The City Where We Once Lived by Barnes Eric;

Author:Barnes Eric;
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 5306357
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

• • •

“Why will those plants grow here when everything else is dead?” I ask the gardener.

It’s a few days since I started working in the playground. I spent the morning planting the last of the ivy and the vines and have now gone to the gardener’s courtyard on the edge of downtown. We sit in two of his chairs.

“Whatever has killed all the plant life here,” he says to me, “it doesn’t affect certain species from other places. Those plants, the ones I got for you, most originated in the mountains of northern India. An area where miners have, for decades, dug for gold and other metals. Horrific chemicals are used to separate the gold from the rock. Those chemicals seeped into the mountainside and the groundwater and although originally most trees and shrubs were killed, eventually some life near those mines did find a way to survive.”

I see him sip from his drink. He has offered me a drink but I’ve said no.

“And so is the point that life survives,” I say. “It adapts, no matter what?”

It is very cold today, my breath faintly white and his white too. But as in the playground, the gardener’s courtyard blocks the wind and so, here with a blanket across my lap, I feel almost warm.

“No,” he says. “Clearly there’s a point at which nothing will come back.”

He presses back in his chair, stretching his legs out, then crossing them slowly.

“Had the factories kept pouring toxins on this place,” he says, “then absolutely nothing, no one, would survive.”

I think about this. Slowly, staring toward the vines climbing up the walls. “So, that the city died, the factories shutting down, in some way that stopped the damage before it got even worse?”

He stares forward. Rubs the raw tips of his shortened fingers against the arm of his chair.

“Yes,” he says.

Always, there is the rain. Light. On my hands and face now.

“And keep in mind the change in weather,” the gardener says. “The weather has changed dramatically. That is killing the plant life too. Some think that alone is what’s killing everything.”

I notice newspapers on his table where he normally sits to read. My paper is there, but there are papers from other places too. I realize the gardener stays in touch with the world beyond the North End. It doesn’t surprise me, but I find myself now thinking that the gardener knows so many things about which I’m unaware. The countries that are at war. The politicians who are in charge. The teams that have won. The movies made. The books that have been written since the last time that I read.

I don’t ask about any of this, though. I have no interest in knowing what’s in those papers.

The gardener touches his hand to his head, slides his fingers slowly across his brow, barely damp from the light rain.

“What’s it look like,” I hear myself say, “to see a landscape that’s alive?”

He says, “It’s been years since I’ve seen a world not scarred in some way.

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