Greenfall

Forty years after the last barge left the drowned city, one man is still doing his rounds.

The elevator bell rang at a quarter to five, the way it did when the wind came round to the east, and Ilario Mendes said "Coming," and got up.

He said it to the dark. He'd said it every time for forty years, and he didn't think anything up there was waiting for him to say it, but he'd been the superintendent of the Larkspur since he was twenty-nine and a tenant who rings deserves an answer. The bell was in the shaft somewhere between the twentieth floor and the thirtieth. The cars had been dead since the second flood year. When the east wind came off the river and up the open shaft, it found the bell and swung the clapper, and it rang once, sometimes twice, a soft round note like a spoon on a glass. Rosaura used to call it the tenants calling down for the super. Rosaura had been gone forty years too. He still said Coming.

He dressed by feel. He went down the stairs from sixteen in the gray light, past the waterline on the fourth-floor landing where the river had come up one spring and stayed, and stepped off the concrete into the boat.

The boat was a fat little workboat with a wheelhouse built for one man to stand in out of the rain. Her engine had died years back, in a dry summer, and he'd pulled it and sunk it to anchor a crab line, and now he rowed her with two long sweeps set in oarlocks he'd welded to the gunwales himself. It made her slow. He wasn't in a hurry. He hadn't been in a hurry about anything for most of his life.

He pushed off from the stairwell and rowed out through what had been the Larkspur's lobby doors into the morning.

The city came up out of the fog one tower at a time.

That was always how it came. First the nearest, the Calloway, standing in the river to its knees with fig trees growing out of its crown and long gray ropes of vine hanging off it like the rigging of a wreck. Then the Okonjo Building behind it, gutted down to its frame, so you could see straight through it to the fog on the other side. Then the old Merchants' Exchange with its glass all gone and its forty floors of empty window frames, and every one of those frames, this time of year, was a nest.

The herons had come back first. He remembered that. Some years after the barges he'd been rowing past the Exchange and looked up and there had been a heron standing on a window ledge on the twenty-sixth floor, gray and unhurried, looking down at him the way a doorman looks at a man he isn't sure belongs in the building. The next spring there were a dozen. Now the Exchange was a rookery from the eleventh floor to the roof, and the noise of it in the mornings was like a schoolyard, and the river below it was white-streaked and stinking and full of fish, because herons don't miss.

He rowed past it with his face turned up. The young ones were in the nests now, gangly and loud. A pair of adults came off the thirtieth floor with their great slow wingbeats and went over him low enough that he heard the air move through their feathers.

"Morning," he told them.

He ran his lines between the piers of the old Ring Road overpass, where the deck had come down in the middle and lay in the river like a broken plate. Catfish, mostly. Carp. In the last few years the shad had started coming up again in the spring, silver and quick and full of bones, and he'd sat in the boat the first morning he pulled one up and laughed out loud, alone in the fog, because there hadn't been shad in the Sallow since his grandfather was a boy.

He had five on the lines this morning, and two catfish, and a carp he put back because it was too big to be worth the smoking. He was coiling the last line when he heard the engine.

He had not heard an engine in a long time. The last one he'd heard was a barge.

So for a moment it didn't sound like anything. It was only a noise from downriver, high and thin, a whine with a stutter in it. Then the birds went up off the Exchange all at once, a gray cloud of them, shrieking, and he knew what it was by what it did to them.

He sat in the boat with the line in his hands and watched it come out of the fog.

It was small and white and very clean, an outboard with a canopy and a blue stripe and some lettering on the bow he couldn't read at that distance. One person in it, standing at the wheel. The boat came up the channel between the Calloway and the Okonjo slowly, carefully, swinging wide of the broken overpass, and the person at the wheel was looking up at the towers with the expression people used to have on their faces the first time they rode the elevator to the top of the Larkspur and saw how far down the street was.

Then they saw him, and the engine stopped.

The two boats drifted toward each other on the slack water under the overpass. It was a young woman. She had on a vest with the river authority's crest on it, and a hat, and she had a tablet in a rubber case in one hand that she had forgotten she was holding. She was maybe twenty-five. She had a long jaw and a way of tipping her head to one side, and he looked at the jaw and the tilt and his chest closed like a fist.

"Ilario Mendes?" she said.

No one had said his name aloud in forty years. It sounded like someone else's.

"Super's office opens at nine," he said. His voice came out cracked and strange, and he cleared his throat. "Leave a note on the board."

She laughed. Then she put her hand over her mouth, as if the laugh had surprised her, and above her hand her eyes were wet, and she said, "Pilar is my mother. I'm Noor. I'm your—" and stopped, because the next word was too big to get out over the water.

He set the line down in the bottom of the boat, very carefully, so it wouldn't tangle.

She tied her boat to his and climbed over, and he gave her the only seat, which was an overturned crate, and stood at the sweeps. He didn't trust himself to sit.

The river authority was declaring the old city a reserve. That was what she told him first, because it was easier than the rest. The whole drowned basin, eighty square kilometers of it, from the delta wall to the old airport. No habitation. No salvage. No one in or out without a permit, and the permits were for scientists. They were going to let it all fall down the way it wanted to, and let the birds have it, and the fish. It was a good thing, she said. It was the right thing. The city had cleaned the river by dying. The authority wanted to keep it clean.

"There's a survey first," she said. "Somebody has to come in and certify that it's empty. No persons found. They always have to say that, legally, before they can draw the line. I put in for it." She turned the tablet over in her hands. "Your name's on the old list. People who refused evacuation. There were a lot of them, the first year. They took most of them out. Yours just stops. Nobody ever crossed it off."

"Nobody came back to cross it off."

"Mama doesn't know I'm here."

He rowed. The sweeps went in and came out and dripped.

"She says you chose a building," Noor said. "Over them. She says the last barge was at the Larkspur steps and Abuela had her by the hand and you said you'd be on the next one, and there wasn't a next one, and you knew there wasn't going to be. She says you knew."

He didn't answer. He rowed them in through the Larkspur's lobby doors, under the arch where the brass letters had been before somebody pried them off in the third year to sell, and into the dim green stairwell where the river slapped against the steps. He made the boat fast to the rail. Then he held out his hand to help her up, and after a moment she took it.

"It's thirty-one floors," he said. "I'll go slow."

He went slow for her, and she went slow for him, and neither of them said so.

They climbed through the Larkspur in the green light that came through the vines over the windows. He knew every landing. He told her as they passed them, without meaning to. Eleven, the Teixeiras, a houseful of kids, the youngest one used to ride his tricycle in the hall at six in the morning. Fourteen, that was ours, I'll show you. Nineteen, Mr. Szabo, who played the cello badly with the window open every Sunday and wouldn't stop no matter how many notes the tenants left. Twenty-two, the Bakshis, who fought. Twenty-six, the woman whose name he'd never known, who paid her rent in cash in an envelope and never once opened her door wider than her own hand.

"You remember all of them," Noor said, on twenty-seven, sitting on a step to breathe.

"It was my building."

On thirty-one the hall was full of light, because the roof above it had a hole in it the size of a car where a water tank had come through in the bad years, and the light came straight down onto the carpet and the carpet had become a meadow. Grass grew up the walls. There was a young ash tree in the middle of the hallway outside 31-B with its roots gone down through the floor. Noor stood in the middle of it with her mouth open.

He went to 31-C and knocked twice, the way he always did, and opened the door with his key.

There was no one inside. There hadn't been for nearly thirty-eight years. The room was very clean. A chair by the window. A bed with no mattress. On the wall, a dozen photographs of two different husbands, both in uniforms from wars Noor had only read about, faded almost to white.

"Mrs. Edith Abernathy," he said. "Ninety-one years old. She came into this apartment as a bride and she buried two husbands out of it. The day they evacuated the Larkspur she was sitting in that chair, and she told the man from the authority that she would leave this apartment in a box and not one minute before. And he said, ma'am, the barge goes in twenty minutes. And she said, then it goes."

Noor looked at the chair.

"They were going to carry her," he said. "They had the stretcher. She'd have died on the barge, the way she was, or in the camp after. She knew that. Everybody knew that. So I said, go. I'll stay with her. I'll bring her on the next one. The man from the authority said there might not be a next one, and I said I know." He looked at his hands. "Your mother's right. I knew. I just couldn't make the knowing come out of my mouth with Rosaura looking at me. So I said next one, and I picked her up, your mother, and kissed her and put her on the barge, and I came up here. Thirty-one floors. The elevators were already out."

"How long?"

"Two years. Two years and four months." The words came out flat and plain. "I carried water up every day. I caught her fish. She liked catfish fried, she didn't like carp. She told me about the husbands. The first one was a lot more fun than the second one. Then she died in that chair in the winter, in her sleep, and by then the authority had pulled the levee crews and there were no barges anymore. There was nobody to call. So I carried her up to the roof and buried her in the garden."

He took her up the last flight. The roof of the Larkspur had been a garden even before, a co-op garden the tenants fought over every spring, and now it was a wood. Pear trees, gone wild. Tomatoes seeding themselves in the cracks. In the corner by the parapet, where you could see the whole drowned city and the river shining between the towers, there was a slab of gray slate set upright in the earth, and on it, scratched with a nail, very neat:

MRS. EDITH ABERNATHY 31-C TENANT

Noor stood in front of it.

"And after that," she said. "After her. You could have walked out. The delta wall. People walked out."

"I know."

"So why?"

He looked out at the towers. The fog was burning off. The herons were coming and going over the Exchange, and the light was on the water, and far off a cormorant was drying its wings on the antenna of the Calloway, black and crooked against the sky.

"Because by then it was mine," he said. "And because somebody had to stay who remembered who lived in it. You understand? Not the building. Them. The Teixeira boy and his tricycle. Mr. Szabo's cello. If I walked out, there'd be nobody left in the world who knew Mrs. Abernathy liked catfish." He shrugged. It was a small, tired, foolish gesture and he knew it. "It's not much of a reason. It was the one I had."

He showed her fourteen last.

14-F. It had been under the waterline for three springs in the bad years and the floor had buckled and the walls were blistered, but the door had held, and the doorframe had held, and on the inside of the kitchen doorframe, under a skin of green that he cleaned off every month with a soft cloth, were the pencil marks.

A short line, and in his own square carpenter's capitals, PILAR 2. A little higher, PILAR 3. Then 4, and 5, and a big jump to 6 the year she'd had her growth, and 7, and 8. The last one was at about the height of Noor's elbow. PILAR 9, and under it the month and year of the last barge.

Noor put her fingertips on the last line and read the date under it with her lips moving. Then she turned around and put her back against the frame, and stood up straight with her chin up.

He took the stub of a carpenter's pencil from his shirt pocket. He had always carried one. You can't be a super without a pencil. He set the flat of his hand on top of her head, level, and drew a line on the frame where the heel of his hand met the wood.

She stepped away and looked. Her mark was a foot and a half above her mother's last one.

He wrote NOOR beside it, in the same square capitals. Then the date. He didn't ask her the date. He knew the date. In forty years he had never once lost count.

She asked him to come. On the stairs going down, and again at the boats, and once more with the engine already running. She asked him the way her mother would have, he thought, if her mother had been the one to come, straight out with her jaw set, and each time he said no in a different way so that she'd know he'd heard her.

"Who'd do the rounds," he said the last time. That was the truest one.

She stood in her clean white boat with her hand on the throttle, looking up at him.

"I have to file the survey," she said. "Tonight. They're waiting on it."

"I know."

"It says no persons found. That's the box. It's the only box. If I don't check it, they send a team in, and the team takes you out."

"The building's not empty," he said.

"I know," Noor said. "I'm going to say it is."

He gave her the catfish, smoked and wrapped in waxed paper, because a super doesn't send anybody away with nothing. And he gave her the key to 14-F off his ring, the old brass one with the number stamped on it.

"For your mother," he said. "Tell her the super says her place is kept."

She held the key in her fist. Then she backed the boat out into the channel and turned it, and the engine went up to its high thin whine, and the herons rose off the Exchange shrieking, and she was gone into what was left of the fog.

He listened until he couldn't tell the engine from the birds.

He rowed home slowly. He hung the shad in the smokehouse on ten, and cleaned the catfish, and climbed to sixteen as the light went. He ate. He sat at the window with the city going blue and then black in front of him, the towers standing in the river with the stars coming out through their empty frames, and somewhere out in the dark a heron complaining in its sleep.

Around midnight the wind came round to the east.

Up in the shaft, somewhere between the twentieth floor and the thirtieth, the bell rang once, soft and round.

"Coming," said Ilario Mendes, and he got up and took his pencil and his key ring, and went up to see who it was.