This morning the bathroom ceiling fell when I opened the door. It had already buckled when the water boiler broke above it and leaked out two years ago. We never got it fixed - too busy, and then lockdown happened. (Plus there are, like, four other bathrooms and three WCs in this ridiculous house.) Meanwhile, over the year a brown stain bloomed and flourished, and above it, the boards rotted.
Later I watched short videos of Hurricane Ida in NY, bucketing down, or flooding ground floor apartments, or gushing down stairwells into subways. I thought of Kim Robinson's novel New York 2140, about a New York completely covered in water. But Robinson's work is utopian: people live in co-ops in the top floors of high-rise buildings; even in the midst of disaster, they are able to imagine radical change and possibility.
I also thought of a few sentences from Ben Smith's bleak novel Doggerland, about a boy working on a decrepit wind farm in the North Sea, sometime in a post-apocalyptic future in which the world is mostly drowned:
"And so, water continues its work - of leveling, of pressing at edges, of constantly seeking a return to an even surface, a steady state. It repeats its mantra: solidity is nothing but an interruption to continuous flow, an obstacle to be overcome, an imbalance to be rectified."
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