CHAPTER 17

Crossing

It takes a moment. Sometimes a few minutes.

For others, it takes an hour. Even more.

But eventually you will realize that the city isn’t just abandoned.

Actually, everything in the city, all the trees and grass and flowers once planted around buildings and homes and stores, all of it has somehow died.

His kids ride the carousel with him. He has always preferred a ride like this. The rides that flip upside down or whirl about at high speed all make him motion sick. The rides with height scare him badly.

Tonight, his kids agree. They have no interest in the small roller coaster or the catapult cages shooting passengers up into the air. Even when he pointed to the teacup ride his daughter said quietly, “Not tonight.”

Mostly, the three of them have only walked around this small carnival near his parents’ house. Alternately overwhelmed and relieved by the noise. They walk. Not talking. Only looking at the games and cotton candy machine and the other people jumping into and out of the rides.

He and the kids arrived here yesterday. For a stay of what duration he doesn’t yet know.

Insurance claims. Government filings. Bank accounts. Health insurance. Will they stay here or go someplace else? He’ll need a job. They’ll need a house. The kids will need to be in school.

He needs to tell the kids that their mother died.

The young man who runs the carousel stands on a platform in the center of the circling ride. He’s a kid really, staring up. The father glances at him, then watches for a moment. The kid is still staring straight up. For a full minute. The father sees him intermittently, as the ride keeps circling round. The kid’s face is bruised near his eye, and the father notices one hand is red and cut and wrapped in a small and awkward frame. A homemade splint.

There’s a realization in a carnival or at a fair that you’ve put yourselves, your children, everything, into the hands of someone who hates what they do. Who is barely paying attention. Who is not in any real sense trained for the job they have.

His daughter rises and falls on the unicorn. His son does the same on a tiger.

He thinks of the friends of his who must have died back home. Coworkers. His neighbors. He lived there ten years.

How many people did I meet in those ten years? How many of them are dead?

The ride circles. The father stands, hand on a pole. Steadying himself.

His apartment building may even still be standing. All the things he owns could be fine. The toys and clothes of his children. Furniture he’ll want some day, need when he figures out where they can live. Memories embedded in a painting on a wall. A lamp even. Certain clothes.

Or maybe it was washed away.

Who knows? How to find out? What exactly should I be doing?

His son, on the tiger, reaches out to his father. Holds his hand. No reason. His son’s not afraid. Doesn’t want down. He’s not sad. He’s not smiling.

He just wants to hold his father’s hand.

A few hundred people scavenge abandoned homes and buildings. Day after day. They sell what they strip and tear and wrench from these structures to men and women in white panel vans who park along the street.

Faces pale with gypsum dust, arms bloodied from scraping them against broken timbers and rusted vents, necks scarred from cuts inflicted over months and years of work.

Often they go hours without anyone speaking aloud.

She wants the boy between her legs. In his bra and panties. She rolls over. Pulls him onto her. Wants him close. Touching her. Kissing her. She wants him now and she’ll want him later, pushing into her, in his slow way, such a beautiful boy.

“Please come. Please now.”

She showers in the morning. In her own room. Where she brought him. Now she dresses. It’s quiet. Top floor. Suite. They said this was the quietest room in the hotel. That is all she asked for. Quiet. Which brought her to this sprawling room overlooking the new end of the city.

From the other side of the suite, though, there’s a window where she can see the vast neighborhoods of the abandoned city. They call it the North End. She stares out at a broad, sculpted avenue that leads from neighborhoods to downtown. Buildings rise there, in a cluster.

How can a city die?

The boy sleeps in her bed. She watches him. How he breathes.

Downstairs, she eats breakfast alone in the hotel restaurant.

Across from her, a man cries. Quietly. Into his hands.

He sits alone. Table like hers, at a window; they’ve inadvertently ended up facing each other across their separate tables.

He can’t stop crying.

She drinks her cappuccino. Eats two poached eggs. A piece of bacon. One piece of toast. She drinks another cappuccino.

And still he silently cries.

She reads a paper book. About the history of oil. The rise of petro states worldwide.

Periodically, she looks up.

He still can’t stop himself. He holds his face in his reddened hands.

After a time, a woman sits down with him. Wife. Blocking the man from view.

The wife doesn’t talk at first. At least not to her husband. She orders breakfast. Coffee.

Soon, though, she’s talking. A voice that’s only air.

Only venom.

The woman looks up from her book about oil. The deals made to establish whole countries.

The man leans his head back. Staring up at the ceiling. His wife breathes venom. Words the woman cannot hear.

The woman stares at the back of the wife’s still head.

She knows that sound. She doesn’t even need to make out the words.

It’s her father’s voice. Her father’s sound. Her father, before school, after, that is the voice her father had. Breathing fire at her day after day.

The man crying reminds the woman of her mother. She’s realized this. Not that she ever saw her mother cry. But her mother sat, silently, absorbing the fire spewed at her every day. Never once doing anything to stop it.

She wishes, the woman does, finishing the last of her cappuccino, signing her bill, checking the page she’s on in the book about oil, she wishes her mother had once stood. Told her husband to stop. Done something. Something to stop or halt or even barely diminish the assaults her father continually launched.

But she didn’t.

The woman stands. Gathers her things.

While the wife breathes fire.

The man still cries. Even though there are no tears now. He doesn’t hold his face. Actually, he’s only looking at his wife. Still. Face blank.

But clearly, inside, he cries and cries and cries.

The water tastes like water once imagined. Cold and bright and with a feeling, not a taste, but a feeling that you could drink this water your entire life.

It runs from the taps this way. Everywhere in the North End. The water tastes like something you haven’t otherwise ever found.

The doctor looks at his wife. They’ve walked into the hospital. A city hospital. In the South End.

Maybe they have a job for him.

Not as a doctor. He has no license in this country. It will take a year or more to get approved for that. But he knows his way around a hospital.

The clerk looks over his application. Human Resources. “Don’t you want a job as a doctor?” she asks him.

He sits across from her in a small cubicle. His wife waits outside in the hall.

“That’s not yet possible,” he says.

The clerk nods. “That’s a shame,” she says. “We need doctors. Always we need doctors.”

The doctor nods too. Smiles slightly. “So what do you have?”

She looks at her computer screen. Scrolling. In a moment, she says, “Orderly?” She repeats the word, turning toward him. “Orderly.”

He nods. “That will be fine.”

She looks at his application again. Then at him. “Okay. We have to do background checks. Run your work papers. It will take a week or two.”

He nods. “Everything will check out fine.”

She looks at him. “I wish I had time to hear your story.”

He smiles some. “Another day.”

Outside, in the hallway, he and his wife stand together. Where to go next? There is a college here. Maybe she can work there, she has said. But from what they can tell, this South End is not a place with things like museums. Art galleries. Even the one college here doesn’t have an art or art history department.

They’ve been exiled to a place unable to embrace their skills.

As they turn off the hallway toward the elevator, two men stand in an alcove. Near the elevator doors. One is weeping. The men embrace.

The doctor looks around. He sees a sign for the hospital’s morgue. One of the men, the older one, holds a clipboard. Paperwork.

Transfer papers for the just deceased.

He and his wife get on the elevator with the two men.

The men are clearly brothers. The facial shadows of shared parents.

The younger one wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

The elevator doors don’t yet close. The four of them stand and wait.

“I am very sorry,” the doctor says to the men.

Both men glance toward him. Nod. Thanks.

His wife, though, steps toward them. Hugs the older man. Holding him a long moment.

The elevator doors close. The floor begins to lift. Slowly. The elevator is old, its motions so methodical.

His wife moves to the next man. The younger of the brothers. Hugs him also. He begins to cry again. Into her shoulder. He can’t stop. He just cries. His whole body shakes. Crying. Long past the time when they’ve arrived on the first floor.

The abandoned factories hold vast supplies of raw materials, chemicals; there are spare parts. Warehouses stacked fifty feet high with never used tires. Thousands of them. Covered in dust. Left here a decade ago. Factories whose holding tanks are lined with layers of gold, filaments of platinum strung inside clear glass tubes.

Wealth and value decommissioned, left behind as people and businesses fled this place.

The woman walks ahead of her husband. Down a faceless street of tiny duplexes. Triplexes. Short apartment buildings just two or three stories high.

To her left, the highway roars. A sound whose source they cannot see. A constantly rising sound, it drowns out her steps, her breathing; increasingly it drowns out her thoughts.

She likes it, in her way. No thinking. No worry. No madness.

She just walks.

The streetlights above the highway turn everything they see to a faded gray or white.

Her husband taps her shoulder. She turns quickly. Wants to slap at his hand or face or body. Anything.

He steps back. Is saying something. She can’t hear the words. The sound of the vehicles is far too loud.

He points. At a house on this narrow road paralleling the highway.

It was once a tan house. Gray now. Very small. Built cheaply between two, low concrete apartment buildings. Probably the house was built before the apartments. Only now does it look out of place.

The small shrubs planted on both sides of the concrete porch are dead. Sticks. Sprouting up and out. A thin plastic bag clings to a branch. It shakes and billows outward, whipping wildly.

The woman realizes there’s a wind. Rain. She’s soaking wet. Her hair sticks to her forehead. Chin.

Her husband points to the house again. To a path along the left side of it.

She goes to the path. A walkway made of small concrete pads, laid intermittently in the mud. They find the back door. She turns the knob. It’s unlocked. She walks into a living room made from a dining room. The house has been cut in half, arbitrarily; the wall that cuts through it divides a window on the wall. On the floor is carpet, low, aquamarine with swirls of texture. The couch is brown. There’s a TV. An old one. Big. It sits heavily on the floor.

Her son sleeps on the couch.

And the woman starts to cry.

She has not cried in years. Not since before her first son died. Not since some trip to another institution in another state. A flight, a rental car, a well-manicured lawn surrounding a low building outside of town. Another meeting with the therapists, case workers, a selection of young men and women who’d exited this program. It changed my life. It will change your son’s.

It didn’t.

But it did make her decide that she would never cry again.

Tell yourself you’d do better.

Tell yourself you’d find a way.

Tell yourself the mom’s the problem.

Tell yourself she makes it worse.

Tell yourself the dad’s the problem.

Tell yourself he makes it worse.

Tell yourself your love for your children and your faith in your spouse would never falter, never change, never exit this landscape that’s been created without warning or invitation. A world unknown. Without empathy. Without care. Stripped of connection. No forgiveness. A world that knows no mercy.

Live there. Year after year.

Then tell yourself you could still cry.

Or tell yourself that if you cried, you could make that crying stop.

Her son wakes up. Looks at each of them. They stand across from him. In his half of the living room.

He’s impossibly thin. Arms exposed, as if ejected lamely from the sleeves of his thin and graying T-shirt. Red lines, or are they black, scraped up and down his skin, trajectories only he can follow, cutting paths of pain and blood and failed relief all across his body.

“Go away,” he says quietly. Still lying there. Prone.

The father looks around the room again. The mother cries.

Their son sits up, feet now pressed against the horribly stained and worn-out carpet. “Really,” he says flatly. “You should go away.”

Although buildings and factories are slowly stripped down to their bare walls, few homes are scavenged in the North End. Only those that stand in the last neighborhood built there. A modern subdivision, nondescript, unlike any other neighborhood in the North End. This subdivision was built after the highway was constructed, the subdivision covering the remnants of a vast park split in half by the straight, deep trench that cut the city in two.

The scavengers not only strip these homes of the metals they can sell, they also tear the houses down. Flattening them. Then moving on to the house next door. As if clearing the land. Maybe turning it once again into the park that was destroyed.

Or returning this land to what it had been many hundreds of years ago.

“Are you looking for something really cheap,” the teenaged girl next to them now says. “I mean, like, free?”

The doctor and his wife sit in a diner near the hospital. They have been talking about what to do next. A practical, ordered conversation that is incongruous with the love they feel for each other.

“We have money for a few weeks,” his wife has said. “But only if we are very careful.”

“There are many jobs, even basic jobs, that we can do,” he has said. “We only need to find shelter. Some time. Then we’ll be fine.”

Now, they both turn to the teenager in the small booth next to theirs.

“Sorry,” the teenager says. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

They both shake their heads. His wife smiles lightly. So does he.

The girl says, “It’s just that you both seem very nice.”

She has tattoos across her hands and arms and neck. Her nose is pierced with a silver ring. Her lower lip holds a row of thick, black studs. “So if what you want is something cheap,” she says. “Really cheap. Then you just cross the overpass. To the North End. And, well, it’s strange. Hard to explain. But you just pick a place to live.”

The doctor isn’t following what she’s saying. His wife squints. Confused.

“People say it’s scary there,” the girl says. She’s drinking coffee. She holds a piece of toast that she’s about to eat. “They say it’s dangerous. And I used to think that. But then I went over there.” She stops to butter her toast, slowly unwrapping the fifth or sixth of the foil-wrapped tabs of butter from the bowl on her table, carefully coating her wheat bread in fat.

The butter is free, the doctor realizes. As is the cream she loads into her third or fourth coffee refill. The jam is free too, and she spreads it thickly across her toast.

Maximum calories, a very few dollars at a time.

“I went over there thinking it’d be scary,” the girl says, pausing to chew. The husband notices that she has near perfect manners. “I thought it’d be some sort of crazy thing to do. But it’s not crazy. It’s not even scary. What it is,” she says, pausing, looking for a word, “what it is,” she says again and, for a moment, she closes her eyes, “is quiet.”

They thank her. Finish breakfast.

Afterward, they cross the overpass to the North End.

Entering a city that’s been abandoned.

They walk. Small backpacks looped over their shoulders.

She holds his hand.

He smiles. It will be fine.

They walk. Along a broad avenue leading past brick homes two stories high. A boulevard, really, lined now with the slick black trunks of trees that somehow died.

It’s a mile to downtown. Home after home. Brick. Wooden. Gothic. Ornate. Simple. Austere. Beautiful.

All so beautiful.

Architects designed these, each one, individually. House after house. Churches made of stone. Lodges adorned with slate. Brick storefronts lined with tiny parapets. More long blocks of homes.

All empty.

“I know nothing of this place,” the doctor says.

“I’m not sure where we are,” his wife says, now in Spanish. She’s spoken English since they got out of the camp. But English wouldn’t convey her meaning.

Her husband nods.

It rains. But lightly. As if the rain didn’t fall but was instead spontaneously created, tiny beads of moisture manifesting themselves before their open eyes.

Downtown, a man carefully sweeps the large set of granite steps leading up to the cathedral. The man sees the two of them. Raises a hand. Hello.

Then he goes back to sweeping.

A white van moves slowly down the main avenue they just traversed. The van stops. The driver, an old but clearly strong, deeply healthy man, gets out. He holds newspapers in a bundle. He goes to a metal box on the street corner. Opens the door. Drops the new papers inside.

The doctor watches this in wonder.

There’s a bridge across a canal, its stanchions and trusses so ornate and elaborate that you’d think it was meant to cross a grand body of water. But instead it simply crosses a narrow canal.

There are many of these bridges. They can see four or five of them from where they stand.

He sees an empty hospital. A boarded-up city hall. A court building lined with columns; its front doors have been removed. Inside, it’s only black. Next to it is a dark museum, then a library, made of stone, soaring four stories tall; on top of it there is a dome.

Next to the doctor and his wife is a small brick building whose roof is gone except for a set of heavy, horizontal beams on which clear sheets of glass have been carefully placed, a ceiling translucent, beaded with the slight and steady rain. Below this, there are tables of a kind. A giant wooden spool turned on its side. A crate. Another crate. Chairs of many types and heights. It’s a restaurant, and near the back there is sheet metal, maybe it’s the hood of a car, that’s been used to form a bar.

Lightbulbs hang from single wires. Bright white lights in the otherwise constant gray. The bare heat of the bulbs creates a steam from the drops of rain in the air.

A few people sit. One raises her hand. Waves.

“We were banished to this city,” she says to her husband. “But they did not say which side.”

The doctor and his wife enter the restaurant. Set down their bags. Sit at a table.

In a minute, a man brings each of them a glass of wine.

A helicopter passes overhead. The doctor and his wife look up. Through the beams and glass the helicopter is only a blurry image. Yet it’s a disruption. Not just of the silence in this place but the stillness. And the simplicity.

That there’s even electricity here seems remarkable.

The doctor’s phone has no signal.

They sip wine. It’s cheap and served in old glass jars, but it is quite good.

“What has happened?” he asks his wife.

But she doesn’t answer. She just looks across their crate, smiles lightly, only a little. But, nonetheless, it is a smile. For him. She says, again in Spanish, “I don’t know. And I don’t care.”

Storms come here. Quickly, with an intensity whose cause scientists still have not identified. Born of the cloud mass that covers this place, or born of the same source that brought the cloud mass here.

Lightning, rain that’s total, the air turned liquid as tornadoes begin to spin, wreaking damage all across this empty landscape.

The storms hit the South End too, of course. Tearing not through abandoned neighborhoods, but through new and populated subdivisions whose inhabitants have increasingly decided to search for other cities where they can live.

The helicopter sweeps out across the industrial area of the North End. The analysts tell the woman about the history of the factories below them.

“This was one of the most successful areas of mass production in the world,” the female analyst says. “Many decades ago.”

The woman nods. “And the South End?” she asks.

Another analyst nods. He’s wearing jeans. The woman only now notes this. The three analysts are all wearing jeans.

She wears a suit.

The analyst who is black still nods. “Some industrial production moved to the South End,” he says. “But not all of what was here. Much of it simply died. Which means that, in a way the people of the South End don’t fully understand, they were dependent upon the North End being a center of industry. Even if the residents moved to the new neighborhoods, they needed the industrial base to remain. But it didn’t. Couldn’t. Because so many people fled.”

The woman leans toward the window of the helicopter. Looks down. Smokestacks. Sprawling factories. Warehouses that go for hundreds of yards, even as their wooden roofs sink slowly inward, in places bursting downward, soaked through from inattention and this constant rain.

“So,” the woman says, still looking out the window, “our bet is against the debt of the South End? Municipal debt. But also companies based there that cannot easily move?”

An analyst says, “Yes.”

“What about the housing?” the woman asks. They’re crossing over an airport. Abandoned. The covered, cantilevered walkways all leading to planes that won’t ever again arrive. “In the South End,” she says, “there must be a way to bet against the people all living in the shadow of a place like this.”

The analysts are quiet for a minute. She can hear them whispering.

In a moment, one of them says, “Housing.” She’s not sure who has spoken. “We have a way to bet against their homes. A location-specific derivative. Built upon residential-dependent retail, property-tax supported debt instruments, and, of course, every home mortgage we can find.”

Outside the helicopter, they pass the buildings in the business district. Office buildings. Beautiful ones. Built of stone and steel, and one is adorned every few floors with granite chimera, each unique, each looking out on the many buildings around them.

They pass another office building. Apartment buildings. Next to them is an old hotel. She can see the rooms. Once beautiful.

In one room, its windows are open. She sees a man is standing there. Looking right back at her.

“Why do these people stay?” the woman asks.

No one answers. The helicopter turns north.

Far away, near the edge of the gray horizon, black clouds have formed. Rapidly.

“We’ll have to return to your hotel,” the pilot says over the intercom. “Now.”

The helicopter begins to bank. But she watches the storm as it continues to form. Seemingly fed by the ceiling of gray clouds above them. But also by the water of the sea, or the bay, or maybe it’s a lake, located to the north. The water is warmer there. Only slightly. But it’s warmer than it has ever been. Warmer than the world seems ready to accept.

A miracle of engineering, the North End was built on ancient shoreline and wetlands that once flooded throughout the year, a feat manufactured via a series of interconnected levees and canals.

A city created by a system of tidal management that, over the decades, has been almost completely ignored.

Levees fail. Canals overflow.

No one seems to care.

No one seems to know.

And yet the water moves slowly forward.

The boy runs. Very suddenly. He springs up from the couch, barefoot, in T-shirt and jeans. He is running. Past his mother and father. Out the back door. Gone.

They have to chase him. It’s not a choice. Mother and father, seeing this, their youngest son, his disgusting home.

Both of them sprint after him. Down the road that parallels the sunken highway. He runs ahead of them. Half a block. Toward lights ahead of them. Brighter even than the streetlights over the highway, these lights are yellow and red and green, glowing against the sky.

A carnival.

The boy jumps the fence, men scream at him, his mother follows, over the fence, the husband stops, pays the men. Their admission. He talks fast. Pulls more cash from his open wallet.

Lights, strung on wires from pole to ride to the top of another pole standing between three rides. Games, some with bottles, some with water, basketball hoops, large rings, plywood stalls adorned with overstuffed bears and overstuffed tigers and overstuffed alligators of four sizes. Music plays. From every ride. Every game. So that each song intercepts another, walls of sound they pass through as they run, constantly crossing the point where one song gives way to the other.

The mother sees him. Her son. She hasn’t lost him. Even over the fence. Through the crowd. She will not lose him now.

The boy runs. All he wants to do is run. He does not know where he will go. He does not know what he wants. He does not know even where he is.

He just wants to run.

As a boy, he hated carnivals. He hated circuses. He hated anything like a fair.

His mother knows this. Thinks this. As she chases her son across the crowded, asphalt parking lot.

Near a ride on the edge of this small carnival, a crowd has gathered. Thicker than what should be.

The boy slams into someone in the crowd, then another person. He thinks he can push through them. Just push everyone aside.

But there are too many people.

In a sense, he’s now trapped. Among people all standing still. Pushing together. Moving toward something he can’t see.

The boy now wants to scream. So he does. But no one hears. The music is too loud.

The boy now wants to hit something. So he does. But no one even responds. Everyone just assumes his blows are a part of the motion of the crowd.

And he’s unable, after all, to hit anything very hard. Weakened. Fading. Wisp.

His movement forward is impossible. He only slides, between people so focused on pushing forward that he can only find small spaces in the gaps between the bodies.

The mother pushes too. Forward. Hard. All her strength. Shoving every person who can be moved.

When the boy, the son, slides out between so many people, he thinks that he is free. But he isn’t. He’s standing at the center of the crowd. Above two people. Teenage boys. Barely men. One bends over the other. Kneeling. But his arms reach forward, frozen. Suspended somehow. His hands made lame.

On the ground, the other boy, a black kid, he stares blankly toward the sky. His mouth overflows with liquid, white and tinged with blood, and his lower jaw is clamped shut. Jammed against his teeth and lips.

He stares. Blankly. Upward.

Dead.

The boy knows this. Even barefoot. Thin. Standing still on the wet asphalt. The man on the ground is dead.

Across from the son, here in the center of this ad hoc mass of bystanders, the boy looks at his mother.

His mother steps forward, over the dead body. As if it were not there.

It’s not that she doesn’t care.

She just needs to get ahold of her own dying, broken son.

No animals either. They’ve all gone. Not just the dogs and cats. But the birds who lived here or just passed through. Squirrels in the park. Nothing.

All of them have fled this place.

The carousel operator looks down at his friend. Kneeling over him. It’s so loud here. So many people stand around him.

Everyone he knows seems eventually to die.

Around him, the crowd keeps pushing inward.

But he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care even when a woman, he can’t understand what she’s doing, she just steps over his dead friend. The epileptic. He barely knew the guy’s whole name.

The kid stands. He looks up at the sky. Rain falls. His face is wet. More wet even than his shirt and jeans and hands.

He raises them. His hands. Rinsing the epileptic’s saliva from his fingers, the blood from his thumbs. He sees bite marks, his blood, or his friend’s, from when he tried to pull open the epileptic’s mouth, all washing away in the light and steady rain.

The kid looks upward now. There’s nothing to see. Just the lights of the carnival. Hung from poles and rides around him. Light reflecting vaguely off the clouds that hang above them.

He thinks that he should scream. He thinks that he should hit someone. He thinks that he would like to drive faster than he’s driven before.

But he has no ability to do these things.

None at all.

Why, he wonders, does everyone always die?

He does not hit anyone as he pushes through the crowd. He just moves through them as they part. His tent and backpack are tucked away in a compartment in the center of the revolving carousel. He steps up onto the ride. It carries him around as he walks forward. Months later, and he’s still not used to this.

He gets his stuff. He hits the stop button on the carousel.

And now he’ll leave. It’s time. To go somewhere else. Find some other job. Find some other place.

Maybe he’ll call the girl. If he can find her. Maybe it’s time to call.

Maybe he could go back. Just to see her.

He’s soaking wet. Like he’s been all his life. He is soaking wet. Without a plan. But he’ll leave here. He’ll go somewhere else.

That’s what he’s meant to do.

Once awarded for its architecture, the city is now actively forgotten.

A failure no one wants to admit.

To acknowledge it would mean something no one is willing to define.

As they pass through the hotel lobby on the way to the black SUV, the woman sees the boy. He’s a young man. She knows this. Sixteen. Eighteen. Somewhere in that range.

He sits alone in the hotel bar.

Even now he is so beautiful.

She wants to tour the North End in their vehicle. Now, after the helicopter trip was cut short. But she also wants very much for the boy to come to her.

He sees her across the lobby. Stares. Looks down. Now looks up again.

He does not know what to do.

She doesn’t blame him.

But she wants him to be with her. A line she’ll cross. She’s decided. So she waves to him. Waves him over. He’ll ride with them.

He’s a line she’ll cross. Her choice. It’s already done.

Along the highway wall, in the neighborhood cut through a park, scavengers hunt the small, poorly made homes for metals. Sometimes glass of certain types. Unbroken. The people who buy these common treasures, they want the glass in perfect form.

She holds her son. This is something different. Something not allowed. For so many years.

Her husband drives. She sits in the backseat. Her son rests his head. In his mother’s lap. What’s happening, the mother can’t quite understand.

She leans forward without disturbing the boy. Reaches out her hand. Touches her husband’s arm.

She’s not done so in many years.

Along an avenue in the North End, a man is walking. He carries an old and heavy camera. It uses film.

Periodically he stops. Before a factory. A school. An old home.

He snaps a picture. Pauses. Then he snaps one more.

He gets into his car. After hugging his brother one last time. He’ll come back. In a week. For the funeral. Their mother wanted to be buried in the North End. He can’t quite focus on that yet. But she wanted to be buried in the old cemetery there. Where her family’s buried. All of them. Going back more than a hundred years.

People forget all kinds of things. Ignore them. Relegate it to the other. The different. It’s not mine.

Poverty. Clear stupidity. A lack of food. Limited water.

Utter prejudice. Violent sexism. Disgust for learning. A rejection of the intellectual.

This city is not alone.

In truth, some few say what otherwise goes unsaid.

This city was just the first to fall.

His kids stare toward the crowd of people. Standing under the lights of the carnival. He touches their shoulders. Touches his daughter, then his son. Let’s go. “It’s time for dinner,” he says, watching the crowd across the parking lot.

That’s not good, he thinks, looking at the crowd. But it’s not an event for him to know.

“It’s time,” he says. They need to drive. Meet his mother at her favorite restaurant. Miles from here. “Come on,” he says, as his kids both lean into him; his boy holds his leg, his daughter holds his hand. Smiling some. Up at him. He says to them, “It’s now time.”

The storms over the city, when they come, each time there’s a sense that they grow bigger, taller, more severe. It’d be hard to know for certain. There is no comparison. These storms, over a city that’s been abandoned, are hard to quantify. Measure. Or even comprehend.