The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  The

  Floating

  World

  A NOVEL

  C. MORGAN BABST

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2017

  for New Orleans

  . . .

  When the sun refuse to shine

  . . .

  When the moon turns red with blood

  . . .

  When the winds begin to howl

  . . .

  On that Hallelujah day

  . . .

  When the revolution comes

  . . .

  When our leaders learn to cry

  . . .

  When the saints go marching in

  Oh, when the saints go marching in

  How I want to be in that number

  When the saints go marching in.

  — TRADITIONAL

  Each must be his own hope.

  — VIRGIL, The Aeneid, Book XI

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Forty-Seven Days after Landfall

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  PART TWO

  One Day before Landfall

  Landfall

  One Day after Landfall

  Two Days after Landfall

  Three Days after Landfall

  PART THREE

  Fifty-Six Days after Landfall

  Monday

  Fifty-Six Days after Landfall

  Tuesday

  Fifty-Seven Days after Landfall

  Wednesday

  Fifty-Eight Days after Landfall

  Thursday

  Fifty-Eight Days after Landfall

  Wednesday

  Ninety-Three Days after Landfall

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  PART ONE

  The Sorrowing Houses

  Forty-Seven Days after Landfall

  October 15

  The house bobbed in a dark lake. The flood was gone, but Cora still felt it wrapped around her waist, its head nestled on her hip. She laid her hands out, palms on its surface, and the drifting hem of her nightshirt fingered her thighs. Under her feet, lake bed slipped: pebbles and grit, mud broken into scales that curled up at their edges. Her legs dragged as she moved under the tilting crosses of the electrical poles, keeping her head tipped up, her mouth open. Her fingers trailed behind her, shirring the water that was air.

  Troy’s bloated house reeked of flood. Dirt, mildew, algae, the smell of the dead. On the dusty siding, she traced the line of sediment that circled the house, high up where the water had come. Beside the door was the mark of the storm:

  The broken concrete of the driveway seesawed, and the kitchen window was still open as she and Troy had left it when they came for the children, the shutters banged flat against the weatherboard. The little boy had jumped at her from the windowsill, naked except for a pair of water wings, a frenzy of brown and orange. She closed her eyes—Blot it out—but even in the dark, she could feel his head cupped in her hand. She could hear Reyna screaming. She saw herself rocking in the pirogue in the thick air, the little boy nestled against her chest. The flood had floated them high.

  Now, she got up and put one foot against the siding, two hands on the sill. She strained, scrambled, jumped. She hauled her body up and perched in the window, her muscles trembling.

  The moon cast Cora’s shadow, long and black, across the kitchen floor, where a woman lay, her face no longer a face, only a mess of blackened blood. She shut her eyes. Blot it out. But when she looked again Reyna’s body still lay curled, as if in sleep, around the shotgun that was missing from the house on Esplanade, her arm trailing awkwardly behind her like something ripped apart by a strong wind.

  Blot it out, Mrs. Randsell had told her. So she had been sleeping. Drugs like a dark river to drown in. But now she felt again the gun recoil against her shoulder. Saw again the light of the blast in the high hall. Blot it out, but she could see as clear as if it were happening again in front of her now: Troy standing above her at the top of the stairs, the little boy reaching out to stroke his mother’s smooth, unmaddened brow. She saw Reyna press her face against the window, her eyes plucked out by birds. Cora looked down from the window, and the pool of blood whirled through the woman’s face, through the kitchen floor, pulling her under. The storm threw a barge against the floodwall. The surge dug out handfuls of sand. The Gulf bent its head and rammed into the breach until it had tunneled through to air. The lowest pressure ever recorded, the radio voices said, and the vacuum pulled at her, her nightdress snapping against her body like a flag.

  Night poured in through the window. Stars streaked down through the sky. She would fall. She was falling. The flood’s reek rose.

  Thursday

  October 20

  Joe saw it only for an instant, the hawk perched on a peak of the Mississippi River Bridge. He had never seen a hawk before in the city, but now that the animals had returned, he saw them everywhere. Above all the little creatures that scuffled and twittered, reestablishing their territories among the fallen pines, raptors floated in an emptied sky.

  Joe looked in the rearview to be sure it was a hawk he’d seen and not a vulture or a crow; the mirror reflected only the X’s of the steel arch. He might paint it anyway, he thought—the predator with her hooked beak, silhouetted against the river and the illusory sea.

  At the end of the bridge, he merged onto General DeGaulle, towards his father’s nursing home. He had always hated this drive, the elevated highway over the big-box stores and the Vietnamese places and the nothing, Tess would say. (No, he should have corrected her, not the nothing. The houses.) Now that the roofs below him were covered in the Crayola-blue FEMA tarps as if the city was drowning in a cartoon ocean, he hated it even more. But this was the final trip—the West Bank had seen the last of Joseph Boisdoré. He made his mouth smile. The physical state affects the mental, and vice versa, Tess had said, dragging Cora out of bed for a walk in the suburban sunshine of Houston. If you smile, you’ll find yourself happier. Smile, and, given time, even this knob of guilt might melt away.

  In the parking lot at the Little Sisters’, Sister Cecilia was waiting for him. She was the picture of a nun: short gray hair, a hank of keys clipped to her elastic waistband. Mother Superior, Tess liked to call her, though she was not.

  “Sister, how good to see you.” He stuck out his hand, and she took it in both of hers.

  “A rare pleasure, Mr. Boisdoré. How is your father?”

  He nodded, maintained his smile, didn’t say, So much better, now that he’s back home. “He’s puttering.”

  They had all been opposed when he suggested moving Vincent out to the cabin, but his father was better off alone with Joe, somewhere Tess couldn’t interfere. Since they’d been home, Vincent had put a French polish on all the good furniture and oiled the rest. He’d been walking around in the felled trees. So much old-growth pine. You’ll let me buy it off you? Ten dollars a cord—Okay, it wasn’t perfect, but the old man mostly knew where he was. People don’t buy good things nowadays, he’d said, last night over red beans. Particle board crap. Comes flat in a box and you put it together yourself, with plastic pegs. He was so well this morning, Joe had left him there alone.

  “That’s good to hear. We’ve had a lot of bad news.” Sister Cecilia led him in towards the emergency stairs. BROKEN was written big on masking tape across the elevator doors. “Many who couldn’t make the transition.”

  Joe nodded as she crumpled her skirt in her fingers—trouser sock above tennis shoe—and began to climb.

  “I’m sure he’s grateful to be getting Tess’s cooking more often. He used to really go on
about it—so much crab she put in the gumbo, how crispy was the chicken.”

  “Actually, it’s just us boys at the cabin, Sister. For the time being.” Confession was a long habit. “Tess’s in the city, looking after our daughter Cora. She’s not doing well.”

  Sister Cecelia’s hand stopped on the railing, gripped it the way you grip a tool.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” She took another step. “This has been hard on many married people. Hard on everyone. I hope you will find a way to reconcile.”

  “Yes, Sister.” He paused on the landing to catch his breath and looked up at her. It was amazing how much they understood, nuns, considering how little they had experienced, but “hard” was an understatement. “I think we will. Tess just needs time. To take it in.”

  “And you do not need time?”

  Rembrandt could have painted her: the judgmental patience in her face.

  “Pop grew up in that cabin, you know,” Joe said. “Been in the family since 1815. I do think the familiarity’s doing him good.”

  She nodded. “I will pray for you.”

  They walked up the remaining floors in silence. He was breathing hard; otherwise he would have felt odd, being with somebody now without going over all of it. How did you make out? and I guess we always knew those levees weren’t worth shit. and Happen to know a tree man who can do a job quick? If it was late, if there’d been drinking, or even in the day, in a dimly lit hardware store with the door’s jingle bells gone quiet, if it was just you and him, if there was trust, you might talk of other things. Did you hear about the shooting on the Danziger? It was not an act of God. They pulled AKs on me in my own goddamned house. It was not a natural disaster. You think they might have blown the levees, like they did in ’27? It was man-made. You think a one of them is going to be called to account? An act of man.

  The battery-lit stairwell was a column of heat, and sweat ran down his chest, but Joe reminded himself to smile: otherwise, his chest might start burning. Smile if you want to feel happy. Move if you need to feel strength.

  On the ninth floor, Sister Cecilia waited. She was breathing lightly through her nose.

  “You’re in great shape, Sister,” he said as he huffed up the last steps.

  “Last spring, some of us gave up the elevators for Lent.” A smile flickered on her mouth. “I kept it up for the sake of my heart, but now I wonder if the Lord was not preparing us.”

  When they came out onto the floor where his father had lived for five years, wheelchairs were stalled at odd angles in the hallway, and a humid murk of urine, mildew, and microwaved food hung in the air. Sister Cecelia’s Reeboks squeaked on the linoleum. They turned beside the nurses’ station, where a beach scene in paper ribbon still hung above the filing cabinets: construction paper sun, corrugated sea. The door to the room across from it was open. Inside, Joe saw the usual plastic-wrapped mattress, the vacant stare of a television screen. Now, though, a pane of the window was cracked, the glass split but still together, as though someone had tried, and failed, to escape.

  At the end of the hall, Sister Cecelia was weighing the two ends of her keychain in her hands, her straight form in bloomy cotton backlit by the window.

  “Sorry.” As he lifted his hand from the arm of a wheelchair, blue imitation leather flaked off in his palm.

  Somehow he hadn’t expected that the room would be just the same. Laundry overflowing the hamper, slippers stepped out of beside the bed. Damage was normal now: The bathtub ring around the city, the misplaced houses and overturned cars. Their home on Esplanade wallpapered in mold, a magnolia tree in the kitchen, his unfinished sculptures of dogs and children hanging in the dying branches. Their furniture all crammed into the Dobies’ house, their boxes in the storage barn. He and Tess were not speaking to each other, and Cora was not speaking at all. The thoroughness of the destruction almost kept you from remembering what had been destroyed. But here, the remote was hidden in the BarcaLounger. The ceramic pheasants, dull with dust, roosted on the windowsill. A photograph of his mother in her wedding dress stood on the bedside table, her dress gone as sepia as her skin.

  Smile, he told himself. He breathed through his teeth.

  In his pocket, his phone rang. It was Sol, the overseer of the farm behind them. He looked at Sister Cecelia, stationed in the corner, and took the call.

  “Hey, Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You aware your dad’s out walking along Lee Road? I pulled over to see if y’all was in trouble, if he need any help, but he just waved me on.”

  The muscles between Joe’s ribs seized up, and he bent over as if just to grab his father’s pajamas from the foot of the bed. You’re in over your head, Tess had said.

  “He seemed alright, to be fair. Said he was out looking for the dog got loose.”

  “We don’t have a dog.”

  “Well, shit. I couldn’t recollect if you did or you didn’t.”

  “Can you try again?”

  “Would if I could, Joe, but I’ve been twenty minutes driving before I could get any signal, and now I’m at the feed store. You ain’t off somewhere, are you? Tess at the house, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “Well, damn. If I’d’ve known you had errands to run. Hell, I coulda—”

  Joe bowed his head down over the folded red blanket his mother had crocheted. He pressed the END button with his thumb, and held his breath, his feet still on the floor.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Boisdoré?”

  Sister Cecelia laid her hand on his back, but he only pressed his cheek against the blanket’s weave, breathing in the wet sheep and Woolite, trying not to see his father standing on the shoulder, waiting for a break in the traffic. People sped on Lee Road, roaring around the blind corners—he could hear the whip of the wind against the gateposts and the trees. He shook his head against the blanket, dug his nails into the wool. He tried to remember his mother’s hands. Index finger wrapping the yarn around the hook, the hook pulling through the chain. If only life followed that regular, smooth rhythm, time falling into your lap in a well-knotted braid. But instead there were always snags, holes, cut strands of yarn that, if pulled, could unravel the whole thing. There was no pattern for peace. His chest still burned.

  TODAY, TESS TOLD herself, they would make it to the hedge.

  The confederate jasmine that Laura Dobie had trained along her iron fence had begun to insinuate itself into the boxwoods, and ripping it out was the least they could do. The least we can do, Tess told Cora, considering the Dobies are lending us their house. The main objective, of course, was just to get Cora out of bed, but Dan Dobie really had been so sweet—the way he’d just thrown his house keys at her through the car window as he and Laura headed out of town.

  “Keeping their house from falling down in their absence is really the very least we can do,” Tess said, petting her daughter’s arm, and Cora slid her skeletal legs off the mattress of her childhood bed, let her feet fall on the padded floor of Dan’s home gym. Cora then stood up under her own power and walked, her bony knees trembling, all the way to the hall door.

  Cora’s nightgown was half-tucked into the seat of her underpants, but Tess had not made a move to fix it, worried that that would break the spell. Her daughter was on her arm now. They were descending the stairs. Tess held onto the banister, feeling a bit unsteady herself.

  She saw how one might think neurosis could be catching. They used to joke about it in the office—I think you’ve caught Verlander’s kleptomania, Alice—but emotional contagion was a real thing, at least according to Hatfield. Since moving alone with Cora into the Dobies’ house, Tess had had to fight not only against the ubiquitous grief but against the urge to sink into the mattress and disappear, as Cora was trying so desperately to do. Tess had to remind herself that Cora had experienced a direct trauma—had seen the storm with her own eyes, had been out in the flood in a pirogue, and to top it off had had the tremendous bad luck to rescue Mrs. Randsell, only to watch h
er die of a stroke just one week after they’d finally made it to Houston. Still, when Tess tried to be happy that Del was coming today—that in a few hours her healthy daughter would be here with her feet up on the Dobies’ coffee table, helping her drink a bottle of chardonnay—she only felt exhausted.

  For now, though, she and Cora were going down the stairs. They took one at a time, Cora staring hard at her toes. Her feet were dirty again, God knew why. Again, her dinner tray had not been touched. Again, she smelled oddly of river mud. But they reached the bottom of the stairs without incident—Tess told herself that this was progress.

  When she tugged her daughter’s nightgown free so that it fell over her legs in a muslin cloud, however, Cora stopped short in the middle of the foyer and, as Tess had feared, refused to budge. Yesterday, though, they’d gotten as far as the front porch; today they would make it to the hedge.

  “Cora, come on now,” Tess said, her hand calm in her daughter’s hand. “Your sister’s coming today. We need to make things pretty for her.”

  Cora didn’t move.

  “We can’t let Del see how we’ve been letting ourselves go, can we?” she asked, offering Cora a chance to agree. “Won’t it be nice to just work a little while in the fresh air?”

  “Fresh,” Cora said, her face full of stubborn sleep, like the face of an awakened child. She shook her head slowly. “No.”

  Tess could admit that she would have liked to stay in bed. The world outside was hot and sour, and it was nice to take refuge in the air-conditioning, among the old mahogany furniture she and Joe had rescued from their house on Esplanade. The curtained rooms were quiet, and Laura’s ugly high pile carpets were so soft beneath your feet. But you couldn’t just sleep. Already, Tess had cleaned the Dobies’ kitchen cabinets with Murphy’s Oil, washed the mustiness out of all of the sheets, polished the Marleybone silver that had traveled with her to Houston and back again. You couldn’t sleep. She had been telling Cora this since Houston, even as she handed over the Ambien. You couldn’t just sleep until it was over, even if you were drained beyond your last drop, reamed out like a lemon down to the pith. You couldn’t just sleep, even if that was the only thing that felt good. Even if, alone on the Dobies’ nice pillow-topped mattress, Joe not in it, Tess slept like a baby. Every morning now, she woke up clutching her pillow, sprawled out and drooling. But she got herself out of bed.