by Bryan Camp
She has her back to him, staring out over the New Orleans skyline, dressed in a woolen gray business suit, a scarlet belt around her waist. Regal Sloan—Constant, now—his best friend and partner in a world he’d tried, and failed, to leave behind. “So tell me,” she says over her shoulder, “what kind of an ass-clown works during Carnival?”
Jude grins and crosses the room to stand beside her. “The kind that would be friends with a backstabbing, foulmouthed—”
“Okay, okay, I get it. What’s new?”
“Voodoo folks are getting nervous about Legba. Something is pissing him off but good. And you don’t want Legba angry. You—”
“Wouldn’t like him when he’s angry, I know. I’ll get into it. And you got another request for a sit-down from the dhampir that Scarpelli sent to us. He’s requesting that you reconsider your position.”
“The hell would I do that?”
“A couple of dozen people vanished from the city along with Scarpelli when you banished him. Not nobodies either; some real movers and shakers. You’d be surprised how many bankers and real estate developers—”
“Are vampires? No, I really wouldn’t.” He sighs. “I’ll sit and listen, if he buys me dinner. Food, not blood.”
She chuckles, and they share a companionable silence. There’s still a tension between them, Jude knows—betrayal and suspicion and jealousy and loss don’t just go away overnight, but they’re working through it. They won’t be the same as they were before, just like the city can never again be what it was. But they’re alive, and they’re together, and they’re doing their best, and to him, that’s about all anyone can ask.
“I should be going,” he says. “Check the front when I go; I left you a little present.”
Regal nods, and then thinks of something. “Oh, right, the door,” she says, realizing the far wall of the office was still solid. “Let me get that for you. You know Mourning controlled this thing the whole time? Just made it seem random?”
“He was good at that,” Jude says. “But don’t worry about the door.” He leans out, through the window that just a second before had held a giant pane of glass, and would again once he was gone, stepping out into empty space, as if off the edge of a cliff.
“I make my own path now.”
Later, in the short walk off the parade route to the house he lived in before the storm, Jude thinks about all the gods that have claimed to be his father, and in a way, it makes perfect sense. Every Trickster is a little bit of a bastard.
Jude can sense the loss surrounding him even now: a young woman gleefully losing her virginity in the back room of her parents’ house; an old man losing the memory of his childhood home; a child losing his innocence, as he sees his father lying to his mother about another woman. He can see the glow of good fortune and the twists of bad luck awaiting everyone he meets.
But he can feel other things now, too, mysterious and potent and beautiful. Presences that are newly born. Nascent gods of drink and revelry, of lust and danger, gods of Carnival and Mardi Gras Indians and crawfish boils, of jazz bands and second lines, the minor pantheon of the reborn New Orleans. Others are older gods with new faces and new names, crab-shaped or pelican-headed, formed of Carnival floats and magnolia trees and Uptown mansions—gods of other lands and other times, shifting forms and acclimating to their new home, as Dodge had, and Barren. A few kept their old names, ancient, protean river gods and entrancing voodoo loa, all mingling and living with relative harmony. Within them all, Jude can feel a piece of Leon Carter, of his magic, his music, giving voice to New Orleans and her song—sugary, dark, and seductive as a good rum.
Jude thinks of all of this and holds all of it in his heart, this secret world that is his to protect, to make better. He lifts his fingers to the X spray-painted on the door, the symbol of all that was lost in the storm, all that still searches for a place to belong. He opens himself to his magic, to the possibility of change, to the hope that that which has been lost might be found.
He accepts it all.
In the end, the World Tree Yggdrasil will burn, and a giant wolf will eat the sun and the moon. Or seven seals will be broken, seven trumpets will sound, and a great Beast will have dominion over the Earth. Or the Fifth Sun will turn black, and the ravenous women who are the stars will descend upon the Earth to devour mankind. Or a great deluge will drown the world, leaving only an immense and empty ocean. Or Apep will succeed in his attempts to overcome the principle of ma’at, and the world will devolve into chaos. Or the Earth will start to shake and never cease, tearing great rents in the surface, casting man into the depths. Or a plague, or a great war, or a famine, or a horde of the undead will cover the planet, destroying mankind. Or a giant rock will fall from the sky and a cloud of ash will blot out the sun. Or the universe will cease its growth and begin shrinking, falling in on itself, tightening into a single, lifeless dot. Or the walls that were built to hold back the waters will break, and the deluge will rush into—and drown—streets and homes and lives.
In the end—and there is always an end—there will be those who are lost and those who mourn.
And yet. There are always those who refuse to let the end be the end. The man and the woman who cling to the highest branches of the World Tree and escape the flames, who return and rebuild a new world out of the one that burned to ash. Or the man, who goes by many names, who builds a massive vessel and rides on the waves of the great ocean until the flood has passed. Or the one who will sacrifice himself upon the bonfire and becomes the next Sun, dying so that the world might live. Or there are the faithful who live forever after evil has been cast into oblivion, the vigilant who survive the plague or the war and who create a world where such things do not happen. There are those who are lucky enough to return to their homes after the storm and the flood has passed, to rebuild, to remember. There is magic in all things, in songs and in fire, in the night sky and in the storm on the horizon, in voices raised high and secrets hidden deep, in stories and in change and in hope.
There is magic in beginnings, this is true, but there is also magic—such great and beautiful and powerful magic—in refusing to let something end.
Author’s Note
This is not the book I set out to write. The ingredients are the same: New Orleans and syncretic myths and Tricksters and a murder mystery; and the seed crystal—that scene of a poker game full of gods—remains largely the same as when I first wrote it as a writing exercise in Bev Marshall’s undergraduate fiction class at Southeastern. The novel it became, though, is profoundly different than the one I first envisioned.
After the writing exercise, our assignment was to turn our scene into a short story. I knew, even as I started writing it, that this thing growing inside me was novel-sized, but I believed I could put together something short story–shaped that I could build on later. I had a weekend to write it. My family and I had to stay with my aunt in Florida for a few days, so I brought my laptop with me, a clunky old Dell that overheated and died every few hours.
I began that other novel—the one that this one isn’t—hunched over that overheating beast in the back seat of my parents’ car on August 28, 2005 . . . a day before the federal levees failed and destroyed the city I was writing about.
Not that I really knew that New Orleans. Growing up on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain, across from the city, New Orleans was close enough to visit, but far enough away to still be something of a mystery. It was Oz, glimmering on the horizon. Just as fantastic, just as fictional, just as much a symbol of hope.
And from the safety of a living room in Florida, I watched it drown.
The thing you have to understand, if you’ve never lived along the Gulf of Mexico, is that this kind of thing didn’t happen. You planned for it, you prepared for it—but no one ever really believed it could happen. My entire life, evacuations were weekends away from home.
Not months.
Not lifetimes.
There’s far more to the story of this
book, of course: years of writing and rewriting, the guidance of my MFA committee—Amanda Boyden, Joseph Boyden, and Jim Grimsley—the lessons I learned at Clarion West, a decade of living in (not simply near this great city), but truthfully, the biggest change occurred in those days and nights right after the storm. Watching the news, cut off from just about everyone I knew, feeling guilty and sad and fortunate all at once. My family escaped and had a home to return to, while far too many others did not.
If Jude and I share anything, it’s an overabundance of good luck.
This isn’t the book I set out to write. It’ll never make up for the lives and the houses and the futures that were lost; no book could. Nor is this a requiem for the Oz that was gone before it ever existed. I’m certainly no authority on New Orleans, and wouldn’t dare to speak for those who survived the storm itself. Those are not my stories to tell.
If my luck holds, though, this book might be worthy of my New Orleans, the home I’ve come to love.
Acknowledgments
I have much to be grateful for, and the following is an incomplete list of those to whom I owe unrepayable debts of gratitude:
To my editor, John Joseph Adams, for his brilliant, enthusiastic guidance. Turning a manuscript into a novel is a lot of hard work, and John makes it look easy.
To my copy editor, Erin DeWitt, my cover artist, Will Staehle, and to Tim Mudie, Bruce Nichols, Hannah Harlow, Erika West, Larry Cooper, David Futato, and everyone else at HMH, for managing the magic trick of turning a bunch of words in a .doc file into a work of art.
To my agent, Seth Fishman, for taking a chance on me even after I vanished for a year’s worth of revision.
To his assistant, Jack Gernert, for coming up with the title. To Will Roberts, Rebecca Gardner, Ellen Coughtrey, and everyone else at Gernert, for supporting and guiding this debut author through the gauntlet of modern publishing.
To Michelle and Bryan Camp Sr., for life, for the gifts of my youth, for the lessons of my adulthood. To Rose Camp, to Bryndon Camp, to Bryttany and Keith Wogan, for helping me become the man that I am. To Gerri and Ed Merida, to Abigail and Michael Labit, for welcoming a book nerd into your home, into your family.
To Becky Merida, for hugging the Hulk out whenever I need it.
To Hal Harries, for teaching me compassion.
To my writing teachers: Bev Marshall, who was the first to tell me my writing had potential; to my MFA thesis committee: Amanda Boyden, Joseph Boyden, and Jim Grimsley, who were the first to hold my writing to professional standards; to my Clarion West instructors: Mary Rosenblum, Stephen Graham Jones, Connie Willis, George R. R. Martin, Gavin Grant, Kelly Link, and Chuck Palahniuk, who are the luminaries I strive to emulate.
To my life teachers, otherwise known as friends: Les Howle, Neile Graham, Tracie Tate, Greg Herren, Nick Mainieri, Henry Griffin, Bill Lavender, Nancy Dixon, Candice Huber, Casey Lefante, Wayne Rupp, Niko Tesvich, Bill Loefehlm, Tawni Waters, Lish McBride, Alex Jennings, Alys Arden, and everyone in the UNO MFA program and the New Orleans literary community. Even something as wonderful as publishing a first novel would be a hollow accomplishment without great friends to share it with.
To the seventeen magical beings who are friends and family and inspiration all at once: Alyc Helms, Blythe Woolston, Brenta Blevins, Carlie St. George, Cory Skerry, Georgina Kamsika, Greg Friis West, Helen Marshall, Henry Lien, Indrapramit Das, James Harper, James Herndon, Kim Neville, Laura Friis West, Huw Evans, Nick Houser, and Sarah Brooks. To the Clarion West class of 2012, I don’t think I could have done this without all of you, and I’m sure glad you’re all in my life.
To Michael Thomas, you’ve earned my gratitude in many different ways over the years: roommate, best friend, best man, first reader. It’s been just shy of twenty years of conversations, commiseration, dreaming up big projects, and inappropriate humor. Another twenty won’t be nearly enough.
Finally and most importantly, to my lovely and loving wife, Beth Anne. The accomplishments I’m most proud of—the MFA, Clarion West, this book—I’ve done because the man, the husband, the writer who could do them, that’s the one that you deserve. I haven’t yet found the words to thank you for all that you do and for all that you are, but I promise to keep trying for as long as there’s breath in me.
Visit www.hmhco.com to find more science fiction and fantasy titles from John Joseph Adams Books.
About the Author
Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and the MFA program at the University of New Orleans, and his short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed. The City of Lost Fortunes is his first novel, which he started writing in the back seat of his parents’ car as they evacuated during Hurricane Katrina.
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