping raw materials from these homes. Dropping all of it in massive piles. Near the street. Leaving all of it for the buyers who will come soon. Seeking the scavenged remnants of a neighborhood left behind.

The near silence of how they work is hypnotic or haunting, or maybe it’s only calm.

He sits in the waiting room of the hospital. His older brother sits nearby. They don’t talk. They’ve talked earlier. Now, they’re just waiting for their mother to die.

They both stare down at their phones. He does so only as a motion with which to occupy himself. He’s trying not to cry. Not in front of the nurses. Not in front of his older brother.

“Hey,” his brother says, nodding toward their mother’s room.

Two nurses are leaving her room. The brothers stand, then return to their mother.

She raises her hands as they enter. Smiles wide. But weakly. Too weak to speak. They stand, on each side of her. Each of them holds one of her hands.

She does not want the TV on. The room is small, quiet except for the hiss of oxygen fed to a tube running underneath her nose.

She closes her eyes. To sleep. Smiling. Holding her boys’ strong hands.

You are all I’ve ever loved.

Air-raid sirens sound off throughout the North End, on a schedule no one can decipher. A civil defense system meant to survive a nuclear attack, its decades-old computer still triggers the sirens. The wailing screams from church steeples and the roof of an old hotel and from tall and vacant office buildings in the long-failed business district.

Even a few minutes later, the rising then falling sirens still echo emptily across the city.