by Arden, Alys
I poured her coffee in a paper cup, hoping she wouldn’t stay, splashed in some sugar-free vanilla syrup, and slid it across the counter with a smile as fake as hers. How the hell am I going to survive Sacred Heart?
Her heels clicking the pavement outside cued Ren to reclaim the stage. This time, Sébastien stopped fiddling with the machine and leaned on the counter next to me.
“Procéde, s'il te plaît,” I said.
Ren pretended to ponder. “Where was I?”
“The policemen were just getting to the apartment of the Carter brothers,” Sébastien reminded him.
“Oui, oui, merci beaucoup. The policemen raided the third-story apartment and, to their horror, found seven other people held captive, all with their wrists sliced open in the same fashion as the little girl’s. Most of the victims praised God for the miracle of being rescued, but those who had been there for more than a few days begged for death. They screamed that they would never be able to escape the Carter brothers or all the horror they had witnessed.
“None of the victims reported having been taken to the grandiose apartment against their will. It was when they tried to leave that the brothers demanded the party never end! They tied each one up and held them prisoner. The victims claimed that every night, when John and Wayne arrived home from work, the brothers would slice open their flesh and drink their blood directly from the pierced veins.
“The cops found only two dead bodies, but the survivors claimed to have witnessed at least six others come through the front door and never leave. They said that once a victim’s blood had been completely drained, the Carter brothers would dispose of the body by shoving them through a trash chute into a bath of acid below. No traces of these bodies were ever found.
“The policemen waited for John and Wayne Carter to return from work, and ambushed them right outside their apartment. Even though the brothers should have been exhausted after their day of manual labor, it still took over a dozen men to hold them down. As you can imagine, there was a media frenzy after the arrests. The Carter brothers photographed well and were charming enough to gain a surprising swell of sympathizers – but despite their charisma and good looks, the sadistic killers were sentenced to be hanged. Post-execution, their bodies were laid to rest in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
“Now, here is where it gets interesting.”
Sébastien and I exchanged looks.
“I’m sure you know that if you live, or more specifically die, in New Orleans, you’re probably gonna end up buried in an oven tomb, since the high water table makes earth inhumation difficult. You’ll spend your eternal slumber in something that not only looks like an oven but literally roasts you, like a slow-cooker. In times when the body count outnumbered the tombs available, resting bodies got exactly one year to roast in peace – not a day more, not a day less. Then the crypt-keepers would just push the crumbling remains to the back and slip in a fresh corpse.
“When the Carter brothers’ remains were scheduled to be pushed to the back, the crypt-keeper found the tomb empty of bone fragments. There was not a trace of John or Wayne Carter ever having been laid to rest.”
Ren took a deep breath, allowing his audience a moment to ponder the strangeness of his story.
“In all the decades since, no one has been able to explain how two corpses could simply vanish without a trace. The mystery is all that remains.”
He paused again and then took a dramatic bow.
I clapped loudly, and Sébastien joined me for a moment before returning to the espresso machine with a smile on his face.
Ren took another bow. Despite the meager audience and the events of the last couple of months, nothing had affected his ability to tell a story.
“John and Wayne?” came an unfamiliar voice from the corner. The sketcher. “As in John Wayne? Do people in this town believe this crap?” His headphones were still on, but he must have turned his music off and listened in on the story. I scowled, annoyed by his blatant skepticism, but the questions didn’t faze Ren in the slightest. On the contrary, the naysaying seemed to enliven him. There was nothing Ren loved more than a debate about the supernatural.
“Oh, people in this town believe far crazier things than the tale of the Carter brothers, young man. But you are probably correct that the brothers were likely living under false names. Even so, that’s who they claimed to be, so that’s how the story goes.”
“And do people in this town believe in vampires?” the guy asked, pushing his hair behind his ears.
“The truth is relative,” Ren answered, being purposefully vague.
The scientist in the room interjected, “A logical truth is a statement that is true inall possible worlds. As opposed to a fact, which is only true in this world, as it has historically unfolded.” Sébastien made my brain hurt.
“Don’t bring logic into a discussion about the truth, my boy!” Ren yelled.
Sébastien raised one eyebrow, but knew that arguing would be an exercise in futility.
Ren looked back at the sketcher. “The truth depends on what you believe in.”
“I believe if I ever came across a vampire, I would stake it.” He gathered up his things.
“Them are fighting words, son!”
“You have no idea,” he mumbled, walking out the door.
The three of us looked at each other with blank expressions and then burst out laughing.
“Testy young fellow!”
Suppressing giggles, I looked at Ren. “Sorry about that.”
“Miss Le Moyne, if you remember only one thing I have ever taught you, let it be this: you can never please everyone. As an artist, if your work doesn’t inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance. And that goes for you too, Mr. Scientist. The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators.”
“Ha ha. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Ren nudged my elbow and motioned towards the window table. “Anyway, he was cute.”
“Yeah, Adele, maybe you two could go vampire hunting together,” Sébastien teased.
I rolled my eyes.
“Speaking of dead… I have a brilliant idea. We’ve only had two customers today: the prissy, sugar-free-vanilla girl, and the disgruntled artist. Let’s close up early and call it a day.”
“Hey, what am I, chopped liver? You’ve had three customers.”
“Let me rephrase, two paying customers,” Sébastien countered. “What year was it the last time you paid for your caffeine fix, Ren?”
“You know I leave the math to you and your sister.” He headed for the door.“Au revoir!”
“Bye, Ren!” I yelled.
“À demain, ma chérie!”
Chapter 13 The Unexpected Muse
October 19th
Seven days had gone by with nearly the exact same routine.
I woke up to a silent house, showered, listened to the radio while getting ready, and then went to Café Orléans. The thrill of going back to work had quickly worn thin – there was barely anything to serve and hardly anyone to serve it to. I never saw more than a handful of customers a day, most of whom were cops or government recovery workers. Sébastien had returned to his lab rats. I hadn’t seen Jeanne; she was practically sleeping in her lab, trying to get it back to full capacity. Mr. Michel spent most of his time at the roasters, and Mrs. Michel spent most of her time upstairs on the phone with insurance agents, lawyers and vendors. There wasn’t really a point in opening the coffee shop, but it gave us hope that one day things would return to normal.
After I finished the post-Storm cleaning, there was nothing to do but watch the clock tick away the remaining days of my plaid-skirt-free life. My anxiety over starting at Sacred Heart had grown so intense I began to feel sick. I attempted every persuasive argument I could think of to get out of going to school, but my father, who I had barely seen all week, wasn’t budging.
Every day, he disappeared, driving out of the city to find groceries, or gasoline for the
generator, or construction supplies. Between the broken infrastructure and the scarcity of goods, this endeavor sometimes took the entire afternoon. Then he went straight to the bar “to get things in order,” or so he said, not to return until after I was asleep. Always after curfew.
We hadn't been able to find anyone to fix the wall, but my father had managed to get a government-issued blue tarp. The blue plastic patches were becoming a frequent sight all around the city – a marker of someone who’d returned home. After moving his bed into my old room, my father now said that his studio was finally well ventilated. He joked, but I knew he was desperate to get the wall fixed because the crime in the city was out of control (two more dead bodies had been found). Every day, I worried more and more that he would send me back to my mother’s.
The physical destruction didn’t hold a candle to the mental damage the Storm was doing to the city’s inhabitants. For me, the worst part of the aftermath was the guilt. I felt guilty all the time. I felt guilty to have survived when so many others hadn’t. I felt guilty that we still had our home. I felt guilty that our most frustrating problem was finding gasoline for the generator. Bouncing between the guilt and trying not to feel sorry for myself was maddening.
The lack of interaction with people forced me into an even deeper state of introversion than usual. At times, I felt like an empty shell of myself, staring blankly at things I was supposed to recognize. Everyone else appeared zombie-like as well, but the solidarity only brought temporary comfort. It was as if we had all gone to war together.
Little did I know, the war hadn’t even begun.
* * *
I had two distractions from the dystopia that was real life. The first was Arcadian, the used bookshop next door to the café. Even though they hadn’t reopened yet, Mr. Mauer let me borrow books like he always had. I helped him clean, and together we mourned several trash cans worth of pages that had drench ’n dried, but seventeen feet of water had poured into the neighborhood where he lived, so the ruined books were the least of his problems.
Maybe the solitude was a good thing since I was becoming a walking hazard, leading me to my second great distraction – tinkering with my new, er, talent.
I attempted to use it only when no one was around and I had reached the peak of absolute boredom with everything else. I don’t know if this was because it scared the hell out of me or if I was hoarding it, like saving the last bite of your favorite food on the plate until everything else was gone. A cherished treasure to give me something to do when I felt like I was on the brink of solitude-induced insanity. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. The random freak occurrences were making me a frazzled wreck.
Yesterday, at the café, I had been in such a deep Émile-daydream that I hadn’t realized I was stirring my Americano with a floating spoon. Not until Ren walked in and it clanked down onto the rim of the cup. I’m not sure whether he saw, but he did look at me a bit suspiciously after that.
Note to self: be more discreet.
Regardless, Ren was the highlight of my days. He came into the café every morning and patiently waited, just in case people showed up for a tour. No one ever came, although he mentioned that two or three customers usually showed up at night for his ghost tour.
The only other people I consistently saw were the uniform-clad mayor’s daughter, Désirée, and the naysaying vampire-hater, whose name I had learned was Isaac. Désirée came in early morning. I still wasn’t sure why she came downtown every morning just to turn around and go back uptown for school, but we had gained her patronage. At least we now had iced coffee, so I didn’t have to deal with her stink-eye (at least, not regarding the coffee). Isaac always came in at around ten and stayed for at least two hours, always with headphones on and sketchpad in hand. Besides his name, the only other piece of information I had garnered was that he was from New York City, which was apparently superior to New Orleans in every way, and which possibly explained his too-cool-for-school attitude. I had grown immensely curious as to why he was in town – the city being far from tourist friendly. Other than ordering his coffee (plain black, not that we had much else to offer), the only time he ever spoke was to openly complain about something.
His condescending air was the reason I had initially disliked him. The reason I continued to dislike him was that whenever I broke from my book, I caught him looking at me. He’d always quickly lower his gaze when our eyes met, but I had a sneaking suspicion he was sketching me, which made me extremely self-conscious. And extremely annoyed. And feel even more trapped in this bizarre reality. It’s not like I could ask him to stop without seeming totally presumptuous and vain, because I didn’t have any real evidence that he was actually doing it, but each day I caught him glancing at me more frequently, and each day playing the role of unexpected muse made me loathe his presence. I racked my brain to think of a way to catch a glimpse of his sketchpad and vindicate my suspicion. Luckily, I had a lot of time on my hands to plot.
The only good news was the heat had finally broken, and the dreadfully long, unair-conditioned summer was over. But the electricity in the fall air that I usually loved, now only amplified the feeling that each day was a ticking time bomb.
Chapter 14 T - Minus One
October 20th
“Why don’t you guys just have plain New York coffee?” Isaac asked, pushing the tips of his light-brown hair out of his face and over his head. The sleeves of his dirty gray T-shirt hiked up just enough to reveal that the tops of his arms were not as tanned as his forearms. The hair fell back in his face as soon as his shoulders relaxed. He pushed it behind his ears again as if by autopilot.
Today was really no different from the last eight; only today I was having trouble suppressing the urge to dropkick him as he asked for a refill.
“Oh, I know where you can get some plain New York coffee…”
His big brown eyes lit up.
“In New York. I’m sure they wouldlove to have you back.”
He started laughing. His fingers scratched the result of not having shaven in a few days. “Are you sure you’re from around here? Aren’t Southern girls supposed to be hospitable?”
I wanted to jump across the counter and strangle him.
Instead of getting angry, he was actually being congenial for the first time. Is this how New Yorkers are? Be mean to them, and they like you back?
“So, whereare you from?” he asked.
I was still a little taken aback by his prompt of nonobligatory chatter.
“I’m from around the corner.”
I knew exactly where this conversation was going. I’d had it a hundred times with tourists over the years, but it had never truly annoyed me until the question came from him.
“You were born around the corner?”
“Well, technically, I was born in a hospital a couple of miles away, but I was raised my whole life, minus the last two months, around the corner from here.”
“You don’t sound Southern,” he replied in his usual know-it-all tone.
Films and television shows almost always got the New Orleans dialect wrong, further perpetuating the incorrect assumption that we all have a twang. It was a pet peeve of mine, my father’s, and all native New Orleanians. Even though Isaac was correct – my accent did sound nearly identical to his – I scowled, not wanting to be disassociated from my hometown, especially not now.
“Are you some kind of expert on Southern dialects?”
“Ugh, no. I just thought—”
“You just thought we would all sound like Scarlett O’Hara?”
“I guess. I don’t know… You seem to really love this place.”
“Well, yeah. It’s messed up right now, but you’re an idiot if you can’t see why I love this place.”
His smile cocked. I call him an idiot and he smiles?
“Maybe you could show me around sometime? Take me to see some of the things that were so great?”
“Are!” I yelled. “Are so great. The city isn
’t dead.”
“Right… I guess I’ve only seen the dead parts.” He was not helping his cause. “So how about it?”
Was this some coy way of asking me out?My defensiveness flipped into nervousness. “Sorry, I don’t have time. Too busy trying to keep things from dying.” I slammed his coffee mug down. The contents sloshed over the rim.
“Fine, sorry I asked.”
He went back to his table, jammed his headphones on, and started furiously moving his pencil.
Great, now he’s probably turning me into a monster.
Luckily, before the guilt could set in for being unnecessarily mean, Sébastien walked through the door with his hands behind his back.
“M'aimes-tu?”he asked as he approached the counter. The heavy-looking bags he was attempting to hide swayed into my sightline.
“Of course I love you,” I answered, eying a red plastic top jutting out the top of a bag. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Well, that depends on—”
“Oh my God, is that milk?”
“Oui!” He smiled. “Pépé found a place two hours outside of the city. He bought as much as they would allow.”
“We’re going to be the cat’s meow around here,” I said, mouth salivating as I ripped the plastic ring from one of the jugs.
I steamed the milk into a creamy white foam and poured it over my chicory coffee. The first sip burned my tongue, but I didn’t care. I greedily took another. The mixture tasted like New Orleans. I attempted to savor the third sip, hanging on to every flavor.
“Things are on the up and up,” I said, making another café au lait for him. “First milk, then who knows? Maybe the government will get its act together and fix this place.”
“Baby steps… Merci.” He gently kissed my cheeks and poured his coffee into a paper cup. “I have to get back to school. Pépé just asked me to run the milk over because there are no working refrigerators at the roasters.”
“No!” I grabbed his arm. “You just got here! I am dying of boredom. Please!”