41
When he got back to the Library, Donny already had his bag packed—everything but the work papers he had left out the night before.
As he tried to put those away with some semblance of organization, he found a copy of one of the stories about his work for the President. He remembered how he had wrestled with the decision to take that case, convincing himself he would save the revolution by standing up for its best values, and showing that they were better than the people they had defeated. He didn’t know that one of the costs of the revolution was that the revolutionaries would learn from their enemies that the value of individual human lives can be easily trumped by the needs of the group. That they valorized nonhuman lives was small comfort.
He crumpled up the clipping and tossed it.
It hit the feet of Marianne Abboud, who was standing at the threshold, smoking a cigarette.
“I saw your door was open,” she said. “I guess it didn’t go well.”
Donny shook his head. “They banished her.”
“Oh,” said Marianne. “That’s not helpful.”
“I know,” said Donny. “I’m sorry to blow your source.”
“I’m sorry I tipped you off. I hadn’t meant to. But she’s not my only source.”
“She’s not?”
Marianne shook her head.
“Who is?”
Marianne pulled an invisible zipper across her mouth.
“When will they administer the sentence?” she asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” said Donny. “Monday, when I should be back in Dallas with her.”
“They don’t want to spoil the May Day celebration in the morning.”
“Right,” said Donny. “I guess there’s some big parade tonight. They’re even letting her ride one of the floats. They put me in a cage right away, but she gets to rage. Last hurrah of the damned, I guess.”
“I hear it’s quite the party. Like Mardi Gras, but with better politics. We should go.”
“I can’t. I need to go try to salvage my case, and face up to the mess I left back home, which I thought I was going to fix with what I just messed up here. I have someone helping me, but it’s not looking good for Donny. Any chance you all are looking to hire any burnt-out war-crimes lawyers?”
“What if I told you the source you just burned gave me information that could help your case about the camps?”
“I’m listening.”
“She told me where they disposed of his remains.”
“The president?”
She nodded. “It’s here. In New Orleans.”
“Why would they go to the trouble of moving him so far?”
“For the same reason that you will find this information helpful. They buried him in the same spot where the AMR guards disappeared the prisoners. And we are not hiring, but I could use some help finding this spot.”
“Let’s go,” said Donny, standing.
“There’s just one problem,” said Marianne. “It’s underwater now.”
“So am I. Come on.”
42
What the crew at the Library were able to come up with by way of watercraft was not the fastest thing, but probably the one that could go the furthest into the shallows: a dinged-up old aluminum canoe still tagged as property of the concessionaires at City Park, on a trailer attached to a pedicab. There were no paddles, but someone had left a long wooden pole that worked to operate the canoe as a punt.
That meant that Marianne could concentrate on the search, seated in the bow, while Donny stood close to the middle, pushing against the bottom and scanning wide.
And so they worked their way from their put-in in Mid-City up to the heart of City Park, to where they could see the neoclassical columns of the Museum of Art sticking up out of the water. Donny half expected to see the banner of whatever the last exhibition was, but there was only vegetation hanging from the chipped cornice. He pushed them in closer, hoping to be able to see in through the shadows. A big night heron flew out from back in there, startling them with its primordial squawk before they even saw it.
“We don’t have time for your apocalypse tourism,” said Marianne.
“We also don’t have time to be in a hurry,” said Donny. They were both right.
That was when they saw the alligator, sunning itself on the roof of the old coffee shop. They saw it when Donny clumsily knocked the side of the boat with the pole, waking the beast with the noise.
“He looks a little cranky,” said Donny. “Or she.”
“What do they eat?” said Marianne.
“Anything that moves,” said Donny. “So don’t get any ideas about getting in the water.”
The gator slid into liquid. They tracked its eyes and notches for a while as it picked up speed, swimming parallel to them and then away, and then they lost it as it seemed to head toward the neighborhood to the south.
“Maybe it went under,” said Donny. “You got that map?”
She handed it to him. It was a map she had taken from the Library. New Orleans from before the floods, even before the fighting. A motorist’s map to a perfectly normal American city, one of those maps from the era when you could get away with never thinking about geography. When you could think of the city as a static thing, made by people, to their design. Instead of a product of nature, organic, dynamic, entropic.
A map that did not anticipate that the waterline could change, let alone so dramatically.
A map that did not tell you this entire neighborhood was built on what had been, when Europeans first arrived, a swamp. Land below sea level, a bowl designed to hold vast quantities of water when the river broke free of its banks.
So they paddled out into it, navigating by the street signs that remained, green and white markers from the past poking up from the water.
They paddled past flooded blocks of big twentieth-century houses under ten to twelve feet of water, now occupied mostly by wildlife, if at all. Supposedly a handful of members of the community were living out here now, establishing shelter in attics and rooftop shanties, showing a way to live when the coastal settlements of the world were underwater. But they didn’t see any of them.
They did see more alligators. And snakes.
They saw a rat the size of a small dog, swimming, looking not at all freaked out.
“Adaptation,” said Donny.
He looked at the water to see if it was poisoned. The reptiles and birds didn’t seem to mind, but they were hardier species, and ones that didn’t need to spend all their time in the water.
“Over here,” said Marianne. “See it?”
There was a sign in the near distance, marking the entrance to the Fairgrounds. It had been a very long time since they had a fair, or a music festival. This had most recently been a refugee camp—as so many such places seemed to end up in recent years—one of the biggest in the hemisphere. Camp Zulu was the place where many people found they had hit a wall. The place where they were trucked after illegally crossing a border or a state line, and made to live behind the wire, if they were lucky enough to stay out of the Superdome. A place where people had lived long enough for kids to grow up in there, and have kids of their own. Some of them Donny’s clients. The place—or one of them, at least—where the real spark of revolution was ignited. And where the atrocities of war were buried underwater.
Only, not exactly there, according to Marianne. Closer to the bayou that flowed between there and the park.
“Up in there,” said Marianne. “The big tree.”
The directions they had were not the kind that involved a street address.
The tree Marianne was pointing at was a huge live oak that stuck up out of the water, on a high point that was no more than an inch or two submerged.
“How old do you think that tree is?” said Donny.
“Very old,” said Marianne. “Older than the city.”
He pushed the boat to it as Marianne stood up in the prow, and they both peered into the dark water spectral
ly illuminated by flashes of morning sun, and looked for the faces of other specters, of bodies put here to hide the evidence.
43
Marianne was right: the party that night after they returned from their excursion was like Mardi Gras.
Just without the rich people.
Marianne said she would catch up with him later, after she finished updating her report.
Donny made his own mask, sacrificing one of his neckties to the project with the aid of a borrowed pair of scissors.
Donny had been to Mardi Gras in the good old days, before the floods and the fighting. Back then the way it worked was that parades were organized by different insider circles, most of them the elites, in a city built from elaborate social codes of class and ancestry. The rich people, usually rich white people, were the ones on the floats. Throwing plastic jewels and coins to the gathered mob below. Misogynistically expecting women to expose themselves for those trinkets, and making sure they were liquored up enough to comply.
At the new May Day parades, they threw real money, and real jewels.
And half the people were in some state of undress already.
The money came from the buildings they had seized during the uprising: banks, federal buildings, corporate offices. The gems came from the jewelry stores. The catch was, the money had no independent value there, in a community where most property was shared—or at least that was what they said the deal was. So throwing wads of cash to the mob for the new New Orleanians was just pure Dionysian play.
Bacchus liked to run up his credit card, and then walk the bill.
For Donny, however, the money was very real. And if he hustled, he might even get enough to get Thelen off his back for a while.
That’s how he found himself chasing after a twenty-five-foot-high white heron, an insanely beautiful thing that looked to have been made from real feathers. Riding up at the top of its long neck was a beautiful brown girl with storybook long hair, naked but for the golden bling that adorned her bosom and arms, smiling and tossing hundred-dollar bills a little boy in a toga was handing her from a big saddlebag that sat between the wings. Donny was convinced the heron was alive, and that if he called out the right words both it and the girl would see him and want to give him a ride. But then he stumbled in the crowd and found himself on the ground, pulling bills from the scrubby turf and stuffing them in his already-full pants pockets.
He had already drunk the Kool-Aid back at the hotel, and also devoured the fungi the front desk clerk had hooked him up with, an offer Marianne wisely declined, but one that Donny was glad he had accepted. The best remedy for failure was self-medication, and the prescriptions they had on offer here were like nothing he had ever sampled.
He got up, and saw himself in the window glass of an old storefront. Shirtless and loco, tribally colored, silk necktie repurposed as Zorro mask, insane grin on his face, money falling out of his pants.
“Show me your dick!” yelled some female-sounding voice, and Donny, being a guy, assumed they were talking to him. But when he turned he just saw some bearish-looking dude with a ring in his nose, a big beard, a lethal-looking codpiece, and even less on than Donny. The guy grabbed Donny and gave him an aggressive French kiss, and then walked on.
Kim grabbed him, and kissed him even harder.
His mind needed a moment to register who “Kim” was, and how he knew her name. It came back to him: After he and Marianne split up at the hotel, Donny’s evening had started out with that front desk clerk, Kath, and a pair of her young researcher friends, Earl and Kim. They invited him over to their place on Chartres Street, where they ate even more mushrooms and broke out the paints. That was how Donny had ended up mostly green from head to toe, with blue speckles, like some simian gecko. Earl and Kath were a couple, and Donny and Kim were acting like one, for the moment.
He grinned with unabashed psychotropic joy, and Kim grinned back, their hands lingering on each other, delighting in the sensory explosions popping along their fingertips.
“The snake is coming!” yelled another voice, and people turned and started moving farther down the parade line.
A flock of wild parrots flew through, so close to his head it felt like they were in his hair, their cackling chatter like crazy flying monkeys. And then there was an actual flying monkey, some naked furry dude with artificial wings who glided after them and alighted in the crowd not far from Donny. People started eating the wings, and Donny kept moving.
“We are all bonobos on acid!” yelled a voice in the crowd.
And the snake came into view.
It was four blocks long, this thing, made of some fleshlike material lubricated in a way that made it glisten. It had no wheels, or visible means of vehicular propulsion. It moved like a real snake. Maybe there were people inside it, moving like a human centipede. There were people on top of it for sure, a lot of people, naked and feasting and throwing strawberries the size of pomegranates to the crowd.
Donny finally caught one, and dove his face into it. It tasted even better than it looked. He even ate the leaves at the top.
“Get in!” yelled one of the eyes, which was a human face, the face of a cute black woman with green irises and lips painted real black. She was looking right at him.
Donny ran to the front, ahead of the snake, Kim forgotten.
“Come on!” said the woman.
“How?” said Donny.
“Feed me, baby!”
Donny ran after the snake, half-naked and shoeless, until he realized he was dropping the money.
He was on his knees trying to recover it when he felt his tie back around his neck. And then a jolt as it pulled taut, choking him.
When he looked up, he saw a beaked Venetian mask. But it revealed just enough of her face to see it was Heather.
And the smile on the wolf standing next to her was unmistakable. It was Slider, holding Donny’s tie like a lasso.
44
When Donny woke up, he could still hear the music, but it was far away.
He could also hear the sounds of the swamp. Those sounds were closer.
“Where am I?” he said.
He was still tripping. He still had no shoes, and his shirt was torn and wet. The tie was still around his neck, knotted too tight. The room around him was moving. The bars of the undersized cage in which he was locked did not move.
His question received no answer. Just the sound of faraway brass, and crickets that sounded like they were inside his head.
“I knew I should have left town,” he said.
“You should have never come,” said Slider.
Slider had peroxide-white hair now. He also had some new tattoos, one of which, the image of some kind of cosmic coyote pounded out in luminescent ink, looked to be moving independently of Slider.
“I knew it,” said Donny. “How’d you do it?”
“My squad helped me, just like they helped me spring Heather last night,” he said. “And Heather paid off two of the guards, told them she wanted to split. I needed to disappear, or they were going to disappear me.”
“Good to see that bribery still works even in a propertyless society.”
“Only because they had the stupid idea to let the lawyers in,” said Heather.
Donny saw her now, in the background. She was sitting at a table, working on something Donny couldn’t see.
“Joyce says you killed the guards who disappeared your parents, Slider.”
“Joyce is almost as big a liar as you,” he answered. “I didn’t kill anybody. Kind of wish I had now. But she wouldn’t even tell me where to find those guys.”
“What do you mean?”
“They found a trove of documents from the camps,” said Heather. “Some of the secret blacklists of prisoners tagged for the detour, and the names of the guards who killed his parents.”
“I have those names,” said Donny. “The names of the guards.”
“Not their new names,” said Heather.
“New names
?”
“New identities. Names, birthdays, Social Security cards, jobs, hometowns.”
“Some of them even got new teeth!” said Slider. “So they could fake their own deaths.”
“Joyce has all this info?”
“She’s sitting on it,” said Heather. “Says she wants to build cases to prosecute them all here, since the other courts won’t do it.”
“She’s wrong,” said Donny. “I was doing it. There’s a way. Let me out. I can persuade her.”
“Haven’t you fucked enough shit up already?” said Slider. “If you would just mind your own damn business, I wouldn’t have to grab you in the first place.”
“I’m just trying to keep my promises,” said Donny.
“Yeah, right. Promises to your banker, maybe. You’re a sell-out, dude. Taking her dad’s dirty money. And then fucking up our whole deal. We just want to be together. Can’t you understand that?”
“I guess.” He could, even if their Romeo and Juliet bit was hard to take. “This world we’ve made makes it hard.”
“No shit.”
“And I thought she was a hostage, Slider,” said Donny.
“Man, you are such a sucker.” He actually laughed. “Next thing, you’re gonna tell us how her daddy loves her.”
Donny could finally make out what Heather was doing at the table. Making bombs.
“Dad doesn’t give a fuck about me,” she said, not looking up. “It’s just about the money.”
“Well, Lecker’s the one with the money.”
“That freak. I can’t believe you don’t even know how they’re using you.”
“Let me out of here and tell me all about it.”
He realized the cage was a kennel, for a medium-sized dog.
She laughed at his request, and kept talking. “All the patents for the Tripto Labs seeds are in my name. Mom kept them, separate from the trust, and licensed them to the company. But the license expired a month ago.”
“While you were here, incommunicado.”
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