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t had rained in the city for over three hundred days. One morning it stopped, and that was the first time I saw him.
I was walking to a café on my block, turning my face upward to let the sun’s warm rays bathe me. The cynical chambers of my brain were still reluctant to accept that the change could be permanent—perhaps even real. It could have been that I had finally buckled under the strain of endless downpour and gray clouds, and had conjured a dreamscape for myself. But the warmth and brightness felt too real to be memories, and the faces of the people who thronged in the streets left no room for doubt. No, after nearly a year of rain, we were celebrating beneath a cloudless blue sky.
Halfway between my apartment and the café lay a vacant lot. It was unfenced, and weeds had long ago proliferated over every inch of its surface, creating the impression of a miniature grassy park lodged between two brick buildings.
It was there that I saw him. At first I thought he was a child; a boy wearing a panama hat and a tattered brown overcoat too large for his build. He was seated on the lot’s verdant carpet with his back to the street, his legs folded beneath him as though he were a yogi. Maybe it was the warmth that impelled me to friendliness and curiosity, or perhaps something about his serene posture that hinted to me of secrets. Whatever drew me, I inched my way into the lot, not wanting to disturb him. As I stepped around his side, I realized that he was not a child: his face was little more than a pale, shriveled lump, turned upward, so that his adam’s apple protruded like a bent knee. A few strands of wispy white hair, as fine as a baby’s, flowed from beneath his hat. Atop his enormous hooked nose was perched a pair of protective sunglasses; thus I was unable to tell if he was looking at me when he spoke.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he asked without turning his head.
“You can say that again,” I replied.
He made no attempt at further conversation. After a minute or so of silence, I felt my stomach rumble, reminding me of my original errand. Before I turned to go, I phrased my question as politely as I could: “Are you—watching for something?”
“No,” he said with a grim smile, “I can see it all just fine.”
I craned my neck, but saw nothing more than the expanse of sky, framed by stained brick. When the man offered no further explanation, I quietly took my leave with a roll of my eyes.
“Look,” he said as I turned my back to him. “Can you not see?”
I told him of the mundane sights I perceived.
“Then all the better for you,” he said, smiling.
My stomach groaned again, and this time I departed before the fellow could offer any further inscrutable musings. |
For the first week of sun, the entire city seemed to rejoice. It was as though the golden light bathed us not only with warmth but with goodwill and patience. In the streets, where I had become so accustomed to the shouting and jostling of myriad black rain-slickers, pedestrians made way for one another, and acquaintances actually paused on the sidewalk for a chat. I dined at outdoor tables, and sketched scenes in the park. I felt what all of us must have felt, though I may be a bit more romantic than most: that our city had been lifted from the second circle of Dante’s Hell, and hung within the spheres of Paradise.
As the months passed, however, rumors began to circulate. The lakes and reservoirs had begun to dry up, it was said, and the state parks were becoming unusually prone to brushfires. Even so, most of us rejected such negativity. We remembered all too well the miseries of the previous year, and knew that anything was preferable to those gloomy days and nights.
On days when I had little to do, I would return to the weed-filled lot on my block, and stand with the old man for a time. He was always seated in the same posture, always clad in the same coat and hat. I began to believe that he never left this spot; that he had found it to his liking, settled down, and found some way to soak nutrition from the plants themselves. Such an idea was absurd, of course, but despite his evident poverty, I never saw him panhandling—or even eating or sleeping, for that matter. He was always there when I arrived, and we always had the same conversation:
“Look. Can you see?”
“See what? I can’t see anything but the sky and the buildings.”
“So much the better for you, then.” And he would smile without humor, and sometimes I would chuckle at his strange mantras. |
The day of the accident, I labored under an uncharacteristic melancholy. Though the sun shone as brightly as it had for the past six months, I awoke with a headache, and my veins seemed uninterested in moving my blood about. I washed and dressed as usual, and proceeded into the street, harboring vague hopes that a steaming cup of Earl Grey might lift my spirits.
Whether my melancholy made me less alert, I do not know. I know only that the automobile seemed to spring from nowhere, and the next sensation was of air rushing past my face, followed by the crunch of my ribs against hard, dry asphalt. I saw concerned faces, hovering in a circle in the air above my face, muttering amateur diagnoses. Then colors danced at the edges of my vision, and they became shadows which swarmed over my eyes. |
I awoke in the middle of a sunshower. I was in a hospital bed, my right arm in a sling. I tried to sit up, but an earthquake of pain in my side nearly stole my sight again. The rain was hardly a trickle, and the light still shone brightly through my window, but the steady patter of tiny drops on the glass brought my depression back with a rush.
I lay still, watching rain streak the window, and thought I discerned dim figures somehow woven throughout the droplets. It must be my imagination, I decided; the accident must have traumatized my senses.
Sleep came for me before I could form further thoughts. |
The days passed with a comforting rhythm: breakfast at eight, gentle exercises in the morning, lunch at noon, reading in the afternoon, supper at five, more reading, then sleep. Nurses attended my every need, doctors checked in a few times a day, and through it all, the sunshower, continuous now, formed a constant backdrop of dull white noise.
And with each passing day, I became ever more sure of the reality of those ephemeral forms. Yet they always danced just beyond the edges of my vision, mocking my attempts to discern their nature.
On the morning I was given crutches, I decided to leave the hospital. If the rain would begin again soon, I reasoned, I ought to soak up the last dregs of sunlight while I could. The doctors pleaded with me to stay for just another week, but at last they persuaded me to agree to weekly sessions with a physical therapist, which would be conducted on an outpatient basis. Warning me to be careful on the slippery sidewalks, they provided me with an umbrella and showed me to the door.
On my way home, I stopped at the lot. The old man was in his habitual place and position, but I noticed something different about him. He was shivering, though the shower was scarcely a drizzle—hardly intense enough for him to catch cold.
I hopped to his side, trying to hold my umbrella and crutches at the same time. I slipped on the soaked weeds and nearly took a fall, but I recovered just in time to avoid bludgeoning him with a crutch.
Then I saw why he was shaking: tears streamed down his face, his mouth clenched in a miserable grimace. With each breath, he shook with sobs, and I felt my own eyes becoming moist as his weeping fueled my melancholy.
“Why are you crying?” I asked.
“Because I am old,” he said. “I am weak. I cannot hold them forever.”
It was the first time either of us had diverged from our usual exchange. A thought occurred to me; an idea so mad that I would never dreamt of speaking it aloud. But here in the vacant lot, it was only me and the old man, and I sensed that nothing I could say would seem particularly strange to him. So I asked.
“You’re doing it, aren’t you? You’ve been holding back the rain, but now you’re growing tired.”
“I’ve been holding back many things, and holding others close.”
He stated this as calmly as if he’d been explaining what he had eaten for breakfast.
“What about before?” I asked. “What about the rain?”
“I was not here then,” he said, as though this explained everything. “I am here not, but I will not be here much longer.”
“Who are you?”
“I am the Levee.”
And he returned to his weeping.
“I—I had an accident,” I stammered. “And I’ve—I think I’ve been seeing—”
He continued to cry quietly, and for some time I thought he would make no answer. But at last he nodded, and raised one hand to the sky.
“So your eyes begin to know,” he said, wiping tears from his cheeks. “I ask you: what can you see now?”
I opened my mouth to make my usual reply, but as I gazed up into the sky, the words caught in my throat. For I did see. In the sky above us, storm clouds swirled: great mats of stratus topped by raging thunderheads, filled to bursting with torrents of rain and hail. My sadness erupted at this sight, and then I saw what was behind those clouds: a legion of spirits innumerable, the cast of Doré’s nightmare visions, swirling like a celestial hurricane as they tore the skies with their shrieks of agony and rage. Circle after circle they ascended, though I sensed that I was looking into a deep pit as much as into the heavens. With each new depth I felt my horror and sadness increase, until I was weeping frantically, unable to tear my eyes from the lunatic scene above me.
And then, above this crowd of tormented souls, at the very bottom of that black celestial pit, I saw what was behind them, driving them onward with tentacled whips, bellowing to them with its mouths, devouring our sun and our light, and the light of the million other worlds to which it somehow also reached. Its body lay everywhere; its appendages manifold; its hunger insatiable. My weeping turned to screams, and I tore my eyes from the infernal vision.
But the demons—or souls—leaked through, I saw, as they must have been for weeks now. Several were clutching my breast and arms, moaning as they sank their ephemeral teeth into my flesh. In the street they preyed upon the old and the weak, stealing what they could, tormenting those whose spirits resisted. They fell with the rain, and as I watched, the clouds rumbled and poured, snatching at the hair of women, clawing at the faces of men, a maddening panoply of invisible harpies and wraiths. The rain poured now, soaking the streets and filling the gutters. Water swirled around the tips of my crutches, and I knew I had to reach my apartment. Sobbing without restraint or care, I turned to go.
I offered a word of farewell to the old man, but when he made no answer, I glanced down at him. He was no longer sitting in his lotus position, and his form no longer trembled. The flood flowed unchecked into his nostrils and mouth, and he did not cough.
I fell to my knees, heedless of the pain in my side or the rains which soaked my clothes, and mourned the death of the old man. |
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