“Thank you all for being part of this experiment!” Julius yelled from behind them. “The City of New Orleans thanks you! You are all free to head back home and rest up! I'm sure you're all exhausted! You'll be receiving your compensation, your conformation number and the rest of the paperwork in the mail in the coming weeks! You have each made New Orleans a better place!”
“What's he talking about?” asked Mars.
“Sometimes it helps the Wonder in the city interact with peoples' subconscious when you tell them something that almost makes sense. It will give the subconscious something tangible to use as it starts building false memories to try and explain to the person where they've been for the past several days. Some of them might use the things he's said, some might create other scenarios, and a few might just remember everything that happened.”
“Huh,” said Mars. “So now do we hang out and guard the time rip until it's gone?”
Roman shook his head. “That's what the Hurricanes are for. Do you mind bringing them here?”
Mars picked up two of the cocktails from the sidewalk and brought them over. They were red and smelled strongly of rum and fruit juice.”
Roman took one of them from her. “Just as the café au lait strengthens the link between now and 1934, something newer yet just as iconic works well to sever that link.”
“I thought Hurricanes were an older drink,” said Mars.
“They were created in the 1940s, so they represent this side of the time rip, being invented after 1934. And I specifically had you purchase them from a new bar that's only existed for a year.”
“Yeah, I'd never even heard of that bar.”
Roman walked over and poured the Hurricane out slowly over the time rip. The window into 1934 faded away and the time rip began curling into itself, balling up like a cocoon. When the plastic glass was empty, he took the next one from Mars and slowly poured it over the time rip.
“It's almost like it's melting,” said Mars. “Like pouring hot water on an ice statue.”
She went and got the other two Hurricanes. By the time the third glass was empty, the time rip seemed to be completely gone. Roman took the fourth glass and, just to be safe, slowly poured it all around where the time rip had been.
“Time to clean up,” said Julius as he joined them.
Edith looked at the messy mixture of Hurricanes and café au lait on the street. “Oh, gross! Those smells are awful together! I'll go get a bucket of hot water from my shop.” Then she turned to Julius. “But first, you all lied to me about The Angel and The Axeboy. What in the hell is that about?”
“Regrettably, we did,” said Julius. “It was incredibly circumstantial, and I will explain it all soon. And it will never happen again.”
“Good.”
“While we're on the subject,” said Julius. “You lied to our faces about William being from 1934.”
Edith's face dropped a little. “Oh. You knew?”
“When you remember living in the '30s, it's pretty obvious when clothes were made back then and when they were made in our time.”
“I'm sorry,” she said. “I just didn't know if you'd let him go through.”
“Well, now you do. Can those be the first and last lies that we ever tell each other, Edith Downs?”
Edith stuck out her hand, and Julius took it and shook. “Deal.”
“Why don't you take a couple days off,” said Julius. “You deserve it.”
Edith looked at the rest of them. “None of you are taking days off. How about I just sleep in and come in late.”
Julius raised an eyebrow. “We don't really have a standard starting time.”
“Then I guess you'll just be pleasantly surprised whenever you end up seeing me tomorrow.”
Julius smiled. “I guess we will.”
“Now I do believe we've got some cleaning up to do,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Julius. “I'm not paying you to stand around. Get moving.”
“Yes, boss,” said Edith.
Everyone split up to start cleaning up the street, and Roman grabbed a duffel bag and walked over to Edith. He pulled out a thin, square box, a bit larger than a book, and handed it to Edith. “This is for you.”
“What is it?”
“It'll make sense when you open it, but you should probably open it when you get home.”
“Fine. Just keep a girl in suspense, why don't you.”
Roman turned and went about the business of picking up trash and thinking about how to most efficiently clean up the area. After a few minutes, he turned to Mars, who was emptying out the squirt guns that still had café au lait in them. “Mars, do you know anyone really fond of crackerjacks?”
File 84 :: [Edith Downs]
The sun hadn't yet set when Edith finally got home. The first thing she did was flip through her records and put on Maurice Chevalier. She closed her eyes and soaked up his ridiculously cheesy and playfully French accent.
The second thing she did was yell, “Oh my god! Maurice!” as Maurice (her pet named after the singer, not the singer himself), wandered sleepily out of her bedroom. His meows came out short and half-awake, though she could tell that he was very upset at his own inability to complain sufficiently.
She went and fed him, which would be the third thing she did.
Fourth, she poured herself a long glass of wine and marched right into the bathroom to take a short but very hot shower.
Afterwards Edith went about her apartment, speaking casually with the mems who were hanging about as she picked up after herself and Adelaide, putting away Adelaide's make-shift sleeping area. After only a glass and a half of wine she realized, wobbly, that she couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten. She thought about getting delivery, and then remembered that she didn't have a damned phone that would work. Maybe in the morning she'd see about getting a land line, if those even still existed for residences.
It was then that she noticed the scratching at her kitchen window. Walking over, she saw a note tied to a branch – like the tree itself was delivering it to her. “That's absurd,” she said to herself, immediately realizing that nothing was actually absurd to her any longer. She opened the window and untied the note. “Thanks?” she said to the tree. The note was from Wole, asking if Tuesday night would be a sufficient night to have dinner. Not quite sure what day it was, she figured Tuesday would probably be fine, so she wrote “Yes” on the note, then, worried that the response was too short, drew a smiley face. She nodded to the tree as she tied the note back onto its branch, then shut the window.
Thinking of dinner on Tuesday reminded her stomach of its empty state, which it in turn reminded her about through a series of grumbles.
Edith walked down to a little noodle house a few blocks away and got some phở, brought it back and curled up on her loveseat and put on a black and white movie. She thought about the other members of The Agents Of and about what they might be doing. She imagined Adelaide jumping across rooftops and running down streets, but the streets and buildings were all black and white like the movie Edith was watching, with old cars full of Tommy Guns and gangsters, and damsels in long white dresses standing in the street with distressed looks on their faces.
She thought of Mars, sitting in a dive bar sipping straight Jameson or doing her entity-acupuncture work in the bowels of an abandoned French Quarter building. Or maybe she'd be rocking out to some band playing at one of the bars on Saint Claude.
Roman and Julius were harder to picture – she really had no idea what they might do in their off time, except maybe occasionally sleep (and that was a big maybe). She imagined Julius walking the streets in search of trouble that he could fight or fix, or perhaps he was deep in the headquarters underneath Spanish Plaza looking over maps of the city with piles of notes in near-indecipherable scribbling covering every spare corner of each page.
She thought of Roman in his laboratory tinkering on some device with all of his strange tools. She could just as easily picture
him perched atop one of the towers sticking up from the Saint Louis Cathedral with the moon and clouds drifting above him as he looked out over the city and the river.
“Oh, shit,” she said, realizing that she was nodding off. Thinking of Roman had reminded her of the package he'd given her. She pushed pause on the movie, walked over and picked up the package from the small table next to her front door. She got a steak knife from the kitchen and cut the tape, then opened it and pulled out something wrapped in tons of bubble wrap, along with a note. The note itself was old and yellowed and faded, and she could hardly make out the handwriting:
Miss Edith,
Thank you for everything. I have seen far more wonders than I thought existed. Our encounter was so very brief, but you make quite an impression. I think on you often. I would write you about all my adventures, telling you about all the jazz greats that I've met, about meeting the love of my life and our beautiful children, but instead I'm sending you something even better.
I hope you get this package in good health.
Your Trumpet Player,
William Town
September, 1948
Edith sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes. She set the note down on the kitchen counter and unwrapped the bubble wrap. It was a record – a little 45 – and it was swarming with little blue mems. She held it up and turned it around – there were so many mems that they couldn't even hide inside of their object like mems always do. She laughed. “You bastard. How the hell did you even manage that?”
She had to gently push the mems away to even see the cover of the record sleeve. It was a simple graphic of a trumpet, a feather and an axe. The Axeboy's Blues was typed across the top, and underneath the image were the words: The New Single by Experimental Jazz Musician William Town.
Edith laughed and wiped another tear away. “Axeboy's Blues... Of course you'd think of that, you silly man.”
She refilled her glass of wine, walked over and put the 45 on the record player, then curled back up onto the loveseat with her wine. She held the record sleeve, which it seemed had just as many mems in it as the actual record did. They whispered to her of love, honor, and fog-filled nights full of fear and screams and strange creatures. Maybe William merely wanted to show her his life – what he'd accomplished, what he'd witnessed. But she would copy and store these memories, and guard them with her life just as she would all the others. Whether it was on purpose or not, William just made his legacy immortal. William had just opted to become legend in the same future that he had chosen to leave behind.
As the lone trumpet began pouring out of the speakers, tears flowed down Edith's face and she laughed. She had told him how she'd wanted to hear him play – not the dreary strange way that he and the other musicians on that roof had played while under that spell, but how he played when he was truly doing what he loved. Then the trumpet stopped, replaced by a beat – a beat that she realized came from William's stamping foot and his clapping hands. And then his voice was there, traveling through decades upon decades to tell the story of The Axeboy. The story she'd told to him, the story they'd lived together earlier that morning and the night before.
Edith shivered at the thought that her and William were suddenly so far apart in time – that he was long dead. That, in a way, she'd been talking to a ghost that morning. Such a beautiful and inspiring ghost.
Edith looked over at the TV screen, and frozen there was a man in a white suit leaning on a table and talking to an elegant woman at a bar, with a dark stranger leering in the background and a band playing behind him. One of the men in the band was playing a trumpet, frozen with his fingers pressed down on two of the keys.
She smiled. Of course there had been a trumpet player frozen on her screen when she went to go open that package.
And then William was done telling the story and the trumpet playing started up again, continuing with the rhythmic pounding of his foot. Then it was over, and Edith sat there a moment. Eventually she turned off the record player and pressed play on the movie. She saw the moving images – saw the characters speaking to each other, kissing each other, getting shot by one another – but all she heard was William's story of The Axeboy, over and over and over. His story caressed and kissed the wine and exhaustion flowing through her head, pulling a blanket over her and then running a hand along her cheek and kissing her forehead. In the back of her mind, Edith knew she had so much work to catch up on – getting her pastry shop in order, finding a way to organize the memory files, getting a system in place for her network of mems that she wanted to spiderweb across the entire city. But for now, she would let herself sleep. She would sleep and dream of who she was, who she had been, and who she was becoming.
Andy Reynolds lives and writes in New Orleans. The Axeboy's Blues is his second novel, his first being Spectacle of the Extension. He also reads his work on stage for the biweekly writing/spoken word group, Esoterotica, and has contributed work in two of their anthologies, two CDs, and a play that the group put on for The New Orleans Fringe Festival. For updates on future novels and writing projects, please see AndyReynolds.net
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[1]
For more information pertaining to The Drawing of Dawn's Shade please refer to The Agents Of Fateful Encounters Volume II.
[2] The Press Street train travels day and night down the border between the neighborhoods of The Marigny and The Bywater. Rather than burning coal, it burns embers of The French Quarter from when The Quarter completely burned down in the fires of 1788 and 1794. Burning the embers charges the air and makes it much more difficult for ghosts and other unwanted creatures to slip between the ever-thinning wall between the living and dead worlds that exists around the train tracks between the streets of Rampart and Royal. The method was perfected and brought to fruition by scientist and Agent Roman Wing in 1923. For more on the subject see The Agents of Karma Volume III.
[3]
The Moonwalk – a walkway atop the levee, full of benches and street lamps, which stretches nearly the entire length of The French Quarter. It was commissioned by Mayor Moon Landrieu in 1975 to replace the row of wharves and warehouses that had previously blocked public access to the river.
[4]
In actuality they were listening – Roman had discovered years ago that they were all blind (Well, one particular beast had had the power of sight, but it had been destroyed some time ago, which had caused more than a couple of problems. Roman still wouldn't admit that he'd had a hand in its death, but it's pretty common speculation that he did). Roman had also figured out that the sound of wind made it harder for them to hear/see, not long before he found out (much too late for his poor friends) that the sound of rain enhanced their hearing at least tenfold, making them completely impossible to outwit.
[5]
The fires of 1788 and 1794 were thought to have burned up about a thousand buildings, nearly all of The Quarter, but someone had thought that the original French Quarter, or Vieux Carré, was worth saving. Roman had his ideas about who it was that planted it at the bottom of the Mississippi and why they may have done such a thing, but the subject was quite sensitive politically so he kept his theories to himself.
[6] The Scientist was one of the members of The Agents of Curious Happenstance in the last half of the 19th century. He was the first Agent to take a real scholarly approach to all of the “stranger” aspects of the city, quantifying Wonder and finding its various uses as well as studying and cataloging the various usually unseen species that wander in and around the city. He'd invented countless devices, including several that would keep the Agents safe and/or pacify those who would do the Agents harm. More information can be found in the volumes of The Agents of Curious Happenstance.
[7] Roman had become so impressed with Elsh's drink-making capabilities, in fact, that he had taken several of her concoctions to local mixologist Rhiannon Enlil, who he'd met while she was bartending at Cure, a high quality cocktail bar on Freret Street. First testing the cocktails to make
sure they were not poisonous to humans, he would take them to Rhiannon and ask her to replicate them with ingredients available on land. Here is one such example:
Kindness of Strangers
A recipe by Rhiannon Enlil
Inspired by: Cocktail 6:R991 by Elsh
The name, chosen by Rhiannon, was inspired by a line of dialogue in the play, A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams.
Instructions:
In a mixing glass, pour the following:
2 ounces of Chateau de Laubade Blance Armagnac
¾ ounce of Dolin Blanc Vermouth de Chambéry
a barspoon of maraschino liqueur
a dash of grapefruit bitters
6 drops of orange blossom water
Add ice and stir swiftly with a barspoon until the mixture is very chilled. Strain into a cold glass (coupette, cocktail or martini glass)*. Use a peeler to take a swath of rind from a lemon, then pinch the rind over the surface of the cocktail and discard.
* Each cocktail recipe Rhiannon concocts for Roman is designed to be served chilled rather than over ice, since that is how Roman and Elsh partake of them.
Description:
When Rhiannon includes Kindness of Strangers on cocktail menus, this is one of the descriptions she has been known to use:
New Orleans is the bohemian daughter of France, so I chose to make this drink with white Armagnac, the feisty eau de vie so deliberately distant from elegant and mature cognacs. It is stirred with blanc sweet vermouth, a touch of dry maraschino cherry liquor, then accented with grapefruit bitters and orange blossom water.
The last ingredient is a bridge of floral grace, which compliments the citrus and the bite of the Armagnac; it is also a beloved and crucial ingredient in some classic New Orleans cocktails, conjuring up late night walks through the Quarter with the smell of night blooming flowers. When mixed, this drink is a pearly opalescent that tricks the eye – clear as glass, but still catches the light with its rich texture. Serve very cold for an elegant but complicated cocktail of strength, flowers, richness and depth.
The Axeboy's Blues (The Agents Of Book 1) Page 41
