by Will Clarke
A wave crashes down on me. And when I get up, she is gone. Emily Reed, who I haven’t thought about in almost ten years, just vanished before my eyes. Emily who broke my heart that spring break. Emily who didn’t even wait until we got home before she lowered the axe. Broke up with me the second day we were in Mexico, forcing me to sleep on a fold-away bed the remainder of the trip.
But I also remember a different trip where Emily and I got married. Both of these events happened. I remember them now.
I see Emily with Stewart and Jo-Jo in our bed on Mother’s Day. I see Emily, her legs spread, in labor with Stewart. I feel the tears running down my face and the awe pounding in my heart. I see Jo-Jo eating his snowball the day he potty trained. I see it all. This thing around my neck did this. So I pull it from around my head, and I throw the necklace out into the sea. I watch the waves swallow it.
I can’t believe Mama would do that to them.
Emily and the boys’ faces begin to fade. I am forgetting them. The only way to get my family back, to even remember who they are, is with that fucking thing.
So I run out into the water. I splash to where I saw the necklace last. I can’t find it. I feel around, and I splash, and then the gold coins hit my arm. I grab the necklace and hold it tight. I try to swim to shore, clutching it until my knuckles hurt.
I find myself caught in the undertow. It pulls me deeper into the ocean and I let it. Drowning crosses my mind. I let it pull me further away from the shore, into the brackish water. I dive into the broken ocean as the brown tide and oil hits. I swim out not to die or to drown but to feel alive again.
The ocean absorbs me. The water fills my ears with a hushed roar, and salt stings my eyes. Everything is a warm, silty blur.
It’s primordial.
Prenatal.
I stay underwater for what feels like weeks. My chest begins to tighten—every cell in my lungs burns for the air above.
I surface and gasp.
Oxygen, when you’ve been underwater too long, is the definition of hope, and it is everywhere. I tread and I look up at the sky, and I breathe. Something shifts. I put the necklace around my neck. A curse feels lifted. I feel free for the first time in months, years, maybe forever.
I look out over the beach as I swim diagonally from the shore and out of the undertow. I see a woman standing among the beach grass, waving her arm in broad, swooping gestures. She is dressed in her long, flowing garb. Her black hair braided. Red kerchief on her head. Flowery silks fluttering and whipping behind her like flags on a battlefield.
I splash and swim to the shore with the necklace around my neck. I run flat-footed across the hard, wet beach into the dry, clumsy sand. I run to this girlish version of my mother standing among the dunes.
She is small and fluttering, like a hummingbird version of the woman we just buried.
But it is her—Mama as a young woman, her from an earlier time and place.
“Why?” is all I can say.
“Oh, doll-face,” she says. “You have to forgive me.”
“I can’t do this,” I say.
“You have to.”
“My entire life is a lie.”
“There are no lies,” she says. “Just alternate realities.”
This young woman who will one day become my mother steps forward.
“Close your eyes,” she says.
She touches my cheek, the same way Mama always touched my cheek. I shut my eyes again. When I open my eyes, I am somewhere in Paris. The Marais. I want to duck into the nearby macaron shop. I want to hold onto something solid like the marble counters. But before I can do that, my mama, the mama I remember, the mama I just buried, walks up to me.
“Come with me.” She grabs me by the arm and pulls me into Mercí Book Café. The walls, like Mama’s bedroom, are covered floor to ceiling with hardback books.
“Sit.” She points to a seat at a table with a lone carafe of water and mint leaves. I sit down, and I am wearing my Mandala Worldwide polo shirt, and my bathing suit has grown into a pair of Dockers. I am still barefoot, though. And hoping that the cute French waitress with the bright red lips doesn’t notice. My mother talks to the waitress in perfect French. She orders café au laits.
Mama pats my hands and smiles. “Dukey, how I have missed you.” She is wearing her gold coin necklace. It jingles with her heavy sighs and exaggerated gestures.
“Stop. Stop doing this,” I say.
“Oh, Duke. You don’t control the hole.” She winks. “It controls you.”
“Why are we in Paris?”
“The fascists and the terrorists, they are like pimples. I heal one and twenty more fester and pockmark my face.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the fascists and the terrorists.”
My heart is kicking like a rabbit.
“Just stop,” I say.
“I am tired of stopping, Duke. I have spent my whole life stopping. I have stopped everyone—maniacs you had never heard of, because I stopped them before they were ever born. I am tired, and you of all people should know that.”
“This isn’t real.”
“Since you are such a fan of what is real,” she says, “let me tell you a story of something that was once very, very real: There was a Frenchman, The Duke of Avaray. After the war, after the Allies reclaimed Europe, the Duke rose to power, becoming the president of France, and later he would become their emperor. He played the Russians against the Americans in 1955. Then the Duke launched a nuclear war in the Holy Land that almost pounded mankind into extinction.”
Mama holds her cup just beneath her lips as if she is reading the coffee grounds. “I went back in time to kill the Duke when he was only five, but that little boy. Oh, that little boy. Those cheeks… you looked just like my little Stevo. You could have been his twin. You could have come from my own womb.”
Tears swell in Mama’s eyes.
“So I went back for you.” She looks up towards the memory of that day. “Back to when you were born, and I stole you from your own mother’s arms.” She begins to weep. Perhaps the first time I have ever seen this woman cry in my life. Mama blows her nose with her napkin and takes a sip of her coffee. She clears her throat and stares at me.
“So you’re telling me that I’m some sort of monster?” I ask.
“Not a monster, Duke. Not anymore. You are a good man because I rewrote your destiny. I saved you because you had so much potential to bring justice.” She puts her hand on mine. “And you are a good, good man. You grew a big heart with so much hope, my son, and you will carry this hope when I am done with it.” She touches her necklace. “You will see all the terrifying possibilities, and they will yawn forth like baby Krishna’s mouth.”
“Why was I in Tulum when I put the necklace on?” I ask. “Why can’t I remember why I was crying?”
“Oh, Duke.” She wipes her tears with a napkin. “I had to.”
“Had to what?”
Mama touches the coins on her neck again, and we are outside, standing in the Paris streets. “The Great Unseen Hand is looking for them. I had to hide them the only way I knew how. It would have been horrific for them and for you.”
“Say their names. Tell me their names, goddamn it!” I pull the gold coins from over my head and hold them out to her. “Make them come back.”
“Certain questions should never be asked of the necklace. Their names and their memories will only break your heart, my sweet boy. Every birth is a death. And their brutal murders by The Unseen Hand would have destroyed you. The grief would have stopped you from fulfilling your destiny. May their names be forgotten. Let them never be. It is better this way.”
“You’re playing God with that thing.”
“There’s no playing to it, my boy.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“This is what I saved you for.” She pushes the necklace back to me. “Please. You will see.”
Thunder crashes and the dark sky pours down on us. Everything goes gray. Mama s
tands before me under a brilliant red umbrella.
“Beware the bellwether. So goes the fate of New Orleans,” Mama says. “So goes the fate of the world.”
Then my old mother shrinks into a young girl. Before my eyes, Mama has become the umbrella girl in the Banksy mural that Vonnegut guarded. She walks away from me into the downpour. She closes her umbrella and disappears into the gray rain.
Paris is gone.
White clouds roll across the heavens of the French Quarter. The stench and the regrets of Bourbon Street are all around me. I stand here in New Orleans, seeing her for the first time as she is—the sweltering epitome of this wet planet. New Orleans is simply the world with the volume turned up—with all its muddy insanity and overflowing beauty, its heartbeat joy and spine-crushing poverty, its wonder-filled music and inescapable disaster. The city is a miracle and a curse.
I hold Mama’s necklace in my left hand. It glistens with raindrops and hums with power. I hold this magic thing in my hairy fist and I ask it the questions that Mama told me not to ask. It speaks to me without words. It tells me to put it back around my throat, and when I do: I Know All. I See All. I Tell All—just like the hand-painted signs have always proclaimed beneath the buzz and glow of the old neon palm.
I can see the rays of possibility running into the horizon.
Hope.
I see how to fix this.
I tell the necklace to take me there.
* * *
The Great Filter Theory. Ah, the Fermi Paradox which addresses the fact that there is no scientific evidence that extra-terrestrial beings have visited our planet nor is there any proof that anyone ever met a time traveler. We have also never observed intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos with our current technology. That leaves us to believe that the universe apart from Earth is dead and that time travelers do not exist. It is obvious that the leaps required for interstellar space travel and time travel have never happened because the sentient species that could create this technology always destroys itself before these watershed moments. It’s a grim theory, and it’s one that Madame Melançon’s life utterly disproves. So have hope as ridiculous as it may be. ↵
II
Other Books by the Author
Praise for Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles
“This book says more about the meaning of mankind than the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, and The Hunt for Red October.“
— David Gordon Green, director, George Washington, Pineapple Express, and Eastbound & Down.
“I loved Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles. It’s a great and unashamed page-turner, full of fabulous characters. I just wish remote viewers really were that interesting.”
— Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats.
“Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles has a plot so twisted that to encapsulate it, leaving out Clarke’s shrewd deadpan exposition, is to rob it of its brusquely winsome charm. “
— Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review
Acknowledgments
Michelle, Andrew, and Jack, you all are everything. Thanks for your love and support.
Thank you to my Canadian classmates and professors at the UBC Creative Writing Program, particularly Annabel Lyon, Susan Musgrave, Andrew Grey, and John Vigna. O Canada, indeed.
Thanks, Suzy Batiz and the Poo Crew at Poo~Pourri. You guys are my spirit animals.
Thank you, Susan Krasnow, for your copy editing and candor.
Thank you, Ann Asprodites. You truly belong in a city where the streets are named for muses.
Thank you to my Wednesday Writers’ Group—what a mighty and generous league of fellow writers.
Thank you, Christine Phillips, Harris Clarke, and Molly McLaren, for your early feedback and readership.
Thank you, Bob Bookman, for your steadfast guidance and sage advice.
And finally, thank you to Jenny Bent and Denise Roy for your editorial guidance and generosity.
About the Author
Photo by Caleb Wills
Will Clarke grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. He is the author of several works of fiction including Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles: A Spy Novel (Sort of) and The Worthy: A Ghost’s Story. Both novels were selected as The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and his short fiction has appeared in Texas Monthly, The Oxford American, and Best American Fantasy. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and family.
Praise for The Worthy
“Clarke’s novel, subtitled A Ghost’s Story, is a winning comedy of collegiate (bad) manners, set at Louisiana State University.”
— Publishers Weekly
“There’s a time, in college life, when it all seems like ‘life is just one big beer-chugging backslapping moment.’ The Worthy both remembers that dumb fun and provides a bit of a corrective.”
— Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune
“Devilishly funny.”
— Eliot Schrefer, USA Today
“The Worthy is a terrific, tautly written ghost story. An ironic cross between The Lovely Bones and Animal House. Will Clarke definitely has chops.”
— Christopher Moore, author of Lamb and A Dirty Job