Soul of the Lost City

I just talked to a friend, a filmmaker, who lives in New Orleans' French Quarter. She stayed in her house through Hurricane Katrina and got out last Tuesday with a gun, and her car, in dire straits. Injured from battling the storm, and with only the clothes on her back, she got a first-class plane ticket, all that was available, from Baton Rouge, to stay with friends in New York.

When she walked to her seat, she was asked repeatedly to show her ticket: Apparently, airline personnel couldn't believe a woman in black jeans with bruises on her arms was one of their elite passengers. "I know I looked like a heroin addict," she said. "But still."

My husband and I, who are also refugees from New Orleans, just called a woman who had posted a six-week sublet apartment on Craig's List. Since we have no home we can return to, we thought we'd stay in New York, where we were when the storm hit. "We are from New Orleans," my husband explained to the woman. "We need a place to stay--could we look at yours?"

"Well, I hope you don't expect a discount," was her rapid-fire response. "And how come you have a New York area code?"

"We were expecting to pay. There isn't any 504 area code," my husband replied. "We had to get a new number."

I decided I would rather be homeless than have her for a landlady. Refugees are sensitive. I know. I am one. And they swing quickly from one mood to another. I know. I do. Sometimes they are thinking: how can I ever make another decision in this world, when all those I have made up until this point have led me to this circumstance? At the same time, they have to make thousands of decisions, constant decisions: where to go, how to get what we need, how to stay alive.

All day, every day, here in the third place I've lived in a week, we get dispatches: a librarian and a poet we know, sweet people, got out of town after the flood by stealing a car and a boat. They'd become petty criminals, desperate to survive.

"It was like the War of the Worlds, getting out," our friend Donna said. She had left in a convoy with friends, going north. "The gas stations were closed down, no rest stops: people were wandering in the bushes, filth and excrement everywhere. Where we could stop, people were very silent, sitting on top of their cars in north Mississippi in the middle of the night. Hundreds, staring out, realizing they'd evacuated, but had no place to go. They were the ones who left. Their lives, even their relatives, perhaps, abandoned, things getting worse."

Her husband had been away, hiking in the Cascades. When he returned on Wednesday, and found his wife, he was full of plans for the new life they'd have to forge--the bank where he works would take him on in Little Rock, they could live in Arkansas. He was ready to act. "He didn't get it," she said. "He didn't get what we'd been through. I burst into tears. I have to weep. I can't move on."

I had a dream the night that I realized New Orleans, the city where I live, was being destroyed. The night the levees broke. I saw myself on the white bed in the hotel room I was living in in Manhattan. I saw, beside me, on the floor, against the wall, a woman holding a man who was stretched and broken, bluish, I thought, dying.

"You are the broken person," my friend said. "You are the one who is stretched, and a little torn."

I was having a hard time believing that. Or I didn't want to admit it. But it is something I have to understand: That to be lucky is never only that. And also: I am not so lucky. None of us are. For some of our neighbors are suffering, and they are us. We don't like to believe that; we spend much of our lives erecting barriers to that fact, too many, but they are us.

A week ago, when I was shopping with my daughter, buying supplies for her first week at college, if someone had told me what would be true in one week, I would have thought them mad: In seven days, you will have no home you can return to, and potentially, no possessions. In seven days, your city, your friends, your neighbors, will report they had to take up arms to steal to survive. Or beg. Your daughter's crowd from high school--lovely New Orleans girls in a photo on my daughter's new dorm dresser at a New England college--will be among the dispossessed, the missing, the rumored dead.