Zeitoun stared at his brother’s electric smile. Mohammed had everything then. He was everything, the most famous and accomplished athlete in Syrian history. He was a long-distance ocean swimmer, one of the best the world had ever known. That he was from a country not well known for its coast made his achievements all the more remarkable. He had won races in Syria, Lebanon, and Italy. He could swim thirty miles at a stretch, and faster than anyone else. Faster than any Italian, any Englishman or Frenchman or Greek.
Zeitoun examined the picture more closely. Poor Mohammed, he thought, all his brothers and sisters swamping him. They did that to him whenever he was home. The races—in Greece, Italy, the United States—kept him away too long. He was feted by heads of state and featured in newspapers and magazines all over the world. They called him the Human Torpedo, the Nile Alligator, the Miracle. When he was home his siblings went wild, buzzing around him like flies.
And then, at age twenty-four, he was gone. Killed in a car accident in Egypt, just before a race in the Suez Canal. Zeitoun still missed him terribly, though he was only six when it happened. After that, he knew Mohammed only through stories, photos, and tributes, and the monument to him that stood on the waterfront in Jableh, just down the street from their home. Growing up they had to pass it every day, and its presence made forgetting Mohammed, even momentarily, impossible.
Zeitoun sat and stared at the photo for a minute or so before putting it back in the box.
* * *
He couldn’t sleep inside the house. It was hotter this night, and in New Orleans he had never withstood this kind of heat without air-conditioning. Laying on sweat-soaked sheets, he had a thought. He looked in one of the upstairs closets for the tent he’d bought a few years back. The previous summer, he’d set it up in the backyard, and the kids had slept outside when the heat relented and allowed it.
He found the tent and crawled through the window of Nademah’s room and onto the roof. Outside it was cooler, a breeze cutting through the stagnant air. The roof over the garage was flat, and he set up the tent there, securing it with books and a few cinder blocks. He dragged one of the kids’ mattresses out and squeezed it through the tent’s door. The difference was vast.
Laying on the mattress, he listened for the movement of water. Was it still rising? He wouldn’t be surprised. He would not be shocked if, come morning, there was twelve, thirteen feet of water covering the neighborhood.
The darkness around him was complete, the night silent but for the dogs. First a few, then dozens. From all corners of the neighborhood he heard them howling. The neighborhood was full of dogs, so he was accustomed to their barking. On any given night, one would become excited by something and set off the rest, an arrhythmic call-and-response that could last hours until they calmed, one by one, into silence. But this night was different. These dogs had been left behind, and now they knew it. There was a bewilderment, an anger in their cries that cut the night into shards.
WEDNESDAY AUGUST 31
Zeitoun woke with the sun and crawled out of his tent. The day was bright, and as far as he could see in any direction the city was underwater. Though every resident of New Orleans imagines great floods, knows that such a thing is possible in a city surrounded by water and ill-conceived levees, the sight, in the light of day, was beyond anything he had imagined. He could only think of Judgment Day, of Noah and forty days of rain. And yet it was so quiet, so still. Nothing moved. He sat on the roof and scanned the horizon, looking for any person, any animal or machine moving. Nothing.
As he did his morning prayers, a helicopter broke the silence, shooting across the treetops and heading downtown.
Zeitoun looked down from the roof to find the water at the same level as the night before. He felt some relief in knowing that it would likely remain there, or even drop a foot once it reached an equilibrium with Lake Pontchartrain.
Zeitoun sat beside his tent, eating cereal he had salvaged from the kitchen. Even with the water no longer rising, he knew he could do nothing at home. He had saved what he could save, and there was nothing else to do here until the water receded.
When he had eaten, he felt restless, trapped. The water was too deep to wade into, its contents too suspect to swim through. But there was the canoe. He saw it, floating above the yard, tethered to the house. Amid the devastation of the city, standing on the roof of his drowned home, Zeitoun felt something like inspiration. He imagined floating, alone, through the streets of his city. In a way, this was a new world, uncharted. He could be an explorer. He could see things first.
He climbed down the side of the house and lowered himself into the canoe. He untied the rope and set out.
He paddled down Dart Street, the water flat and clear. And strangely, almost immediately, Zeitoun felt at peace. The damage to the neighborhood was extraordinary, but there was an odd calm in his heart. So much had been lost, but there was a stillness to the city that was almost hypnotic.
He coasted away from his home, passing over bicycles and cars, their antennae scraping the bottom of his canoe. Every vehicle, old and new, was gone, unsalvageable. The numbers filled his head: there were a hundred thousand cars lost in the flood. Maybe more. What would happen to them? Who would take them once the waters receded? In what hole could they all be buried?
Almost everyone he knew had left for a day or two, expecting little damage. He passed by their homes, so many of which he’d painted and even helped build, calculating how much was lost inside. It made him sick, the anguish this would cause. No one, he knew, had prepared for this, adequately or at all.
He thought of the animals. The squirrels, the mice, rats, frogs, possums, lizards. All gone. Millions of animals drowned. Only birds would survive this sort of apocalypse. Birds, some snakes, any beast that could find higher ground ahead of the rising tide. He looked for fish. If he was floating atop water shared with the lake, surely fish had been swept into the city. And, on cue, he saw a murky form darting between submerged tree branches.
* * *
He remembered the dogs. He rested his paddle on his lap, coasting, trying to place the pets he’d heard crying in the dark.
He heard nothing.
He was conflicted about what he was seeing, a refracted version of his city, one where homes and trees were bisected and mirrored in this oddly calm body of water. The novelty of the new world brought forth the adventurer in him—he wanted to see it all, the whole city, what had become of it. But the builder in him thought of the damage, how long it would take to rebuild. Years, maybe a decade. He wondered if the world at large could already see what he was seeing, a disaster mythical in scale and severity.
In his neighborhood, miles from the closest levee, the water had risen slowly enough that he knew it was unlikely that anyone had died in the flood. But with a shudder he thought of those closer to the breaches. He didn’t know where the levees had failed, but he knew anyone living nearby would have been quickly overwhelmed.
He turned on Vincennes Place and headed south. Someone called his name. He looked up to see a client of his, Frank Noland, a fit and robust man of about sixty, leaning out from a second-story window. Zeitoun had done work on his house a few years ago. The Zeitouns would see Frank and his wife occasionally in the neighborhood, and they always exchanged warm greetings.
Zeitoun waved and paddled over.
“You got a cigarette?” Frank asked, looking down.
Zeitoun shook his head no, and coasted closer to the window where Frank had appeared. It was a strange sensation, paddling over the man’s yard; the usual barrier that would prevent one from guiding a vehicle up to the house was gone. He could glide directly from the street, diagonally across the lawn, and appear just a few feet below a second-story window. Zeitoun was just getting accustomed to the new physics of this world.
Frank was shirtless, wearing only a pair of tennis shorts. His wife was behind him, and they had a guest in the house, another woman of similar age. Both women were dressed in T-shirts and sh
orts, suffering in the heat. It was early in the day, but the humidity was already oppressive.
“You think you could take me to where I can buy some smokes?” Frank asked.
Zeitoun told him that he didn’t think any store would be open and selling cigarettes this day.
Frank sighed. “See what happened to my motorcycle?” He pointed to the porch next door.
Zeitoun remembered Frank talking about this motorcycle—an antique bike that he had bought, restored, and lavished attention on. Now it was under six feet of water. As the water had risen the day before, Frank had moved it from the driveway up to the porch and then to his next-door neighbor’s porch, which was higher. But now it was gone. They could still see the faint, blurred likeness of the machine, like a relic from a previous civilization.
He and Frank talked for a few minutes about the storm, the flood, how Frank had expected it but then hadn’t expected it at all.
“Any chance you can take me to check on my truck?” Frank asked. Zeitoun agreed, but told Frank that he’d have to continue on a while longer. Zeitoun was planning to check on one of his rental properties, about two miles away.
Frank agreed to come along for the ride, and climbed down from the window and into the canoe. Zeitoun gave him the extra paddle and they were off.
“Brand new truck,” Frank said. He had parked it on Fontainebleau, thinking that because the road was a foot or so higher than Vincennes, the truck would be spared. They made their way up six blocks to where Frank had parked the truck, and then Zeitoun heard Frank’s quick intake of breath. The truck was under five feet of water and had migrated half a block. Like his motorcycle, it was gone, a thing of the past.
“You want to get anything out of it?” Zeitoun asked.
Frank shook his head. “I don’t want to look at it. Let’s go.”
They continued on. Soon they saw an older man, a doctor Zeitoun knew, on the second-floor porch of a white house. They paddled into the yard and asked the doctor if he needed help. “No, I’ve got somebody coming,” he said. He had his housekeeper with him, he said, and they were well set up for the time being.
A few doors down, Zeitoun and Frank came upon a house with a large white cloth billowing from the second-floor window. When they got closer, they saw a couple, a husband and wife in their seventies, leaning out of the window.
“You surrender?” Frank asked.
The man smiled.
“You want to get out?” Zeitoun asked.
“Yes, we do,” the man said.
They couldn’t safely fit anyone else in the canoe, so Zeitoun and Frank promised to send someone back to the house as soon as they got to Claiborne. They assumed there would be activity there, that if anywhere would have a police or military presence, it would be Claiborne, the main thoroughfare nearby.
“We’ll be right back,” Zeitoun said.
As they were paddling away from the couple’s house, they heard a faint female voice. It was a kind of moan, weak and tremulous.
“You hear that?” Zeitoun asked.
Frank nodded. “It’s coming from that direction.”
They paddled toward the sound and heard the voice again.
“Help.”
It was coming from a one-story house on Nashville.
They coasted toward the front door and heard the voice again: “Help me.”
Zeitoun dropped his paddle and jumped into the water. He held his breath and swam to the porch. The steps came quicker than he thought. He jammed his knee against the masonry and let out a gasp. When he stood, the water was up to his neck.
“You okay?” Frank asked.
Zeitoun nodded and made his way up the steps.
“Hello?” the voice said, now hopeful.
He tried the front door. It was stuck. Zeitoun kicked the door. It wouldn’t move. He kicked again. No movement. With the water now to his chest, he ran his body against the door. He did it again. And again. Finally it gave.
* * *
Inside he found a woman hovering above him. She was in her seventies, a large woman, over two hundred pounds. Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower. Her legs dangled below. She was holding on to a bookshelf.
“Help me,” she said.
Zeitoun talked gently to the woman, assuring her that she would be taken care of. He knew that in all likelihood she had been there, clinging to her furniture, for twenty-four hours or more. An elderly woman like this would have no chance of swimming to safety, much less have the strength to cut a hole through her roof. At least the water was warm. She might not have survived.
Zeitoun pulled her out the front door and caught a glimpse of Frank in the canoe. His jaw had gone slack, his eyes disbelieving.
No one knew what to do next. It would be very difficult to fit a woman of her size into the canoe under normal circumstances. And lifting her into it would require more than two men. Even if they could lift her and fit her inside, they couldn’t possibly fit all three of them. The canoe would certainly capsize.
He and Frank had a quick whispered conversation. They had no choice but to leave her and find help. They would paddle quickly to Claiborne and flag down a boat. They told the woman the plan. She was unhappy to be left alone again, but there was no choice.
They reached Claiborne in a few minutes and immediately saw what they were looking for: a fan boat. Zeitoun had never seen one in person, but they were familiar from movies. This was a military model, loud, with a great fan anchored perpendicularly to the rear. It was headed directly toward them.
Zeitoun thought it was very lucky to have found another craft so quickly, and he was filled with something like pride, knowing that he had promised help and could now deliver it.
He and Frank positioned their canoe in the path of the boat and waved their arms. The fan boat came straight for them, and when it was close, Zeitoun could see that there were four or five uniformed officers aboard; he wasn’t sure if they were police or military, but he was very happy to see them. He waved, and Frank waved, both of them yelling “Stop!” and “Help!”
But the fan boat did not stop. It swung around the canoe holding Zeitoun and Frank, not even slowing down, and continued down Claiborne. The men aboard the fan boat barely glanced at them.
The fan boat’s wake nearly tipped their canoe. Zeitoun and Frank sat still, gripping either side until the waves subsided. They hardly had time to exchange incredulous looks when another boat came their way. Again it was a fan boat, also with four military personnel aboard, and again Zeitoun and Frank waved and called for help. Again the fan boat swung around them and continued without a word.
This happened repeatedly over the next twenty minutes. Ten of these vessels, all staffed by soldiers or police officers, ignored their canoe and their calls for assistance. Where were these boats going, what were they looking for, if not for residents of the city asking for help? It defied belief.
Finally a different sort of boat approached. It was a small fishing boat manned by two young men. Though Zeitoun and Frank were disheartened and unsure if anyone would stop, they gave it a try. They stood in the canoe, they waved, they yelled. This boat stopped.
“We need help,” Frank said.
“Okay, let’s go,” the men on the boat said.
The young men threw a line to Zeitoun, who tied it to the canoe. The motorboat towed Zeitoun and Frank to the woman’s house, and once they were close, the young men cut the engine and coasted toward the porch.
Zeitoun jumped into the water again and swam to her door. The woman was exactly as they’d left her, in her foyer, floating near the ceiling.
Now they only had to figure out how to get her into the fishing boat. She couldn’t lift herself into the boat; that wasn’t an option. She couldn’t drop down into the water for leverage. It was too deep and she could not swim.
“You have a ladder, ma’am?” one of the young men asked.
She did. She directed them to the det
ached garage at the end of the driveway. Zeitoun dropped into the water, swam to the garage, and retrieved it.
When he brought it back, he set it on the ground and against the boat. The plan was that the woman would let go of the bookshelf, grab the ladder, put her feet onto it, and climb up until she was above the boat and able to step into the hull.
Zeitoun held the ladder while the two young men steadied it against the boat, ready to receive her. It seemed an ingenious plan.
But she couldn’t climb the ladder. She had a bad leg, she said, and couldn’t put pressure on it. It took a certain degree of agility, and she was eighty years old, weakened by staying awake for twenty-four hours while floating near her ceiling, thinking only that she might drown in her own home.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
There was only one option now, they decided. They would use the ladder as a sort of gurney. They would prop one end on the side of the fishing boat, and one of the young men would stand on the porch, holding the other side. They would then have to lift it high enough to get her over the lip of the boat, and far enough in that she could roll into the hull.
Zeitoun realized that two men, one on either end of the ladder, would not be enough to lift a woman of over two hundred pounds. He knew he would have to push from below. So when the two young men were in position, and the woman was ready, Zeitoun took a deep breath and went under. From below the surface, he could see the woman let go of the bookshelf and grab the ladder. It was awkward, but she managed to place herself atop it, as if it were a kind of raft.
As she put weight on the ladder, Zeitoun positioned his shoulders under it and pushed up. The motion was akin to a shoulder-press machine he’d once used at a gym. He straightened his legs, and as he did, the ladder rose from the water until he saw light breaking the surface, until he felt the air on his face and was finally able to exhale.