* * * *
On the second anniversary of the New Reasoning, millions gathered in New York City, at the site of the Memorial Museum erected to commemorate the destruction of the World Trade Center. Former members of terrorist organizations were in attendance. The centerpiece of the ceremony was the bronze sculpture entitled The Sphere, which had survived the September 11 attack. A new band was added to the piece, with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. inscribed upon it.
Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!
In the fifth year of the New Reasoning, Greg sat at the mixing console at the broadcast facility at NASA, watching a sleek, white ship preparing to launch. The unmanned test flights had gone well. He smiled. This was to be a short flight to Proxima Centauri, the closest star. How he would have laughed if anyone had called it that five years before.
He had spent the last month taping interviews of the seven person crew, another group of bright, hopeful astronauts about to take the trip of a lifetime. He thought again of the recordings of the Challenger and Columbia crews. Once, such memories would have evoked only sorrow. But not today. Death was part of life; the sacrifices had not been in vain. No sacrifices were ever in vain.
The countdown began. No one was nervous; no one afraid. Fear was in the past. As the numbers rolled down and the engines began their roar, Greg adjusted the volume on his monitor feed, smiling down at the faders.
"Now,” he whispered, “we're ready."
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The Recreation Room by Albert E. Cowdrey
These facts are known: When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Mr. Cowdrey had already evacuated safely to a town in western Mississippi. A longtime resident of the Crescent City, Mr. Cowdrey had plenty of past experience with hurricanes and always had an emergency plan. (In fact, his previous hurricane story, “Grey Star,” appeared in our Jan. 2003 issue and is currently reprinted on our Website.)
Here's the speculation: After Katrina, when Mr. Cowdrey returned to his home near Tulane, he found that his muse had moved in. How else to explain the string of stories we've received over the past two years?
Sweating, Jim Guest trekked along the street where he'd spent most of his life. All the way, he marveled that it could be so absolutely empty.
The lawns were dead, the magnolias dying. White dust covered the brown leaves, and a dry pungent reek almost like burning sulfur set him coughing. In the distance he could hear men's voices, a hound's mournful baying, but here on Lark Street the vacant bungalows stood silent. Power lines hung like Christmas festoons, poles interlaced like jackstraws. A clapboard garage had floated into the roadway and lay becalmed, like an ark that had failed.
The sky was a blue steel bowl, the sun blinding. With every movement an effort, Jim seemed to breast a tide of molten wax.
Just beyond the garage, No. 488 came into view. Well, it was still there, not looking abandoned so much as never lived in. The big pines he'd planted as seedlings had all blown down, but they'd fallen away from the house instead of crushing it. Next door, Dr. Dreyfus's house had been impaled by a boat, a pricey SeaCraft with twin outboards now suspended in midair. Both houses bore the watermark, what people were calling the bathtub ring, almost at the level of the eaves.
He hated the thought of going inside 488, seeing what had happened there—especially if Madame Lott's prophecy turned out to be right and the dead awaited him. Yet he'd come a long way, and couldn't turn back now.
* * * *
Back before Katrina—everything these days was reckoned BK or AK, as it had once been antebellum or postbellum—back in those distant times, Madame Lott had been Jim's private oracle, consulted with a mixture of faith and irony.
As a scientist—before retirement he'd taught biology at the university—of course he knew it was all nonsense. Consulting her had been a gag at first, like sitting down with one of the Tarot readers who infested the sidewalks around Jackson Square. And a gag it seemed (who was the “mystery woman with flame-colored hair” whose fate was entwined with his own?) until Madame Lott remarked that if he drank less coffee, he'd get rid of his “migrant headaches."
How the devil did she know he had migraines? (And, by the way, the prescription worked.)
That first visit to her Royal Street “studio” on an idle Saturday morning twenty-two years ago had set the pattern. She'd opened a narrow doorway to another realm in Jim's careful, fact-obsessed life. Sure, she faked a lot, that went with the Reader and Advisor game—intuition didn't come at anybody's beck and call. Yet from time to time insights emerged from her purple-glossed lips that were hard to explain. About his father, for instance—the revelation that finally had convinced him there was more to her than turbans and twaddle.
"I see a man with white hair,” Madame Lott had intoned. “Somebody close to you, somebody you love. He's facing a storm. I see the flash and I hear the thunder."
Only Jim's father qualified in the white-haired and close department. He was a cool, dim, abstract man, a bookkeeper whose frustrated yearnings for science had helped nudge Jim into the field. He'd never really thought about loving his father until two weeks later, when he astonished himself by breaking down after learning that the old man, for reasons never made clear, had shot himself.
Then there was the case of Dot, Jim's wife. One day in 1997 the seeress had announced, “The woman in your bed, she carrying a dangerous baby in her womb, a baby she won't be able to get rid of."
Since 55-year-old Dot was in no danger of contracting motherhood, he'd ignored this bit of fantasy until she was diagnosed with disseminated and inoperable cancer that had originated in her cervix. After her death left him stunned, dry-eyed, a man suddenly adrift and alone in a universe without meaning, he'd asked Madame Lott to tell him about heaven and hell and God and all that.
"Heaven and hell,” she'd said, “is something you makes up. Your hell is your hell. Your heaven is your heaven. Sometimes you wills ‘em without even knowing it."
"What about God?"
"Nobody knows him, whatever they say, so don't you try. Go read your Book of Job. It's all in there. And watch out for false comforters, the ones who deny that life is hard. Only death is easy."
Why in the world did that make him feel better—hearing that God was unknowable, death was easy, and he made his own heaven and hell? Yet that night, as if weary of his private Hades, he wept and slept, and next day began a slow recovery from his grief.
Since her days of glory, when she'd been all three Fates rolled into one, Madame Lott had definitely gone down in the world. By the last time he'd seen her, the week before the storm, Royal Street was a fading memory—like other marginal businesses, Madame Lott had been driven out by soaring French Quarter rents. Now she handed out advice on love, death, and (ironically) money in a large dingy room, formerly an agency specializing in cut-rate travel, in a strip mall on Airline Drive. Her neighbors were a remainder outlet, a karate school, a ratty Chinese restaurant, and several boarded-up storefronts. What had been the show window was swathed in muslin drapes that created a dusty gloom.
In the noontime shadows, her fat fingers had rested lightly on the backs of his pale bony hands, occasionally stroking the hairs like the strings of a zither. She wasn't a palmist—she'd explained that many times; she touched his hands to (why else?) sense his aura. That day he'd figured his aura must be cloudy, because she hit him right off with a truly startling pronouncement: “There be dead folks in your attic."
After a moment to get over his shock, he told her, “I finished the attic years ago. Turned it into a rec room. I spend a lot of time up there. No corpses anywhere—I'd have noticed."
He'd felt sorry for her, overflowing her iron folding chair and handing out fake insights. When he first met her, she'd been a handsome café-au-lait woman, and her robes and turbans had made her look imposing instead of merely hokey. Now she was just one more American behemoth, her huge sagging bosom overhanging the card table lik
e an avalanche waiting to happen. On the wall, dim in the shadows, hung decaying travel posters for Aruba and Curaçao and framed photos of two solemn brown babies—grandchildren, Jim supposed. He indulged a brief fantasy of Madame Lott at home, stringing up one of her bras like a hammock and rocking both children to sleep in the giant cups.
And she wasn't improving her reputation by filling his attic with imaginary corpses. When he told her she was wrong, the woman-mountain stirred uneasily and muttered, “Well, maybe there used to be some dead folks up there."
Oh fine, he thought. A new tense—the Past Prophetic. “I've lived in the house off and on since it was built,” he pointed out. “I grew up there. There's never been a corpse in the attic."
She sighed deeply and tried a new line. “Maybe they'll be dying, not dead. I hear somebody gasping for breath. And now they be quiet, so quiet."
"So this happens in the future? That doesn't tell me much. The future's even longer than the past."
"Oh no, Mr. Jim,” she said, suddenly decisive and firm. “The future ain't long. It ain't long at all.” And in that, as it turned out, she'd been dead right.
* * * *
On a sulfurous August day, the last day he'd seen or ever would see Lark Street as it was supposed to be, clothed in a hundred shades of green and heavy with summer scents, Jim had clipped his privet hedge and brooded about life's monotony.
Snick, snick, snick. Keep everything level. Right. Nothing ever happens in New Orleans. Dull goddamn town. Snick, snick, snick.
Life had been tedious since Dot's passing had left him alone. He was not an exciting man ("dependable,” people said, “conscientious,” “sensible,” “means well"—in brief, a bore). Well, his trade had been teaching science to undergraduates; he wasn't supposed to be lively. Back when he was a student himself, he'd dated and thought cautiously about marrying a girl named Gwen—only he thought about it so long that she married somebody else, moved to a town upstate, and for twenty years they communicated only by Christmas cards. In time he'd relapsed into a not-too-uncomfortable bachelorhood, expecting to live and die that way, perennially alone and boring.
He still shook his head when he remembered the day the Dean had sent Dot to straighten out the Biology Department's finances. (Like Jim himself, the Accounts Payable had been scrupulously honest but muddled.) She was slender, with suspiciously red hair and a quick, sardonic wit, in spite of which she managed to set his budget right without making him feel like an idiot.
Afterward they began meeting for coffee in the student center. He could hardly believe she liked him. But she'd just escaped from an abusive husband and wanted a gentleman the second time around. She seemed to like his somewhat gaunt good looks, old-fashioned courtesy and quiet smile. After a brief courtship they married, and his life had never been the same.
When Papa shot himself, Jim had moved back into the house in Lakeside, by then an aging subdivision of shade trees, deep greensward, and bird-named cul-de-sacs ending in small circles. He never even thought of selling it; he'd grown up there, learned to swim and paddle a pirogue on the Seventeenth Street canal, played inept but enthusiastic baseball in Lark Street, which had always been kid-friendly and almost without autos. The anonymous interior of the house reflected its occupation by two isolated men in succession. The only emotional focus was an oil portrait of his mother, who'd died when he was three and existed only as a lady with wide-spaced gray eyes and a surprised expression, imprisoned eternally under glittering varnish in a gold-leaf frame over the blond and sootless fireplace.
Under Dot the picture stayed, but the house changed. She'd done poorly out of her first marriage but well out of her divorce, so she quit her job and they lived on his salary and spent the income from her shrewdly invested community property on improvements to their lifestyle.
He'd never been to an auction sale, but for two or three years they went every few months, buying handsome, solid furniture that Dot refinished in her spare time. Without obvious nagging, she somehow inspired him to turn the dusty attic into a rec room that became their favorite relaxing spot. Here they took it easy in elderly but still comfortable chairs, whacked a ball around a pocket billiard table if they felt athletic, otherwise read mysteries and drank their evening wine. Through a casement window they looked down at Lakeside—once part of the cyprière, the great cypress swamp that had absorbed the river's overflows for millennia—now, dried out by pumps and canals, an extended pine-and-magnolia grove where thousands of red-tile or gray-slate roofs nestled among the trees.
Dot bought a genuine 1950s jukebox with a pile of authentic 45-rpm vinyl records and a diamond-needle Cobra tone arm, so they could listen to the music of their teen years—early Elvis from the days of “Heartbreak Hotel,” mid-course Sinatra, platters of the Platters, Al Hibbler quavering out “Unchained Melody” and Satchmo growling “Mack the Knife.” While he listened, Jim worked at an old desk—his ambition was to write a book called “Vanished Worlds” on extinct New World species like the passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet, and Florida wolf—while Dot relaxed with bright heaps of seed catalogues and, increasingly, travel brochures.
She became uncannily adept at squeezing the lowest rates out of airlines, finding comfortable hotels at off-season prices, saving and exploiting bonus miles. Protesting mildly all the way, Jim let her drag him to Moscow and Macchu Picchu, Shanghai and Siena. How'd she locate that villa in Tuscany, find an affordable bug-free room for the Carnivale in Venice two days before it began, persuade the Capuchin monks to open their boniest and most fascinating Roman grotto for the Guests, though at the time it was closed to the public? Somehow. She was Miss Sweet Persuasion, never obviously pushing yet nearly always getting her way. When she died, all his life's adventure went with her.
Now he hardly ever left Lakeside except during Mardi Gras, when he fled the crowds to an upriver town called Bonaparte where his old girlfriend Gwen greeted him gladly. She'd lost her husband, started a business to fill the gap, and wore a groove to Baton Rouge airport, jetting off to foist educational materials on school boards throughout the English-speaking world. A little of her dynamism woke him up, a lot tired him; Gwen found his inertia first restful, then hypnotic. Come to think of it, things had been much the same back when they were dating. Now as then, they enjoyed each other best in small doses.
Otherwise, he relaxed into a life built around habitual tasks and memorabilia. His house was his private museum. His mother's portrait held its old place of honor, and silver-framed photos of Dot against a dozen exotic backgrounds crowded a marble mantelpiece she'd salvaged from a defunct mansion. Exotic figures found homes in this nook and that cranny—shadow puppets from Java, plague-doctor masks from Venice, a Ch'ing statue of the Goddess of Mercy in fading reds and greens.
Here he dreamed away his days, usually content though sometimes weary of the sameness of existence. Indeed, of existence itself. In dark moments he wondered how long death would take to find him. He asked Madame Lott, and her answer had been worthy of the Pythoness at Delphi. “Death will come for you too soon,” she intoned, “and too late."
"And what,” he snapped, “is that supposed to mean?"
She gave him an odd sort of smile. She'd had some dental work, and one of her incisors was now encased in gold, with a star-shaped porthole through which the tooth gleamed whitely.
"It's always too soon to pass,” she explained. “Just ask anybody. And also too late, because death don't never come in time to save you from sorrow.” Hard to argue with that now.
* * * *
Jim heard about Hurricane Katrina on the news, but paid no attention to it until Gwen called. A storm snob, he quietly scorned nervous Nellies, convinced that anything could be ridden out if he ran the bathtub full of water and laid in an ample supply of sardines and bread. Hadn't he survived three big ones and a dozen little ones in the course of his life?
But Gwen was worried, and called from Bonaparte to tell him so. “I don't like the way it's waltzing aro
und the Gulf,” she said. “You know it's picking up energy all the time. Come on up, Jim. Beat the crowd. Besides, I want to see you,” she added. “It's too damn prim around here, with no smelly old man in the house."
He spent another five minutes grumbling, just to make her realize he was doing it for her, not because he was scared of some damned storm. Then he packed a few clothes, and went outside to close the storm shutters. He waved languidly to his neighbors, who seemed as casual as he. Dr. Dreyfus was parking his Lexus. A lesbian couple—Jean and Carol, was it?—who lived on the other side were walking their pugs, Bunch and Bundle. In the yard that backed on his, the Campbells’ kids were enjoying their new pool as noisily as usual.
He considered, then decided against emptying his fridge. How long would he be gone, after all? He tossed his suitcase into the trunk of his car and took off.
It was Saturday, August 27, 2005, a day in the doldrums, windless and searing. The last storm coordinates he noted before turning off and unplugging his TV made him uneasy—Katrina had finally made up her mind and was taking dead aim at New Orleans. A Cat 3, she was as big as Hurricane Betsy had been, back in 1965—the strongest storm he'd ever lived through. He wanted to ask Madame Lott about Katrina, and drove twenty miles up the Airline before cutting over to I-10. But her studio was closed and locked, so he slid Ella Sings Cole Porter into his car's CD player, turned up the air conditioning, and headed without undue haste northward toward the land of loess bluffs and kudzu infestations.
Three hours later he was drinking iced tea on the long curving porch of Gwen's neat, elderly house among the walled gardens and wisteria of Bonaparte's Old Town. She smiled at him, a big busty woman with close-cropped gray hair and a formidable Armenian nose (her maiden name had been Sarkosian). “It takes a hurricane to make you come see me,” she complained, as if it were all his fault.
Then she launched her conversational surfboard on a tide of gossip about the town that she, like the natives, called Bony Part. Who was sleeping with whom. Who was sleeping with what. Juicy little scandals from a juicy little town. Some teenage kids of local bigwigs had been caught buck nekkid in a Sweet Dreams Motel with Mazola for lubrication and Ecstasy for, well, ecstasy. Jim smiled tolerantly and succumbed to a summer trance, sipping the cold tea and enjoying the hum of her voice as if he were napping near a beehive.
FSF, October 2007 Page 10
