The focus required to scale the levee had calmed her anger at Ramadan. With her last two strides, she set her feet close together on a dry-looking patch of dirt, and she looked up at the climb she would have to get back home. Then, Ramadan holding still in her arms, she turned and faced the Mississippi.
“Okay, there it is,” she said. “There’s your river.”
He remained quiet and calm. He could feel Alicia’s heart beating against his chest, pulsing from her exertions, as accusatory to him as his hammering fists had been to her. He blinked at the river and its curious vibrations. The sun had risen higher, and its mirroring on the surface of the water hurt his eyes. He looked up at his mother’s relatively soothing face.
“There’s your river,” she said to him again. “There it is—and you can’t have it!”
Ramadan didn’t know the meaning of her words, of course, but she had spoken them with authority, as if speaking some absolute truth. She saw his face turn contemplative and knowing, the way babies look when processing new language, the look of enlightenment. Yes, he knew, again. He couldn’t really have the thing he wanted anyway. That was lost. This was as close as you could get. You couldn’t ever truly have the bliss again, could you? That glare on the water had dispelled the myth that this thing was the Mother of Mothers. It was the thing that hurt your eyes just as you were about to repossess the thing you missed the most. He turned back to the river, ready to resign himself to the disappointment of being. But then—the light was already softening, and if he let his head bob a little, up and down, or tilted it from side to side, it didn’t hurt his eyes at all. He had discovered a way to make the glare disappear. Could you have it, then? If you put yourself in just the right position, just the right place in this place, could you have it back—whatever it really was?
“Ah!” he said. It was a wordless projection of the affirmative, all his preverbal self could muster. Ah!
“Ouch!” Alicia screamed, not in response to Ramadan’s Ah! but to the pain from the mosquito feasting upon her ankle. She bent down and slapped it, staining her palm with the splat of her own blood and the gray wings of her attacker. She tensed with revulsion at the sight of the foul, ruddy splotch, and as she tried to flick it away, Ramadan fell from her arms, rolled into the mud, and landed facedown. The water was rippling toward the shore, edging its way toward him, licking his toes.
“Oh,” she said, posed in a stiff crouch, unsure if she should first rinse her hand in the river or pick up Ramadan before he started wailing.
But then he lifted his head, and he had that same smile she’d seen when she rushed to him outside the barroom on Bourbon Street. His chin was painted with a goatee of Mississippi goo, and he sort of looked like a pirate, one of whom had given that old watering hole its name. Then he rolled over, as amused as he’d been back at the bar. Instead of crying like a baby, he was laughing like a Lafitte.
* * *
ONE MONTH LATER, as Alicia lay dying, she knew it was the mosquito. The doctors couldn’t say for sure. Through the fog of her illness, it wasn’t clear if they had even diagnosed the virus. Maybe they had, but either way, they couldn’t do anything to save her. Whatever—it was the mosquito.
The sin of feeding Mustafa during his fast had come back, almost literally, to bite her. You couldn’t trick God with your excuses. Oh, the blithe irreverence of youth; the impetuosity of love. Sin was sin. She had seduced Mustafa out of his holiness with that damned potato chip—and she did mean damned. God had not forgotten or forgiven her transgression. An eye for an eye? No! More like a tooth for a tooth! She had fed him indiscriminately and, in return, she had been fed upon. Fatally. Besides, the world survived on juicy stories like hers. It ate them up. Her death was but a digestion.
Yes, her fate had been determined the moment she tempted Mustafa—whose destiny suddenly struck her as also likely imperiled by his weakness. Where was he now? After the incident with Adad, she had never gone back to his store. Adad had made his contempt for her clear that day, and she couldn’t bring herself to beg him for anything. She would have had as much luck penetrating his implacable spirit as she would have had in asking him to return an opened box of Cheerios. To him, she was damaged goods. So those eggs had been the last things she ever bought from him. Whenever she needed groceries, she took her business elsewhere, walking the few extra blocks to Matassa’s in the Quarter or riding with Crip or Booker T to Winn Dixie. Unlike at Adad’s, you could get a decent steak at those stores, plus you didn’t have to endure a stare that made you feel indecent, a piece of meat gone bad. No, she didn’t want Adad to see her growing bigger and bigger each day, swelling with longing for Mustafa. And after Ramadan was born, she had not wanted to give Adad the opportunity to reject him again, this time in person, so she had denied him Ramadan altogether.
Where was Mustafa now? she wondered again. Lying somewhere far across the world dying like her, being consumed, eaten alive by, if nothing else, a ravenous guilt? Did he even know he had a son? Surely not. Even if Adad had broken down and told him about her being pregnant, Mustafa would have no way of knowing whether she’d had a girl or a boy. So no, he did not know he had a son. Only now on her deathbed, thinking of Mustafa on his, did she really regret not conquering her pride, not being stronger, and confronting Adad with the reality of his kin. There must have been something of Mustafa in Adad, something that would have made Adad care for her, love her. She should have boldly rolled Ramadan into the Quicky Mart every day. She should have looked Adad in his all-seeing eyes and given him something truly to behold—Ramadan! She should have taken bundle after bundle of Pampers without paying and dared Adad to charge her. Couldn’t she have worn down his defenses? Couldn’t she have defeated him? If only she had had that vision. If only she had seen Joan of Arc while there was still time. She might have been inspired, realized that even a girl like her, single and poor, could change the world, her world. A woman could be a warrior! At least then there would have been a chance for Mustafa to know about Ramadan. But not now. Now it was too late.
And what was to become of Ramadan, the boy she’d dared to brand with the occasion of their sin? In naming him, she had felt she was committing a sacred act, not sacrilege, like going to confession. You had to tell what you had done in order to be redeemed. She had meant Ramadan’s name to be, in part, an apology—no more, penance. But God had not accepted her offering, she knew now—and her punishment was this death. Was Ramadan, then, also doomed to be devoured too soon, like a calf, a duckling, a lamb? No. The mosquito had landed on her. Ramadan was safe. Maybe she was the sacrifice that would afford her son some divine absolution. Any mother would die for that—to save her child. (On the last day she had been able to speak, she asked Mama Joon to make sure to give Ramadan her crucifix. She had a fond memory of how he had grabbed it the day they had gone to the river; he liked it as much as his father.) So yes, she was ready now. She had discovered her cause, without even knowing she needed one, a reason to die: Ramadan!
She was fading in and out of consciousness in her hospital room, so drowsy and bleary-eyed she couldn’t tell if anyone was here with her. Maybe that was Mama Joon or Clarissa in a chair near the door, which opened to what must be the hall. She saw a pale rectangle of light that ghostly figures drifted through from time to time. Nurses, not angels—no wings. But maybe that was just a blanket with a pillow propped up vertically on the chair, and the whole assemblage had acquired the rumpled slouch of a worried relative. The television was on, but she didn’t have the energy to analyze its radiance for meaning. A Law and Order with a murderer named Mr. Muss Kito, maybe. Better still, an old ER in which nobody can solve the riddle of this young woman’s severe headaches and fever until someone, a pretty internist trying to flirt with a hot, hunky doctor, makes a bad insect joke in the cafeteria about how maybe the patient just has a bug, and then George Clooney’s face mimes “Eureka!”
“What’d you say?” he asks.
“I said, ‘a bug.’”
“That’s it! That’s it!”
And Clooney drops his tray—a spray of mashed potatoes and gravy and pellets of green peas splatter against the lower legs of Julianna Margulies’s scrubs—and he dashes off to save the girl in the nick of time. In the medicine closet he rummages through boxes of bottles until he finds the last remaining vial containing the serum to counteract this disease, which occurred mainly in the remote jungles of South America or in Madagascar maybe—and that, yes, was transmitted by mosquitoes!
“Yes!” Alicia yelled, not as herself, really. Her voice bellowed out from the depths of her achy chest, going Clooneyesque, attempting to embody the essence of the actor playing the doctor who, in her delirious mind, was holding the glass tube of precious serum up to the light and shaking it with admiration and gratitude, this elixir that would save his patient’s life—Alicia’s life—doubly grateful that he had chosen this career, not as a doctor, but as an actor with the privilege of playing a doctor. And even if this scene wasn’t real, he was still a man honoring with his art a man who saved lives. (Her “Yes!”—her last word—had all of this in it, an overdose of empathy, adrenaline laced with hope.)
“What did you say?” The blanket and the pillow propped up in the chair called out to Alicia in the voice of a weary Mama Joon. “Did you say something, baby?”
Alicia hallucinated her mother’s pillow-head and torso seamlessly adjoined to a blanket of legs, a centaur of sympathy. Then she closed her eyes and sank into the last layer of consciousness. All of the pain she had felt for weeks, headaches and severe neck and muscle soreness that medication had dulled but not alleviated, was now leaving, blown away by the breeze of her retreat. The anxiety, too, was flaking away like ash, all of the worry that, had she the focus to experience it, would have traumatized her. One day, before her mind faltered, she had overheard the doctor say “meningitis” to Mama Joon. She had been drifting in and out of sleep, but she had heard enough in his tone to detect that he feared the worst. The paralysis that had already started to grip her body had saved her from suffering the full impact of that blow. Weakness had given her the strength to endure it. But that day she had begun to live with this thought: I am going to die. If she had been depressed before—and, of course, she had (for what but depression was Ramadan’s twin, the one who had declined birth, the dark one who Mustafa’s absence had impregnated her with as surely as his presence had inseminated her with the light of Ramadan?)—this reality, this majestic flow of death, at once imminent and eminent, had purified her blood with an intravenous efficacy. It was as if one of the plastic bags hanging beside her bed was tubing, needling, and dripping into her veins potent, intermittent hits of I am going to die. Evidently, one pleasing side effect of this drug was its ability to abort the insidious progeny of gloom. For Alicia, the threat of mortality was a menstruation, cleansing her of that thing incapable and unworthy of achieving humanity.
Her room was dark when it finally came for her, when the world purged itself of her. It wasn’t so bad, being unborn, being unalive, not being, being been. It was as natural as putting one foot in front of the other, as natural as the way she had experienced—that day Mustafa had started walking toward her at the Quicky Mart—the approach of love. Was death love? Was death life? The rationality of it subsumed her. To pronounce it drowning would have diminished its swiftness, the clarity of its truth. This was absolute. Proof of something. This—death—was the answer!
And just like that, she saw her unsolved equation, the mathematical means of quantifying who she would be after losing Mustafa but gaining Ramadan:
And, too, just like that—she knew the answer! It was the You – Him numerator that gave it to her. She knew now that for her (and she was the X), You – Him = 0. From there it was easy! Every third-grader knew that 0 divided by any number (other than zero) equals 0.
Therefore:
Even the addition of Ramadan to her life (You + 1) was not enough to recalculate the immutable mathematical result of losing Mustafa. Without death and its unique authority on the matters of nullification—and this was almost her last sensation—she would never have known that. People were always questioning what good algebra was. Middle school kids everywhere famously whined while struggling with Pythagoras, “I’m never going to need this stuff to get through life.” Well, it sure had come in handy for her while trying to get through death! If she’d had the strength to crawl out of bed, she would have. She would have staggered across the room, thrown open a window, and shouted out to the city, to the world, “Learn your algebra! It could save your soul!”
Alicia felt triumphant, as if by puzzling out her equation, she had conquered the riddle of herself. She thought of Joan of Arc again, golden and high up on her horse. Joan had triumphed and then she had died, crowned the Maid of Orleans. Alicia knew she hadn’t saved the world or even her city (why anyone would need to save New Orleans was beyond her), but she had just saved herself. It was better that she had not wasted the strength Joan had given her on trying to win over Adad, because she needed all of her strength now. She needed the will to die.
In her last breath, she was settling for something less grand than Joan’s achievement, yet somehow just as momentous. How strange that being zeroed out to nothingness by mathematical deduction and by death could bring her to such a conclusion, to such wholeness: I am the Maid of Me!
Part II
Evacuations
6
The Storm
Alicia’s dying thoughts may have seemed random but they would prove, so she might have insisted, as prophetic as television. Especially her fleeting acknowledgment of the inability to save her city. For soon, on that quintessentially Ramadanian day—during which the five-year-old Ramadan is transformed from a charging bull back into a giggling boy by the deus ex machina magic that is a grandmother’s love—on that very day, the most consequential of storms was heading straight for New Orleans.
It was early afternoon on Saturday, August 27, 2005—less than two full days before landfall—and Mama Joon, intent on prepping a pot roast for Sunday dinner, had not paid much attention to the news of the tropics. She and Ramadan were in the kitchen, basking in the bounty of their affection. (Husbands and wives have bedrooms. Grandmothers and grandchildren? Kitchens. Where else, to the envy of all other relations, under the guise of making a meal, to make love?) Ramadan was skipping around the kitchen munching on the carrot stick Mama Joon had let him swipe off the counter from the bunch she was going to chop up and toss into the bottom of the roasting pan. They didn’t know it then, but it was to be the last day—for two months, at least—of such routine. The last day when you knew what was going to happen next, when the biggest question was whether to slow-cook a roast at 300 degrees, which would mean rising early tomorrow morning, or to go with 350 and sleep in; whether to bite the pointed end of a carrot stick or the fat end first.
When the phone rang, Mama Joon picked up the cordless handset and checked the caller ID. Clarissa. She pressed the TALK button and, defying its command, hummed instead. “Mmm hmm . . .”
“Mama, they’re saying this hurricane is really coming!”
Hunched at the kitchen counter slicing through onions on her chopping board, unmoved by Clarissa’s breathlessness, she asked calmly, “What you want me to do about it? Do I look like Nash Roberts to you?”
She wasn’t even sure if Clarissa remembered the beloved retired local weatherman, but she wanted to disarm her with a wisecrack. Whatever amount of money she was about to ask for would require negotiating. Lately, Clarissa was working off and on as an unlicensed beautician, but she didn’t have any steady income. She was forty-two years old now, so it was clear to Mama Joon she never would. With her, every crisis had budgetary implications. The use of “Mama” and “hurricane” in the same sentence was a loan inquiry; or more likely an application for an unrestricted grant. One of Clarissa’s better submissions, in fact. But she wasn’t fooling anybody by leaving out the “Joon.” Just saying “Mam
a” emphasized their blood relationship, prioritizing her funding request. She knew her daughter—Clarissa was leaving nothing to chance today. No mere mother figure or friend affiliation would do. Mama . . . hmph. More like MAMA. Like FEMA, an acronym: the Motherhood and Money Administration.
Indeed, Clarissa had no clue who Nash Roberts was, but she knew Mama Joon was joking, and that to help her case she needed to play along. So she laughed uneasily and mellowed her side of the exchange. “No. Really, it looks kinda serious. Things are happening fast. Every channel is saying we probably need to evacuate. I just finished talking to Crip and Booker T on three-way. We’re going to Baton Rouge.”
“Mmm hmm.” If she started the roast now, it would be done in plenty of time. When the lights went out, she and Ramadan would have something better than cold cuts for sandwiches.
She listened as Clarissa rambled on about some girlfriend of Booker T’s with a big house near Southern University. “A college professor!” she said, not impressing Mama Joon with her son’s ability to seduce even the most proper of conquests.
“Sounds nice.”
“There’s plenty of space for all of us. We have two cars. Crip and Booker T. You and Ramadan should come.”
Clarissa knew better. The last time Mama Joon had been in a car driven by one of her grandsons was a couple of years ago, after she’d started having severe abdominal pains. Damon, forsaking his high, had picked her up and carried her to the backseat of the Cadillac that Crip had parked in front of the house to take her to the hospital for what turned out to be an emergency appendectomy. They were zooming along when the cops pulled them over on Basin Street near Canal. Not for speeding, as it turned out—the car had been reported as stolen. But with Mama Joon screaming from the pain and the hospital only a few blocks away, the cops, who actually recognized Crip as a neighborhood criminal of some renown, had been compassionate enough to let him drop his grandmother off at the emergency room before arresting him.
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