Zeitoun (15 page)

He continued on, knowing he should feel tired. But he was not at all tired. He had never felt stronger.

This day he ventured closer to downtown, passing families wading through the water, pushing laundry tubs full of their possessions. He paddled by a pair of women pushing an inflatable baby pool, their clothes and food inside. Each time, Zeitoun asked if he could help, and occasionally they would ask for a bottle or two of water. He would hand them whatever he had. He was finding so many things—bottled water, MREs, canned food—and whenever he saw anyone, he gave them whatever was in his canoe. He had plenty for himself at home, and didn’t want any more weighing him down.

He paddled up to the I-10 ramp at Claiborne and Poydras, a concrete structure about ten feet above the waterline. Dozens of people were there, waiting for rescue. A helicopter had dropped off water and food, and they seemed to be well provisioned. They asked Zeitoun if he wanted any water, and he said that he had enough, but that he would bring it to those who needed it. They gave him a case. As he turned his canoe around he saw a half-dozen dogs with the group, most of them puppies. They seemed healthy and well-fed, and were keeping cool from the heat under the shade of the cars.

Zeitoun, assuming that whatever was ailing the city was likely worse downtown, chose not to get too close to the epicenter. He turned around and made his way back to Dart Street.

As Kathy was driving to Houston, Yuko was making arrangements for the family to spend the night with a longtime friend of theirs she called Miss Mary. Like Yuko and Kathy, Mary was an American, born into a Christian household, who had converted to Islam as an adult. Now her house had become a sanctuary for families fleeing the storm, and when Kathy’s Odyssey pulled into the driveway there were already a dozen or more people there, all of them Muslims from New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Mary, a bright-eyed woman in her forties, met Kathy and the kids in the driveway. She took their bags and hugged Kathy so tight that Kathy started crying yet again. Mary took them inside and showed the kids the pool in back, and within minutes the four of them were swimming and happy. Kathy collapsed on the couch and tried not to think of anything.

When he got back to the house on Dart, Zeitoun found his tent in the water below. It had been blown off the roof—probably, Zeitoun guessed, by a helicopter. He retrieved it and set it up again, dried the interior with towels, and then went inside the house to look for ballast. He brought out stacks of books, this time the heaviest ones he could find, and put them in the corners of the tent.

As he was inside stabilizing it, he heard another helicopter approach. The sound was deafening. He expected it to pass over his house on its way elsewhere, but when he poked his head out and looked up he saw that it was hovering over his house, over him. Two men inside were signaling to him.

He waved them off, trying to indicate that he was fine. But this only seemed to intrigue them more. The second man in the helicopter was beginning to lower a cage to him when Zeitoun thought to give the man a thumbs-up. He signaled to his tent and then to himself and gave the helicopter a series of frantic thumbs-ups and
a-okay
signals. Finally understanding Zeitoun’s intent to stay, one of the men in the helicopter decided to drop a box of water down to him. Zeitoun tried to wave him off again, to no avail. The box came down, and Zeitoun leapt out of the way before it knocked the tent flat and sent plastic bottles bouncing everywhere. Satisfied, the helicopter tilted away and was gone.

Zeitoun returned to restabilizing his shelter, beginning to get ready for bed. But like the night before, he was restless, his mind racing with the events of the day. He sat on the roof, watching the movement of the helicopters circling and swooping over the rest of the city. He made plans for the following day: he would venture farther toward downtown, he would revisit the I-10 overpass, he would check on the state of their office and warehouse over on Dublin Street. On the first floor there they kept their extra supplies—tools, paints, brushes, drop cloths, everything—and on the second floor they had their offices, with their computers, files, maps, invoices, deeds to the properties. He winced, thinking of what had become of the building, a rickety thing to begin with.

All night the helicopters roamed overhead. Besides them it was quiet; he heard no dogs. After his prayers, he fell asleep under a vibrating sky.

In the morning Zeitoun rose early, climbed down to his canoe, and
paddled across the street to feed the dogs. They whimpered as he approached, and he took it as relief and gratitude. He climbed the tree, stepped carefully across the plank to the house on the right, and crawled through the window. He dropped two large pieces of steak for the dogs and refilled their water dish. As they busied themselves, he climbed out of the window, stepped carefully over to the next-door roof, and made his way into the second house to feed the second pair of dogs. They barked and wagged their tails, and he dropped two pieces of lamb between them and refilled their water. He left through the window, climbed down to his canoe, and paddled off.

It was time to see what had become of his office building. It was about a half mile away, just off Carrollton, a nearby road lined with warehouses, chain stores, and gas stations. The water was filthy now, streaked with oil and spotted with detritus. Anyone left to wade through this would become sick, he was sure. But so far this day, he had seen no one in the water. The city was emptying. Every day there were fewer people wading, fewer faces in windows, fewer private watercraft like his.

It had been drizzling throughout the morning but now the rain began to pick up. The wind came on, and the day grew miserable. Zeitoun paddled into the wind, struggling to control the canoe, the wind rippling the brown-blue water.

He took Earhart over to Carrollton, and took Carrollton southwest on his way to Dublin. He expected that there might be people on Carrollton—like Napoleon and St. Charles, it seemed a logical thoroughfare for rescue or military boats—but when he got close, he saw no official personnel at all.

Instead he saw a group of men gathered at the Shell station just across the street from his office. The station was elevated from the main
road and was under only a few feet of water. The men, about eight or nine of them, were carrying full garbage bags from the station’s office and loading them into a boat. It was the first looting he had seen since the storm, and these men were the first who fit the description of those Kathy had warned him about. This was an organized group of criminal opportunists who were not simply taking what they needed to survive. They were stealing money and goods from the gas station, and they were operating in numbers that seemed designed to intimidate anyone, like Zeitoun, who might see them or try to impede them.

Zeitoun was far enough away to observe without fear of them reaching him—at least not quickly. Still, he slowed his canoe to keep a safe distance, trying to figure out a way to get to his office without passing directly by them.

But one of the men had already noticed him. He was young, wearing long denim shorts and a white tank top. He squared his shoulders to Zeitoun and made a point of revealing the handle of a gun he had holstered in his belt.

Zeitoun quickly looked away. He did not want to invite confrontation. He turned his canoe around and made his way toward the house on Claiborne. He would not check on the office this day.

He arrived before noon and called Kathy. She was still in Houston at Miss Mary’s house.

“Won’t be able to check on the office today,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

He didn’t want her to worry. He knew he had to lie.

“Rain,” he said.

She told him that friends had been calling her, checking in to see
where she and Zeitoun were, if they were safe. When she told them that her husband was still in the city, there was always a three-stage response. First they were shocked, then they realized it was Zeitoun they were talking about—a man who did not inspire worry in any situation—and finally they asked that while he was paddling around, would he mind checking on their property?

Zeitoun was all too happy to be given a mission, and Kathy obliged. She had just gotten a call from the Burmidians, friends of theirs for thirteen years. Ali Burmidian was a professor of computer science at Tulane University, and ran the Masjid ar-Rahmah, a Muslim student association on campus. They had a building on Burthe Street that housed a resource center and dorm for visiting students from the Arab world.

Delilah Burmidian had just called Kathy, asking if Zeitoun could check on the building, to see what kind of damage it had sustained. Zeitoun said no problem, he would check on it. He knew the building well—he’d been to functions there a few times over the years—and he knew how to get there. He was curious, actually, to see what had become of the campus, given that it was on higher ground.

“Call again at noon,” she said.

“Of course,” Zeitoun said.

Before he left, Zeitoun called his brother Ahmad. After expressing great relief to hear from him, Ahmad got serious.

“You must leave,” Ahmad said.

“No, no. I’m fine. Everything is fine,” Zeitoun said.

Ahmad tried playing the big brother. “Go to your family,” he said. “I really want you to leave. Your family needs you.”

“They need me here more,” Zeitoun said, trying not to sound too grandiose. “This is my family, too.”

Ahmad had no way to counter such a statement.

“This call is expensive,” Zeitoun said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

When he arrived at Tulane, the water was so low there that he easily stepped from the canoe onto dry land. He walked into the tiled courtyard of the Masjid ar-Rahmah and looked around. The grounds were crosshatched with downed branches, but otherwise the property was undamaged. He was about to look inside when he saw a man emerging from the building’s side door.

“Nasser?” he said.

It was Nasser Dayoob. Also from Syria, Nasser had left the country in 1995, traveling first to Lebanon. From Beirut he stowed away on a tanker whose destination he did not know. It turned out it was heading to the United States, and when it made port Nasser jumped off and immediately sought asylum. He was eventually granted sanctuary, and by then he’d moved to New Orleans. He had stayed at the Masjid ar-Rahmah during his legal proceedings.

“Abdulrahman?”

They shook hands and exchanged stories of what they had been doing since the storm. Nasser’s home, in the Broadmoor neighborhood adjacent to Uptown, had been flooded, and he’d come to the student association for shelter, knowing it was on higher ground.

“You want to stay here or come with me?” Zeitoun asked.

Nasser knew that he would be safe at the campus, with little possibility of flooding or crime, but still he went with Zeitoun. He too wanted to see what had become of the city and of his home.

He ran back into the building to get his duffel bag and then
stepped into the canoe. Zeitoun gave him the other paddle and they were off.

Nasser was thirty-five and tall, with freckles and a thick mess of red hair. He was quiet, with a slightly nervous demeanor; when Kathy met him she’d thought he was a fragile sort of man. He was a sometime housepainter, and had occasionally worked for Zeitoun. They were not close friends, but running into Nasser here, after the flood, gave Zeitoun some comfort. They shared a lot of history—Syria, emigration to America and New Orleans, work in the trades.

As they paddled, they talked about what they had seen so far, what they had been eating, how they had been sleeping. Both men had heard the dogs barking. Always the dogs barking at night. And Nasser, too, had fed dogs in the empty homes, on the streets, wherever he encountered them. It was one of the strangest aspects of this in-between time—after the storm but before anyone had returned to the city—the presence of these thousands of left-behind animals.

The wind was stronger now. Fighting through an angry horizontal rain, they paddled by the post office near Jefferson Parkway and Lafitte. The parking lot there had become a staging ground for evacuations. Residents who wanted to be airlifted out of the city could come to the post office and helicopters would take them, presumably, to safety.

As they paddled closer, Zeitoun asked Nasser if he wanted to leave. Not yet, Nasser said. He’d been hearing about the New Orleanians stranded under highway overpasses, and he didn’t want to be among them. Until he heard more reliable reports of successful evacuations, he would stay in the city. Zeitoun told him he was welcome to stay at the Dart house or the house on Claiborne. He mentioned that there was a
working phone on Claiborne, and this was a godsend to Nasser. He needed to call a half-dozen relatives, to let them know he was alive.

They paddled back to Claiborne, passing a full case of bottled water bobbing in the middle of the waterway. They lifted it into the canoe and continued on.

When they arrived at the house, Nasser got out and began tying up the canoe. Zeitoun was stepping out when he heard a voice calling his name.

“Zeitoun!”

He figured it was Charlie Ray, calling from next door. But it was coming from the house behind Charlie’s, on Robert Street.

“Over here!”

It was the Williamses, a couple in their seventies. Alvin was a pastor at New Bethlehem Baptist Church and wheelchair bound; Beulah was his wife of forty-five years. Zeitoun and Kathy had known them for almost as long as they’d lived in New Orleans. When the Zeitouns had lived nearby, Pastor Williams’s sister used to come to Kathy for meals. Kathy could never remember how it started, but the sister was elderly, and liked Kathy’s cooking, so around dinnertime, Kathy always had a plate ready for her. It went on for months, and it warmed Kathy to know someone would go to the trouble to eat what she’d made.

“Hello!” Zeitoun called out, and paddled over.

“You think you could help us get out of here?” Alvin asked.