Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

brought to the second floor. He recalled the worst of the predictions before the storm: if the levees broke, there would be ten, fifteen feet of water in some places. Methodically, he began to prepare. Everything of value had to be brought higher. The work was simply work, and he went about it calmly and quickly.
    He took the TV, the DVD player, the stereo, all the electronics upstairs. He gathered all the kids’ games and books and encyclopedias and carried those up next.
    Things were tense at the house in Baton Rouge. With the weather windy and grey, and so many people sharing a small house, tempers were flaring. Kathy thought it best to make her family scarce. She and her kids put away their sleeping bags and pillows and left in the Odyssey, intending to drive around most of the day, going to malls or restaurants—anything to kill time. They would return late, afterdinner, only to sleep. She prayed that they could return to New Orleans the next day.
    Kathy called Zeitoun from the road.
    “My jewelry box!” she said.
    He found that, and the good china, and he brought it all upstairs. He emptied the refrigerator; he left the freezer full. He put all the chairs on top of the dining room table. Unable to carry a heavy chest, he put it on a mattress and dragged it up the stairs. He placed one couch on top of another, sacrificing one to save the other. Then he got more books. He saved all the books.
    Kathy called again. “I told you not to cancel the property insurance,” she said.
    She was right. Just three weeks before, he had chosen not to renew the part of their flood insurance that covered their furniture, everything in the house. He hadn’t wanted to spend the money. He admitted she was right, and knew she would remind him of it for years to come.
    “Can we talk about it later?” he asked.
    Zeitoun went outside, the air humid and gusty. He tied the canoe to the back porch. The water was whispering through the cracks in the back fence, rising up. It was flowing into his yard at an astonishing rate. As he stood, it swallowed his ankles and crawled up his shins.
    Back inside, he continued to move everything of value upward. As he did, he watched the water erase the floor and climb the walls. In another hour there was three feet of water indoors. And his house was three feet above street level.
    But the water was clean. It was translucent, almost green in tint. He watched it fill his dining room, momentarily struck by the beauty ofthe sight. It brought forth a vague memory of a storm on Arwad Island, when he was just a boy, when the Mediterranean rose up and swallowed the lower-sitting homes, the blue-green sea sitting inside living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens. The water breached and dodged the Phoenician stones surrounding the island without any difficulty at all.
    At that moment, Zeitoun had an idea. He knew the fish in his tank wouldn’t survive without filtration or food, so he reached inside and liberated them. He dropped them in the water that filled the house. It was the best chance they had. They swam down and away.
    Using his cell phone, he talked to Kathy throughout the day. They reviewed what couldn’t be saved, the furniture too large to carry upstairs. There were dressers, armoires. He removed all the drawers he could, carried upstairs everything that could be removed and lifted.
    The water devoured the cabinets and windows. Zeitoun watched, dismayed, as it rose four, five, six feet in the house—above the electrical box, the phone box. He would have no access to electricity or a landline for weeks.
    By nightfall the neighborhood was under nine feet of water and Zeitoun could no longer go downstairs. He was spent; he had done all he could. He lay on Nademah’s bed on the second floor and called Kathy. She was driving around with the kids, dreading a return to the house in Baton Rouge.
    “I saved all I could,” he said.
    “I’m glad you were there,” she said, and meant it. If he hadn’t been