Disintegration
Karen FischerOn morning drives to New Orleans East, the rising sun became briefly hidden by I-10 as it climbed from highway into bridge. The grade was reminiscent of a roller coaster, the chugga chugga chugga only this far from memory. When I reached the apex of the highway-turned-bridge, the sun could finally show itself fully once again. The power of it, even in the early hours, was blinding. But relief came quickly as the road dipped towards the first exit from the bridge onto Downman Road. The transition was steep. It required vigilance. If I did not hold the brakes steady as the Celica careened downhill and onto this exit, the car could, in theory, spring out from below me, crash through the concrete barrier, dive over the bridge and into the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal. The lazy brown waters sifted below, ambivalent about who or what entered them. For two months I made this drive on the same days and hours of each week. Many of those days, I drove far beyond this point, across Bayou Sauvage and Lake Pontchartrain northbound to Slidell to drop off the man who would one day become my fiancé. From there, I’d turn and head West back to New Orleans East.
A rural road led to a new job and when I maneuvered onto it for the first time, I was stunned by how severely the concrete was destroyed by potholes. Some of the jagged holes were so deep you could hide from the tips of fingers to beyond the wrist, halfway to the elbow, in them. The holes seemed geriatric, like missing teeth in an elder’s mouth. Tripping in one could break an ankle or slice
open a calf. The common knowledge was that it was truly a lost cause to fill potholes in New Orleans. The city was sinking. Once filled, they opened right back up. In the most populous areas, an attempt to repair was made. On that road, there wasn’t. It did not look like a soul had been there for decades.
My first day of work was after a storm. A sheet of water rested over a swath of the road leading to the office. When I drove through, the geriatric potholes regurgitated their reservoirs of water, sprayed them thick and blinding across the windshield. I was new to the city, the ways that water warped perception. Standing water from a distance was fuzzy at first, like a mirage. Yet even up close, it was hard to tell if that same water was two or ten inches deep. I learned to fear the mirages. On the news at night, stories ran over hurricane season about how these sheets of water, if driven through, could make a car float and sink with the driver strapped in, the pressure too thick to open the door or a window to get out. In part due to this hardened fear of drowning doing some everyday, banal activity, I came to study the sky to predict the rains. The fact of the matter was that the weather asserted itself with no trepidation. It would show you just why, over time, it was in your best interest to take it seriously.
The office sat on a massive property that held wooden boxes so plentiful that they created a maze. Over time, the two-by-four panels holding each box together would be broken open with crowbars, one side at a time, to spill out their contents. The two other workers were young men, one black, one white. Each day, they pulled on rubber overalls and mucking boots to sift through the alleyways between the boxes and crack open different ones at specific times. One of the men was cagey and always looked like he was caked in sweat, even before venturing into the field in the mornings. The other man always called me ma’am, though I was at least a decade younger than him. The stink of the place hovered
and clung to clothes, but it wasn’t rancid and unbearable, like trash. Instead, the odor held the sharp stink of decay. There was a difference: There were traces of sweetness in it. The contents of the boxes were items like the pulps of oranges and the decapitated fronds of pineapples. The sales pitch was that anything that was once alive—the exception being an animal—could go into the boxes. It was this intention of siphoning young items that were recently alive away from general waste that lured me into the job. It was a stretch, but if I tried, I could somehow connect the boxes to the land to the storms to the rains to the floods to the deaths to life and, finally, to renewal and, perhaps from there, a chain throughout the region’s history could be broken. It seemed an endless line, what this simple action of regenerating soils could mystically do, at least from a moral perspective. I was convinced that the mission of what the boxes were all about met an invisible expectation of what it meant to me to be a good person: It seemed my sole purpose was to fix something awfully broken in the world around me, and even if that intent was met from a very, very far distance, at least I would be able to sleep at night knowing I was achieving the millennial pinnacle of making a difference while earning my living. Plus, they were hiring. I had no money. I needed a job.
With the stink of the boxes came the hogs. It was said that they escaped from a nearby farm. They were dark and furry and caked in mud. They’d congregate among the alleyways of the boxes, nibbling contents that had fallen out between edges of two-byfours. They were massive, easily hundreds of pounds apiece. Until then, I had barely seen farm animals and these were not the dainty piglets of childhood field trips on the East Coast. The hogs of New Orleans East were faster, thicker, tougher somehow. They were of the land, wandering in herds as the sun climbed over the course of the day.
It was winter, though winter meant nothing in the land of perpetual summer. It was one of the few places in the country where the weather did not tide over in tune with Christmas. The trees did not change. They stayed green and cheery, oak branches splaying out to shadow broken sidewalks. You could wear sundresses in February. This felt like freedom, at first, to be able to wear a sundress everyday and abandon staples of clothing from my life before, like fluffy winter coats. But before long, each cotton sundress was stinking and stained yellow in the armpits. Over time, I found that eleven of the twelve months of the year were far too hot to reasonably enjoy the steaming, hearty dishes that the city was so well-known for. Days where it was cool enough to wear a long sleeve shirt were savored. I missed wearing black. Over time, I developed a theory that the weather produced a false cheeriness in people. Who could be openly unhappy if the sun was out? Who could be brooding? It was ridiculous to do those things in a tropical place, and my suspicion was that a large swath of people simply avoided talking about the challenges of life for this subconscious reason. It felt foolish to complain while the sun was out. Why not cheer up?
Some days at work, I would exit the office and scream into the vast field where the boxes lay. Occasionally it was to scare off the hogs. They seemed docile, but there were up to ten in a pack. They came to eat each and every morning. If they wanted to, they could overpower any human being. Years later, I was perplexed to research the hogs and confirm everything I had seen firsthand about them: They had excellent memories. They remembered places they had been before. They were very effective foragers. Because of that, if you were a farmer, you did not need to worry about feeding them heavily. They wandered in herds. They could thrive in hot weather, especially in wet, swampy conditions. They were meek and sensitive. But at the time, the sight of dozens of hogs eating corn cobs with curly tails poking from their thick mud-
splattered bottoms was so foreign, so beyond anything I had ever known, that I could not help but be afraid of them. They merged into the same category of fear as the rains: They were unknown and mysterious and powerful. They humbled me. I could watch them, perhaps admire their ingenuity, but it was always from a distance.
Some days the hogs didn’t take to the boxes in the field. They’d rough up the land right behind the office and fall over to take naps in the morning sunshine. The grass quickly got torn apart by their hooves and with a casual storm, it became a mud-pit proper. I’d arrive at work in fit and flare sundresses and brown vintage pumps and walk by fat hogs bathing in mud as I entered the office. Some days, the boss dropped off fresh donuts for breakfast. I’d eat a piece of fruit instead. When he saw that the donuts lay untouched, he’d grumble to himself. One day I was ushered into his office to listen to an hour long tangent about how leaders in the city plotted against him and his business. This task of wordlessly listening seemed outside of my job description, but I nodded, deepened my dimples, and thought the whole time, I’m getting paid eighteen dollars to listen to this. Another day, the boss stormed in and picked up one of the thick, neon bags that the final contents of the boxes found their way into. I was told to find a bag that was cheaper because my hire should make the boss more money and there was only a set amount of time that he would keep me employed if I wasn’t making him more money, and did I hear him? Did I?
Despite these interactions, I spent most of my working hours alone. Minimal instruction was given. My only required daily tasks were to input the weights of contents deposited in the boxes into a database and pick apart piles of receipts to shove them into corresponding plastic bins. Afterwards, I would stand up, wander to the back door, and watch the hogs as they slept.
One shift, the rains came. The sky clapped and blackened. I was alone. Even the hogs had run for cover. The next business
was miles away. A truck drove slowly down the road with geriatric potholes. Within minutes, they turned to come back the way they came. Turned again. Back down the road, slithering past the office. I watched from a window through blinds at half-slit. Rain started to spit. Thunder pressed over, long and steady. All of a sudden, the truck, instead of stalking the office, pulled in next to my Celica. The only car in the lot.
Two men got out of the truck. They wore mucking suits, except in camouflage print. One held a gun. When they knocked on the door, I called the boss and had him on the phone with me as I opened it slightly.
One of the men held up the rifle. “Mind if we shoot one of them hogs out back?”
I repeated the question to the boss. I parrotted his response to the man:
“You do not have permission to shoot one of those hogs. If you do, I will call the police.”
I slammed the door in their faces and, eventually, they drove off.
I don’t know what happened to that business. By the time I left, tens of dollars were in the checking account. People did not know what precisely could go into the boxes, so services were canceled. The boss turned on me, too, though he was always a bit turned on me. I was not from there. I did not know how things worked. All I knew was that when he screamed at me, it wasn’t me he was screaming at. It was something larger in the place, what the world around us dictated was right and wrong, and he followed through on what he found to be permissible conduct. One day he called me into his office with his hands fixed in the shape of a spade. He threatened—again—to fire me. During the interaction, he narrowed his eyes and smiled in a way that indicated that this was not the first time he had spoken like this to a subordinate. It
was, perhaps, an expression of marked power, of one relishing in the feeling that they had the upper hand over you and you must do as they say or else. I deepened dimples, nodded, and plotted when to email my resignation letter and leave the keys in the mailbox. After that day, I never saw him again.
A few weeks later, the boss mailed paperwork to my apartment detailing a false infraction that culminated in him terminating me, even though I had been the one to quit. But it was not infuriating anymore—it was darkly comical to see firsthand how far someone would go to feel in control of what happened around them, or as the result of them. It became a lesson the city taught me about what lay behind pretty facades. I had accepted this job, though it was doomed from the start, because I needed the money. I tried to make the mission something that justified the experience of it, even when the expectation and reality did not align. I was flailing. I was afraid. But no matter those facts of my life, pretty facades were not helpful. The dreams of what something could be were not enough. At the end of the day, I had made no difference at all, and the urge to accept a job just to feel like I was making some change in the world by organizing receipts was misguided. I deeply resented the narrative that it was typical to accept abuse in order to make the world a better place.
In some ways, fear of New Orleans lived right beside the joy for it. I moved to the city for those well-known joys—the people, parades, festivals, shotgun houses, pastel colors galore, and the endless amount of restaurants, shops, and landmarks that seemed, somehow, to stand the test of time. So much romance was cradled in the idea of visiting the city fifty years ago and going back to the same restaurants you visited then to eat the same dishes on the same plates with the same decor—that was timelessness, something incredibly difficult to find in a country so young, yet New Orleans had it. But all of this held duality. Fight or flight, fear
of the unknown, all of it welded together and changed the joy, made it morph in a funhouse mirror. Months later, my one-day financé was driving the Celica north to Metairie on I-10 when the hood flew up and smashed the windshield. The car was totaled. Insurance was too expensive because of the nearly confirmed likelihood of a car flooding when it was parked anywhere in the city during a storm. Since we could not afford insurance, we bought cheap hand-me-down bikes instead. One day, I biked through inches of water in a low-lying neighborhood during what should have been a routine afternoon rain. The water crept up towards stoops. Mothers holding infants waited with their front doors open, watching the progression. When I got back to my apartment, I was soaked to the bone. My belongings were soggy and destroyed. The mayor at the time made a statement that people had to learn to live with this water, but I didn’t know how that was possible when massive swaths of the city that ran the gamut from rich to poor had their prized possessions destroyed over and over in this way. How could you be expected to live like that, to plan for a future when risk was riddled like potholes everywhere? I flipped through channels on the local news. The flooding I had biked through wasn’t covered. It, apparently, was unremarkable. A common statement I heard was that New Orleans was an excellent Caribbean city. If held to tropical standards, it was very well-developed and functional. At the core, this seemed to be a sentiment that did the constant work of writing off neglect as charm. Perhaps because of that, it was not uncommon for me to hear New Orleans referred to by residents as the third world. Rideshare drivers, bartenders, servers, neighbors, just about anyone whose work was not based in an air-conditioned office on a bad day would easily, without thinking twice, say something along the lines of “Fuck this third world shit.” A large part of the sentiment came from a skepticism that anything would
ever possibly change, no matter what anyone said or how many transplants moved from the North to the South with the intention of fixing something they did not understand. For better or for worse, New Orleans had stayed the same for longer than I could comprehend. Anything with particularly deep roots there, be it an oak or a person, could effectively stay the same and even, over time, remain deeply unchanged.
Yet upon leaving, the predominant emotion was that I had somehow failed. I had not come to the same conclusion from the calculation so many had made before me. People stayed in New Orleans for many reasons, but often this convergence of risk and reward required the same questions out of people: Was it all worth it? My personal calculation was that it was not. I had not tamed my fears, though they were justified. It did not take a hurricane to flood the city. A simple rain could do it, and with it your car, home, or life was easily in danger. People died in incredibly benign, yet violent ways. If you were born into a neighborhood out of your control, you could break your ankle in a pothole and no one would think that it was anyone’s fault but your own. It was futile to try to control what happened to you in a place so wild.
It is said that the biggest difference between animals and humans is that animals have the ability to live in a continuous now. They, unlike humans, are not walled off between contemplations of past pains or when future traumas will strike. Instead, animals can live in the moment in a way that human beings covet so deeply it makes us sick. Even as I attempted to become sturdy and scrappy and suspicious and a part of the land in New Orleans, I was no match for those who naturally belonged. So really, as anyone coped with what New Orleans could, or would, do to them, the hogs had it best. They were present. They were there. If the rains flooded their land, they would wait. Their skin was thick enough to withstand anything storms had in store. They could warm each other in their
numbers. I imagine they would be excellent swimmers. Even now, the hogs keep rolling in the mud of my mind—I wonder if their boxes have been abandoned, if they’re still munching apple cores, or if the contents have finally done what they were supposed to do all along: disintegrate into the earth below, broken down into a pyramid of dirt until you took a shovel, dug in and, miraculously, steam poured out.
