“It makes you want to jump in yourself,” said Lix. “Or give someone a push.” Alicja held him firmly by the arm at last. She felt the pull of drowning, too.
Before they’d seen the disappearing hat, Lix and Alicja had not noticed all the detritus. What city dweller ever does? You close your mind to it, or else you have to walk with fury as a constant at your side, offended by the woman and her discarded can, the small child and his lollipop, the thoughtless driver cleaning out his car, the tissues and the cigarettes, the paper bags. But finally, as everybody pushed and pressed to reach their own side of the river, Lix and Alicja took refuge on an observation deck and leaned out over the water to let the more impatient and the more fearful squeeze by. Then they could not help but notice what the muscle of the river had swept up. The sticks and paper first, the evidence of living rooms and kitchens, the tossed-up hanks of hay and rope, the bottles and cans, the sheets of farming polyethylene and plastic bags. A book. A hollowed grapefruit half. A little wooden figurine. A smashed and empty produce box. Vine canes. Bamboo. Nothing large.
Once the crowd had cleared and they’d reached the west side of the bridge, though, where the river was at its (so far) mightiest, the detritus was weightier. Stripped trunks of trees, their branches knocked off by the journey from the hills. Container pallets, lifting up and ducking in the torrent. Sides of boathouses and sheds. A roof. And borne along, as blithe and cheerful as a child’s toy tossed blissfully into a stream, what seemed at first to be a bungalow. It was, in fact, a houseboat still afloat but desperate, its curtains more like flags than sails.
That houseboat silenced everyone. It even silenced the policemen’s bullhorn for a moment. “Evacuate” and “Come ashore” would be no help to anyone. The houseboat seemed alive with possibilities. You could not help but people it. You could not help but think of children sleeping in its only bed, restless with nightmares that could never be as terrible or hopeless as what awaited them when they woke up. You could imagine making love in it, in that sweet wooden house, and never knowing that your moorings had come loose. You’d think the world was twisting just for you. Or, perhaps, you could enliven the houseboat with one old man, too frail and rheumatoid to get up from his deep and ancient chair to save himself. He’d feel the helpless flight of his frail home. He’d see the landscape hurtling by. Perhaps he’d even spot the enfants on the bridge and think the world was coming to an end.
Just as the houseboat swept away, quite disappeared below the swell, just as the call to “come ashore” resumed, somebody said, a lie perhaps, an honest error, or the truth maybe, we’ll never know for sure, “I think I saw a cat on board.” They all turned around to face downstream and hope to catch a final glimpse of the children and the lovemakers, the old man and his cat, in their houseboat on its mad and bundling emigration to the sea.
ON THURSDAY MORNING, no one was surprised to wake to havoc on our streets and the din of rescue boats and helicopters, winching busy people from their penthouses and from their balconies. Flood depths downtown had almost trebled overnight. It was the city’s turn to be submerged. The waters had ignored the basic dictates of geography. Although the distant mocking clouds had finally dispersed, the widow had tossed off her shawl to reveal the sodden, sunbaked shoulders of the hills, Navigation Island was now invisible. Only the tops of tarbonies and pines bending in the flows and disrupted by the weight of squirrels, the green clay roof of the bandstand with half its tiles removed, streetlamps, still lit and sending orange streaks of light downstream, and sodden flags on three-quarters-submerged poles, revealed that this had once — a day ago — been land and home to weasels, rats, and foxes, all long since drowned because they’d never learned to swim or climb or fly.
The campuses across the bridges were standing in a glistening lake. The MeisterCorps Creative Center for the Arts was closed. The utility corridor where once a Lix-in-love had planned a kidnapping was little more than a cloudy sump. A brown-gray river ran where they had waited in their rental van. It ran and spread into the banking district and beyond, into the army barracks even, and the zoo. The one hundred famous green koi carp in the open pool escaped. One ended up — or so the story goes — in an eel trap ninety miles downstream. The zoo’s three missing Nile crocodiles, four meters long and volatile, were never found, however, although they gave the city much to talk about. As did the mosquitoes.
On the west side, all the old parts of the city, the valued and expensive parts, the tourist sights, the markets and the galleries, the narrow medieval squints, were flooded and cut off, and blocked by tumbled and abandoned cars. Even Anchorage Street was under four meters of water.
Alicja and Lix had river views at last.
It was approaching midday and they were on the rooftop, still in their granddad shirts and nothing else when they heard the shouting from the street — the new canal — below. A voice they recognized. Her father’s voice. A voice they did not want to hear, not when they were almost making love, nothing spoken yet but certainly implied when Alicja had dropped her head on Lix’s shoulder, the misunderstandings of two nights before forgiven, and pulled her shirt up above her knees to sun herself. He’d said she had attractive legs.
Reluctantly, she got up from their breakfast spot and found the space between the pots where they could look down on the street, where normally they could drop their key to friends or call out to acquaintances.
“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s in a boat.”
“Is it a gondola?”
“A motorboat.”
“Ignore him. Come back here.”
“He’s seen me already.”
“What’s he selling? Has he got bananas? Ask him to sing some Verdi. Bel canto, Signor Lesniak. Ask him to dive for coins.” Lix was in the best of moods. Their decision earlier that morning not to get on evacuation boats like every one of their neighbors from the more vulnerable lower floors of the building but to sit the crisis out had made him almost joyful. He and his wife would stay exactly where they were, at home, and watch the river from their windows and the roof, the entertainment of the unexpected regatta, the kayakers who’d waited all their lives for this, the uptown fishermen turned ferrymen who’d find that people were a better catch than perch, the firemen in their dinghies fighting water for a change, and looters with their craft tied up to balconies that now were jetties. They wouldn’t miss such mayhem for the world.
Clinging to their own nest like breeding grebes was not the timid thing to do, Lix thought. Staying put was a risk, surely. His choice had been adventurous for once. No one could tell how long the floods and their supplies of food and clean water would last. No one could guarantee, indeed, that the river would not sweep the street away, like it had swept away the little houseboat and (as it had turned out, overnight) every strut and stay of the wrought-iron walkway where they’d chanced their lives the day before. Perhaps that’s why Lix felt so weightless and alive.
“Ask him to call someone to have the flood removed within the hour.” Lix spoke in perfect Lesniak. “‘Dry streets are just a call away. I’ll put some pressure on someone in Forecasting. I’ve got some favors I can cash in. I only have to whisper in a friendly ear and there’ll be drought. I only have to say our name. Polish parents are the very best.’”