The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  “Come on now—” she reached out her two hands, remained upright, cheerful. Project the affect you would like to see echoed in the patient. “It’s like cold storage in here.”

  Tess turned and opened the front door, let a rectangle of yellow sun swoon across the barge boards, but Cora backed away.

  “Cora,” Tess said, in the same calm, conspiring voice.

  Cora’s eyes, ringed in dark circles like the city’s flooded houses, were blank.

  “Cora,” she said again, more forcefully now.

  But Cora just stared straight ahead as though she knew no one by that name.

  “SHEBA!” VINCENT PUT his foot down between the logs. Hollered. “Sheba, goddamn it, you come!”

  Heat dripped down the insides of his thighs like urine, and a smell of waste rose up out of the knocked-down trees. A hamster-cage, rot-wood smell. Not like the sharp, clear smell of sanding and saws—like trash. Like a bedpan tipped over, soiling the sheets. Like the dog dead, flies clustered on her eyelids.

  “Sheba!”

  Out over the forest, something had come. He licked his finger, held it into the air. No wind. But something had come and knocked it all down. Must have been how the dog got loose. Didn’t like thunder, that dog. Went to ground if you didn’t let her in the bathtub. He marched out into the forest. A few steps was all it took to put him out of breath, but still, he couldn’t hear the road behind him anymore. He looked over his shoulder. Couldn’t see the road.

  Mr. Vincent, where you headed? Some old redneck, pulled up off the shoulder in his dualie, thinks he’s a big man. You sure you should be out here by yourself? Like he was some pickaninny needed scolding. Damn him if the Boisdorés hadn’t owned this tract for almost as long back as there’d been men here of that name. The name had belonged first to white men, of course —Frenchmen you didn’t call bigamists, even if that’s what they were —who passed it on to the children of colored women who were neither wives nor whores. Adelaide was the only name she had, but then her grandson was Boisdoré—or so it was written on the deed to these 180 acres when it was given to him in exchange for his service in the 1812 war, though landowning in even so great a parcel did not convey the rest of what it should have: “Personhood.” A vote. And now even the trees had been knocked down.

  Vincent squinted to see how far this all went. Whether tornado or hurricane. Far. Out in the distance, scavengers circled in the air.

  They had found her near to the edge of the property, Sheba. Flies encrusted in the grayed fur around her eyes. A shameful thing to have forgotten, and then for him to go calling in the woods for a dead dog like a fool—Pop, they say it’s dementia. Nothing to be ashamed of. Damn them if it was nothing to be ashamed of, a grown man wetting his pants. And the dog was under the soil these twenty-five years. Under a stone angel Sylvia had bought her—had her name carved in it, and those narrow dates like a tragic child, except she’d been an old dog when she died. He’d picked her up in his arms and felt all those lumps the veterinarian said were benign, brushed her face clean, almost laughed at the dirt on her. Paws clay-red from digging. Dug ’til her heart had stopped. She must’ve been hunting. Moles, maybe it was, though in all his life he’d never seen a mole. But that dog always went out with a purpose, her nose to the ground, flung back the mud with quick claws. Shovel-foot. You wanted her to dig postholes for you, but she had her own ideas.

  They all had their own ideas, comes down to it. Your purposes were never good enough for them. Build a business and watch them turn up their noses. Build a home and watch them run away. To Texas. To Esplanade Avenue, with some white girl’s money. Nothing you ever did was good enough, not even the cabin, which his father, said by most to be the finest cabinetmaker in the South since the Butterfly Man, had built by hand—each board cut to notch into the next, so that there wasn’t a nail in the whole house they hadn’t hung a picture on. But it wasn’t good enough, not for Joe under Tess’s thumb. Not even the sleeping porch, the pleasantest place to spend a night, a little breeze and the fireflies blinking, was good enough. No, they’d torn it off and built a two-story camelback addition that looked like it had fallen from the sky, like one of those L-shaped bricks on the kids’ Nintendo game. He wanted sometimes to turn off the water and lead them by candle to the outhouse, show them what, for centuries, had been just fine.

  Vincent covered the sun with his hand and looked out again to where the vultures or buzzards or what have you were wheeling around the dead pecan, like they were tied to it by strings. The scavengers liked the dead tree was why they’d left it up. He contended it was edifying, to remember what we built ourselves out of, what we went to. Not dust so much as flesh. Flesh to flesh. Sylvia hadn’t liked hearing it. She believed in transcendence, the way Joe did with his art, his higher purpose as he’d shouted once, mad as hell. According to them, there was something surpassed the material. A soul, some swishy stuff that wormed around in the air. He didn’t have much talent for religious feeling, though he went to church regular, even now that Sylvia was gone. What’s an hour every Sunday and a few fish dinners compared to even the slimmest possibility of an eternity in Paradise? she’d say. He’d never had a problem with her fish dinners, no matter what day it was, but transcendence was not something he had much truck with. He liked making things you could sleep on, sit in. Things that had function. And it comforted him, to know he would be recycled, as the kids would put it, become a buzzard, even a little worm. He could blink and be there and hardly know the difference, the way his mind was going. Blink, and you’re tunneling through the darkness, the mud cool and soft on your sides. Blink, and you’re afloat on a cushion of air, scanning for death on the weather-beaten ground.

  THE PLANE TILTED low over Kenner, too low, so that Del could read the names on the buildings, see the dogs, boxes, lumber riding in the beds of trucks. The white guy in the middle seat leaned over her and peered out—he’d been gone since the storm, probably, like a lot of the rest of them who had congregated around the podium at LaGuardia, introducing themselves, talking like it was some kind of family reunion. Del looked away. She’d chosen the window seat as she had ever since she’d gone away to college eight years ago; she’d liked looking out of the plane window at the bridges over the lake, the highway over the swamp, the sun flashing off the hotel towers and glowing on the gray roof of the Superdome. All of it was always still waiting for her, always exactly the same. But now she couldn’t bear to watch the city coming in, to see for herself where the brown lake ended or did not end.

  Above the beat in her headphones, she could hear the captain saying they’d take one more low turn, and she dropped her head into her lap, her hands hard against the buds in her ears. The plane was banking, it shuddered. Maybe when they landed, she could go to the podium and ask to fly standby back to New York, take a temp job, prostrate herself at Fran’s feet, at Zack’s: abandon your roommate—atta girl, Del—and fuck your best friend while you’re at it.

  She looked down at the steel roof of Bryan Chevrolet, bleak and shining in the heat. She didn’t want this; it made no sense. It was obligation and obligation only: go be with them, go help. But what help, really, could she be? Her father would pick her up, bring her downtown, and they would sit awkwardly in the Dobies’ living room not saying anything useful to one another, until her father slapped his knees and rose to go.

  “Miss? Miss—” She heard him over Master P, but she didn’t look up until the middle seat tapped her shoulder.

  “I’m afraid you need to turn that off. We’re landing,” said the flight attendant, his soft face full of pity. She took her earphones out but left the music running—tinny, tiny, metal forks on strings.

  At baggage claim, the people from her flight stood around, sifting the change in their pockets, looking anxiously towards the rubber curtains where the bags would emerge. She thought she could tell the New Orleanians without even hearing them talk. They were the tired ones. The bloodshot. The ones who looked uncomfortable standin
g up straight, like they felt guilty for being unable to relax. Others, earnest kids, her age and younger, had come to help clean. make good, said a T-shirt one boy was wearing. make good, as if any good could be made out of what was, essentially, a hate crime of municipal proportion. Put on your waders, boys, and grab your hammers, your jars of rusty nails. As if the centuries-old institutions of racism and poverty could be torn down by installing plastic soffits on a couple of 501(c)(3) houses. She looked towards the sign stanchioned by the escalators, no re-entry beyond this point. The belt began to move, rubber mats interlocking. Her duffel came out first—her lucky day!—and she dragged it to the curb.

  Outside, the air was hot, almost oily, the way it glommed onto her skin. In New York, it was already fall. They had taken off from LaGuardia through a veil of cold fog and landed back in summer. In the eight years she’d been away, she had become a person of seasons. She liked them, the way they divided time, gave each day a sense of urgency, of possibility. Here, in the eternal heat and wetness, everything was slow, nothing ever changed. She settled her bag on the pavement and looked down the tunnel. Older, squeaking cars and the kind whose lights clicked on automatically in the dark came towards her. They’d all been getaway cars, probably. Standing still on the highways or plunging upstream in the contraflow. Her father had tried to laugh when he called from the five-mile bridge: The storm’s gaining on us, at this rate.

  She dug in her purse for her BlackBerry, turned it on, and stared down at the screen, expecting the little red message light to flash. Around her, people were kissing each other, throwing bags into trunks, driving away. The light stayed dark. She thumbed down through her recent calls to her dad’s cell number and dialed it, got a busy signal. She hung up and dialed again. The aggressive bleating of downed phone lines. She called Zack—I’m home, she was going to say, laughing a little, but she hung up before the call went through.

  I’ll call you when I get home, she had told him the morning after they’d fucked, that predawn morning when he had stood above her on the stairs to his apartment—sweet old Zack in bare feet and boxers, his face behind his glasses puffy with sleep.

  She hadn’t called him then, though, and so she shouldn’t be calling now.

  Zack, on the other hand, had left dozens of messages on her machine, apologizing for “taking advantage” of her when she was the one who was in the wrong. She should have been on her knees—fuck your best friend and drop him, Del—but she couldn’t even get up the courage to let the phone ring.

  Why can’t you go home again? he’d asked. It had been all downhill from there. It was three days after the storm, and there was a bowl of rocky road with a spoon stuck in it on his coffee table and the room was spinning. She had left her purse in some bar on Avenue A, and Fran hadn’t answered the buzzer, and so here she was on Zack’s couch, and she hadn’t understood what he meant when he said Why can’t you go home again?

  She was so drunk. She kept seeing herself pulling at the door of her tenement building on 6th Street, shouting, and she could smell the stale piss and grime on the concrete steps, which was the same smell—mingled with beer—that came up from the gutters on Bourbon Street when the police rode down it on Mardi Gras at midnight, their horses flank to flank. And then she remembered that New Orleans was on lockdown, remembered that her sister was trapped inside.

  Zack was sitting beside her on the couch in his boxers and bathrobe, his brown ringlets tangled, smelling of sleep. Just go back, he was saying. Of course you can go back.

  No, I can’t, she said. I left. I just—She waved a hand in the air. Everything’s locked up.

  You can’t or you don’t want to? The couch was small, and Zack’s thigh was pressed against hers, and she could feel the tickle of his breath in the tiny curls on the back of her neck. I doubt Fran meant to lock you out. You sure you don’t just want to call her?

  No, she said, remembering how she had slammed her bedroom door in Fran’s face that afternoon, when Fran had just wanted to comfort her. I deserve it. I was a bitch.

  Zack patted her knee and she let him. She was half-glad she’d been locked out, half-glad she’d wound up here. Zack was the only one she could always count on to understand. They’d become friends during a sophomore seminar at U of C when she’d gone on offense over Serena Williams’s treatment at Indian Wells and he’d piped up to support her. He believed in the reality she lived in. He’d never made her feel insane.

  You saw what they did. She slapped her chest, drank her water. Couldn’t be bothered. All the school buses, just sitting in the water? And Cora’s there—And thank God she’s lighter than me, but you saw how the Gretna police closed the bridge. You saw the Convention Center—did you see one white face?

  Zack took her mug and went to the kitchen with it. Two or three.

  My parents left her! If I’d just been there, I could have made her come, thrown her in the fucking car.

  Zack took the Brita from the fridge, filled her cup. The water seemed to slow, twisting in the air. He put the foggy pitcher back on its shelf, closed the door.

  This isn’t your fault, he said.

  She shook her head. I should have done something. She stared at the water, at a warped crumb of chocolate lying at the bottom of the mug. I should have done something. But I was here.

  He’d sat back down, and she could feel the heat of him through the terry cloth. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she leaned against him, into his smell of Tide and sleep. He had always taken care of her—held her hair back, brought her pad thai when she was sad, listened and listened, unlike Fran who talked and talked. It was stupid, the way she was with him. Say one thing and do another, her body a dumb little homing pigeon. His hand had worked up the back of her neck through her hair, his fingers splayed against her scalp.

  Come on, Del. Your sister isn’t your responsibility. That city isn’t your responsibility. You know why you’re here: To make a life for yourself. To escape all that, he said. Say it with me: “This is not my responsibility.”

  She shook her head, folded down over her lap, and his hand moved, heavy, over the hilled muscles of her back, the canal of her spine. Water was captured between the levees, the pumps were down. The flood had washed out the roads, it had picked up sections of the bridges off their pilings and carried them away. She imagined subway gates locked across the entrances to the I-10, police horses standing flank to flank across River Road. Her chest was tight with crying and bourbon, and she sat up, closed her eyes. In Zack’s bedroom, Hendrix rattled from the speakers as Zack brought his arm down and wrapped it around her rib cage, his hand at the cusp of her breast.

  I love you, he said. He had said it before, a couple of times. But he had always been the drunk one, and she had always pretended not to hear.

  I know, she said, with this feeling in her chest like water straining against a door. He bent and kissed the bone at the base of her neck—wet mouth inside his beard—and she started to cry.

  I’m sorry, he said, beginning to draw his hand away, but she reached up and took it in her hand, brought it under her shirt, under her bra.

  The next morning, she had tried to leave before he caught up with her, but the knob on the street door was loose, and she didn’t make it in time.

  Del, I’m so sorry. You were drunk. I—He brushed his hand across his mouth, his toes curled around the step, his glasses on. Sweet old Zack.

  She should have said no then, that she was the one in the wrong: she had used him like a security blanket, and now she was throwing him away. But she’d said nothing. Hadn’t even called when she got home.

  Behind the airport parking lot, the sky was the color of cement. She looked at Zack’s name on her phone, tried to press the green button again, but that wasn’t the sort of conversation you could have here—in the anonymous throngs of New York, sure, but not here, never here. Those Boisdoré girls are fast, she could hear the Buckner mothers clucking, pink tongues flicking inside their collagen-plump lips. Oh, but it
’s hard to be of mixed parentage, Leslie. I worry about them. They’re both so pretty, but who will they find to marry?

  She pulled her long-sleeved tee off over her head, sat down again on her bag and hunched over to watch the headlights as they went around and around. She rubbed the sweat into her biceps. She called Fran again, for the fifth time that day, but it just rang once and went to voice mail.

  “Hey, Fran,” she said to the machine. “I just wanted to say—again—how sorry I am for treating you the way I did. You were just trying to help, I know, and I treated you like shit. I’m having a hard time. I just got to New Orleans. Going to see what I can try and do—”

  A long beep cut her off. She stared for a second at the screen, her thumb over the send button, then tried to get through to her father again, then her mother. Nothing. Even when she dialed the house line, she got the fail-tone.

  She picked up her bag and went across the traffic to the taxi line. She’d been forgotten.

  THE TRUCK’S WHEELS thumped over the seams in the bridge, and the Tiffany lamp and the laundry basket with his mother’s crocheted blanket in it knocked against the flatbed. Sister Cecelia would donate whatever he’d left behind to the poor. Sol wasn’t picking up the phone, and the cabin line just rang. Twenty-four miles of this, and then Joe knew he was likely to get caught in traffic on the 190 through Covington, and then he would have to drive slow down the length of Lee Road, looking in the scrub for his father, stopping at the shops to ask, praying to God someone had found him and brought him home.

  The lake was placid today—no whitecaps, no waterspouts spinning up towards a darkening sky—but trauma had a tendency to repeat itself, as Tess would say. He had left his father, just as he had left Cora, not realizing he shouldn’t have until it was too late.