It's Tuesday, just over a week since the storm, and the floodwaters are receding, a bit more each day. Last week there were not enough police; now there are too many. Thousands of law-enforcement personnel from all around the country have descended on New Orleans. The bodies, however, remain uncollected, and hundreds of residents are still trying to tough it out, refusing to leave their homes, and their pets.

"This is a dog-and-pony show," a New Orleans cop says to me, laughing. "Twenty thousand law-enforcement officers in the city right now, for what? Three thousand people? There are all these agencies with firepower meant for Iraq. I've got guys who I'm responsible to drive around and help patrol, and they're frustrated with me because they've got no action: 'We want some action, we want some action!' 'Well, you know, I'm sorry we can't provide any action for you so you can go out and play war games with your toys that you've never gotten to use.' It's a joke. It's way, way, way too much, way, way, way too late. It's like a big Mardi Gras parade of police, only there's nobody to catch any beads, because there's nobody left out there."

F.B.I., FEMA, I.C.E., A.T.F., L.A.P.D., E.R.T., N.Y.P.D.—all the acronyms and abbreviations are here, and they all look the same: Oakley shades, narco-tactical vests, sidearms strapped to their legs. They stand around wearing T-shirts with steroid slogans, clutching high-caliber assault rifles, angled down, their index fingers at the ready.

Everyone wants to help, but there's just not much for them to do. I get stopped at a checkpoint by some National Guard troops. I show my ID, but one of the soldiers wants more.

"Do you have a letter from the battalion commander?" he asks me.

"I don't need a letter from the battalion commander," I say. He nods and waves me on.

"Nice going, Obi-Wan," Neil Hallsworth, my cameraman, jokes. "We're not the droids you're looking for."

I'm not shocked anymore by the bodies, the blunders. You can't stay stunned forever. The anger doesn't go away, but it settles somewhere behind your heart; it deepens into resolve. I feel connected to what's around me, no longer just observing. I feel I am living it, breathing it. There is no hotel to go back to, isolated from the destruction, as there was when I covered the tsunami in Sri Lanka. We are surrounded, all day, all night. There's no escape. I wouldn't want to get away even if I could. I don't check my voice mail for messages. I don't call home. I never want to leave.

We're sleeping in trailers parked on Canal Street, not far from what used to be the old Maison Blanche department store, where my father once worked. At night sometimes, when the broadcast is done, we sit outside the trailers in small groups, staring at the silhouettes of empty buildings. We don't need to say a thing. There is a bond that's forming among us. We are in new territory, on the cliff's edge. This place has no name, and all of us know it. The city is exposed: flesh and blood, muscle and bone. New Orleans is a fresh wound, sliced open by the shrapnel of a storm.

I'm not sure when it happened, when I realized that something had changed. I don't think there was a precise moment, a particular day. It's like when you're mourning and suddenly you become aware that the pain has faded. You don't remember exactly when it did. One day you laugh, and it shocks you. You forgot that your body could make such a sound.

Here, in New Orleans, the compartmentalization I've always maintained has fallen apart, been worn down by the weight of emotion, the power of memory. For so long I tried to separate myself from my past. I tried to move on, forget what I'd lost, but the truth is, none of it's ever gone away. The past is all around, and in New Orleans I can't pretend it's not.

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My mother's name is Gloria Vanderbilt, and long before I ever got into the news business, she was making headlines. She was born in 1924 to a family of great wealth, and early on discovered its limits. When she was 15 months old her father died, and for years afterward, she was shuttled about from continent to continent, her mother always moving off into unseen rooms, preparing for parties and evenings on the town. At 10 my mother became the center of a highly publicized custody battle. My mother's powerful aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, was able to convince a New York court that my mother's mother was unfit. It was during the Depression, and the trial was a tabloid obsession. The court took my mother away from her mother and the Irish nurse she truly loved, and handed her over to Whitney.

My brother and I knew none of this as children, of course, but we'd sometimes seen a look in our mother's eyes, a slight dilation of the pupil, a hint of pain and fear. I didn't know what it meant until after my father died. I glanced at myself in the mirror and saw the same look staring back at me.

"I thought we had a silent agreement... [to] just get through our childhood loss and meet up as adults." 

My father's name was Wyatt Cooper. He was born in Quitman, Mississippi, a small town hit hard by the Depression, which started just two years after his birth. His family was poor, his father was a farmer, though by all accounts not a very diligent one.

My father was a born storyteller. As a child, he was often asked to give sermons at Quitman's First Baptist Church when the preacher was out of town. He wanted to be an actor from the time he was little, but in Quitman during the Depression that didn't seem like a very realistic goal.

"Listen to me, boy, and I'll make you the youngest goddamn governor this state's ever had," my grandfather would bellow at my dad. But my father had no interest in his father's far-fetched political plans.

Whenever he could save up money, he'd hitch a ride into Quitman and see movies at the Majestic, the only theater in town. The Philadelphia Story played there; so did Gone with the Wind. Films showed for only a day or two, but my father tried to see them all. He'd save the ticket stubs in a scrapbook.

Eventually he left Mississippi and worked as an actor in Hollywood and Italy, did stage productions, and took bit parts in TV dramas and cigarette ads, but his career never really took off. He found more success as a screenwriter, working at Twentieth Century Fox.

My parents met at a dinner party. Their backgrounds could not have been more different. My father had never been married and had a large clan of brothers and sisters and a mother whom he adored. My mother was an only child estranged from her mother, and her third marriage had just ended. In each other, however, they recognized something—a desire for family, a need to belong.

"There was something about his eyes," my mother later told me. "We were from very different worlds, but he understood me better than anyone else ever had." They were married just before Christmas 1964. One year later my brother, Carter, was born. I came along two years after that.

When I was born, my parents lived in a five-story town house on New York's Upper East Side. Out front were two stone lions, silent sentinels guarding our home. There was a marble foyer and a sweeping spiral staircase, and though I don't remember the house well, I recall the smell of Rigaud candles, green wax, heavy scent. The candles' flames shimmered against bottles of Noilly Prat and chilled aquavit, white wine in silver goblets with boar-tusk handles. There were fabric-draped walls, smooth silks, and needlepoint pillows, rough against a child's soft cheeks. The tables were laden with bowls of polished wood with silver fishes jumping out.

When my parents had parties, my brother and I were always encouraged to attend.

I remember walking with my father through a smoke-filled room, my small hand safe in his. I craned my neck to see those around me, catching only brief flashes of faces and soft filtered light. There were powdered women with red lips, men in heavy shoes with thick hands and French cuffs. The rooms were filled with actors and artists, boldfaced names in society columns and kitchen conversations. Truman Capote was a frequent guest; his pudgy lisp made me giggle. Andy Warhol was there as well; his white hair scared me.

At a certain hour, my brother and I went upstairs to our room. We lay in bed in the dark listening to the laughter down below. There were hands clapping and glasses clinking, a muffled murmur that shook the floor. We closed our eyes as a piano played; a woman sang, "Good morning, heartache." Her distant voice lulled us to sleep.

I never imagined it was anything special. I never believed that that life would end. I had a father and a mother, a brother and a nanny, a childhood untouched by loss. When my father died, in 1978, and the chasm first opened, it seemed easier just to run away.

After his death, we moved every few years—bigger apartments, one more beautiful than the last. My mother would get restless, start to redecorate. Then my brother and I knew it wouldn't be long before she'd begin searching for another home—a new place to settle, a new canvas to work on.

I didn't know my mother was famous until I was about 12. I was in middle school when she designed a line of jeans that became wildly successful. On the street, suddenly people began to stare at us and point. My brother and I thought it was funny. We'd count how many times we saw our mother's name stitched on the back pocket of somebody's pants.

My mother once said that she survived the traumas of her childhood because she always felt that inside herself there was a crystal core, a diamond nothing could get at or scratch. I'd felt that same rock form inside me when my father died. In New Orleans, however, it started to crack.

Bourbon Street is closed, but a daiquiri bar has just opened. I think it's the first one. The entrance is boarded up, but through the heavy storm shutters you can hear the thumping bass of a stereo: Kelis sings, "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard / And they're like / It's better than yours..." It's the first music I've heard since the hurricane.

To get in the daiquiri bar you have to go around back, through the lobby of the Royal Sonesta Hotel. The hotel's only just opened up as well, and we've moved in after a week in trailers. The F.B.I. is staying there, too; so are a bunch of New Orleans cops who no longer have homes.

Inside the bar is a wall of drinks in refrigerated coolers: Mango Madness, Citrus Storm, blood-red Hurricanes. The place is packed: reporters, police, F.B.I. SWAT teams, a couple of drunk nurses. Everyone's doing shots or drinking daiquiris and beer. There are more men than women, and the young cops are eyeing the nurses— horny, hungry, hoping to score.

Earlier in the day I ran into Dr. Phil McGraw. Some volunteers had set up a feeding kitchen for first responders, and The Dr. Phil Show was there with a couple of cameras.

The Scientologists are here, too. Kirstie Alley arrived with a bunch of them, and John Travolta is around as well. No one beats Steven Seagal, though. He's not here with any group. I saw him late one night dressed in a cop uniform, out on patrol with some deputies from the Jefferson Parish Sheriffs Office. He's been going out with their SWAT team. We talk a bit, and when he leaves he puts his palms together in front of his face and bows briefly. Then he hops in a cop car and speeds off.

"Seagal's tight with the sheriff in Jefferson," a New Orleans cop tells me later. "There's a bar where a lot of cops hang out, and I remember a couple years ago Seagal comes in with those guys and takes out a framed 8-by-10 photo of himself and fucking hangs it on the wall."

"Get out of here," I say. "No way."

"I shit you not," he says. "As soon as he left, a couple of us took out our pistols and shot it. Blew the fucking thing off the wall. One bullet actually went right through and hit a car-rental place next door."

I don't really drink, but I like the bar because there's no bullshit here. For days Police Superintendent Eddie Compass has been blaming some of the problems the police faced after the storm on the fact that the armory got flooded and a lot of their ammunition and supplies were ruined. When I mention this to some of the cops at the bar, they burst out laughing.

'I'll take you to the fucking armory," one police officer tells me. "It's fucking empty. The police force is broke, and it was broke long before the storm."

A lot of the cops feel betrayed—screwed from above, below, and behind. They're pissed off that the media have been focusing so much on the police officers who didn't show up for work during the storm.

I don't blame them. Out of a force of about 1,700 police, only some 120 were unaccounted for. The vast majority of cops came to work and stayed on duty around the clock. They were barricaded inside their stations, working multiple shifts. In the Sixth District, the precinct headquarters was flooded, so the police set up a perimeter in the Wal-Mart parking lot. They chased the looters out, saved hundreds of guns from getting out on the street, and ended up sleeping in their cars for weeks.

"We'd sometimes seen a look in our mother's eyes, a hint of pain and fear."

I don't think I could ever come in and look at this place the same," Captain Casey Geist says. "I'll never come here for a football game."

We're in the Superdome. It's empty now, except for a few dozen cleaners in white HAZMAT suits scraping the grime off the seats and floor. It's noisy. Miniature tractors pick up the mounds of garbage piled on the Astroturf field. Here and there you find a child's football, abandoned wheelchairs, rotting food half eaten by evacuees. Some 20,000 people took refuge in the Superdome, told to come by the city's mayor, who called it a shelter of last resort. He'd hoped that help would arrive from the state or federal government within two days. It didn't. Hope is not a plan.

Captain Geist is with the 82nd Airborne. He's been to Baghdad, but says that this is much worse. He's heard a lot of the rumors about what happened inside the Superdome, and he's not sure which of them are true. He seems to believe any of them is possible.

"People were here, they were doing drugs. People were having sex out on the floor," he says, recounting the various stories he's heard. "It seemed like just madness, uncontrollable madness."

At the Superdome, however, there was at least some order. They had medical attention, stockpiles of food and water, and police and National Guardsmen. When the levees failed, however, and the electricity with it, the Superdome started to bake. The mayor had warned people to bring their own food, and some did, but as the floodwaters spread, more people began arriving.

"They started defecating all over the place," Captain Geist says, shaking his head. "You know you can go to one corner, and everyone can go to the bathroom in one spot, but, I mean, people would drop their pants in the middle of the field and just go."

We like to think we are so advanced. We like to imagine we have protection from our own dark impulses. The truth is, it doesn't take much for all of that to be stripped away. Desperate people sometimes do terrible things. New Orleans was no different. The lights go out, the temperatures rise, and very quickly we get in touch with emotions that the cool air keeps at bay. We are all capable of anything. I've seen it again and again. Great compassion, terrible carnage—the choice is up to us.

Pretty soon they'll have finished cleaning up the Superdome, and the debris at the convention center will be swept away. It seems that a lot of people want the evidence, the memory, simply to disappear, the slate to be wiped clean. One day there will be football games played in the Superdome once again, and all of us will forget the lessons we've learned.

"Mark my words, man," a cop tells me one day, "it's all going to be cleaned up and forgotten. It's all going to be for shit. People are going to cover up things. And you know, these people are poor. No one's going to speak for them."

"You really think people will forget?" I ask.

"I've had family members tell me, 'Why don't you just leave, why don't you just leave? You didn't sign up for this.' But my father was at D-day, and what if he had said, 'Forget it, I'm not doing this. I didn't sign up for this. There's too many people dying. There's too much carnage.' You just don't leave. You can't just forget."

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My brother was 12 when my father died, and as hard as my father's death was for me, for my brother it must have been even worse. They'd had a more mature relationship. They'd shared a love of literature, and my brother often discussed with my father the history books he was reading. We were two years apart, but as kids, we were together all the time. A voracious reader of history and military campaigns, he had labeled me Baby Napoleon while I was still in my mom's womb, but he was the true leader of our childhood campaigns. He created giant battlefields for war games with our toy soldiers. The rules were too intricate for me to follow, but I loved to sit and watch him direct armies across the sweeping plains of our bedroom floor.

After the funeral, both of us retreated into separate parts of ourselves, and I don't think we ever truly reached out to each other again. I can't remember ever discussing my father's death with my brother. Perhaps I did, but I have no memory of it.

Suddenly the world seemed a very scary place, and I vowed not to let it get to me. I wanted to be autonomous, protect myself from further loss. I was only 10, but I decided I had to earn my own money, so I could save for a future I couldn't predict. I got a job as a child model and opened a bank account. My mother was wealthy, but I didn't want to have to rely on someone else.

In high school I started taking survival courses: monthlong mountaineering expeditions in the Rockies, sea kayaking in Mexico. I needed to prove to myself that I could survive on my own. I left high school a semester early, and at 17 I traveled for months by truck through Southern and Central Africa. I'd completed the credits I needed to graduate, and was sick of the pressure, wanted to forget about college and those silences at home filled by the murmur of television and the clanking of cutlery. Africa was a place to forget, and be forgotten in. My brother was already away at college. I assumed he'd come up with his own way to deal with the loss. I thought he could take care of himself.

He was smarter than I, more sensitive too. He lived much of his life in his head. In high school he fell in love with the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the fantasy of that lost world, and had gone to Princeton—I think in part because he hoped to discover that that way of life, Fitzgerald's world, was still alive. He was an idealist, impractical. He worried constantly about money, yet on impulse would buy a white double-breasted suit he saw in an ad. It hung in his closet unworn for years. I used to tease him about it—the waste of money, his lack of common sense.

I never thought of him as an older brother. It would have meant accepting that he was somehow looking out for me, that I wasn't independent, that I needed someone else.

Carter Vanderbilt Cooper. That was my brother's name. Strange. I rarely say it out loud anymore.

I thought we had a silent agreement, that we would both just get through our childhood loss and meet up as adults on the other side. I imagined one day we would be friends, allies, brothers laughing about our long-ago fights. I'm not sure why he didn't keep his end of the bargain. Maybe he never knew about our silent pact. Maybe it was all in my head.

On July 22, 1988, my brother showed up at my mother's apartment unexpectedly. It was a Friday, early in the morning, and he said that he wanted to move back in. He seemed out of sorts, nervous, and said he hadn't slept the night before. Throughout the day he took several naps in my old bedroom, on the second floor of the duplex. When she checked on him, my mother noticed he'd opened the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was a summer day, and the heat was overwhelming.

"Don't you want me to turn on the air conditioner?" she asked him.

"No," he said. "It's fine the way it is."

They ate lunch together and talked. My mother was concerned, but not overly so. She knew that something was wrong, but Carter wouldn't say what. After lunch she let him sleep for a time, then checked on him to see if there was anything he wanted. At some point, as he lay on the sofa in the library, she read him a story by Michael Cunningham called "White Angel," which had just been published in The New Yorker. At the end of it, a young boy unexpectedly dies after he runs through a plate-glass sliding door in his parents' living room while they are having a party. A shard of glass severs an artery in his neck. The violence of the story surprised my mom, but it didn't seem to upset Carter.

"That was a good story," he said.

He took another nap.

At about seven P.M., he came into my mom's room. He appeared dazed, disoriented. "What's going on? What's going on?" he asked.

"Nothing's going on," my mother said soothingly.

"No, no," he said, shaking his head. He ran from her room, "as if he knew where he was going, knew the destination," she would later tell me. My mother followed him as he ran up the curving staircase, into my room, through the sliding glass door, and onto the balcony.

By the time she got there, he was perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the terrace outside my room. His right foot was on top of the wall, his left foot was touching the terrace floor.

"What are you doing?" she cried out, and started moving toward him.

"No, no. Don't come near me," he said.

"Don't do this to me, don't do this to Anderson, don't do this to Daddy," my mother pleaded.

"Will I ever feel again?" he asked.

My mother is not sure how long they were out there on the terrace. It all happened very fast. He looked down at the ground, 14 stories below. A helicopter passed overhead, a glint of silver in the late-summer sky. Then he moved.

"He was like a gymnast," my mother remembers. "He went over the ledge and hung on the edge like it was a practice bar in a gym."

"I shouted, 'Carter, come back,' " she told me later. "Just for a moment I thought he was going to. But he didn't. He just let go."

I try not to imagine my brother hanging from the ledge. Try not to picture him pressed against the balcony, his legs dangling 14 stories above the concrete sidewalk. Did a couple out for a summer stroll catch a glimpse of him before he let go? Did a family gathered around the dinner table see him plunge past their window? What was he thinking right before he hit the ground?

That's the thing about suicide. No matter how much you try to remember how that person lived his life, you can't forget how he ended it. It's like driving by a car smashed on the side of the road. You can't resist craning your neck to take stock of the damage.

"Will I ever feel again?"

That was the question my brother asked moments before he let go of the ledge he was hanging from. It didn't make sense to me at the time. I'd even forgotten he said it until my mother recently reminded me.

We both had tried to cauterize our pain, push our pasts behind us. If only I could have told him that he wasn't the only one. I abandoned him long before he abandoned me. I see that now. I could have reached out to him, talked with him, but he didn't make it easy, and I was a kid, and had myself to worry about.

Several months before he died, my brother went back to Quitman, Mississippi, back to our father's hometown. I didn't know it at the time. I found out only after his death. I went to his apartment and noticed a roll of film he'd never developed. The pictures were from his trip. My father's sister Annie Laurie was still living in Quitman at the time. Carter could have gone to visit her. He didn't. He just wandered around the town. I realize now that in those last months of his life, he was searching for feeling, but he couldn't reach out.

It's two and a half weeks since the storm, and at the daiquiri bar the music is pumping. Outkast sings "Hey Ya." The bar is not very crowded, and for the first time I notice that white police officers sit on one side, African-American police officers on the other.

One of the African-American officers I'm sitting with is angry at CNN. We aired a story about some police who were allegedly looting after the storm. He's not disputing that it happened, but he wishes we'd done more to point out that it was only a handful of cops.

The police officer has just had two days off. He drove out of state to visit his kids. He went in a police cruiser, which New Orleans cops are allowed to use on their days off. Every couple of hours, however, he was stopped by local police, who thought he was a deserter.

"The first cop who stopped me gave me a card with his name on it and his phone number, in case I got stopped again. But the next time it happened, they just ignored the card. They'd stop me and make me go through the whole explanation each time." Even their own seem to have turned on them.

Another cop, who's been on the force more than a dozen years, says he plans to leave. A few years ago he'd been offered a job with a small-town police force in the Midwest, but turned them down. Now he says he's going to call them back. "I'll work anywhere around there. I don't care. I just want out."

"With 9/11 they treated it like a crime scene," he says, holding his beer by the neck. "With 9/11 they sifted through the wreckage, every piece. Here, they're simply going to bulldoze some of those buildings, which still have people in them. Months from now, people are going to be sitting around and they'll say, 'Yeah, what ever happened to old Joe? Where'd he go?' And no one will know. People will simply disappear."

His neighbor was dead for two weeks before anyone realized she was missing. "I went and found her body," he says, his voice clipped. "I took a forensics class a couple months ago, and they told us, in a situation like this, to always look for the flies. I actually found my neighbor by listening to the beating wings of flies."

Drinking with these police officers, I can't help but feel they're the only ones who'll really remember what happened here. I saw pieces of the horror; they saw it all—who was here, who wasn't. They know who the real heroes are.

A cop says, "You can tell, it's the people who do this"—with one hand he mimics someone talking—"the people who are talking big, they are the ones who ran."

When the storm hit, his fiancée told him to leave. " 'Fuck them,' she tells me, 'fuck the police,"' he says, clutching a beer. There are nearly a dozen empties on the table. "I told her, 'I was a cop before I met you, and I'll be a cop after you leave. Fuck you.' "

Like a lot of cops, he tried to look after family members while still doing his job.

He used a WaveRunner to help rescue his partner's mom. As he took her out, he realized how many more people still needed help. "We turned a corner, and there were just dozens of people on roofs, and they were all crying out. You could hear some of them trapped in their homes, all screaming.

Just driving away, leaving them in the dark, that was the hardest part." His voice is quiet, plaintive. "I'm only 23," he says.

In disasters, in war, it isn't governments that help people, at least not early on. It's individuals: policemen, doctors, strangers, people who stand up when others sit down. There were so many heroes in this storm, men and women who grabbed a bandage, an ax, a gun, and did what needed to be done.

Well past midnight, I stroll down Bourbon Street with a half-dozen cops. The street is empty and dark. The cops are off duty, out of uniform. A Louisiana state trooper pulls his car over and demands their IDs. He knows they're New Orleans police, but it's past curfew and he wants to prove a point.

"Fuck you," one of the police officers yells. "You're in my city, telling me I'm violating curfew? Fuck that." The trooper drives off. We walk back to the bar. There's no place else to go.

Black Hawk helicopters still pass overhead, the sound crushing, comforting. The cavalry's come; help has arrived. They're still occasionally plucking people off rooftops and porches. Now it's the holdouts who decided to stay but have finally had enough.

At the Coast Guard command center at Air Station New Orleans, the hallways are crowded with cots—pilots and mechanics crashing between flights. Hundreds have come from all over the country, flying sparkling red choppers, angels from the sky.

Lieutenant Commander Tom Cooper flew the first rescue mission over New Orleans, hours after the storm. He joined the Coast Guard straight out of high school and has been to a lot of disasters, but this one he'll never forget.

"Their images stay with you, you know?" he says of the people he rescues, and I know exactly what he means. "You never get to talk to them, because the helicopter's so loud. You hear them yell thank you every once in a while, but most of the communication is just done looking in their eyes.

"It's like an out-of-body experience, you know, to see that, to see it in person, to see it live—people crawling out of their attics onto their rooftops and signaling you for help."

Underneath the hovering chopper, the rotor blades create a mini-storm, hot air whips your face, water sprays all about. Cooper hovers, unable to see the people below. Normally he has a co-pilot, but there are so many missions that at times he flies alone. A flight mechanic squats behind him, helping him line up the helicopter. The mechanic holds on to a handle, controlling a hoist used to lower the Coast Guard diver. The diver is attached to a cable, and the hoist can lower him as much as 200 feet.

The day after the storm, Tom Cooper flew with Lieutenant Junior Grade Maria Roerick, who had just been certified as a Coast Guard pilot. It was her first rescue mission.

"Everywhere you'd look, you'd turn, there's somebody over there, there's somebody over there," says Roerick. "You had to start sorting people out, saying, 'There's kids,' or 'There's elderly. I think they need medical attention over there.' "

In the six days after Katrina, Coast Guard pilots out of Air Station New Orleans saved 6,471 lives—nearly twice as many as they'd saved here in the past 50 years combined.

When she sleeps, Roerick still sees the faces of people waiting to be rescued. "You go to bed at night completely exhausted," she says, "knowing there are still thousands of people out there. You can't get them all. You want to scoop them all up."

We wake each day unsure what lies ahead. Early in the morning, we gather in the lobby of the hotel. Few words are spoken before we head out. We climb into our S.U.V., a small platoon searching the city. The water recedes, new streets emerge, the map is re-drawn every day.

Some residents still refuse to leave. On the street outside her two-room rental, I spot an elderly lady, overweight, overtired. She sits on a rusty metal chair and leans on a cane with the words "love ministries" crudely carved into the wood. She stares straight ahead, but her eyes are clouded and seem to be focused somewhere just above the horizon. Her name is Terry Davis, but she says around here everyone calls her Ms. Connie.

"I'm legally blind," she tells me, "and they won't let me take my service dog with me."

On the corner, Los Angeles police officers are fanning out, trying to get everyone on the block to leave. It's been three weeks since the storm, and the mayor has announced that everyone has to get out of the city. Forcible evacuations, some are calling it, but the truth is, they aren't really forcing people out.

"It's just temporary," a police officer says to Ms. Connie.

"No, no, dear," Ms. Connie says, slowly standing up. "I don't mean to be a hard case, but my dog goes where I go, or I don't go."

Normally, I wouldn't intervene—I'd just stand back and observe—but in this case it doesn't feel right. I've just talked to some National Guard troops who told me they have changed their policy and are now allowing people to take their pets on board the evacuation helicopters. I tell the police officer that the policy has changed. He goes back to talk with his superiors.

Ms. Connie lives alone with her dog, Abu. Her husband died years ago. Both he and Ms. Connie were traveling preachers. She invites me into her home. In her living room there is a large hole in the corner of the ceiling, damage from Katrina.

"This is my skylight," Ms. Connie says, chuckling. Though legally blind, she can see just enough to move around, but not to clean. The apartment is a mess. A thick layer of dirt and dust covers everything—none of which Ms. Connie can see.

"I don't trust law officials," she says. "They can't make up their minds." She isn't sure what she would pack if she were to leave, and she has nothing to pack her belongings in. The suitcase she used in her traveling days is broken. On the refrigerator is a hand-drawn sign in smudged ink: JESUS IS LORD.

"I'm not sure where I will end up," she tells me, "but God knows where I'll end up."

The police officer returns and tells Ms. Connie she can bring Abu along.

She believes it's a sign. The time has come to go. "I believe the Lord gives you guidance and will give you guidance, if you listen..."

"God is still watching over New Orleans?" I ask.

"Absolutely, absolutely," she says, smiling. "Will she rise again? Absolutely, absolutely."

Back at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, I introduce myself to a man at the bar. He's a local resident who's been helping CNN crews get around town. He doesn't recognize me, and when I tell him my name, he seems surprised.

"I thought you must be some old geezer," he says, Merlot on his breath, Mardi Gras beads wrapped around the stem of his glass. "When people say your name, they shake."

"I doubt that's true," I say, laughing.

"No, really," he insists. "You have the power of a thousand bulldozers."

I leave the bar and go to my room. I can't get the image out of my head: a thousand bulldozers. I don't think it's true, of course. I don't like to think about my job that way. I've never paid much attention to the business of news—who is watching, how big the audience is, what time slot I am in. That information always seems to take away from the work. Katrina, however, is different. So many times in Africa I wanted people to know the suffering of others, but I long ago gave up believing that it would really change anything. Now people are watching, and I feel that maybe I can be of some help. I see it in people's eyes; they talk to me on the street: "Hey, Anderson, somebody's got to do something about what's happening over in St. Bernard," they'll say. Or: "You gotta do something about the bodies. Why aren't they being picked up?"

'I worry I've forgotten what's important about my brother, what's not. I recall looks, images, arguments. There was the time my brother punched me when I was an infant. The time in high school when he screamed at me, "You're not my fucking father!," and stormed out of my room. The day I scrawled "I HATE HIM!" in a diary.

"Were you close?" Inevitably I get that question. Sometimes it's right after a person finds out about my brother's death; sometimes it's only after weeks of their knowing me. Were we close? Not so close that I knew he was going to kill himself. Not so close that I understood why he did.

I knew his laugh, his smell. I knew the sound he made when he walked through our front door, the jingle of his keys, the particular way his shoes scraped on the floor. We didn't talk, however. I didn't ask him deep, probing questions. Do any brothers do that sort of thing? I knew what I observed, I knew his surface, but clearly that was not enough.

I still dream about him, and in my sleep he seems so real. They're not happy dreams, however, because I know he's going to kill himself, and there's nothing I can do to stop him. I wake up believing for a moment that he's alive. I wake up filled with dread.

I found a Polaroid of my mom, Carter, and me celebrating his birthday. It was the first one after my father's death. The cake is small and has 12 white candles almost a foot and a half in length. Carter bends sideways in a half-hug with our mom. She's smiling, and I'm next to her. I find these photos from time to time—frozen moments I can't remember. Every time I do, the violence of Carter's death shocks me again. I keep the pictures, as well as his scribbled notes and magazines—the things I found in his apartment. I tell myself that one day I'll go through them and perhaps discover some clue that will help me understand, help me answer the question: Were we close?

Every politician I talk to seems to say the same thing: "Now is not the time to point fingers." Spin doctors use the term "blame game." "I'm not going to play the blame game," they say, dismissing you when you ask for answers, for the names of officials who made key decisions. I notice that some reporters start using the term, too. I can't understand why.

Demanding accountability is no game, and there's nothing wrong with trying to understand who made mistakes, who failed. If no one is held accountable for their decisions, for their actions, all of this will happen again. Not one person has yet to stand up and admit wrongdoing. No politician, no bureaucrat, has admitted a specific mistake. Some have made blanket statements, saying they accept responsibility for whatever went wrong. But that's not good enough. We need to know specifics. What was done wrong? What were the mistakes?

I ask any official I can. No one will answer. The only "mistakes" they admit to are actually veiled criticisms of others. The mayor should have declared a mandatory evacuation on Saturday, instead of waiting until Sunday. Precious hours were lost. The governor could have done that as well, but didn't. They could have moved hundreds of city buses and local school buses to higher ground and used them to evacuate the nearly 100,000 residents who had no access to private transportation. They didn't. There were plenty of mistakes to go around. I just want someone to admit to them.

A little more than two weeks after the storm, the mayor announces a plan to re-populate the city, but three days later, after heavy criticism, he backs off, blaming Hurricane Rita. Rita is on the cusp of becoming a Category 3 storm, and it's heading this way. It's projected to make landfall around Galveston, Texas, and already the media are gearing up, pulling out, like children drawn by shiny objects.

After weeks of my asking him, the mayor finally agrees to an interview with me, but after it's done, I feel as if I blew it. We spoke a lot about Rita, because it was in the headlines, but I wish I'd focused more on Katrina mistakes. I worry that politicians are trying to divert attention away from the failures, to delay and distract people until they forget.

At the end of the interview I ask him if he'd be willing to come back on again and discuss what he did wrong and what others did wrong. He says he would be happy for the opportunity. For the next four months, however, he declines my every invitation to sit down and talk.

Over the phone my producers are telling me that I'm doing great. Each day they tell me the ratings for my broadcast are high, but the truth is, I don't want to hear about it. This is not a "story"; these people aren't characters. It doesn't feel right to talk about plotlines and ratings points.

At times I feel like a failure, as if I'm not up to the responsibility. At night, when I try to sleep, I go over the questions I've asked interview subjects, the wording, the accuracy. Did I stutter and stammer and beat around the bush? Was I fair? Was I too emotional? Did I give the guest a chance to answer? Did I let him ramble on too much? Did I get spun? I worry that our cameras are not capturing enough. I worry that I'm letting New Orleans down.

Excerpted from Dispatches from the Edge, by Anderson Cooper, to be published this month by HarperCollins; © 2006 by the author.