Seawall Liturgies

The wall was nine meters of poured concrete faced with granite salvaged from the old courthouse, and it ran from the bluffs at Calder Point south to where the rail bridge used to stand. On the dry side, they called it the Seawall. On the wet side, when they bothered to call it anything, they called it the Dam, which was not what it was, but the word had a plainness that suited them. It kept something out. It kept something in. The distinction depended on where you were standing.

Senna Olivares had been standing on both sides in the course of her work. She was a census agent for the District Authority, which governed the dry side, and twice a year the Authority required a count of the flood-side population for purposes of resource allocation, meaning for purposes of knowing how many people to not allocate resources to. Senna understood this. She had been doing the census for three years. The Authority called it the Outwater Survey, and the people who lived in the flood called it nothing, because they did not acknowledge the Authority’s right to count them, though most of them answered Senna’s questions anyway, because she was polite and because refusing to be counted was a gesture that required more energy than most of them had.

She crossed through the passage gate at six in the morning on a Tuesday in October, the fourth year after the second surge. The gate was a steel door set into the wall’s base, wide enough for a supply truck, though supply trucks had stopped coming two years ago. The guard on the dry side checked her credentials and logged her transit time. On the wet side there was no guard. There was a woman sitting on an overturned crate, mending a fishing net with her feet in six inches of water, and she looked up when Senna came through and said, “They sent you early this year.”

“Budget cycle moved up,” Senna said.

“Budget.” The woman said the word like she was testing whether it still meant anything. She went back to her net. Her hands were quick and certain, and around her ankles the water eddied with each small shift of her weight. Senna noticed a child’s sandal floating past, pink and curled with waterlogging, and neither of them mentioned it.

The flood side was not underwater, exactly. That was a common misunderstanding on the dry side, where people imagined the wall holding back an ocean, the other side a drowned Atlantis of submerged streets and floating debris. The reality was more mundane and more strange. The water level varied with the tides and the season and the increasingly erratic storm patterns. In October, most streets had between half a meter and a meter of standing water, warm and brown and smelling of salt and decomposition. The buildings still stood — the ones built on higher foundations, anyway, the ones whose owners or occupiers had reinforced the ground floors with sandbags and marine sealant and, in some cases, with the rubble of buildings that hadn’t survived. People lived on the upper floors. They moved between buildings on elevated walkways made of lashed-together doors and shipping pallets, or they waded, or they used the flat-bottomed boats that the flood side built from salvaged lumber and roofing panels and anything else that floated.

The economy, if you could call it that, was fish and barter and the occasional smuggled goods that came through the wall or, more often, around it by boat from the coast. The Authority had tried to regulate the coastal traffic for a while but had given up, not out of compassion but out of the arithmetic: it cost more to patrol than the contraband was worth. There was also kelp farming, which had started spontaneously when someone noticed the stuff growing on the submerged foundations, and which had become the closest thing the flood side had to an organized industry. They ate it, dried it, burned it for fuel, wove it into rope. The dry side imported none of it. The dry side imported nothing from the flood side, as a matter of policy, because importing implied a trading partner, and a trading partner implied a legitimate entity, and the Authority’s position was that the flood side was not a legitimate entity but a humanitarian situation, which was a word that allowed them to feel concerned without feeling obligated.

Senna made her way along a walkway that connected the old commercial district to the residential blocks farther in. The walkway creaked under her weight but held. Below her, the water was opaque, green-brown, and something moved in it — a fish, maybe, or a piece of waterlogged furniture drifting on a current she couldn’t see. She kept her clipboard in its waterproof case and her pencils in a zip-lock bag in her jacket pocket and she had learned, over three years, to wear boots that went to her thighs and to bring iodine tablets and to never, ever touch her face with wet hands.

The first household she reached was the Parras family, who lived on the second and third floors of what had been a hardware store. Davi Parra answered from the window, leaning out with a cup of something steaming.

“How many people in this household?” Senna asked.

“Seven,” Davi said.

“Same as last count?”

“My mother-in-law came back.”

Senna wrote it down, then looked up. “Came back from where?”

Davi drank from his cup. “From being dead,” he said. “She’s in the kitchen. You want to count her or not?”

The dead had started returning fourteen months after the second surge, or at least that was when people on the flood side started talking about it openly. On the dry side, the Authority’s official position was that reports of revenants were a symptom of post-disaster psychological stress and should be treated with counseling and, if necessary, medication. The Authority had issued a memo about it. Senna had read the memo. It was three pages long and used the phrase “grief-mediated perceptual disturbance” eleven times.

The first time Senna had encountered a revenant during a census, she had been in a converted apartment above a flooded laundromat. The family — a couple and their two living children — had introduced her to the husband’s brother, who sat at the table with his hands folded and his eyes open and his skin the color and texture of wet clay. He did not breathe. He did not blink. But when Senna asked the standard census question — “What is your primary occupation?” — the dead man’s wife said, “He fixes the boats. He was always good with his hands.” And the dead man’s hands had moved, just slightly, a flexing of the fingers, as if they remembered.

Senna had not counted him. The census form did not have a category for him. She had stared at the form for a long time after leaving that apartment, standing on the walkway with the water below her and the form in her hand, and the categories printed on it — NAME, AGE, SEX, OCCUPATION, RELATIONSHIP TO HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD — had seemed suddenly insufficient, like a map of a country that no longer existed.

When she returned to the dry side and filed her report, she had noted the encounter in the margins and her supervisor had crossed it out with red pen and written: NOT APPLICABLE. COUNT THE LIVING.

Davi Parra’s mother-in-law was sitting in the kitchen in a plastic chair, her hands in her lap. She was wearing a housedress that someone had laundered recently — it was clean, though the hem was damp. Her hair was combed. Her eyes were open and they tracked Senna when Senna came into the room, but they tracked her the way a cat’s eyes track movement: without interpretation, without interest, just the mechanics of sight.

“She came up with the tide,” said Lourdes, Davi’s wife, who was Senna’s age, maybe younger, with a tiredness that had stopped being temporary and had become structural. “Three weeks ago. She was sitting on the steps of the building across the street, the one that collapsed. Just sitting there. Davi saw her when he went out to check the nets.”

“Did you — ” Senna stopped. She didn’t know what the right question was.

“We brought her home,” Lourdes said. “What else would we do?”

The mother-in-law — her name had been Ofelia, and Lourdes still used the name, present tense — sat in her chair and did not speak. Her chest did not rise and fall. But when Lourdes set a cup of broth on the table in front of her, Ofelia’s hand reached for it and brought it to her lips and tilted it, and the broth went in and did not come out, and Senna did not ask where it went.

“She wants to know about the avocado tree,” Lourdes said. “The one she planted in the yard before the first surge. It’s underwater now, obviously. But she keeps looking out the window toward where it was.”

“How do you know that’s what she wants?”

Lourdes shrugged. “I know.”

Senna wrote down seven and moved to the next household. On the walkway outside she paused and looked back at the building and through the window she could see Ofelia’s silhouette, still in the chair, still facing the direction of the drowned yard, and Lourdes moving around behind her, doing something at the counter, and the ordinariness of the scene was the thing that stayed with her — not a woman and a ghost but a daughter-in-law and her husband’s mother, in a kitchen, on a Tuesday, one of them alive and one of them not, and both of them waiting for something that neither could name.

The next three households were simpler. A couple with no dead, living above a flooded pharmacy. A man alone in a room full of books he was trying to dry, page by page, on lines strung across the ceiling — he had been a teacher, he told her, and the school was gone but the books were not, and he did not know what to do with that fact except try to save them. A family of five in which the youngest, a boy of about three, had been born on the flood side, after the wall, and who had never seen dry ground and did not seem to miss it, and whose mother said he cried when they took him up to the roof because the openness frightened him. He was used to walls that sweated, to the sound of water, to ceilings close enough to touch.

By noon she had counted forty-three people across twelve households, and of those forty-three, six were dead. The dead were not evenly distributed. Some households had none. One had three — an elderly man and his two dead sons, who had drowned during the second surge and whose bodies had returned within days of each other, waterlogged and slow-moving and profoundly uninterested in the living except insofar as the living occupied space that the dead seemed to remember as theirs.

On the dry side, property law was clear. The Authority maintained a registry. Title to land and buildings was recorded, transferred, taxed, and adjudicated according to procedures that predated the floods and had survived them largely intact, because the people who owned property on the dry side had always owned property, and the law existed to protect them, and they knew this, and they supported the Authority because the Authority supported the registry, and the registry supported them. The wall itself was a property line. Everything inside it was owned. Everything outside it was not, which meant it was available, which meant anyone could take it, which meant in practice that the people who had nothing took what the people who had everything had abandoned, and this was called squatting by the Authority and was called living by the people who did it.

But the dead complicated things. Because the dead who returned were, in many cases, the former owners of the buildings the living now occupied. Not on the dry side — the dry side’s dead stayed dead, or at least stayed absent, possibly because the dry side’s dead had been embalmed and sealed in vaults and the water could not reach them. But on the flood side, where the dead had been buried in the ground or, more often, had simply been lost to the water, the returning was repossession. The dead came back and sat in their old kitchens and looked out their old windows and seemed to want nothing except to be where they had been, and the living had to accommodate this because the dead did not leave and could not be made to leave and, more importantly, because most of the living were related to most of the dead, and you do not evict your mother from her own kitchen, even if she has been dead for two years and even if the kitchen is now yours.

The flood side had developed, without ever formally deciding to, a system. The dead had residency rights. They could not own property — ownership required the capacity to make decisions, and the dead, whatever else they did, did not make decisions in any way that could be documented or adjudicated. But they had the right to remain. They could not be displaced. Their presence in a household was counted as a factor in space allocation. And when two living people disputed a building, the presence of a dead former occupant was considered relevant to the claim — not decisive, but relevant, testimony that could not be spoken but could not be ignored.

Senna’s supervisor called it “dysfunction.” She had tried once to explain it to a colleague on the dry side, a man named Ferreira who worked in the Authority’s housing division. She had described the residency-rights system and the way disputes were mediated and Ferreira had listened and then said, “That’s not a system. That’s the absence of a system.” And Senna had wanted to say that the absence of a system was also a system, that the dry side’s registry and deeds and tax codes were no more natural or inevitable than what the flood side had built, that both were human responses to the problem of who gets to be where, and the only difference was that one was written down and the other was lived. But she had not said this because she was not sure it was true and because saying it would have required her to take a position, and her job was not to take positions but to count.

In the afternoon she reached the deeper blocks, where the water was waist-high and the walkways were sparse and she had to wade. The buildings here were older, lower, and many of them had been residential before the floods — apartment blocks for people who rented because buying was never a possibility, who had moved to higher ground when they could and who had, when they couldn’t, simply stayed and adapted, raising their furniture on cinder blocks and then on stilts and then, when the stilts weren’t enough, moving up a floor and letting the ground floor fill with water and silt and the occasional dead person who drifted in through a broken window and settled into a corner like a piece of furniture that had always been there.

Here she counted a household of twelve in a building that had once been a four-unit apartment block. They shared everything — food, water, childcare, the labor of maintaining the building against the constant work of the sea. The woman who seemed to be in charge, though she denied being in charge when Senna asked, was named Paloma, and she was maybe sixty and she had an authority that came not from a title but from being the person who remembered where everything was and how everything worked and who had done what to whom and why it mattered.

“On the dry side,” Senna said, because she could not help herself, “they would call this a commune.”

“On the dry side,” Paloma said, “they call everything a name so they don’t have to look at it.”

The household included two dead people. One was a man named Beto who sat on the roof in all weather and who, Paloma said, had been a roofer before the first surge and seemed to be checking the flashing. The other was a young girl, maybe eight, who had drowned in the channel between the buildings during a storm and whose body had come back three months later, still the size she had been, still wearing the shorts and T-shirt she had drowned in, and who now sat on the stairs between the second and third floors and who, according to Paloma, smiled sometimes, though Senna did not see her smile.

“Does she eat?” Senna asked.

“She takes food,” Paloma said. “I don’t know if she eats it. The food goes somewhere. Maybe the water takes it. I don’t know.”

“Is she — do you consider her part of the household?”

Paloma looked at Senna the way you look at someone who has asked whether you consider your own hand part of your body. “She lives here,” she said.

The household shared meals twice a day, at a long table made from a door laid across sawhorses. Paloma invited Senna to eat. The food was fish stew with kelp and something starchy that might have been taro grown in one of the rooftop tubs. The dead girl sat at the table too, at the end, and no one served her and she did not reach for anything, but she was there, and her presence shaped the seating arrangement the way a load-bearing column shapes a room — you build around it without thinking about why.

During the meal a man named Roque, who was missing three fingers on his left hand and who had stopped caring what anyone thought of him about ten years ago, told Senna that on the dry side the Authority was planning a third pump station to keep the groundwater down. He knew this because his cousin worked for a plumber who contracted with the Authority, and the cousin sent messages by boat. “They spend more keeping the ground dry than they’d spend building us a hospital,” Roque said. “But the ground on their side has deeds attached to it. Our ground just has water.”

No one at the table disagreed with him, but no one elaborated either. It was not a grievance being aired. It was weather.

Senna climbed to the roof to check on Beto. He was crouched at the edge, his fingers running along the seam where two sheets of corrugated metal overlapped. His fingers were gray and swollen and they moved with a terrible precision, feeling for gaps in the sealant, pressing where the seal had failed. He did not look at her. She stood behind him and watched his hands work and she felt something she had not felt before on the flood side, something that was not pity and not horror and not admiration but was closer to the feeling you get when you see a machine still running in an abandoned factory — the work continuing because the work does not know how to stop.

From the roof she could see the wall. It ran north-south across her field of vision, gray and absolute, and on the other side of it she could see the tops of the dry-side buildings, their rooftops clean and angular against the sky. On this side, the rooftops were cluttered with rain catchments and solar panels and drying racks and improvised gardens in plastic tubs, and between the buildings the water stretched in every direction, brown and flat and alive with the small movements of boats and debris and, here and there, a figure wading through it, going somewhere, and she could not tell from this distance whether the figures were alive or dead.

She realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out and inhaled and the air smelled like brine and warm concrete and something sweet and rotting, maybe fruit, maybe something else, and she wanted very badly to go home, to cross back through the gate and walk on dry pavement and file her report and eat dinner in her apartment where the floors were level and the walls were painted and the dead did not sit in chairs in the kitchen waiting for news about avocado trees.

But she did not go home. She had three more blocks to count.

The next block included a building where six unrelated adults had formed a household by accident — they had all taken shelter in the same structure during the second surge and had simply never left, because leaving meant wading out into the flood with nowhere to go, and staying meant becoming responsible for each other, which none of them had chosen but all of them had accepted. They called themselves nothing. They had no name for what they were. They shared food and labor and a single composting toilet and the endless work of bailing water from the stairwell, and when Senna asked who the head of household was they looked at each other and someone laughed and someone else said, “We take turns,” which was not quite true, Senna thought, but was also not quite false, and was in any case more honest than the dry side’s fiction that every household had a head, as if families were governments and someone was always in charge.

The last household she visited that day was the most difficult. It was in a building at the edge of the deep zone, where the water was chest-high at low tide and the residents moved between rooms by pulling themselves along ropes strung near the ceiling. The building’s upper floor was above the waterline, just barely, and the family — a man named Teodoro and his daughter Vera and Vera’s two children — lived in what had been an attic, their entire existence compressed into forty square meters of sloped ceiling and gable windows and the constant sound of water slapping against the walls below.

Teodoro was seventy-four. He had owned the building before the floods. He had owned the building and the building next to it and a lot on the corner where his father had run a welding shop. The deeds were in a waterproof box under his cot. He showed them to Senna, unfolding the papers carefully, and the papers were real — she recognized the Authority’s seal, the old seal, from before the second surge, when the Authority had still governed both sides.

“These are valid,” Teodoro said. “I own this building. The Authority says I own this building.”

“The Authority doesn’t govern the flood side anymore,” Senna said. “You know that.”

“The Authority doesn’t govern the flood side because the Authority chose not to. That is the Authority’s decision, not mine. My deed is older than their decision. My deed is older than the wall.”

This was, in a strict legal sense, true. The wall had been built three years after the second surge. The deeds predated the first surge. Teodoro’s family had owned this block for four decades. But ownership on the flood side was like gravity on the moon — the law still applied but it applied differently, because the conditions that the law assumed — dry ground, stable structures, the possibility of exclusion — no longer existed. You could own a building that was half-underwater. You could not keep people out of it. The water connected everything. There were no locks that worked when the water rose above the doorframes.

“I’ll note your ownership claim in the record,” Senna said.

“It is not a claim. It is a fact.”

“I’ll note it.”

Teodoro folded the deeds and put them back in the waterproof box and slid the box under his cot and Senna understood that this was a liturgy, that he performed it for every census agent and would perform it for every census agent until he died, and that when he died and came back, he would probably perform it still, his gray hands unfolding the papers, his dead eyes reading the words, his claim that was a fact that was a prayer that the world he had lived in still existed somewhere, behind the wall, in the registry, in the filing cabinets of the Authority that had abandoned him.

His daughter Vera walked Senna down the rope-ladder to the landing where her boat was tied. Vera was thirty, with a competence that came from never having been given the option of incompetence. She held the ladder steady and did not make small talk. At the bottom, standing in water that came to her waist, Senna said, “He shows the deeds to every census agent?”

“Every one,” Vera said. “And to the relief volunteers when they used to come. And to the priest who paddles through once a month. He showed them to a pelican once, I think.”

“Does it help?”

Vera was already climbing back up. She paused and looked down, the rope ladder swaying. “It helps him,” she said. “What else is help for?”

She slept that night in an empty room on the third floor of a building near the gate, the room the flood side kept for census agents because census agents were the only people from the dry side who came anymore. The bed was a foam mattress on a platform of cinder blocks, high enough to stay dry during a typical surge. The sheets were clean. Someone had left a bottle of water and a piece of dried fish on a plate, and Senna ate the fish and drank the water and lay on the mattress and listened to the sounds of the flood side at night: water, always water, and the creak of the walkways, and the voices of people she could not see, and once, very clearly, the sound of someone singing, a woman’s voice, singing something slow and tonal that might have been a lullaby or might have been a hymn and that came from below her, from the flooded ground floor, where no living person would be at this hour.

She did not go down to look. She lay on her mattress and looked at the ceiling and thought about Ofelia wanting to know about her avocado tree and Beto checking the flashing and the girl on the stairs who might sometimes smile, and she thought about Teodoro and his deeds, and she thought about the wall.

The wall was nine meters of poured concrete. It had been built by the Authority to protect the dry side. This was the official account. Senna had been thinking, over three years of census work, that there were cheaper ways to keep water out.

This was not a thought she could put in her census report. The census report had fields for number of living persons, number of structures, estimated resource needs, and a comments section that her supervisor read only to cross things out. She would write her numbers and file her report and the Authority would use the numbers to demonstrate that the flood-side population was declining (it was not) and that the situation was stabilizing (it was not) and that the wall was serving its intended purpose (it was, but not the purpose they meant).

In the morning she went back out. The tide had risen overnight and the water in the streets was higher, up to her hips in places, warm and heavy against her legs. The warmth was the thing that unsettled her most, each time. On the dry side the Authority pumped clean cold water through the mains and you turned on your tap and it came out sharp and clear and you did not think about the fact that it had been filtered and chilled and pressurized for your convenience. Here the water was blood-warm and it pressed against her body like something alive, like something that wanted in. She had felt it on every census trip — a loosening, a softening in the legs first and then in the chest, as if her body were remembering something about water that her mind had decided to forget. She did not trust the feeling. She pushed through it.

She counted six more households, forty more people, nine more dead. The dead were becoming less remarkable to her, which she understood was dangerous. A woman’s dead husband sat beside her while she gutted fish and the woman spoke to him about the price of salt and he did not respond but she spoke to him anyway and Senna recorded them both and moved on, and the recording felt natural, which was the problem.

By late afternoon she had finished her count. She had covered every occupied structure within her assigned sector. Total living: one hundred and fourteen. Total dead: twenty-three. Total she would report to the Authority: one hundred and fourteen. The twenty-three would go in the margins, if they went anywhere at all.

She was standing on the walkway near the gate, preparing to cross back, when she saw something she had not seen before. A woman she did not recognize was standing at the base of the wall on the flood side, in water up to her knees, and she was pressing her hands against the concrete. Not pushing. Not pounding. Just pressing, the way you press your hand against a window to feel the cold on the other side. And her hands were gray.

Senna watched. The dead woman pressed her hands against the wall and stood there, in the water, and after a while she turned and waded back the way she had come, slowly, without urgency, the water parting around her and closing behind her. She moved toward one of the deeper blocks and Senna lost sight of her.

She asked the net-mending woman at the gate about it. The woman looked at her without surprise.

“Some of them do that,” she said. “They go to the wall. They stand there for a while. Then they come back.”

“What are they doing?”

“What do you think? They want to go home. Some of them lived on the other side, before. Before the wall.”

“But the dry side doesn’t have —”

“I know what the dry side doesn’t have. They don’t have dead people walking around because their dead people are in boxes in the ground. Sealed up. The water can’t reach them. Lucky them.”

“You think the water is what brings them back?”

The woman knotted a strand of netting and bit the cord. “I don’t think about it. They’re here. I fix my nets. What I think doesn’t change anything.”

Senna crossed through the gate at 4:47 p.m. The guard on the dry side checked her credentials and logged her return time and asked how many, and she said one hundred and fourteen, and he wrote it down without comment. She walked through the dry streets in her wet boots, leaving a trail of brown water on the clean pavement. People looked at her and then looked away. She smelled like the flood side. She would smell like it for days, no matter how many times she showered. The salt got into everything.

Her apartment was on the sixth floor of a building that the Authority maintained for civil servants. It was clean and dry and the walls were white and the floors were level. She took off her boots and set them on the balcony to dry and she stood at the window and looked south, toward the wall. From here she could see the top of it, a gray line against the sky, and beyond it nothing — just sky, just the flat gray horizon where the water met the air. She could not see the buildings on the other side, could not see the walkways or the boats or the rooftop gardens. Could not see Paloma or Teodoro or Lourdes or the girl on the stairs. Nine meters was exactly the right height for that.

She opened her census form. She picked up her pen. In the field marked TOTAL POPULATION she wrote 114. She looked at the number for a long time. Then she picked up a new form — she had extras, the Authority always gave her extras — and on the new form, in the same field, she wrote 137.

She would file the first form. The second form she folded and put in the waterproof case with her clipboard. She did not know what she would do with it. She did not know who would ever see it.

Outside, the sun was going down. She could smell the salt in her hair. In the morning she would file her report and the Authority would read the number they wanted to read and the other number would stay in its waterproof case, and the tide would come in, and the tide would go out, and someone on the flood side would set a cup of broth in front of a woman who did not breathe, and the census form did not have a field for any of it.