“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” said my driver as if he’d already seen this.
The Mississippi looked like an ocean. Muddy, viscous, and frothing. Normally the river was hundreds of feet below the bridge, but now it must have been only a few dozen. Weeks ago I’d seen it crawling up the banks, but the water had now swallowed the floodplain, and I could see the tops of those riverbank homes nearly submerged, the white steepled tips the only evidence of roofs. On the Illinois side, there’d been a gas station beneath the bridge, and it had vanished under the raging murk. Treetops emerging from the water had collected debris, driftwood, and plastic, including a blue and yellow inflatable raft. I tried not to let my dread grow—our house wasn’t even that close to the floodplain—but I tried my mom again. Still no answer.
On Route 64, maybe five miles outside Amber, we finally arrived at a roadblock where a state trooper in a plastic-bagged hat stopped us. He approached the window, and my dread swelled.
“Can’t go past here,” he told the driver. “We got floodwaters from the Waps River still receding.”
“Officer, my mother’s at home, and I haven’t been able to get a hold of her.”
“She didn’t evacuate?”
“I don’t know. But if she’s hurt or didn’t get out… I don’t know what to do.”
He looked around. He was the only one out on this lonely stretch of road, waiting for the opportunity to warn people of danger. He looked like every kid I’d ever grown up with, white and ruddy and heavy in the face. “What’s the address?”
I gave it to him. “It’s really only about five miles from here.”
“Okay. But promise me: Do not drive through any high water. Turn around. It’s not worth your life.”
I thanked him, and my driver, reluctantly, put the car in drive and eased around the roadblock. Crunching over leaves, branches, and smaller fallen limbs, we passed through this familiar route of my childhood, roadside trees chewed, battered, and torn from the ground with clotted dirt clutching the roots.
My house came into view, the yard flooded. But the beat-up Explorer my mom had been driving for the better part of the last decade was still in the driveway, and I couldn’t tell if it had been caught in the flood.
“Will you wait here?” I asked the driver.
“Supposed to be back in the city tonight.” He craned his neck to look back at me. “What’s the plan?”
“I’ll pay you to wait. If my mom’s here, we’ll just grab her things and take her back to the city with us.”
“And if she ain’t?”
I unbuckled my seat belt, done with his brusque shtick. “We’ll figure that out.”
I splashed into the driveway, water lapping at my boots, dark chestnut Ainsley Chelseas I’d bought in the Frankfurt airport, soon to be ruined. I texted Allie: Hey, just got here. I think Mom stayed. The water made soft gurgling sounds with each step. I almost stopped to fix the mailbox with our house number and SHIPMAN FAMILY FARM still on the side, but I left it. I was so exhausted, jet-lagged, and put off by my surly lib driver, I imagined going up to my old room and lying down on the guest bed.
Squishing through the muck, I reached the front steps. The water was right up against the house, deeper than it had looked, sloshing against the door. It was locked. I rang the bell, which I heard echoing inside. I called for my mom but got no reply. I unscrewed the outside light fixture and fished out the key my parents had always kept taped to the inside lip of the dome.
The first floor had almost a foot of water, some of it rushing out past my ankles as I stepped inside. Even as I thought about all the rot and damage this flooding would inflict on the structure of a home over a hundred years old, the smell hit me: a putrid, sewage stench. Exponentially more potent than Venice. I gripped my mouth and nose. I tried to breathe the scent of my palm as I called for my mom.
It had taken her almost no time to turn the place into a dump again. Though the flooding was what mattered, the dishes in the sink and the general chaos of fast-food wrappers had reasserted itself since my visit. There were pebbled splashes as water dripped from the ceiling.
“Mom!” I shouted. Then I saw her phone on the dining room table and slogged over to it, trying not to think of why this water stank so badly. The phone was dead. It made more sense now. A neighbor or someone from her church had come to get her when the flooding began and she’d simply forgotten her phone. Of course, she wouldn’t just know my number or Allie’s off the top of her head. Now it was only a matter of tracking her down. First, I had to get to town, though. Find out where people had evacuated to. I decided that as long as Mom’s car was still running, I’d tell the driver to head back, and I’d stay in a hotel until I found her.
This meant finding the keys to the Explorer and hoping the water hadn’t gotten to the engine. My parents always tossed them atop the bureau in the living room, and this is where I found them now—sitting on a white legal pad with what looked like a note. Overcome by relief, I splashed over to it.
It certainly was a note, written in her stunted, boxy handwriting. But it made no sense.
THE FLOORS WET
Was all it said.
I flipped to the next page looking for more. All she’d written was “the floors wet”? I tried to concoct a scenario that made sense, but my imagination struggled to piece it together. Who was this stupid complaint even for?
That drip again. Close by. The stairs of our house ascended to a loft-like hallway that led to all the second-floor bedrooms. As kids, Allie and I had spied on our parents whenever they had company, sneaking from our rooms to the banister, staying low, giggling at each other to be quiet. This was what I was thinking of as my eyes traveled up, first lighting on that one missing spindle, and then on my mother, hanging by her neck from an electrical cord secured around the banister where her daughters had once whispered.
At first, I just stared as my brain tried to make sense of it, and stupidly, I wondered if my mom had decided to play an extremely elaborate prank. The contortions our minds will attempt in order to tell us that what we are seeing is not real.
But no. It was my mom, wearing a soiled nightgown, her face a bloated blue-purple, her dry tongue lolling out of her mouth, red-veined eyes bulging, flies on her face. Her fingers pointed straight at the floor like she was trying to shoot lightning from the tips. The dripping was coming from beneath her nightgown, her fluids slowly draining into the water.
And still my shock was so total that I couldn’t process what I was looking at or what had happened. My brain continued to swipe through explanatory scenarios, anything to render this moment inert and commonplace. I almost even said something to her, something along the lines of “That’s not funny.”
Then I gagged and fell down, backward onto my butt, so that the cold, reeking water swallowed me to my stomach. I turned my head and vomited, the reflex taking over, and I gagged again and again until my stomach ached, and after it was over, for a long time, I wanted to scream, but I could only sit there, my breath gone, bile coating my jaw, staring up at my mother’s body, quietly dripping, distended eyes staring at nothing and everything. The house was quiet except for the sound of water. How very many mystifying noises still water can make.
E
XECUTIVE
S
UMMARY ON
E
LECTION
2032
PRESENTATION CONFIDENTIAL: DO NOT DISTRIBUTE
EYES ONLY: REPRESENTATIVE TRACY AAMANZAIHOU
Ashir al-Hasan
October 15, 2032
Destroy Document After Reading
Abstract: With two and a half months and an election still to go, 2032 has been a challenging year, personally and for our country. In many respects, it reminds me of 2020 when a rancorous presidential contest collided with exogenous emergencies that had the trappings of a waking nightmare. When I agreed to establish a back channel with you from my position at the Global Change Research Program, it was because I believed you to be one of the only elected officials still speaking with urgency on the climate issue and who understood that the Pollution Reduction, Infrastructure, and Research Act was a deeply flawed and counterproductive piece of legislation, even as I harbor concern for how often you request input on topics far outside my purview. However, I’ve become radicalized in the sense that politics have now infested the government’s scientific agencies so thoroughly that we must essentially advocate for the continued existence of sound science and the policy it demands as this global emergency barrels forward. What follows here, I fear, will be less than helpful, and will cover the major domestic events of 2032 and their impact on an increasingly chaotic and unhinged political race that is fracturing as never before an already anomic American polity. In some sense, this will read as a treatise of my greatest fears about this moment, and concludes with a clandestine conference this September, which, I beg you, must remain ensconced in secrecy.