by Bryan Camp
The next span of days passed in the blur of uniformity that had occupied her life for years. She woke to her cell phone’s alarm at the same ass-crack of dawn, stumbled the same groaning path from mattress to bathroom to kitchen, drank the same black coffee from the same WELCOME TO THE BIG EASY ceramic mug, pulled on the same leather jacket, no matter whether the temperature demanded it or not. Within an hour she was gone from the empty apartment, killing time until that day’s collection in coffee shops and libraries, laundromats and bars, anywhere she could eavesdrop on conversations and interact with the living in the superficial ways still available to her. She always met Sal at that day’s deathbed, gathered up the coin of Fortune, ate the Voice in whatever form it took, and led the Essence to the First Gate. Any time after sunset Oussou was there to unlock the Gate, fight with Sal, and flirt ineffectually with her. During the day his twin, Masaka, held the key. They were a mirror image of their twin: sober and alert, dressed all in white like a Santeria iyawo except they had lavender crosses on their jacket where Oussou had white ones. Masaka was always polite in a detached sort of way that Renai found insincere, though that might have more to do with the high school she’d attended than any insight into Masaka’s personality.
Day or night, Masaka or Oussou, once the Gate opened, Sal took the coin and guided the dead through to the other side, while she remained behind to occupy herself however she could in this half-life of hers. She exercised her body to exhaustion or read one of the battered Anne Rice paperbacks she’d taken from the free pile outside a used bookstore or found a willing one-night stand down in the Quarter—one of the only benefits of her aura of disinterest being the ease with which she could ditch the inevitable creeps when they turned dangerous or needy or gross—only to find herself once again within these same four walls, wrapped in the same sheets, waiting for sleep to carry her into the same absence of dreams.
And she woke, always alone, to do it all again.
It certainly wasn’t the life she’d envisioned for herself before she’d died, but at least it was life. She knew firsthand how uncertain the alternative could be. The hope that carried her from day to identical day was that her time with Sal was preparing her for something more, some greater assumption of the psychopomp’s role. It was the kind of hope that shared a place in her heart with anxiety, with despair. She never asked Salvatore straight out what her future held for fear of his answer. She didn’t examine too closely the uniqueness of her circumstances out of worry of what she might realize. Ignorance was far from bliss, but when the truth might literally destroy her, it would do.
Renai couldn’t be sure how much time went by in this way before she remembered her conversation with Seth; two days, three, maybe as much as a week passed without her paying any attention. The routine made everything bleed together. It wasn’t like death got weekends off. When the situation changed, the morning didn’t begin any differently than the ones before it. In fact, she almost missed it. She leaned against the faux marble counter in the empty kitchen in the empty apartment, humming to herself while her coffee brewed. The only things in the kitchen were a sleek new coffee machine and an ancient radio, and she couldn’t function without both of them. The former because if she didn’t get a couple of cups of steaming hot, chicory-bitter coffee in her first thing in the morning she might as well still be in her grave. The latter because it gave her access to the Deadline.
Growing up in New Orleans, she couldn’t say when she’d first listened to the Livewire—the local independent radio station’s listing of that week’s music performances that played at the top of every odd hour—it had just been something she picked up in the tap water, like the words to “Iko Iko” and the “Who Dat?” chant or knowing when hurricane season started. The Deadline, though, she’d only discovered once she’d become a psychopomp. It wouldn’t play on WWOZ’s internet feed or any radio modern enough to have digital tuning. You had to be able to twist the knob just the slightest bit off, so that the signal got a little funky with static, but not so far that you lost the music entirely. There, amid the hiss of white noise, a voice read off the names, times, locations, and manner of every death that would occur in the next twenty-four hours. Each morning, before she’d even brushed her teeth, Renai would sip her first of the day and listen to the list, choosing a life to take. If asked, she wouldn’t be able to explain the criteria behind her choices. Some deaths just felt right, like she’d heard their names before, like she’d once known their whole life story and they’d simply drifted apart.
That morning, just a few days before Halloween, she was trying to decide between an old lady in the Poydras Home assisted living community and a homeless man beneath the Calliope overpass when the staticky voice of the Deadline said, “Ramses St. Cyr, gunshot wound,” followed by an address on Washington Avenue and a time later that afternoon. Renai swallowed her coffee so fast it nearly scalded her throat on the way down. She snatched her leather jacket off the counter and dug through the pockets, pulling out a crumpled little slip of paper that could have been a receipt or a fortune cookie’s message or just a balled-up straw wrapper, but when she pulled it open, the words RAMSES ST. CYR stared back at her. Her meeting with Seth, his odd request to consider her options, all of it came sweeping back in a how-could-I-have-possibly-forgotten-this rush, like walking into class and seeing everyone else last-minute cramming for a test.
She smoothed the little slip of paper out so that it lay mostly flat on the counter and picked up her mug. She raised it to her lips but didn’t drink, chewing her lip instead. She set the cup back down. “Ain’t this some shit,” she said, to no one in particular.
She could, of course, just pretend that none of this had happened. She could toss this scrap of paper in the trash on her way out the door to collect one of those other deaths, and nothing would change. Seth had made it clear that neither of them would owe the other anything unless she did . . . whatever he thought she’d do once she saw Ramses’ circumstances for herself. As if she had the authority to do anything but collect him and lead him to the Gates once his name was read on the Deadline. Really, she couldn’t do anything unless Salvatore said she could, and she hadn’t even mentioned meeting the ugly god to him, much less gotten permission to color outside the lines. She knew exactly how the psychopomp would react if she told him now, especially since—according to the Deadline—Ramses’ death would be a violent one.
Gotta crawl before you can fly, Raines, he’d say, and send her off to collect some other dead. Then she’d turn around and another year would have gone by just like the one before. Shady as this whole situation felt, at least it was something new. She couldn’t ignore that part of the temptation. If that was all it was, though, some desire for a break in the monotony, she probably wouldn’t have considered it this seriously. But the name on the paper kept nudging at her, some memory from her old life just out of reach, maddening as an elusive word escaping the tip of her tongue. She could remember a woman she’d called “Miss St. Cyr,” but not how she’d known her. Couldn’t have been too close, if she hadn’t been “Aunt” something or other. Just someone she’d see out on the parade route or while making groceries or—
Or on Grandma Raines’s front porch at the house on Washington Avenue.
And just like that, she made her decision. She dressed quickly, tugging on a pair of jeans and yanking the tag off a bright yellow top before she pulled it on. Her recollection of events was a pretty thin thread to use to tie everything together, she had to admit. For all she knew, the Ramses on the Deadline could be some distant cousin of the Miss St. Cyr she remembered, if they were even related at all. She could be confused about the name of the woman from her childhood. The memory from her grandmother’s porch might be no more than wishful thinking. Nor was she blinded by the blank-check nature of Seth’s offer. A favor for a promise? That was the kind of shit they said when they thought you were too stupid to read the fine print.
No, the real reason Renai decided to see
where this name led was because she’d realized that for the first time in a long time, she’d been weighing her options based on her past instead of her present. That she’d been thinking like Renaissance Raines, instead of the psychopomp who wore her face.
Chapter Five
The first murderer, punished with a mark that assured that none would give him shelter, or salve his suffering, or release him from his isolation by ending his life. An unbeatable warrior, refusing to restrain the mighty weapon he had summoned from a blade of grass, his mystic gem torn from his forehead and exiled to the wilds, his pus-filled wounds unhealing, his cries for death unanswered. A powerful wizard, whose magics came from his demonic parentage, trapped in a tree by the student whom he lusted after, doomed to be evergreen and everlasting. A desperate king, sacrificing son after son after son to his one-eyed god in order to gain another span of years; so feeble at the end that he fed by sucking milk from a horn’s tip like an infant. The consort of the dawn, prince and poet both, whose lover was arrogant enough to demand eternity but not wise enough to plead for vitality, forcing him to endure an undying senescence. The shoemaker who mocked the condemned man—a healer and a teacher and a child of God—by telling him to hurry on his way to his own death, who was commanded in turn to wander without rest until the end of days. Again and again, immunity from the grave is not a gift to be granted but a sentence to be carried out. Not a blessing, but a curse.
Renai killed time for the majority of the day—an expression she found especially apt these days—breakfast in a kitschy local chain coffee shop on the corner of Magazine, a movie she didn’t have to pay for because no one noticed her when she walked in, a beer in a crowded Uptown bar where the fountain outside was made out of beer taps.
She didn’t need to eat these days, since the Voices she consumed sustained her far better than any mortal food, but she found that the simple act of having a meal could make her feel human when the weirder parts of her life got overwhelming. What little cash she needed to move through the world in this way she got from the pockets of her dead, which she took without shame or second thought. It wasn’t like they needed it where she was leading them.
Twilight had wrapped itself around the city by the time she eased Kyrie into a parking spot on Washington, an easing off of heat that wasn’t yet the relief of fall, a gloom descending that wasn’t quite enough to spark the streetlights into life. Renai sat astride her rumbling bike, trying to decide if she really wanted to go behind Sal’s back like this; after all, the foul-mouthed psychopomp was the closest thing she had to a friend.
She checked the time on her phone. Early yet, she thought, still plenty of time to talk myself out of this.
As if sensing Renai’s indecision, Kyrie sputtered and stilled, ending the debate.
When Renai got off of Kyrie and looked up and down the two-block stretch of Washington where Ramses St. Cyr was destined to die, it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the line between life and death she had tightroped since her resurrection. One side of the street held the quintessential New Orleans neighborhood: sprawling oaks and small front yards overgrown with clover and a row of shotgun houses—only one room wide but stretching four rooms back, the porch leading to the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen and then out again—built half a step away from one another. Many were shotgun doubles, one building split down the center into a duplex with a separate door for each residence. Most homes actually had two front doors: a wooden one that swung in, and a wrought iron security gate decorated with whorls and fleurs-de-lis that swung out.
Two cemeteries took up a block each of the other side of the street: St. Joseph and Lafayette No. 2. The closest one, St. Joseph, held plaster tombs above paved concrete much like St. Louis No. 1, though unlike the cemetery on the edge of the Quarter, here only a chain-link fence separated the quick and the dead. Lafayette No. 2 looked more like a combination of a park and a burial site, with grass covering the ground and growing over some of the flat plots that interspersed the more common tombs. A much sturdier fence of slender, upright iron bars with sharpened tips wrapped around the block.
And right in the middle, belonging to neither world, was Renai.
She didn’t quite remember where on Washington her grandmother had lived before the storm, but she was pretty sure it was deeper into the Central City neighborhood than this. Maybe her memory of “Miss St. Cyr” was wrong after all. She walked down Washington until she stood at the corner of Loyola, the street that separated St. Joseph from Lafayette No. 2. The absence of streetlights over the two cemeteries made them pockets of night in the deepening twilight, ominous even to her.
Renai ought to be finding her way to Ramses’ deathbed, but instead she stood staring into the dark spaces, wondering if any of her dead had been laid to rest here, if that simple padlocked gate might hide another of the Seven Gates. She even imagined something moving in the depths of St. Joseph, some dark shape that moved low to the ground and darted from one shadow to another.
Get it together, girl, she thought, you got shit to tend to, but then she saw it again, moving closer this time, and she tracked its progress to the base of a tomb just on the other side of the chain-link fence. One breath, another, and then a passing car’s headlights lit a pair of eyes an eerie, predatory green. Everything in her clenched, coiled tight in case she had to spring quickly away. Most people would tell themselves that they were seeing nothing more than a feral cat, but Renai knew better.
Renai knew monsters were real.
She doubted she could fight it, whatever it was. Her best bet was escape, but Kyrie was too far away given how fast she’d seen that thing move. She pulled the hood of her jacket over her head, shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet. If it came for her, she decided, she’d call on the ghost word and sprint for the nearest house. If the iron gate and solid wood door didn’t keep it out, maybe she could find something she could use as a weapon. Flight if she could, fight if she had to, die if she was wrong. Would they have said her name on the Deadline if this was her end? Or was she a special case?
Maybe there was another way. “I’m under the protection of the Thrones,” she called across the street, “so unless you wanna answer to them, you better just go back the way you came.”
At first, her only answer was a low growl that made her blood run cold. And then a voice she recognized said, “The fuck you are.” It should have been a relief to see Sal—now wearing the shaggy-furred and long-eared dog-skin he sometimes used—leap over the fence and into the light, but as he crossed the street, she could see fury in the lay of his ears, in the stretch of his tail. He didn’t even wait until he reached the sidewalk before he started berating her. “At this moment, in this place?—you’re under the protection of Jack Shit and Fuck All. That’s the kinda help you can expect when this shit goes tits-up, which it will.”
Renai tried to answer, but all she got out was his name before the psychopomp made a noise that was part yawn and part sneeze, a huff of indignation where a human would have held up a hand for silence. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed. “You don’t get to talk yet,” he said. “I don’t know what bug crawled up your ass lately, but you gotta tighten up.” He plopped down on his haunches and glared up at her. “You don’t get to choose when you follow the rules, Raines. That’s what makes ’em rules. Your ass shouldn’t be anywhere near a violent death like this one. You ain’t got the juice.” A city bus came toward them down Loyola, groaning to a stop at the corner of Washington. Sal started to say more, but the pneumatic hiss of the bus’s air brakes startled him and made him whip his head around.
“It’s just the bus, Sal,” she said. The doors swished open and a handful of teenagers swung out, laughing and giving each other shit. The driver watched them cross the street before making its wide turn onto Washington, the bus’s PA system announcing its next stop. Renai got a close look at the teenagers as they walked in front of her; none of them pulled at her the way Miguel Flores had in the mome
nts before his death. Down the block, a dark SUV pulled out into the street, bass beat thumping. The driver forgot to turn the headlights on. Sal still stared off in the direction of the cemetery, ears flat against his head. “What’s got you so jumpy?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he snapped. Then he turned his mournful, doggie eyes at her and gave his lips a quick lick. “Sorry. It’s just . . . this shit we do? I know it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day, but this isn’t just life and death, Raines. It’s eternity and oblivion.”
Renai didn’t hear what Sal said next, couldn’t focus on anything but the fact that the dark SUV still hadn’t turned on its lights, that it slowed when it got alongside the group of teenagers on the sidewalk. Renai was running before her thoughts caught up to what her instincts knew was happening. The window slid down, DJ Khaled’s “I Wish You Would” blaring from inside, and a puffy jacket sleeve stretched out, a gun clutched in a side grip.
Renai—stretched out to put as much of her body in front of the teenagers on the sidewalk as she could—couldn’t see any faces in the darkened interior of the SUV, the night going purple as the ghost word took hold, her skin drawing tight and ephemeral. The shooter yelled something angry and vulgar that was drowned out by the music and the sharp pop, pop-pop, pop of his shots. She felt the sting of each bullet passing harmlessly through her, a pinprick of pain quick and immediate as a mosquito’s bite. The SUV’s engine roared and the back tire chirped against the concrete when it clipped against a curb as it vanished around the corner.
She looked down at the group of kids, who had fallen to the ground, didn’t remember turning toward them, didn’t remember running beside them, the adrenaline surging through her system chopping time into disconnected film frames.
There were five of them, three boys and two girls. One of the girls was Latina; the rest were black. “Are you okay?” she asked, realizing too late that she was shouting. Lowering her voice, she said, “Anyone hurt?” They were all muttering to each other and starting to sit up, one girl wiping tears from her eyes, another girl rocking back and forth and unable to stop crying, the first one in the group to hit the ground—a lanky boy in pants a couple of sizes too big—still lay with his hands covering his head until one of his friends shook him by the shoulder. Renai opened her mouth to say something else, and then realized that they couldn’t hear her, since the ghost word had rendered her invisible, intangible, and silent. In the shock of the moment, it didn’t occur to her that she hadn’t spoken the ghost word at all. She raised her hands to pull off the hood and break the spell but hesitated when Sal cleared his throat. She turned to find him standing beside her, his attention fixed on her and not the kids.
