The End of the World Drives Us Into One Another’s Arms

Disaster Heart by Delaney Nolan

Over the dark Gulf, Hurricane Ida spins towards the coast of South Louisiana.

It is August 29, 2021, and she has spent all night sucking up warm, moist air. She has rapidly intensified into a Cat 4 monster. It is Sunday morning, it is the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, it is six hours until landfall. Everyone evacuating has already evacuated. If you haven’t left by now, it is simply too late to leave. 

I am driving through my neighborhood in New Orleans, turning off of Music Street. The roads are empty. My roommate is in Michigan, my neighbors on every side have packed up and fled, most of my friends are already sitting in twelve hours of traffic, trying to get to Austin, bickering with one another and sick of fumes. I’ve stayed because, by my arithmetic, I’m more likely to be useful than in need of rescue: Our street rarely floods and I have a truck that mostly works. I’d leave if the evacuation order was mandatory, but the mayor has now waited too long to make that call.

I turn up the dial of the radio. A local official is telling communities down around Jean Lafitte to get out, that they are expecting ten to twelve feet of storm surge to sweep through and over the communities not protected by the Army Corps’ federal levee system.

“The storm surge we are anticipating will be unsurvivable.” She says it twice. “Unsurvivable.”

A common symptom of floods, of storms, of catastrophe crashing down is disaster heart. A ravenous, immediate hunger for closeness.

But that hunger drives us down bolder and more human paths. The hunger is loneliness made useful. Though to admit to loneliness can be a little humiliating, it is loneliness that has me eating candy bars at the refugee camp in Tulkarm. It is loneliness that has me awake at 3am in Kyiv, listening to the rap-rap-rap of defense forces. Loneliness that drives me again and again over the flooded roads of South Louisiana.

If you are reading this with a hungry heart, if you jerk and slide towards horror in the blue light of a silent television screen playing impossible news—it is no surprise. You might be experiencing it too.

On the day of the storm, everyone gets to decide where to ride it out, like disaster companionship musical chairs.

My friend Cassi, a dreamy willow of a woman, who rescues baby crows and seduces the local trumpet players, chooses my house to hunker down. She brings her two cats. It is four hours to landfall, and Ida is spinning towards the oil and gas town of Port Fourchon. 

Here on Music Street, the ground is littered with needles, the little orange safety caps of syringes. The condemned flophouse kitty-corner to us used a long metal key to turn their water back on and sometimes they give themselves hasty rag baths on the sidewalk. Everyone calls it The Lips House because in their erratic and colorful stabs at home decor they have affixed a large Rolling Stones lips installation above the front door. Three hours to landfall. I know their names and they know mine and I know their stories; Gary, the primary dealer, has half a face of tattoos, and he amputated his dog’s legs himself in the kitchen because he used to be a vet, or at least he went to veterinary school for a year. Two hours to landfall. Raydell and Cornell usually sleep on the abandoned porches across the street: Cornell sleeps on the porch of the house he grew up in, decades ago, before his dogs died in Katrina and gunshots left him with a colostomy bag. Throughout the summer, I’ve made them sandwiches and taken them to the DMV to get their IDs—tiny basic gestures the government should, by rights, be providing. In six months, they’ll both have housing again, thanks to hard-fought HUD vouchers. In two years, Cornell will be dead, having ODed alone in the apartment he finally moved into. Dead of being alone. But now it is August 2021, and everyone is still alive. One hour until Ida makes landfall.

In my house I’ve stocked the following: 

An axe to chop through the roof in case of flooding.

A kayak to float the streets for rescue.

A large and foldable knife in case of men.

As Ida approaches the coast, she pushes the ocean before her. She dumps a foot and a half of rain across the Gulf. After dark, storm surge overtops the levee in multiple parishes and six feet of water sweeps into the little towns outside the federal levee protection system, into Jean Lafitte and Oakville and White Ditch. Ida picks up ton upon ton of floton—a local term for shallow-rooted marsh vegetation that I have never found in any dictionary—and drops it across Lafitte, leaving a mess that will take months to clean up. Boats in the canals of Terrebonne Parish splinter and sink.

Ida crashes into Port Fourchon and her winds reach 150mph, driving inland storm surge fifteen feet high. She pushes the Mississippi into reverse, rolls train cars off their tracks and whole trailers off their foundation, leaving them upside down. In Houma, she rips roofs into the air, drops them across the street, snaps telephone poles at their base for miles up and down the bayou.

In my living room in New Orleans, as the rain goes sideways and the light drains out of the sky, I pace from the front door to the kitchen and back, too nervous to sit down or stop drinking.

“Do you want to play cards or something?” asks Cassi, lounging on the couch and turning her blue spotlight eyes out the door. For now, we’re keeping it wide open, to watch the lashing rain through the screen.

“I can’t concentrate,” I tell her. “But maybe we can listen to music.”

Cassi puts Chopin on my record player and we try to dance like ballerinas, lifting our legs in clumsy plies. We are drunk. Down the street, though I don’t know it yet, the winds are pulling down a brick wall and smashing the side mirror off my truck. 

An hour later, Cassi and I see a Lips House neighbor trying to push his van out of a rapidly flooding ditch. We rush outside into the shrieking rain and heave, the metal slick from the downpour, water licking our calves. One, two, three; we heave it free.

“Thank you!” he screams over the sound of the wind. “Jesus Christ, thanks!” And we sprint back inside, howling with something like joy.

After darkness falls completely, somewhere on the rim of the Mississippi River, Ida pulls her next great trick: She rips the screeching, shrieking metal of an entire 475-foot high electrical tower down and hurls it into the thrashing water, snarls the transmission lines and throws them down there too. When transformer boxes blow, one after another after another in great blazing pops, their light is a faint, dull green, like the distant spell of a witch.

Around 8pm, every light left across Orleans Parish blinks off at once.

The internet goes. Then the phone signal goes, too. 

And with that, something impossibly rare has happened to us: We are alone.

The post-Ida blackout happens to coincide with me writing a novel about an electrical grid failure amidst a heat wave. So I already knew about our grid’s fragility—I’d talked to experts who used phrases like “matter of time” and “held together by prayers.” And I knew heat was climate change’s biggest killer. But in the days after Ida, I learn quickly that I didn’t understand heat yet. Not really.

In the United States, the counties most likely to experience dangerous “wet bulb” conditions are clustered in southern Texas and Louisiana. Wet bulb is a way of measuring both temperature and humidity, and how it really feels to be outside, soaked in sweat. When it’s really humid, scary humid, sweat stops evaporating from your skin. It stops doing its cooling work. Phoenix’s blazing sun and burning sidewalks may claim heat notoriety, may leave horrific second-degree burns, but it is these Louisiana nights—when humidity never slacks, when the air is wet wool, when sweat only pools, when there is simply no relief—that pose the quiet danger. 

“Heat is sneaky,” an expert told me once. When you’re in danger, you don’t always realize you’re in danger. All night your heart hammers, its muscles pushing blood to the surface of your skin, seeking coolness. The body begs. The heart exhausts itself. 

But before all that, before the heat, before the death, before the blackness of unlit nights—what nobody tells you is that the morning following a major hurricane, the world is green, green, green. 

The terrible winds have spent all night pulling down leaves, whole branches, ripping entire living trees to the ground, and so for a few hours—before the cleanup begins, before the oak even realizes it’s dead—every street, every sidewalk is covered in bright green life. It is stunning. The winds have blown off the humidity for once, and the sun is out, and it’s the most beautiful, breezy, perfect day we’ve felt in months. 

For hours, Cassi and I bike around town, checking on the homes of absent friends: You’re okay, we tell each other; you’re okay. 

Debris and stray roofing nails turn our tires flat, and then we’re on foot. Everyone who stayed is outside, on the street. The restaurants empty their walk-in fridges, feeding everybody before the food goes bad. Cassi and I devour plates of eggs and bacon and gulp down Bloody Marys on a sidewalk near the French Quarter. Everything is free. 

“You’re okay,” we say, a little tipsy now, until we reach Cassi’s home and see how the trees have shattered across her courtyard, crushed cars. We have to climb over them to reach her front door. You’re okay, I say, touching her back as she keels over.

“Is there anything you need?” we ask each other, ask everyone we run into. We change a flat tire. We take water bottles out of the dark freezer, quickly as we can, and roll them on our necks, hand them around, give some to Raydell and Cornell.

In the evening, we sit on our friend Nick’s porch and watch as the tough neighborhood women lovingly dubbed The Lesbian Mafia set up a table with pots of gumbo and jasmine rice and feed every single person who shows up and asks. 

A neighborhood woman joins the line for gumbo, speaking closely and cheerfully to a younger, dark-haired woman holding a child’s hand. “Es como un guiso,” the neighbor says to the mother. The mother and child just arrived here from Honduras six days ago. It is their first hurricane. It is their first gumbo. The neighbor just met her this morning and has taken on translation duties. She makes the kid laugh. The Lesbian Mafia heaps food into her bowl. The mother tastes it, nods in approval, adds hot sauce. There is no electricity. Everything is still free.

The end of the world makes you want to find somebody. Every end of the world—even the small apocalypses—drive us into one another’s arms.

Former UN peacekeeper Heidi Postlewait spoke of the “emergency sex” colleagues had with one another amidst the horrors in Somalia and Haiti. 

During the earliest, murmuring days of COVID, before we knew what was really happening, I stood in the middle of my street on a humid evening with cicadas screaming and licked my friend’s face, drew my tongue from chin to forehead. 

Fear makes us touch-hungry. If there’s any blessing hidden in the apocalypse, it is that it cracks us open.

One by one, we leave Nick’s porch and the gumbo table. Cassi goes to her ex-lover’s house. Since it’s the end of the world we all breathe a little sigh of relief; if the world has ended, then nobody cares who anybody else is having sex with. Make your mistakes deliciously. Though I have no arms to be driven into. There’s simply nobody in town that I want, no container around to pour my desire into; my hunger has no place to go. 

But there are others who consider wielding a startling violence to meet their every appetite. Which means, that night, a man follows me home. 

No one else is around. And without streetlights, it is dark, completely dark in a brand new way. I’m wearing a headlamp as I bike home on a patched tube. A white van turns the corner behind me. Then it stops when I stop in front of my house.

I climb off my bike and lean it against the stoop, knees bent, heart pounding from heat and the slow itch of fear. The man, young, white, grips the steering wheel and stares out the window at me. He is tense, silent, considering, about to lurch. There are no lights, and there are no people, and there are no emergency services, even if I could call.

I’ve stupidly left my knife inside.

“What?” I snarl at the man, suddenly aggressive for no reason I can name. “WHAT?” 

It will be unsurvivable. Unsurvivable.

I think it’s the headlamp that saves me. Pointed at him, I can see his face, his hesitant but hungry expression. But he can’t see mine.

Ten long, long seconds pass. And then he slams the accelerator and speeds off. 

Halfway down the block, he screams back through the window at me: “You know what, bitch!”

I do. I do know.

Raydell and Cornell have gone, but I tell the sweetheart junkies I don’t recognize on the porch across the street what happened, my heart hammering. We shake hands and they promise to keep an eye out for me because at the end of the world, it’s your neighbors, whoever they might be, who will keep you safe. I go inside and lock every deadbolt, keep my candles away from the windows. In the wall behind my bed, a family of mice chatter and sing. For hours, I lie awake. No one else is in my home, or the home next door, or across the street, or behind me. The electricity won’t be back for a week or two and it has started to pour again. To anyone on the street looking at the dark windows all around, it’s obvious I’m in here alone.

I finally reach Cassi, and she and her ex-lover and a roommate all together pick me up. Neighbors keeping each other safe. I dart through the rain and dive into their car, they bring me home, and in a house with other bodies I collapse onto a couch that isn’t mine and I sleep and sleep and sleep.

There follow days and nights of brutal, mind-warping heat, impossible sleep, bath-warm bottled water, garden hose showers in the yard. Hearts are pounding all the time. There is no time of day or night when it cools off. 

Across the city, people who live alone are the ones who die—slowly at first, then faster. They die of heat in senior centers. They die of heat in apartments. They die of weak hearts and heat, of a combination of antidepressants and alcohol and brutal, brutalizing heat. Sometimes, their bodies aren’t discovered for days, until someone notices flies in the window, buzzing against the glass, tick, tick. 

On the fourth day I run into Rafael, my neighbor who lives with his girlfriend in a camper across the street.

“We’re looking for volunteers,” he says, breathless, gesturing behind himself with his phone, “They’re evacuating everyone at the senior center. They found a body.”

The senior center is three blocks away. The EMS crews haven’t arrived yet, so instead, a dozen of us are slowly climbing up and down the flights of stairs, knocking one by one on apartment doors, checking for life. Without power, the upper floors and the dark stairwell are sweltering. Sweat pours down my neck as I pass Rafael and his girlfriend, helping an elderly woman down the stairs one excruciating step at a time. The elevators are out, the air conditioning is out, refrigerators are out. People had no way to chill their insulin or charge their nebulizers or call their grandchildren for help. The hallways are dim, the air chokingly still.

“These ones are checked,” a drenched, middle-aged man tells me, thumbing behind him. He and I walk the last corridor of the fourth floor.

“Anybody in here?” we call, knocking on the doors, one by one. We gently push inside, bracing for bodies. The smells of spoiled food drift from inside. Utter silence under our voices; no background hum of electronics. We knock, push the door open: This room’s abandoned. Heat deaths are difficult to diagnose in an autopsy. It looks like the heart simply gave up. Knock, knock: In the last room, a woman is slowly gathering her medications into a green, fake leather purse.

“Where we going?” she asks us, just above a gasp. All the windows are closed. It’s hard to imagine spending an hour in this smothering heat, never mind four days.

“Just downstairs,” we say, pointing out the window to where ambulances have now begun to arrive. We guide her by the elbow down the stairs as the paramedics walk up.

In the end, nineteen people in New Orleans die of heat in the post-Ida blackout. Most of them are elderly, and most of them are Black, and most of them are living alone.

After six days, I surrender. 

I drive to Texas to meet an Alaskan crabber I’d been seeing who fled before the storm hit land. The crabber isn’t exactly who I want, but it’s the desire, the loneliness, that slowly sets me spinning down a useful path.

The crabber and I drive down to the bayous of south Louisiana to deliver aid and supplies, and we discover that there, it really is the end of the world. For Pointe aux Chien, for Dulac, for Isle de Jean Charles—this country’s first federally-recognized climate refugees, already pushed from their homes—this is a true apocalypse. Home after home after home has been blown open atop the already rapidly-dissolving land. It will take months, years, to put it back together. The wetlands that the storm ripped up will likely never come back. 

It’s down there where I meet Sherri Parfait, Chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. She is a mom of three with a librarian’s glasses who tells me about their doomed future, how they’ll all have to pick up and relocate as the land erodes. Her telling of this obsesses me. Her voice pricks at me for weeks, as does the strange post-disaster glimpse into another world, with no money and no cop cars, with every neighbor sharing food and ice, walking one another to safety through dark halls of heat. 

From Dulac to New Orleans I witnessed what Rebecca Solnit calls the “paradise built in hell,” the documented socio-cultural phenomenon of kindness and solidarity that takes place immediately after disasters, in those heady days and weeks when people discover that this can feed their hunger for connection, for meaning, for immediacy.

We get communal goodwill in the wake of a disaster, yes, but also on top of that, we get apocalypse pleasure. Apocalypse recklessness. And with this, many more things become possible. Yes, today storms and jackboots are at the collective door, but if the future is foreshortened, then our mental calculus of acceptable risk—physical, emotional—must also change.

The wreckage down the bayou, Chief Parfait-Dardar’s tribe—they drive me to pitch my very first reported story, which launches me into journalism, changing my life, to Kyiv and Nablus and Ramallah, driving me to stand outside the razor wire of LaSalle Immigration Detention Center, where I interview the friends and family and rabbis and lawyers who refuse to let Mahmoud Khalil be made alone.

Maybe we are better off thinking of loneliness this way: Not as a lack, but as a drive, a hunger to gather the world towards yourself. A delirious craving to suck the blood out of life. When you understand loneliness as a useful form of desire, it all becomes easier to bear. Then loneliness becomes a sort of gift.

I think by now we all know about the weather. We are, of course, facing down a true apocalypse. In the coming decades, temperatures will (further) soar, hurricanes will (further) strengthen, glaciers will crack and calve, seas will rise, and if I live to be my grandmother’s age, I will see up to three billion people pushed outside the temperature niche, living in an “uninhabitable zone,” three billion strangers stalked by conditions that are simply too hot to endure, hotter than Ida’s nights. Unsurvivable, said the radio.

Here we are at the end of the world, driven into one another’s arms. Here we are as disaster heart pushes us toward one another. We are grasping. 

There are many tools and technologies to hide from that feeling now. Businesses built as escape hatches from the messiness of human grasping for connection. But please: let yourself be lonely. Let it push you out the door. Drive to Texas in the middle of the night. Walk towards the sirens. Brave the heat. Knock on the stranger’s door even though you told yourself you would under no circumstances let yourself knock on a stranger’s door again. Stand in front of the riot police shields. Loop your arm with strangers who share no language with you except the demand for protection, before the splintering glass of the bus stops, the smoke and crack of rubber bullets. Loneliness can make us better; might just save our lives, if we let it.

In the morning after Ida, we glimpsed the new world. Before our tires went flat, Cassi and I biked to the Lower Ninth Ward, where a grocery store had burned down overnight. Among the smoldering ash, we picked with strangers through the remainders, boiled candy-colored Big Shot sodas and scorched cigarette packs. Someone had already pried open the ATM, and when I reach in, I pulled out handfuls of burned $20 bills that dissolved into ash in my palm, and with a breeze, they blow away. We’ve stumbled into a world without money, or before money, operating on the logic of children, without taxes or shame, picking through an obstacle course and looking for treats. We didn’t need the burned-up cash, anyhow. Everything was free.

The post The End of the World Drives Us Into One Another’s Arms appeared first on Electric Literature.