Chapter 1 #2
From the top you can see the old suburb.
That's the thing nobody tells you about drowned places — they don't disappear, they just get quiet.
Roof peaks like a set of teeth. A church steeple with a bird's nest in the louvers.
Water the color of weak tea moving over what used to be somebody's front lawn, gently, without any opinion about it at all.
"How long?" I asked.
"Since it went?"
"Yes."
"Thirty-one years for most of it. Three days for the rest."
"That's usually how it goes."
He looked over at me. "You've seen it."
"I've seen it."
"Where?"
And I didn't answer, because it was day one and he'd already gotten more than he'd paid for, and because the answer takes a while and I wasn't going to give it to a man who'd called me lady.
"Three and a half days of instrument time," I said instead. "That's all I want. Your pump houses, your wall, your intake, and whatever tide records you've got that aren't in somebody's head."
"No."
"You haven't heard the—"
"There's no second part. I know how this goes.
You get three days, you get numbers, the numbers say what your numbers already said before you came, and then I've got six hundred and forty-one people who've heard a doctor say eighteen months and no way to un-hear it.
" He put both hands on the wall. "You know what that does to a town?
Nobody plants. Nobody fixes anything. Why patch a roof on a house you've been told is a boat. "
"So your solution is that they don't find out."
"My solution is that they don't find out from a stranger on a Tuesday."
"And when the water's in the vault school?"
"Then I'll have been wrong," he said, "and I'll be here for it. Which is more than you'll be."
"One question," I said, on the way down the stair. "Then I'll stop."
"You won't."
"I'll stop for today, which is a real offer with a real expiry."
He didn't tell me to go, which in the dialect of that man is an invitation engraved on card.
"Why did nobody build up the wall?"
"We did. Twice."
"When?"
"Year four and year nine."
"And?"
"And year nine sank faster than year four," he said.
I stopped on the step.
Because that's the whole thing, right there. That's the entire finding, and a man in a rag-stained undershirt had it in his hands and didn't know what it was — or knew exactly what it was, and had put it somewhere with the nail scratches.
"Do you understand what you just told me?"
"I told you a fact about concrete."
"You told me the derivative," I said. "You've got two data points and they're the wrong way round, and there's exactly one mechanism in nature that does that, and it means the answer isn't more wall, it's—"
"Doctor."
"—it's less town in this location, which I appreciate is not a sentence anybody wants at the bottom of a staircase—"
"Doctor."
I stopped.
"Not tonight," he said, and it wasn't cruel.
That's what got me. It would have been so much more convenient if it had been cruel.
He looked out at the roofs coming up through the tea-colored water and he said it the way you'd say it to somebody at a bedside.
"You'll get your turn. Just not on the first night, not on my stairs, not to a man who's been awake since four. "
"When?"
"Ask me tomorrow," he said, "when I've slept and you've eaten," and went down into the yard, and that — not the wall, not the argument, not any of the parts I'd rehearsed for eleven hundred kilometers — is the moment I stopped being able to leave.
I lost that argument. It's important to me that the record shows I lost it, because for a long time afterward people in that town told the story like I'd come in and dazzled him, and I didn't. I got beaten badly at the top of a seawall by a man with a rag over his shoulder, and then I went down the stairs and sat on my dead buggy in the dark and considered my life.
Which is where Mama Onyx found me.
She is roughly the size of a fire hydrant and moves like weather. She had a cup in each hand, which I would come to understand is her natural state, the way a heron has legs.
"Drink that."
"I'm fine."
"That wasn't a diagnosis, baby, it was an instruction."
I drank it. It was coffee that had been made out of something that had never been near a coffee plant, and it was, against all reason, extraordinary.
"What's in this?"
"Chicory, barley, and a thing I don't discuss."
"That's not reassuring."
"It's not meant to be reassuring, it's meant to be hot." She lowered herself onto the buggy beside me with a series of sound effects. "So you're the eighteen months."
"News travels."
"Honey, in this town news doesn't travel, it ambushes." She sipped. "You wrong?"
"No."
"You sure?"
"I've checked it eleven times. I want to be wrong. Being wrong would be a lovely afternoon for me."
She nodded slowly, and looked out at the wall, and said nothing for long enough that I started to think the conversation was over.
Then: "Bunk in the east row. Number nine. It's got a door that sticks, you got to lift and push."
"He threw me out."
"Mm."
"Fairly comprehensively."
"He threw you out tonight," she said. "Man's been throwing people out for six years. Ain't nobody left yet." She patted my knee and got up, which took a while and involved further sound effects. "One night."
"One night," I agreed.
She was already walking away.
"Mama Onyx."
"Mm."
"Why?"
She didn't turn around, and later I'd learn that's a thing they all do here, they conduct entire relationships facing the other direction.
"Because that boy's been holding a wall up with his back for six years," she said, "and you're the first person to walk in here and say the word drown to his face and still be standing after."
"I'm sitting."
"You're standing, baby. Trust me. I can tell."
The door stuck. You had to lift and push.
I lay on a canvas bunk in a shipping container in a town that had eighteen months, and I listened to the water rationing bells ring twice somewhere out in the dark, and I thought about nine children coming up out of a hole in the ground carrying slates.
And I thought about the marks on the wall. Somebody scoring concrete with a nail, once a year, every year, in the same place, for a decade — a man conducting the loneliest experiment in the Gulf and telling no one the result.
Then I thought about the son of that man saying the gate's that way, twice, in exactly the same tone, and I found that I had already decided something, in the way you discover you've been holding your breath.
Three and a half days.
I'd take it in pieces if I had to.