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- Herausgeber: ERIS
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
"We knew very little with any certainty. One thing, though, was confirmed by everyone: that we were not the only ones flooded. For all we knew, every city across the globe had suffered a comparable fate." As an unnamed city finds itself partially submerged below water, a small community of friends and lovers is forced to adapt to a world that has been radically transformed. An arresting vision of the wages of ecological disaster, Our Distance Became Water is at once lyrical, moving, and psychologically acute. Endlessly inventive in both style and substance, this is a singularly powerful literary response to environmental change.
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OUR DISTANCE BECAME WATER
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Contents
Part I
Where We Are Different
One
This is what’s left of our city. A manic precarity jutting out of a liquid smoothness, desperately trying to stay up, erect, glimmering. But the glow of glass and metal has been overshadowed by the flatness of the waters, already invading the second floors of most large buildings. The old imperial dream, that concentration of colonial sighs and capitalist saliva, is slowly sinking. Its foundations have now been replaced by aquatic life, unexplained sudden gurgles, steady corrosion, liquidity.
The first to go were the deep basements, two and three levels below the ground-floors of the large mansions in the smart areas of the city. Private cinemas and gyms started flooding from within, the water surging from underfloor heating outlets and those hatches that neatly conceal laptop plugs. Next were the swimming pool levels, those penumbras of filtered natural light and mood illuminations, neither quite basement nor ground floor. The pool waters started rising as if emboldened, their fastidious cleanliness mixed with that ubiquitous green shade by now affecting the colours of the whole city. Not just green of course. Tongues of oily blackness, multi-coloured ribbons of assaulting perseverance, clouds of unearthly brownness: the underground tunnels were being washed out; soot and dirt amassed over centuries of digging and hiding were now moving up and mixing with the wetness of pools and humidors. Bloated sewers made life unbearable during those first months. The muck and the stench were bad enough, but what was truly intolerable was the way this urban belching haunted everyone’s dreams, from the youngest to the oldest. Blobby monsters that trembled like oil spills; vessels of things past, done and dusted one would think; ostracised excreta pulsing with memories, guilt, missed opportunities: all these wounds on the fabric of our self-possession bloomed wildly during the first few months.
After the basements, it was just a short gulp before public fountains, paddling lakes, and navigable canals started rising, initially playfully—an open invitation to children and overworked adults to dip in toes and fingers and indulge for a moment in the positives of this soaring chaos. The very first act of the local government, initially rendered helpless by that wave of anxiety that paralysed all structures, was to try and switch off the fountains when they saw that the water spurting out of them had turned seaweed green, thick with bacteria and other forms of undesired life. But it didn’t work—the gurgling force coming from below was impossible to contain. And anyway, it was only a matter of time until all these were also covered by that flat stillness whose only motion was an imperceptible but voracious upwards.
Two
A few years before the waters.
That was a time when time meant different things. A time when we could specify appointments with what we now realise was an unfounded, even arrogant, certainty. And so, we specified. The place: the lobby café of a rather grand art-deco hotel—not too busy but not empty either, plenty of available tables in case of error or hesitation. The time: late afternoon, both of us pretending to be busy on our phones, easy walls that suck you in, blurring the line between social defence and monomania.
It had been a very wet week and the café was breathing in the humidity coming from hunched bodies, muddy shoes, and dripping umbrellas rushed into the dry. Our discussion was flowing, although not very smoothly. Yes, we had things in common and we could have talked about them. We might even have done so; neither of us remembers. We mostly talked in question marks, a breathless ping-pong of hooks and dots, neither of us really caring for the replies, or certainly not registering them. We produced the right sounds, of course, but only as growling preludes to the next question. A barrage of forgettable questions and even more forgettable answers in order to conceal the one thing that we knew our skins could not conceal: a sudden desire, a thirst for the other’s body and touch and smell that was bubbling inside us. I experienced my desire for you as a river, rough and foamy and yet at the same time darkly ponderous, over which I had to—simply had to—throw all those question marks in order to bridge us on the basis of something less embarrassing, less exposing than that elemental force. Language would do. It usually does. But we failed, despite our best conscious efforts. Every question we threw at each other was aiming not for an answer but for that brief space of rupture between the hook and dot of the question mark. In that echoing space that language forgets, our connection blossomed and our skins carried on communicating, devoid of all social niceties.
My wild gesticulating managed to upset a glass of sparkling water situated too close to me. What you did then was, I now know, the determining gesture of our future: without thinking, without even halting in your effort to answer my no doubt uninteresting question, you dipped your thumb into that agitated body of water and carbon dioxide and started making little waves across the table surface, methodically from left to right. Our fingers were already used to that wave-making movement. We practised it every day with a concentration that belied the casualness of the whole thing. We were both constantly logged in, dwelling in that short space between waves on our respective screens, your face brooding and enigmatic, mine in desperately aloof profile, both of us screaming “please find me”. The waves around us stopped when our fingers encountered each other’s profile photos. Some sea separated, some rain stood still in mid-air, and the inconsequential act of momentarily reversing the direction of our swiping marked us for each other.
Well, actually no, nothing as earth-shattering as all that. It was just regular online dating, after all. We saw, we swiped, we met. But allow me to carry on thinking that something a little special happened at our first meeting: that the fractal randomness with which our fingers reached out, almost piercing each other’s screens, had something decisive to do with the way we have since introduced the water between us—an accidental space where to this day our bodies carry on asserting our desire for each other.
We now know that we had invited the water into our relationship much earlier than the flooding came, long before the augured extinction that was later to engulf our lives. Our love for each other predates our city’s unwilling marriage to the water. And our love (and fear and anger and embarrassment and panic and resignation) for water predates everything that was to happen to our city that year.
We used to think of the times of our first love, and, even later, of our love maturing through difficulties, as times where water hardly had a role. As dry times. Except that now, after the rise of the waters, after the establishment of the city’s new-found liquid wisdom, we understand something we could not then: that there have never been dry times. We have always been trying to float on the water that we ourselves were obsessively inviting—a perfidious guest that converted us, its eager hosts, into numb hostages.
waterspeak
I know you well. I am both inside and outside, crossing your skin, unstoppable.
I am gentle with your bodies, aren’t I? See how I provide for your needs. You would think I am here for you. I take the shape of your outline, fill your world with wombs. I become your home, your dreams, your phobias.
I conduct you, heat and cold, I am your angel, aren’t I? Furious fleet flitting around, reaching where your little skin-contained identities cannot.
What a dear I am.
Really though, all this is so tiresome. Because, mark: I have no access to your subconscious. I do not profess to speak your inner truth.
Sod that, I cannot stand the truth.
I am only carrying your vibrations in my globules and plopping them up against the other shore.
Oh, and I reflect. I do this pretty well.
But you are fooled. You seem to forget that I’m not here for you. I’m here and that’s all. And only for a little while.
In a few battings of the cosmic eyelids, I will be gone from earth, evaporated in trellises of interplanetary frivolity, off to play somewhere else with things neither better nor worse than you.
So let me put it this way: your anthropomorphising me, your hating me or adoring me, your judging me as too cold, too hot, too dirty, too shallow, too smelly—all this is cute but frankly irrelevant.
You are all an unintended consequence of my being here.
Three
A few years before the waters.
By the time the water reached the second floors of the larger buildings, most shops and businesses that could afford to do so had already moved further up. There was a great deal of requisitioning during those times, with the local government desperately trying to find dry spaces for its offices, and in the process its officials being lobbied or even bribed by the better-connected business owners to procure new spaces. This added to the masses of displaced people trying to find accommodation in the taller edifices of the city centre, after their houses and low apartment buildings had been flooded. State controls and the usual civil society guarantees were slowly being eroded, allowing instead a state of permanent exception to settle in.
Still, the city managed to avoid the panic and despair that threatened to invade every single activity, and quickly reinvented itself. There was an ever-expanding programme of initiatives by residents and the government trying to get everyone in the mood for co-operation and creative engagement with this new reality and especially with the refugees from the peripheries; some serious attempts at a working network of municipal boats that connected the main points in the city; a small but adaptable fleet of private boats that operated as taxis and mini buses; a wave of public art projects that took to the waters for inspiration; and a flurry of innovative entrepreneurial activity and productive downsizing on the part of mixed-use shops that had moved from the ground floor up and were trying to lure the residents out of their watery isolation.
Third and fourth floors across the city were quickly becoming the old high streets. Existing corridors linking abandoned flats were being pierced with makeshift shop windows, hastily covered up with sturdy sliding doors at night. An odd thing: these doors were almost never made of glass. Glass sales suffered greatly during these months of endless relocation. Partly no doubt because of the glass’s fragility and the difficulty of transporting it. Partly because it was hard to find glass readily available. But partly also because it would seem that none of us wished for yet another reflective surface in addition to the water below. We needed spaces where we would be sheltered from this incessant mirroring. We were becoming blinded by this constant opportunity for self-reflection, this aggressive reminder of our facial expressions, our tastes and clothing, our hairdo errors. We had all developed sophisticated defence mechanisms to hide our creeping fear of the future and our deep-seated anxiety about how we were to carry on providing for ourselves and our loved ones when everything was collapsing around us. So we were trying to avoid looking at ourselves. We would stare even more obsessively at our phones (if electricity provision allowed us to charge them) when waiting for public transport to arrive; we would keep looking up towards the buildings with their constantly changing uses when being driven around on a boat; we would try at any cost to avoid catching our reflection on the water for fear of thinking things we had been waving aside since the rising of the waters. A moment of denial perhaps, but a much needed one.
What we would never tire of, however, provided that we could do it from a safe distance that left any self-reflection out of the picture, was admiring the new watery aesthetics. The usual street-level dirt had been swamped by this flat, homogeneous surface. Even the floating rubbish islands looked photogenic. The waters were broken only by treetops rising up like floating bushes, or by the top part of street lamps, most of them miraculously still working, casting their light deep into the waters around them and for a moment creating the impression that life on the ground was carrying on as before, just a little more refracted, just a little more trembling.
A new sense of pride was taking hold of us, a renewed interest in the verticality with which our city was defiantly surfacing from the waters. We would marvel at the way its reflection chased its real self, an upside-down version replete with seemingly endless promises of depth and continuity. The city’s avenues had now turned into broad canals, and a new-found silence and quietude was spreading through them like a breeze caressing our faces, especially in those scarlet summer evenings when even the few remaining birds would stand still and watch. Rare moments of collective desire, these, with some west-facing terraces and balconies across the city appropriated as new public spaces, filling with people from all floors and of all provenances, drinks in hand, chatting away.
These were early days. In the back of our minds we were all pretending to be passengers onboard a large cruiser, moving into the future with an imperious deliberateness so that not a single drop of our drinks would ever be unnecessarily spilt and thereby add to the fatal liquid slowness lurking below us.
Four
In those early days, when we still did not know how long the waters were going to stay, the few surviving cafés and restaurants moved up to the open roof-top terraces. Those usually drab and neglected spaces were being rapidly spruced up and, riding that wave of denial that seemed to have settled on the city, were promising carefree evenings. The new marketing campaigns of these high-end pop-up establishments were now focussed on the views offered, presenting the whole visit as a playful new experience of looking at the flooded city from on high.
Something that the marketing campaigns were keen on hiding was that these restaurants and upmarket cafés would often share the roof space with whoever had been displaced and failed to secure better accommodation. Roofs were being rapidly taken over by anyone who could get to them, in an attempt to stay dry. White linen, silver cutlery, and table service was often taking place next to rickety tents and sleeping bags spread around large open spaces, with children running between the tables and parents chasing after them as the restaurant-goers tried to cast the children a faux polite smile between bites. But this is how things were: the humidity had made it imperative that people seek the higher terraces, whether for setting up home or having candlelit suppers.
It is true that people were mostly eager to reinforce the stereotypes with which they regarded each other. But a stunned version of social tourism was also on the rise: people who never mixed before now had the opportunity to see each other in a new and more clement light. Attempts at dividing the space with potted plants and other fence-like contraptions that blocked the view from outside were quickly taken apart by both sides: everyone wanted a piece of these new vistas populated by unfamiliar types of people and these alien everyday rites taking place against the backdrop of the flooded city. This soon turned out to be a selling point for many of these restaurants, which emphasised in their advertisements the unexpected social aspect of ‘making new friends’ while sipping your vintage port.
A tentative, random democracy of sorts, as if the flatness of the water below was rubbing off on the skin of the residents, making them more open, more curious, perhaps—certainly more available to the gaze of the other. No one could tell how long this was going to last.
Five
A couple of families moved to our floor. One of them took up the flat of a man we knew by sight, a banker or something. We don’t know how they got access to it, or what their connection was to the previous owner whom anyway we had not seen since the rising of the waters. There might not have been one—property was becoming scarce, but at the same time somewhat more readily up for grabs. Squatting was slowly becoming standard practice, although it was much less acceptable if the previous occupiers had actually been physically displaced. This was hard to prove, though, and the police (or whatever counted as police in those days) did not much care about who occupied what, as long as the available flats across the city were fully occupied and homelessness was contained.
Selina, the woman of the family that moved in next door, was very friendly. She invited us over to their new place, a flat we had never seen from the inside. We welcomed the opportunity despite our initial misgivings about sanctioning what we thought was essentially a breakin. We were, perhaps inevitably, identifying with the previous owners, who, although this was by no means certain, could have returned at some point and discovered that their property was no longer theirs. It may have been at that time that the habits of most people, even the ones who had recently occupied a new space—especially them—started changing. We began spending much longer in our flats than before the waters, perhaps afraid of going for an evening out and coming back to find new occupiers settled in their homes. On the other hand, we understood the need for property to be used and for people to inhabit structurally sound and dry quarters. Day by day we were becoming more liquid-like, understanding the need to fill up every available space, often indiscriminately, ignoring the usual doors and walls. Just like the water, we too were rising and spreading, flowing together or quickening into whirlpools of conflict.
The flat showed signs of the kind of predicament wherein the taste and social class of the new occupiers differed radically from those of the previous owners. The standard minimalist original building design was taken over by a functional approach, with surfaces being used for actually putting things on and walls for sticking up photographs and posters. The new family had managed to make it look quite homely and personal, helped by the fact that they seemed to have brought with them a great deal of stuff from their previous residence. We were welcomed in by Selina’s large, open smile and proudly ushered towards the windows from where we could admire the view. The flat was on the west side of the building and their view was different to ours, bringing in a city that glimmered in the late afternoon light. We were appropriately complimentary and repeatedly commented on how they must come over too to see our view, how different it was: we’re sure you will find it interesting, although not as open as yours. These overdrive moments of civic normality were quickly becoming the new expected behaviour all over the city, with any trace of irony meticulously avoided.
We were then shown to the table, its dark glass surface partly covered by a soft, flowery tablecloth overflowing with cups, jars, plates of biscuits, sliced cakes, and savoury snacks. Her husband and their son also joined in. They were distinctly less friendly and somehow broody, as if they wanted to show us that we were now invading their space and time. We took our places hesitantly, trying a little too enthusiastically to focus on Selina’s chatting while visually blocking the son and the father. But we were all too aware of the dark silences that were sliding amongst us, threatening even Selina’s seemingly inexhaustible arsenal of badinage. For our part, we asked several questions in order to keep the conversation going, but it was hard to do so in an interesting way: we could never ask anything about their past, how they ended up on our floor, where they were before that, what they did in their lives. All these felt out of bounds, somehow implying that this newly arrived family did not belong here, that they were still outsiders. We could only make the smallest of small talk, and this relied on a sense of the necessity of proving that everything was normal.
But there were moments when even that sense of necessity collapsed. Then the silences would seep in. And, unlike the fairly harmless silences that might befall a dinner party with newly acquainted guests, or even the embarrassed silence that follows a social faux pas, these new silences, so much more frequent and inevitable since the waters, had become viscous and hefty. It was as if they had a different consistency, as if they were made up of weightier molecules floating around us, as if they were breathing heavier breaths full of sticky humidity. We could hear the silence much more clearly now, almost bouncing on the surface of the water below and doubling its own gelatinous elasticity. And then the silence would become a threatening alterity sliding over our skins like somebody else’s sweat, bearing a scent that none of us could recognise.
Six
A few years before the waters.
You got us in the habit of going for a swim at the local swimming pool every Saturday. It was a pool like any other municipal pool, a bit too busy, a bit unkempt but quite jolly. The only thing neither of us liked was the occasional competitive surge that would take over the crowd and, as if by contagion, make us all swim faster, keeping fastidiously to our lanes and quickly forgetting how to dither or play. We would only realise afterwards that we too had been taken over by it—our breaths shallower and our limbs tenser in the showers. There was an elation that went with it, an illusion of fearless progress that pushed us to follow everyone else in the false belief that we were leading. Our side-glances at the stragglers only confirmed our aquatic superiority, making us go faster with every arm spread, adjusting and readjusting our goals for yet another length, yet another spectacularly swift and elegant turn. But even while we were performing these dolphin-like acrobatics, secure in the sense of our nascent amphibianism, wrapped in a water that made us feel safe and victorious, we knew that this was not the water we desired.
You had the idea, one warm morning just before our usual pool time, to go to a pond in the nearby park. You did not say why exactly, perhaps you did not know either. I thought it just would be a short walk, perhaps with a coffee at the park café, but you insisted that we take our pool bags with us as if we were going to the swimming pool. For a moment I had the impression that you were planning a swim there—quite a ridiculous idea given the nature of the water, its shallowness, its ecology. But something else came up as we approached the pond: a notion that felt like a shared emergence, a common plan solid in its unspokenness.
We knelt by the side of the pond, feet on the hard cement edge that stopped water and reeds from invading the rest of the park. We leaned carefully towards the green water, just enough to see our faces reflected on its surface. We pulled out from our satchels the plastic carrier bags we always carried with us when going to the swimming pool to put our wet swimming trunks in after the swim. They were small and quite flimsy. We dipped them in the pond water and filled them up enough to create two small round baubles of distended plastic film, securely knotted in by the ends of the bag. We then helped each other, securing the little baubles on each other’s wrists by tying up the flapping handles like kids do with their balloons. We walked slowly towards the swimming pool, feeling the weight of our liquid balloons dangling on our wrists. Rather than pulling our arms skywards, they plopped about our bodies, bouncing softly in a reminder of a gravity as playful as it was inevitable.
We felt silly, especially when entering the swimming pool with our plastic baubles awkwardly attached to our wrists. But we also felt united by a strange confession, joined in a necessity that was simultaneously plunging us deeper into the swimming pool and keeping us apart from it, as if we were floating just above its chlorinated surface. Our swimming technique was impaired, of course, made cumbersome by the bouncing bags awkwardly splashing against the surface of the water and increasing its resistance to our movements. I was afraid that they might tear and that the pond water would pour out and mix unhygienically with the swimming water. I was terrified at the thought that a change of pool colour might happen, leaving us both utterly exposed, as if it were our bodies themselves that were leaking illicit liquids. The following Saturday, and all the Saturdays after that, we took with us pharmacy carrier bags that looked more resilient, more ready to accommodate our other waters.
waterspeak
It is such a bore when you study my comings and goings, jotting them down to catch me next time. Look at you, drunk with power, enclosing me, channelling me, controlling me, putting me in narrow waterways or large deposits, trapping me in reservoirs, framing me behind long dams or in tiny tubes.
No, you don’t understand—you don’t hurt me, you cannot hurt me.
It is your attitude that irritates me, that bossy, pitiable, macho egomania with which you think you can control me, and your automatic tendency to measure me: weight, speed, density, frequency.
Yeah fine, carry on, see if I care.
Human rhythms are so shallow I can barely feel them. They ride a different temporality than I do: day and night, forgettably short seasons, unregistrable epochs.
Ebb and flow, streams and currents, waves and tsunamis: you want me to conform to what you think my rhythms are—see how you can never see beyond your little selves?—a breath of rising and falling, a living regularity because life is regular and water is life, right?
OK. But you really ought to know—well you do not need to, I do not even think you can know, but it is good sometimes to show you that you cannot know—anyway, you really should try to understand that my breath is not of your life, or of any life.
My breath is time.
My breath is of a universe that hosts me in globular suspension between planets, in vast clouds of a rain that will never fall, in fathomless oceans suspended in space and floating about unsupported: my breath is there, rounded up in a water that you will never drink.
My breath is polarised, spread across aeons, breathing in when nothing was impossible and breathing out when the possibilities will have shut forever.
But, OK, you cannot conceive this.
Let’s focus on your planet, that hydrospheric apparition on stilts in the great hall of cosmic gossip. Even then, you think of me as percentages: oh wow so much of the surface of the earth, no really, so much of a human body. Eye-rolling stuff.
Just shut up and listen for a moment and you might just about understand that my breath is caught in the rattle of a dying sun, hidden under strata of a geology that ignores you, deep in the centre of what you call your planet and with whose body you will never manage to sleep.
My breath is liquidity in waiting, tangled with chunks of eternity.
Seven
In time, time also changed. It became slower and hazier. Accuracy was no longer a possibility, and the city started moving in rhythms of approximation and contingency. The boats provided by the city council were never enough, so we had to find other ways of dealing with our transport needs. The frequently insuperable difficulty of getting around meant that even those of us who could afford it had generally stopped moving about much unless it was absolutely necessary, and even then we could never guarantee that we would be on time. People extended their everyday activities on previously underused balconies, windowsills and corridors.
It was this generalised inward turning that forced buildings to become as self-sufficient as possible, utilising whatever expertise their residents could offer. The rooftop restaurants and cafés started shutting down for lack of clients and of raw materials for elaborate dishes and cocktails. Many of the shops that had opened on the third and fourth floors were also closing, unless they were providing for their neighbours’ immediate needs of food and basic sustenance. Hordes of delivery people on makeshift motorboats initially criss-crossed the canals, creating a constant buzz in the city. But even these started to abate: since internet access was no longer reliable, online transactions could not be trusted; petrol was becoming an inflated commodity; and delivery charges were mounting. The most entrepreneurial of us became small-scale itinerant salespeople, buying or hiring boats and moving from building to building, buying and selling stuff for money or exchanging it for other goods. But because boats were becoming a rare commodity, when need urged, forgotten children’s canoes, old wardrobes, even simple plywood doors were dug up and thrown in the water in the hope that they would float. And, in general, they did. Distances were navigable, the waters were smooth, and since few of us really knew what we were doing, speeds were tentative even for those who had the good fortune of possessing a vessel with an engine.
In the places where buildings were close to each other, planks were installed, jutting out of windows and doors and linking up whole areas in a network of walkable highways. Buildings became tentacled, linked to their surroundings in a promising and seemingly well-ordered web of routes, yet often leading nowhere near where one would ideally like to end up despite appearances to the contrary. Some shop owners got organised and tried to set up an ambitious network of planks linking the third and fourth floors of various blocks, but the maintenance was so complex that few parts of the network survived more than a couple of months. Still, when these planks started being installed, it was bracing to see, especially early in the morning, rows of people patiently queueing up in single rows, trying to reach nearby buildings. Some would carry on going to their work like this, if their workplace was on a walkable route; others would visit friends or do their shopping or avail themselves of whatever was left of the city’s services; and others would come out seemingly determined and busy but in reality simply rushing out of their homes in an often pointless attempt to reestablish normality through a morning constitutional or by mingling with other people.
As a last resort, some people swam, defying the risks of infection or the very real chance of impaling themselves on a protruding piece of metal lying invisible just below the surface. But the ones who swam seemed to have traced their routes carefully, avoiding at least the predictable risks. Some of them would also dive, often disappearing from view mid-swim, and going as deep as they could. They were part of this new generation of inverted climbers, climbers that dived rather than ascended, holding onto trees that were not yet uprooted, railings that had not yet detached from facades, streetlights that were still standing in their recently discovered darkness. It was said that these diving climbers would go as low as the old basements of the city, out of nostalgia or perhaps an emerging desire to develop larger breathing capacities that would allow them to stay underwater for longer. Rumours had started even then that some of them were well on their way to building a life right there, on the urban seabed.
Eight
We didn’t know how long the waters were going to stay, or whether they were going to rise further. Predictions were largely unscientific and unreliable since most of the measuring equipment was damaged and, one after the other, the usual channels of communication were inexorably coming down. Rumours circulated about an imminent withdrawal of the waters, but the reasons supporting such rumours were tenuous to say the least.
Initially, most people tried to find answers outside. All airfields were flooded, all roads submerged, so the only way out of the city was through water. All the large ships that used to be accessible to the city’s residents seemed to have sailed away, probably loaded with those amongst us who wanted to leave and could afford to pay extortionately high prices for a passage to no one knew where. Amongst those that remained, a new group of people emerged: well-organised, deeply determined, and confident pioneers of the dry, teams brimming with hope and the ambition to become our city’s explorers and to return loaded with goods from our past and answers for our future. Rage against the waters and the hope of discovering those parts of the planet that had not turned against us seemed to be propelling these dry-land crusaders ever further away from the city.
Of those who had left shortly after the waters, most never made it back. We allowed ourselves to believe that the departing ones were setting up home somewhere there, but most of us were too doubtful to take the risk and follow. The few who did return brought with them only rumours rather than actual experiences, stories that would become the subject of corridor gossip however monstrously untrue or even contradictory. But these stories managed to keep alive the hope of a better world outside: floating colonies for the super-rich, vast indifferent arks gleamingly passing by, never stopping for anything or anyone; vertical structures piling up millions of displaced people, reaching sky high and oscillating wildly with every little gust of wind; and even dry high grounds, promised lands where everyone lived in peace, where farm animals were still alive and crops still offered the old food staples.
And then there were others—devoid of heroism and without a thought of crusading glory—who would just climb on a raft, often in the middle of the night, and start rowing across the water boulevards and floating above the outer suburbs, most of which were almost entirely submerged. People spoke of endless rows of low houses and of gardens now colonised by the vegetal and marine life that was taking over the city. These rows were interrupted only by the occasional taller building or by still-standing monuments incongruously protruding from those infinite lagunas of the periphery. The suburban populations had long gone, large chunks of them having escaped the waters and moved into the vacated upper floors of the central buildings. Yet there were quite a few unlucky ones who drowned in their sleep, either unaware of the rising water or fighting not to lose one another or their belongings. There was nothing to see and do there anymore, just a passage towards an imagined dry world outside.
Cinder, Selina’s broody young son whom we often met in our floor’s corridor, was one of those castrated pioneers, eager to encounter the dry old world and leave behind our current humid existence. His mother kept saying that she really wished he wouldn’t go, but his response was always the same: he had no choice. He was battling claustrophobia and social isolation of a kind he had never experienced before. He was used to being connected with his peers, mostly electronically but also in the neighbourhood where they lived before moving to ours, and neither of these means of connection was any longer readily available. The internet was erratic to say the least, and one by one most areas seemed to be switching off. As for the streets, this was hardly a term we could use anymore.
Cinder returned after only a few days in the open laguna. He encountered nothing but endless horizontality, an infinity of wet reflecting surfaces on which to marvel at his solitude, sparsely pierced by isolated and inhospitable structures and traversed only by other pioneers of the dry at various points on the spectrum between hope and despair. In the weeks following his return, although he wasn’t any friendlier, he seemed calmer, as if he had finally put to rest a thought that had been tormenting him. He even spoke to us at some length about his journey outside that one time we met him next to the no-longer-working lift. He mostly talked about what he ate when he was out there, about the fish he managed to catch and how it tasted funny and he had to cast it back in. He also spoke of the sun, constantly refracted behind humid columns of clouds rising from the water and making navigation even harder. But he was speaking with a composure that lacked any sign of his usual edge. When we asked him about new friends in the neighbourhood, he just shrugged.
So we knew very little with any certainty. One thing, though, was confirmed by everyone: that we were not the only ones flooded. For all we knew, every city across the globe had suffered a comparable fate. Even the mountains, invisible from within the city but appearing like giant glaciers as soon as one started navigating a little further out, seemed to be under the same level of water wherever one went. There was no convincing explanation for the flooding, except perhaps for a change in the earth’s magnetic field exacerbated by an anthropogenic attrition that was playing havoc with gravity, making the whole globe a laguna of (relatively speaking) shallow water swamping the horizon.
