I ring the doorbells of all my neighbors. The only person who’ll tear himself away from his television long enough to speak to me briefly through the door says he hasn’t heard anything about the city’s part in the war. “Though there was an announcement just before that tomorrow and the next day will be wage-paid holidays for all workers and government-subsidized ones for all businesses because the rebellion was crushed. And that all TV programs will be preempted in a few minutes for a four-hour special on the revolt, with live coverage of the most damaged areas in the country, videotape highlights of the last bloody battles, and the president conducting a walking tour of the partially ravaged Capitol.”
Georgia pleads with me to try to find her father in the hour we have left before the curfew. “That way I’ll always know we did everything possible to find him.”
I leave the building. The weather’s clear and the neighborhood as peaceful as on an average summer Sunday: stores grated and locked, most of the apartment windows shaded and closed, an occasional car or motorcycle driving past, a solitary couple at a bus stop. They know less than I about what’s happened in this city, as their television broke down an hour ago and they’re going to a friend’s house to watch the special.
I start to jog to the park’s chess house. Little by little I see signs that perhaps a minor disturbance took place. A broken car window…an abandoned bike…a row of garbage cans turned over…a speeding police car and army truck with their emergency lights on. Then that a riot if not a fierce battle took place, with stores without windows…buildings without walls…streets without buildings, and smoke, flames, bodies, limbs, teeth, hair…I head home. This time across the park, which was bombed and strafed. Past the gutted chess house. Through several residential neighborhoods: now smoldering mounds of debris. My own street’s been torn up while I was gone, my building blown apart. Only the old-fashioned marble staircase remains, ending in the sky. “Georgia,” I scream. “Jimmy!” I shout their names repeatedly as I dig and pick away at the rubble.
The super comes out of a hole in the ground where the entrance to his basement apartment was. “No use wasting your energy and voice doing that, Mr. Devine. Whole building’s occupants either been wiped out or buried under or went scrambling out of here between the time the explosions started and the place caved in. Really can’t say who was responsible for it all. Either the revolutionaries who rushed into the building and for one strategic reason or another set it off, or else the government tanks that came up the street chasing them. Didn’t see any of your family leave, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t. I just know nobody else is around but my wife and me. We were the lucky ones, living so deep in the ground with no floor to fall from. All our friends used to say ‘Why do you want to live in a dungeon like that? Steam pipes all over your ceilings and no view but the next building’s blank wall.’ Now they know. Because I always felt this would happen one day, which is why I took this place and job. What do you think you’re going to do now?”
I haven’t been back in this city for nine years. First thing on arriving I go to our former street. Twenty-to thirty-story apartment buildings have gone up where our five-story buildings used to be. There are trees and shrubbery on the sidewalks now, and all the stores have become so sophisticated with their wares and window displays and exorbitantly priced: ours was a neighborhood of apparently poorer workingmen.
I check the tenant directory in the apartment house where our building and several others once stood. Only name I recognize from the old days is the super’s and I ring his bell.
“Who is it?” he says over the intercom. He can’t quite place the name so I say “You know: Georgia, Phil and Little and Big limbo from number thirty before it was blown up.” Now he remembers and he tells me to take the apartments A to L elevator to basement two.
“So how goes?” he says in the basement corridor. “And did you ever find any of your pretty family and your wife’s dad?”
“Nope. They just never turned up or were found. How’s your wife, father-in-law and son?”
“First wife cracked up, got a new one now, and I never had any in-laws or son. You must be mistaking me for another super.”
“How do you like your new building?”
“The walls are like cardboard, most of the plumbing and wiring’s already shot, and it’s either way overheated or drafty and cold. But it’s a more cheerful looking and social place. And there are no rounded hallways and big staircases and high ceilings and such like the old one, which makes it easier for my staff and me to clean. Well, it’s been good talking to you, Mr. Devine. And every bit of luck in your future living, okay?”
I press the elevator button for the lobby, but it takes me to the floor we lived on. Our hallway floor was made of a lively terrazzo and at the end of it was a casement window we threw open on the warmer days. On the walls were forged iron fixtures with light bulbs. This door would be where our thick oak one was if this was still our third floor. Georgia would be home now preparing dinner, and instead of using my keys today I think I’d ring the bell. She’d say “who’s there, please?” and when I’d tell her, though first posing as a special delivery postman with a message about her missing husband or maybe just a grocery boy, she’d open the door and say how unusual it is for me to forget my keys. I’d kiss her lips, ask where’s our son. She’d yell out the window “Jimmy, your father’s home,” or “Dinner’s ready,” or “Come quick — the surprise of your life is here.” The front door would still be open. I’d hear him run upstairs. He could take the elevator of this new building, but like me he likes racing up rounded stairways. But I’m getting confused. Our building was destroyed, this one went up in its place. The same super’s downstairs — that’s true: ten years older and with a different wife, though he said he never had an in-law or son. If Georgia’s on this floor it’s because she moved in some time after the building was constructed, and because of a number of errors, neither of us was told the other was alive, and the super might not have told me she’s here because over the years he’s developed mental blocks about certain people, events and times. I’d knock on the door. I’d knock because I don’t live in this building and never had the keys. She’d open the door. Jimmy would be there and they’d be overjoyed at seeing me, we’d all kiss and hug. I’d tell them how neither my hands and then the most advanced digging equipment could turn up any of their remains. How I stayed in the city for a year, each day canvassing all the police stations for some word of them, till I was told to give up or at least stop pestering the police, so I got a job with a Central Region orchestra, remarried, had two children, Laurel and Rose. Then a revolution started in Central. I was on tour, my wife and children were at home, they too were never found. We had the basement apartment — I’d taken that safeguard of my former super’s just in case there would be another revolution — but this time the building fell on top of it rather than around. The revolution ended as quickly as the last one. One of the sides won. The other side is now in power. It seems there’s going to be another revolution there, which is why I came to this city. I’d heard that because of the extensive death and devastation of the last revolution here, this region had become the most peaceful of the five. She’d tell me her story. While I was searching for her father, she and Jimmy were watching the television special when suddenly all the electricity went and seconds later the building fell apart. Both were quickly hospitalized in different cities and were incoherent for a year till a relief agency brought them together again. “No, that’s not how it happened,” Jimmy would say. “I was in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, when the tap stopped running and then the windows and walls went. Just as I was looking at Mom through the space where the living room wall used to be, the floor under me went also. Then I don’t remember anything but a lot of tumbling, and next thing I know it’s a year later and Mom’s holding me.”