Oh, the Water

It was as if we craved some greater catastrophe, the winds having merely buffeted—buffet-ed, nibbled at the skins of rooftops, crunched on window glass, sucked on curtains. It would take more than water rising slowly toward thieves to get our attention.
    The day after the storm had passed, someone said—knocking on wood, of course—that there were dark forces protecting New Orleans. Either they turned, like a mad dog to its owner's child, or they battle with patron saints—an ancient king and the mother of God—for the soul of that most soulful American city. The half-hearted prayers of the temperate, the temperate-zoned, seem in any case to have fallen on deaf ears.
    Last night the black waters rose in my dreams. This morning people float their dead on chunks of rooftop in Louisiana, haul them out of the Tigris in Iraq. Eight hundred and more pilgrims died on a bridge when someone shouted "suicide bomber." I'll put my money on the "bomber" being the one who shouted it. I mean, why kill twenty when you can kill a thousand—slowly, painfully, with snakelike efficiency, requiring less cleanup than piles of bloody parts?
    I used to think the world hadn't gone mad, that the madness was just better reported. Now I'm not so sure. I can't ignore these thoughts, though I sometimes wish I could. They're like the mental equivalent of a lead X-ray vest: heavy, deadly, yet somehow meant to protect.
    Last Christmas, with the tsunami, I could focus on my one lost friend, block out the other two hundred and twenty-six thousand. In New Orleans, it's just a nightmare—all the least human elements of the city left behind with mothers, babies, the old, the sick.
    The predators are the people who should be left on rooftops, with their guns and their knives and their stolen plasma-screen televisions that they won't be able to use until deep into autumn. This is the madness I'm talking about. Where are you going to wear those diamonds? To what party? It'll be too dark to see even their fiery shine, and the booze will be too warm to drink, cut with water that will be—almost incredibly—even less drinkable than it was before.
    I don't remember the names the news has been giving for the part of the river with all the chemical plants, I only remember the one I was once told: "Cancer Alley." I remember hearing, first-hand, about an open-air asbestos dump. That was fifteen years ago, which I also find hard to believe. What happened to that dump—a great mound where it was not impossible—although of course it should have been—to see children playing? My hunch is that it was covered with some token amount of dirt, like Antigone's brother, which did about as much good—washed away now, like everything else, into what has become not a lake, but some kind of hellish stew.
    "This water's been drunk and pissed six times before it gets to New Orleans." I remember it turbid and mephitic and a vaguely sulfurous yellow—even the poorest-looking houses around us had bottled water, which, ironically, was more expensive than soda or punch, which a lot of people drank instead.
    I remember once being soaked to the skin by bath-temperature rain before I'd made it all the way off the porch. Halfway down the block, a big black woman in an old white Cadillac stopped, called me over, said, "Get that umbrella out of the trunk," as she popped it.
    "How will I give it back?" I asked.
    She waved the question away. "Don't you worry about that," she said, and rolled up her window and drove off. I remember I cried there, standing in the street, holding that spine-sprung child's white umbrella with its cracked plastic handle, which I kept for years after. That it didn't keep the rain out was the farthest possible thing from the point.
    I remember old women sitting back on their screen-porches in the overwarm evenings—dark hulks in shadow, ice cubes clinking against the tall sides of glasses. "How you all doin'?" was what they'd ask of you as you stole—glowing apparition—down their streets.
    "All right" was the secret code. They would nod and you would pass by.