“Get out,” said A., whom I had known only to be passive and somewhat whiny, but who had suddenly transformed into someone declarative and stern: his work persona, I assumed. “Everyone, queue up for the boats.” The water was now lapping up the front steps.
“What about the house?” someone asked, and we all knew he was asking about the books in the attic.
“I’ll handle them,” said a youngish man, whom I had never met, but who I knew to be the house’s owner, or manager, or keeper—it was never clear which, but I knew he was responsible. “Go.”
So we did. This time, whether because of who A. was, or because of the equalizing nature of the crisis, there were no jokes from the soldiers, no sneers: They held out their hands, and we grabbed them and were lowered into the rafts, and the whole exchange was so matter-of-fact, so collegial—we needed saving, and they were here to save us—that you could almost believe that their disgust for us was an act, that they respected us as much as they did anyone. Behind us, another fleet of boats was arriving, and now there was a loudspeaker announcement: “Residents of Zone Eight! Evacuate your units! Descend to your front doors and wait for help!”
By now the water was rising so rapidly that the boat was actually bobbing on the water, as if atop a wave, and the puny motor was becoming choked with leaves and twigs. A block east, on Greenwich Street, we were joined by other motorized rafts moving east, from Jane and West 12th Streets, all of us making our slow way to Hudson Street, where corps of soldiers were stacking sandbags, trying to hold the river back.
Here there were emergency vehicles, and ambulances, but I climbed out of the raft and left, walking east, never looking behind me: It was best not to get involved where you didn’t need to; there was no honor, no use in it. I hadn’t gotten too wet, but my socks squished as I walked, and I was glad I hadn’t worn my cooling suit, despite the heat. At West 10th and Sixth Avenue, a platoon of soldiers jogged by me, groups of four each holding aloft a plastic raft. They looked weary, I thought, and why wouldn’t they be? Two months ago, the fires; last month, the rains; this month, the floods. When I finally got home, everything was quiet, though whether that was because of the hour or because some of the inhabitants had been conscripted to help with the efforts, I didn’t know.
The next day—Tuesday: yesterday—I went to work and did little but listen to radio reports of the flood, which had consumed a significant part of Zone Eight and all of Zones Seven and Twenty-one, from what had been the highway all the way east to, in some instances, Hudson Street. The Bank Street house had, presumably, been ruined; someone will let me know for sure one way or another. Two people had died: An elderly lady had fallen down the stairs of her house on West 11th Street trying to reach the boat and had broken her neck; a man on Perry Street had refused to vacate his basement apartment and had drowned. Two streets had been somewhat spared, purely from happenstance: The army had felled three massive, diseased trees on Bethune and Washington early Monday morning, which had mitigated the flooding there. And on Gansevoort, the army had been digging a trench on Greenwich to reroute a deteriorating sanitation pipe, and this too had minimized the damage. Whereas, a few years ago, I would have been outraged by the flood—its inevitability the result of years of governmental inaction and arrogance—I found that this time I could summon little of anything. Indeed, I felt nothing but a kind of weariness, and even that I experienced not as a sensation but as an absence of one. I listened to the radio and yawned and yawned, staring out my office window at the East River, which David had always said looked like chocolate milk, watching a small vessel inch its way north: maybe to Davids Island, maybe not.
But if I could not find it in myself to feel anything about the flood, there would be others who would: the protestors who gathered each day in the Square and were removed each night. I had expected a surfeit of them when I returned home—they had long ago discovered who among us were on the Committee, and they had an unerring sense of when we’d arrive home each night. It didn’t matter how often we changed drivers, or how much we tried to upend our schedules—the car would approach home, and there they’d be, with their signs and slogans. They’re allowed to do this; they cannot congregate outside state buildings, but they can outside of ours, which I suppose is more apt—it’s the architects they hate even more than what we’ve built.
Last evening, though, there was no one, just the Square with its vendors and people shopping its stalls. This meant that the floods had given the state a reason to conduct a roundup of the protestors, and for a moment, I dawdled in the street despite the heat, watching regular people doing regular things, before going into the house and up to the apartment.
That night, I dreamed of when I was a teenager at my grandparents’ farm in Lā‘ie. It was the year of the first tsunami, and although we had been （just） far enough inland to not be directly hit, they had always said that they wish we had been, for then we could have collected the insurance money and begun anew, or not at all. As it was, the farm was too intact to be forsaken, but also too damaged ever to be productive again. The hill that had provided shade for my grandmother’s herb garden had been destroyed, and the irrigation channels were filled with seawater—you would pump it away and then it would return, for months. Salt had affixed itself to every surface: The trees, the animals, the vegetables, the sides of the house were all streaky with white. The salt made the air sticky, and when the trees fruited that spring, the mangoes, the lychees, the papayas all tasted of salt.
They had never been happy people, my grandparents: They had bought the farm in a rare romantic moment, but romance is ephemeral. Yet they kept working at it long past the point when it ceased to be enjoyable, partly because they were too proud to admit they’d failed, and partly because they had limited imaginations, and couldn’t think of what else they might want to do. They had wanted to live as their own grandparents had dreamed of living, before Restoration, and yet doing anything because your ancestors wanted to do it—fulfilling someone else’s ambition—is a poor motivation. They had berated my mother for not being Hawaiian enough, and then she left, and they had had to raise me. They had berated me for not being Hawaiian enough, too, while at the same time assuring me I never would be, and yet when I left as well—for why would I stay someplace I had been told I would never belong?—they resented that just as much.
But the dream was not so much about them as it was a story my grandmother had told me when I was a child, about a hungry lizard. All day, the lizard would stalk across the land, grazing. He ate fruit and grass, insects and fish. When the moon rose, the lizard would go to sleep and dream of eating. Then the moon would set and the lizard would wake and begin eating again. The lizard’s curse was that he would never be full, although the lizard didn’t know this was a curse: He wasn’t that intelligent.
One day, after many thousands of years had passed, the lizard woke, as usual, and began looking for food, as usual. But something was wrong. Then the lizard realized: There was nothing left for him to eat. There were no more plants, no more birds, no more grasses or flowers or flies. He had eaten everything; he had eaten the stones, the mountains, the sand, and the soil. （Here my grandmother would sing a lyric from an old Hawaiian protest song: Ua lawa mākou i ka pōhaku / I ka ?ai kamaha?o o ka ‘āina.） All that was left was a thin layer of ash, and beneath that ash—the lizard knew—was the core of the earth, which was fire, and although the lizard could eat many things, he could not eat that.