City of Refuge by Tom Piazza

bottle he kept in there, a mild tranquilizer that he liked to tell his music pals acted as a sort of Dolby system, cutting out just the unpleasant highest frequencies. He got some water out of his own private cooler (the one little luxury he had half-jokingly insisted on in negotiations with Borofsky) and took the Benevol. He sat at his desk and closed his eyes and breathed deeply, slowly, several times, from his stomach. It will be all right, he said to himself.
    Where would he be if this were all gone? All this life had been a kind of exoskeleton, or scaffolding, inside which he had assembled enough of a self to keep the operation working. His self was invested in the city, in its rituals; he read meaning into it and it returned the favor by endowing him with a set of coordinates, a loose confederation of attitudes, and a community of others who operated under the same constellation. It was not a constellation of meaning he’d been born into; it was a refuge he’d found, a world that worked in a way he needed the world to work, a safe harbor to get away from something in himself for which he lacked a name, some emptiness, some longing, some intimation that perhaps he did not really even exist…But what if it wasn’t here anymore? Where, exactly would he be? Where was he? There had to be some kind of point to it all…
    This was a bad way of thinking. He was supposed to be calming himself down and not driving himself crazy with unanswerable questions. Keep breathing deeply, he thought. Center yourself.
    Useless. After a minute or so he opened his eyes, stood up, turned off the lights and lingered in the doorway of his office to take one more look around. He thought if there were anything he wanted to take with him just in case, then he decided to take nothing, as a gesture of faith. Maybe if he acted as if everything was going to be fine, it would be.
     
    SJ walked four blocks toward the Industrial Canal from his house to where they had closed off part of Tennessee Street for Little T’s birthday party. The neighborhood was lively with Saturday activity, slightly quieter because some had left, but most of the Lower Nine had stayed put. Hammers were going here and there, people putting plywood up over windows, but it seemed generally like a regulation Saturday. There hadn’t even been a question about whether to go ahead with the block party.
    That morning, SJ had driven all around the neighborhood, looking for Wesley—across Reynes Street, past the park, and down North Tonti past Forstall, right again on Andry. He knew that one of his nephew’s best friends lived over on North Miro, and also the girl’s cousin was on Lizardi, and SJ had decided to invest forty minutes or so driving around to see if he could catch a glimpse of Wesley or find someone to ask. He was concerned especially to find out if his nephew was aware of the coming storm and prepared. And, too, he wanted Wesley’s help preparing his house and Lucy’s house. Looking for Wesley, frustrated by his nephew’s disappearance, SJ was balanced between anger and worry. The two emotions often came packaged together for him.
    SJ had most of what he needed stockpiled at home—plywood, fitted with special hooks, batteries, candles, radio, water. SJ didn’t work on Saturdays; he kept the day set aside for himself, usually to pursue the various projects he had going around his own house. This Saturday wouldn’t be much different, aside from helping some neighbors board up their houses. He stopped into Happy Shop to buy some gum, a small store run by a Vietnamese family, located on North Claiborne. Some people in the neighborhood had an antagonistic attitude toward the Nguyens, who ran the place, especially some of his fellow veterans, but SJ was always friendly to them.
    Now SJ could smell the grills going a block away. On this afternoon he wore a white ribbed light cotton sweater, a small gold cross on a chain around his neck outside the sweater, a beige