I tried my mom again and got no answer. I went to bed still uncertain about what I should do.
“This mess is someone’s fault, I’ll tell you that.”
I woke to Fred’s voice integrating into my dream, and in the haze of sleep I thought he was talking about the floods, and he was. Just not the ones in America.
“So who do we call about getting out of here then?” A pause. “Well, I’m not going back downstairs with a literal tide of shit on the floor of the hotel, excuse my French.” Another pause. “No, what I’d like is that you people prepare for events like this, and if you can’t do that, at least comp us a night someplace that has its sewage issues under control. Christ, I thought this was the best hotel in the city.” He hung up.
“What happened?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
“The whole first floor is flooded and smells like a toilet exploded.” He put his hands on his hips and stared at the corner of the room as if an answer would emanate from that intersection of molding. He looked on the verge of tears. “We’ll have to either stay in the room all day or actually walk through it.”
I wasn’t much for signs from the universe, but this sent a stitch of crimson dread through me. As if the waters from home had come and found me. “We need to leave anyway. I think I need to go see my mom, Fred.”
“Why?”
“These storms back home. Allie can’t get a hold of her. I was up all night.”
“So send someone to check on her! I’ll pay for it.”
“No, I can’t. I can’t explain. I just need to go home and be with her.”
He looked at me, his handsome face despondent. I loved him for how much he wanted us to stay.
“You know I have to go to Hong Kong.”
“You take the jet. I’ll book something.”
He took my hand and kissed it. “Why is it every time you leave me, I feel this pain. Like I’m never going to see you again. It scares me every time.”
I’d brought no sensible shoes. We were given complimentary galoshes by the hotel, and they put our bags on an elevated luggage rack. Still, we had to wade through the hotel’s muck-drenched interior and into the street. I held my breath the whole way, gagging when the stench slipped into my nostrils. I asked if there’d been a storm, but the bag man said it was simply acqua alta: a king tide. The moon brought an exceptionally high spring tide, and the lagoon came rushing in to claim the city. In the streets, water bubbled out of cracks in the stones and storm drains. We slogged away, the murky water waist-deep, and yet no one else in the streets seemed particularly concerned. They all wore waders and struggled against the water like it was second nature. A group of small girls paddled by in a tiny boat, slapping the water with red plastic oars and shouting at each other in Italian. Only now could I see the way the water marked a line on all the buildings, the plaster and Istrian stone eroding below a certain height. It was not like I’d been unaware that Venice was dealing with flooding issues, but I hadn’t realized the water was spilling into hotel lobbies.
I managed a first-class ticket to Chicago, but there was only a coach seat to Frankfurt. It had been two years since I’d flown on a commercial airliner, and I’d forgotten all the minor indignities. The scramble to claim overhead baggage space, the way you warred for the armrest with your seatmate, the disappointing entertainment options, the constant chirp and squawk of some child. I dozed on and off, and when I woke, I called Allie to say I was on my way to get Mom and take her to my condo.
In Chicago, I hired a car, but it came with a human driver. There was too much debris on the roads, he informed me, and traffic was logjammed. Bridges had fallen, roads were impassable, people had fled to high ground from anywhere with a floodplain. Driving southwest from O’Hare, trash coated the highway, washed down from overflowing sewer drains that had discharged the excess water after the Chicago Deep Tunnel had reached its limit. Sewage had spilled into Lake Michigan in volumes never before conceived by city planners, and now the whole population was scouring supermarkets for bottled water. Garbage collected at storm drains and was strewn across sidewalks: diapers, plastic bottles, traffic cones, children’s toys, lawn chairs, aluminum siding, driftwood, water-logged paperbacks, and for some reason dozens of plastic baby doll heads bobbed along in the restless roadside rivers, staring dead-eyed wherever they pointed.
“I’ve been out of the country,” I explained. “How long has this been going on?”
“Worst was last week.” The driver was old and South Side, his accent dripping with loyalty to the White Sox. “It’s better now. Last Friday the streets were all waist-deep.”
“Jesus.”
“Randall’s just flying around the country declaring disaster areas here, disaster areas there. Whole states are underwater.” He paused, then asked, “Who you voting for?”
Shocked by his forthrightness with a customer, I stammered, “Whoever gets the Democrat nomination. Formisano or Love.”
“Good. As long as you’re not for that nutjob Braden. I’m afraid she’s Trump all over again. But times a million. And we can’t do another four years of that useless shithead Randall.”
Put off by his vulgarity, I nodded and took out my phone, hoping a dome of etiquette would descend. We were quiet for the rest of the ride. I couldn’t stop watching videos.
An entire McMansion, intact, carried down a river along with the basketball hoop attached to the garage. A sinkhole in a major highway with the rear ends of two cars jutting out. A man clutching a rope in a strong current, trying to pull himself to safety as rescuers urged him on, only to tire, give up, and let go.
The sun broke through the low clouds, and we drove by sight after sight, harrowing and spectacular: An SUV flipped on its head on the lawn of a half-collapsed home, outer walls ripped away, exposing soggy pink insulation. Trees bisecting roofs, crushing whole homes, pulverizing cars that had remained right-side up. Near the Illinois-Iowa border, traffic slowed to a crawl as the highway narrowed to one lane. I could see where the high-water mark had carried vehicles, chewed through foundations, cracked and cratered asphalt roads, and dragged entire buildings into rubble. A couch had beached itself on top of a gas station like it was just waiting for a family to jam into its moldy leather and start watching TV. Coming upon the Mississippi, which I’d seen from this vantage point only a few weeks earlier, I couldn’t believe my eyes.