The Wrong Party

“Sign it,” he said. That was the first he had said to me since the beating. The beating from him. The others kept beating me. I had ceased to be human by this point. I was treated as an animal, a creature, a living machine. My bones were theirs to break, my skin theirs to defile. I had no native authority left, not even over my own person. My human inheritance was spent, my history annulled. The story of my whens and whos was unwritten. How did this thing that used to be me come to be? I was forgetting.

The food, when it came, was a kind of porridge. Rice, wheat, I don’t know. At first, every third day or so, a piece of fish or prawn or fowl. And at first, I ate eagerly. Would you believe I felt gratitude? Gratitude to be treated as someone deserving. Then after the beatings began, and they still gave me meat, I was sickened by it. For I had become that meat. I was the beast of burden, the yoked and lashed, the chained and whipped. I was in ruins.

I became a brother to them all, to all those who must—what choice is given them?—submit. The beetles who traced the cracks in the walls, my brothers. The spider in her web that daily grew like ripening fruit, my sister. The mourning doves were my only confessors. And my crimes? What of my crimes?

My membership in the wrong party burned brightly in their books. They fed themselves on my many imagined infractions. “Sign it,” he said. Sign this statement I didn’t write. I couldn’t read it. (My eyeglasses were long ago ground into the floor. The lenses were still there, a sick flour.) Still, I knew what the statement said. It said I was wrong. But I was wrong about one thing only: I was still a person. I had one power left to me. I could refuse.

Suitcase

Everything—all of it—everything fits in here. In this one suitcase that's not even mine. Guy in the building said, "If you ever come back, I'll take it." This thing has been around. It's beat up, bruised by the blows of a hundred curbs. I packed it so full the clasps are straining. It's bulging like a belly after a last big meal. But this is it. I got no car. No tickets. No nothing. Just this one suitcase I'm banging down the street.

Couple shirts, another pair of pants, socks, drawers. My comb. Everything Manny gave me when he joined up—his books and that trophy. Believe it, I'm hauling trophies out of town, my arm yanking out of the socket. Got my work boots, too. They're no good for walking, and you know there's gonna be work. Sooner or later. Also the framed picture of Mama from that time at the beach. Look at her there, that smile shining like the sun. She didn't see this coming, the whole city on the road. Everyone's feeling the storm on their heels.

I could slide right in the back seat, wouldn’t take up but a little room. Stick the suitcase under my knees, fold myself on top, and we’re out of here. But no one stops. Just one suitcase and I look like a fugitive. A proper citizen has more to his name. Anyone with so little must want some of theirs.

I just want to get out, get gone, stay dry, be safe. This is no score. This is me—this is all of us—moving on. Am I coming back? To what, I’m wondering. A place that doesn’t exist anymore? Will the building still be there? And if it is, then what? Who’s living there, whole place soaked with stink, and maybe no roof to hold the sky off you? I’m not coming back. It’s just me, slugging myself down the street, someone else’s suitcase knocking my legs out from under me.

Paper

Forms permits applications certificates. Exams receipts statements bills. Tickets licenses deeds diplomas. Registrations schedules maps. Cards instructions lists. I can remember the crisp creases of meaningful paper. The civilized and civilizing corners. The way, once folded, the unfolded pages fall into their folds again. A memory of purpose. I have memories like that. Memories of my purpose.

Slips chits stubs. Reminders bulletins birthday greetings. Nothing is folded inside my pockets. I have no paper to name me, guide me, or sustain me. Instead, I hoard food, in whatever state I can find it. And string. And rubber bands. But when. And where and how far, how much, and what then? The day is a vacant expanse. Nothing stands out. Nothing marks off the time. There is no grid with stations to occupy. I am nowhere.

Magazines messages books letters. Newspapers tabloids catalogs notes. Do things still happen? Do things still change? I can’t tell. If people still communicate and mean things to each other, I don’t hear about it. The commerce of humanity, even the way faces can talk—it’s all so far away from me now. I see graffiti, the same unreadable words measling the city. No one’s saying anything. Traveling light? I’m not lighter for it. I’m sagging with nothing to prop me up. Dragged down by empty pockets.

Ones, fives, tens, twenties. Only hard goods—I own no paper.

Flood

Hard to believe, but ten years ago, this was underwater. Everywhere, from here to the overpass, underwater. You can’t see it easy, but look at this wall right here. See that black mark? Lot of the bricks are down, but that black line, that was the water line. It was that high. Imagine that, water up over your head. I still remember the water. Cold water. Brown water. Had a skin on it, a sheen. That was the oil from the refineries and the failed tanks. It moved in new currents. It spread like smoke. The water was sick with the oil’s green and pink.

And the bodies floating in the water. Birds, so many birds, of all things. You’d think they could fly away, get out. The water came too quick. Back then, levees held back a wall of water, the ocean pounding on our door. And when those levees fell, birds couldn’t fly fast enough. They bobbed on the surface. You’d see them collect in pockets around chimneys.

It was days like that. And then the bodies—people. People from the neighborhood. I knew these people. They got pushed around under the water until a leg uncrooked, whatever it was, and they floated free. Bare backs on the surface, like fat alligators. People did what they had to do. People had their sense—how things are meant to be—washed away. People did things they would never tell you about now. I did those things too.

Hard to believe now, with all these houses and buildings like bad teeth, all these bricks crumbling. Everything here was underwater. Up over your head. After the first couple weeks, with the bodies, and after the police just dripped away, and the flood gangs, as we called them, and the bullets falling like more rain, we heard the pumps day and night. Months of it. Nobody sleeping anyway, but that sound kept you awake, you know? A grind that sent ripples through the water. Hard to believe now, this was once a grand place. People lived here.