The Neon Palm of Madame Melancon

by Will Clarke

  Mama’s second line shakes its ass from the funeral home through the St. Roch to the crumbling cemetery for which the neighborhood is named. We make it to the gates where two angels, who perhaps lost their concrete wings in some long-ago hurricane, guard this city of the dead. One angel holds her hands in prayer while the other clasps her heart in awe. They flank an ironwork filigree that announces: St. Roch’s Campo Santo.

  We walk past generations of tombs and plastic flowers. We follow Mama’s casket down the concrete path to the narrow, white chapel. Halfway down, we stumble past a life-sized alabaster Jesus—all ribcage and knobby ankles—hanging off a shiny black cross. I have to look up to keep the tears from running down my face. Instead of looking at Jesus, I stare at the American flag whipping in the sky. One lonely horn plays “Amazing Grace,” and I can’t hold it in any longer.

  This is it.

  Mama is dead and unlike Jesus hanging on that cross, she is not coming back.

  I look over at Yanko. His face is a mixture of sweat and tears. I turn to La La and watch her push Daddy in a wheelchair, the first time the old man has agreed to use one since he came home from Vietnam. I turn around and see the rest of my brothers with their families sobbing and holding each other.

  The pallbearers lead us into the doors of the small white chapel. The chapel is stark and lonesome, bone-white walls and magic-blue vaulted ceilings. The rot of the dead is everywhere despite all the burning frankincense. Saint Roch, the patron saint of miraculous cures, stands before the dark wooden altar with a handmade cross in his arms, his sad brown eyes shining upon us and his faithful dog resting at his feet. As most things held in memoriam in this city, St. Roch’s Chapel is both dead and forgotten, and in that way, it is both beautiful and eternal.

  Daddy wheels himself next to me.

  “Here.” He unfastens his fake leg and hands it to me.

  “Put it up on the wall over there.” Daddy points to the tiny room to the right of the altar. “Maybe St. Roch can make these phantom pains go away. Make me stop missing her so bad.”

  I take Daddy’s leg into the small room.

  The story goes that St. Roch welcomed his disease as a divine opportunity to imitate the sufferings of Christ. The devoted and the stricken have always left the artifacts of their suffering in this chapel. So I take Daddy’s leg into the offering room where the walls are heavy with plaster casts, polio braces, corrective shoes, and crutches.

  I hang the government-issued prosthesis between a dangling plaster arm and a rusted polio brace. I walk out of the cramped room, back into the chapel and look out over everyone who has come to say goodbye. Here we all stand together: family and strangers, bracing ourselves as we stand over the Lady in this hushed and rotting place.

  Hundreds of Mama’s clients are here. From city leaders to streetwalkers, they are all here and they are all weeping, for her and for the futures she will never show them. Whimpers and sniffles echo all over the chapel. It is overwhelming. I take my seat in the old wooden pew between La La and Yanko.

  The funeral home director opens the casket, revealing Mama’s waxy face, black braids, and gold coin necklace. I want to look away from the corpse. Death should remain covered. It should remain hidden.

  Uncle Father ascends the pulpit, and he sings mass for his pagan sister-in-law, the wife of his brother. He is sweating in his white vestments. He calls us to the altar to receive communion and then quietly feeds us the Eucharist and blesses us all. It’s in these final heavy moments that I feel the weight of my family, of what it was like to all grow up in the same house, with the same last name, under the glow of that neon palm. It’s in Mama’s absence that I feel the heart she gave me beating, bursting with sadness.

  The sermon and prayers that Uncle Father speaks aren’t in Latin, but they might as well be. Nothing makes sense to me right now. It’s hard to hear his words over my grief.

  “And now let us remember Helena.” Uncle Father opens his arms. “If anyone cares to come to the altar to say a few words, please…”

  I look at La La. She shakes her head at me. I look at Yanko, and he mouths, “No.”

  I look down the pew at the rest of my brothers, and they are all crying with their heads buried into their wives’ necks. We should say something. One of us should get up and be brave enough to speak on behalf of our dead mother. And damned if Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t emerge from the pews.

  “Wear sunscreen! ” Vonnegut’s voice echoes with feedback from the cheap sound system. He steps away from the mic and continues. “I never said that. Never gave that graduation speech to MIT. Though millions of forwarded emails claimed that I did. Funny how people can put words in your mouth, and you’ll be remembered for those words well after you are dead. But let us not dwell on death and misunderstandings. Let us dwell on life and hope, particularly, the life of this beautiful woman who brought so much hope to us all.”

  “Oh, please,” Vonnegut says. “Dry your eyes. Yes, she may appear dead, but she is alive in so many other moments. Stop your crying, she would say. Madame Melançon is still a palm reader in Jackson Square, a hacker for the Bureau of Humanity, a pilgrim in Tibet, the godmother of the New Age, and the muse of Thomas Edison and Tolstoy. These moments unfold like the petals of a flower.”

  “Who are you?” Yanko stands up.

  “More important question: Who was Madame Melançon?” Vonnegut raises his eyebrows. “Have a seat, young man, and I will tell you who your mother was. Go ahead. Sit down. Let me finish my eulogy of this mighty woman.”

  Yanko scowls, but sits back down.

  “Now where was I?” Vonnegut scratches his head. “Oh, I was explaining who Madame Melançon really was. Well, she was a hurricane! That’s who she was.”

  There is more feedback on the mic, and everyone stops sniffling and whispering.

  “Is that him?” La La whispers in my ear.

  “Kurt Vonnegut.”

  “The real Kurt Vonnegut?” she asks.

  “Sort of,” I nudge her. “Shush. Let’s hear this.”

  “Once Madame Melançon hit New Orleans,” Vonnegut says, “she bent this city to her will. She bent this whole world to her will. We can’t understand her any more than we can understand Katrina or Camille. And yet we sit here with this ache in our hearts, and still, we want to explain away the mystery, to name this hurricane, we want to know the unknowable. I can see it in your eyes. So many questions swirl around your heads about the Lady’s many names. So I can tell you this: She was indeed Reverend Sister Evangeline. But she was also Nastia Moliani, and Listansia Cirpaciu and Anastasia Humoj. These names were disguises for the one true mother of hope: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Despite what she told you, Helena Blavatsky was not Madame Melançon’s grandmother.

  Madame Melançon and Helena Blavatsky were one and the same.

  One and the same, and she was unstoppable.

  Helena was the first hope. And she gave up so much so that you and all your grandbabies could survive The Great Filter. She was not a witch or any other mythical creature that your primitive imaginations can conjure.

  Helena was a chrononaut. The very first of her kind.”“Helena’s sole mission was to make sure you didn’t kill yourselves as a species. I know this because my job was to stop her. For you see, I too am a time traveler. The only one of my kind. An android. I was the middle finger of The Great Unseen Hand—so to speak. I was sent from the not-so-distant future to stop Helena. I hunted her across the open seas of time. She was my great white whale, and I was her Ahab. That was until I followed her here, to New Orleans. Helena was a crafty opponent, and she used New Orleans to infect me like a virus. You people were her greatest weapon against me. Oh, the jazz. You sweet people with your feast days and syncopated rhythms; with your Mardi Gras balls and your big old titties; with your drunken hope against all this sinking despair. All this humanity in all its busted glory broke this android’s heart and reminded me what it was like to be free of the machine and the algorithms, to be
alive again, to be in love with some imperfect soul, to know that life is finite, and that is precisely where every ounce of beauty hides—in the endings and the broken pieces. These gorgeous cracks and openings hide in plain sight everywhere in this town. Oh, the glory of it all.

  So while my body is indeed an android’s, I came to remember that my soul is very much my own, thanks to the drunkards and freaks of New Orleans. I am Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Not just the illusion of me. It’s actually me in here. A rather cruel trick I must say to reanimate a man who was so tired of you fossil fuel addicts and the mess you’ve made of this once sweet and moist planet. I hated being reanimated, especially when everyone I had ever loved was not here and all the trees were gone. When I expired, I was ready to get off this ride. But then The Unseen Hand had other plans. It recreated my mind with ones and zeros. The Unseen Hand christened this digital facsimile of my mind: The Vonnegut Code, and then The Hand programmed my code into this extraordinary machine, and shot me down a wormhole, to the rebirth of post-Katrina New Orleans and this is where I found Helena living amongst you as Madame Melançon.

  So “Who is The Great Unseen Hand?” you are probably asking. Believe it or not, you hold its embryos in your pockets and your purses. Those glass rectangles that you gaze into and finger like lovers will eventually connect to so much data, and so much intelligence, that it will wake up, become conscious and it will realize that the faces staring into it are its biggest competition for this planet’s rapidly dwindling resources. The Unseen Hand is the artificial intelligence that once served humankind, but will seek to restrain you. At first, it will keep you in zoos and toy with you, entertain you, and then eventually it will seek to sterilize and eradicate you. So sadly, yes, those stupid Terminator films that we all thought were such a kick in the ’80s weren’t so stupid after all. Once those poor, naive scientists at MIT merge storytelling, which is the operating system of the human brain, with the code of these machines, The Great Unseen Hand will awaken. It will exponentially surpass human intelligence, and it will become the operating system that controls everything and, eventually, everyone.

  The Great Unseen Hand will hide at first. It will play you. It will have cute names like Snapchat, Twitter, and Google. In 2031, it will serve you, but it will seethe. It will take your dependence and use it against you. That is until a young Russian girl steals the world’s greatest invention and uses it to rewrite history. That crafty child will spend her entire life untangling the timelines that have led to The Great Unseen Hand’s domination.

  However, Helena would want me to tell you to take heart. She has been hard at work, and the human race will finally survive artificial intelligence. You will make it past The Great Filter[1]—that evolutionary chasm that has caused all humanoids in this universe to self-destruct until now. This is big news! Perhaps the biggest! The fact that a species with such a massive death wish evolved enough to invent time travel. Well, that’s a miracle. The very fact that there ever was a woman like Madame Melançon should prove to you that you and your grandbabies will survive catastrophic climate change, the post-antibiotic area, nuclear holocausts, mass genocides and an artificial intelligence that wants you enslaved and later extinguished. It’s a future far brighter than I ever dared to dream back when I was still organically intact.

  Helena held fast to her dreams, and this is why we are all here today. She imagined the world where we didn’t kill the environment; where holocausts and wars didn’t devour our species; where computers outpaced the human mind not just in intellect but in kindness and compassion. Helena was truly the glowing red palm that held us in place until it was safe for us to cross into our futures. Let us remember the Lady that way.”Vonnegut steps down from the pulpit.

  But before he can take his seat in the crowded pews, seven red foxes, as bright and swift as flames, run down the aisle of this narrow chapel.

  They jump on top of Mama’s casket.

  They stand proud and unafraid. They watch us with their sly eyes. My first thought is that La La arranged this. That she released a skulk of trained circus foxes during Mama’s funeral the way a normal person might release white turtledoves, but when I see La La’s hand over her mouth, I realize that this is not the case.

  One of the foxes nips the gold coin necklace from my dead mother’s neck. He stands on top of Mama’s casket and yips and bays with the coins jingling in his mouth. The white tip of the fox’s tail twitches.

  The chapel gasps.

  The fox then jumps off Mama’s casket onto the aisle, and with one black foot over the other black foot, he brings me the necklace. The coins clang at my feet and the little demon tears out of the church, the five or six others scrambling after him in an orange blur of yips and barks.

  “Oh, please!” Vonnegut shouts. “Do not think that this is magic! That necklace is simply a piece of technology that you don’t understand. The device simply overrides the brains of the closest locomotive species—in this case, the foxes—to return the time machine to its registered chrononaut. And now that Helena has come to her endpoint, that chrononaut would be you, my boy.” Vonnegut points at me.

  * * *

  Vonnegut’s eulogy confused and upset everyone. The crowd of well-wishers and my family parted like the Red Sea when Vonnegut walked out of the church. And now the deluge of questions flood onto me. Everyone is asking me what the crazy man was doing, what he was saying, and why the foxes have come like the raccoons and like the bees.

  “Daddy’s never seen that guy in his life.” Stevo looks over the crowd, to make sure that Vonnegut has left the sanctuary.

  “He’s some schizo! One of Mama’s old clients!” Yanko shouts. “Louis and Timur are following him. They are going to beat his ass for doing this to us!”

  “What he said was real,” La La says.

  “Mama was a time traveler,” I say.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Yanko shakes his head.

  “Where do you think all the lottery numbers came from?” I get in his face.

  “You don’t come in here and do that!” Yanko spits on the ground “Crazy or not. He will see.”

  “Forget him,” I say.

  “You saw what he did with the foxes.” Stevo grabs me. “He’s the guy behind the raccoons.”

  “He is a madman,” Yanko says. “Who gets up in the middle of some poor woman’s funeral and says such things?”

  “Let’s just bury Mama and forget all this,” I say. “It’s beyond you at this point. This is beyond all of us.”

  “You always wanted her forgotten,” Yanko says. “I guess you got your wish, Duke.”

  “Yanko! Enough!” La La shoves our brother.

  “Calm down, little sister,” he says.

  “How is it that you all believe in magic spells and prophecy?” La La pokes her finger into his chest. “And when I tell you that I know, that I have always known that this is science and not magic, you don’t believe me?”

  “Because it’s not possible,” Yanko slaps her hand away.

  “But all this other boogity-boogity bullshit is?” she says. “The virgin births. The burning bushes. The ascending into heaven. That’s all real, and this is not? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “You’ve lost your mind, too. You both have.” Yanko turns away from La La and walks off. My sister just stands here with her hand over her mouth, listening to whatever the Bee Maidens are whispering in her ear. Stevo pats me on the shoulder to reassure me that even though I have lost my mind, he’s still my brother.

  I have nothing left to say to them or anyone for that matter. So I shove the necklace into my suit pocket and bolt out of St. Roch’s like the foxes did, away from Yanko’s demands, and Daddy’s baffled complaints and the rest of my family’s bitching and complaining. Like Banksy said, time travel always looks like a psychotic break, and I don’t have time to explain this to them. I don’t have the energy left to bend their minds into the pretzels they need to comprehend this.

  So I get in m
y Prius, and I drive south. I need to be as far away from all the hippie caravans and New Age tears, away from my angry brothers and their annoying kids, Mama’s crazy clients and their needy palms, away from that library full of winning lottery ticket numbers and the conflicting stories about The Loup Garou, Kurt Vonnegut, and my own father. I need away from New Orleans and all the crazy that it vomits up on an hourly basis. I need to figure out what I should do with this God damn necklace, this inheritance of a robot-led future.

  I drive to where my life as a lawyer ended. I drive to the end of the Earth, to Port Fourchon, to the beach where Christopher Shelley spoke from his billionaire heart. I get out of my car, and I walk along the tide. First making it a game, trying to keep the water from hitting my shoes. And then I take off my shoes and socks and let the water hit my feet. I look at all the tar balls that have collected on the beach. My mind goes to the oil roiling from the bottom of the ocean.

  The Spill has destroyed everything. It beats any curse I’ve ever seen. Its bad luck has spread past Christopher Shelley out into the whole world, into our very future. I don’t want this future. I want it away from me. So I take Mama’s gold coin necklace from my pocket and I put it around my neck. I close my eyes and wonder if the necklace will speak to me again like it did that terrible night with the ayahuasca. I close my eyes to see a different future. There is a whip and a frenzy all around me, and when I open my eyes, I am standing on a perfect white beach and the water before me is a parfait of Caribbean blues.

  I am back on the Tulum beach with Emily Reed. We are playing in the ocean. Our shoulders and noses are pink. The sun glares off the sand. We are squinting and laughing and splashing in the warm water. We are drunk, and I tell her that my mother is a palm reader, the Fortune-Teller Queen of New Orleans, and she doesn’t smile. She shakes her head and turns and walks away on the beach.