3
LENINGRAD
Mother was never afraid of the water like Bix was. She was like me, she loved it. She studied sea butterflies—pteropods—at Amen. Mother worked at the museum in The World As It Was. She was the one with keys. She brought us there when the city fell down. We went to the safest place we knew, big old doors and big old locks and lots of other people with keys who walked there through the water one night and stayed on because no one was coming to save anybody.
I was in love with Amen already. When we were small, before things changed, on Sunday afternoons Mother went in to get more hours in the lab and Father walked Bix and me around the dark, still rooms while people we didn't know looked at the bones and the birds and the beasts. We would lie under the great blue whale, and I would pretend I was under the ocean. It was a place that said time broke everything before and repaired it new. Sometimes new was better and sometimes new was worse. But if there was a change, it would change again. As the broken world turned outside the walls, I longed for the quiet rooms that taught me that. Mother didn't like the subway entrance, brought Bix and me in from the street, up the big stairs and to the big doors, right past the statue of Teddy Roosevelt. She catalogued pteropods in a basement lab. The sea butterflies told her everything she needed to know about what was happening to the world, the change of chemistry in the ocean, the things we were doing to break it, the things we might do to make it whole again. It was the only work that mattered, she said, sometimes when she forgot to be humble, and in the joy of walking into the museum. In her voice, there was something else, too—greed, hope. The picture in my plastic baggie used to hang on the fridge in our Tenth Street apartment, her head bent over a microscope, looking at a specimen, mouse-brown hair tied back in a ponytail, long beak nose pointing at the instrument like an arrow. There was another picture of the lab, too. Mother with her arms around another worker when they got a grant, champagne bottle on the table in front of them. That picture was lost in the flood. The World As It Is doesn't let you keep things, but her body kept that arrow gesture in her bones, her whole life bent toward research, never wavering, even when she couldn't work like that. She had keys to the kingdom. She won them herself. She gave the museum to Bix and me.
By the night of the storm that took it, Amen only had a few people left, all too scared or stuck to take the walk north, sleeping on the roof in lean-tos and made-up structures. Used to be only tents there, then the rule was if you stayed, you built solid. The roof was the only way to survive the rotting city, the people who might break a window and get into Amen until they saw there was nothing that would feed them. We were high on the roof, safe from people with guns or dogs, the old building rotting and dangerous below. Shelters kept the rain off, fought the heat. We had a garden in the Park. When we went, we carried the two guns we had left, the ammo we saved, the ones who knew how carried bows we made or scavenged. We grew food. We had bees. We went out. We came back. When we were lucky, the empty city echoed around us, dog packs off hunting deer. The longer we were in Amen, the luckier we got, the quieter it was, a whole city moved off to find good water.
We were like the people in Leningrad, Father said, in the War, the Second one, when the Hermitage, a museum bigger than ours even, was left for dead in a dying city but the curators stayed. There wasn't much left, but in Leningrad in the siege in the War the curators stayed and ate restorer paste to stay alive and wrapped the dead and laid them in the basement until the thaw and chipped the ice off the paintings while the siege went on outside. All that mattered was that the art remained. Even if they could have run away across Lake Ladoga and into the edges of the taiga forest and hidden with what they knew, they wouldn't have left. They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows replaced and the broken walls repaired and the museum alive again for everyone, for the world that mattered, the one they wanted.
That was us. Only the siege was storms. We stayed because we had to, because Bix was too terrified of the water to go, but we also stayed because it was the work, Mother's and Father's work, the reason they met, the work of keeping what was left until the world was ready again.
4
THE END OF THE ROOF
Keller reached the stairwell first. He grabbed the metal pipe wedged in the stairwell door handles. He wrenched it free. I left the door wide behind me, ran after Bix, deeper into the dark.
