Unburying Hope (2 page)

Chapter
Two

When Celeste was young, her mother told her
stories of a time when Detroit was the doe-eyed, fresh-faced belle of the
nation’s ball.

Her mother’s melodious voice had whispered to
her in the dark nights of her childhood when she could not sleep, telling her old
stories of a mermaid hidden in the river.
 
When she snuck off to look for it one day after school, the stench from
the sludge at the side of the river was so mustardy that she’d held her nose
all the way home and showered twice to clear it from her hair.
 
She’d reported back to her mother that
a hobo had said the mermaid was dead and now there was a river monster that
could live in the stink.
 

As Celeste grew into adulthood, Detroit
declined into a gaunt, overlooked old woman whose stringy hair was sown with
weeds that grew taller than the rusted cars left behind on abandoned lawns when
their owners escaped the paroxysms of choking near-death that had episodically
gripped Detroit since the gas crisis in the 1970’s.
 
From her commuter bus, Celeste could see that time had eaten
out the hearts of neighborhoods, leaving ghost homes half crumbled into
architectural graveyards.

The downtown core of tall buildings sits flush
up to a walkway at the edge of the flowing Detroit River.
 
Today, sky-high shiny office windows
loom over half-dead streets and murky waters polluted with mercury, dioxin and
PCB.
 

Around the Financial District core and its low
rim of broken down office buildings, there lay a decaying, interlocking series
of half-circle neighborhoods where people lived lives battered by long term
unemployment, home foreclosures and a seemingly relentless whirlpool of theft
and drug abuse that focused all the challenges of a nation at the end of its
empire onto her streets of flare-ups and breakdowns.

The closest half-circle held the blue-collar
neighborhoods and townships previously populated by the auto industry’s
assembly-line workers who were able to make a living wage to provide for their
families, have a few luxuries with their necessities, protected from the whims
of their profit-driven bosses by their strong unions.
 

Then the educated middle class had its own
further half-ring.
 
They hoped that
their children would grow up to be bosses, not workers on the line who might
some day be replaced by robots.
 

No one had seen correctly into the future
though.
 
It wasn’t robots that
massacred Detroit as thoroughly as an ancient rampage of the Huns.
 
It was a seemingly innocuous play for
money, a creation of intricate mathematical equations scratched out on yellow
pads of paper up in office towers in New York City by young white bucks who
wanted to skew the game, to make profits off of other people’s labor without
having to put on a heavy white denim jumpsuit, without strapping on safety
goggles, without having to stand at a conveyor belt for four straight hours
until you earned a twenty minute break, then another hour, then a forty minute
lunch break, then three hours and ten minutes until your eight hours on your
feet was over.

House values in these former bustling areas had
plummeted so low that deserted homes could be bought for $5000, $10,000, but
there was always the odd house in the neighborhood where tree branches grew
into windows and an almost feral energy came forth from ivy vines and creeping
mint or toughened wisteria trunks that once had been small accents in a yard.
 

Families were locked out by the Sheriff when
banks didn’t get their monthly checks, the townships were broke and Celeste
avoided many areas as the City of Detroit chose to implode some of its 100,000
empty buildings and rip down streets that couldn’t seem to right themselves.

Then there was another, far wealthier half-circle,
where the executives of the car companies and their manufacturing suppliers had
lived in luxury before their own lives were ripped asunder by the cannibalistic
greed of investment bankers who had bought their companies, off-shored jobs,
cashed out and then left them to writhe in a death spiral as international car
companies became competitive.

Detroit’s Wall Street attackers enjoyed their
$1200 bottles of wine behind their damask silk curtains in the suburbs of New
York and Connecticut so that they didn’t have to look into the eyes of the
children of Detroit, whose future they’d raped, Celeste’s mother had told her.
  

Ask a Detroiter, Celeste knew, and you’d see
chagrin about the economic collapse that eats their city away like a lethal
black mold, but you would hear the vision of a remade Detroit where children
could get to school without being accosted with offers of a free hit of an
addictive illegal drug.

Residents stare off into the distance, telling
stories about how easily stick-ball games in summer or hockey games on frozen
water sprayed from hoses onto driveways in the winter used to bring everyone
out into the open so that families could play together.
  

The remnants of Detroit’s beauty came from the
scrappy hope of its residents that someday things would get better, that the
people would come back, the jobs would return, paychecks and health insurance
could be counted on again, the elderly would feel that they could safely toddle
out onto their front porches and someone would see them and know whether or not
today was a day that could use a helpful visit, an offer to change a light bulb
too high for age-gnarled hands.

As deeply as she knew Detroit was asleep in
its pain, she wanted to awaken with it.
 

That hope felt dreamlike, Celeste thought.
 
Like a movie shown on a 30-foot screen
in a darkened theater, it couldn’t hold in the light of day.
 
But she’d felt that brokenhearted
loneliness herself since her mother had died, since she’d last known what she
was doing for her days, her weeks, her months.
 
It was time to get back in charge of herself, even if Detroit
had gone unconscious.

Chapter Three

In her sterile low walled cubicle on an
October Friday morning, Celeste unpacked her leather purse, pushing aside the
black taped can of spray paint and the baggie of paint-encrusted stencils.
 
She placed her lunch container into the
small fridge under the counter and flipped the switch on the pay system.
 
She watched as it hummed on, red LED
lights flashed until the screen had the usual program on it: Customer Phone
Number, Account Number, Billing Date, Balance Due.
 

The threat of the office closing hung around
her like a shroud.
 
The laminate
desktops were chipped, the black screen in front of her looked nothing like the
sleek laptops sold in a nearby computer store.
 
If she squinted her eyes, the office looked the exact same
as it had eight years ago when she’d been excited to walk in to her first job,
except that the cheap materials hadn’t aged in the same manner as the elegant
ceiling carvings in the cavernous 100 year old building.
 
She’d have graffitied here, but risking
her job had never been worth the momentary sense of justice that spraying the
word ‘HOPE’ would have brought her.
 
Better to do it surreptitiously on the walls of abandoned buildings in
her beloved home city.
 

She usually carried the spray paint and four
36 by 36 inch stencils, folded down into small squares in her purse.
 
She’d first painted the walls of one
home in her neighborhood, one she’d coveted from afar for years, afraid she’d
never be able to save enough to buy it.
 
It had dormers, was two stories high, had curlicue Victorian trim around
the double hung windows and she’d wandered through it four or five times each
time it had came on the market in the last six years.
 
Every time it was listed for sale, another family had lost
it, the bank had repossessed it and the price dropped.
 
It was almost in her price range, when
suddenly it was plastered with the yellow sheets of paper from the City,
eviction notices, demolition notices.
 
Before it could be pulled down, her heart broken with the realization
that she would not be able to wake up within the comfort of its walls, she
bought the spray cans and cut out the letters in cardboard culled from the delivery
boxes left behind the back of her corner market and one night in the dark, she
painted one letter on each side of the house.
 
H on the front, O on the right side, P on the back and E on
the left side.
 
She’d painted in
orange, with navy blue tears dripping from the letters, spraying a touch of silver
on to make the tears glisten at night.
 
It had been her prayer, her gift to the house and it had salved her
sorrow to see the neighbors wander around the house reading her short message
the next day before the huge yellow excavator arrived to pull her dream house
down to the ground.

What angered her most was the onslaught of
thieves in the dark of the terrible night, who crawled onto the broken down
walls and ceilings left behind by the tractor, stealing the copper pipes out of
walls, pulling sheet metal out of the roof, all to be sold for scrap by poor
Detroiters who had no income with which to feed themselves, no jobs available
and no homes themselves.
 

With half of Detroit unemployed, the
cannibalism of demolished homes was the final insult to her.
 
It catalyzed her and she’d gone out
night after night for months after that, with Frank after he found out, and she
painted her letters around homes and old brick storefronts, anywhere that the
City turned off street lights to save money.
 
Her graffiti was photographed a lot, in the Detroit Free
Press, online.
 
No one knew who
could possibly have hope in that cesspool of poverty, but she did.
 
She did.

Chapter Four

The ceiling bell rang.
 
Fifteen minutes to door opening.
 
In two of the five empty cubicles lined
parallel to hers, Frank and Jeanne scrambled into their chairs and flipped on
their own computers.
 
The other
three cubicles had been empty for seven months, since the last downsizing.
 
Celeste sat with her computer ready,
her keyboard clear, her brain turned off just enough to be able to hear between
the lines of the customers who would stand at her window one after another
until lunch break, giving her small checks or cash to pay up their delinquent
accounts and reinstate their phone service.

Plexiglas separating the employees from the
customers went from the top of each desk to the ceiling, with squawk box holes
for the customer to speak through to each teller.
 
There was a small cutout at the bottom of the glass where
they could slip a check or ten and twenty dollar bills to catch up their
account.
 
She thought it was funny to
discover it on her first day, a protection against what?
 
She’d been in line at the Department of
Motor Vehicles to change her address to her new apartment, and seen angry
people, but no plexiglas.
 
She’d
seen angry people at the Post Office, but no plexiglas.
 
So why here?
 

Nowadays, anyone could make an online payment
or set up a payment plan on a laptop.
 
The people who wandered through these doors at 8 am had no computers,
couldn’t call because their phones had been turned off and were more ashamed
than angry.
 
They’d get in close to
the window and, even though every single person in line was in the same
predicament, not one raised their voice enough to yell through the squawk box, their
ears attuned instead to hear if the people in line behind them were listening.