The Reclaiming
How much longer’s The Old City got.
Cid is thinking this, on the rooftop sushi bar again, as usual. Never could keep away for very long. Those stuffy brick alleys always did feel more like home than home. Terrible, maybe. Dangerous, yes. But Home. This is the best time for it too, when the café doors are just closing and music starts to trickle out the bars. Like pausing to flip over a tape to the other side, he feels. Just as quiet, just as necessary.
Round this time folks coming into The Old City from downtown will have to squint against the sun and cross the street on either side to avoid the reconstruction; behind windows smudged and blinking all the tight brick rooms will slowly choke with smoke and conversation; the flower man starts making his nightly rounds with an armful of trinkets to pawn — already he shambles up to the man with the foodcart exchanging doodads for a hotdog. At Urban Bar in the intersection you would see students wheeling in on their bikes to hop the fence for a few drinks. From the patio you can see down every street — girls stomping into the nightclubs, fumbling for their IDs; musicians hauling amps and wires into open backdoors; strangers lighting each other’s cigarettes on curbs, balconies, pockets of brick and steel. Every now and again a freight train rumbles across the tracks to the north from the outside, headed somewhere nobody knows or cares to wonder about.
Back up on the roof Cid leans against the railings clutching a sweaty drink in his fingers and from here he surveys his city. From here he catches the thinning smoke drifting up from the barbeque trucks beneath the Interway and wonders which wood they’re using tonight. From here he might only just be able to make out the last big bridge cresting over the river behind towers of spraypainted brick. It’s just as well, this one thing he’d sooner not look for — rather not think about the water or the banks or the barriers; rather fill his spare hours with strong drinks and long nights in some familiar comfortable place.
He is brought back in by the sirens. The electric jazz blips away and one by one every speaker in the Old City flicks off, a familiar advisory washing the intersection dry.
– The following eco-warning is in effect for all greater E10 surrounding counties: a Cluster approximately ten-point-five acres thick has been spotted mobilizing in the Powell area, heading southeast. Residents north of Callahan Drive are encouraged to relocate to a designated safe zone immediately. Compliance with these precautions is in the interest of your own wellbeing. We repeat –
Cid lets out a long breath. He downs his drink. It had happened hardly a year ago, and it wasn’t about to stop. They were calling it the Reclaiming. Said it was worse in rural areas, and Tennessee was no exception. Maybe the first month or two might have inspired hysteria, panic, fear; these monsters still lurk in everyone’s corners of course, but now the whole city functions like a machine — switches over from one channel to another just like that, from entertainment to survival. The tabs are all frozen, to be paid for tomorrow; the lights refill the rooms; proprietors hold open their doors and leave them unlocked; people march urgently but unsurprised back to the lot beneath the Interway to board their hovers, say their goodbyes, promise to message each other when they make it back home safely.
Cid has grown familiar enough with this routine and so finds his way back to the wide intersection of Central and Jackson, where he’d hidden his motorboard on Urban’s patio. He kicks the ignition to life with his heel before speeding on towards the ramp without another thought. The hovers around him all grumble back west along the main thoroughfare of the city through well-lit channels. Back to sturdy walls and security. He weaves between them without hesitation. While the machines speed back along the I-40 he careens north onto what remains of the 275 bypass towards his complex.
The barriers this way are not so well kept up as the rest of the city. Still they rise from either side of the highway, twenty feet of solid concrete lined with twisted wire. These southern hills dive and rise in waves of cement. Sometimes he could even see the intruders, once cleared away with metal and fire, now rooted again, just off the Interway; see them breach old electric fences with drooping branches; congested vines erupting out of old pizza joints, filling stations, supermarkets; wraithlike sprouts in scary shapes stretching out of neighborhoods he might have skated through with friends only months ago. Just off the roads the world seems to be fading, dissolving into some familiar but menacing wave of green come to break against civilization, collecting all in its undertow. These constant reminders of the Reclaiming. As he cuts across the pockmarked road a single metal spire shoots up out the thick in the distance, still blinking its warning to planes which will likely never fly this way again. The image flashes by in hardly a second but that’s all it takes to draw Cid back — to a foray years ago up into the abandoned hills with his friends; how they had dared each other to climb a colossal telephone tower; how they wagered with the promise of beer which of them would make it the furthest before losing their wit or being electrocuted. It used to be enough to laugh at useless days.
Truly these were the worst moments, but the most sacred too — the moments that reminded him of other moments. Whether it was the sound of bikes on an overpass or the smell of hot rubber in the street or even this, the brief glint of an electric spire on a hill, inevitably these moments would catch him in their snares, latch on to lift him out the present and drag him deep through some long undisturbed pool of memory. These moments would soak him completely. When they were done with him he could all but wring the past out from his clothes.
But memories can burn if held tight for too long. So he kicks down the ignition again and does all that he can do — go forward.
Before long the Interway spills him out onto Merchant Drive — that rickety old road blasted through with potholes and sharp metal. He wheels into his complex not five miles from the hazard zone north of the city, thinking only of solitude and the chance to try it all again in the morning. He swings up on the curb beside his compartment and heads for building 12.
The wind fills the complex like muddy water in a bucket, though Cid’s grown accustomed to the lack of urban noises here; has come to recognize the swell of summer wind and the dim streetlamp buzz as trademarks, identifiers of his own corner of this world. Tonight however there is another sound. For all the wind’s howling another much more distinct groan rumbles through the shadows of Merchant Drive. The sound pitches in Cid’s chest, snags him at the spine that it might seize him completely — the heavy crunch of roots displacing concrete, soil, stone.
At the end of his drive there was lodged a rusted blue dumpster, never illuminated by sun or gig. Cid never dared to venture any closer than he needed to; not after that night many months ago when he’d gone to chuck the waste and a wily specter of a man lurched out at him from within the dumpster’s folds. He had never crossed into that alcove again. It is from this ugly corner however that he senses the awful groaning.
The creature spills out of the dark onto the road with a heavy creaking; it rattles its furious leaves; the roots churn one way against the gravel as the trunk gyrates in another and like this it propels itself out from the shadows. It was a monstrous stout arbre, wide-reaching and green — a sturdy chestnut tree in bloom like the ones used to dot the University grove. Brown husks of its stone fruit come loose from the limbs as it writhes across the pavement towards him. Not since that incident by the storm drain last June had Cid encountered an arbre in person; not since then was he confronted by the reality of the Reclaiming. For the first time this entire night Cid raises his voice against the wind, casting one single word into the dark.
– Straggler!
It was all he could think to say; the only word which seemed to mean anything; the only word he trusted to merit a reply. Lights slowly came to flicker on as blinds momentarily rustled behind windows. Eyes came to peer through curtains and peepholes but the complex would not be roused.
You bastards, he swears, damn every single one of you.
Without realizing it he sprints up the stairs to his building, crashes through the door, fumbles jittery in the darkness for what he resents is resting there. When his fingers find the handle he yanks the cocktail off the bar and wheels back down into the street.
The arbre had slithered fully into the road, dragging its low-hanging branches across the gravel. Each tuft of leaves a different face, surveying the whole clearing, scanning for others of its kind. More windows come blinking alert, some spectators even standing silent in cracked doorways, safe as a chain could keep them. Damn every single one of you, again. As long as it isn’t you, Cid thinks. As long as it isn’t you. He strikes the match quick against the cloth. Fire seems impossible in this wind, but here it burns. All shadow looks darker when something bright is lit. You won’t do it. But if you don’t, it will. As long as it isn’t you.
Cid hurls the cocktail direct at the base. The arbre comes awash in a pillar of roaring flame — heavy bark hissing as it splinters; roots blackened raw and scorched; snapping twig and popping leaves; this horrible vibrant groan. Soon a slow sad wail like an animal ensnared comes roiling up out of its hollow. Against wind and crackling fire they all stand watching, witnesses to pain they don’t have to feel. Then in their own time the doors are brought back to the jamb and the blinds snap down and curtains flash across windows and the lights slowly blip out and then only Cid remains to inherit the rest of the moment; to work it through on his own; to wonder about this draft in his chest and how to stop it up. Damn every single one of you, he thinks. Damn my own self too. As long as it isn’t you.
With these thoughts he returns to his room.
He peels off his boots, throws himself down on the same battered sofa and comes to realize that the room has stayed the same but somehow he’s the thing that’s changed. In the fridge there is only the one beer left, some eggs. He doesn’t want them anyway. But that cry still grates in his chest, the wail of that tree — no, not some rooted tree like used to, an arbre, a vicious thing that would of done the same to you; a terrible monstrous thing hiding out alone in the dark until finally someone came along to burn it; until along comes you. But I don’t want to be that person. What kind of person then? The kind that drinks himself across same old highways into same old sofas all tangled up in the past? Yes. Just like that. A kind of person that isn’t hurt; that doesn’t hurt; a person like a room — wrapped warm and tight up in my own walls, never broken into or breached. That’s what I could be. But you need more than a beer and some eggs. I don’t want them anyway. I want — I want —
He falls asleep and doesn’t dream and when he wakes up it’s cause there’s a banging on his door.
– Open up, sugar kane!
When he pulls himself finally off the sofa he goes to unlatch the door in the dark without checking the peephole. Only one person would know to call him that name, and he rarely expects good news whenever she comes knocking around. He unlatches the door and there she stands — a windblasted vision of blue in her heavy overcoat, bunched hair, ragged pants and boots. As usual all of it seems too big for her. She’s all bone, liquid, muscle, flowing through the world at her own constant speed.
– There he is. What, d’ya die in here.
– Just about.
– I was knocking.
– I heard you.
– Well, you gonna let me in. I’m thirsty.
– Come on.
They drift over to the sofa as Cid lights the room.
– Y’oughta check your phone sometime, big guy. A girl gets worried.
– Yeah.
– Hey.
– What.
– Good to see you, Cid.
– You too, Lynn.
She has a smile that she does and Cid is never sure how to take it; never sure what she means only certain that there’s something she won’t say.
– Come sit, buddy.
She pulls out one of the old flasks from her parka, a slim silver bullet of Anythingmaker bourbon she passes his way. He fumbles in his pocket for the smokes, their usual trade. That distinct Anything burn always did remind Cid of before — back when Lynn would come home exhausted from University on the weekends; when they’d dress up sharp for family dinners and compliment their mother’s cooking and answer to Christian and Lynette when spoken to; the burn of entire summers spent on balconies, porches, roofs, swigging Anything from the flask, rolling cigarettes, talking nothing but stories and noise. It seems so unfair now, cruel even, not to be able to preserve those times completely; not to draw it all back inside, he thinks, all at once, before it drains back away. I would be so full. I would fill until all I could do after is spill over. How nice it might be sometimes, to spill over. It’s just all too much. It’s just all absolutely too much.
– What was that about.
– Huh.
– I said the mess outside your place. What was that about. Smelled like something burning.
– Yeah.
– You ok.
– Yeah.
– Cid.
– Yeah, it was an arbre, alright. Goddamn straggler. Crawled out from behind the — . What’s it matter, it’s toast.
– Hmm.
– What are you doing here anyway. Weren’t you deployed, I heard about the Cluster. Earlier, on the waves.
– I was. We were. Lotta machine factions showed up, actually. Pistons, Axels, Wingnuts. Even a few Deadbolts, if you can believe it.
– Cogs are still the biggest though, yeah.
– Well we got there first. Way sooner than any of the others.
– How far’d they make it.
– All the way to East Town.
– Hell.
– We torched those motherfuckers, too. C’mere.
Cid hands her back the flask and Lynn pulls out a corder from the folds of her coat. The screen blips on a muffled landscape of shadow and flame — youth in thick heatwear piling out of trucks holding cocktails, hoses, all manner of fire-starting apparatus; dark spots struck and washed instantly alight, blending into the inferno. Branches whip down from off screen to crush a boy with a bag. Another girl is pulled from a moving truck by thick roots squeezing her dry, dragging her under.
– Mary Planters, Lynn is saying. Remember her, from the theater. I couldn’t believe it either but — . I mean she had no idea what she was getting into. It wasn’t just her either. I mean, it wasn’t easy. But we torched ten whole goddamn acres of em tonight, Cid. Sent em crawling back under the dam. Ten whole goddamn —
All the while there is the heavy red static of burning come to wash out any other discernible sound from the screen — a sound too heavy to record. Cid strikes another match and bolts to the fridge for the beer.
– Cid.
He chugs the beer straight down in one, doubles over, lets himself a long belch.
– What’s the matter.
– It’s fine.
– Cid.
– I’m fine, alright. I just. I don’t wanna see that shit.
– That shit.
– You know what I mean.
He feels another one of her trademark looks size him up — something about her eyes he’s come to recognize but still he can’t define. It’s a look that goes right into him, makes him see even a bit more of himself; a look too intimate that makes him anxious and self-aware.
– Lynn. All I mean is that I…we aren’t…I’m not like you, Lynn. This is what you do. But it’s not what I do. I just don’t need to see it on my couch where I sleep, alright. That’s all I meant. That’s all I —
She was quiet. He wanted to resent her for coming here, for bringing it all inside like this; somehow he felt that wasn’t fair. He wanted to resent the trees too but he couldn’t muster the energy even for that. Most days he found himself trying not to think of the Reclaiming at all. As if by force of absolute will he might push the whole thing out of existence; might be finally able to cruise along a useless backroad again in the sunlight or find someone nice to go up into the mountains with or just manage for one holy hour out of each day to convince himself that life was going on like usual before.
– You’re selfish.
– What.
– You need to grow up, Cid.
Lynn is rising, concealing her screen.
– That’s not fair.
– I’ll tell you what’s not fair. There are people every day out there fighting this thing, whatever the hell it is, so that we can all go on with our days as best we can. People die, Cid. They do. But they do it. They know there’s some bigger reason. Mary Planters wasn’t even as old as me. She was your age, Cid. But she was there.
– Well that was her fucking choice wasn’t it.
– What about your choice. You sit in this room like usual, you drink yourself wild like usual, you pretend and pretend as usual that everything is the same. It isn’t, Cid. It’s not. Nothing is the same.
– You’re not the same.
– Excuse me.
– You don’t give a shit.
He wanted so much to ask her what would happen when she dies like that, then — what happens when an arbre reaches down out the sky to pluck you up and toss you off the Interway, or runs a branch through your chest — will I have to hear about it from some other Cog at the bar showing his buddy a screen talking about look how many we blasted over in East Town, too bad about that Lynn girl but we sure put those goddamn trees in their place, how bout another round to celebrate. Instead all he said was,
– You don’t give a shit.
Lynn zips her coat up to her chin, shambles over to the door.
– You don’t get it, Cid. One day maybe you will. But not now you don’t. I do give a shit. Especially about you, about Ma, about all of it. Why else would I…I had to do something, you know. You have to grow up and do something for yourself. You can’t just keep on living like it’s not…like everything’s still…you just don’t get it, Cid. One day maybe you will.
When she leaves Cid is still standing there staring at the doorway expecting some kind of answer; listening to his sister’s zoomer kicking up over the wind until finally it carries her away; tracing the grain on his door like the lines on dead wood might lead him safe to some this new way. But all I know is the old way, he’s thinking. All I know is what I know.
He goes back to the sofa, finds the last of Lynn’s flask, downs it all in one long draught. Like a hand over fresh sheets the whisky smoothes him out evenly.
And then he stands up, goes out the door too.
Outside the warm smell of burning still swells through the complex. Cid kicks his motorboard to life and barrels back toward the road, going nowhere. How nice not to have a destination, he thinks — just pick a direction and go, like you used to. He shoots all the way down Merchant against the wind till it turns into Cedar, screaming past all the little stations and busted neighborhoods. He carves all the way down till the thick-walled channels of Broadway cross before him — the last safe junction heading south back into the city. Broadway was dark, everyone already locked tight in their houses, watching the Cluster burn on the waves, assured that all the danger was taken care of out in East Town.
Taken care of by people like Lynn, he thinks. I’m really not like her, am I. I’m really not that strong.
But the ashes in the lot outside — I put those there. I made them. When everyone else was just watching in their doorways I brought the fire down and I set it to burn and I watched it all happen alone. I did that. But why didn’t you say anything to her, he wonders. Why didn’t you tell your sister you can do it — that you did it — are you so afraid to be like her — are you so afraid to fight.
Before long Broadway is spent and he comes up on the ragged little steel mill part of town just north of the train tracks — past the big empty school and the sunbleached boutiques and the rail salvage warehouses and all the tiny churches. He kicks his board on over the tracks and then he is back in The Old City, just like he left it. But that’s not where I’m going, he thinks. I won’t just stop right here.
He wheels himself down Central Street, all the way down to the river; doesn’t stop until he can see the last big bridge cresting over the water; see the great concrete wall along the far banks choking back wild tufts of branch and leaf. The old neon coffee sign somehow is still burned into the hills, BEST PART OF THE MEAL seared bright against the looming dark. So some things can stay the same after all, he says to Lynn as if she could hear him.
He follows the road down to what used to be the Greenway trail along the river and powers his board off underneath the bridge.
For the first time in over a year Cid allows himself to sit in silence and look at the water. Only the water seems to go its own way as usual, sloshing slow and thick back to the sea, a child gone to meet its mother. He looses a pebble with his shoe, rolls it between his fingers. The grit cuts into his thumb resurfacing some comfortable old sensation. He lobs the rock into the water, listens for it to splash. How simple, how completely useless and simple and sweet, he is thinking. This is what I miss. This is what I want to return. He lets loose another pebble then another and one more; with each one the old questions come bobbing back up like bottles in the stream — why don’t you listen to Lynn — are you so afraid to be like her — are you so afraid to fight.
Maybe not to fight, no — not afraid of danger so much as I’m afraid to lose; afraid to lose everything I know; to lose this feeling of how useless and good life can be; afraid to forget completely the old complaints of finger scrapes and parking tickets, traffic jams, angry professors, problems so easily solved and forgotten; afraid to lose all the old comforts too, wild nights with close friends, quiet mornings outside, the big big sky above you on the grass and you trusting it was there to keep you safe.
But what is there to keep you safe now, Cid. What can keep you even from you. He looses another pebble.
He doesn’t hear it at first for the river but before long a sound catches him stiff — a low groan bouncing around the bridge’s shadow. A warm wind comes down from upriver funneling little white specs in midair. They twirl and catch in Cid’s hair.
His chest tightens when he identifies them as stray Dogwood petals.
He jolts up, kicking his board back to life, searching in the dark for what he knows is there. The Greenway starts to tremble and then there comes a thick sloshing, a grating crunch. Long branches whip their spectral bodies out from the river, twisted roots blasting apart the brittle pavement. In seconds the road is filled with a dripping thicket, churning its way towards Cid.
He turns alone in the dark and catches sight of the only light he can find — the colossal stadium tucked into a hill just off the Greenway. Still carelessly lit, the stadium glows like a burning ruin, looms heavy and powerful over the river’s bank like a home at the end of the world, walls open, silent, waiting. Thinking of nothing else but home, Cid kicks down the ignition.
At his back the Dogwoods shuffle down the road, swiping away rubble with their wide-reaching arms. Behind them a tangle of Willows whip their lashing branches against the pavement, propelling themselves on, the wet slap of their leaves like bile in Cid’s brain.
But what about his sister, his friends, his Ma, all those who somehow have ridden the wave into this new year and managed to do just fine. Where were they all now — asleep in their own rooms — comfortable — at peace. He hoped so. There was nothing to do for this feeling, no way to shut out this grasping arms-out warmth. An open palm ready to give, but what to offer. Who for. The stadium draws itself up out the shadow before him and the arbres gain speed behind but in this moment there is only that warm feeling.
Cid releases the ignition only to slam it down again.
He moves fast but then the earth is wrapped around him. A tendril whips his ankle out from underneath, and for a breath or two he is not even a body. His board barrels on down the Greenway, chokes and rattles through the guardrails where it clatters into the river. And Cid himself is reclaimed, the vines enclosing his arms, chest, suspending him in air. Some sturdy trunk begins to grow around his legs, and the bark is wet but warm. He feels the roots breach concrete, dirt, stone, and there is a smell that goes too far back for memory. The thicket rushes past Cid’s tree, a flurry of shadow and green, and then there is only the light of the stadium, burning its lonely beacon home. Now all the old feelings have changed. Everything is something else now. Nothing so familiar. And I’m part of it too now, he is thinking — everything that’s overgrown. In a dream, maybe, there’s a way; some way to wash that old boy onto these new shores and tell him how maybe home’s a place that goes with you, whether you got one or not. A place big enough for two worlds. All the old cities, all this now, for awful and for good, for however it all turns out to be. You just don’t get it, Cid.
One day maybe you will.
