Death Will Have Your Eyes

by James Sallis

  Facing the river, Forts St. Louis and St. Charles were far the most formidable. Yet from the first, walls and forts alike had been built as much to keep the French in, to keep them in every sense contained, as to repel outside forces.

  By the time of Louisiana’s sale to America in 1803, wall and forts were again crumbling. William Claiborne, the first American governor, reported that final demolition was made easier when on a dark night one of the rear forts was stolen in its entirety, presumably for use as firewood.

  39

  The world has changed more than we can imagine, David,” Blaise said.

  Outside, a midsize plane painted white with blue stripes that ran its length, looking like seersucker, breasted into the sky.

  “Or perhaps it’s only that, having changed ourselves, we can no longer see it as we once did.”

  We hunched over our coffees. They’d come out of a machine the size of a small refrigerator that promised to deliver everything from espresso and cappuccino to hot chocolate and local café au lait. I, for one, had my doubts. I’d seen the counterman emptying in bags of powder as we approached, before he turned to serve us.

  To our right, passengers with camera cases and backpacks emerged from International Arrivals. To our left, huge Mardi Gras masks, gold, green and purple, a clown, a witch, a lion, loomed above an exit.

  Gabrielle came back from the rest room. I pushed a questionable au lait in its Styrofoam cup towards her.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  She sniffed at it, looked into the container as though wondering when the goldfish might have died.

  “So much for New Orleans’s reputation.”

  “You’re in Jefferson Parish now, honey child. Out here on the frontier, it’s every man for himself.”

  “What about the women?”

  “They’re for himself too.”

  “Figures.” She turned to Blaise. “I overheard what you were just saying, the last part anyhow. You think people ever really change? In any way that matters, that makes a difference?”

  “Well…You come right down to it, I guess I have to, chère.”

  A gaggle of middle-aged Germans came out of the corridor from International Arrivals. The guard at the gate said something to them in German. Keeping faces averted into their own group, they responded, laughing.

  “What about those?”

  Gabrielle nodded towards a dozen young Latin males in muscle shirts and white slacks. They were seated in a line, matching blue athletic bags at each of their feet.

  “You think I should go over and tell them that their women will be making their own decisions from now on?”

  “Good point,” Blaise said. “But what about him?” nodding towards me.

  “Well, true, he’s a special case. Always has been.”

  “He’s changed.”

  “More than I wanted to, originally,” I said. “And far less than I wanted to ultimately.”

  Blaise’s eyes followed another plane heaving itself into sky. “Life is so very peculiar. So particular,” he said. “Like a series of snapshots, each one of them slightly, all but imperceptibly, different from the one before. But, still, by the end of the series everything is different. You look up and don’t know where you are anymore; it might just as well be another world.”

  “Maybe it is another world. Johnsson told me that all the things we cared for so passionately, all the things we believed so strongly, were gone now. That they’d come to be of no more consequence than an old sweater, or a stamp collection.”

  “Johnsson admitted that?”

  I nodded.

  “Amazing. And I’ve known the man, worked with him, over forty years.”

  I shrugged.

  “He is rather a walled city, himself, you know. I suppose we all have been. The nature of the beast, eh, David?”

  “Of walls, at least. And Joshua out there now with his trumpet.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “There’s a poem by Cavafy, a Greek, that I’ve been thinking about a lot, Blaise. ‘The Barbarians.’ In it, this city’s always gearing up for imminent attack. People working together, making decisions and passing laws, gathering foodstuffs, building, arming themselves. Because soon the barbarians will be at the gates. And this has been going on for years, for lifetimes. But the barbarians never come, and finally people realize they aren’t going to come, and then everything begins to fall apart. The poet says he doesn’t know what they’ll do now without the barbarians. Those people, he writes, were a kind of solution.”

  Blaise put his empty cup on the table by my own. Gabrielle’s remained full.

  “It seems there are still barbarians at your walls, David.”

  “Whatever far land they come from, and to whatever purpose: yes. But not a tribe, perhaps. Maybe only a single wild man.”

  “You know that Gabrielle will be kept safe?”

  “Yes. And I thank you.”

  “Even you won’t know where we are. But when it’s over—I will know when it’s over—I’ll bring her to you.”

  I nodded.

  “I don’t understand this,” he said.

  “Nor do I.”

  “But I don’t have to understand.”

  He stood. “Our plane should be about to board.” He held out his hand. We shook, then embraced. “What will you do now, my friend?”

  “Be still, I suppose, and silent, and trust this may bring them in closer to me.”

  “You will be wanting a moment alone,” he said, and stepped off towards the concourse.

  “Blaise.”

  He stopped. “Yes?”

  “You understand why I never came back.”

  “Ah. But David: you did.”

  He turned away again, into the concourse, the crowd.

  “He’s a wonderful man,” Gabrielle said.

  “He is.”

  “I only wish I could have known about him before this, known how important he was to you.”

  “I—”

  “No. I’m not asking for explanations, David. I don’t have to understand, either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to. That I don’t hope, in the future, all this might become a part of my life, too.”

  “How could you want it to?”

  “I don’t even know what it is, not really. But I know who you are. And it is part of you. A larger part than you want to admit.”

  She leaned into me. My arms went around her.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Yes. You do.”

  Then she and Blaise were walking away towards the gates.

  I hurried to the escalator and stood at a railing high over the concourse watching them make their way together across the polished floor. Line after line of travelers with wrapped bundles and luggage—golf clubs, guitar cases, shopping bags, matched leather—milled at ticket counters right and left. Blaise and Gabrielle walked through them all, down the floor’s empty center, into sunlight.

  When they were out of sight I retrieved the car from level A-4 (yep, still running, still indomitable) and drove back down Airline, past dozens of makeshift businesses and ramshackle motels advertising free movies and weekly rates, to the hotel. I showered and shaved, and walked across Tulane for breakfast at the Home Plate Inn. It was what used to be called a luncheonette. Huge letters high on the front window announced WE NEVER CLOSE. There was little window space left among a jumble of legends such as Po-Boys, Daily Specials, Steaks, Breakfast Any Time, and what space there was, bore a grayish-brown film of forty years’ grease, smoke and bad city air, like geological strata. But the eggs, grits and biscuits were first rate.

  So was the coffee, and I walked another large black back to my room. I lay for a while propped on the bed, idly browsing TV—a piece on Japanese gardens, a profile of Anna Akhmatova I’d seen before, a Jerry Lewis movie, various sports events, news updates, cooking shows—thinking about Gabrielle, about Blaise, about Adrian’s death there on that service road. Then I discovered an FM-radio ch
annel playing Mahler’s First and put the remote down.

  Sometime during the second movement’s achingly slow minor-key version of “Frère Jacques,” I fell asleep.

  When I awoke the next morning, Luc Planchat was sitting beside the bed drinking coffee from a plastic cup.

  40

  He put another like it on the table beside me. The lamp’s round, frosted globe hung above it like a sun gone cold. Morning light held its breath, oddly depthless, oddly indeterminate, in the window.

  “Au lait,” he said. “Fresh. And,” retrieving a waxed-paper bag from the floor by his chair, “hot, or at least still warm, I hope, beignets.”

  I pried off the cup’s lid and let steam come up around my face. It smelled of nuts and fecund earth and growing things, its depth and richness for a moment preempting the world’s glib surface. I took a sip. The taste wasn’t as rich as the smell—what actuality ever fulfills anticipation?—but it was close enough.

  We sat there. Indistinct voices passed by in the hallway. Sunlight swarmed at the window behind blinds and deadfall drapes, rummaging for entry at some corner, quarter or edge, seeking recognition.

  “I know your work, old friend,” Planchat said. “I’m a fan. Even have—had, I suppose I must say now—two small pieces from some years back, lucite and ebony. Not much like what you’re doing now, of course—or what you were doing, should I say? But exquisite, truly beautiful objects. Something of a great, cold sadness about them. I’ll not forget them. Though I’ll never see them again.

  “Like your Cendrars, je suis l’homme qui n’a plus de passé. I’m the man with no more past.”

  Or too much of it, I thought.

  I scrabbled in the bag for a beignet. When I bit into it, tatters of steam escaped, and powdered sugar snowed down onto my chest and legs. Outside, the day turned over, turned again, and finally caught.

  “It’s not at all of any real importance whatsoever that we survive, you know.” Planchat savored the last mouthful of coffee and dropped his cup into the waxed-paper bag. “Either the race itself—or you and I individually.”

  He looked to the window: that quarrel of light.

  His eyes, when he turned them to me, were much like the window.

  “One of our preservationists observed how difficult it is to recall to our presence that which we’ve asked to leave. It’s just as hard to rid ourselves of what we’ve summoned. Perhaps more so. All those stories of monsters, deals with diverse devils, three wishes, Gogol’s Nose: something in our DNA understands all that. Tools aren’t readily converted to other use. Axes make poor cuticle scissors.”

  He walked to the window.

  “Do you mind?” Pulling back drapes, opening blinds.

  Rivers of light flooded the room.

  “There. That’s the only speech I have, a short one, and it’s done. The story accompanying it will take a bit longer.”

  He came back across the room and resumed his chair.

  “Some months ago I realized I’d come under scrutiny. That I had suddenly become, for some agency or another, whatever its motivation, an object of interest. No single thing I could point up. A half-dozen, then a dozen small, insignificant things. And instinct, of course.

  “Once perceived, that interest, that presence, became ever more apparent—finally almost tangible. I couldn’t for one moment imagine that it might be other than malignant. And so I fled. Fled that life, with its careful, safe architecture, as I’d fled so many others before—and with little more remorse or regret. The quiet years, that interlude, were over. Like Lazarus, I went out into the world again.

  “From afar I watched circles of activity around where I’d been, some of it purposeful, much of it puzzling. Eventually I saw that activity withdraw; and what strands I could, I followed. To an electronics lab in Buffalo. To an army base near the Canadian border. Followed the spiraling-down of all these lines, finally, to you.

  “Death has sent us a most elaborate invitation, old friend. It occurs to me that we might do well to RSVP that invitation together.”

  41

  We left the hotel together half an hour later by doors opening onto a narrow alley and canyonlike culvert, wearing gabardine overalls liberated from an unwatched laundry and carrying gray plastic bags we’d stuffed with trash.

  Quixote at least had his windmills. We didn’t know what to attack, or where. None of us did.

  There was a certain aesthetic to all this, of course, my own motion drawing along these others, their course in turn circumscribed by Planchat; but it was form only, volumes brought to balance, vectors in momentary equilibrium: beautiful speech without intrinsic meaning.

  Over beers in an ancient bar just off Canal, still wearing overalls, two workingmen among others, we talked through our options. The nameless bar appeared to be illuminated solely by Dixie Beer signs scattered liberally about. Whenever the street door opened, light started in, then remembered its place and, as though nodding to some unspoken agreement, withdrew. We sat at a high hardwood bar polished smooth as elbows.

  It seemed best, we decided, simply for me to continue what I’d been doing all along: remain visible, stay in the open, wait for storms to come down. As far as we knew, whoever was out there had no idea of Planchat’s presence—and that changed the whole equation.

  Circles inside circles.

  Later we walked down Canal to the river. It was getting towards noon then, people streaming in from every direction to lodge in clusters by fast-food stands and the mouths of restaurants like leukocytes rushing to infection sites. The river was a shining, keen blade of water.

  “You cared for your new life?” Planchat said after a while. We’d been sitting quietly, watching as one of the riverboats filled with tourists for its noontime excursion, listening to the steam calliope of another farther down towards skyline and bridge.

  “Yes. I did. I learned to.”

  “And for someone in it?”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  In midwater three barges aligned in a perfect eclipse, then began drawing away from one another.

  “She’s waiting for you?”

  I looked into his face and after a moment said that I didn’t know.

  Neither of us spoke for several minutes.

  “When I realized I was being surveyed,” Planchat said, “it was with something very much like relief. I’d passed through a number of careers, at length amassed a considerable personal fortune. Women wandered in and out of my life. I couldn’t care for them, didn’t feel much of anything, really. Two or three in the morning, I’d find myself deserting my own bed, wishing they weren’t there, that I could be again alone. Because I was alone, I’d always been, and these women’s bodies beside me, the anxiety and surrender in their eyes, served only to make that fact unbearably painful to me.”

  Planchat picked up a loose chunk of asphalt and threw it out over the water. A heron tipped towards the ripples it made, then reconsidered.

  “I hated it, David. Ten years, and I hated every month, every week, every day, every last moment of it. Now that’s all blessedly done with. I’m awake, and the dream is fading. This is what I do. Not the only thing I was ever good at, not at all—but the only thing that ever brought me joy.”

  I knew then that it was Luc, not myself, who would die.

  42

  They came in fast when they came, at four-something the following afternoon, in the tree-shrouded streets just above Tulane, two of them, one in front of me when I turned a corner, the other closing in behind.

  No one said anything. I looked from one to the other, instinctively turning sideways. Somehow their concentration wasn’t as focused as it should have been, and that didn’t make a lot of sense. A little like Doc Holliday stopping off to bird-watch on his way to the O.K. Corral.

  Catching an arc of intent that flashed between them, in what amounted to a single motion I looked at A, feinted towards B and came back around in an easy circle to strike at A, who was already mov
ing in to help his partner. The force of my blow, riding on his own momentum, took him down, hard, on his back. And from there it was a simple thing to follow the line of force, feeding it into a body roll that slammed me up against B and dropped him with a loud crack of head against sidewalk.

  Frankly, I had no idea that I still had that kind of movement in me.

  Education is a wonderful thing.

  I looked through their pockets and found the usual half-nothings: faceless keys and a tensor pick, an array of official identification. One wore a suit with Hong Kong’s version of an English label and carried British travel papers. The other, in jeans and leather jacket, bore a Polish passport.

  That seemed to be all the action. We waited. Finally Planchat stepped out of the cover of trees to join me.

  That’s life, I was thinking. All the things you wait for, so anticlimactic when they finally happen.

  “A disappointing catch, old friend,” Planchat said.

  Then he looked up—maybe intuition took his gaze there, maybe at that moment (I think he did) he somehow knew—at the rooftop of a boarded-up Victorian house nearby.

  Silently a black-rimmed hole appeared in his forehead.

  I dove for the shelter of the nearest parked car.

  One eternity went by strutting.

  Then another.

  Birdsongs had just started up again when a body came over the roof’s side, tumbled through the limbs of a huge pecan tree, and fell motionless to earth.

  I waited.

  Waited some more, then went over to the body. It had been taken down quite expertly. Garotted, most likely, with a silken cord. Most likely with the silken cord now tied in a bow about the man’s genitals.

  “Garbage,” a voice said beside and above me. “Garbage everywhere. Piled up, tottering, ready to fall. Great stinking bags of it, like this one.”