City of Refuge (18 page)

In those first days it was all but impossible to get an accurate idea of where the floodwater was, or how deep it was, in most neighborhoods. The official word by Thursday was that eighty percent of the city was underwater. But what did “underwater” mean? Did it mean ten feet in the street? Did it mean two feet? What would happen to the water system? What would happen to the sewers? They found Internet addresses with satellite photos of the city and pored over them, trying to figure out how far the flooding had reached into which areas. When they had finally gotten in touch with a handful of friends, they shared sites, chat groups, blogs that offered information. Boucher set up an information clearinghouse for the parents and teachers.

Jean watched the news, shaking her head, repeating phrases like “those poor people.” Gus’s reaction was a little beefier. A Korean War veteran, a photo of him in uniform still hung in the living room. “Where the hell is the National Guard? They need to start laying down the law in there.”

“They’re all in Iraq,” Alice said, and her uncle declined to respond.

Occasionally images of looters would flash across the screen, the same three or four brief clips, usually black males with their arms full, glancing sideways at the camera or, shirtless, up against a storefront being detained by police. Gus’s anger at these images was palpable. “Now, I have to ask,” he said, “isn’t that just…animalistic? Don’t those people have any sense of right and wrong at all?”

Craig took a deep breath. “Those people” could, of course, be read in a couple of different ways. “I think it’s a little hard to tell,” he said, “how many of them are taking things they need and how many are actually ‘looting.’”

“Well, it’s kind of hard to figure how anybody down there in that situation needs an armful of shirts and a TV…Look at that one there—they’re laughing.”

“Okay; hush up now Gus,” Jean said, clearing the plates off the coffee table where they were watching.

“Well, I guess I’ll just go and be quiet,” Gus said, scowling at the television.

Alice started making phone calls the day after they arrived to see about getting Annie into school, since there would be no school in New Orleans for the fall semester, at least. Alice had a couple of college friends in the Chicago area. One, Stephanie, who was married to an architect and lived in Winnetka, told Alice about a Montessori school in Winnetka, which was too far away for Annie, but the Montessori network was banding together to try and provide space for displaced New Orleans children. Two phone calls put Alice in contact with a school less than ten minutes away, St. Lawrence Montessori, and she made an appointment to visit with Annie on Monday.

The principal, a tall, vigorous woman in her thirties with a mane of wavy red hair swept back and fastened with an elastic band, was appropriately solicitous about the fate of New Orleans and assured Alice that there would be a place at the school for Annie. They were offering a complete tuition waiver, in addition, for children displaced by Katrina. The building was bright and cheerful, on an oak-lined street; full of vivid construction-paper cut-outs, and books arrayed neatly on shelves underneath the classroom windows. The children looked smart and happy and well-cared-for on the playground, and Alice loved it. It reminded her of all the best of Boucher School, except that it was much smaller than Boucher. And it was private. They worked out the logistics
easily, and Annie was scheduled to start school at the beginning of the next week.

When watching the televised news became too much, and when he began to feel badly about tying up the Brunners’ land line, Craig walked around the neighborhood to burn off nervous energy and to take his mind, even if only for a few seconds at a time, off of what was happening to the life they had known. Up and down the alleys of Elkton Craig walked, subliminally astonished by the solidity of this neighborhood, the tiered fire escapes behind the houses, the garbage cans set out for the trucks on their dawn runs up and down the hidden arteries of the town. The walks grounded him somewhat, even if just in his own body, but they also took on an oddly distorted aura. The disjunction between what had happened to his own reality and the continuity in this new place created a strange and pervasive sense of unreality, a kind of paranoia, as if nothing he saw was what it appeared to be.

Craig knew he needed to get to work on something, although he wasn’t sure just what. The Brunners had generously offered Craig the use of the dining room table as a desk, but he couldn’t get Internet reception there on his laptop, and Aunt Jean couldn’t resist talking to him as she went through, even if it was just to say that she wasn’t going to talk to him. He needed some space to himself.

On Friday of that first week, Craig found a solution, half a mile away, in the gentrifying neighborhood everyone called OffWabash, a string of three blocks that had apparently been dipped in money and on which new, trendy-looking stores were growing like crystals among the old Czech grocery stores and dusty tailor shops. Women’s clothing stores with inscrutable and vaguely South American or French-sounding names (La Bahía, Alizé…), a brilliantly lit fine stationery store right next to a Chinese laundry, a bookstore (Sister
Carrie’s). Most important, he found a coffee shop called Brew Horizon, which had wireless Internet service and where he could set up, do e-mail and establish some kind of base.

Brew Horizon was eerily similar to every other independent coffee shop in gentrifying old neighborhoods around the country—the coffees listed in colored chalk on blackboards hanging on the walls under pressed-tin ceilings and expensive track lighting, large burlap bags of coffee beans here and there for effect, auxiliary items—coffee carafes, teapots, chai—for sale on shelves, art by an employee or a friend of an employee for sale on the walls, people lined up to give drink orders to tattooed baristas…The whole combination made him feel momentarily and unreasonably elated, as if it were the possible base for a new life, as Maple Street had been back in New Orleans, with its shops, and the Riverbend so close by with the levee, and the Camellia Grill. Predictably, the balloon of his elation began to deflate as soon as he thought of New Orleans.

But he knew to expect that, and Brew Horizon was exactly what he had been hoping to find. For several days, Craig felt as secure as one might feel in a weatherproof harness securely lashed to the side of a mountain in a snowstorm. He was able to get a start on whittling down a pile of unread e-mails that had grown by over three hundred in less than a week. They came from friends, family members, old schoolmates, people he had met once seven years ago, and no matter how quickly he answered them the number never seemed to shrink. Everybody wanted to know not just how he was, and the family, but how
it
was, what it was like to live through what he was living through, something to make it comprehensible on a human level. All of America, it seemed through the window of his laptop, was overwhelmed with awe at the scale of what had happened, and the suffering they were witnessing on television. Over a table halfway back, Craig sat, with his laptop plugged in, writing, answering e-mails, drinking coffee. He would go back to the house for lunch
and to see Annie and Malcolm. Some days he would get a panini right there at B Hor, his new private nickname for the place, which he used in e-mails to friends and to Alice.

He also began making phone calls to generate some work.
Gumbo
had suspended publication for the indefinite future; the restaurants and other businesses whose advertising revenue underwrote the paper were closed; the offices were unusable, the staff was scattered across six states—and he would need to start making some money. And, too, he knew, he needed to keep himself from going crazy from the overwhelming sense of powerlessness. He wanted to make some kind of contribution. And he wanted to find a way to respond to what some public officials were saying. The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, a man with the face of a malevolent toad, if toads were pink and flabby, had said that large parts of New Orleans should be bulldozed, and that it didn’t make sense to save it. Remarks like that made an aurora of heat and anger collect around Craig’s head. He wanted to do something to answer.

Like Alice, Craig had several college friends in Chicago, one of whom was Peter Morehead, an editor at
CHI EYE
, one of Chicago’s alternative newsweeklies. They had stayed in loose touch since college largely because they were both involved in the alt newsweekly business. According to Peter’s office voice mail, he was out of town until Monday, September 5, and Craig left a message in the hopes that there might be some freelance editing or proofreading he could pick up, maybe even some kind of guest editorial. He called other friends, left messages, sent e-mails.

He and Alice bought Tracfones at a nearby Wal-Mart and set about trying to contact their New Orleans friends. Everyone he spoke to was in shock. He finally reached Bobby and Jen in Baton Rouge, and he managed to track down Doug Worth, who had joined Connie and their kids in Hammond. Doug told him that the floodwater
had apparently not reached their immediate neighborhood, and this was important news. It meant that their house might be livable.

After the initial elation at finding a base during those first days of free-fall, Craig began to notice odd symptoms in himself of something he couldn’t name at first. He had started to find the people who came into the café irritating, for no reason at all that he could tell, except that they looked happy. They looked as if they took their coffee shop and their safe, dry streets and houses for granted. As if this were the way things were. Also, after living in a place that was so multiracial, the rarity of black faces struck him as odd. He would look around at the housewives waiting on line for their four-dollar lattes, with their kids in strollers, talking to one another about all the stuff of day-to-day life, entitlement oozing out of their scrubbed pores all over the floor, and Craig would find himself thinking about the Café Rue de la Course on Oak Street, or maybe about Vaughan’s or Little People’s, or Shakespeare Park. Then he would start thinking about the people who lived around Shakespeare Park, and Kemp’s Lounge, and all those little grocery stores, and that soul food place that used to be right on the corner of Washington and LaSalle that had the great macaroni and cheese that Bobby had shown him when he had only been in the city a month, and the other restaurant in the lady’s living room that had the jukebox with all the gospel records on it, and the parades going up Washington, and he thought about the images he had seen the night before, and that morning, on television as he ate his dinner or ate his breakfast, and that his children had to see it and live through it, and anger began to coil around his heart like a snake, irrational anger at everyone around him who was going on as if life hadn’t been interrupted, as if the greatest single forced migration in American history since the Dust Bowl hadn’t just happened, as if their little arguments, their irritations and snits added up to even an ounce of shit…

His pulse at such moments was elevated, heart pumping and
breath coming hard, and when he would get the crucial moment of distance and take a slightly calmer breath, sometimes tears would come to his eyes. He knew what this was; he had heard about post-traumatic stress disorder for years in other contexts, and it didn’t take a PhD to recognize it. When it would hit him he would get up and take a walk outside for a minute and clear his head if he could.

Privately, Craig called this the Weird Anger, in an effort to encapsulate and reduce its power, but when it came it was almost overwhelming. There were other symptoms, such as the bouts of crying that came out of nowhere, triggered by almost nothing. Someone would ask him how his home was—using the word “home” and not “house”—and he would feel his stomach buckle and he would be unable to answer. If they said “house” he could usually get through the conversation. Or walking into a store and hearing Louis Armstrong playing over the sound system and having to turn around and walk out, covering his eyes. Any display of empathy, even those that did not go past the surface, could reduce him to tears, and Alice reported the same thing. Even the most obvious tourist emblem—a drawing of jazz musicians playing in a gift shop, or even the French Market brand coffee, for example, that the Brunners had bought to make them feel at home, could immobilize them with instant and overwhelming grief. The memory of the tenderness, the generosity of spirit, that was in the air in New Orleans, the small things that everyone they knew seemed to appreciate, the appreciation for the fleeting hours and minutes, expressed in gratitude and dance and eating together…Anyone who indicated that they understood what the loss of that meant, or indicated even that they couldn’t understand, but that they sympathized, felt like a friend for life, and at the same time made palpable how much they had all lost. Or might have lost, since nobody was sure yet what parts of the city had been affected in what ways.

On Tuesday, a week after they had arrived in Chicago, Craig was
sitting at his table at Brew Horizon when his cell phone rang. He was trying to encapsulate and neutralize one of the Weird Anger attacks. This one had been triggered by a thin fellow in a yellow and black bicycle riding outfit, carrying his helmet and waiting on line with his own personal travel mug, which he obviously carried with him everywhere. He appeared to Craig to be very satisfied with his life—proud, very likely, of his solar panels and recycling bin, his virtuous light conservation policies at home—the type, Craig thought, who thinks cars should share the road with bicycles, who rides in traffic and gets righteously indignant when drivers don’t treat him like another car. Didn’t he understand that cars are large, and powerful, and that he existed only by their sufferance, that they could knock him over if they hit him? Didn’t he understand how dangerous the world is? It was criminal, sang every nerve in Craig’s body, to gauge the forces around you so lightly—someone needed to tell this fool—criminal to assume that there is a right order of things, that someone who has not been adequately socialized by your rules won’t break through and crush your satisfied, healthy, enlightened ass up against a wall until blood comes out of your ears, smash your fucking bike to fucking pieces…