St. Anselm on Fire

My brother Frank kept a notebook too, and his pages are the only reason I can set his week inside mine. He gave it to me the following spring, in the ruined city, and he did not say anything when he did, and I have not said anything to him about it since, but I am going to set down what is in it, because his thread of the story belongs in this account and because he will never write it himself. He is a nurse. He belongs, as he puts it, to the part of the human machinery that keeps running after the fire alarm stops meaning anything.

Frank had the night shift at St. Anselm General when the walkers reached the western reservoirs. He was thirty-four, an ER nurse of twelve years' standing, and his account of the following week begins, with the black humor that carried him through it, with a sentence about a man with a fishhook in his thumb.

The hook came out at nine. By ten the ER lobby was full. Not with wounded, he writes, with people asking questions. A hospital is the one building strangers trust, and when the answering services died and the officials went from screens to silence, the city walked its fear to the nearest emergency room and stood in line with it. His charge nurse put the hook man at the desk to hand out water. That is in the notebook, underlined: the hook man handing out water, telling every fourth person, no sir, they ain't come to the river yet, and not believing it himself, and every fourth person not believing it either, and drinking the water.

The order to evacuate the west districts came at two in the afternoon by siren and, strangely, by door-knock, because the city still had that much of itself left, block captains and bus drivers and a mailman named Reyes who knocked on four hundred doors in the Hillcrest district and is credited, Frank writes, with more lives than any decorated man of the war. The smoke was coming over the western heights by four. Frank was on the loading dock, triaging an evacuation that had outgrown the hospital in an hour, and what his notebook holds from those hours is logistics, which is calamity's true face. Who can walk. Who cannot. Where are the pharmacy keys. Someone's mother with a tank of oxygen and someone else's arithmetic about how far a tank goes. He writes: we made two columns with tape on the floor, WALK and CARRY, and then we made a third column with tape, and the third column had no name, and we put eleven people in it, and I am not going to write what the third column was.

He got out with the last convoy at nine that night, on the running board of an ambulance, and the convoy did not get five miles.

The river road out of the city was a parking lot of the entire metropolitan area pointed east, and somewhere in it the convoy dissolved, ambulances taken for shelters, for ambulances, for soapboxes. Frank walked the roof of the world, the levee tops, moving along the crest of the exodus like a man walking the spine of a sleeping animal. His notebook from those miles is mostly lists of sounds, and the sounds are the honest archive of the city's death: car alarms, going one by one like batteries, which took days; generators; a violin somewhere on a rooftop playing what he calls the saddest C major I ever heard; the loudspeakers on the water towers, telling the west districts the water was unsafe, then telling them nothing, then playing a looped tone at three-minute intervals, which is the sound the federal government makes when it has stopped having anything to say; and underneath it all, far downstream, the groan of the walkers at their work on the bridges.

The bridges went on the third morning. He watched the Sable Street span from the levee, a bridge he had crossed twice a day for twelve years, stand up out of itself, steel unzipping in a slow blossom of fire, and go into the river in sections, and the crowd on the levee made the single moan again — I add this from my own crossroads, not from his notebook — one moan, many throats. And then the crowd did the second thing crowds did in those days, the thing that was never in the papers: it began to help. Off the ground, out of the smoke, onto the shoulders. He writes: no one taught us that. It was just there, in us, like the fear. Both were just there.

By the fourth day the water was failing. The red weed had the reservoirs and the treatment works, and the eastern districts were drinking from fire hydrants and fighting over pallets in the dark, and Frank, who had been sleeping two hours a night on the levee with a hundred thousand of his neighbors, made the decision his notebook marks with a line and a date, the marginalia by which ordinary men date the ends of eras: gone to Mother's house. Mother was in the ground ten years and her house on Delmar Street was a burned district, and what he meant by the sentence was: I am going to see it once, and then I am leaving the city, because the city is dying and I have stopped being able to help it die well.

He had a companion for the first three days of the exodus, a hospital cook named Bree who had a car with a quarter tank and a map of the counties on the back of a placemat, and on the second day they gave the quarter tank to a family with a baby and walked, and on the third day Bree stopped at a farmhouse where someone was calling from a hayloft, and went in, and did not come back to the road, and by the light in the loft window at dusk she had found the thing she was for. Frank waited on the road until the light went, and what he writes about that wait is one line, and it is the line I would put on the war memorial if the memorial were mine to write: she went in because the calling was still going on, and that was the whole of the credential, and no one will ever make a medal for it, and the medal is not owed.

He reached Delmar Street at noon. The house was standing. The maples his mother had planted were standing, and the red weed had taken the yard to the eaves and hung from the porch in curtains, and the little brass numbers his mother had polished were still on the door, and Frank, a man of lists and doses, sat down on the sidewalk of Delmar Street, in the middle of the fall of his city, and wept for the length of one page of a notebook, and then stood up, because there was a family across the street trying to load a car that would not start, and he is a nurse, and the column with no name was behind him, and the tape on the floor was gone but the columns never really leave.

One vignette from the third column, because the notebook has it and I am his brother and somebody should hold it. An old man named Frey, oxygen tank, brought in by his son in a wheelbarrow at the hour the tape was going up on the floor. The tank had four hours in it by the nurse's arithmetic, and the CARRY column was a six-hour walk, and Frank put the arithmetic on a card and gave the card to the son, and the son read it and understood it, and the two of them stood in the corridor with the old man between them, and then Frank, who had no authority to spend hospital property, spent it: he signed out the hospital's spare concentrator, a machine the size of a suitcase that plugs into a wall, and put it in the wheelbarrow. It runs on electricity, he told the son. There is no electricity where you are going. I know, said the son. And they wheeled the old man east into the smoke with a machine that would run for as long as anyone plugged it in, and I have thought about that machine for years, about what it was for, about the kind of gift it was, a promise made in the wrong currency, paid in full, at the only exchange the world had left.

The family was a woman named Veda Grier and her sister June, and what happened with them, and with the river, and with the last ship of the United States that anyone in St. Anselm ever saw fight, is the next page of the notebook, and the best hour in it, and I will let it have its own chapter.