Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  “Shit.” The word positively lingered.

  I gave him a ten-spot anyway. The losses continued.

  He pointed to my head.

  “Go Buffs,” he said.

  With that last act of charity, I was now operating at a loss somewhere in the low double figures. A quick calculation: almost twenty in the hole, plus the chair, and let’s not forget the loss of dignity. What price on that?

  And, lest we forget, I fucking sucked.

  * * *

  But outside Lafitte’s a half hour later with my guitar case safely stowed under the table and a Turbodog half consumed, I was absurdly pleased with myself. I’d offered my tribute to Logan Kind on the very spot where he had performed, even playing a couple of songs he’d played. I’d performed a few New Orleans songs, a couple of old personal favorites, and I’d been paid and ripped off, been justly heckled, and had escaped arrest. I needed to replace one of the chairs in the courtyard of the house I was staying in, but, all in all, I was far from discouraged.

  It was never intended as a career move.

  All my realistic expectations had been met. My far more unrealistic one was the crazed fantasy where a nameless stranger approaches and, vividly recalling Logan Kind playing in the same place more than eight years ago, proceeds to answer every single stupid question I might have.

  Of course that didn’t happen.

  Of course that was never going to happen.

  * * *

  “Y’all still attacking innocent people with your big car Mister Tourist?” It was the fallen woman on the bike from the previous night, in the same anachronistic gauzy attire, on the same precarious mode of transport. But wait a minute. Was the crate on the front now just that bit more securely fastened?

  “Just you, young lady.” I offered up a riposte and raised my glass. “You threw your beads at my car.” It was a lame response.

  “You deserved much more. You do know that deliberate cruelty is unforgivable, don’t you?” She toggled between laughing and pouting. “I’ll be entertaining on the square this afternoon Mister Tourist. Y’all can come by and see me later, if you have a notion to, if you can spare the time.” Her tone held nothing but a tease.

  And with that, her bike picked up speed and she was gone.

  I finished my beer.

  * * *

  I returned to Elysian Fields in the early afternoon with my guitar and used the house Wi-Fi to log back onto Croftertales.

  There was much more to read on the site.

  The biographical information about Kind became more extensive the closer his death loomed. But that made sense. Crofter was a stillborn release initially, and for a good many years after. The Internet wasn’t around to jumpstart his legend until later, after he had left for the states. Even then there was next to nothing about Logan during his time in Oxford. He was believed to have lived alone, for close to a year, in the house that Carly Williamson had coveted and now occupied.

  Carly had told me more than the web could offer. Why was that? My guess was that the death of Stephen Park had encouraged her to talk.

  There was an extended posting from Margot Kind. When Logan had first arrived in New Orleans he had got in contact with his sister. She had been surprised to hear from him. It had clearly been a while.

  Margot had known that Logan had fathered a child. She had known that his ex-wife had died in a hotel room in France of food poisoning or some other natural cause. The former Mrs. Kind had apparently suffered from poor health for a time and her death had been a piece of new information for Logan.

  Margot’s post proceeded to touch on several subjects. She was now the executor of Logan’s estate, which, while not exactly a goldmine, was gradually becoming more lucrative. There was talk of a Logan Kind film, independently produced, commensurately budgeted. Margot was planning to write about Logan herself, thanks to a small publishing house and a modest advance. Each passing year brought more sales, and more interest in her late brother. It was easy to identify her pride in Logan and his music. At the conclusion of her post she personally thanked all the good people at Croftertales for keeping her brother and his legacy alive.

  The next posts covered Logan’s final months on earth, and in New Orleans. They were immediately post Katrina, and by then Kind no longer lived in an apartment on Esplanade and no longer lived close to the house where the artist Degas had visited for five months in 1872. Logan’s third floor apartment had survived the storm, but he had moved out abruptly, abandoning his few pieces of furniture and his security deposit, and leaving no forwarding address. There was a series of photographs of the outside of the apartment.

  But even as he all but disappeared, he was seen twice more on the street, still playing his guitar.

  The last recorded sighting was from a man named Alex who lived in Portland, Oregon. He had been in New Orleans with a convention of librarians, actually the first brave delegation to visit the city after the storm. He had performed an afternoon’s volunteer work in the Treme and was walking through the deserted quarter in the early evening. Alex loved Crofter. He loved Logan Kind. He almost couldn’t believe it when he spotted Logan playing. He stopped and listened. He didn’t have his camera with him and the battery on his cell phone was dead. He was alone. Logan would be dead in two weeks.

  Logan had played as Alex had watched. But he hadn’t played covers that day. And he hadn’t played old songs from Crofter. Alex was convinced these were new, unrecorded songs. He stood stunned and helpless as Logan played one more Alex didn’t recognize. When Logan started to leave, Alex tried to talk to him but Logan put away his guitar and kept on leaving. He asked Logan the names of the songs. He asked Logan where he was staying. He asked Logan how he was keeping.

  But he got nothing. Logan left.

  It would be fair to say that Alex’s post caused a veritable flood of cyber conversation on Crofterales. There were skeptics who questioned Alex’s story and outright cynics who believed they could spot a Kind hoax when they saw one. And there were the faithful who clamored for more details, actual song titles and descriptions.

  After the bombshell from Alex, the rest of the posts were mostly posthumous.

  Several were strictly of a historical nature.

  The location on the Industrial Canal where Logan had died had become a pilgrimage destination. There were photographs of a raised metal structure resembling a balcony, intersecting a piece of rusted out fence and suspended twenty feet above the ground by a pair of concrete supports easily ten feet square and beginning to crack and crumble. The balcony structure became a steep ramp that dropped down into a shallow bank. On one of the supports the letters KIND RIP were clearly visible in a mélange of black and red graffiti. One photograph showed fresh flowers protruding from a cheap vase located just below the letters.

  For as long as I stared at the photographs of the death scene, the nature of the structure remained a complete mystery. Was it some outdated fragment of industrial construction or an abstract waterfront sculpture? I would have willingly believed either explanation.

  Other images displayed the nearby St. Claude Avenue Bridge and the loose stone path that ran along the top of the levee and came to an end at the side of the road.

  The next posts clearly owed a debt to Wikipedia.

  The bridge connected the Bywater district to the Lower Ninth Ward. When Katrina washed over the Lower Ninth, people climbed up into the structure for safety as the levees burst along the canal. After the flood the bridge was the only passable, if restricted, route upriver from the flooded areas to the rest of the city for several months. At one time in its history, the bridge, built in 1919, carried trains as well as cars. It still functioned as both a bridge and canal lock.

  I studied the death site images more carefully.

  Close to the shore, tall poles stood like cranes. Further out in the water, thirty-foot-tall edi
fices in asymmetric rectangle configurations extended skyward, with a handful of support beams still extant. Again, whether I saw modern art or chunks of industrial refuse was still open to interpretation.

  Out beyond the raised balcony and the ramp and the rectangles stood the two canal jetties, lofty scaffolded wood-lined walls of surviving functionality. These jetties housed the narrow water passage for shipping of assorted size and function. Traffic waited or painstakingly progressed, depending on the status of the bridge.

  The pictures taken from Logan’s death scene had been uploaded in the last year or so, and they were some of the very last things that had been posted on the site.

  The flowers still looked fresh in the photographs.

  Croftertales finally ended with much assorted minutiae. In the last postings were the hopeful and the sentimental and the paranoid and the crazy. Logan was still alive and would show up one day. His death was a stunt. After all, he was a very good swimmer. There was no suicide note found. He was even singing new songs.

  Other singers were discussed, specifically ones who sounded like Logan, or ones who had chosen to cover his songs. Comparisons were made, and to a fault Logan’s work was considered to be superior. Logan had been killed for any number of convoluted reasons. Someone actually asked us to consider the Deltatones as possible murder suspects. For at least one person, their act of possible piracy was merely a precursor to far worse villainy.

  It all sounded increasingly unlikely.

  As I closed my computer it occurred to me that the mysterious “Circumstance” that Stephen Park had mentioned had not been mentioned once by anyone on Croftertales, including Park himself.

  I found “The Town Where She Loved Me” on my phone. It was the song Park had cited as another example of plagiarism.

  I sat on the bed and listened.

  What was it I had been thinking about two nights ago as I fell asleep?

  Nine

  The next morning it was time to walk.

  Esplanade and Elysian Fields met close to the French Market, where I had my chicory-infused coffee with the rest of the tourists. We were easily identifiable, with our squeaky new exercise shoes lightly sprinkled with powdered sugar.

  As I walked the length of Esplanade, I found Degas’ house, one of a number of similarly painted colonials. I stood expectantly outside, awaiting some form of high-toned cultural visitation that utterly eluded me. A little further along Esplanade, the apartment building where Logan had lived had since gone condo. It was much prettier than I had expected.

  Esplanade Avenue dead ended at the edge of City Park two miles from the market.

  I arrived at the section of levee at Bayou St. John. It was well manicured and ornamental, more like a section of grassy public park and less like a working barricade.

  Inside the park I strolled through the rose gardens, past a bizarre model train map of the city with peculiar details and little regard for universal scale. At the sculpture gardens, I took a picture of three posed figures on benches. Two faced the water and the other faced towards me. Out in the water, a gangly blue structure rose up and stretched enigmatically upwards towards nothing.

  At the furthest point in my walk I stopped in an ocean of blossoming flowers clambering all over remnants of brick and stone walls laid across fresh-cut lawns. It was an onslaught of miscellaneous oranges and browns and yellows. I tried to imagine what they truly might look like.

  But I could only hazard a guess because I don’t see these colors well at all.

  For almost forty years I have encountered several variations of what I refer to as my colorblind dreams: a gradated selection of nighttime visions that tend to accurately barometer my stress levels.

  These images vary according to my degrees of anxiety, from mildly perplexing to flat-out scary. The mildest and most conventional version closely follows the actual scenario that took place when I was fourteen and at secondary school. It coincidentally occurred during the very same year as my guitar lessons.

  We were summoned to the nurse’s office in alphabetical order. This would happen twice in that same year. The first occasion was, for most of us boys, the more traumatic of the two. It included the firm and clinical grabbing of the tender teenage testicles with an icy hand, the assorted shifting and separating of the yeasty male appendages, and the mystifying final inquiry delivered in a tired and listless tone:

  “Have you experienced any discharge?”

  It wasn’t a word that offered much in the way of clarity. That her hand was where it was indicated, that she wasn’t talking about my nose or eyes. I further assumed she wasn’t alluding to the act of taking a slash. Did she mean a wet dream? I didn’t think she did. I felt certain she was after something more infectious, more pain-related, more running, more oozing, for want of many better words.

  So I followed my first instinct, whispered in the negative, and was briskly tucked back into my waiting underpants and sent back to Latin class.

  Naturally in the playground debriefing later that same day these events assumed comic distortion. The nurse’s eastern European accent became much more Germanic and guttural. Her top lip sprouted dense tufts of hair, garnished with the occasional wart. Several of her patients claimed unexpected stiffies, and one even boasted the much needed administration of a swift wank post examination. All trauma was soon forgotten, and we and our manhandled willies would live and flourish.

  The second and more harrowing visit that year, for me at least, was for an eye exam.

  A series of charts featured random letters in descending size. I told the optician which letters I could read, prepared to lapse into silence when the letters became far too small to decipher. She didn’t say much. A few students had already returned to class and reported their progress. Some had given up the fight early, barely three charts in, and letters home advising the hasty purchase of spectacles were en route.

  I was still in the game, five charts in, doing fairly well, thank you.

  Then the exam changed. Impenetrable patterns of color were silently placed before me.

  “Can you see the number?”

  There was little point in lying. “No,” I said.

  “I see.” There was a pause, and another assault of color was produced. “What about this one?”

  “No. Should there be a number?”

  She nodded sadly. “I’m afraid there should. Can’t you see it?” Her tone was almost plaintive.

  I shook my head. “I can’t see it.”

  “I see.” There was another sad pause.

  Then she tried again.

  “What number do you see now?”

  “I can’t see a number now.”

  “I see.”

  Our conversation followed this sorry pattern for a few more minutes. Then she explained that the numbers on the chart were formed in a pattern that most people could identify. Because I was colorblind, the number in the pattern was invisible to me. My worst scores seemed to be in the spectrum of yellow to orange to brown.

  She told me I was colorblind.

  Naturally I had a question for her. “Why am I colorblind?”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s a question of genetics. You get your colorblindness from your mother’s side, from her genes. It’s not so very uncommon in men.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Well,” she said. “I’m afraid you can’t join the army or be a pilot.”

  “I see.” I could play this game too.

  I was curious. “What number can’t I see?”

  She pointed to the chart. “The number in this pattern is twenty-eight.”

  I stared hard at the Technicolor snowstorm on the paper, and as hard as I tried to make myself see that number, it was no use. It wasn’t there.

  She took the paper away after a minute.

  “Let me give you the sec
ond part of the test.”

  A second series of patterns was produced. I looked and saw a number clearly visible amid a blizzard of colored dots. I smiled knowingly at the nurse. This was going much better.

  “I can see thirty-four.”

  She shook her head. “I’m very sorry. There’s no pattern there.”

  This was even more irritating. “I can see one,” I told her. “It’s thirty-four.”

  “I’m afraid that’s because you’re colorblind. There’s actually no pattern there.”

  “But I can see it.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t one.”

  I was given a note to take home to my mother. In the note I was declared colorblind and, as the nurse had already explained, several career options were henceforth declared off limits to me.

  For reasons that I’ve never fully identified, that second battery of tests has always been troubling to me. The best way I can articulate it is to just say that telling someone that something they can plainly see isn’t really there is somehow an unsettling concept, especially for a fourteen-year-old.

  I remember getting annoyed with the nurse then. The number was clearly there. I could see it as clear as day. Her response was patient and infuriating. As my temper began to unfurl, I was suddenly seized with a small moment of triumph: I could see the fucking pattern, and she couldn’t, so tell me who was the colorblind one now?

  But it was a short-lived moment of triumph.

  So the incident stayed with me, and that second test fashioned a transformative preview for a recurring sequence of dreams. In a mild incarnation, I dream often about colors forming a pattern that I can clearly read, sometimes a word I can read and understand, but more often a picture of someone I can recognize in my dream state, rendered tantalizingly unknown to me the very second before I wake up.

  This is a dream I have at least once a week.

  It’s never a good start to the day.

  In this version, no one needs to tell me that no tangible pattern exists. It’s a given at this stage. My dream is constructed on the prior knowledge of my condition, but I’m still annoyed because I can see the image nested inside the pattern.