The Floating World: A Novel Read online

  It wasn’t until they were stalled in the bumper-to-bumper evacuation traffic on the five-mile bridge, brake lights blinking as hopeful as Christmas lights over the water that Joe had known—the dread manifest as pain in his gut—that they had to go back for their daughter right away. But they weren’t allowed to exit the highway until they reached Mississippi, and there, all the roads went north, the DO NOT ENTER signs skimming past at 50 mph in the contraflow. By the next day, the bridges were washed out. When he’d finally managed to leave Houston three days later—Tess incandescent with rage in the porch light, her nightgown glowing blue—he’d sped back down along the highways, empty now except for the convoys of Humvees, and found the National Guard blocking the entrance to the twelve-mile bridge.

  Nothing you can do, brother, said a corn-fed black boy from Illinois. Brother, when he’d never laid eyes on the man in his life.

  But my daughter’s in there, Joe said. She’s not safe.

  You have to have faith, sir.

  Faith? He’d laughed, before looking harder: The uniform starched and shiny. The cross tattooed on the side of his neck. You tell me what you have faith in. You believe in God? You trust in the goddamned government?

  The boy just blinked.

  They’d shoot you as soon as look at you, son, Joe said, and that was when the other soldier shouldered his rifle and he realized he had Vin’s 9mm in his belt—all among the Humvees, the click-clack of rifles brought to ready.

  Back upriver and then down through the spillway, past its flooded clay pits and the graveyards of defunct sugar plantations, he picked his way. He saw what the storm had left: A gator flipped on its back, showing its pale belly. A wild boar with a shredded coat, hung by its tusks from a tree. Shards of bridges, whole houses floating on the water. He crept downriver along the levee, through the dark fabric of the night, his headlights out, his windows open.

  The moon was no more than a fingernail clipping, and the shadows of things identified themselves only by their sounds. Wind whipped through the batture trees, while generators roared beside the whisper of clapboard shacks and revenant dovecotes. Warehouses lumbered towards him and then retreated until their noise merged with the river’s sibilant hush. Every now and then a bird cried out, and he fingered the safety of the pistol in his lap. As the stench of the rotting city rolled up towards him, overtaking the sharper smells of swamp and sulfur, he thought of the sentries, what he’d do if they stopped him again. My daughter’s still in the city. You have to let me in. He saw himself pounding on a huge steel door.

  No cars passed, no helicopters, and he imagined he heard breathing—people hunkered down behind their barricades of fallen trees and locked doors, tossing in their sweaty beds. They were waiting for someone to come up from the city and drive them at gunpoint from their homes. The pickups and old sedans they’d parked nose to nose across the gates of their suburbs eyed him as he passed.

  When finally, up ahead, he saw a Humvee hunched on the shoulder, its lights off, he steered the truck slightly left and shifted it into neutral. The sound of tires rushing across asphalt was like the surge of a river. He fingered the pistol’s safety and glided, waiting, but the Humvee didn’t move. Beyond the levee, flashlight beams played in the mossed canopies of the trees.

  Frogs shrilled like sirens as he shifted the truck back into drive and pressed the pedal to the ground, feeling the cold sweat prick up on the back of his neck as speed threw him against the seat. He was on the inside again, one of them, and as the humid stench of the city grew denser, he felt fear like a huge black bird descend upon his shoulders and dig its talons in.

  He followed the river through its bend, over the train tracks at Magazine and into the wet heart of the park, where he had to inch the truck around limbs fallen from the big oaks. He veered back out to rejoin the river at Tchoupitoulas, where the warehouses and gray wharfs lengthened into the night, wharf upon wharf upon wharf, and the shotgun shacks of long-dead longshoremen crouched, their chimneys strangled by alligator vines that laughed in yellow bursts of flower. His eyes began to close. He opened them with a start to see only the endless gray wall that protected the river from the city, protected the city from the river so well that even the sound of the water could no longer reach him. He knew the river was there, though; he felt its flow like the moored ships must feel it, their heads bent like beasts of burden against the current, their bodies brushing against the endless walls as they slept.

  When his bumper scraped against the port’s wall, his eyes flew open. He’d fallen asleep. His foot was off the gas, thank God, but he would have to pull over and rest. To the left was a sea of asphalt. He pulled the truck in and parked. He could not see the light-spangled bridge either in front or behind him. He could see nothing. He could not stay awake. He was home. He had no idea where he was.

  When Joe thought of his father’s forgetting, he imagined it was like falling asleep at the wheel, like a blinding rain that fell hard and with no warning. Sometimes a wind would push through, parting the rain for long enough that his father could see figures, Tess and the girls swimming in the pool in Folsom, Sylvia walking the dog along the levee. Sometimes the sun was hot enough to burn the clouds off for a day, maybe two, but often the forgetting came down so hard that there was nothing to see but water.

  There were snakes in the roadside ditches. Speeding cars on the road. He should have put a collar on his father, like a cat, complete with jingle bells and an address-stamped tag. But even if Vincent never left the cabin, there were still dangers—a fireplace, a stove, stairs, bottles of bleach and drain cleaner. He should have gotten the child-locks out of the attic, the gates you had to drill into the wall. No matter how well he’d been doing, it was neglect, plain and simple, to have left his father alone.

  As the truck mounted the bridge over the Bogue Falaya, he looked across the railing at the stream, the trees shaking their shadows down into the rock-strewn water, and prayed. That his father was not in the river. That he was not wandering among the for-sale motorcycle trailers or inside the abandoned church. He scanned the weedy ditches, his neighbors’ tree-strewn driveways. He rolled off the road onto their property and squinted up the shell drive, his foot on the brake. Now that the trees were down, he could see all the way to the cabin. The front door was open.

  He threw the truck in park, left the keys in the ignition. He wished he’d gotten farther clearing the trees, but he’d been waiting on cooler weather. As it was, he had to pick his way over a thicket of fallen pines—the small broken branches, the needles spiking his legs—to get to the clearing in front of the house. Even from the driveway, he could feel the air-conditioning pumping out of the open door.

  “Pop?” Dead wood absorbed the sound.

  In the great room, the TV was still on, playing a black-and-white episode of Lassie. His father’s bowl of Grape-Nuts sat untouched on the kitchen counter.

  “Pop!”

  From around the house, he thought he heard the creak of hinges, but it could have been nothing, just another door left open in the wind. He didn’t want to run. His father’s voice was feeble now, and if he’d come back of his own accord, come back to himself, Joe didn’t want to look frightened, though the swath of grass between the house and the studio seemed infinite.

  “Pop?” He stuffed his fists in his pockets. A shadow moved inside the workshed. “You in the workshed?” He made it into an everyday question: his mother just setting dinner on the table.

  “—for the third time.” His father, blinking, emerged from the door.

  Joe pushed his fists higher, into his belly, to stop the burn. “Hi.”

  “Hello.” His father nodded his head.

  “Working on something?”

  “Ach—” Vincent flapped a hand. “I’m not tinkering with your arts and crafts, you don’t have to worry about me. I’m just doing some thinking.”

  “Sol, from over at the Harricks’—”

  “I know who Sol is.”

  �
�—he said he saw you out walking.” Joe pressed his hands together in front of his heart. “You went out to run some errands?”

  His father shook his head, jutted his chin out. “Where is she?”

  “Who?” Joe prayed he didn’t mean the dog, or worse, his mother. Whenever he forgot she was dead, whenever they had to remind him, it hit him like a Mack Truck that’s jumped the divider.

  “The girl—” His father’s hand flapped, bad, as always, with everybody’s name. “Adelaide. Del.”

  THE SHADES WERE drawn, and the room was crowded with the dense, shadowy shapes of furniture. Del knew half of their things had gone into a storage unit in Folsom, but it still looked like every last one of their beds and chests of drawers, every single side table and upholstered chair was here, leaning against and upon one another on the bouncy floor of the Dobies’ home gym. Across the hall, her mother’s things were scattered around Laura and Dan’s master bedroom—her Chinatown kimono deflated on the unmade bed, worn-once clothes piled in the lounge chair by the defunct fireplace, her reading glasses abandoned on the book left open on the nightstand: Jung’s Answer to Job. She’d thought her mother had given up Jung over a decade ago.

  Getting out of the taxi, Del had found the Dobies’ driveway empty, the kitchen door unlocked, and she had wandered into the strange house, hallooing. She couldn’t make herself loud enough. The thick velvet drapes and deep upholstery conspired to absorb sound. She’d only ever been here before for Mardi Gras parties and the couple of times when Laura and Dan had needed her to feed the cat, and the house felt conjured, as if she were remembering it out loud—Crate and Barrel farm table, Noguchi lanterns hung from original plaster medallions, flea market chairs.

  Peering into Dan’s home gym, she thought she saw a NordicTrack balanced upright in a far corner, but the room was so cluttered with the furniture Del had grown up with that the hall light struggled to enter, getting caught in the tilted mirrors on the vanity and the doors of the chifferobes. Del thought of the firetraps she’d visited with Phillip when she was still an assistant at the auction house—apartments of wealthy Manhattan hoarders whose contents they would be called in to consign. Phillip would dandle the Edwardian hardware, while he had her climbing under tables through drifts of trash, turning drawers upside down, the flashlight glancing off old paper labels and branded wood. Five hundred K for the lot, she heard Phillip pronounce over her family’s things, considering condition. Without the water damage, it would have been much more, depending on the market for early Louisiana furniture: four times that, maybe five. Back in the day, Papie could have fixed it all up again, restored it to very near its original condition. But that was all over, now. He hadn’t trained a single person—not that it would have to have been Del—to replace him.

  She took a hesitant step into the room, balancing herself on a wobbly demilune. Between the two dim squares of windows, Cora’s tall tester bed gathered itself together out of the darkness. The silver ghost of Del’s face flew from her mother’s vanity mirror, and only then did she see Cora’s body under the sheets.

  Del jumped. “Holy God, you scared me.” She pressed a hand to her chest for effect. “Where’s the damn light switch?”

  Cora didn’t answer, and Del had to drop her bag and fumble along the wall and behind the NordicTrack to find it. Under the canopy of her bed, Cora’s face flashed into focus. She looked terrible, at least a decade older than her twenty-eight years. She had always been thin, a sycamore tree of a person with eerie blue eyes set deep in the smooth bark of her face, but she was hollowed out now, storm felled. She had to be forced to eat, their mother said. Her eyes closed, and Cora waved a thin hand as if she could brush away the light.

  “I didn’t know you were home,” Del said. “You didn’t hear me calling?”

  “It’s too bright.”

  Del looked up at the ceiling fan, the single bulb cocooned inside a globe of frosted glass. “Well, no. Not really.”

  “Out there—” Cora cocked her head at one of the blinded windows.

  “Okay.”

  Del threw her bag onto a made-up sleeper sofa, and the springs creaked. Her own bed was dismantled, its pieces leaning in a corner by the window that overlooked the Dobies’ courtyard. The tester and the mattress were gone—rain had come through the hole the tree had made in the roof and flooded the attic, dripping down into her childhood bedroom to destroy the finish on every piece of furniture, as well as the bed’s silk canopy, her books, the macramé box that held her prom corsage. Her mother had delivered this news in caressing tones, as if she’d expected Del to cry.

  “How did your stuff make out?” Del asked, though she already knew: Cora’s flat-on-the-ground cottage near the track had flooded to the windowsills—it was a total loss.

  “I don’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I won’t ever want to talk about it,” Cora repeated as if it were a conjugation drill. Je déprime. Tu déprimes. Nous déprimons. Qui? Nous-memes.

  Del finished unpacking her bags into the armoire—the one from her parents’ room, with the monogrammed patera and the lovely holly stringing—and when she turned back around, Cora had vanished into the mattress again. Del climbed up into the bed beside her and reached under the covers to pet her sister’s glossy head.

  “You know what this reminds me of?” she said. “Back when we used to play hide-and-go-seek in Papie’s workshop.”

  While Del counted, Cora would close herself silently in the empty case of a grandfather clock or shut the lid of a cedar trunk over her head. It could take a half hour to find her—sometimes so long that Del would get scared, start yelling, and Papie would turn from the workbench with his hands on his hips, and say if they didn’t quit their ruckus he’d call Mamie away from the books to drive them home. She could still hear the dozens of clocks ticking, the whisk of sandpaper across the spindle in Papie’s hand. Cora never said a word, and when Del found her, sometimes it would take her a while to move—her eyes closed, her face pressed against the wood. When Cora was the seeker, though, she was something else: miraculously aware, not methodical so much as inspired. Del was rarely in her hiding spot (under the drop cloths maybe or behind the shutters and peeking through the chinks) for a count of twenty after Cora had opened her eyes.

  “You were really good at it,” she said, finding Cora’s hand, interweaving their fingers. “Remember?”

  “I don’t want to remember anything.”

  Del peeled back the covers from her sister’s face. “Why not? We used to have so much fun.” She took Cora’s shoulders, shook her once for each word. “Didn’t. We. Used. To. Have. So. Much. Fun?”

  “Stop!” Cora jerked herself away, turning her face to the pillow. “Stop!”

  “You’re being ridiculous!” Del sat up and stripped the sheets from the bed. Her sister’s stick legs lay still on the white cotton. They were covered in pink patches like peeled-back bark. Scars, where chemical burns from the floodwaters had healed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Jesus.” She picked up the sheets and pulled them slowly back up over her sister’s body. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did that. I—”

  She could feel her heart beating in her neck. Cora turned over and, facedown now, lay still. On the TV at Odessa, her regular bar on Avenue A, she had seen the clothes of a drowned woman ballooning on the brown water. She had seen the men and women and children teeming on the bridges and on the concrete skirt of the Dome. She had looked among them for her sister’s face.

  You know there’s a train station a block from there, she had said to Yuri, the bartender, pushing her glass across to him for another shot. Don’t you think maybe you put your people on a train instead of in a motherfucking football stadium in the path of the storm?

  She’d drunk the whiskey, put it back down on the far side of the bar. Built that thing in the same spot where they used to make slaves fight to the death, you know. Superdome, Thunderdome. Twenty thousand men enter, no man leave
s.

  Yuri didn’t laugh. Just filled her glass, licked his lips. They should have left on their own, no? You cannot expect—you cannot rely on the government to take care of you.

  She rolled her eyes. This isn’t Ukraine, Yuri. This is supposed to be America. America! she shouted at the TV, feeling the old Polish men in the booths look up from their herring. America!

  Calm yourself, he’d said as he laid a hand on her arm, rubbing his thumb along the inside of her wrist. Calm down, or I’ll have to take you home.

  “You should have left with them, Cora,” Del said.

  Cora didn’t move.

  TESS HAD BEEN circling the terminal for a half hour now, hitting redial each time she left the dusk of Arrivals for the outer light. She had looked for Del in every young girl sitting wide-legged on her duffel, in every light-skinned woman leaning against the aggregate columns. To the rescue again, she kept thinking. Tess to the rescue. No matter what had been agreed upon or how often Joe was reminded or what responsibilities she had besides, it was always Tess to the rescue. Except, today, it seemed that it was not.

  She made another circuit—stopped at all the crosswalks, jolted at five miles per hour over the speed bumps, kept expecting to see those amber eyes flash as Del caught sight of her, to see the blank, disappointed look on her daughter’s face change to a put-on smile, the way it always had when she was a little girl, forgotten by her father at school. Adelaide could be hunched over her knees in one of the short plastic chairs with their backs up against the wall, a vacuum roaring in a far-off classroom, the receptionist tapping the desk with her purple fingernails, but as soon she noticed Tess, it was always Mommy, Mommy! and the big hug and the beaten dog’s eyes. But Adelaide was a grown woman now. She was not waiting. She must have taken a cab.

  Tess stopped the car at terminal’s edge and looked back at the taxi stand, but there was no one in line. From the edge of the overhang, the fumes wavered like a lace curtain. She drove through it and out onto Airline Drive.