Flood

We had moved in the week before. Many of our things waited in the basement to be unpacked. Waited for a new life. On the second day, our mother fell down the stairs and twisted her ankle. On the third day, my father began to unpack his records and order them chronologically. He had hundreds of them. All in near mint condition. All with that smell that comes when you first rip the seal. On the sixth day, my sister found a spider web inhabited by a black widow. She picked it up by one of its legs and stuck it in a jar to show our parents. When they yelled at her and threw the jar away and checked her body for bite marks, she didn’t understand that it was out of fear and not anger.

Then, the flood came and everything was destroyed.

The hundreds of records. The however-many spider webs.

I don’t remember the rain. I just remember our father standing knee deep in water, with stuffed animals and old photographs floating past him. Once the water was gone, the first thing to go was the carpet. Our mother hated the color to begin with, and the previous owner had kept a dog that left a pungent smell behind, which only became worse after the flood.

We lived in that house for twenty years and the carpet was never replaced. Only a small portion of it remained on the stairs where our mother had fallen. The water had climbed just a few steps before deciding it could go no further.

As a young man, our father had been a drummer in several different bands, but I only saw him play once. He had struggled with alcoholism for years, but I only saw him drunk once. His marriage had disintegrated before his eyes and beyond his control, but I only saw him cry once. And even though I imagine he had had dreams at night like everyone else, he only shared them with me once. All of these things happened once, and they all happened on the same night.

It was a family gathering of some sort and at one point it involved live music in a garage. Someone who couldn’t keep a steady beat played the drums until our father grabbed the sticks from him and took over from there. I remember being taken aback by his confidence, the way he played with such authority and precision. It almost seemed that I wasn’t looking at our father at all. He looked ten years younger and twenty years happier. The rest of the night he spent drinking, as though the weight of memories that came with playing had become too unbearable. When our mother drove us home, my sister tried to keep my eyes away from the passenger seat, where he spent the ride muttering under his breath and rolling his head from side to side.

He started to cry when our mother made him sleep alone in the attic, a place with a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, where unwanted things became forgotten things. She slammed the door in his face as if he were a pet that had misbehaved in front of guests.

I don’t remember the dreams I had that night. I just remember waking up afraid, running up the stairs into the attic, and smelling an unfamiliar smell under my father’s breath. The light had been left on and he lay on the center of the floor with no blanket or pillow. I don’t know how I managed to wake him up. The next thing I knew he was staring at me wide-eyed as he held onto my head with both of his cold hands, saying my name over and over: “Madeline, Madeline, Madeline,” which he never called me unless it was during a moment of distress. He would always call me Mad, with the affectionate air that no one else had. Before I had a chance to tell him my dreams he was telling me his, all the while never letting go of my head.

“I’ve seen the Future,” he began. “It’s a man with a dead flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other, opening a door that leads to a long dark corridor, and when he looks inside, not expecting to find anything of worth, he sees a flicker of light, which is extinguished as quickly as he sees it, far away, at the other end. It’s the Present, who had been hiding from him and kept a candle burning. The moment he saw the Future had stormed in he blew it out, but it proved to be too late. The Future had seen the light and knew who it was, and he knew that the Present had no where to hide. He began to run through the narrow passage, crouching all the way on account of the low ceiling, holding out the dead flashlight and knife, and because there was no light he couldn’t see the Present open his mouth in horror, unable to scream.”

That night, he told me of the next flood. The one that would come twenty-three years to the day after the first one. The one that would take more than our possessions. The one that would take our dreams, drown them in an ocean of filth, until all we could do is wait for the water to subside and watch them soak into the carpet, which we would throw away soon after.

The tattoo on her forearm read: “Just let us continue to say farewell.”

On the day of her second failed attempt, when she had wrapped shoelaces around her neck and tied them to the pipes that hung from the ceiling in the bathroom, Marie considered herself to be reborn. Every year from then on she ignored her birthday, something she had had no control over, and instead celebrated the anniversary of the event that was hers and no one else’s.

“I’m no longer a danger to myself,” she said to me, a smile chipped into her face.

Two large men in white stood by the bolted steel door. The one on the left watched the television screen in the corner.

“But apparently, I’m still a danger to others.”

I could hear a woman behind me softly weeping. The tears felt like strands of rope pulling me toward her, away from my sister.

“You’ll never be a danger to me,” I told her, afraid to reach for her hand.

Time flew by on her new birthdays, because she was always in a happy mood. She asked me if I still used my typewriter, and I told her I had recently dug it out and still hadn’t gotten all of the dust off of it.

“What’re you writing these days?” she asked.

“I’ve been writing reviews for an online porn site.”

“Seriously.”

I explained to her that it was an easy way to bring in a second income, and that I had gotten nothing but positive feedback from the senior editor since my first submission. She told me that I was a fool and that it was a waste of my talent. When I began to argue that talent was a myth, the smile on her face started to crumble.

III

I came home early from work that day. I hadn’t been home for two days. It doesn’t matter why. The first thing I noticed was that the windows had been left open, which was something that Kenji never did. The second thing I noticed was a note taped to the stereo:

1. I won’t be home till late.

2. The guy next door was found dead last night.

3. Where the hell have you been?

I closed all of the windows and pan-fried some leftover broccoli. I began to think of all the arguments I had heard between the landlord and the man next door while sitting on the couch on my pajamas, watching the television on silent. I thought about it long enough to over-cook the broccoli. As I stuck the first murdered piece in my mouth, it dawned on me that I had never known his name.

It was three months later when I heard the knock on the door.

When I opened it, I saw a man with a blue face who looked vaguely familiar, and familiar may have been too strong a word.

“My name is Kyle Rossman.”

“Yes?”

“I used to live across the hall.”

“Okay.”

“I died a few months ago.”

“Oh, that was you.”

“May I come in?”

I didn’t know if he had been buried or cremated, but either way I knew that he must’ve come a long way to be standing at my door. At that point, however, I had just gotten used to the idea of being alone, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted company.

“My cat spilled something earlier, and I think he may have pissed on the carpet.”

“I can help you clean it up.”

I noticed a stream of liquid slide down his chin.

“Well, it’s pretty hot in here and I can’t open the windows.”

“We can figure something out.”

I felt disarmed by his kindness, and without another word I let him in, not even realizing that I was wearing a T-shirt with holes in it and no bra.

“It’s a funny thing about the windows,” I told him, holding onto my chest.

“What’s that?”

“The day after they found you, I came home and the windows were all left open. I guess you had been in the apartment a few days.”

“My body was so full of barbiturates that I don’t remember sticking my head in the tub.”

“Yeah, well I ended up closing them all because it was cold that day. And to be honest, I couldn’t smell anything. When my boyfriend came home, he started giving me shit, saying that I only closed the windows to prove I could take it, that the stench of death didn’t faze me.”

“I didn’t think to open the windows in my place. I should’ve been more considerate.”

“For some reason, the windows wouldn’t budge from that day on. And now it’s starting to get hot.”

When Mr. Rossman asked what had become of Kenji, I managed to condense the yearlong deterioration into a single sentence. As I went into my room to search for something else to wear, he tried desperately to open the windows in the living room. All he could do when I came back in was look at me and shake his head. I explained to him that I appreciated his silent failure, as Kenji would’ve yelled at me in a similar situation.

“Are you hungry?”

“I don’t know.”

“All I have is rice and some left-over tempura.”

I noticed that Soseki had begun to graze his body against the dead man's leg.

“He wants you to pick him up,” I said.

Mr. Rossman, then, put him over his shoulder.

“I always loved cats, but I could never keep one because I was allergic.”

“You don’t seem allergic, now.”

“Death has a way of curing most afflictions, I suppose.”

We sat down and watched an old movie while I ate, with Soseki snuggling between us, his purrs reverberating like a steady, hidden motor. I revealed to Mr. Rossman my weakness for movies involving trains, an affection that carried over into real life.

“My sister and I once took a train to Los Angeles. There was a music festival there that was supposed to change our lives. That was twelve years ago, and I couldn’t tell you one thing about the music. All I remember is riding that train with my sister, eating frozen pizza, and falling asleep on her shoulder.”

He made it through about halfway before nodding off. At first, I thought he had died a second time, and I wondered what could happen if the police walked in and found a corpse sitting on my couch with a bowl of half-eaten rice in his lap. But I imagined that there was no law against harboring a man who had been legally dead for three months, one who, furthermore, had arrived out of his own free will.

Suddenly, without warning, he awoke and started screaming. Before I knew what was happening, his bowl of rice was face down on the floor and Soseki had taken shelter beneath the radiator.

He never looked at me. It was as if I wasn’t even there. He got up and started pulling at his hair like they were poison needles. He rushed toward the door and grabbed onto the knob, but was unable to get a firm grip on it. He used the other hand with no more success. He stood there for what felt like a full minute, switching hands in an attempt to turn the knob. Whichever hand he used, he would use the other to pull at his hair, which he began to tear out in huge chunks.

Kenji had been with me in the cab, and we were on our way to a home that seemed to be hiding on the opposite corner of the world. When I looked into his face, I saw the faces of two other men, whom I thought were gone from my life and I had tried desperately to protect him from. I reasoned that because I saw their faces at that moment, it must’ve meant he knew everything. I kept turning away from him, ashamed to the point of insanity, and each time I reached for the door handle my hands would fall into a paralysis, while I could feel my heart rate ascend to hundreds of beats per minute. Whenever I looked at him, all I could ask of him was to feel it and tell me I wasn’t crazy and that it was about to explode. But before he could answer I would turn away and resume the struggle. I could hear the driver yell something, and Kenji yell something back. The car wouldn’t stop but I knew I had to get out. But the hands I was using weren’t mine, and the man sitting next to me wasn’t Kenji.

Sitting on the couch that I had made love on countless times, all I could do was watch the dead stranger writhe in torment, as though the life he had thought was gone forever had come back to bleed him internally.

Sleep has eluded me. Daylight has slowly become a myth. Darkness burns at the end of my candle.

Night after night, I stare down at my notebook, each blank page a white room that Marie sits in alone, each word written another iron bar that adds to her confinement and separates us further.

I have but one wish, and that is to watch with my sister the coming of dawn. To be holding her hand when the sun first thrusts its golden swords, ripping open the belly of the sky until it bleeds light onto the water. I know in my heart that this hope will never be realized, not in this life, and not for the reasons you may think. Not because she has been locked up for nine years, nor because we haven’t spoken in nearly three.

On the eve of the twenty-third anniversary, I asked her what she remembered about the flood.

“I remember standing there in my pajamas, watching Daddy watch all of his records being submerged.”

For years, I wondered why they were never moved from the place they stood. The day I turned seventeen when our mother had given me my first turntable, the first records I tried were among the abandoned ruins, most of which had covers that were eaten away. Aside from a few minor crackling noises, they all sounded undamaged.

“But he never tried to save them,” I said.

In the absence of any natural light, I could see our father in Marie’s face.

“I guess a big part of him had already died.”

As a man in white touched her shoulder, she grabbed my hand and turned her head toward the window. I could see the rain reflected in her eyes, as if it was falling into her body, drowning her with a second flood.