Keller and Angel and Mano could have left Old City without us, but they stayed. Keller was an entomologist, he had keys too. His wife Angel was a librarian in Washington Heights where they lived, and then she was our teacher. Even though Mano was Angel's nephew, they looked like mother and child, same thick black hair, same dark eyes, same laugh like wheezing. Mano was Keller's son—no question about it, no foster about it, Keller said—even if he didn't watch him being born. For me, Mano was Manolito, playmate, sibling. For Bix, something else. Keller was a wall of person, solid and laughing and bigger than anything around him. His wide shoulders had a stoop. His brown skin always looked warm and quiet. He'd had a tummy to carry around because in The World As It Was, Angel fed him too much mofongo. Mano would tease him about it. Keller kept his beard and hair trimmed. "I did locs in college, Nonie," he said, laughing, "and Angel likes my hair short. I never can argue anything with Angel."
6
WE HELD ON
The ripping away blasted my ears flat, pitched me down the stairs onto a pile of Father, Keller, and Bix mixed with chunks of roof and brick. The hand of the funnel reached in, pulled my legs up into the cloud. Bix grabbed my arm. In the tangle, she held a railing still secured to the broken wall. I screamed under silence, my hearing dead from the blast to the roof, "Bix!" One of my shoes loosened as the storm pulled me, my legs pointing to the twisted gray. Then the roar of the wind moved. The funnel let go. I slammed back onto the stairs, Bix's fingernails left moons of blood on my skin, my knee hurt. I tasted blood. My ears rang. Bix pulled me to stand, then turned and started to run. I stumbled after Bix down the stairs. I looked back at the hole where the roof once was, saw another funnel hit, sending a wash of rubble over us. In place of Amen there was only the black of all the clouds. In that blackness I heard a scream behind the ringing in my ears and did not know it was my voice until I felt the raindrops in my mouth. The World As It Is didn't work if you screamed. A pummel of hail poured down. Then the hail stopped. Rain waterfalled in, collapsing on my head like a giant's overturned bucket. Fear curled into my spine in a blind swiftness.
"Nonie!" It was Father. "Nonie, take my hand." He grabbed my hand with his. I had the shakes. The screaming gave fear a tiny hole into my heart to fill up my body until I couldn't move. But if Father held my hand I could walk. Father was always there, and everything was safer with him. I looked down to see he held one of Bix's hands. Keller held Bix's other one so as to make us roped together, all four. Keller looked up at Father, rainwater hitting his face, his skin hard to see in the shadows of the broken stairwell. Keller led, trailing the length of us, kicking away pieces of wall from what was left of the stairs. Father and Bix and I snapped behind him like the end of a downed power line in a storm. Our chain: Keller and Bix and Father and me, Keller and Bix and Father and me, Keller and Bix and Father and me. All holding hands, all heading down and away. We ran together. We didn't stop. We held on.
7
THE WORLD AS IT WAS
Storms always came. They took things. They took things before I was born, Mother and Father told me that: bits of the coastline, glaciers, reefs, whole islands, cites—San Juan, Miami, the Azores, Shenzhen, Mumbai, the Philippines, Bangkok, Abidjan, Nagoya, New Zealand.
They took water from the inland and gave it to the sea, crops failed, forests caught fire, tall mountain ranges burned with the trees along their ridgelines. People moved to places where food was. Countries filled and emptied until the people themselves were the floods and the droughts. Mother and Father watched it happen on their laptops, reading articles, looking at pictures of loss side by side on the couch on Tenth Street, the electric off and on.
Mother told me is was slow at first, the way the world changed. You could forget about it. People talked like you could fix it. A storm would pass, and they'd put things back together. Or one day there was no gas, and you learned to live without your car. "You learned to live without bananas, without airplanes," that's how Mother said it. She said it like losing taught you lessons you needed, until you were happy to have a day with fresh water in your apartment and a bath.
It was slow enough you might have babies, like Mother and Father. Them wondering if that was smart. Bix first, born in a hospital with power and lights, before martial law. Me three years later, born at home in the dark.
Things fell in slow motion. Rolling blackouts, waves of refuges heading north and west, army everywhere, gas rationed food scare, the president in a huge ship offshore.
In Old City they built floodgates that kept the sea outside, blocked the ocean getting up the river, made the city an island we lived inside, a bowl that flooded up from the sewers when the storms came. In the Old City, weather was a gamble. It was hot nearly all year. Dry when you needed water. Flooding so it couldn't be managed. Cold snaps would come and plunge you into ice, then melt and flood again. All the time everyone hoping it might turn around, until they knew it wouldn't, until the world warmed up so fast you couldn't catch your breath. Every year the storms were bigger—moving ocean up into the streets. But there was electric sometimes, there were people in the city, none of ever imagined Amen. There were jobs and grocery stores. We had a ration card, we drove places, and you could just take a car out on the road like that, like it was nothing.
