The Futilitarians Page 17

  At the end of The Metamorphosis after poor Gregor has died, been swept up by the charwoman, and dumped out with the rubbish, the family takes a trip to the country to clear their heads, take a break together after everything they’ve been through. When Gregor had been earning for the family, they atrophied. But now, with him gone, they appear to thrive, or at least are going to try. On the tram, Gregor’s family evaluates their newly unburdened circumstance. The Metamorphosis ends with this sentence: “And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang up to her feet and stretched her young body.”

  I’ve always appreciated the morning of the day after a bad hangover. Waking up full of gratitude for yet another second chance, remembering what feeling good is like. So much possibility and productivity lie before you, before the day locks in, starts its inexorable work toward sundown, when you can kind of use a drink. Luckily, for most of us, the hangover is just part of the cycle of good times, the hard fall, regeneration. For others, the fall is continuous and recovery is out of reach. When they finally succumb, their Metaphysical Hangovers are inherited by those around them. We survivors then struggle through it with all of our excellent intentions, negotiating the ebb and flow, the endless searches for something to get us to that new morning. The ECRG had reinforced that while searching, we should remind ourselves of the gifts of the hangover—the renewed sensitivity to the suffering of others and the tender generosity toward our own suffering. The extra necessity for kindness and patience. We hope, we know, that there’s health and good feeling on the other side, we just have to get through this bad stretch, either alone, or with all the others out there willing to share their remedies.

  SEPTEMBER

  The Walled City

  In an uncanny commemoration of the seventh anniversary of Katrina, another hurricane, Isaac, made landfall over the city. As we readied the house, putting away patio furniture and clearing our storm drains, we listened to weather updates on the radio and compulsively checked our weather apps. When I was growing up, hurricane tracking maps were printed on paper grocery bags and you could chart a storm’s progression across the Gulf of Mexico by following the coordinates announced by a local weatherman wielding a big marker in front of an easel, or by listening for the Coast Guard’s scratchy stats on the AM radio. All fun and scary reminders of our particular place on the planet. Now our personal technologies and social media collectively work people up about a storm’s approach, a luminous, interconnected vigilance adding to the already-charged electricity in the air.

  Logistical preparedness bolsters mental preparedness, and the basic mood in the city about Isaac was an industrious don’t-worry-we-got-this calm, with some familiar anxiety fraying the edges. During crowded press conferences, the mayor touted the city’s post-Katrina $14 billion improvements to the federal flood-protection system. One broadcast featured him breathless and adrenalized, just returned from helping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with the inaugural closing of “the Great Wall,” a brand-new $1.1 billion, 1.8-mile, 26-foot-high wall protecting the city. Since there was no mandatory evacuation, most of us hunkered down, cooked off the food in our fridges, and hung around with our neighbors on the gusty sidewalk, trying to sort out a network of resources—who had the most food or booze or water or gas or guns.

  Hurricane Isaac turned out to be a ponderous, lethargic Category 1, lashing the city with wind and rain for days. The federal levees around New Orleans did a good job of holding back the storm surge, our massive drainage system—which includes the largest pump in the world—did a good job of keeping up with the rainfall, and our old house did a good job of not falling down.

  The big problem in the city was the loss of power that persisted for nearly a week while temperatures surpassed ninety degrees, a disappointment after the oft-touted new and improved post-Katrina mega grid. Schools and businesses closed. Ironically, Isaac’s evacuations happened after the storm, to escape the insufferable heat and generally rank inconvenience of being in an energy-deprived subtropical city in late August or early September. Porches, front yards, sidewalks, and neutral grounds now served as living and dining areas, giving the city a communal air I hadn’t felt since Katrina. Chris, who described the humidity as like living inside of someone’s lung, would join us for drinks and gumbo on the porch that week, along with Ellen, who lived down the street and wandered the neighborhood in her fashionable rain boots, making social calls. We slept on the floor in the living room since it had the most ventilation, and then later at Soren’s house, since his power was restored days before ours. I scrawled total loss on the calendar of the last week of August and the first week of September. All regular activity had been replaced by the tense days of preparing for the storm, Isaac’s anticlimactic landfall, and then the misery of waiting for the electricity to be restored. In the shuffle of thousands of canceled or rescheduled meetings across the region, there would be no ECRG in September.

  Besides, “existence” becomes less philosophical and more immediate in the face of natural disaster, as does “meaning.” Disasters and evacuations are actually excellent exercises in life evaluation. It can be a healthy chore to have to decide what the most important things in life are and then flee your home to join your similarly burdened brethren on the clotted highways. Watching my husband, unprompted, gather our newly acquired wedding albums from the shelves and load them into the trunk while Katrina approached the coast and I pouted and procrastinated (I’d never evacuated in my life) reaffirmed that wonderful, central choice I’d made in marrying him.

  After the danger of Hurricane Isaac passed, we put on shrimp boots and hats and took a walk with the boys in the waning bluster, the neighborhood a post-storm compendium of vulnerability and fortitude: blighted and neglected buildings that had finally given way, National Guardsmen in their desert-mottled Humvees and impressive gear, uprooted oaks revealing man-sized root systems. But mostly blocks and blocks of old shotgun houses and Creole cottages that had already withstood well over a hundred years of hurricanes, missing some siding and roofing shingles but pretty much fine. The more dramatic ravaging was still novel for our sons, but the familiar images of destruction gave me little spasms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as the seven intervening years between Katrina and Isaac collapsed for a few disorienting seconds.

  Our sons’ earliest years were spent in a world defined by epic loss and a communal obsession with rebuilding and protection. Silas—Brad’s son, who had only just recently become my son when Katrina hit—was six when we evacuated to a Red Roof Inn in Houston. As we watched the same footage of the same broken levees over and over on CNN, it occurred to me with weird certainty that I might be pregnant. Later, walking back from the drugstore to the motel, where fellow evacuees sat on ice chests in the parking lot as their dogs relieved themselves in the harsh corporate landscaping, or stared at their useless cell phones in the lobby, I told Brad that if the test was negative, we were going back on birth control. New Orleans was still filling with water and we had no idea if we had jobs, a house, a city.

  The day before, we had driven west along the I-20 corridor from Tuscaloosa, the first stop on our evacuation, swerving around downed trees, passing power-dead gas stations with lines of stranded cars, and watching caravans of linemen from all over the country exit south for New Orleans. The radio had rolling reports about which levees had given way and how it would be weeks before they could pump the water out. We kept losing the station, I kept trying to fish it out of the static with a tense hand on the tuner, and my new son was locked into an obsessive, repetitive loop about the Berenstain Bears, had not shut up about the Berenstain Bears since we’d crossed into Mississippi. Hungry for news, raw, and anxious, I had a selfish, unmotherly meltdown about whether or not I could handle this situation. After decades of being a self-involved single person, I didn’t have a built-up reserve of maternal patience to draw from, did not feel ready. In the too-bright Red Roof
Inn bathroom, the affirming pink lines appeared on the pregnancy test with surprising alacrity and conviction, bringing with them a whole new quality to my despair. Motherhood and Katrina hit me almost simultaneously.

  As CNN churned out the unthinkable, Silas’s sweet thin form asleep in the other double bed, I cried and Brad reminded me that we’d wanted this. That this was supposed to be a good thing? Remember? After the levees broke, many pre-Katrina desires and expectations had to be reconsidered, if not completely scuttled. But in this case, it was too late. We were facing a holdover from our recent Mexican honeymoon and the various Oaxacan mescals we’d discovered, and though we had just returned from that trip a few weeks earlier, now as we lay beneath the cheap, scratchy motel comforters and numbly aimed the remote control at the nightmare television, that trip seemed to belong to a previous, inconceivable life.

  We could not return home, and unmoored from any sense of a domestic life, flush with FEMA money, we kept heading west, with me wanting to hit every Dairy Queen between Austin and Los Angeles. By early September, my body and instincts were no longer familiar to me, nor was my world. Normally, the changes in mood, taste, and basic biological purpose experienced during pregnancy are somewhat cushioned by the stability of the external circumstances of your life. But not this time. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand the smell of coffee, couldn’t drink alcohol while everyone else seemed to be steadily self-medicating, and my low-grade existential dread graduated to full-blown nausea. And suddenly, we were driving across lunar west Texas, thinking of nothing else but the inundation of our city and where we were going to sleep that night. My disorientation was total—geographical and molecular.

  As we drove through the arid Southwest, marveling at how intact and solid this world was, the mesas and rocky deserts, and up through Los Angeles and San Francisco, wondering if they’d make good new homes, we visited and commiserated with other scattered evacuees and were warmly taken care of by friends. I began home-schooling Silas, a kindergartner, working through phonics and number patterns together in the backseat. When we returned in early October to New Orleans, which was wrecked beyond all our imaginings, we were undoubtedly a family, forged in the confines of travel (car, motel, highway), by the intensity of the moment, and the uncertainty of the future.

  We were luckier than most. Living so close to the river, on the original high ground that the Native Americans had pointed out to the French as being a good place to settle, we were spared flooding. The water had stopped about a block and a half away. It was our downed pecan tree that kept us out of the house for about six more weeks, having ripped out the electrical box and caused some minor damage. We stayed with my sister Kristin’s family across the river in Algiers, where most of my other siblings from flood-damaged areas had decamped to regroup and figure out what was going on and what to do next.

  With some national questioning about whether or not New Orleans should even be saved, and many citizens evaluating what the city meant to them, whether to stay or leave, the city was facing a true existential crisis. And as we in the future ECRG would do, many turned to the literature of the past to help them articulate the culture, history, and meaning of the place and create arguments for its survival, from nineteenth-century journalist Lafcadio Hearn to the autobiography of Louis Armstrong. One oft-revived standby was “New Orleans Mon Amour,” a 1968 magazine piece by Walker Percy, which tried to make the argument that New Orleans could somehow represent the salvation of the American city:

  If the French had kept the city, it would be today a Martinique, a Latin confection. If the Americans had got there first, we’d have Houston or Jackson sitting athwart the great American watershed. As it happened, there may have occurred just enough of a cultural standoff to give one room to turn around in, a public space which is delicately balanced between the Northern vacuum and the Southern pressure cooker.

  Hard to say how much Katrina threw off that balance, with our gross racial and economic inequity laid so bare to the world, leaving many of us to question whether it had ever existed.

  New Orleans was my home, and the only place I wanted to be, but it was no longer a nurturing environment, not for a pregnant woman. Being in a “delicate condition” didn’t jibe with the new vernacular, where “gutting,” “debris,” “breach,” and “curfew” got frequent play. Humvees rattled the pavement and razor wire coiled at certain corners. At work, my classroom was now a barracks for the National Guard’s Task Force Raven, cots and M16s replacing the desks, a sergeant using my office as private quarters. Downtown, where we live, felt especially and overwhelmingly masculine. The military, along with contractors and relief workers, had taken over and put up tents, so that the neutral ground on Canal Street was jammed with huge trucks parked flank to flank.

  We were staying with a college friend in L.A. on our evacuation when the front page of the Los Angeles Times featured a story about this influx of maleness into the city, focusing on the strip clubs that had hastily reopened to accommodate it. I wondered if Rebecca would’ve been part of that corps of first-responding dancers if she’d lived. We were still exiled in California on the seventh anniversary of her death, though with the events of the storm it seemed a whole lifetime had passed. Not being able to visit her tomb on that day compounding the disjointed helplessness of that moment.

  In my first trimester in post-apocalyptic New Orleans, I was also endowed with a heightened sense of smell, a gift from nature to help pregnant women sense what to avoid eating, a bobbing gauge in the near-perfect machinery that is human reproduction. Without electricity, without human care, the city was rotting, and the sweet, oily smell of decay lay beneath everything. The refrigerator removals, the continual disgorging of businesses, the high tunnels of debris along the streets—the stench was amplified. As I shopped at one of the first grocery stores to reopen, though everything looked fine on the surface and they’d tried their best to disinfect it, the ghost of decomposition dogged me and I had to cover my mouth to keep from gagging while walking the aisles.

  Soon after, I had what I thought was a classic pregnant woman’s arbitrary public breakdown. In Schiro’s, the one restaurant that had reopened in our neighborhood, cluttered amber fly strips dangling in the windows, the lone, weary waitress offered us the choice of “a cheeseburger, a cheeseburger, or a cheeseburger.” So much for New Orleans’s status as the cuisine capital of the country, we sighed. Between bites we waved the flies away from our hamburgers, like we’d done at so many seaside restaurants during our honeymoon on the Oaxacan coast. Then, over the restaurant’s speakers, we heard the plaintive opening chords of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” which transported me so thoroughly back to high school, a time of unknowingness and anticipation, late–Cold War nihilism, analog desire—record players and backseats and levee mischief. We didn’t know there’d be such sadness and loss ahead of us. We didn’t know the apocalypse would feel so intimate. And now, inside of me, I was gestating more uncertainty, more potential for sadness and loss. So, so you think you can tell / heaven from hell? The force of all we couldn’t know back then suddenly seemed altogether unbearable, and soon my face was experiencing that muscular confusion of trying to cry and chew at the same time.

  But really, was it hormonal? How to separate it out? Everyone at the time seemed to be in that same raw emotional state, men as wide open and as liable as women to break down at any moment. And didn’t most New Orleanians experience a kind of morning sickness, the Rebuilding Hangover, every day that fall when they opened their eyes, cleared their heads of the last shreds of sleep, and remembered, holy shit…

  After my fifth month or so, as more people returned to the city, making it seem just a bit more normal, I embraced my new role as walking symbol for renewal. I was “God-bless”ed on the sidewalk and in sparsely occupied buses. With the proliferation of T-shirts admonishing people to DEFEND, RENEW, or SAVE the city, I made one that said REPOPULATE NEW ORLEANS curving over my belly. Our baby had almost become an abstracti
on, part of the drama of reconstruction. Since children were still so scarce, whenever Silas would clatter around the neighborhood on his scooter, people would peer from behind curtains when they heard him. In one science-fiction moment, a woman cautiously cracked her door open as we passed and stage-whispered, “Oh God, it’s a child.”

  Eight months after the levees broke, I was in the Touro Infirmary, where most of my family was born, blind with pain and curled into a ball to receive the blessed epidural. The nurse holding my shoulders alternately admonished me to focus and recounted to the anesthesiologist, who had just moved back to town and was about to insert a needle between my vertebrae, that she’d gotten only $30,000 for her destroyed home in Bay St. Louis, and I realized that really no moment was sacred from the storm’s narrative. Touro had lost some staff and had hired on staff who had lost their hospitals. Everyone who helped usher our baby into the world had suffered, was still suffering, but neither that, nor the nature of their profession, seemed to dampen their pleasure in aiding in the miracle. Over the next few days, I began compulsively asking the nurses for their hurricane stories, which were many and varied, usually mingled with advice on dealing with my newborn.

  On the unnerving ride home from the hospital, past the still-shuttered former refugee horror show, the Convention Center, and the frayed crowns of the enormous new palms along Canal Street, I kept wanting to apologize to our tiny son about the state of the city, explain to him that it wasn’t always like this and that we were working really hard to make it better. Then, when he was exactly a week old, I read on the front page of the paper about how the Army Corps of Engineers had botched the repair of the Industrial Canal, rebuilding the eastern wall two and a half feet higher than the unbreached western one, thus making our dry, unflooded neighborhood, which butts up against the canal, far more vulnerable than before. As I read in disbelief, that familiar rage ballooning in my chest, I kept glancing down at our beautiful son on my lap, his eyes closed, perfect lips pursed, hungry, and searching.