Katrina Street
by Louis Gallo

Nov. 2, 2080
New Orleans

Dear Jack,
I dream that you are still alive. I hope so. I have no one else to write. For three years I haven't spoken to a soul in this well-meaning but desolate swamp hovel. They think I'm mute because I don't want to talk and have nothing to say. I listen though and hear the songs of the algae, the shrieks of ions. Dusty, desolate angels lurk in the corridors.

I barely know you, but we're cousins of some kind. I vaguely remember you from the house on Katrina Street, donated to refugees by a local church. I call it Katrina Street, but it's real name was Downey. I was ten years old. You were only three or so. My father made you laugh by whistling silly ditties, which made me laugh too. And he teased you with some silly toy. But I don't recall much more. My sister Katie told me the stories, became my memory. Katie's eyes were quartz. She wrote poems about death. It befell upon me alone to take care of her during the course of her tempestuous, volatile life, her life of fire.

I don't know if anyone else is left in the family. We were isolated for so long in Virginia because of my father's position at the university, we lost track. My fragile sister, two years older, my great companion, my idol, died several years ago by her own hand. I can't forgive her. I oversaw her moods and protected her ever since I was myself still only a girl. I had no choice. Our parents left this life early, within months of each other.

I moved to New Orleans after Katie hanged herself because it was the only place that made sense to me. My father's side of the family had always lived here—he often joked about "exile" in Virginia, when they still called it Virginia. When Katrina struck nearly a century ago (yet, preposterously, just yesterday), Dad's mother, sister, and her husband evacuated and wound up with us for a while before they settled on Katrina Street. My memory is sketchy. And during the crisis, the exodus, my beloved Nanny, Mom's mother, died of natural causes. Her death only compounded the massive, chaotic grief over Katrina. Mom never recovered and gradually faded out of this world like fine mist. My father nearly lost his mind trying to console all of us weeping women—my mother (his wife), his own mother and sister, Katie, and me. The adults seemed so old. Indeed, they were old, though not my mother and Katie. Katie was never old.

Jack, you were too little to remember anything at all, but perhaps like me you heard accounts handed down through the years, from your parents and grandparents. Surely they have all passed on as well. We have lost everything. Time is sorrow. To be alive is a forsakening.

I am now housed in a dilapidated nursing hostel waiting to die. This city has never recovered. It's still a rough, pioneer outpost, a forgotten remnant of our former country, a miasmal island in the Gulf of Mexico. We live in structures built on stilts. Only the French Quarter thrives as a tourist attraction, albeit a minor one, given the devastation seventy-five years ago, which eventually took the country along with it. You'd think that a city like New Orleans could have been rebuilt, restored. But history is an angry god. A god with no memory.

From this window seat I spot my three adopted alligators waiting for me to toss out a treat, usually some nuggets of dog food or a portion of the slop they serve us patients. Nutria, I believe. Only the rodents thrive. The alligators are white like the one I saw in the Aquarium so long ago, before Katrina. And the one my Aunt Regina, Dad's sister, painted a picture of. Her painting, destroyed in the flooding, haunts me to this day. A child sweetly asleep on a bed bunched with patchwork quilts, the white alligator under that bed. Both child and alligator looked serene as the moss that once draped our three-hundred-year-old live oaks. Nothing now but scrub pine and briars.

Well, they have arrived with my medicines, so I must say goodbye. I hate the pills that cloud my mind even more than it's clouded already; but they also relieve some of the pain, so I comply. You can also cure pain by enduring ever greater pain. My head is vapor.

I pray you receive this letter. I have an old address from a kindly priest who did some research for me, Father Michael. He's young but patient and courteous B and very brave. After Katrina your immediate tribe re-located to the former North Carolina, so I hope this address is accurate. Father Michael doubts just about anything I say, which I understand. One can make only tentative alliances with the living dead.

Sincerely,

Celeste Lattimore (nee Maestri)

November 27, 2080
New Orleans

Dear Jack,
You have not replied, but that's not so unusual these days. The post office delivers sporadically and then only if the brigands aren't too restive. To think that we once thrived, received mail every day, used cell phones and computers. So rare, so rare. The internet collapsed abruptly when I was twenty-five years old. Some say from information overload, but how can you overlook the constant sabotage and international piracy? You probably don't remember better days, but I do. I used to collect the mail at home before and after Nanny died. I sorted it into three piles, one for Dad, Mom and Nanny.

The country crumbled quickly after Katrina, and that president back then, and his evil cronies, are to blame. The debate still rages, but it's obvious to me. Can one man of insidious intent destroy an entire civilization? I once studied the facts, I was avid...all irrelevant now, I suppose, but that gang bankrupted our nation and used the war in Mesopotamia to annul the constitution so they could remain in power ad infinitum. Who could stop them? They seized the reins and pocketed whatever they could before fleeing the borders. (We were overjoyed, later, when they found the president hiding in a make-shift hole he had dug with his own hands in the Yucatan. TV footage showed medics picking lice out of his hair with tweezers.) My father and mother, even Nanny, raged about him. "He should be tried and executed as a war criminal," Dad would rant. "We're the terrorists, not the Mesopotamians!"

That war raged for decades. Wrecked our economy, our spirit. Billions and billions spent on bombs and missiles, torture chambers, private contractors in league with the president...it could not sustain itself. Only a few years later the world ran out of oil, thanks to China. The rusted husks of old automobiles remain in the streets, grotesque monuments to false prosperity. People are walking again, stealing horses, riding bicycles, crawling.

Father Michael has a gentler view. He says the country was doomed anyway; the usual historical cycles at work; even Rome didn't last. And Katrina signaled the end, symbolically and actually. We could no longer take care of ourselves, our own citizens. We could have foreseen China but who could imagine that a chain store, Wal-mart, would eventually constitute itself as a political entity without spatial boundaries? Thus our Global Estates of Wal-mart and the current war. War, always war. My entire life. A terrible black flower that never dies.

I don't think the conflict between China and Walmart will escalate. Both benefit from the stalemate, but I feel too feeble at the moment to go on. It's just my hunch. The world has been medievalized again. The few rich, the multitudinous poor, and the lower than poor, the indigent. I pray each day for a letter from you.

Sincerely,

Celeste Maestri Lattimore

November 29, 2080
Hostel for Indignenes #116, Coastal Southeast Territories (formerly parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida)

Dear Dr. Atfallah,
I write in behalf of your patient, Mrs. Celeste Lattimore, an indigene. Her dementia has intensified, along with her anxiety. She corresponds with an imaginary relative she knew some seventy years ago. I have traced her lineage, and can find no reference to such a person, a Mr. Jack Schubert. She believes he may be her only family member still alive. My records show that she is the last surviving member of her family, since her marriage proved childless. The others, in direct descent or collateral, all died or perhaps disappeared in the infamous "holding" camps.

May I recommend an increase in her dosage of medication? I realize the request is substantial, given the times and economy. But it is my duty as a pastor. Not that I don't have other needy individuals throughout the Territory. Or that one ancient lady matters in the grand scheme. But I would like to hope that some mercy remains in our now merciless world.

Thank you for you time and attention.
In God we Trust,
Reverend Michael Spires

December 14, 2080
Fort Biloxi, Medical Unit, Coastal Southeast Territories

Dear Reverend Spires:
We appreciate your concern for our patient, Mrs. Celeste Lattimore (Indigene 888-555-679-2). Understand that we are grossly understaffed and rely upon volunteer field medics besieged on all fronts by homeland terrorists, illegal aliens, nomadic indigenes, and common highway thugs. As you know, the indigenes have no legal rights. This is the Greater Mexican Law under Supreme General Santa Ana Alaric y O'Reilly, in effect since the Year of the Seventeen Presidents.

We hope to dispatch a team to New Orleans within the next two months. Please have patience. Arsenic and petro-toxins from Katrina still abound in the soil, and those not killed instantly from exposure often suffer lingering respiratory and systemic complaints. Moreover, many of our few personnel have been dispatched to southern Africa to tend to the few dozen people not yet decimated by AIDS. That part of the world, as you know, is virtually unpopulated since the virus mutated into several virulent strains that prey upon even vegetation and animals. The same goes for certain former countries of southeast Asia, now occupied by the Chinese. Finally, General Santa Ana's campaigns against our own local Chinese occupation make Anormal@ operations difficult, if not outright impossible.

But we shall do our best.

P.S. I understand that you still occasionally introduce yourself as "Father" Michael. This is foolhardy, sir, if you don't mind my so saying. The church has been driven underground, as in the remote past, at the beginning. Martyrs abound.

Sincerely,
Dr. Nyrang Bledsoe Atfallah

December 24, 2080
New Orleans

Dear Jack,
Father Michael thinks I've invented you. Imagine! I remember you so well from that day when the core of our family gathered on Katrina Street, your face bright as a ruby grapefruit. Everything seemed to unfold at once as if time shot ahead of itself.

Katrina killed us all, if not physically, in spirit. Impossible to grasp the infinite tentacles of that hurricane, which was no hurricane but a maelstrom of evil, call it Satan if you will. Blinded cows in the pastures pacing in furious circles. Wild dogs devouring corpses in the streets. People drowning in their attics! It broke my heart to hear that ten thousand specimens of marine life died in the ravaged Aquarium, which Katie and I visited on our previous trips here with our parents. And yet the silly little penguins survived! Penguins!

I am certain I do not have long for this world. You can feel death inching in, spreading like the blackest of inks. But I remain optimistic about hearing from you. I have been alone since Katie took her life, and before that it was always just her and me. My departed husband seems a mere vaporous dream. He tolerated Katie for years, tried to make our marriage work, but when it comes to my sister, I am blind, deaf and dumb, and not pretending, as I pretend now to be mute. Rafael Lattimore was a good, decent man, and for a while lifted me from the ranks of the indigenous. A military communications specialist with one of Santa Ana's regiments.

Katie married as well—five times! No man could bear her for very long, despite her beauty, her passion and talent. Katie was pure flame. Katie's heart clamored with joy, tolled with despair. Her temperament rivaled that of the classical poet Sylvia Plath, whom no one reads now—so few books remain after the fire bombs and incinerations during the Year of the Seventeen Presidents. But I cling to my copy of Ariel as I cling to my rosary beads and crucifix.

I am not an official Catholic, but so what? Nothing is official anymore. The Chinese and Wal-mart have mandated secular "Good Cheer" as the only viable mindset and they go out of their way to enforce orders to neutralize the few surviving religious devotees. The usual sadism. I will be neutralized all right, but not by such hands. The fat fingers of lucre and power. I know the exact date and time of my death. I have dreamed it, willed it. (And, also in the year of Katrina, I saw the blessed Virgin weep tears of blood in what used to be California. Time stopped in the year 2005.) I will die in the Time of Black Flowers, when they wilt to powder on their stalks.

Father Michael knew Katie, but only for a few years. She overwhelmed him, didn't pay him the slightest mind, kept forgetting his name. He fell madly in love with her the day they met, despite her age. But he kept his distance. He knew she would annihilate him as she had already annihilated five men, none of them pushovers. Our parents could never handle her, and once Katrina struck and Nanny died, they dissolved into ghosts of themselves. My father took Katie to see a psychiatrist for a while but abandoned the idea when the doctor prescribed heavy doses of anti-depressants (not only for depression, but the anxiety, obsessive behavior and panic attacks as well). The ironies! The Chinese now mandate anti-depressants for the populations they control, which is virtually the entire world aside from those regions liberated by General Santa Ana's militia. Who distributes the medication? Wal-mart, of course. It works out.

Did you know that the widow of the last veteran from World War I died in 2005? I take that too as an omen, I take almost everything as an omen, but I can no longer summon the mental energy to worry or care about what the omens signify. They signify the usual.

And it is Christmas Eve. Well, no longer Christmas officially, but the Eve of Good Cheer. Jesus has been outlawed, despite the Mexicans—or perhaps because of the Mexicans. Katie and I did not practice any formal religion, but on the night that our father's family arrived a few days after Katrina, late that sweltering, terrifying night, we crowded round the computer as my father clicked on to the virtual rosary site. Actually, it was only Katie and I, Dad and his sister Regina. A honkish version of Ave Maria blared from the loudspeakers, and we repeated the Hail Mary over and over, and The Lord's Prayer, in that darkened room, illuminated only by the glare of a monitor screen. We sobbed as we chanted, we were frantic to recite the words, repeat the words forever, let the words ravish us with magic. It was the most intense moment of my spiritual life.

Why, haven't I prattled on? Are you alive, Jack? You would be so old now. The idea of your being old only recently dawned on me. And we lost so many during the seventeen assholes fiasco, oh I mean presidents, forgive me...and the constant skirmishes between the Chinese and Mexicans. So most likely these letters of mine get delivered to a tomb.

Merry Eve of Good Cheer, Jack. And Merry Christmas too. What do I care if they read and probably confiscate all letters leaving this place? Once you've lost everything, you no longer grieve. It's over. Birds still flare out of trees. The seasons turn. It's a kind of splendor.

Father Michael says hello.

Love,
Celeste Maestri-Lattimore

January 2, 2081
Hostel for Indigenes #116

Dear Dr. Atfallah:
You must send someone immediately. I am a priest, yes, a priest, not a doctor. Mrs. Lattimore can no longer sleep at all. She has waking delusions of the Biblical Flood. She was not even here in New Orleans during Katrina. It's a case of racial memory, I suppose, but vivid and real enough. She drowns in her dreams every night, those waking dreams, feels herself swept away by bilge rushing through cracks in the walls. And then the mold forms and effuses caustic gases.

She is apparently re-living the experience of her father's sister, her Aunt Regina, who stayed in Virginia for a month before returning to New Orleans to assess the damage. Professor Maestri received hysterical cell phone calls from his sister (the towers were restored by then for a while) raving about the black and orange fungus that coated everything. She and her husband spent weeks scraping mold, drenching the house with bleach and anti-bacterial agents. Which the greater poisons? They eventually fell prey to respiratory infections and died in bed in each other's arms the following year.

Professor Maestri rushed to New Orleans to attend the funeral, a cremation, since the city's extravagant cemeteries were destroyed by Katrina and never rebuilt or reopened. As Mrs. Lattimore tells it, her father and his decrepit old mother huddled together in a drizzle in the rubble of St. Rosa de Lima as some priest droned on and on about hard times and divine consolation. The maternal grandmother was over eighty years old, and had lost the will to go on. A staph infection had already spread on one of her calves, and within six months the professor lost his mother, sister and brother-in-law (not to mention his home town). Mrs. Lattimore had lost both grandmothers. The Virginia portion of the family languished in grief; the New Orleans portion simply perished.

Mrs. Lattimore's older sister, Katie, twelve or so (just as adolescent hormones began to surge through her body)—the timing of these events, the timing!—reacted not with despair, but rebellious rage. And that's when the trouble started with Katie. I call her Katie, but her final married name was Mrs. Toussaint Marlow; some years ago I knew her personally, and if ever I beheld a woman possessed by demons, it was Katie. And quickly enough Mrs. Lattimore became her sister's keeper, to the detriment of her marriage, finances and health.

But here I am rambling on about a single, ailing patient. I've broken the rules and become emotionally involved. This old woman who has sacrificed her entire life to another deserves the right to spend her last days in some dignity and peace. I DEMAND more medication. In my capacity as a steward of God. She is slipping away, Sir, and if an iota of compassion burns in your administrative soul, you will comply.

Sincerely,
Father Michael Spires

January 22, 2081
Fort Biloxi, Medical Unit, Coastal Southeast Territories

Father Michael Spires:
The tone of you last dispatch offends me. "An iota of compassion" blah blah. However, I will send a special courier, someone we plucked from off the street because no one else is available, to deliver the medication. What medication we have, that is, which is woefully inadequate. I must warn you that it may disappear straight into the black market, but I have no other options at the moment. General Santa Ana has flagged me to participate in a new campaign (I am sworn to secrecy on the details) and I will be replaced by a teenager whose only experience is building chicken coops. Like most indigenes, he is illiterate, so don't waste your time trying to communicate. This office is virtually defunct. The Chinese have advanced as far south as Alexandria in the west and Jacksonville on the east. Evacuation orders are imminent for many on the peripheries.

Mrs. Lattimore interests me. I am a doctor, after all, just as, you claim, you are a priest. And my family was displaced by Katrina too, way back then. They got over it and moved on, but as we all know, many of the remaining survivors, mostly children at the time, still suffer a wide-ranging array of symptoms we have come to call "Chronic Desuetude." It's a strange malady. Symptoms persist for years, decades, lifetimes, and seem congenital in many cases. Time stops for these victims. There is pre-Katrina and post-Katrina, and they're stuck somewhere in the interface. Personally, I believe what they need is a good, swift kick in the buttocks to jar them out of it, but I'm not a monster.

At any rate, you may hear no more from me. I am headed into Chinese territory and have, they say, a ten percent chance of survival. Death or identity transformation. They do facial transplants by the thousands, Orientalize their POWs, integrate them. No chance of return as who I am now.

This is probably farewell. Tend to my, and your, patient.

Sincerely,
Dr. Nyrang Bledsoe Atfallah

January 31, 2081< /br> Hostel for Indigenes #116, Coastal Southeast Territories

Mr. Jack Schubert:
Do you exist, sir? I take the liberty of addressing this post to a positively ancient ANorth Carolina@ address, which I lifted from one of Mrs. Celeste Lattimore's unmailed letters. Since North Carolina has been subsumed by China and Walmart, I have no idea where this letter will wind up or whose eyes will read it. I take the risk willingly. I don't even know if and when it will arrive since the only postal system available now is the revamped Pony Express. The local post office went up in flames just three days ago.

But to the point: your cousin, or I presume cousin, has drifted into a kind of waking coma and time is short. Dreams have become her only reality. She never speaks, never closes her eyes, has lost touch with the world. I sit by her bedside and hold her hand for hours each day and night and distribute the last of her medication in tiny droplets. I believe the end is near; yet there is hope. If you would simply respond, or better yet, visit, there is a good chance that my patient (I am not a doctor, but I'm all she's got) might rally, even if only for a spell.

So if you do exist and if you have received her letters, letters I personally passed into the hands of Pony couriers, along with hefty bribes, please send us a sign, respond, make yourself known. If I do not hear from you by mid next month, I will dismiss you as deceased or a figment.

Sincerely,
Father Michael Spires

February 1, 2081
New Orleans

Dear Jack,
I realize I now reside in a phantasmal world of my own making. This is no letter, obviously, but a prayer. Prayer is not the right word. Reverie? Extra-sensory, of course, with direction. You are the direction.

You may receive or you may not, but that's irrelevant now. I want to pass on some memories, dispense with them in the hopes that they will not die with me. That is why you are so necessary.

In my letters I mentioned that my grandmother Nanny died during the Katrina exodus of our New Orleans family who lived with us for a few days, then moved to the house on Katrina Street. We were all frenzied, emptied our heads of tears often enough. Nanny, at the time, could hardly breathe and had diminished to a mere eighty-five pounds. She lived with our immediate Virginia family from the time Katie and I were born. She was our care-taker while our parents went off to work. Life without her was inconceivable.

However ludicrous, I believe that Katrina had demonic, supernatural intent, that it struck us in Virginia as well, and Nanny too was its victim. I will never forget Aunt Regina's husband, my Uncle Sean, presiding over her funeral on a windy mountain-top in what used to be called West Virginia. I can hear his sonorous voice now, after all these years, intoning, AMay the Lord maketh his face to shine upon thee,@ as he touched Nanny's coffin. The ice-chilled wind swept back his thinning, gray hair. We mourners stood stunned, choked up, we tried our best not to collapse into sobbing wretches.

But the strangest thing then happened. As we walked to my father's car, I looked back at the casket—it was ready to be lowered into the ground—and I saw it slowly open. I watched Nanny climb out of that wooden box. She signaled to me and smiled, she looked twenty years younger. She whispered to me alone, "Be Happy. I'll be with you forever." I heard this and felt a little frightened, despite my joy. And this is what has sustained me through the decades, this vision.

My mother crumbled into tiny pieces of herself. She couldn't survive without her own mother. We watched her dissolve. It took a few years. She died when I was seventeen. Then Katie broke down altogether, and, as I mentioned, I looked after her until she too died many years later. My father didn't last long after Mom died. He wrote short stories and poems and called her his Amuse.@ He was twenty years older than Mom, his former student. I found one of his old love letters to her in an abandoned attic trunk. It expressed a passion I have envied all my life. Yet how could I waste my time on passion when I had to tend to Katie, who tried to take her own life several times?

My father finally succumbed to one of the paralytic strokes that ran in his line and lingered in a wheelchair for a while. This was three years after Mom's death. He suffered silently, bravely. But, may the Lord forgive me, one afternoon I found him sitting beside the patio table staring into space. I placed a revolver on the table and said, "Dad, do what you must. Don't worry about us girls. We can take care of ourselves now. Or, at least, I can take care of both of us. I love you." I kissed him on his forehead and started back toward the house. I unlatched the screen door and sank into the love seat in our back room...and waited. Soon I heard the shot. Like thunderclap. Like the only sound in the world. I curled up on the love seat and instantly slept the sleep of the dead. Katie was off somewhere with the man who would become her first husband. I was twenty years old. Our country had fallen apart. Our so-called president, that fool, had gone into hiding. China and Wal-mart had already commenced their slow, careful and inexorable siege.

When I woke up hours later, I notice dried tears of blood on my cheeks. Katie walked into the room and screamed. Her boyfriend had to hold her down physically until she calmed down. Then I took her by the hand to the window and pointed toward Dad slumped in his chair...

Oh, I must stop for a while, Jack. I'm so tired. I don't sleep anymore, but I do go blank. And that's where I am now. Blank.

Love,
Celeste Maestri

March 1, 2081
China Colonies, Southeastern District Four

Dear Father Michael:
I take the liberty and risk of answering a crumpled letter I received from you addressed to Jack Schubert.

Jack does indeed exist. I am sorry to say that he was deployed (at his age!) several years ago to the Barataria region in your neck of the woods. Or perhaps the orders were a ruse for confinement in a holding camp. The Chinese have secured a few outposts down there. I regard myself his widow in either case.

It may cheer you to learn that Jack had a phenomenal memory and did actually speak of Katrina Street, though he was there only once in his life as a very young child. He mentioned it to me often enough. And he did remember a funny man who made him laugh, and two girls who played with him. These memories were sacred to him. Jack, like many others, constantly dreamed of flooding, that he had drowned in the murky waters of New Orleans, a place he never set foot in. He had planned a trip, but the Chinese occupation put an end to that. Until his "deployment" he served in the Utilities Management Brigand of General Tsu. We were left alone, spared, for many years.

I hope that I will be overlooked as just another grieving old woman if they intercept this letter.
Mrs. Jack Schubert

April 1, 2081
New Orleans

Dear Jack,
Much is happening here though I am immune, given my condition. The Chinese have invaded and the city rages. The clamor and artillery would deafen normal ears but seem like distant echoes to mine. Our hostel was hit and heavily damaged. The old wood smolders and acrid smoke saturates everything, the bed sheets, the walls, food, the skin. I believe I may be the only survivor as I lie here dreaming. The others have either died or fled. A masked assassin crashed through the door of our room and shot Father Michael through the skull. His body fell across my bed, at my feet, and I feel his heaviness at this moment. You would think the dead weighed nothing at all.

I am beyond grief. Father Michael was kind and compassionate, though too late, too late for me. I am probably cringing with pain for lack of medicine. But I feel nothing. Because I am going home, back to Katrina Street, where we will gather as once we did, all of us, you, Katie, my and your parents, my grandmothers, your grandmother. We were all there that day when you visited. An emaciated old house scheduled for demolition, donated by a church. Remember the kitchen? A hodgepodge if ever I saw one. Dad's mother fried one pancake after another and we smothered them with blueberry syrup. Your old grandmother, Dad's god-mother, wept over the loss of her house, her every possession, yet even she rallied for a laugh every now and them.

Dad is making you guffaw again with some trinket we had picked up at Burger King. He's pretending to steal it from you. Katie and I can't stop giggling. We dash madly down the long hallway, and you follow us, pretending to shoot us with your fingers. Aunt Regina sits on Uncle Sean's lap as he tries to tell another one of his long-winded jokes. Nanny listens but with difficulty. She can hardly breathe. Mom says that if somebody renovated the place it would look fabulous. She looks Dad in the eye. "Oh no," he laughs, shaking his hand, "not me, never again, I'm done with all that."

We have all been driven here by Katrina, though Dad, Mom, Nanny, Katie, and I live only a few blocks away. Here in the sleepy, drowsy Blue Ridge mountains, which really are blue. Dad complains of his "exile" often enough, but he has come to love the area. Except the cold. He says that in February we rival Helsinki and even Antarctica. He checks the internet weather site and jots down temperatures. He says New Orleans heat and humidity are in his blood. When he dies, he laughs, he wants to be cremated, with half his ashes scattered in the nearby New River, and the other half interred in the family plot down south. Aunt Regina says the cemeteries in New Orleans are under water. My grandmother, still at the stove, bursts into tears.

You and your family will leave soon, Jack, so you can make it back to North Carolina before dark. Then we will leave too because tomorrow is a school day. (You see, this all happened during the most normal of times, as if on the bluest of summer days the sky suddenly splits in half.) Aunt Regina, Uncle Sean and Dad's mother will stay, sleep and eat here, visit our house every day. There will be hundreds of attempts to call missing relatives and friends scattered by the storm. Most of the calls don't go through because the New Orleans and Gulf Coast exchanges have ceased to function. And yet we are all here, lucky, in the oddest sense of that word. We did not perish or get hauled into the Superdome. We're here, together, and the moment is electrifying. We are calmly overwhelmed, anxious, charged with despair. Many years from now when only you and I still breathe, we will remember only vague swatches of this catastrophic reunion, the color of a wall, the smell of pancake syrup, the silly toy that made you laugh. But nothing will ever come close to touching its sanctity. For a few hours, almost eighty years ago, in 2005, we were fused with the glue of...what? Need? Love? Joy, horror and thanksgiving?

This is also what Katrina did for us, Jack, and you now must carry on the burden and the blessing, for, as I said, I am going back one last time to look around (Wal-mart and Chinese be damned!), sniff the musty, stale air, hobble down that long, dim hallway. I will wave goodbye to my grandmother, Aunt Regina, and Uncle Sean as we pack into the car and drive to our house. I will try to console Katie, who doesn't want to leave. "It's a school night," I will say and pat her back softly. Dad will weep as he parks the car in front of our house. Mom will help Nanny into her room. Katie and I will zoom through the house, laughing like goofy monkeys. Then, for a while, we will sleep the profound forgetting sleep of wet soil, here, now, always, in this fragile, evanescent commonwealth.

Love Always,
#888-555-679-2