When his city was wiped from the map, the Mayor of Everson found himself without a purpose for the first time in his adult life. The morning it happened had been postcard-perfect, an anonymous lamb of a dawn: seabirds sought their breakfast along the sparsely-peopled wharf, crabs scurried sideways on their errands. The sun was yawning at the end of the bay, casting a rusty series of its own iterations towards the city. And then––the world becomes a fumbled camera, a confused ocean, an hourglass sky. The wide sea seizes, dislocates, comes screaming across the long island, vomiting fish and driftwood, like a great, wet giant awakened by something he shouldn’t have eaten.
As was true for so many who’d outlived the great wave (ridden its crest, swam with its fishes, made a salty lemonade with its lemons), the rails of the Mayor’s dreamlife rarely diverged from those of the now-lost city. When he dreamed himself at a podium addressing an colloquium of bearded ninjas, it took place in the gymnasium at Everson High. When he dreamed of a barber’s cape wrapped so tightly around his arms he had no choice but to sit and listen to his poor departed mother discoursing on the human reproductive system, well, the barbershop was Everson’s hairstrewn own. All that gave form to his mental life, all the invisible infrastructure of three dimensional space, all that remained untouched by the wave. It had retreated into an interior place, but it was still there. And so each night he woke into a world where Everson still existed; each morning, he rediscovered its absence, and went deaf with terror.
Perhaps if he’d seen more of the world: more barbershops, more gymnasia. But the Mayor had rarely stirred from his native city, let alone from the long island itself. Every other year, it’s true, there was the Conference of Mayors, up the river, in the provincial capital of Innington City, with its swarms of municipal prostitutes and bad buffets. Even this, he could have done without. The fact is, Everson was enough. Its universal smell of flopping seafood, its scattered festivals with their origins in sea-mists, its miniature crises and theatrical implosions, all its purely local rites and rhythms that seemed so odd, so provincial, to inlanders. To let that native moon follow him on his rounds: the wharf to the church-house, the hospital to the graveyard, the barbershop to the brickyard: that was enough. He loved that moon like a young child loves a parent; he never asked where else it might shine, on what other archipelago, on which of a thousand nations. He never asked whether it had other children.
No, it was always Everson or bust.
Pensive, pensile, he’s hunched over his campstool, between the flapping leaves of his A-frame tent, trying to bring his thoughts back to the what now. . . um, his tent? Yes, his tent; after the threat of afterwaves got ticked down to “marginal,” the Mayor had, against all advice and the pleading of his sisters, returned to City Hall, pitched this tent, and started familiarizing himself with whisky. Rather, he’d pitched this tent on a gently elevated site above the harbor where, as best as he could figure, City Hall had once stood. –– If all human endeavours in the centuries-old city had merely been removed, and the old familiar topography left intact (he continues to reflect), he would have no trouble, no, no trouble at all pinpointing the site of City Hall, or the barbershop or the secondary school for that matter. If the sea had merely cleared the table with its too-dramatic gesture, as if clearing the palate with a heady proof of spirits; if the sea had merely swept the time-layered accoutrements of progress to the floor, taking perhaps even the tablecloth with it, then certainly, yes, he’d have no trouble at all putting the city back together in his mind (at this thought, the muscles of his face relax visibly). It would be a simple exercise, really. He has an appraiser’s eye for all the nuances of the land, he knows every gentle grade and each miniature bluff, every ancient tree each seaworn boulder, every dune with its rebar of reed-roots, each beach of crushed seashells or grainy beige, each offshore reef, every mangrove cove and salt marsh, all the tidemarks and pyres of driftwood, every intimacy of the body of the land. If all that was just still there, that map-of-itself on which we built our city. Ah, but the land, itself, is different now.
It takes some imagining. But as distorted as the land has become, its permutations are somehow not beyond his grasp. A moth resembles the caterpillar it was, and the land still bears a trace of its old contours. Antediluvian, for example, a shallow gully had run behind City Hall, its stream trickling down towards the water. The ocean, in its moment of deafening pique, its fifteen minutes of fame, had funneled its blue wrath on and up this little canal, reversing its course a hundredfold, as Goliath might have if David hadn’t brought his A-game to the trenches, as if to say I’ll show you an equal and opposite reaction. The gully is wider now, deeper, it’s a veritable canal, there are great berms of unmentionable sediment ploughed a story high on either side. City Hall Hill has flattened out and collapsed, reduced to a gentle rise which merges with the berm and then drops precipitously into the canal, which drained the sea back into itself, which is now no more than an exit wound.
The Mayor sits there in his tent, pendant, his view of the sea blocked in places by debris, and he’s bringing his thoughts back around to the future, to the what now, and he thinks of all the grisly murders you’d hear about from the inland cities, how sometimes you’d be found so badly mutilated that only your lover could identify your corpse. The remnant of a mole between the breasts, a constellation of freckles on the knuckles of a severed hand, a cat-scratch scarred into a white X on the wrist; there’s only one person in the world who would know it was you. He has not, merely, in his two decades of being Mayor, studied topographical maps of the city, been privy to land swaps and surveys, fudged statistics, lunched with zoning commisioners, intervened sometimes publicly and sometimes privately to instigate or prevent various land uses and modifications, et cet; no, the Mayor also knows the city’s land from the vantage point of the child he had been. Subsidences of cracked sidewalks, unused corners of parking lots ideal for invented games of marbles, of dominos (he had somehow contrived to make them fall uphill, hadn’t he, behind the old ice-cream parlor), it was all there somewhere in his memory banks, he’d dragged wheelbarrows and wagons to and fro across the soft landscape, imagined whole fantastic duchies in the pinewoods at the end of his street, kissed girls in the innocent dunes. And then, of course, he’d reproduced it all, every whit of it, back in the summer of his twelfth year, the one he’d inaugurated by shattering a leg jumping his bike off the portico in front of City Hall. When he awoke in great pain in the seaside hospital, he was hesitatingly informed that he’d be banned from the water until mid-autumn. He’d wanted to die, actually prayed for death. Biking was one thing, but the ocean? That was life itself.
As it happened, he did spend the summer on the beach, as did all Everson. His mother, still in mourning, read bad novels distractedly in a beachchair; his six sisters, according to the wonts of their ages, frolicked in the surf, batted beachballs at seagulls, or ran around pinching tide-pool creatures with outstretched arms (faces scrunched up in mild disgust; eyes, though, wide with curiosity); the older ones worked assiduously on their tans, sprawled on their stomachs, tops untied. He (the future Mayor), having begun with a simple sand-chateau in June, proceeded to mold in the damp and pliable grit of the receding tide a more-or-less scale model of first his street, then his neighborhood, then the downtown area, and finally all Everson, bits of driftwood for the wharves and jetties, stones for the cobbled byways of Old Town, tines of gullfeather for the long awnings of the shops and the fish market. He worked quickly, but was never a match for the tide, that inexorable leveller. Rain or shine, across a hundred hot and otherwise useless days, he built and re-built that city of sand, working from the ruins of the day before, gaining a little on the tide each week. Only towards the end of the summer did he realize, first, that his convalescence was getting on to the point that he was only barely limping across the sand (though it was worse on harder earth); second, that one of his three older sisters or one of their friends would occasionally lapse from a sunblind slumber and (forgetting that her top was untied) rise to her elbows, thus revealing, sometimes for several seconds, the twin cupolas of her bare young breasts.
A portable radio, the size and shape of a child’s pencil case, sits on a blanket just inside the tent, blaring quietly in mono “I Ain’t Been Right Since I Been Left.” This sort of plainspoken devastationalism (courtesy of alt-songwriter Dale Watson) has not previously resonated with him, the Mayor, him that sits now in his ad hoc office at the center of his beautiful city, not until the last couple of years. He had come into this world to find himself the only son of a minor merchant, Everson’s only tailor, who had died not long before the boy’s fracturous puberty. We say he was a minor merchant, but that doesn’t mean he was a minor man. His ghost, certainly, was quite powerful; his ghost had brought the tailor’s son the upswell of support he needed to get himself elected the youngest Mayor in the history of Everson. You’re the tailor’s son, they’d say, he fixed up my wedding dress something pretty, it’s still hanging in my closet. Or you’re the tailor’s son, whenever I was in the mood for a melody he was there in his evening dress. The tailor, you see, played his oddly dark and joyful compositions in the piano bars downtown most Saturday nights; he worshipped Monk and Mingus (sometimes parsed by his children as “Mink and Mungus”) and wore the best damn beret you ever saw. But he associated country music with all that was worst about the inlanders: the petty racism, the jingoism, the acceptance of one’s place in the world. No, son, you’re gonna be somebody someday. (He never said anything like this to his daughters.) You’re gonna be more than a minor merchant.
And he was. He, the Mayor, was the Mayor of the great seaside city of Everson. Ran five campaigns, had the privilege of being elected five times in five landslides: one for every hand on his finger. And yet, he was (more than his father might have liked) a man of the people. Never had time for a wife, married to his constituents. He was of them, but above them, too. The classic populist’s paradox. And so when his new secretary started tuning the radio in his outer office to 91.3 KJUN and letting it drawl softly from the walls, as if the ground to her figure, he didn’t complain, but tried to appreciate it as a possible pathway into the heads of his constituents. Who were they? Who was Everson, this five-legged fish he’d married?
“So this is where you’ve got off to.”
The Mayor started. His reverie, the color of squawking gulls and the distant toll of the sea, fell to pieces.
“Reverend?” He cleared his throat. “You um. You caught me off guard, Reverend.”
The Reverend crouched a few feet off, interlaced his fingers on a knee, looked warmly at the Mayor.
“Looks like you’re on guard, to me. Over what. . .” he spread out a hand at the horizon, “I don’t know. We were starting to think you’d gone and followed the city off into the sea.”
The Mayor was silent.
The Reverend studied him for a minute; tugging at his collar, he continued: “There are other cities, you know,” looking at the sea. “There are other cities out there. Well,” he corrected, “not out there, but back there,” nodding behind them.
“I’m not interested in other cities, I’m still the––”
“Yes. I know. I talked to your lawyer, we ran into each other, at the shelter. He said, just in passing, he said you’ve been inquiring about the legal, uh, status, of the city. . . of your position.”
“It’s pretty clear, as I understand it. I’ll forego my salary, of course. But I’ve got three years left in my term.”
“And then?”
“If there’s no election,” he shrugged, “I’m still the Mayor. I’m not saying I want to be ‘dictator for life,’ but. . .”
He displayed his palms, que será será-style.
“What I’m worried about is––”
“A good number of my constituents are still living. When they’re ready to come back, I’ll be here for them, I’ll be waiting. In the meantime I can draw up plans, survey the land––get the lay of things.”
The Reverend paused, made a tent with his fingers. Homily-time.
“Your Honor. . . you’re an old friend. You’ve always been good to our congregation, and when you would fall asleep during services, everyone knew it was because you’d been working so damn hard for us, for Ev––for everyone. And we all still love you. But. . . this was a sparsely populated stretch of coast, besides the city itself. You know that. The fishing is all commercial now, it’s all out of bigger harbors. This a disaster area––”
“My city––”
“It’s a disaster area. They’re not coming back. No one’s going to rebuild.”
“Reverend––”
“The good Lord has other plans for you, he’s not done with you yet.”
“Reverend, I don’t––”
“The story of Job teaches us that––”
“Reverend––”
“God damn it, man, listen to me. I’m not out here because it’s my job, I’m not out here on the Lord’s business, I’m out here as your friend. And as your friend, I’ve gotta tell you. You. . . you need a haircut.” (The Reverend blinked, surprised.) “Forgive me, but it’s true, you need a haircut and maybe a shave. That’ll get you started. And then you need a new plan. You need to figure out what you’re gonna do with the rest of your life. You could go into politics somewhere else, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if you––”
“It was never about politics, Reverend.”
“Find some other little city, or run for the legislature, or––”
“Reverend. Tell me this. What if God had died in the wave?”
The Reverend bit his lip.
“What would you do, with your life?”
A burst of gulls filled the gully.
“Your Honor. . . God is eternal. Such a thing, it doesn’t even. It’s unthinkable. He’s the first and the last, the alpha and the o––”
“Orangutang. Come on, man, either everything’s eternal or nothing is. You can’t pick and choose.”
The Reverend was a man of words, of scripture. He was a fisher of men. But now a sudden and deadening silence inside him produced the phrase but men aren’t fish.
The Mayor was fuming. He couldn’t stop––
“Or is that one of your heresies?”
As the surf surged around his ankles, he slugged at his whisky, recapped it. The Mayor was a pragmatic man, a man of compromise, a man of many angles. But he was a man, which meant that he believed in things that he couldn’t see. He’d been stripped down to that basic fact now. He let out a weighty, animal sigh. He wanted to weep, to sob, to cry out and feel the lost abandoned inner rain squeeze out of his face in pillars. Don’t look back. He was laden, pregnant. He was bloated, tumescent. His limbs were tired and his brain was like taffy, and there was no city behind him, just the lone sands.
What now?
A wave rose on the horizon, he smelled the fetal sea. It curled and curled, the hand of the deep, until it formed a portico of foam and water. It was at least a story high. In seconds he was inundated, engulfed; what’s more, the blue colossus with its feathery fingers brought its own emotion. Hope and bitterness, honesty and loss, nostalgia and original sin, it all curled over his head and wrapped him in its wool, its cape of wild water.
“Take it all off,” he said, “I don’t need it down here.” He leaned back in the old vinyl of the chair, his eyes found the window. It was all there, and after this he’d get an icecream and then get back to work. His constituents were waiting, waiting to rebuild, in their city under the waves, New Everson. A long dream had passed since such an assemblage of waters had assaulted the long island: a dream of stone, of bronze, of steel, of silicon. Now, it was a dream of water.
summer, 2011
Tucson, Ariz.
Tucson, Ariz.
all rights reserved.
