The Floating World

by Babst, C. Morgan

  Finally, up ahead, the trusses of the bridge that would lead her over the Rigolets and out of New Orleans rose above the wreckage of the highway. Her hands began to shake. She pulled off along the rutted path that ran between the bridge’s pilings and the red brick walls of the ruined fort. She got out of the Jeep and walked down the bank, past a storm-stripped tree and towards the water, until she was standing on a thick mat of driftwood, littered here and there with red milk crates and plastic buckets.

  The surge had risen yards above her head, depositing sand and broken branches on top of the fort, crashing down on the ramparts, splitting them. White streaks of salt like dried tears striped the brick, and black stains poured from the cannon emplacements and into the water. She looked across the pass, low now, a narrow channel of calm water separating here from away. Out in the water, a cormorant stood on the post of an ancient pier, drying its wings.

  Sheltered against the landside of the ruined fort, a dogwood shrub had survived the storm, flexible enough to bend down before the water and rise again when it had passed. Though everything around it was dead and fall was coming, she thought she saw glimmers of green on its red branches, and she picked her way to it over the flayed logs. At the end of each twig, new leaves were budding, and some had already unfurled. She reached out her hand for a shoot to keep as a charm. When she broke it, white sap oozed out, and she heard a cry.

  Staggering back, Cora tripped, falling down on her knees in the drift of dead wood. A dog—brown chested with black fur matted to its back and jowls—was limping towards her from out of a cannon emplacement in the wall of the fort. She started to rise and run back towards the Jeep, but the dog was whimpering. It flinched every time it put its right leg down. Just a yard or so away from her, it stopped, holding its leg up in the air, a thin line of red blood trailing down its foreleg from a ripped dewclaw.

  “Come,” she called to it, whistled. “Come here, buddy. Lemme see.”

  The dog came, but when she reached out to touch it, it shied away again, pressing its body against the ramparts. Cora went back to the Jeep. In the glove compartment, Troy’s cousins had left beef jerky, Cheetos, a bottle of hot spring water, and she took them, opened up the dried meat, and called to the dog again.

  “Look—” She held her hand out to it. “Come see what I got for you! I know you’re hurt. I won’t hurt you again.”

  The dog came. It wolfed the jerky, butted its heavy head against her leg, its hurt paw lifted. Opening the bottle of warm water, she crouched down and lifted the dog’s paw onto her knee. When she poured the water over it, the dog flinched back but waited, and Cora poured the whole bottle out over the wound, rinsing the blood off into the sand. From her hair, she untied her bandana and wrapped it around its leg for a bandage.

  “You want to come with me?”

  The dog tilted its head, listening.

  “I’m going away now. You wanna come?”

  She opened the back hatch of the Jeep, threw her bag, full of all of the clean clothes she’d taken from the Dobies’ and the money—the nearly ten grand she’d pulled from its hiding place in the ceiling of her closet—into the backseat, and patted the floor of the car, inviting the dog to jump.

  “Come on now. There’s nothing left for us here. We can be something else now.”

  The dog, though, backed away from her, then turned, trotted several steps towards its cave in the wall of the fort, and paused, lifting its injured paw and looking over its shoulder at her.

  I am already dead, she thought she heard it thinking. Dead before I died.

  But she was not. From the surface of the water, the bloody wash of dawn had lifted, and the cormorant beat at the air, taking flight across the pass. The dog loped off, hiding itself in the ruins. There was no hope of helping it, and so she gave up, got in the Jeep and crossed the bridge towards higher ground.

  Tuesday

  October 25

  In Tess’s dream, Cora stood on one of the turnarounds near the middle of the Causeway. The smoke hung thick around them as fog often did on fall mornings, obscuring the wavy dark line that would otherwise have been all that was visible of the distant shore. Tess was driving out to rescue her, wheels thumping rhythmic as a heartbeat over the breaks between the floating sections of the bridge. She kept passing mile marker eleven over and over again, and eventually, it occurred to her that she had gotten off the bridge itself and onto the disused cloverleaf that had served as a turnaround before the second span of the bridge was built—a closed loop just feet above the lake, which spread out under the overhang of smoke like molten pewter. She began to look for exits, but every ramp was flooded with a glassy film of water. She meant to plow through, but she could not gather the nerve, and so Cora waited. Up ahead, on that far turnaround, she stood, still as a statue, until she could wait no longer, and Tess had to watch as her daughter stepped over the concrete barrier and into the lake.

  Tess had had patients who had experienced such things: a wave of cold passing through the skin on a hot July day, or a sudden bout of disorientation, an abrupt falling feeling that they recognized as announcements of loss, they said, even before the police came to the door. Early in her career she had believed them. Those stories had seemed to confirm something important, something that she increasingly strained to believe—that the world was of a piece, that an organizing principle greater than plain physics held sway over our lives. It was what had drawn her to Jung in college, his belief that future wars could enter dreams as yellow floods spreading across Europe and that golden scarabs could fly out of patients’ heads to tap against the windows of his examining room.

  At some point she had shed it all, though, or so she thought. She’d grown up, stopped going to church, stopped having patience for the mystical. Synchronicity became coincidence and confirmation bias. If a patient came to her with a story of “confirmed” premonition, she would explain that we project meaning backwards onto things that would have passed unremarked were they not followed by landmark events. She had settled into a more mature understanding of our minds—that our memories were constantly revised to reflect our present understanding, that any experience of order or wholeness was a construct created by our consciousness for its own comfort. The world did not signify, it was only given significance.

  Still, she was having trouble seeing this morning, as if she had smoke in her eyes.

  THE DAY WAS beautiful, one of those bright blue, crisp autumn days that did their best to make up for the humid summer just passed. Del sat down on the sawn edge of the Dobies’ porch and tried to let the sun wake her up. She had been half-asleep on the leather sofa, trying to recover a dream—a hot orange square surrounded in black metal—when Mrs. Fuller from around the block had knocked on the door with Cora’s phone in her hand. The old Nokia looked like it had been backed over, and Del tried to imagine Cora letting it fall from her fingers onto the street. She would have had to put the key in the ignition and hold it in place while the engine turned over, then shift into drive. She would have heard the plastic cracking under her tires. At the end of the block, she would have had to decide whether to turn right or left, and somehow she couldn’t see Cora doing all of this and then jumping off of the Mississippi River Bridge, as her mother had started saying she must have done. She rubbed her finger over the phone’s cracked screen. She had to admit that it was reasonable for her parents to be afraid—that the fire might not have come as a relief, but only a release from her final obligation—but Del couldn’t believe it. As Cora would have said, she couldn’t feel it to be true.

  She turned the phone over and stared at the street, quiet now—the clubs all closed, everybody off attending to their business. The musicians would be sleeping off their hangovers, and people all across the city would be sorting out the salvageable from the ruined. In New York, it was ten o’clock already. Magda would be slipping off her shoes under her desk while Phillip stalked through the showroom. Zack had told her he was preparing for a trial this week, s
o she imagined him hunched over files or leaning forward towards a conference table, his tortoiseshell glasses on. She liked it when he wore his glasses.

  She took her own phone out of her pocket.

  Zack answered on the fourth ring. “Adelaide Hortense Boisdoré. Well my, my.”

  Hearing his voice, she felt his tongue move against her upper lip. She put her hand to her mouth, took it away.

  “Hey, Zack.” She wasn’t sure what she’d meant to say. Really, she’d just wanted to remind herself that he still existed. “How are you?”

  “How are you?” he said.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  He cleared his throat, and she could hear him nodding, feel his hand at the back of her neck. “We should probably dispense with the apologies and just stop doing that.”

  “I guess so,” she said, and her voice broke on the word.

  “Mmm-hmmm.”

  She waited, listening for something on the other end of the line that she could read for his expression, his posture, whether he would have stepped into her then, negating everything, and let her feel the heat of his body against his skin. But all she heard was an insulated door closing.

  “I want not to lose you more than I want to fuck you, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. She would not cry.

  “I want it to be okay for you, when NOLA is spick-and-span again, to come back. I just want everything to go back to being the same.”

  On his end of the line, an arriving elevator chimed its electronic bell.

  “Listen, Zack—”

  “Do you think spick-and-span is some kind of racial slur against Latino domestics?”

  The elevator disgorged a hubbub of voices.

  “This was a stupid time to call.” She swallowed. Her face was getting hot. “You’re at work. I’ll let you get back.”

  “If you hang up now, I’m never speaking to you again,” he said, so matter-of-fact she believed him.

  “Okay.”

  The lobby doors opened, and more people passed him, talking. Rubenstein, a woman said. “Dailey.” She could see his half-ironic, half-respectful nod. “So, look. I do think I owe you an apology for the car. I wasn’t listening. I was railroading you. And what you said about Cora—”

  “She’s missing,” she said.

  “Fuck.”

  “Just thirty-six hours or so, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know you’re worried.”

  “I am.”

  She listened to him breathing, the patient slowness of his lungs filling, emptying. On Royal, a car passed, throwing up dust.

  “Zack, I think she left because of that woman, because of Reyna. I did something—”

  “Do you need me to go to my office?”

  She nodded and stared down the empty street.

  “That’s a yes?”

  “Yes.”

  She listened to him walking down the hallway, his feet on that diamond-patterned carpet. She’d used to love meeting him for lunch at his office. They would sit on the floor behind his desk, basking in the sun that came straight in through the big windows, and look out over the Hudson at the breadth of New Jersey, dotted with cities, smokestacks, bridges like snagged threads, scuffed patches of swamp and parkland. Her own office had been a windowless cube, no escaping from it, except through the art. There, if she needed to get away, she had to slip down to storage, into the cold, humidity-controlled air. On her last day, she had run there, her hands shaking, feeling like she was escaping to a bomb shelter where the headlines, the phones, the designers bitching about install dates, couldn’t get to her. I think you’d better take a break, Phillip had clucked. Downstairs, the only sound was of the freight elevator going up, its chain uncoiling from the ground.

  She had kicked off her shoes and walked up and down the aisles of archival boxes. She’d just needed to look at something beautiful, to breathe, to be nowhere. When she found lot 503, she climbed up on the lower shelf and clawed down the box. Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a rare, complete, and undamaged set. Ukiyo-e prints, Magda had told her, had fallen out of favor for a while, and people had used them for packing material, like old newspapers, their headlines now meaningless: Nagin: Entire City Will Soon Be Underwater. New Orleans Shelters to be Evacuated. Katrina Destroys Entire Towns. This lot was in perfect condition, though, and as she lifted the top from the box, she saw the bright, barely faded colors through the scrim of acid-free tissue. Under the Wave off Kanagawa was the first image of the series. Fran had had a poster of it in her dorm room at school, and Del had spent many hours, stoned, staring at it. Fuji, someone had told her, was the Japanese symbol of immortality or the fountain of youth, something like that, and she’d liked to gesticulate with the joint while she interpreted the image, claiming that the wave, towering up like a mountain to crash down on the fishermen in their boat, represented mortality, but that Mount Fuji—small, distant, but at the compositional center—was a reminder of a solid and permanent world beyond. Under the scrim of paper, though, she could hardly distinguish the fishing boat from the wave itself, and Fuji was lost in the distance.

  She wasn’t wearing gloves—she hadn’t even washed her hands after lunch—but still she plucked at the corner of the tissue with her fingernails and pulled it off. The real woodblock was so much better than the reproduction: the blues were strong, and up close she could see the slight stippled variations in color that showed how the block had been re-inked and reapplied. She had never noticed before how the streaked snow on Fuji’s peak reiterated the ripples of the water below the boat or how the death’s-head faces of the fishermen recapitulated the foam breaking in gouts off the head of the wave and the snow falling in the distance on the mountain.

  She saw, then, that the mountain was not a counterpoint to the wave but a reflection of it, and that its distance, its smallness, the way the wave wrapped around it made it a weaker reflection—it was part of the mortal world. Nothing was exempt, after all. She’d picked up the print and laid it on its face in the top of the box, then pulled the next sheet of tissue off the Red Fuji, whose lower slopes were flooded by a blue forest. In the next print, Fuji was threatened by clouds while bright red lava fractured its shoulders. She turned through them all—Fuji hidden under a bridge, Fuji disappearing into the snow, Fuji reflected in a lake, drowning in a river. Magda had told her that ukiyo-e meant pictures of the floating world, and she finally understood what that meant: that even a mountain was ephemeral, something that existed as we perceived it and so disappeared when we turned away. More than that, though, the mountain—everything, even love, even home—was mortal. Snow would eventually wear Fuji away, its eruptions would break it apart. Eventually even the stones would turn to dust. Nothing could go back to being the same, but she couldn’t say that to Zack. He wouldn’t want to hear it.

  She got up off the porch and went back inside. On his end of the line, a door shut with a click. Zack cleared his throat.

  “Is this a landline?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I gotta say, I was happier when I thought you were calling me for me.”

  “I was.” If she had been there in his office, she would have put her hand on the back of his neck, she would have laid her head on his shoulder. She took a deep breath. “I was, Zack.”

  “But you have a legal question.”

  She let the breath out. “The body, it was in her friend’s house. So I burned it down.”

  “Wow?” She heard the creak of his desk chair as he fell into it.

  “Yeah. After I dropped you off.”

  “Did you use an accelerant?”

  She almost laughed. “That’s your question?”

  He paused. His mouth would be twisted inside his neat beard. “You asked my advice.”

  “Lighter fluid.” She walked to the end of the Dobies’ hall, walked back again.

  “Did you spread it around? Toss it on the couch, the walls, et cetera?”

 
; “I dumped it on a roll of paper towels and lit a matchbook and opened the gas and left.”

  “Good,” he said.

  Now she laughed.

  “Yes, that’s good. This all went down in the kitchen?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And this is where the body was.”

  The smell of the house was still in the back of her throat, and Del pressed her arm across her face, closed her eyes.

  “Yes.” She ran herself a glass of water. “Reyna. Her name was Reyna. She was on the floor of the kitchen.”

  “How was she killed?”

  “Shotgun.” She said, through a mouthful of water. “My dad gave Cora a shotgun to protect herself with, before they left her.”

  He sighed through his nose. “Why are you so sure Cora did this? Aren’t there hundreds of shotguns in New Orleans? I mean, it’s the South, right?”

  “Cora told me she was responsible. Now she’s missing.”

  “She told you what, exactly?” Zack expelled a heavy breath. “Look, even if you burned the house down, they’ll find the shot. And the remains will be identifiable.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t just leave her there. She was a woman. She had children. And Cora had been going to visit her at night, walking across the city alone.” Del stared through the window at the Dobies’ dying garden. “I don’t know if Cora really killed her or if she just thinks she’s responsible for it. I don’t know what actually happened, but I called the police, I talked to the DMORT, and Reyna was just being left there. It was wrong. It was so fucking wrong, Zack.”