by Will Clarke
La La talks me into sitting down in the parlor. She talks me into letting her look at my palms. La La, in her Annie Lennox drag, sits across from me in Mama’s parlor, examining the lines in my palms and humming old Russian songs to herself. Part of me, the most spiteful part of me, wishes that my sister really was psychic, so that she could indeed pull all this pain out of my palm and into her own heart.
“So many islands,” she pulls my left palm to her eye. “You have so many islands where there should only be stars.”
This comforts part of me. Not because I feel like La La can divine the future, but because it reminds me so much of our mother, of the gentle tracings Mama would make on our palms as children, telling us our dreams were in our grasp.
“Hold still. You’re in my light.” She pulls my hand closer to her face.
She traces the deep line in the middle of my palm from just below my pointer finger to my pinky. She sighs.
“What?”
“Relax,” she says. “And hold still. I’m listening to the Melissae.”
I exhale.
“I’m sorry, Duke.”
“For what?”
“It’s being undone,” she says. “From the other side.”
“You’re supposed to be making me feel better.” I try to laugh this off.
“The palms don’t lie.” La La says.
I jerk my hand away. “Okay, we’re done.”
“Duke. Okay. Sorry,” she says. “She’s coming back. Will me lying to you make you feel better?”
“I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“It’s not easy news to take,” she says.
“La La, how do you do this? Why do you see these things and I don’t?”
“The lines in your hands reveal the folds in your brain. The folds in your brain reveal your character. Character is destiny.” La La parrots Mama.
“But why can you see this and I don’t?” I say.
She points to her gold coin earrings. “Mama pierced my ears with these when I was eleven and ever since… “
“Those are how you see the future?”
“And hear the past.”
“How do they work?
“They just do. Mama gave them to me so I could help protect us against The Great Unseen Hand—the demon who should never have been summoned.”
“How come you didn’t see what happened to Mama then?”
“I don’t know. It’s like she just opened a door and vanished.”
“What do you see now?”
“Nothing. Just pure silence when it comes to Mama.”
* * *
I don’t usually drink before noon, but today, when the back of my car is loaded up with boxes with the remains of my dead career, and there are three storage units overflowing with everything I own, and my wife has taken my kids and left me, I can’t think of doing anything else. I want to obliterate myself. I want to drink away that ayahuasca trip. I want to erase the memories of working for a corporation bent on destroying the planet. My brain needs a hard reset. So I drive down to the Roosevelt Hotel. If I’m going to spiral out of control, I’m going to do it in a classy place, not at some dive like the Saturn Bar or F&Ms. I leave my car with the valet and find myself standing with two Brooks Brothers alcoholics, waiting for the doors of the Sazerac Bar to unlock at eleven.
When the doors finally open, we all three give audible sighs, and briskly take our places at the magnificent bar. I sit down by the fresco mural of white men bossing around the black men who are carrying heavy, brown bags. I have the bartender pour me a Sazerac. (Because what else are you going to drink at this bar?) It’s sweet. Burns the feelings out of my throat. I order a second. I sip this one and contemplate the racist mural, and try to decide if it’s just a piece of history that should always show us how horrible we have been or some embarrassing racist celebration like the mammy dolls and Confederate monuments that still pepper the landscape around here.
I pull out my phone and text Stevo:
*Meet me at Sazerac.*
He texts back: *Now?*
*Yes. Now!*
*Why aren’t you at work?*
*She left me.*
*Be there in 10*
While I wait for Stevo, I order a third, and then fourth Sazerac. And by the way, that mural is definitely a racist piece of shit, I tell the bartender. I might just have to take a Sharpie to it. I reach into my pocket for a pen to deface the painting behind the bar, but find nothing. I stare at the ice in my empty glass, and I notice The Times-Picayune sitting on the bar. The front page is dedicated to Christopher Shelley’s tirade. It says that Mandala lied. That seals and stoppers were leaky. That we skimped on tests that could have stopped this. We were maybe overly optimistic, but more than likely just dishonest and corrupt. We were driven by profits, and we put those profits before the people who blew up on that well. It says we killed the ocean for money. I helped kill the ocean for money. That’s what this paper says. I want to light it on fire. I want to light myself on fire.
By the time Stevo gets here, it is half-past noon, and I am half-past wasted. He’s brought Daddy with him.
“Ah, T’boy, you drunker than a skunk.” Daddy crutches over to me at the bar.
“You see this. You see this.” I push the article in Daddy’s face. “Mama said this would happen. And it did.”
“Yeah, your mama has a tendency to do that.” Daddy takes the paper from me and folds it in half without even reading it. “Now why ain’t you at work, son?”
“I quit,” I say.
“T’boy, that’s good news.” He gives me a heavy pat on the back. “Those couyons wrecking everything down here.”
“The future. Vonnegut left me a paper from the future.” I try to warn them.
“Stevo, gather your brother up and I’ll meet you back at the house.” Daddy shakes his head. “Try to keep him from embarrassing hisself.”
Daddy crutches out of the Roosevelt, back to his car.
“Come on, Duke.” Stevo lifts me up, off my barstool, throwing my arm over his shoulder.
“Remember the dead with fox feet, laughter, and rage.” I pour my Sazerac on the floor.
“Hey, cut it out.” Stevo takes my empty and slams it on the bar. “Don’t do that.”
Stevo holds me up and carries me out to the valet. The smelly hippie holds me while we wait for the valet to bring my Prius. I can feel this spinning blue marble that I helped destroy. It’s under my feet. I can feel it spinning through this infinite black void, and it’s making me want to puke.
He pushes me into the passenger side of my car.
“We are so small. So, so small,” I say. “Ants. Just ants like the ones all over Yanko’s leg. Just like that. Not even knowing we are crawling on this big living thing.”
“Duke, put your seat belt on,” Stevo says.
“Why do I need a seat belt? I’ve already seen how this will end.”
“Shut up.” Stevo gets into the driver’s seat and peels out of the valet. “Put your goddamn seatbelt on so the car will stop dinging.”
I shut up and close my eyes, and before I know it, we are driving up Magazine. We pull in front of Mama’s house, and there’s a white Maserati GranTurismo next to the curb. Half of the neon palm is glowing; the other half is flickering out.
“Whose car is that?” I point.
“Gay André’s,” Stevo says, like this is perfectly normal like that the teacup mobster has always popped out and bought Maseratis in different colors for every day of the week.
“Why is he here?”
“He’s getting a reading from Cactus.”
I am caught by the seat belt and can’t get out of my stupid Prius.
I shake off my pity party and remember how to unbuckle this thing. I stumble into the house, where, sure enough, I find Gay André in the parlor, sitting before Cactus with his palm splayed out. Candles glowing and that sickening sweet smell of Nag Champa is everywhere.
“You!” I point at Gay André.<
br />
“Ah, Duke! My main man!” He gives me his best flat-faced André the Giant smile.
“Where’d you get that car?”
“I’m one lucky bastard,” he says. “Ain’t that right, Cactus?”
“That’s what your palm says.” She giggles. “Hashtag blessed.”
“From the numbers in the matchbook. You telling me you won the lottery from the numbers Mama gave you?”
“Not just the lottery. Mega Millions, baby!” He smiles. “I told you your mama looked after me.”
“Why? Why? Why?” are the only words I can string together.
Stevo grabs me by the collar and walks me upstairs.
“Why?” I say. “Why would she do that to us?”
“Go to bed.” Stevo pushes me into my old bedroom.
I close the door behind me and lock it to show him who’s boss. And then I stare at the bunk beds. I crawl into the bottom one, the one that I slept in as a boy, and do what I should have done before I drank all those Sazeracs. I pull the covers over my head and extinguish consciousness.
33
May 31, 2010
6,814 dead animals have been collected since the Spill
I wake up and get dressed. I don’t put on my Mandala polo shirt or my pleated khakis. It occurs to me that I never want to see those clothes again. Instead, I put on Stevo’s tie-dyed Jazzfest t-shirt and a pair of his old jeans. I go down into the kitchen to make myself some breakfast, and I find La La sitting at the kitchen table. For once, she looks normal. For once, my sister isn’t dressed up like Björk or Lady Gaga. She’s disguised as herself and making toast.
“What gives? You’re not stealing someone else’s luck.”
“I don’t steal it.” The toast pops up and she pinches the steaming slice with her fingertips and throws it on a plate. “I borrow it.”
“Why aren’t you borrowing it, then?” I pour myself some coffee.
“Ugh.” I spit it into the cup. “Who made this?”
“Daddy. At about four this morning.”
“Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask,” she says like she always says.
“You want to go with me to PJ’s?”
“Sure.” She wipes the jam from her face with a paper towel and follows me out the back door.
* * *
La La and I walk down Prytania together. We sip our iced coffees and talk like we haven’t talked in years, like brother and sister.
“I took Christopher Shelley’s teleprompter away at the press conference,” I tell her, “so he’d run off at the mouth. I’m the reason he got fired.”
“Wow. I’m so proud of you.” She gives me a side hug. “You grew a conscience.”
“They’ll probably have to file bankruptcy. Everyone’s going to lose their jobs. What I did will affect lots of good people in very bad ways. I was being paid to do the opposite of what I did to them.”
“Duke, you just renewed my faith in everything. Humanity. The future. Magic.”
“It’s not magic, La La. I just woke up and couldn’t do it anymore.”
“That’s all that magic is, Duke. Waking up.”
“That’s deep. Real deep.”
“We need to go to the Breaux Mart!” La La holds her pointer finger up in the air. “I know how to help you!”
La La’s caffeine has obviously kicked in.
“Why do we need to do that?” I slurp the last dregs of my iced coffee.
“What you were doing was horrible, Duke,” she says. “You just turned off part of your brain to do that job. Now we have to cast a spell to fix that. Balance the karma. Close this part of your life with a ritual.”
“Look…”
And just as La La and I are about to get into an epic sister-brother fight in the middle of Prytania Street, a yellow FJ Cruiser with blacked-out windows pulls up to us.
We stand here with our arms folded, waiting for the stupid tourists inside to tell us that they are lost, and then ask us for detailed directions to Commander’s Palace or Chris Owens as if Google had never been invented.
The window slides down and reveals the two smiling Tulane students who kidnapped me.
“Hi,” Zit Face leans out from the driver’s side window. “You know where we can find the Drive-By Daiquiri Shack?”
“The what?” La La says.
“The Drive-By Daiquiri Shack?” Bowtie shouts. “You know where one is?”
“Like on every corner.” La La points down the street. “Just keep driving. You’ll see one.”
He smiles and rolls up the window and drives off.
“Those were the guys!” I say. “Those where the guys who kidnapped me.”
“What guys?” La La screws up her face. “When were you kidnapped?”
“The night Yanko and I went to the Dungeon,” I say.
“What are you talking about?” she says. “In what reality were you ever kidnapped?”
* * *
La La grabs a wobbly shopping cart and I follow her, past the apples and the bananas of the Breaux Mart.
“It’s freezing in here.” She shivers as we turn down the dairy aisle.
“So you really think The Loup Garou has been following you?” I say.
“I don’t think so. I know so. I saw him at Snake and Jake’s. And then he was waiting for me on the patio at F&M’s, hiding behind a palmetto like I don’t feel him staring at me.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No, he just stared at me.”
“What does he look like?” I say.
“Like a hipster, trying to dress like a tourist,” she says. “He’s some kind of artist. He had paint all over his fingers.”
We stop at the bakery department. She scans the cake case.
“He’s younger than I thought he would be.” La La’s eyes are wide. “Super artsy-fartsy.”
“He reached out to Yanko,” I say. “He wants to meet us at the Yankotronic concert.”
“You should bring a gun,” she says.
“I am not packing heat to a concert,” I say.
The bakery lady with her hairnet and her rubber gloves interrupts, “You need a cake, sugar?”
“Yeah, I’ll take that one.” La La points to a small sheet cake that’s one third fudge, one third sea-blue, one third mossy-green icing with a toothpick sign on it that says, “Thanks, Mandala!” It’s the Mandala Spill cake that was on Reddit that Gary was freaking out about a few weeks ago.
The bakery lady slides the cake out of the case. “We can’t keep these on the shelves. People love ’em.”
“It’s very funny,” La La says.
“Kinda depressing, if you ask me.” The bakery lady boxes up the cake. “We had one with a dead pelican on it, but that one was just too sad for me. So we stopped making those.”
She passes the box across the case to me. “You can pay for it at the register. Have a blessed day.”
I take my cake and lead my sister to the checkout line. It goes without saying that I am paying for it. La La is notoriously stingy with her palm reading income.
“Why are you making me buy this again?” I say.
“For a spell,” she says. “We’re going to keep you away from Mandala.”
“I think I already took care of that.”
“Look, every death needs a ritual,” she says. “This is a big death for you. And you want this to be an even bigger rebirth. Let me do this for you. Let me show you what magic can do.”
The checkout lady scans the cake box and clicks her tongue.
“Oh, dem cakes is cute,” she says. “We need to mail one to Obama and tell him to get down here and fix this mess. Cash or card, honey?”
The cashier lady hands me the receipt on top of the Mandala Spill birthday cake. She doesn’t smile.
“Thanks,” I say.
She doesn’t look up. She is already scanning the next round of groceries.
La La and I walk out of the Breaux Mart to my car with the cak
e.
“I’ll drop you off at the house,” I say.
“No, we have to get this to Christopher Shelley today,” she says.
“I don’t have time today,” I say.
“Trust me, Duke. You want to do this. It will make them think twice before crossing you. You want to punctuate this sentence in your life with an exclamation mark.”
* * *
If you would have told me five months ago that I was going to be sitting in a room with Christopher Shelley at the Ritz-Carlton advising him and guzzling Aperol spritzes, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you would have told me that Christopher Shelley was going to handpick me to be there on the beach the day he decides to reveal what a jackass he really is, I would have told you there was no way that would ever happen. Not Christopher Shelley. He really was a nice guy. Whip smart too. Totally different man in person than he is in the media.
But just like I was wrong about my life in Houston, I have been wrong about my former leader. So now here I am. Everything I ever wanted is gone. No more Mandala Park. No more fancy title. No more job.
The weird thing is I am sort of happy right now, or as close to happy as I can be with my mother missing and my wife threatening divorce.
I stand behind the open hatchback of my Prius while I watch La La wrap the cake box from Breaux Mart. She tapes the final corner of wrapping paper, and then she takes my Mandala business card. She turns it over and writes, “Ваше имя будет забыто,” which in English means, “May your name be forgotten.” These are the same words that Mama spit that fateful night the governor of Louisiana insulted her.