Edwin was ten meters ahead of me. “Watch out,” he yelled without looking behind him as a small birch tree came floating down the street. It got snagged on something underwater, spun around, and floated off again.
Others walked through the flood behind us like we were a pilgrimage of instant refugees. Some crossed the way we were and others tried to move in the other direction.
“Keep up, Jacob,” Edwin yelled.
He looked back. Beside him was the black steel hood of another big car. It was in the middle of the road as if it had been abandoned while moving. The hood of the car reflected the first of the morning’s sunlight, a silver glow laying down on this water that seemed to run through the heart of the city, possibly the whole country. Dead men continued to fall from the sky. The crack and echo of gunfire bounced off the buildings before settling into the mortar and marrow of Rotterdam. Edwin kept looking back and must have seen me among all that—struggling against the current, slipping so my chest and face kept dipping into the water. Every other step now my brother turned back to make sure I kept up.
When Edwin was next to the car we made eye contact. Then he turned, took about four steps forward so he was even with the car’s front bumper, and he started walking the road’s incline out of the water. The water level sunk from his waist, below his pants pocket, and off the back of his knees as he stepped forward. He looked back again like he knew that seeing him was keeping me calm. The water was at the centerline of his shins when he turned back to the port.
Then, in midstride, Edwin plunged straight down—dropping below the waterline.
A white rim of bubbles from where he’d sunk swept to the surface and flowed toward me.
“Edwin!” I ran hard to get out of the deeper water, dove forward, and swam until my knees scraped the road. Some larval shifting of fear roiled through my stomach. Next to the submerged car, I plunged forward again. My head was out of the water and my hands searched the contours of the road. The brick cut the heel of my palm and scraped at my skin. Then my hands found the circular lip of an open manhole and reached down into it. A stronger, quicker moving current beneath the street sucked at my arm, buckled my body in half, and folded me over the steel lip of the hole, and I had to fight from getting swallowed into that hidden river.
My hands ran around the lip. The quick flowing water over the street must have jarred the cover loose and pushed it away. I pinned my armpits against the lip and dove my head into the hole. Everything underwater was black. The current pushed hard against my neck, and it took all my strength to hold myself in that position, underwater in both the flooded road and this unmapped world. My hands circled the water, reaching for anything, each finger striving loose of the knuckles. I thought of Samuel’s manic arm. No sunlight sunk beneath the street. I willed my body to let go, to let the current pull me to Edwin. My abdominal muscles locked in a folded U against the lip. My mind kept telling my feet to kick my body the rest of the way in—just kick.
Air bubbles rose up the side of my head as I exhaled in a gasping scream. Above the surface I took wild fish breaths for air, howled for help, and dove again, but couldn’t bring my body to let itself go with the current. Let go. Let go. Let go. But I stayed like that, diving into and breaching the flooded street, reaching, but not finding anything in that dark underground flow.
“Help! Please help! I need rope.”
The water sunk in through my ears and nose and skin and saturated everything.
I ran to where the road level was above the canal to see if there were any sewer outlets. If there were, they were underwater.
Tributaries slunk off in quick streams and rivulets. In the water a dead rat floated past me. Up ahead where it was dry, there were more gunned-downed paratroopers on the street.
Another man crossing the water had a small child on his shoulders. Beside them was a younger boy.
“Young fellow,” the man said to me. “Keep moving, get out of the street.”
“Please, help me,” I begged, weeping from hot, incoherent rage. That helpless anger stayed with me, it rose and receded in my throat and coated me like a second skin.
“Come on. Keep moving,” he said again.
“What happened?” the boy walking behind the man asked me. The boy’s face was slack and dumb-looking, like he had no context for the city all around him, exploding into flood and noise and death.
“I think we flooded the streets,” I said, standing and following the man and his children toward the piers, walking like a ghost, floating free of who I had been. As I wandered, I was not myself—could never be myself again. I was now the person who had persuaded Edwin to take to the street with me.
My father was leaning over a wounded man and wrapping gauze around his shoulder when I got to the restaurant where we had planned to meet.
I walked inside the barrier of the sidewalk seating.
“Papi,” I said, using the name for him I hadn’t used since I was a child.
When he saw me, he ran over and hugged me. “Damn it, I knew you boys wouldn’t stay where you were, I knew it. Why are you all wet? Where’s Edwin?”
“Papi,” was all I could say.
“Jacob, where’s your brother? Jacob. Jacob, where’s Edwin?” My father looked right into my eyes—all the way to the deepest reaches of my life. “Where’s Edwin?” he yelled and shook me by the shoulders. “Where’s Edwin?”
He saw that I was incapable of forming words. That a swelling of garbled cries clotted in my stomach. He shook me even harder.
“Where?”
“He fell.”
“What?”
“Under the road. He fell under the road.”
The wounded man lay on the patio floor next to a table. Blood already soaked through the bandage wrapped around him. The sunlight reflected off the window, and the golden glow filled the wrinkled edges of my father’s desperate face.
“Jacob. Tell me what happened.”
“The road flooded and he fell under it, through a manhole and got swept away.”
“Where?”
I pointed behind me, down Plantagestraat, to the section of the street where I lost my brother.
“Show me.”
He pulled me along and we worked our way back to the spot where Edwin fell. I led him to the hole under the water. A slow current flowed into the lowest point of the road. Another parallel current ran faster just beneath it, to some unseen place beyond our reach. When we found the hole, my father dropped to his knees and felt out the opening. He plunged his hands in and the currents pulled them away. He sat back up immediately.
“Jesus,” he said. “Jacob, hold on to my belt.”
My fingers clasped hold of his belt as he leaned into the hole, the leather strap popped tight against my palms as the water pressure pulled on him. His legs kicked forward, trying to plunge himself into the hole, and I heaved him back to keep him from being carried away too. My father resurfaced, gasping for air.