Kelly stood up, and dropped a twenty on the table “Lunch is on me today, broke-man, and as far as how much trouble you can get into ... this is New Orleans.”
Wednesday February 5th
2:00 p.m.
After several more beers Jeremy left the bar. It was two in the afternoon, and he had achieved a state of Zen drunkenness. He felt free to act without thinking, and in doing so do the right thing. He turned left as he stepped on the street and was soon in Jackson Square.
Jeremy loved Jackson Square. He could sit for hours, reading or just watching people in the fenced-in green space around the statue of Jackson. He loved the symmetry of the Pontalba buildings that faced each other across the square and the towering grandeur of the cathedral overlooking one of the sides between them. Mostly he loved the artists, musicians, and fortune tellers who set themselves up outside of the fenced green space and in front of the buildings. Jeremy felt like Jackson Square embodied everything that was good about the French Quarter. Sometimes he thought it was funny that the postcards almost always tried to not show the people. They would show the statue of Jackson silhouetted against the cathedral, or the park benches empty on a rainy night, and while it was true that the place itself was beautiful, it was the people that gave it life.
In front of the cathedral, he walked past a man with a saxophone, and a team of jugglers. He passed street artists without looking at their work. He walked up to one of the many fortune tellers, as if this had been his plan all along, and took a seat facing him.
The fortune teller was a man in his thirties, tan from sitting in the park all day, every day. He wore a loose-fitting kaftan that might have been just an Indian print bedspread with a hole cut in the middle for his head.
The fortune teller said, “Hello, would you like a reading, or are you just looking for some place to sit down?”
The question puzzled Jeremy. Why would he sit in front of a fortune teller if he didn’t want a reading? He asked, “You mean I have a choice?”
“Well, I would have to charge you for chair rental,” the fortune teller grinned.
“Do you get many people sitting here who don’t want a reading?”
“You’d be surprised how many people seem to think that if there is a chair it is free for them to sit in. Sometimes I think they don’t even notice me.”
“How many stay sitting after you tell them you’ll charge them for the privilege?”
“Not many. Most take the reading. They’re tourists and it’s part of the experience. It’s fun, and when they go home they can talk about the crazy psychic who trapped them into a reading by setting out a chair as bait.”
The fortune teller raised his voice into a falsetto, added an exaggerated Georgia accent and continued, “I tell you Eunice, I was just plum tired from walking all the way to the Cabildo from my hotel, I mean it must have been two whole blocks, and there was this chair just sitting there, so I sat in it, and then this funny looking guy told me I owed him money just for sitting there, or he said he could give me a Tarot reading for the same price, and at least I’d have something other than rested feet. What was I supposed to do? You know me Eunice, I’m a good Baptist and I don’t believe in that mumbo jumbo, but what choice did I have?” He dropped his voice back to its normal range and added, “But you’re no tourist, and you want a reading.”
Jeremy was surprised by the assessment. “How do you know I’m not a tourist?”
“Maybe you don’t walk like a tourist. Tourists look around trying to see everything, and miss most of what they see. Or it could be that I have been sitting here for years, watching you walk by every now and then.”
“So why didn’t I ever notice you?”
“Natives miss things too… but I’d say it was because you didn’t need me until now.”
A card table draped in velvet sat between Jeremy and the fortune teller. The velvet was weighted at each corner of the table by a chunk of quartz, a fishbowl of water (complete with plastic goldfish,) a fairly heavy ceramic incense burner, and a small electric fan, which was aimed at the fortune teller’s face. There was a lazy Susan on the table, with twelve card-sized rectangles painted around its edge, and twelve small circles forming a ring inside the ring of rectangles.
The reader explained, “This is not a traditional layout, but it fits my philosophy. The cards will lie on a wheel because life is a wheel. We end up where we start, we come from nothing, we go to nothing, and what matters is what is between those two points.”
He handed Jeremy a bowl full of metal charms, and pieces of glass and crystal, and said, “You will shape the reading ... first I will ask you to place a charm on each of the small circles on the wheel. Put what feels right where it feels right.”
Some of the charms had rings that could be attached to a charm bracelet. Others seemed to have been taken from Monopoly sets. Some were fantasy miniatures, like people use when playing Dungeons & Dragons. There were more charms than places to put them.
A flattened bubble of clear glass appealed to Jeremy, so he placed it in one of the circles. He worked his way around the wheel placing charms: a gold dollar sign, a tiny sawhorse, a car, an angel with a sword, a ring with a glass eye mounted as its jewel, a six-sided die, a contemplative gargoyle, a Chinese dragon, a person wrapped in a cloak, a small ugly creature, and a muscle car.
The fortune teller handed Jeremy a deck of cards and told him to shuffle the deck until it felt right, and then place cards in front of the charms, where each card felt it should go. He could go around the circle or he could go out of order, it didn’t matter as long as it felt right.
When Jeremy had finished, the fortune teller produced a wand of sorts. It was the stem of a rose, complete with thorns, loosely spiraled with copper and silver wire, with a small quartz crystal bound with silver to the end in place of its flower. He spun the wheel until the flattened glass bubble was in front of Jeremy, and pointed to it with the wand.
“The first charm you choose represents yourself. By the charm I can see that you are pure, but feel empty somehow. The card you have associated with it is The Fool, which also represents you, and while that may sound bad, it means that you are free. Your path is open before you, and at this point you can do anything and anything can result. Fortune and glory, or pain and disaster await you, and your actions will bring them about.”
The fortune teller gathered momentum, speaking faster and more forcefully as he turned the wheel pointing at charms and cards. “What you seek is right in front of you, but you can’t see it yet. The first obstacle is simply a matter of seeing. Open your eyes and your mind and you will know what to do. You will find love. You will find wealth. There will be difficulty, a threat greater than any you have faced before,” he paused and added, “greater than the possibility of your own death.
“This threat can be overcome by strength and courage, but luck will also play a hand. In the end if you follow the right path, and at each step you will know what that is, you will overcome, and live a prosperous and greatly loved life.
“That will be fifteen dollars.”
Jeremy dropped a twenty on the table and walked away. It had been a fairly generic fortune. He couldn’t help but wonder if the reader gave the same fortune to everyone.
He went tourist-watching on Bourbon Street, wondering what sort of lives the motley collection of souls were temporarily escaping. For a while he amused himself making up stories based on their appearances.
He drank more beer.
He found himself on Royal Street heading in the direction of his house. He stopped in front of one of the street performers. She was of a fairly common type, the living statue. There are a lot of living statues in the French Quarter. They stand still until someone gives them money, and then they do something interesting, and the tourists love it. There are robots that whir through a few moves, and cowboys that draw guns, and musicians that play a
few bars, and all sorts of others trying to find their own individual living-statue niche.
Jeremy stood in front of a living statue of an angel. Her arms were held out, palms up. He knew that she would remain motionless until someone put money in her basket, then she would bow. He had walked past her hundreds of times before, but this time he stopped and stared.
After a few moments he said, “You are beautiful. I’ve seen you a thousand times but I have never before actually seen you. You have been right in front of me but I haven’t seen. You are beautiful. You are an angel.”
Her gaze remained placid. He suddenly felt awkward and embarrassed. He plunged his hand in his pocket and dropped a bill into her basket without even looking at the denomination. He did not wait for her bow, nor did he notice that her eyes followed him as he walked away.
Wednesday February 5th
6:00 p.m.
Jeremy had just put the key in his lock when he felt Mojo twining around his ankles. Mojo was a black cat that occasionally visited. Being a well-trained human, Jeremy would bring out some food every time Mojo stopped by. Jeremy never saw Mojo anywhere but his front steps, and sometimes he wondered where Mojo went when he wasn’t begging for food from Jeremy, but also figured it wasn’t his business. The cat obviously had his own agenda, and that was fine with Jeremy. Mojo was like a pet without the commitment.
Jeremy went in to get the bag of cat food he kept for Mojo, leaving the door open behind him. He always left the door open, but Mojo never came in. Mojo was sitting imperiously, tail wrapped around his legs like an Egyptian statue of a cat, when Jeremy came back outside.
He sat down and poured a small pile of cat food onto the step. Mojo watched, deigned to sniff it, and then started eating. Jeremy petted his back, and said, “So Mojo, what do other people call you? Who else feeds you? Where do you sleep? If I have to sell my house can you show me a good doorway to sleep in?”
Mojo said nothing, except for a little purring. Jeremy asked, “So, since I have always been nice to you, you will take care of me when my cash runs out?”
Mojo kept purring until the food was gone, and then he hopped off the steps, and was gone.
Jeremy sighed, then stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He looked around his entry hall, wondering how long he could live by selling off his antiques and knick-knacks. Most days he would have gone up the stairs that ran up the right side of the entry hall to sit at his computer, but today he turned right, into the sitting room.
His friends had laughed at him for setting up a room of his house as an old fashioned sitting room – the sort of room that is kept in perfect order and where you aren’t supposed to sit on the furniture unless you are a special guest (or entertaining a special guest). Jeremy didn’t mind his friends’ teasing; he had reasons for the sitting room. Partly the room was sort of a costume for the house, a room where he could leave the curtains open and where passing strangers and tourists could look in and see ‘authentic French Quarter flavor’. Besides, while he wouldn’t admit it to most of his friends, he also enjoyed decorating.
So Jeremy sat, perhaps a little too hard, onto the antique love seat, and winced when he heard it creak. But it didn’t collapse under him, so he settled down and tried to collect his thoughts.
The generic fortune was running laps in his head. Was the street angel the answer the fortune teller had said was right under his nose? If so, was he supposed to romance her or copy her? Could he make a living as a street performer? He wasn’t bad with his guitar, should he start sitting on some street corner playing the blues?
No. Though he liked the idea of people giving him money for doing something he liked doing, playing blues on a street corner was too close to begging for Jeremy’s taste. He just couldn’t see himself doing it. So what should he do for money?
A babble of noise from a TV in some other room caught his attention. He couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like an old movie. It bothered him, because he didn’t think he had left the TV on. He tried listening hard for a moment to see if he could identify the movie. The voices were muffled and echoey but he thought he could make them out.
“You see?”
“Do you want the truth? The answer?”
“I’ve got the truth right here.” Gunshots.
He couldn’t place the movie, and he wasn’t that interested in it, but he figured he would keep listening to it and trying to figure out what it was if he didn’t shut it off, so he got up and started traipsing through his house in search of the errant TV.
Both TVs in his house were off. He sat back down in the sitting room and listened. The voices were still there. He got up again and followed his ears this time instead of his brain. The only source of noise in the house was a tabletop fountain in the living room, across the hall from the sitting room.
Once he had identified the noise’s source, he returned to the sitting room. He tried to get his thoughts back on track but kept listening to the fountain. He found he could hear the noise as either the gurgle of water or as far off voices. It was sort of the aural equivalent of one of those optical illusions where the picture could be an old lady’s face, or a young girl’s face.
“You got it,” said the fountain.
“Who are you?” said Jeremy, feeling a little foolish, and more than a little spooked.
“Just your brain’s attempt to find order in randomness.”
Kelly’s lecture on the electro voice phenomenon jumped to Jeremy’s mind. He listened for the voice to say it was his father, and it did. He listened for the voice to say it was just random noise, and it did. He listened to just hear the noise of the fountain, without the voice, and he did.
And suddenly Jeremy knew how to support himself.
Wednesday February 5th
7:36 p.m.
“Have you ever wondered why nobody seems to hear from God anymore?”
She shook her head. It was all she could do, as her lips were sealed with super glue.
“He has become dilute. God is everywhere, God is everything, but the more people there are, the less concentrated the divine force is in them ... I merely seek to rectify the situation. The more souls I consume the more divine I become.”
She struggled against the chains.
His latex-clad body straddled her, his small knife found her carotid artery. She made a sound that would have been a scream.
“Blood is life.”
His mouth dipped and took a sip. “But the breath is the soul. And the soul is what I need.” His bloody mouth closed over her nose and he sucked the air from her lungs.
Wednesday February 5th
8:00 p.m.
The inspiration had hit Jeremy suddenly, and the details occurred to him as he worked. He had everything he needed in the house already. He just had to put it all together. Maybe his life really had all been leading up to this. Or maybe he had just collected the sort of stuff that any twenty-something-year-old guy living in the French Quarter with a very deep pocketbook would collect.
He cleared out his entry hall, moved in a couple of sideboards and covered them with occult knick-knacks. He had a fairly impressive collection: crystal balls, mojo bags, charred bones, wands, cards, and more. One of his favorites was a gizmo that fake mediums would use to make knocking sounds come from a table while their hands were being held over the table. He arranged them as his own little museum of the occult.
On the wall he hung a practical joke. It was an elegantly framed mirror. The mirror was actually a two-way mirror, and behind the silvered surface of the mirror was a mask of the devil. The mirror had a proximity sensor, so that a second or two after anyone got close enough to it, a light inside would come on illuminating the face of the devil. If everything lined up right, the effect was rather alarming: you look in the mirror, your face dissolves and is replaced by the devil’s. If everything didn’t line up right, it was just a t
oy showing the devil’s face.
The sitting room was easy, it only needed a slight rearrangement: a table shifted so that it would function as a desk separating the seating in the room so that in a very vague fashion the room came to resemble a principal’s office. On the table he placed a rather gaudy papier-mâché skull, which had begun its life as a decoration in a Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, and then gone on to be a decoration in a bachelor’s house, and was now being worked into Jeremy’s business plan.
The courtyard took all night. It was a tiny courtyard; the real estate term for it would be ‘intimate.’ When he bought the house there had been a fountain in the center of the courtyard, but he had felt that broke up the limited space too much, so he took it out. Then he found that without the noise of the fountain, there was just too much random city noise for it to be really relaxing to sit in the courtyard, so he installed a waterfall in one corner of the yard.
The waterfall, which was fairly large as fake waterfalls go, did a reasonably good job in drowning out the city noise. It took up more space than the fountain had, but it felt like less since it wasn’t in the middle of everything.
The courtyard was a popular place whenever Jeremy threw a party. Only the kitchen drew more guests, but that was just the nature of parties.
Jeremy had a fairly extensive collection of masks, ranging from ceramic Mardi Gras decorations to scary African tribal creations. He also had a collection of character masks, ranging from cartoon characters to ex-presidents, but he let those stay in his bedroom. They didn’t fit the mood he was trying to create. Some of the ceramic masks went into the fountain, some in the pool and some wired in amongst the rocks of the falls.
He rearranged the wrought-iron furniture. He placed a cast-iron love seat facing the wall in the opposite corner to the fountain. In front of the love seat, he hung a large African mask with a wide-open mouth. He placed chairs in improbable places, facing improbable angles.
The Whisper Garden Page 2