Zeitoun (11 page)

They talked about what would become of the house, of the city. They knew the house would have to be gutted, all the insulation and
wiring replaced, the plaster and Sheetrock and paint and wallpaper. Everything, down to the studs, was gone. And if there was this much water Uptown, there was more in other neighborhoods. He thought of them—the houses near the lake and the houses near the levees. They didn’t stand a chance.

As they talked, Zeitoun realized his phone was dying. Without electricity, they both knew, when his battery was gone there would be no reliable way to call out.

“Better go,” he said.

“Please leave,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

“No, no,” he said, but even as he spoke, he was reconsidering. He had not anticipated being confined to this house for long. He knew there was enough food for a week or more, but now the situation would present a greater strain than he had planned.

“Tell the kids I said goodnight,” he said.

She said she would.

He turned off his phone to conserve what power it had left.

Kathy was still driving. She’d exhausted all means of diversion and was about to go back to her brother’s house when her phone rang again. It was Adnan. He was in Baton Rouge with his wife Abeer, he said, and they had no place to stay.

“Where’d you stay last night?” Kathy asked.

“In the car,” he said, sounding apologetic and ashamed.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Let me see what I can do.”

She planned to ask Mary Ann and Patty once she got back to the house. It would be crowded, but there was no way a pregnant woman should be sleeping in a car when there was enough room at her family’s house.

*    *    *

When Kathy returned to Andy’s, it was ten o’clock and the rooms were dark. All the kids, save Nademah, were asleep in the car. She roused them and walked quietly into the house. After the kids were settled in their sleeping bags, Mary Ann appeared and confronted her.

“Where were you all day?”

“Out,” Kathy said. “Trying to stay out of the way.”

“Do you know how expensive gas is?” Mary Ann said.

“Excuse me?” Kathy said. “I didn’t know you were paying for my gas.”

Kathy was exasperated, defeated. In the house, they were made to feel burdensome; now she was being scolded for leaving. She vowed to herself to get through the night and think of a new plan the next day. Maybe she could drive to Phoenix to stay with Yuko. It was a ludicrous idea, to travel fifteen hundred miles when her blood relatives lived fifty miles from New Orleans, but she’d run to Yuko’s house before and could do so again.

The tension was bad enough already, but for Adnan and Abeer’s sake, Kathy had to ask. After all, Mary Ann knew them; she’d met Adnan and Abeer many times. Couldn’t they stay for one night?

“Absolutely not,” Mary Ann said.

On the dark second floor, Zeitoun held a flashlight between his teeth, sifting through the pile of belongings he’d salvaged. He shelved the books he could. He boxed the certificates and pictures. He found pictures of his children when they were smaller, pictures from a vacation they’d all taken to Spain, pictures from their trip to Syria. He organized them, found a plastic bag, put them safely inside and then re-boxed them.

In another, older box he came upon another photo, sepia-toned and in a rickety frame, and paused. He hadn’t seen it in years. He and his
brother Luay and sister Zakiya were playing with their brother Mohammed, eighteen years older. They were all wrestling with him in the bedroom Zeitoun and Ahmad and all the younger boys had shared in Jableh. There little Abdulrahman was, on the far right, maybe five years old, his tiny fingers swallowed by Mohammed’s huge hand.

Zeitoun stared at his brother’s electric smile. Mohammed had everything then. He
was
everything, the most famous and accomplished athlete in Syrian history. He was a long-distance ocean swimmer, one of the best the world had ever known. That he was from a country not well known for its coast made his achievements all the more remarkable. He had won races in Syria, Lebanon, and Italy. He could swim thirty miles at a stretch, and faster than anyone else. Faster than any Italian, any Englishman or Frenchman or Greek.

Zeitoun examined the picture more closely. Poor Mohammed, he thought, all his brothers and sisters swamping him. They did that to him whenever he was home. The races—in Greece, Italy, the United States—kept him away too long. He was feted by heads of state and featured in newspapers and magazines all over the world. They called him the Human Torpedo, the Nile Alligator, the Miracle. When he was home his siblings went wild, buzzing around him like flies.

And then, at age twenty-four, he was gone. Killed in a car accident in Egypt, just before a race in the Suez Canal. Zeitoun still missed him terribly, though he was only six when it happened. After that, he knew Mohammed only through stories, photos, and tributes, and the monument to him that stood on the waterfront in Jableh, just down the street from their home. Growing up they had to pass it every day, and its presence made forgetting Mohammed, even momentarily, impossible.

Zeitoun sat and stared at the photo for a minute or so before putting it back in the box.

*    *    *

He couldn’t sleep inside the house. It was hotter this night, and in New Orleans he had never withstood this kind of heat without air-conditioning. Laying on sweat-soaked sheets, he had a thought. He looked in one of the upstairs closets for the tent he’d bought a few years back. The previous summer, he’d set it up in the backyard, and the kids had slept outside when the heat relented and allowed it.

He found the tent and crawled through the window of Nademah’s room and onto the roof. Outside it was cooler, a breeze cutting through the stagnant air. The roof over the garage was flat, and he set up the tent there, securing it with books and a few cinder blocks. He dragged one of the kids’ mattresses out and squeezed it through the tent’s door. The difference was vast.

Laying on the mattress, he listened for the movement of water. Was it still rising? He wouldn’t be surprised. He would not be shocked if, come morning, there was twelve, thirteen feet of water covering the neighborhood.

The darkness around him was complete, the night silent but for the dogs. First a few, then dozens. From all corners of the neighborhood he heard them howling. The neighborhood was full of dogs, so he was accustomed to their barking. On any given night, one would become excited by something and set off the rest, an arrhythmic call-and-response that could last hours until they calmed, one by one, into silence. But this night was different. These dogs had been left behind, and now they knew it. There was a bewilderment, an anger in their cries that cut the night into shards.

Zeitoun woke with the sun and crawled out of his tent. The day was bright, and as far as he could see in any direction the city was underwater. Though every resident of New Orleans imagines great floods, knows that such a thing is possible in a city surrounded by water and ill-conceived levees, the sight, in the light of day, was beyond anything he had imagined. He could only think of Judgment Day, of Noah and forty days of rain. And yet it was so quiet, so still. Nothing moved. He sat on the roof and scanned the horizon, looking for any person, any animal or machine moving. Nothing.

As he did his morning prayers, a helicopter broke the silence, shooting across the treetops and heading downtown.

Zeitoun looked down from the roof to find the water at the same level as the night before. He felt some relief in knowing that it would likely remain there, or even drop a foot once it reached an equilibrium with Lake Pontchartrain.

Zeitoun sat beside his tent, eating cereal he had salvaged from the kitchen. Even with the water no longer rising, he knew he could do nothing at home. He had saved what he could save, and there was nothing else to do here until the water receded.

When he had eaten, he felt restless, trapped. The water was too deep to wade into, its contents too suspect to swim through. But there was the canoe. He saw it, floating above the yard, tethered to the house. Amid the devastation of the city, standing on the roof of his drowned home, Zeitoun felt something like inspiration. He imagined floating,
alone, through the streets of his city. In a way, this was a new world, uncharted. He could be an explorer. He could see things first.

He climbed down the side of the house and lowered himself into the canoe. He untied the rope and set out.

He paddled down Dart Street, the water flat and clear. And strangely, almost immediately, Zeitoun felt at peace. The damage to the neighborhood was extraordinary, but there was an odd calm in his heart. So much had been lost, but there was a stillness to the city that was almost hypnotic.

He coasted away from his home, passing over bicycles and cars, their antennae scraping the bottom of his canoe. Every vehicle, old and new, was gone, unsalvageable. The numbers filled his head: there were a hundred thousand cars lost in the flood. Maybe more. What would happen to them? Who would take them once the waters receded? In what hole could they all be buried?

Almost everyone he knew had left for a day or two, expecting little damage. He passed by their homes, so many of which he’d painted and even helped build, calculating how much was lost inside. It made him sick, the anguish this would cause. No one, he knew, had prepared for this, adequately or at all.

He thought of the animals. The squirrels, the mice, rats, frogs, possums, lizards. All gone. Millions of animals drowned. Only birds would survive this sort of apocalypse. Birds, some snakes, any beast that could find higher ground ahead of the rising tide. He looked for fish. If he was floating atop water shared with the lake, surely fish had been swept into the city. And, on cue, he saw a murky form darting between submerged tree branches.

*    *    *

He remembered the dogs. He rested his paddle on his lap, coasting, trying to place the pets he’d heard crying in the dark.

He heard nothing.

He was conflicted about what he was seeing, a refracted version of his city, one where homes and trees were bisected and mirrored in this oddly calm body of water. The novelty of the new world brought forth the adventurer in him—he wanted to see it all, the whole city, what had become of it. But the builder in him thought of the damage, how long it would take to rebuild. Years, maybe a decade. He wondered if the world at large could already see what he was seeing, a disaster mythical in scale and severity.

In his neighborhood, miles from the closest levee, the water had risen slowly enough that he knew it was unlikely that anyone had died in the flood. But with a shudder he thought of those closer to the breaches. He didn’t know where the levees had failed, but he knew anyone living nearby would have been quickly overwhelmed.

He turned on Vincennes Place and headed south. Someone called his name. He looked up to see a client of his, Frank Noland, a fit and robust man of about sixty, leaning out from a second-story window. Zeitoun had done work on his house a few years ago. The Zeitouns would see Frank and his wife occasionally in the neighborhood, and they always exchanged warm greetings.

Zeitoun waved and paddled over.

“You got a cigarette?” Frank asked, looking down.

Zeitoun shook his head no, and coasted closer to the window where Frank had appeared. It was a strange sensation, paddling over the man’s yard; the usual barrier that would prevent one from guiding a vehicle up to the house was gone. He could glide directly from the street, diagonally across the lawn, and appear just a few feet below a second-story window. Zeitoun was just getting accustomed to the new physics of this world.

Frank was shirtless, wearing only a pair of tennis shorts. His wife was behind him, and they had a guest in the house, another woman of similar age. Both women were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, suffering in the heat. It was early in the day, but the humidity was already oppressive.

“You think you could take me to where I can buy some smokes?” Frank asked.

Zeitoun told him that he didn’t think any store would be open and selling cigarettes this day.

Frank sighed. “See what happened to my motorcycle?” He pointed to the porch next door.

Zeitoun remembered Frank talking about this motorcycle—an antique bike that he had bought, restored, and lavished attention on. Now it was under six feet of water. As the water had risen the day before, Frank had moved it from the driveway up to the porch and then to his next-door neighbor’s porch, which was higher. But now it was gone. They could still see the faint, blurred likeness of the machine, like a relic from a previous civilization.

He and Frank talked for a few minutes about the storm, the flood, how Frank had expected it but then hadn’t expected it at all.

“Any chance you can take me to check on my truck?” Frank asked. Zeitoun agreed, but told Frank that he’d have to continue on a while longer. Zeitoun was planning to check on one of his rental properties, about two miles away.

Frank agreed to come along for the ride, and climbed down from the window and into the canoe. Zeitoun gave him the extra paddle and they were off.