Chapter Excerpts
Chapter 9
Tropical Lows
It was a drenching, inky darkness that came around as a nightly flood.
The trip back home after work was something else, though. The winter sunset came down before I left the office, so it was dark on the road when I made it out for the day. The downtown blocks had some activity and there were streetlights shining even in front of the boarded-up hotels and theaters. But the more I pedaled toward home, the darker it all grew. The downtown lights dissolved behind me and ahead were the sprawling miles, the blacked-out and desolate grid that stretched on down every side street I pedaled past. I had plenty of warning about the occasional passing car. I could hear the grinding of diesel truck engines from blocks away and their headlights played on the reflective street signs in front of me as brightly as flashlight beams in a dark room.
The homeward-bound commute each night felt like an expedition into the ruins. All the contractors and laborers who had been hammering away in the area during the day would be long gone by the time I clocked out of work and once again there would be no sign of anyone besides the glow of a candle burning in a second floor window here or there. Mid-City was a bad place to be, and my own feet brought me deeper into it with every turn of the pedals.
Every few nights, a police patrol or the National Guard would spot me on my bike, swerve around and pull me over, demanding an explanation for why I might be venturing this way. Even when it was well before curfew, the police and soldiers never believed I was just innocently heading home from work until they saw the address on my driver’s license.
“No shit?” a policeman said one evening while fingering my ID. “Well, good luck up there.”
Before long, I came to regard the dark not just as a phase of the day but as its own physical presence. I felt invisible in it and swallowed up by it. It might have been different if I were riding home in a car with the radio on and the glow of the dashboard and the headlights marking the road before me. But I stubbornly insisted on commuting by bicycle, just like I had before the storm. Pedaling home, I would look ahead and see nothing but the blue-black shapes of dark buildings in front and hear just the huffing of my own breath and the whirl of my tires on the street. I imagined how the area would look from above, maybe on some aerial survey of Mid-City, and I knew there would be no visible sign of me pedaling past the ruined high school and the flooded beauty parlor and the gutted McDonald’s restaurant with its crusted and broken playground.
It was a drenching, inky darkness that came around as a nightly flood. It crept over rooftops and trees and penetrated windows and filled my eyes and head with its empty presence. It felt primordial. More than once on the bike ride back to the house I knew was waiting somewhere ahead in the dark, I thought about how nightfall must have chased our evolutionary ancestors back to their dugouts and caves to curl up and wonder if the light would emerge again.
When I came to my street I would point my handlebars left, turn off Canal and disappear even from the chance view of a passing car or an Army Humvee. My block had absolutely no sign of life as I approached. My house was just another dark and boarded-up facade along one vacant block among thousands of others across the city’s flood-ravaged zone.
And finally I would stand before my door, my own portal inside this endless honeycomb of ruined living. I would open the door and discover once again that the dark ink from outside had already beaten me home. The dogs would emerge from their hiding spots under the workbench or in the remains of the kitchen cabinets to nuzzle me a bit as I maneuvered the bicycle through the front room, but they were barely visible.
The clop of my shoes on the wood floors and the skittering of the dogs’ paws would be the only noise across the cold house. My fingers would find the stash of matches I kept on the mantle. The matchbooks were relics from hipster bars and expensive restaurants, most of them still closed from the storm. I would fire up lanterns and candles, and the light they cast became the perimeters of reality in my house. I would hold a lantern ahead of me and plunge from room to room. I never found anything amiss, but nevertheless I always proceeded with caution as the lantern revealed one footstep at a time through the place.
I wondered what I looked like making these rounds. I suppose it wasn’t much of a show, just a silent figure walking in the dark, sitting in dark rooms, touching worried dogs, sliding into a dark bed. Sometimes, when I shut a day down and resigned to sleep, I concentrated on my own heartbeat inside my chest and sometimes I swear I could hear it in the quiet house.
