1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose Page B

my frequent forays into the massive expanse of blown-apart lives and property that local street maps used to call Gentilly, Lakeview, the East, and the Lower 9th. She fears that it contributes to my unhappiness and general instability, and I suspect she is right.
    Perhaps I should just stay on the stretch of safe, dry land Uptown where we live and try to move on, focus on pleasant things, quit making myself miserable, quit reliving all those terrible things we saw on TV that first week.
    That’s advice I wish I could follow, but I can’t. I am compelled for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. And so I drive.
    I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn’t inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.
    In some cases, there’s no interpretation needed. There’s one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: 1 DEAD IN ATTIC.
    That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.
    It’s spray-painted there on the front of the house, and it probably will remain spray-painted there for weeks, months, maybe years, a perpetual reminder of the untimely passing of a citizen, a resident, a New Orleanian.
    One of us.
    You’d think some numerical coding could have conveyed this information on this house, so that I—we all—wouldn’t have to drive by places like this every day and be reminded: “1 Dead in Attic.”
    I have seen plenty of houses in worse shape than the one where 1 Dead in Attic used to live, houses in Gentilly and the Lower 9th that yield the most chilling visual displays in town: low-rider shotgun rooftops with holes that were hacked away from the inside with an ax, leaving small, splintered openings through which people sought escape.
    Imagine if your life came to that point and remained there, on display, all over town, for us to see, day after day.
    Amazingly, those rooftops are the stories with happy endings. I mean, they got out, right?
    But where are they now? Do you think they have trouble sleeping at night?
    The occasional rooftops still have painted messages: HELP US. I guess they had paint cans in their attic. And an ax, like meterologist Margaret Orr and Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard always told us we should have if we weren’t going to evacuate.
    Some people thought Orr and Broussard were crazy. Alarmists. Extremists. Well, maybe they were crazy. But they were right.
    Perhaps 1 Dead in Attic should have heeded this advice. But judging from the ages on the state’s official victims list, he or she was probably up in years. Stubborn. Unafraid. And now a statistic.
    I wonder who eventually came and took 1 Dead in Attic away. Who knows? Hell, with the way things run around here—I wonder if anyone has come to take 1 Dead in Attic away.
    And who claimed him or her? Who grieved over 1 Dead in Attic, and who buried 1 Dead in Attic?
    Was there anyone with him or her at the end, and what was the last thing they said to each other? How did 1 Dead in Attic spend the last weekend in August of the year 2005?
    What were their plans? Maybe dinner at Mandich on St. Claude? Maybe a Labor Day family reunion in City Park—one of those raucous picnics where everybody wears matching T-shirts to mark the occasion and they rent a DJ and a Space Walk and a couple of guys actually get there the night before to secure a good, shady spot?
    I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.
    1 Dead in Attic could have been my mail carrier, a waitress at my favorite restaurant, or the guy who burglarized my house a couple years ago. Who knows?
    My wife, she’s right.