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I began to notice groups of residents lugging water bottles and suitcases, heading for the convention center. Hours later they straggled back. At this point my chief means of communication was shouting from the balcony, and I learned that there were no evacuation buses. The city had ordered us to leave, but was allowing nobody in to rescue us and providing no transportation out. On Tuesday evening, my skeletal neighbor Kip, a kidney-transplant patient, waded home alone by flashlight from the convention center, where there were neither dialysis machines nor buses to get him to one. His last treatment had been four days earlier, and he was bloating. We had to get him out.

By Wednesday morning, when the water was cut off, the city was already descending into mayhem. A looter had shot a policeman in the head, a car was hijacked by someone wielding a machete, gas was being siphoned from parked cars, mail trucks and school buses were being stolen, and gangs of kids from the projects were circling the streets on bikes. The social problems in this impoverished city had been simmering for decades; now the lid was off, and the pot was boiling over.

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The city's heavy-handed tactics made me bristle. "We got too many chiefs and not enough Indians," the mayor complained. I knew what that meant: Nobody was in charge. The Homeland Security police state had collided with Caribbean inefficiency, and the result was disaster. I took action. I latched the shutters, kissed my deceased mother's rabbit-foot and cat's-tail ferns goodbye, and in five minutes had packed a bag. In a daze, I was acting out a recurring nightmare: The borders are closing, the Nazis are on their way, grab grandfather's gold watch and run.

I'd heard that hotels might be busing their guests out, and the place to head was the Monteleone hotel on Royal Street, a Quarter institution. So at 5:30 p.m. José, Claudia, Kip and I arrived trailing luggage and low expectations. But it turned out the Monteleone had gotten together with several other hotels to charter 10 buses to the Houston airport for $25,000, to do privately what the authorities should have been doing publicly. We bought a few of the remaining tickets at $45 each. The sweltering lobby was littered with fainting bodies, grandmothers fanning themselves and children seated in shadowy stairways, a scene straight out of "Hotel Rwanda." The last bus out of New Orleans was set to leave at 6:05, the Austrian hotel clerk informed me. I had my doubts.

..snip..

Bus headlights appeared at last. A cheer went up. And then a single yellow Jefferson Parish school bus rattled up, bearing the news that the 10 chartered buses had been confiscated by the state police. We heard on the sly that this bus was offering passage to the Baton Rouge airport for $100 a seat. Allen Toussaint was the first to jump on, and after negotiating the price down a bit with the driver, who I assumed was an evacuator trying to make some extra money, we crouched on the floor and held our breath. Ours was the only vehicle sailing along a dry, unlit highway. Why, we wondered, isn't the city providing hundreds of these vehicles to carry people out by the same route? The authorities may fix the electrical grid one day, but who is going to fix the authorities?

Later a neighbor who stayed behind told me that the 10 chartered buses never did show up. "You mean you all escaped on that stolen school bus ?" she shrieked. The news, she said, was all over town. As in the Battle of New Orleans, the pirates were better organized than the soldiers, and saved our day.