Harsh Oases (37 page)

I tried being a civilian volunteer for another day or two amidst the ruins, but my heart wasn’t in it. So I took the offer of evacuation to Femaville 29.

The first week after the disaster actually manifested aspects of an odd, enforced vacation. Or rather, the atmosphere often felt more like an open-ended New Year’s Eve, the portal to some as-yet undefined millennium where all our good resolutions would come to pass. Once we victims emerged from the shock of losing everything we owned, including our shared identity as citizens of a large East Coast city, my fellow refugees and I began to exhibit a near-manic optimism in the face of the massive slate-cleaning.

The uplift was not to last. But while it prevailed, it was as if some secret imperative in the depths of our souls—a wish to be unburdened of all our draggy pasts—had been fulfilled by cosmic fiat, without our having to lift a finger.

We had been given a chance to start all over, remake our lives afresh, and we were, for the most part, eager to grasp the offered personal remodeling.

Everyone in the swiftly erected encampment of a thousand men, women and children was healthy. The truly injured had all been airlifted to hospitals around the state and nation. Families had been reunited, even down to pets. The tents we were inhabiting were spacious, weather-tight and wired for electricity and entertainment. Meals were plentiful, albeit uninspired, served promptly in three shifts, thrice daily, in a large communal pavilion.

True, the lavatories and showers were also communal, and the lack of privacy grated a bit right from the start. Trudging through the chilly dark in the middle of the night to take a leak held limited appeal, even when you pretended you were camping. And winter, with its more challenging conditions, loomed only a few months away. Moreover, enforced idleness chafed those of us who were used to steady work. Lack of proper schooling for the scores of kids in the camp worried many parents.

But taken all in all, the atmosphere at the camp—christened with no more imaginative a bureaucratic name than Femaville Number 29— was suffused with potential that first week.

My own interview with the FEMA intake authorities in the first days of the relocation was typical.

The late September sunlight warmed the interview tent so much that the canvas sides had been rolled up to admit fresh air scented with faint, not unpleasant maritime odors of decay. Even though Femaville 29 was located far inland—or what used to be far inland before the tsunami— the wrack left behind by the disaster lay not many miles away.

For a moment, I pictured exotic fish swimming through the streets and subways of my old city, weaving their paths among cars, couches and corpses. The imagery unsettled me, and I tried to focus on the more hopeful present.

The long tent hosted ranks of paired folding chairs, each chair facing its mate. The FEMA workers, armed with laptop computers, occupied one seat of each pair, while an interviewee sat in the other. The subdued mass interrogation and the clicking of keys raised a surprisingly dense net of sound that overlaid the noises from outside the tent: children roistering, adults gossiping, birds chattering. Outside the tent, multiple lines of refugees stretched away, awaiting their turns.

The official seated across from me was a pretty young African-American woman whose name-badge proclaimed her HANNAH LAWES. Unfortunately, she reminded me of my ex-wife, Calley, hard in the same places Calley was hard. I tried to suppress an immediate dislike of her. As soon as I sat down, Hannah Lawes expressed rote sympathy for my plight, a commiseration worn featureless by its hundredth repetition. Then she got down to business.

“Name?”

“Parrish Hedges.”

“Any relatives in the disaster zone?”

“No, ma’am.”

“What was your job back in the city?”

I felt my face heat up. But I had no choice, except to answer truthfully.

“I was a police officer, ma’am.”

That answer gave Hannah Lawes pause. Finally, she asked in an accusatory fashion, “Shouldn’t you still be on duty then? Helping with security in the ruins?”

My left hand started to quiver a bit, but I suppressed it so that I didn’t think she noticed.

“Medical exemption, ma’am.”

Hannah Lawes frowned slightly and said, “I hope you don’t mind if I take a moment to confirm that, Mr. Hedges.”

Her slim, manicured fingers danced over her keyboard, dragging my data down the airwaves. I studied the plywood floor of the tent while she read my file.

When I looked up, her face had gone disdainful.

“This explains much, Mr. Hedges.”

“Can we move on, please?”

As if I ever could.

Hannah Lawes resumed her programmed spiel. “All right, let’s talk about your options now .…”

For the next few minutes, she outlined the various programs and handouts and incentives that the government and private charities and NGOs had lined up for the victims of the disaster. Somehow, none of the choices really matched my dreams and expectations engendered by the all-consuming catastrophe. All of them involved relocating to some other part of the country, leaving behind the shattered chaos of the East Coast. And that was something I just wasn’t ready for yet, inevitable as such a move was.

And besides, choosing any one particular path would have meant foregoing all the others. Leaving this indeterminate interzone of infinite possibility would lock me into a new life that might be better than my old one, but I would still be fixed, crystallized, frozen into place.

“Do I have to decide right now?”

“No, no, of course not.”

I stood up to go, and Hannah Lawes added, “But you realize, naturally, that this camp was never intended as a long-term residence. It’s only transitional, and will be closed down at some point not too far in the future.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “We’re all just passing through. I get it.”

I left then and made way for the next person waiting in line.

The tents of Femaville 29 were arranged along five main dirt avenues, each as wide as a city boulevard. Expressing the same ingenuity that had dubbed our whole encampment, the avenues were labeled A, B, C, D and E. Every three tents, a numbered cross-street occurred. The tents of one avenue backed up against the tents of the adjacent avenue, so that a cross-block was two tents wide. The land where Femaville 29 was pitched was flat and treeless and covered in newly mowed weeds and grasses. Beyond the borders of our village stretched a mix of forest, scrubby fields and swamp, eventually giving way to rolling hills. The nearest real town was about ten miles away, and there was no regular transportation there other than by foot.

As I walked up Avenue D toward my tent (D-30), I encountered dozens of my fellow refugees who were finished with the intake process. Only two days had passed since the majority of us had been ferried here in commandeered school buses. People—the adults, anyhow—were still busy exchanging their stories—thrilling, horrific or mundane—about how they had escaped the tsunami or dealt with the aftermath.

I didn’t have any interest in repeating my tale, so I didn’t join in any such conversations.

As for the children, they seemed mostly to have flexibly put behind them all the trauma they must have witnessed. Reveling in their present freedom from boring routine, they raced up and down the avenues in squealing packs.

Already, the seasonally withered grass of the avenues was becoming dusty ruts. Just days old, this temporary village, I could feel, was already beginning to lose its freshness and ambiance of novelty.

Under the unseasonably warm sun, I began to sweat. A cold beer would have tasted good right now. But the rules of Femaville 29 prohibited alcohol.

I reached my tent and went inside.

My randomly assigned roommate lay on his bunk. Given how the disaster had shattered and stirred the neighborhoods of the city, it was amazing that I actually knew the fellow from before. I had encountered no one else yet in the camp who was familiar to me. And out of all my old friends and acquaintances and co-workers, Ethan Duplessix would have been my last choice to be reunited with.

Ethan was a fat, bristled slob with a long criminal record of petty theft, fraud and advanced mopery. His personal grooming habits were so atrocious that he had emerged from the disaster more or less in the same condition he entered it, unlike the rest of the survivors who had gone from well-groomed to uncommonly bedraggled and smelly.

Ethan and I had crossed paths often, and I had locked him up more times than I could count. (When the tsunami struck, he had been amazingly free of outstanding charges.) But the new circumstances of our lives, including Ethan’s knowledge of how I had “retired” from the force, placed us now on a different footing.

“Hey, Hedges, how’d it go? They got you a new job yet? Maybe security guard at a kindergarten!”

I didn’t bother replying, but just flopped down on my bunk. Ethan chuckled meanly at his own paltry wit for a while, but when I didn’t respond, he eventually fell silent, his attentions taken up by a tattered copy of Maxim.

I closed my eyes and drowsed for a while, until I got hungry. Then I got up and went to the refectory.

That day they were serving hamburgers and fries for the third day in a row. Mickey Dee’s seemed to have gotten a lock on the contract to supply the camp. I took mine to an empty table. Head bowed, halfway through my meal, I sensed someone standing beside me.

The woman’s curly black hair descended to her shoulders in a tumbled mass. Her face resembled a cameo in its alabaster fineness.

“Mind if I sit here?” she said.

“Sure. I mean, go for it.”

The simple but primordial movements of her legs swinging over the bench seat and her ass settling down awakened emotions in me that had been absent since Calley’s abrupt leave-taking.

“Nia Horsley. Used to live over on Garden Parkway.”

“Nice district.”

Nia snorted, a surprisingly enjoyable sound. “Yeah, once.”

“I never got over there much. Worked in East Grove. Had an apartment on Oakeshott.”

“And what would the name on your doorbell have been?”

“Oh, sorry. Parrish Hedges.”

“Pleased to meet you, Parrish.”

We shook hands. Hers was small but strong, enshelled in mine like a pearl.

For the next two hours, through two more shifts of diners coming and going, we talked, exchanging condensed life stories, right up to the day of disaster and down to our arrival at Femaville 29. Maybe the accounts were edited for maximum appeal, but I intuitively felt she and I were being honest nonetheless. When the refectory workers finally shooed us out in order to clean up for supper, I felt as if I had known Nia for two weeks, two months, two years—

She must have felt the same. As we strolled away down Avenue B, she held my hand.

“I don’t have a roomie in my tent.”

“Oh?”

“It’s just me and my daughter. Luck of the draw, I guess.”

“I like kids. Never had any, but I like ’em.”

“Her name’s Izzy. Short for Isabel. You’ll get to meet her. But maybe not just yet.”

“How come?”

“She’s made a lot of new friends. They stay out all day, playing on the edge of the camp. Some kind of weird new game they invented.”

“We could go check up on her, and I could say hello.”

Nia squeezed my hand. “Maybe not right this minute.”

* * *

I got to meet Izzy the day after Nia and I slept together. I suppose I could’ve hung around till Izzy came home for supper, but the intimacy with Nia, after such a desert of personal isolation, left me feeling a little disoriented and pressured. So I made a polite excuse for my departure, which Nia accepted with good grace, and arranged to meet mother and daughter for breakfast.

Izzy bounced into the refectory ahead of her mother. She was seven or eight, long-limbed and fair-haired in contrast to her mother’s compact, raven-haired paleness, but sharing Nia’s high-cheeked bone structure. I conjectured backward to a gangly blond father.

The little girl zeroed in on me somehow out of the whole busy dining hall, racing up to where I sat, only to slam on the brakes with alarming precipitateness.

“You’re Mr. Hedges!” she informed me and the world.

“Yes, I am. And you’re Izzy.”

I was ready to shake her hand in a formal adult manner. But then she exclaimed, “You made my Mom all smiley!” and launched herself into my awkward embrace.

Before I could really respond, she was gone, heading for the self-service cereal line.

I looked at Nia, who was grinning.

“And this,” I asked, “is her baseline?”

“Precisely. When she’s really excited—”

“I’ll wear one of those padded suits we used for training the K-9 squad.”

Nia’s expression altered to one of seriousness and sympathy, and I instantly knew what was coming. I cringed inside, if not where it showed. She sat down next to me and put a hand on my arm.

“Parrish, I admit I did a little googling on you after we split yesterday, over at the online tent. I know about why you aren’t a cop anymore. And I just want to say that— “