Brooklyn After the Fall
/By Jane Ciabattari
The First Driver
The changes that came overnight were toxic to my system. The new leader made me feel I was being poisoned to the bone. Being near his tower made me faint. Time to go back to Brooklyn.Going back to the place I was born, I believed, I would be safe. I would be with my own.
The first driver was from Congo. He picked me up to take me over the Brooklyn Bridge the first day of the new regime. I was shell-shocked, in a state of disbelief and terror that made me ill. The driver made no bones about his antipathy toward the new leader.
“What will he do?” I asked.
“Ah,” the driver said. He mentioned the long-time dictator of his homeland. The billions he had stashed in a Swiss bank account. The jewels, the airplanes, the trips abroad on the Concorde, the glorious costumes, as he robed himself like royalty. The insidious corruption.
“Buck up,” he said as he dropped me off at the furnished room I had sublet. “At least we don’t live in Congo.”
Yemeni
The second driver was taking me to my doctor a week later for a checkup (if my levels continued to rise I could be a goner). He told me his family was from Yemen. That’s where the servant class for Saudi Arabia came from, he said. His father immigrated forty years ago, the driver was born here, and only recently had he been forced out of the rent-controlled apartment in Park Slope he grew up in. Now he lived in Sunset Park.
“My father was a farmer back in Yemen,” he said. “Eggplant, tomatoes, greens, what you call, all the veggies. Do you know what he did when he had a huge crop?”
“What?”
“He filled his truck with half the harvest and drove into the city and gave them away.” The driver pulled over to my stop. “Why not share the abundance? That’s how he thought.”
Chipotle Brisket
Up the protein, lower the stress, my doctor said. What went into my body and into my mind would become crucial for my survival, she said. I am one of those susceptible to insomnia, panic, night terrors, because of my impaired blinders and my heightened imagination, likely a result of an heirloom gene, a flaw dating back to my Celtic ancestors.
After years without eating meat (not exactly a vegan but close) she told me I had to eat red meat to help me tolerate the stress. Plus beets and wheatgrass juice to bolster my immunity.
A Mexican burger place in Lefferts Garden became my go-to spot: Beet catsup and Chipotle brisket piled on a hand-made corn tortilla. Eat there, take out some to spread over a weekend.
The health food store on Seventh Avenue, in place since the 1970s, had wheatgrass juice at $2 a shot. The first day they didn’t have enough for a full shot. Then I’ll buy half, I said, desperately peeling off a one-dollar bill.
I wanted to survive this time of imbalance. I wanted to believe it could not last. Surely there would be pushback. The new leader could not overwhelm all the laws and legislatures in the land. California was threatening to secede. Something about that helped me move forward. But to do what? My planning mind was frozen. So I played with scale. If I watched on Twitter, on my iPhone, I could reduce the size of the new leader to an inch. Beyond that, I was in panic mode, blood pressure spiking.
Hungry Ghost
I was walking down Flatbush in a bitter wind. The sidewalk to my right was interrupted, the basement level storage next to the Hungry Ghost open, that set of doors to the underworld open wide.
“Oops!” A guy rushing past almost nicked me into that chasm. Turned back, fast.
“Shit, I didn’t see you, I almost.” He stood a minute, looking at me. Worried. Thinking about what almost happened. He could see my body falling down into darkness. I could tell from his eyes.
“All good,” I said. “Group hug.”
We grabbed each other and a third guy on the sidewalk and there was a moment of peace and humility and connection, Brooklyn style. Then off he rushed.
The Great Library of Alexandria
“In New York it’s all about the money,” the driver told me on the way to Greenlight Books. “If you have money, no problem in New York. If you don’t have money, nothing comes easy.”
I nodded, comfortable. The tone of his conversation was like a lullaby.
Then he surprised me. “You’re spending the evening in a bookstore?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.
I nodded.
“In Alexandria, it’s different. The history. Once we had the oldest library in the world, three million maybe three and a half million books. All open to all the people. Even the strangers.”
He made me think. Millions of books, in one location. At Greenlight, it was more like, what? Thousands? It’s a place full of passion and conversation.
“I love Alexandria,” he continued. “The life, the people. You see the water from every place. You just go north and south, the water within view. Not Cairo. Too much people. See, here, I have a video. Waterfront everywhere.”
We parked outside the entrance of Greenlight, in the center of thriving Fort Greene, and he showed me photographs on his iPhone from his visit that summer. Glittering sunlight. I could imagine the millions of books, from centuries ago. Gone. How far away Alexandria seemed. How far he had come.
He showed me the video he had taken walking through Alexandria, and a digital image of a painting of the great library of Alexandria burning. “Some say it was destroyed by fire,” he said. “It could have been budget cuts. Julius Caesar, the Emperor from Rome, cut the money to the scholars.”
I could see my friends gathering inside, some on the stage to read from books they had written, some in the folding chairs to listen. I stayed in the car a while longer, watching his videos, hearing his stories about that great library with millions of books, free for any scholar in the world. And how the Roman emperor brought it down.
The Importance of Arts, Culture, The Creative Process, and how this project resonates with you: Literarature, art, music, theatre, have inspired me since childhood to consider putting into words the images and actions that are part of my imagination. Some of my most successful writing has taken places at artists’ colonies like MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Community of Writers, Lit Camp--places where writers, musicians, and artists gather and share work and the creative atmosphere. Reaching across "boundaries" reminds us of our humanity. The arts and humanities allow me to travel far beyond my individual space and connect in unforeseen ways. As a former president of and longtime board member of the National Book Critics Circle, I have read and evaluated for our awards thousands of books of fiction, autobiography, and poetry. It's a process that has expanded my world beyond all imagining.
What was the inspiration for your creative work?
I wrote Brooklyn After the Fall while living in Park Slope in the fall of 2016, gradually absorbing a seismic (and toxic) shift in the cultural landscpe of my homeland. My stories often arise from natural disasters (earthquakes, wildfires ) or sudden startling changes in personal relationships--a woman takes her baby and escapes from her husband, a mother learns her daugher has been shot. This story combined the sense of disaster with a search for comfort from those who sustain community. Brooklyn After the Fall was first published in an anthology to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day, and then in Literary Hub, where I write a twice-weekly column focused on conversations with authors of literary fiction..
Tell us something about the natural world that you love and don’t wish to lose. What are your thoughts on the kind of world we are leaving for the next generation? Seeds. To quote the manuscript I'm working on: "Liliana takes me to the shed; it’s wooden with a grapevine painted around it. She opens the steel door. “Here we are.” The shed is filled with paper bags and shelves of glass jars from gallon size to tiny. She grabs one.
“Seeds,” she says.
“Kale. Bok Choy. Broccolini, Radicchio. Punterelle. Arugula. Coriander. Oregano. Wild mustard. Here at the Hive we used to strip all the seeds from the pods, and put them into glass jars to preserve for the next year. Here are the seeds, still waiting to be planted.”
She shrugs.
“Lili is a seed saver,” I say, narrating my video. “Maybe one of the last. But. What is a seed? How many years, decades, centuries, pass before it sprouts? Why does one sprout and not another? Where does the beginning begin? Fire, water. Out of the void. And who comes back after mass extinction? Who decides?"
“I’ve never lived in such a precarious time,” she continues. “I’ve never felt so off balance. I’m watching each plant release into the void with a sadness akin to losing a friend. I’ll never forget this apocalyptic summer, which may be the summer before the end. Seeds are what we have to leave behind.”
She sighs. “On the morning of my twelfth birthday, my mother gave me my grandmother Lila’s diary. Leatherbound, with a tiny lock and key. Gilded edges. At last I had something personal from my father’s side of the family. It was written in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. The family produce business went bust, they moved from Kansas to the Rio Grande Valley, where my grandfather started growing citrus, they were in a car wreck, her leg was busted, she was in the hospital for weeks, she dragged her leg the rest of her life. I opened it up, and the pages were mostly empty. All she wrote in her diary was what she planted, what bloomed, and when.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I want you to know where the seeds are. I don’t want to let go of any of it, but some day I will have to. Each seed carries the potential for a plant, each plant carries a glorious possibility.”
She stops. Takes a big sigh.
I want to hug her, but she’s wound so tight I’m afraid it will make things worse. “I want you to pay attention to your life every day. I may not be here this time next year. A speeding truck. A fire, a shift of the wind. Even you could die.”
“Right. Razor’s edge. I get it.”
Even Lili can get even more depressed day by day.
“Why do we have brains if we have no control over what happens?” I speak as narrator. “Just to cogitate, ruminate, like chewing cud? We think we’re in control. We’re fools. We’re at the mercy of a careless universe. I’m of the last generation of humans.” I press STOP.
And still I make videos, capturing Liliana in her rituals of tending, nurturing, preserving. What will happen when there’s no one left to teach us how to survive?
What is a seed? How many years, decades, centuries, pass before it sprouts? Why does one sprout and not another? Where does the beginning begin? Fire, water. Out of the void. And who comes back after mass extinction? Who decides?
“I’ve never lived in such a precarious time,” she continues. “I’ve never felt so off balance. I’m watching each plant release into the void with a sadness akin to losing a friend. I’ll never forget this apocalyptic summer, which may be the summer before the end. Seeds are what we have to leave behind.”
Photo credit: Jane Ciabattari
Jane Ciabattari, author of Stealing the Fire, has published stories in Ms., The North American Review, Chautauqua, Denver Quarterly, Big Other, and New Flash Fiction Review, among others, had three Pushcart Prize special mentions, won a Hampton Shorts Editor’s Choice award, been anthologized in Nothing Short of 100 and Long Island Noir.
