Extract from West

Anna’s favourite subject is ghost towns. They are just sitting there, abandoned, she says. No one is living in them anymore. No one is paying them attention. When they were populated, they had a story, but once the residents left, the narrative vanished. You can’t tell what their story is just by looking at them, she tells Rae.

Anna is also interested in the Oregon Trail. The trail is being swallowed up by agriculture. Soon, there won’t be any trace of it left. If we lose that history, we won’t remember how we once raced across the country, shaping and devouring it, how greedy we are. In the photographs she has taken, wagon swales show by way of static scenes the image of movement, as if the pioneers are travelling now.  

Anna’s first photograph of Rae reveals a surprised and pale face, not her mother’s, not even her father’s, Rae realises, as if she has just appeared from nowhere. 

Rae doesn’t say much that first time. Anna speaks enough for both of them. When Anna invites Rae back to her place, Rae accepts. She follows Anna home through Brooklyn. They reach  Anna’s red door. They climb the stairs. Anna’s brown walls. Anna points to a door on the landing.

       Film makers. Jack and Jin, she says. They’ve been making a western for eight years. 

       Rae presses her ear to the door. She hears gunshots, horses’ hooves, laughter. 

       Red Hook was once called the Wild West of New York. 

       It’s lawless round here, Rae says.

       It’s cheap, Anna says.

       For now, Rae says.

Anna’s apartment is small and white. On the floor a futon mattress is folded as a couch. Anna’s walls are covered with writing. 

                   The list, Anna says. All the things I will do. 

                   Rae runs her hand across the uneven plaster. She traces her fingers over a map of New York. 

       Here, Anna says, handing her a pen. Want to write your own name and score it through?

       Why? Am I done? Rae says.

The hiker begins in Missouri, where pioneers landed on the banks of that great river and made the slow steep climb up the hill to a place where, at the present time, a cement factory stands. The verdant banks that line the road and the bright blue sky disguise the hardships that lay in wait for him. 

The city is a grid. A grid is a mark. A grid can repeat its pattern infinitely. A grid teaches you about straight lines. A grid can give you direction. You can turn north, south, east or west.

On the morning when Rae announced to her mother that she was moving to New York City, her mother tried to act like she wasn’t surprised, but Rae caught a gasp coming from her mouth. 

When Rae arrived, she went straight to Greenwich Village, where the urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to live. Jacobs said imagination came from not being able to see around corners. She said dreaming could be done in the cornicing of aging ceilings and in decorations created by lives lived before yours.

Rae works in a supermarket. Her favourite task is replenishment. She pulls the cans to the precipice of the shelves, imagining they are about to fall. She wipes the vegetables clean and lays them in the beds of artificial grass. On her breaks, she listens to the truck drivers speak to the stock boys of all the things they’ve seen whilst driving through the corn and soybean crops of the Midwest, but when they talk directly to her, they do so thinking she has no inner life.

Rae gets a job at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. But it turns out she isn’t a good guide. She can never fill the time. Her narrative style is flat and staccato. The visitors’ faces stare back at her, waiting for something she cannot give. Their bright holiday clothes seem out of place. Her boss says she is. 

The director of the museum discovered the building by accident after stopping to use the bathroom at the store on the ground floor. She found in its backrooms layers of wallpaper not stripped for fifty years, just added to. A shithole, the shopkeeper said. A paradise, the director said.

Rae’s favourite part of the house is the main staircase where one wallpaper blends into the next and where the wooden balustrade is faded from the touch of so many hands. 

Rae gets a job in the bookstore below Anna’s apartment. The store is called Once Upon a Time. Here, fiction is shelved next to non-fiction because whatever you write down eventually becomes a story, or a story, once it is written, becomes the truth.

Rae watches young men and women cross to the café opposite the store with their laptops and designer bags. These aren’t the sort of people to walk across country, suffer the storms and hard ground, nurse blisters, contemplate themselves in silence as if contemplating death. They would probably say something like, ‘The city is my wilderness’.

There is much to say about the know-it-alls who have spent the winter reading pioneer journals, wondering if they themselves have the same commitment and pluck to venture west. Chances are if you are going to find anyone setting out from this spot, it will be a man. 

In the books, Rae reads:

Always pack a water pump and filter, a good tent, warm clothing in case the weather turns, GPS if available, though this is not the old way. 

Buffalo Bill Cody used real Native Americans in his shows to enact the very battles in which their families died.

In the Primary Source section are journals, maps, print on demand accounts of navigating the Colorado River, political accounts of movements in Congress, Civil Rights and Reconstruction, signs and significances of the Vietnam War. Books about 9/11, but Rae supposes this too is now history. 

The hiker watches his wife drive away. He will not see her for four months, not until November, in Oregon, two-thousand miles away, at the very spot where the trail is said to have ended. He will walk the original trail. He wants to see exactly what they saw. He will do so alone, while the pioneers travelled in teams. 

Rae moves in with Anna. Jack and Jin help her carry her books up the stairs.

                   Are you a writer? they ask. 

                   She’s a writer, Anna says.

                   A screenwriter? Jack asks.

                   Not any kind, Rae says.         

Anna tells Rae to start at the beginning.

Lakewood, California, then.

The city of Lakewood is built on a grid. Tract housing built for blue-collar workers fresh from the war who wanted to live a peaceful, prosperous life. Before that, the land was agricultural. Before that, it was wild.

Before the houses were built, the ground was levelled and marked like a chequerboard, a game.

Rae’s father grew up in a two-bedroom, one-story house with a small front yard and a sycamore tree. Three doors down from the county doctor. A block from the firehouse. A mile away from the local school. Half a mile away from the ball field. When the trees outside people’s houses sickened, someone from city hall came and planted another. 

                   When I was nine, I moved away to Oregon with my mom, Rae says.

                   Which is also where the pioneers went, Anna says.

At a book launch in the city, Anna tells a literary agent that they are working on a hybrid text with independent photographs and paragraphs. The agent says it will be expensive to produce and the reader will feel disconnected, moving from one paragraph to another as if stepping over a void. 

Rae’s grandfather was always talking about connections. He was an electrician. Disconnected wires have no function. If a wire is damaged, nothing will happen. Corrosion occurs over time. To repair the damage, you first need to know where the corrosion is. If you repair the damage, a current will run unhindered down the wire. 

A narrative works in the similar way except the imagination can jump over white space and does not need tightly coiled material to pass along. 

Rae tells the agent that when planners originally conceived of Lakewood, they made no provisions for a cemetery, as if the residents would never die. 

                   The agent blinks but says nothing, having slipped into a void.

He takes a moment to orientate himself. He straightens his hat and shirt. Before him is a baby carriage loaded with a backpack, tent, food and water. There is no commemoration stone, no fanfare. The enthusiasm is entirely his own. 

When Rae’s grandfather lies dying in hospital, Rae asks the nurse if anyone has visited him. His son, for instance. My father, I mean. No one has come, the nurse says.

There is a Wild West town near Cody, Wyoming, that is meant to look like it has been abandoned. Grass grows over rusting ploughs and wooden walkways, distorting them. The town’s homepage is written in Wild West script. You see a view of the town through swinging saloon doors. 

The town was assembled from the remnants of ghost towns spread across the state. As such, it was never a real town. Only made to look like one. A town where the boardwalk has always been silent, except for the footsteps of tourists coming in the Spring or Fall.

A church was built high on the bluff. Closer to God. Away from the floods. Skeletons of cattle rustlers, sheriffs, and small-town thieves were imported from other places. Their bones were delivered like lumber. 

A cowboy’s relationship with a town is complicated. His reluctance to settle and be happy there shows that he doesn’t really want a family. 

Rae’s father’s absence from home did not always mean a lack because, as with the bare earth that supports growth as soon as you remove a weed, something else grew instantly in his place, requiring her attention.   

In Rae’s home, the decay was rapid and irreparable. Cracks spread in all directions. The foundations were weak and water-logged. The roof was not weather-proof. It had no caretaker, no supervisor. The boss remained permanently absent.  

History was not a problem for Buffalo Bill Cody. It was surely all a matter of how it was presented, in what order and in what style. He had a bombastic understanding of drama and action and an instinct for what an audience wanted to see. 

Rae waits for her father at the funeral home. She waits for an hour.

Rae drives past where orange groves once grew, then north to where she used to live. The living room and the bedroom lights of the bungalow are on, but her mother isn’t there. 

Her mother was an activist. She took on all the causes she could find. Saving indigenous land in Yosemite. Stopping nuclear testing in Nevada. She had seen terrible things. Great oceans thick with oil, bomb blast craters in the desert, indigenous camps flattened by tanks, open cast mines, scraped out valleys, polluted rivers and reservoirs. The world was more interesting than her daughter. Its saving more urgent.

She once told Rae that she could not face having another child. Not another. Not again. She could not go through that again, she said. They took you from me, she said. They cut you out. This was always what she said. 

Rae finds a motel on the freeway called Destination. She texts Anna.

                   I’ve reached my Destination.

                   Laugh emoji.

His wife, returning to Washington State, where she lives with the hiker, is dreaming of an empty house. The hiker will push his belongings in a baby carriage, all the way to Oregon, he says, and yet when his actual babies were young he didn’t lift a finger. No doubt he will tell all he meets that the stroller he is pushing is the one in which he pushed his own children. They are now fully grown and live far away. 

She returns to find he has left posted on the refrigerator the web address of the site to which he will upload photographs and videos of his journey. She knows she will not look at this. If they are going to be historically accurate about this, she must pretend she will never see him again. 

On the bus from JFK, Rae dozes and her father asks, Are you going to work in a bookstore all your life?

She gets off the bus and walks. The East River is swollen; the choppy line of its tide buckles with detritus. 

She passes sodden couches on the sidewalk, storm drains plugged with shopping carts, trash bags filled with electrical appliances. The air smells of gasoline. She doesn’t want to think about how much of the insides of things are now outside.

Rae and Anna walk five blocks to find an open store. Freezers stand without power. Signs read Sale. All must go! Rae picks up a box of frozen fish. She and Anna know nothing of survival. They pass Gristedes where Rae used to work. Her role greeting customers at the entrance has been replaced with an animatronic cow. Cows suggest freshness, nature, but cattle are intensively farmed. Calves are stolen from their mothers. Machines are hooked onto their titties and made to suck them dry. 

They find Jack at Sunny’s.

       Where have you been? Jack says.

                   My Grandpa died, Rae says. 

                   Leave you anything?

       DNA.         

       You had that already.

       She takes a glass.         

       Paul's been looking for you, Jack says. 

       I’m grieving, Rae says.

       He’ll lose it. Then you’ll lose it, Jack says.

       I’ve told her that, Anna says.  

       Jin appears in the doorway. 

       Do you know anywhere in California where a stampede can pass through, Rae? he says.

       Rodeo Drive, Rae says.

They watch the film on Jin’s laptop. A jeep bombs through the desert, its hood dusted and sun-faded. Jack in the driver’s seat smiles at the camera and gives an awkward wave. A panning shot across the desert, the rustle of the wind across the speakers. Flat and sparse desert, the contours of hills in the distance, desert ridges and rocky outcrops. The camera pans in. Jack says, Imagine a cowboy riding into the distance. Sunrise or sunset, it doesn’t matter, providing the shadows are long. 

Rae walks home through the cemetery. The gravestones are the same as they were before. She realizes she could just choose a person at random and love them. Her favourite angel’s wings are sullen and limp, but they were designed that way.

The hiker walks along the quiet road to Independence. Black clouds hang above his head, but he feels full of promise. With a full belly and energy in his legs he could be half the age he is.

Rae helps Paul lay new flooring, build a reading nook, construct a mock fireplace. 

       We are pioneers, he says.

Rae starts dating a Mormon. They roam the city. They never go up the towers. Rae doesn’t want to see anything from up high. The Mormon is an artist and activist. His causes are the same as her mother’s were. After protesting in Battery Park, he’ll be moving west. That’s where the greatest battles are. The Mormon has Clint Eastwood posters on his bedroom wall. Clint Eastwood wants to be seen to look after women in stories, but the women themselves aren’t free. He always looks after the Wild West towns. 

Rae enjoys the physical comfort the Mormon gives her. His golden crucifix swings against her cheek. For the hours they are together she feels certain, then the feeling fades. She tells him about the Wild West town. He tells her about the exodus of Mormons, pushed further and further west. She falls asleep with the vision of wagons pulling families into a void. 

Anna is asking Rae questions for their book. It will form part of the introduction. It will show people who they really are.

                   Rae tells her that the climate dangers in California don’t make you feel afraid, as you would imagine; they make you brave.

The owner of the bodega across the street knocks the awning with a broom to make the water fall. 

Women pioneers didn’t intend their journals to be published. They just wrote what happened to them. The fact that these books are available to read is because someone later decided their experiences were important.

Once the bookstore is fully renovated, Paul looks at Rae as if he doesn’t know who she is, and says, What’s a history major doing working in a fucking bookstore?

Paul opens the store late for a party. Rae hands out beer at the door. The store fills with the young and recently moved to Brooklyn. Rae can’t help but hear what they say. You work in a bookstore? How cute. They list pros and cons of Brooklyn. They joke about what will happen to them during the next storm. The cops who come to tell them to turn the music down stay for a beer. Someone takes a piss in the new wood stove.

The beginning of the Oregon Trail is commemorated with a squat, small stone on the edge of a parking lot. This doesn’t say much about beginnings, about how dramatic things start. 

When a strange feeling comes over Rae, she takes a test in the bookstore’s bathroom. A blue line emerges as if marking the beginning of a race. 

During the Oklahoma Run, fifty thousand people lined up in wagons and on horses and raced forward at the gun through dusty unclaimed land. 

The Mormon will surely take the news badly, for there isn’t anything worse in making a man feel trapped than the expectation of a child. 

Besides, he has gone west.

       Rae texts Anna.

       P.O.S.I.T.I.V.E. Exclamation marks. 

       The eyes of the emojis that reply are throbbing hearts. 

Rae wraps the wand in tissue and places it in the trash as carefully as a baby. She pulls her panties up. The register bell is ringing. A man wants to buy Silent Spring. She points to the rain falling outside.

                   It’s all connected, she says.

Pregnancy is a trail that began before she knew it did.

Anyone looking at him will see a middle aged man pushing a baby carriage that’s packed with supplies. They will perhaps wonder where the child is, who the child was, and whether the child is dead, and whether he is making this journey in honour of the dead child. 

Now, when Rae closes her eyes, her head swims, the room tumbles, and she falls into darkness. She sits on her bed. She lays down. She touches the wall’s rough plaster. She wants her mother.

She thinks of the Wild West town. 

It was common practice to pose corpses before taking their photograph during the American Civil War. It isn’t enough to show someone what someone is. You must try to convince them.

The baby has no face, no limbs. Then buds and a pure white spine. Blue rivulets of veins. Bead black eyes and a tail. Button nose. Its skull, malleable, unfused, growing. Somewhere inside, a consciousness too. It is the size of a grain of rice, and then a tadpole, shrimp, newborn pup. Development does not go back. Each stage is progression. 

Rae can’t cope with story. She watches fragments on TV: advertisements, game shows, documentaries – Nazis, the environment, pioneers. The historical re-enactments look fake. 

At the hospital, a doctor instructs a nurse to position sticky pads onto Rae’s shoulders and chest. The nurse asks the doctor many times whether she is putting the pads in the right place.

       Just look at the pictogram, the doctor says.

       But the nurse keeps saying, Here? Here?

A scan of Rae’s uterus shows an egg sac positioned correctly. A fluttering dot shows a heart.

Next time, she can see its bones, as if the child has already been born, lived, died, and been buried, and she has missed it all. 

Time, for now, is plotted in three trimesters. 

Outside Gardner, Kansas, the Santa Fe Trail forks off leaving the Oregon and Californian Trail to continue without it. Many emigrants changed their minds about what route to take. Lines and bonds formed and broke at the parting of the trails. Many stayed where they were, for Gardner wasn’t such a bad place, indeed, with its rich soil and on a sunny day like this, perhaps even a paradise. 

Rae’s body expands, growing with all the thoughts and feelings she has been holding back throughout her life. 

Rae folds the baby’s tiny clothes and carries them in her many pockets. Maternity clothes have lots of pockets, as if this new state means you should be carrying more. 

Rae says to Anna,

       Perhaps we could go away somewhere for the birth. 

       Oregon. Home. Where her mother was.

Authenticity is easier when the hiker leaves the residential areas, moves off the sidewalk and onto the highway with the grassy ditch by his side. He follows the line of the road knowing it follows the old road, but wishes he could go right across country without seeing asphalt, walking where these people walked, seeing exactly what they saw and with the richness of detail with which they saw it. With their experience. He would even like to feel the fear of crossing land that had no laws, a wilderness, for it would make him feel alive in ways he doesn’t suppose he has ever felt before, not since he was a young boy, at least, when he had the feeling that life was yet to come, when it was promised. It’s a hot day as he pushes out but he has a wind at his back. 

Rae packs loose-fitting clothes, rain gear, disposable underwear. Books. Her notebooks. Her mother’s journals. Stockings to prevent blood clots reaching her heart.

Her mother’s writing style is loose, ill-formed. Her mother repeats words. There are spelling mistakes. 

Rae adds nappies, baby grows, scratch mittens, hats, a papoose, blanket, stuffed toy rabbit. She packs her mother’s ashes.

The pioneers took with them their most precious things. Flour, axle grease, dried meats, medicine, tools for repair, milk, coffee, sugar, furs, weapons, ammunition, skillet, stove, lanterns, dog. The family silver if that existed. Pots and pans. Bed linen. Tools and equipment for repair. Medical supplies: ipecac. Grain and seed for establishing crops. Furs and waxed leather to protect against the storms. Some took heavy furniture – bedsteads, sideboards, wardrobes, pianos.

Families separated. 

You can’t drag a heavy haul across the country. There are mountains to contend with. When the pioneers reached the mountains, they tossed their furniture out. The country soon became littered with belongings. The internal organs of a house, but no house to put them in – no walls, no roof. Travel guides told them how to repair a wagon, how to survive a storm. People grouped together for safety. It’s not like you were on your own.

A labour contraction is also called a surge. A surge is not pain but a force.  

The comfort of a road is that you can see others have been here before you at one time or another, that you’re not on your own, that there are others who might understand.

The day before Rae is due to leave for Oregon, she and Anna take a trip to Liberty Island. A cold wind blows the river into their faces. Ferries pass across the bay, scoring through the wake of larger ships. They disembark under a black sky. 

Rae stares up at Liberty, her great sweep of skirts. Above her, black. Above her, tumult. 

       Will she be damaged by the storm? Rae asks the guard.

       Do you know what she’s been through? he laughs.

       She does. Every woman does.

She was shipped here from far away. She travelled a great distance west. Once home, she was assembled from fragments. 

If Rae could get close, she would tuck a hand under the folds of her robe, feel the strength of her raised arm, trace her determined jaw. 

The public didn’t like the way she looked. They would have preferred something more realistic. Everyone was into realism then. Once you’ve seen the carnage of the Civil War as documented by photography, it’s hard to go back to story. 

Blue Mound rises out of the flat horizon. A landmark for those desperate to see something. Lose yourself in the corn crops, walk right on in and keep walking to a landmark of your choosing. The stoned road throws up bites when trucks pass. 

Clouds hang low over Manhattan. The peaks of the highest buildings are stuck in the white. Tourists are trying to get a clear shot. The city extends into the past as much as it does into the sky.

                   Will you miss me? Rae says.

       Anna snorts. 

       Why don’t you come? Rae says.

       The water is below their feet, below the steep incline of the bank. The bank was built high to protect the island. The water will rise. It might even reach her.

Staten Island is most at risk from flooding. Some residents have already been evacuated. One woman moved west to Lake country. A lake doesn’t move, the woman said when interviewed. A lake stays exactly where it should.

They watch the boats clearing out of the bay. They sip their drinks, hard, bitter, good/bad New York coffee.

       What would I do in Oregon? Anna says. 

       Breathe clean air, Rae says.

       What about your mother? Anna says.

       You don’t understand.

       Tell me, then.

They return to the ferry. Anna takes a picture of Liberty beyond the wake of the boat, the white wake expanding out towards the way they have been.

They walk through Red Hook. They pass wet cobbled streets and chain-linked yards. They stumble along the bayside road through the raging wind. Rae’s fingers, wrists and ankles are swollen. Her extremities are numb. Her borders are vague and imprecise. The stores have closed their shutters and taped their windows. Sandbags are piled against the doors. Rae tries to pull her coat over her belly. These days, it is a struggle to cover herself. Anna clutches her camera against her chest as if it is her own heart.

At the bookstore, they move all the books from the window. It is hard to lift things now. By the time they are finished, the rain is falling. The pioneers dealt with worse. 

Everybody gathers at the window to look out. Trashcans roll down the street. The awning above the old bodega flaps and puckers. The rain is coming down sideways. The author is late. Rae would have expected a historian to be on time.

Her book is about the history of Red Hook. When she arrives, she bursts in, raincoat open, her cardigan misbuttoned, lipstick on her teeth.

She shows slides of artwork by the artist Greg Lindquist. The pictures chart the building of IKEA: 

       Trucks entering a building site, 

       clearing the land, 

       hauling the earth away. 

       A vast foundation footprint covers the ground. 

       Walls are erected against a sky at dusk. 

The megastores will come, the paintings are saying, and when they do it will be over. 

                   ‘Potential’ is a killer word, the historian says. 

                   Many years ago, Red Hook was a marsh.

                   A different slide shows a watercolour of a calm bay and beach with reeds and grasses.

                   Then on the screen appears a man dressed in rags. He stands on a path near ragged cardboard houses and shacks made from corrugated steel. Red Hook in the Depression, the historian says. Tin City, Tin Can City, Hooverville – this place has had many names. By 1932, there were more than two hundred homes here. Stoves made from trash cans, crates for tables, beds are sacks stuffed with newspaper and straw. 

       It is ironic, don’t you think, the historian says. That IKEA, the global market leaders in home furnishings, found a home in New York so close to the spot where the destitute once made homes from trash they found on the street. 

                   The audience laughs. 

He walks on through the night alongside the busy road. He is hot, tired and hungry. There are no other people. The cars shield them, hide them, and it is such that he has no company. 

They go out into the night. The wind is a fury. They make a direct line to Sunny’s. With the music turned up so they can’t hear the storm, it is a harbour.

There are rumours Sunny might sell. New condos are going up in the bay. These people will need a place to drink, Sunny says. Sunny says they must drink at Sunny’s. Sunny’s is the only place there is. 

Anna pushes her phone under Rae’s nose.  

       A photograph of taped windows. Wet street. The end is nigh sprayed on a wall. Sandbags tagged with smiling faces. High water. The black slick water, the crash upon the pier, Jack’s wet shoes caught in the frame.

       Rae takes out her phone. The storm is shown to be off the east coast many hundreds of miles away. 

                   The eye of a storm is meant to be serene. 

       Jack and Jin push their way through the crowd. Berry red cheeks. Jin’s glasses are steamed. He gropes around. His hands find Rae.

       Who let the whale in here? he says.

       Rae kicks him. 

       It’s coming, Jack says. In a few hours.

       Rae looks at her phone again. The storm remains hanging over the Atlantic. But her signal is weak. She holds up her phone. She shakes it. She refreshes the page. The swirl of cloud jumps over the city. 

They walk down to the dock with the rest of the crowd. Rae holds onto Anna’s arm to keep steady. Someone points to IKEA, laughing. They will scavenge a bookcase or two in the morning. Anna takes pictures of the crowd. Anna takes Rae’s picture. They head back. Friends disperse. Some are speaking of sharing resources. I didn’t think it would be this bad, Rae hears someone say. 

It would have been strange for her mother to see her own child with a child.

He would have liked his children to come with him. That way he would not feel this deep chasm in his chest and mistake it for his country. 

They will wait out the storm in Jack and Jin’s apartment. Their apartment has a better view of the street. But instead of watching the storm, they watch Jack and Jin’s film. 

Two cowboys ride the subway, slumped in their seats, chewing corn reeds, legs spread. They bound up the steps at Wall Street and career down the road towards the Charging Bull. One leaps onto its back and rides it until the cops come. 

       Toronto, Jin says. I keep telling you.

       Fuck, no. I’m not pretending, Jack says. 

The film has no narrative to speak of. It is just a series of fragments stuck together. They say that’s how they want it, but Rae knows it needs work. A stronger storyline. Deeper themes. More than men dressing up and acting like they always do.

He has to take the side roads because the highway’s shoulders are narrow and it isn’t safe to walk there. State Highway 24 runs right over the Oregon Trail. The hiker wishes he were walking there because that would make his journey more authentic, but he must go however he can.

Rae sleeps next to Anna. Anna’s body is hot and doughy when asleep. She lies diagonally across the bed. Rae must touch her legs with her own. She lays an arm across Anna’s chest. It rises and falls with her breath. For the first time in a long time, Rae sleeps deeply, peacefully. She dreams that Brooklyn was once a marsh.

After breakfast, they wade out through the high water. Cars have been swept away. A boat sits abandoned in the street. Everything has been moved to places it should not be. Fence panels have been torn from gardens. A whooped fig tree. Buildings have flung open their doors. Wet plaster board hangs from ceilings. A tech shop has laid out keyboards like the dead. Everywhere is the sound of destruction. They hear the fall of walls and ceilings. Corroded wires hang exposed. Treasured possessions lie everywhere. Treadmills and pianos stand in the sun. Everywhere is the narrative that Red Hook beat the storm. A framed poster of Mohammed Ali standing over Sonny Liston leans against a building, and someone has written ‘Red Hook’ over Ali’s head, and ‘Storm’ over Sonny’s. Emergency vehicles calmly cruise the streets. A man presses his hand at shoulder height against a brick wall to indicate the flood water line.

At IKEA, employees in bright t-shirts hand out free water, coffee, and tea. Anna speaks to a woman from the Projects who has set up a scheme called Local Leaders.

When I think of the word resilience, I think of myself, she says.

Rae’s father was an unexploited resource. There may have been endless energy reserves to mine had she found means to extract them. 

In every film the hiker makes, the wind blows across the speakers while a knowledgeable man lists facts about the past. 

They go to Fort Defiance for a drink. The bar was named after the fort that brought down the ship that sailed to capture George Washington, but this is just a bar.

                   Rae. Anna says. You can’t go to Oregon. Now, listen to me. Have your baby here. Call your mom. She’ll understand. Have her come.

                   Rae’s head spins. She watches the flood. It swirls above the storm drains. 

                   You understand, don’t you, Rae? It makes no sense to go to Oregon. Who travels three thousand miles just to have a baby? 

How can the wheel ruts that lie so permanently in the ground, still exist after all this time? he says. Why haven’t they been erased? Why are we still able to see so plainly the paths other people took? He crouches down to touch the wagon swale, the deep gash in the ground through which such profound history passed. It really is incredible.

Megan Bradbury is a novelist based in Norwich. Her first novel, Everyone is Watching, which was published by Picador in 2016, tells the story of New York City through the geniuses that have inhabited it – among them, Walt Whitman, Robert Moses, Robert Mapplethorpe and Edmund White. Called a ‘beating heart of a novel’ by Ali Smith, and ‘one of the best debuts I’ve read in years’ by Eimear McBride, the book was longlisted for the Rathsbones Folio Prize and Not the Booker Prize, and was chosen as one of the Guardian’s Best Books of 2016. She is currently working on her second novel, West.

She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and she has been the recipient of a Charles Pick Fellowship, an Escalator Award, and two writing awards from Arts Council England.

Her short fiction has been published in Ambit, The Mechanic’s Institute Review, and Pen & Inc Press, and she has written for The Irish Times. She is also an experienced mentor and artistic collaborator, and has worked on projects with acclaimed artists from across the world.