I take my bounty over to the couch. Settling in, I click on the television and tune it to the local news station before setting upon my snack. Judging by the quiet, it seems Michael has not yet returned from his date.
“…rain continues to fall, with some neighborhoods still reporting a rate of as much as four inches an hour. So many evacuations are now underway that the governor has declared a state of emergency and has turned to nearby states for additional assistance. Crews from all over the southern U.S. have already begun to answer the call, with several thousand volunteers amassing in Dallas in preparation for further rescue efforts. The state is already predicting losses in the tens of billions of dollars due to Hurricane Harvey, with some experts’ estimates ranging upwards of $100 billion in damages, making the storm on track to be one of the costliest in human history. Let’s just hope this cost is stays in dollars…”
Scenes from the day are playing on the screen. Mostly, it’s aerial footage of the various neighborhoods of Houston, many of them with so much standing water they look like those Polynesian fishing villages I always see in TV documentaries. As image after image of chaos and destruction flash by, the night anchor continues to prattle on in the background, citing a bevy of statistics. When he runs out of numbers to share, the screen changes back to the studio, where the anchor is now seated beside an “expert” with whom he begins to discuss the possible future of the storm.
“The storm is weakening already,” the experts says, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his tweed coat. “Hopefully we should see it start to ease off within the next twenty-four hours if we’re lucky…”
I finish the last of my food but am no sleepier than before. The water has run through me though, and so to the bathroom I go before returning to the couch to watch the news for another hour. Thanks to the storm, there is no shortage of stories to report. However, when the segments do finally begin to repeat, I flip through the channels until I settle on a marathon of an old sitcom, which is just the thing I need to knock me out. I doze on and off for the next few hours, always falling asleep for short stints before awaking with a start, my first thought always of Shannon. The sitcom marathon ends and I return to the news during one of these interludes. Now whenever I wake, it’s always to weather reports with ever-increasing rainfall totals and an ever-lengthening list of neighborhoods being evacuated, which of course only makes my sleep all the more anxious. Near five, the anchor, by now looking quite ragged from his long night on the job, tells me that several rescue operations are now taking place in a neighborhood not so far from Shannon. When I hear this, whatever wisps of sleep still clinging to me are instantly dispelled. Without sitting up, I reach for my phone on the coffee table.
I hope she’s okay. I’ll call her just in case. But what if she doesn’t answer? What if something has happened? What if she's stuck in her—
No.
Finger by finger I relax my grip on my phone. Setting it back on the table, I cross my shaking hands over my chest. Shannon has enough to worry about. There’s no need to wake her just so you’ll feel better. You’ll talk in a couple of hours and see that she’s just fine, and then you’ll go to work and she’ll stay hunkered down, and then, like the weatherman said, the storm will pass and everything will go back to…
Too antsy to lie still, I get up and return to my bedroom. In my bathroom, I turn on the shower. While I wait for the water to heat, I examine myself in the mirror above the sink. I look haggard as all hell, like I haven’t slept a wink.
The shower nice and hot, I strip down and step in, groaning as the water washes over me. I take my time bathing, enough to let the heat work the soreness out of my muscles. The scalding water is useful too for distracting me from the worried voices still nipping at the fringes of my thoughts.
When I come back out to the kitchen to steal a bowl of Michael’s cereal, I find him returned from his night out. He's passed out on the couch, curled up with his head on my pillow and my blanket pulled tight around his shoulders. Seeing him, I laugh. Now there was a man who had never let a thing worry him in all his life. Was that why things always seemed to work out for him?
I lift his legs and slowly slip under them. He hardly stirs as I reposition them on my lap. Outside, night has just begun to lift. In another hour, dawn would be here and then it would be time to talk to Shannon. Finally.
The TV is on a channel I’m positive I didn’t leave it on and the remote is nowhere to be found. As I munch my cereal, I casually look about me, finally spotting the sleek device tucked under Michael’s side. Working it out from under him, I flip the television back to the news, almost choking on the milk in my mouth when the live picture greets me.
“With the first light coming over the city,” a voice, presumably belonging to the reporter in the helicopter who is filming the footage, shouts over the roaring wind, “we can finally see just how much rainfall Harvey has dropped on Houston overnight. Even now, a full twenty-four hours after its first landfall, the storm continues to rage and shows little sign of abating. As you can see, Pat, many neighborhoods are flooded. While the houses here have only about two feet of standing water as of right now to contend with, some of the lower areas of the city have water up to their roofs. As you can imagine, there are large numbers of people waiting to be evacuated everywhere.”
“Thanks, Rob,” says the anchorman, the camera cutting back to the studio. Shuffling the papers on his desk, Pat looks into the camera and sighs deeply. “So far, our sister city has confirmed eight deaths from the storm, with most of these occurring in the areas most affected. With the state’s coast guard reserves having all been called to duty, neighboring states have turned to their own emergency responders to provide additional rescue assistance…”
Great. Just great. That was exactly the opposite of what I needed to hear at the moment. Those houses half underwater and nothing anyone could do, especially me up here in the dry, cozy safety of my apartment.
Michael shifts, shivers, suppresses a yawn. His eyes crack open. His pupils are bloodshot.
“Hey,” he says. He’s clearly still drunk. “Mmmmwhat are you doing up, buddy?”
“I’m worried about Shannon. The storm is getting pretty bad.”
My roommate raises his head to get a better look at the TV, one eye clamped shut.
“Hmph,” he says as he watches the latest images of destruction playing on the screen. He stifles another yawn as a house goes floating by. “I’m sure she’s going to be just fine. You said her house was lifted, right?”
“Yeah, but—"
“Then I you have any reason to worry. Anyways, I'd love to talk more but I need some sleep. You wouldn’t believe the night I had. That girl—Russian, of course—Oh man was she crazy! You should have seen the way she was tossing drinks back, like sprinkling drops of water onto a fire. Never seen anything like it in all my life. And then we ran into another of her friends and this friend was just like her, needed a new drink every minute it seemed…”
Michael prattles on, his eyelids dropping the moment he takes them his eyes off the television, his voice growing quieter and slower as one by one he lists off the night's events. Within the minute, he's right back asleep.