by James Sallis
" 'In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you,' " I prompted.
"Well, that's the truth for sure." He scooped up what remained of the vegetables, a greenish paste nearly as appetizing as baby food from the jar. "Don't guess you'd have any more a these beers?"
He well knew I did. I tore the next-to-last one free of its webbing.
"Obliged."
We sat quietly together. Plane, boat and train gone now. Sky, river, tracks and street all empty. Closest thing to silence you'll find in a city.
"Guess, some point or another, you musta had hell kicked out of you too, be my guess," he said.
"You'd he right."
"Sure I would. Good beer." He held up the can. "Don't mean to be hoggin' it, mind." He handed the can to me. I drank and returnedit He set it down again in the niche he'd made for it. "You from around here?"
"Coming onto thirty-five years. Not much more than a kid when I moved here. Guess it's home by now."
"Guess it is. Never spent much time anywhere else myself, mind. Love this goddamn city. Ain't always been easy, though. Ever' few years, city gets to lie a real motherfucker. Mess your mind up good. Break your heart."
"Yeah."
We sat quietly side by side. The sun was beginning to set New Orleans doesn't go in much for twilight. Sun there on the horizon one moment, light still good, ten minutes later it's nighttime.
"We've met before," I said. "You don't remember."
He shook his head.
"Hotel Dieu. You'd been beaten pretty severely. Everyone thought a truck had run over you. I don't know when this was-a while back-but you were pretty bad off. They weren't sure you were going to make it for a while there. Then you left. Just got up one day and walked out."
"Can't say as I remember any of that. Sorry."
"Sorry?"
"Sounds like it might be important to you. Sorry I can't help." He held out the beer can. "You want the last of this? Dance with the one you brought?"
No.
"You had a book with you. At the hospital." I rummaged in my bag and pulled it out. "This one."
He took it from me, looked at the cover, then turned it over to read the back cover. Held it like a deck of cards, fanning his thumb along the edge back to front, riffling pages. Several pages all but separated themselves.
"Later, when you asked, I left my notebook with you."
I exchanged book for notebook. He browsed through, turning pages at random.
"That's your writing. All but the first four orfivepages."
"Yeah. Could be, I guess. Not so's I canremember, mind you. Definitely strange. Places I recognize in here, people I know I've come across, sure. Not much to tie it all together though, is there?"
"Not a lot. But you doremember the book, the notebook, writing in it…"
"Maybe. Hard to say."
He held the beer can against his ear as one might a seashell.
"Not much I can depend on these days. Too much of it gets away from me. Just slips away and I never even know it was there." He held up the empty can, looking at it. What does one do with a thing like this? "Hotel Dieu."
"Supposed to be called University Hospital now, but no one does."
"Something back there in the shadows for sure. Be a hell of a time pulling it out, though. Nudge it into daylight, stand up straight, tell us about yourself. You were there, you say."
I nodded.
"I remember I was pushing my boat up the Nile. All these little sucking kisses on my skin where leeches were attaching themselves. I was living off some hard, bitter-tasting fruit off trees on the bank and the raw flesh offish with teeth like razors that I snared in nets improvised from old shirts. Had these big grins on them."
His own drunkboat, his own African Queen.
"All these people were after me. They wouldn't give up. Never even knew who they were. See them, feel them, back there behind me. Someone pulled a tube out of my throat."
"You were on a ventilator for a while. A breathing machine. I was there when they took you off."
"All at once I had to breathe again. Had to go on. Before, it had been so easy."
"Always that choice."
"We spoke, didn't we? Something about a missing son, old man looking for him. Everfind him?"
I shook my head. "No."
Night had not so much fallen about us as it had toppled there, collapsed, capsized. Lights lashed up from boats on the river, others stabbed at the darkness from cars racing past on Leake Avenue behind us.
"Someone else brought news-or no news. They drank together."
"Right. The detective and the old man, the father who'd hired him. In a bar on Decatur. Detective's come to tell him his son is dead."
" 'Nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.' I do remember that. You the one read it to me?"
I shook my head again.
"Someone else, then. I was terrible sick, some kind of flu, burning up one minute, freezing the next. Let go in the bed a couple of times I know of at least, too weak to crawl out. Guess he probably cleaned that up too, in between reading this book to me, spooning soup down me. Had to be a week at least, I was like that. He must of read that book to me cover to cover half a dozen times."
"Don't suppose you remember what he looked like."
"Not paying much attention at the time. Not quite there, right?
Couldn't get outside myself. Young man's what I see now I look back on it."
"Black or white?"
"Black. Like you. Mostly his eyes I remember."
"His eyes."
"Brown. With green floating around somewhere in there, never could say just how or where. Like yours."
"Ever hear his name?"
He thought it over. "Sorry. Can't recall his ever using one. Not much use for names, situations like that."
"He never introduced himself? Hi, I'm Carl, I'll be your waiter for today?"
"He could have. Like I say, I was pretty far gone."
"Never heard another staff member speak to him, maybe call him by name?"
He shook his head. "I think I'dremember. Whole thing's etched in my mind. Like a dream, doesn't make much sense, but you can't shake it off, can't get shed of it. I thought I was dying. Held on pretty hard to whatever I could grab on to. Strange times."
Dark now was absolute.
"One more beer, you want it," I said.
"You don't?"
"Got your name on it."
"Why not, then."
First he rolled it along his forehead, then popped it open and drank.
"One thing," he said.
"Yes?"
"Never thought of this before."
I waited.
"When I first started coming out of it. Most of it's kind of a blur, you understand, what happened when, the order of things. All jumbled up together. But now I think about it, there was this one time I came half awake-early morning, late evening, no way to tell-and someone's standing there over me saying, You're going to be okay, you hear me, you're going to be okay, it's just a matter of time now.
"I remember reaching up, things still not too clear. Didn't know him. Could be one of those who'd been chasing after me. My hand's huge up there, blots out the whole sky. I try to ask him. He takes my hand and bends close over me.
Now his face fills the sky. Can't make out what I'm saying.
" 'David?' he says, 'You're asking after David? He's gone on. Sicker ones than you here now, mate. But not to worry: we'll take good care of you.'"
35
Welcome back.
Yeah, I guess you could say the same to me. But neither of us's ever really been away, have we?
Abyssinia, right. Turns out it looks just like Metairie, except with camels. We drag our worlds along with us and we can't let them go, can't get rid of the damned things. Trapped animals have better sense. They'll gnaw a leg off and crawl away. We just tell ourselves that once we get the furnit
ure inside our heads rearrangedit's going to be a new room, a new world. Sure it is.
But you're going to be okay, Lewis. We both are.
You've been here just over three weeks. Don't suppose you remember much of it. Police picked you upfinally. You'd been sitting on curbs outside Cooter Brown's and a string of bars up on Oak berating custom-el's as they came out, demanding what you kept calling donations, going in these places and, before they heaved you back out, grabbing half-finished beers and drinks off the tables.
Sound familiar?
You still feel like you're underwater looking out, what you told me a few days ago, it's because the doctors have you on some pretty heavy sedation. You've been off IVs a couple of days now. You were so dehydrated when you got here you could barely pull your tongue away from the roof of your mouth. Another day or two now, you might even be able to keep food down again. Be a while before you're up for boudin or grillades, I'm afraid.
Much of those last weeks come back to you?
Well, maybe some of it will, in time. You never know. What does it matter? You're here, you survived. That's the important thing.
Okay. You're right, it does matter. And not only to you.
You sure you want to hear this again now? I've already told you twice.
Three, four in the morning, I had a phone call. Dan the Man two flights clown, I hear him stomping up stairs like he's driving railroad spikes with his feet, eveiyone in the house awake for sure and lying there listening to this, no way anyone's gonna sleep through it. Then there's this polite knock at the door: You got a call Brother.
Brother's what most people call me here. Started out like so many things do as a joke, someone going Hey, bro, because I was black, someone else picking it up, calling me Brother Theresa.
I'd never had a call before.
Guy on the other end tells me his name is Richard Garces.
No, I didn't know him, only met him last week. But he told me how over the years he'd built up this loose network of people like himself, social workers, mental-health nurses and techs, people he'd talk to over the net on a regular basis, and how some years back he'd started hearing things he got curious about. So he pushed a little, asked a few strategic questions and kept his ears open, started putting it together.
Hairiest thing he ever did, he said, not telling you. But he had to figure it was my own life-that I had my reasons which Reason could not know, and so on.
But that night on the phone he told me things had gone upside down. "Lew might have said bouleverse." And that he thought I should know.
Ten minutes tops, I was on my way. They were holding you at University Hospital pending court hearing. Don Walsh came in not long after. Didn't say much. Just shook hands, a little sadly I thought (I didn't learn about Danny till later), and introduced his friend from the DA's office, woman named Arlene. Arlene's wearing jeans and a pink dress shirt with a man's tie at half-mast and a leather fanny pack. Steps through, around and past legal formalities like she's off somewhere else reading a book or having a good meal this is so simple, and before any of us know it we're out the other side. Standing on the sidewalk with this miserable six-in-the-morning rain slopping down us and into clogged gutters. Whole city starting to smell like wet sheep.
You and Deborah been together long?
Just wondered. She was there too by then. Asked if it were possible the two of you might be alone awhile. She had her car, she'd bring you round to the Center.
Three weeks, or just over. You came in on a Sunday. It's Monday now. Late afternoon.
Funny. I never imagined I might be sending out smoke signals, to Richard Garces or anyone else. Makes meremember what you wrote: "Signals we're set here to read."
I did keep track of your books. Every new one that came out I'd read it, thinking: Okay, he's managed to pull it off one more time. I'd try to figure out the people I knew, which of your apartments you were describing, the bars and restaurants and women you wrote about. The Old Man's still my favorite.
You all right? Need to rest? That's some strong stuff you're behind right now. Know how it is.
Maybe later we'll have the chance, be able, to talk about all that.
Remember how when I was a kid you used to recite the prologue to Tlw Canterbury Tales to me in Middle English, tell me about Rimbaud? Je est un autre. You must become a seer. Ilfaut que vous changer votre vie.
Okay, changiez. Present subjunctive. Whatever. Hey: I was close.
I used to think a lot about that story you were always telling. How back home your father took you to breakfast one morning at Nick's, on the levee by theriver, and how once you'd ordered and got your plates through a side window into the kitchen and were sitting there on the steps of the old railway station, watching all the white folks so warm at the tables inside and balancing greasy paper plates on knees shaky with cold he told you that no matter what you did-raise his children for him, fight his wars for him, keep his economy afloat-to the white man you'd always be invisible.
Mirrors weren't made for the likes of us, you said.
But of course I knew there was no way I was going to be kept away from those mirrors. Mirrors, hell. I'd be on the covers of their goddamned magazines.
We're kids, stuff like that goes through us like water. What's my old man know? Or your old man? Any old man. Things are different now. World's different. I'm different. Sure.
So I go on readingmy books and then one day, it seems all at once now when I look back on it, how the hell did this ever happen, there I am, in Europe, halfway to being an old man myself.
Biggest damn mirrors you ever saw. Here's everything I've been taught is most important, everything I've made so much a part of my own life, of what I am. Eiux›pean ait, European history, European literature, eveiything that defines the cultiue I live in. Put out a hand and you touch it Knock over some monument of imaging intellect if you're not careful.
Then one day I realize I can't see myself in those mirrors anymore. I'm simply not there. Not there at all, however hard I stare.
Because my skin is black? Because I'm not European? You tell me. I haven'tfigured it out. But everything I'd based my life on was suddenly gone.
I came back to the States only to findthat this had all become every bit as alien to me now as Paris, Berlin or London, Brittany with its cattle, Kent with its sheep.
The whole country was forts now. Fort Lakeside, Fort Prytania, the Walled City of Metairie. Malls and parking lots and fast-food chains. Everybody zipping past at forty, fifty miles an hour like trapped flies banging against windows. Everybody shut away in his own little world.
And the more you're alone, the more natural seems the importance, the supremacy, of self. Other lives become little more than contrails dissolving on the sky.
Somehow, I knew, I had to break out of that tyranny. Get the windows open, learn to move slowly again, break the mirrors, embrace others' lives.
I called you twice, but couldn't figure out what to say. I waited till the machine cut off, then hung up myself. But you know that, of course. You wrote about it.
I've been here at the Center almost the whole time. Here and other places like it. Found out pretty quickly that the pain I carried around with me, thought I couldn't bear-compared with others', that pain was nothing.
These faces, they're the mirrors I can see myself in.
Every one of them.
36
"Yours more than most, though," my son had said there in the He'p-Se'f Center out in Gentilly, on Elysian Fields, New Orleans' own Champs-Elysees, for which (like so many other things in the city) there had been all manner of grandiose plans, none of them ever within sniffing distance of fruition, the street, built at great expense, all its life little more than an interminable bus stop lined with rathole cafes and cut-rate stores, step-up cottages with cheap cement steps and gaps between thin shingles of siding hurriedly hammered on, nothing at all by way of internal walls.
Within the week I was transferred to a ha
lfway house in midtown, a once-grand home now given to dangerously sagging porches and balconies with railingslike decayed teeth, across the street from a service station recently converted to a falafel house, sheets of plywood still stacked along the side. Holding on for dear life, and for lack of any other entertainment, inmates sat out on the balconies to watch citizens come and go.
A couple of weeks later I was home, where this time Zeke, in turn, met me at the door.
"This is my son, Brother David," I said, and everyone laughed: Richard Garces, Don, Deborah, Norm and Ray "RM" Marcus from up the street. All of them had come to see me home. And they'd all brought food.
For the next hour or two we worked our way through, around and over pots of red beans and rice with grilled sausage, steaming gumbo from which protruded various claws and halves of bivalve shells, tasso on a bed of mixed greens, boiled crawfish. We'd covered the kitchen table with newspapers. Garces and Norm Marcus were in competition to see who could collect the biggest heap of crawfish bodies.
I'd taken one look at my own pile of bodies, all the mail that accumulated while I was away (life goes on), and dumped it in one of the boxes people had brought food in. Over the next few weeks that box would move otherwise untouched from kitchen floor to pantry to a closet shelf to the trash can I set out curbside each Tuesday and Friday.
Zeke made untold pots of coffee and, for Deborah, cup after cup of tea, which he delivered to her on a small tray complete with cream pitcher, lemon slices, vat of sugar and a demitasse spoon he'd found somewhere. Hard to tell whether she or he got the bigger kick out of it.
Music was catch as catch can. Whoever firstnoticed the last record, tape or CD was done went over and put on whatever he or she wanted to. Irememberhearing Fats Waller, Mozart's horn and clarinet quintets, Arrested Development, Frank Sinatra punching out lounge-lizard standards (no idea how that ever got in there: not mine), Blind Willie McTell and wife, the Charlie Christian Minton sessions, Irish music recorded live at Matt Malloy's, Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad. At one point someone even pulled out Buster Robinson's old BlueStrain record and put that on.