A large oil painting of cranes occupied the wall opposite the chair. I couldn’t figure out Robert’s taste. (Who was Robert, for that matter, this missing person who’d invited me to his home on the strength of the recommendation of my employer? The house, decorated in the generic style of the West Elm wealthy, offered no idea about him. Later I realized, with occasional exposure to New York’s wealthy elite, that their absence is the condition that defines them.) In the painting, three cranes—one in the water, one in mid-liftoff, and another in flight—are framed in a wide view of a swamp, maybe the Everglades, and are detailed with a Whistler-like attention to the abstract qualities of living things: their feathers flushed with light and wind, they blur in an illustration of the stages of motion. It was a dull, nearly pointless painting, probably held over from some dead relative to whom it mattered in sentimental terms. Oddly, there was no other art in the apartment. Perhaps Robert liked its image of departure since he himself was apparently never home. Cranes are a symbol of vigilance, protectors of stuff for those absent. I stared at the birds, stuck in paint, until I fell asleep.
At ten a.m., it was still raining, though the storm was beginning to taper off, with a few stray beams of sunlight managing to break through the cloud cover. Out front, the streets, lined with tall palms, were flooded and dark water had risen over the stone patio, all the way to the bottom of a squat grill under a shaded alcove. Should I call someone? I thought. Obviously, there was no one to call—and I didn’t want to alarm Robert, who was in China. Who could do what? This happened all the time.
Stop, I told myself.
What if it floods.
It wouldn’t flood.
I borrowed Robert’s bike in the late afternoon, after the storm broke to improbable blue skies and the streets drained of floodwater, and took a long ride from his apartment in the 30s down to the lower tip of South Beach, where I peddled around the construction sites for the new condominiums that were gradually rising along the bay, turned on Washington Avenue in a sweep of sunlight and sped past the lines of crummy pizza restaurants and two-star hotels until 11th Street. From there, I crossed over to Meridian and rode along a park where I had heard men went to cruise for other men, then made my way up again until I hit the Holocaust Memorial with its fist of defiance or anger or what, the rage of history, then curved along the park and golf course until I hit west 34th Street, where the streets gave way to a full suburb that looked nothing like the other neighborhoods that lined the beach only a few blocks away, just square houses and square houses and palm trees and square houses and a man in a white t-shirt mowing his lawn, a cigarette dangling from the parched corner of his mouth. I circled the block a few times. Everything looked the same. A woman stood in her driveway yelling into her phone. She threw it in the grass. “Fuckit.”
Miami’s existential risk is calculated in terms of real estate. The commercial broker CBRE, for example, reported in late 2015 (so, three years after I first went to South Florida) that $366 billion in real estate was vulnerable to coastal flooding and that the entire region would face up to $672 million in annual losses from environmental catastrophe, whichever one came first. They’re talking about the hotels along Ocean Avenue and, to a lesser degree, the less glitzy neighborhoods I rode around in aimlessly. I couldn’t quite understand this measure of worth: it seemed an absurd redoubling of the economic logic that allowed for the crisis in the first place, especially in its privileging of the land’s value vis-à-vis its location over whether that land was truly safe and would be there in a century or so. But the idea that maybe something wasn’t worth so much if you included its future in your estimation of its “value,” e.g., its future under water, wasn’t going to work with developers. How do you calculate loss, as in the loss of place, encompassing those whose “investment” in their home was not simply economic but who had nowhere else to go? How do you calculate the loss of a place, not only its real geography but the geography of its imagination?
I read about the floods and about the sea-level rise and what was at stake—everything, really—and what could be done. The entire social system that had established the community, like many other precarious communities in the United States, was premised on an erroneous assumption about the long-term stability of those landscapes with a great view. In fact, in the worldwide upheaval of a changing climate, those places—beachside, cliffside, or on the precipitous crack between two continental plates—are rarely a good place to set your foundation. But we are too late: you cannot turn your back on $366 billion.
And in any case this is Florida, the American zero: its cultural event horizon, over which remaindered life passes into an oblivion that is not so much defined by its lawlessness as it is by a giggly sense that life is meaningless, an object—usually someone else’s, usually someone who isn’t white—that may be traded with death freely and without consequence. Go to Florida and you don’t come back. Toss the phone in the yard, fuckit. There is no real “return” once you’ve resigned yourself to it; instead, there is balmy, endless, unregulated sunshine, pouring through palm fronds onto the half-empty parking lots of 7-Elevens.
I sat down on the sidewalk with my notebook and tried to define the emotional and visual coordinates of this place in hopes that it might prepare me to do more writing on these jeopardized landscapes. Wrote in my notebook everything I saw instead: woman mowing her lawn; eleven palm trees; several bushes, though I didn’t stop to count them; twenty houses: most seemed empty, but surely weren’t; my iPhone, resting on my thigh, playing Donna Summer out loud since I’d unplugged my headphones; my notebook on my lap; two Hasidic men wandering in the light; a bland description of the weather: humid, sticky, and thick enough to have winded me after the long bike ride; the fist, somewhere outside of my view; the promise of Europe, in these quasi-tropics, no promise at all; my great grandmother on my mother’s side, who fled that promise, also to Florida; tiny droplets of sweat on the asphalt.
I couldn’t fix an answer as to what I wanted to write down, what description would make the most sense for the block. I scribbled, crossed out words and sentences.
“Do you need help?” a woman asked me. A leashed dachshund stood patiently by her side. She stared down at me. Her beady eyes were perched at the top of an aquiline nose that defined the gravity of her expression: “You dehydrated?”
“Oh, no, sorry.” I got up. “I was just, just writing some things down.”
“You want to be careful,” she said, stepping around me. “You could get burned sitting in the sun like that.” She yanked the dachsund’s leash with a “Come on, now.” It yelped in tow. The dog looked at her with an expression of obvious shock, betrayed by its protector. It had wanted to say hello, was all. “Stop that,” she said. “Let’s go.” The dog whimpered, then trotted on, goodbye.
Another dream: There is a city that is not destroyed by the tomorrow that approaches it, tomorrow as storm country, the storm that makes landfall everywhere at once and engulfs you. Over the city, gulls idle in the hurricane wind, floating aloft without moving forward or falling back to land below, surrounded by the “local,” which in this case equals apartment plus sky plus the neighborhoods that have boarded themselves up, local birds over a local city under a local storm. Other images of avian vigilance. Nothing is destroyed.
In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Sontag writes that a deep anxiety underlies science-fiction films (particularly sci-fi involving an alien invasion)—not simply the anxiety of total destruction (the Bomb), but rather “the negative imagination about the impersonal”: the aliens, typically humanoid, resemble us in most ways except in their emotional response to events and other individuals. While humans fret and resist, hide in fear or struggle admirably to communicate before they’re vaporized at the welcome-to-Earth ceremony, the aliens in these films remain cold, indifferent to the fluctuation of emotions that define first contact. Instead, they frequently leverage disarray to their icy, inhuman advantage. This fear, Sontag argues, rests on the belief that aliens will impose a “regime of emotionlessness, of impersonality, of regimentation,” like that of the Soviet Union. In ecological-disaster films, the source