The Neon God

by Ben D'Alessio

  Thyrsus-less and drunk, Dio did his best to put up a fight, although it had been eons since his battlefield glory against the Titans.

  Growing dizzy with every shot, he remembered the automobile displaying the public service announcement back when he still held hope for this city in the swamp, and shouted with all of his strength: “Tchoupitoulas! Tchoupitoulas!!!”

  “Da fuck?”

  “Why’s he yellin’ dat? Why’s he…”

  “Tchoupitoulas!!!”

  A porch light switched on, and then another, and another, as if the houses on Dublin Street were signaling to each other like fire beacons.

  “Tchopitoulas!!!”

  The squeak of a screen door opening sent the attackers running back toward the bar. “What in da hell is goin’ on out chyea?!”

  A large man with a stomach that sagged beneath his t-shirt came storming out into the street, chasing away the muggers. He helped Dio to his feet and brought him inside to get him cleaned up.

  “I’d offer ya some of the good stuff, but it don’t look like you need nothin’ mo’. I can smell the alcohol on ya from ’ere.” He threw a handful of ice cubes into a towel and twisted it into a ball. “Put dis der. You a Tulane student?” While the man cleaned the blood and dabbed at the cut with some ointment, Dio relaxed in the chair, content with being tended to again. “This won’t need stitches, but boy, dey gotchu good. Lemme guess, you comin’ from da station? You ain’t from here, huh? Prolly figuahd as such and followed ya right out da bar. Prolly stayin’ in one of those Air-n-Bs in the neighborhood. Every week it seems like someone is lettin’ a stranger in dey home. How much you have to drink? I can barely tell where the blood stains end and the wine stains begin, son. Dey say dat’s supplemental income and all, but den you get tourists not knowin’ where dey goin’.”

  “I truly appreciate your aid.” Dio dabbed his fingers on the white bandage that crossed his forehead. “Could I have a glass of wine, my fine…” Dio had remembered Zibby’s admonishment and resisted the urge to call him a “fine Nubian.”

  “Okay, okay, you look like you could use a drink. I’ll have one wit’cha.” He grabbed a bottle sitting horizontal in a rack. “I’m Maurice, but everyone calls me Maury. Look at dis, Louisiana wine from across the lake. Can you believe it?” He admired the label as if it were an esteemed vintage of Romanée-Conti. “You got good wine where ya from?”

  “The most delicious.”

  “And where is dat?”

  Dio watched as the ruby red splashed into the glass, “From the heavens themselves,” he answered.

  “Ha! Sounds like a nice place. I should be offering something better than this juice then!”

  “As long as it isn’t Phoenician,” Dio said, and downed the glass without hesitation.

  Zibby

  Zibby slung her backpack over her shoulder and pulled her bike out from the side of the house. Vines full of grape bunches had sprouted out from the soil in her backyard in three neat rows.

  At first, she was absolutely stunned and speechless, simply amazed at the vines ascending before her very eyes. But then Zibby remembered a movie with Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti, The Illusionist, where Norton’s character made an orange tree grow out of a pot in the same way. She had also seen David Blaine and Criss Angel (and their subsequent wannabes on the internet) pull off unexplainable tricks right on the sidewalk. She felt stupid that she hadn’t considered it right away—come on, the toga? The magic tricks? There was probably some off-shoot of an off-shoot of a fringe fest this weekend in the Bywater, and the guy had just gotten side-tracked drinking on the street.

  But that didn’t take away from the fact that he was drop-dead gorgeous. She looked over the fence and into the window, hoping to get a glimpse of him, well rested and toga-less. But there wasn’t any movement. She mounted the bike—Did those grapes get bigger since the last time I looked over there?—and rode down Dublin Street.

  Loyola’s law school was about five blocks closer to Zibby’s house than the main campus, and the most direct way to get there was down South Carrollton to St. Charles. But Zibby made the left one block before Saint Charles and took Hampson, a residential street sandwiched between the famous Uptown thoroughfare and the commercial Maple Street, where her friend Tara worked at Vito’s, a neighborhood sports bar that attracted the graduate and undergraduate crowd.

  She screeched to a halt in front of a white center hall with tawny wood shutters and a black iron fence. 7632 Hampson Street wasn’t just any beautiful Uptown home on the market with an asking price of $1.1 million, it was the one-time home of New Orleans’s native son, John Kennedy Toole, author of A Confederacy of Dunces.

  Dunces, as it is colloquially called, made Zibby, in her middle teenage years when she dreamed of living anywhere but her hometown, proud to be a New Orleanian. The book had long been a staple in the Local Authors section of Oak Street Books, and growing up, perusing the store, she would see the ubiquitous cover with the fat man in the green hat prominently sitting in its own display. But Zibby—again, in her formidable middle teenage years—had adopted an attitude of contempt toward all things “popular.”

  She snickered at friends who indulged in Twilight and derided cousins who read the latest Harry Potter in one sitting—she sneered at classmates who, in fan-girl solidarity, shared their copies of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

  “It’s the same book!” Zibby yelled at the wall of blank faces.

  But Liv, then only an employee of Oak Street Books and a graduate student, had asked Zibby, “How can you be from here and not have read Dunces already?”

  She didn’t like having her Orleanianess questioned, so she bought a copy of the book despite her teenage frustration with her hometown; she finished it in one sitting. Now it was Zibby who was up until the deepest hours of the night with her bedside lamp on as if she had spent hours waiting in line for the latest Harry Potter.

  Of course, she had picked up bits and pieces of JKT’s life, as it was famous in the city for its unadulterated tragedy, but she had not known the specifics: Toole, born and raised in New Orleans, had been an accomplished student and professor (at Dominican College, the defunct all-girls school where Loyola Law now resided), but after years of publisher rejections, he took his own life in Mississippi via car exhaust. He was thirty-one—“If only he was twenty-seven,” Zibby said to herself, a most macabre thought. After his death, it took eleven years of zealous badgering from Toole’s mother for Dunces to finally get published. And that was only after Louisiana’s own Walker Percy, then a professor at Loyola, gave the manuscript his endorsement—it went on to win the Pulitzer.

  John Kennedy Toole immediately became Zibby’s favorite Dead White Man. Unfortunately, Toole’s only other book was a short novel he wrote when he was sixteen—the talent he had at that age made her flush with envy.

  The only other writer that could pull Zibby into an all-night reading binge was Clemmons Ruiz, whose book Quiet in the Alley had been the first since Dunces to keep her up deep into the night.

  She dismounted her bike and walked up to the plaque attached to the iron fence, designating the house a historic landmark and featuring a description of its famous once-resident. Like always, Zibby stuck her finger to the “Kennedy” in the late author’s name and waited a couple of seconds with the hopes of sucking out any writing talent the man might’ve left behind.

  While her finger was stuck to the plaque, Zibby checked her watch. Even setting her watch to ten minutes fast, she was running late. Like the Greeks and Spaniards and other Mediterranean peoples, Zibby worked hard to fight the stereotype that her people were incapable of running a functional city and that New Orleans solely existed for paunched tourists from Ohio and Dallas–Fort Worth to visit and act reckless.

  “I don’t know how you guys live like this!” her roommate from Oklahoma said after spending the first weekend of college on a Bourbon Street bender.

  “We don’t,” Zibby said, returnin
g her gaze to Ruiz’s City of Modern Lovers.

  But the Oklahoman had started to vomit before Zibby had finished her sentence. And from the look of it and the smell of it, the slush was a regurgitated night of Hand Grenades, Hurricanes, and the faintest hint of tequila shots—Zibby had promptly left for the library.

  She hopped back on her bike, turned down Cherokee, and cut across the St. Charles Ave neutral ground without looking for the streetcar—she had developed a sixth sense for the rumbling iron caterpillar over the years—and got to Room 401 a few minutes early for Criminal Law.

  The students in the coliseum seating all looked up when Zibby opened the door, as if each additional matriculant was just one more bastard who could throw off the curve. She thought a girl in second row mouthed “Save yourself.” But it was probably just her adrenaline and the August heat playing tricks on her.

  She grabbed a seat in the middle of a middle row; she figured she was safest there and could do her best to blend into the sea of laptops. Zibby had forgotten that Tara was also in the class, and by the time she checked her phone and saw her friend’s text, she was already boxed in, sandwiched between two guys big enough to play the offensive line for LSU.

  Every time one of the doors opened, the coliseum looked up from their laptop screens and held their breath, only to return when another wide-eyed 1L hustled in and scrambled for a seat.

  At 8:59, the door flung open, but no one entered. As it slowly creaked shut, the silver-armed door closer fighting against gravity to prevent it from slamming, a pointed, black-toed shoe snuck its way between the frame and the door. Zibby heard a squeak sneak its way out of one of her classmate’s mouths, his face turning as purple as his t-shirt.

  Professor Ivon LaSalle nudged the door open with her elbow. She carried a black briefcase at knee level as she sipped a cold brew coffee—only the swirling ice in her plastic cup broke the coliseum’s silence.

  “So, are we people or are we humans?” she said, dropping the briefcase on the floor and setting the coffee on the podium. The clattering of keyboards and swirling-swish of law book pages erupted from the class. “Hmmm?”

  Zibby was still stunned that Professor LaSalle was a woman. The pre-semester emails forwarded from her teaching assistant and the directions for the first assignment on the Blackboard page had come across so curt and cold and completely…masculine. She pictured Liv folding her arms and shaking her head in disappointment as Zibby set the entire women’s movement back a half century.

  No one took the bait.

  “Okay then.” She placed her hands on the podium and leaned over the class roster. “Mr. Romano, are we people or are we humans?” She didn’t even bother locating Mr. Romano in the sea of anxiety before asking the question.

  “Uhhh…” rolled out from the back of the room.

  “Trying to hide in the back, I see. Where are you from, Mr. Romano?”

  “Kenner.”

  “Kenner. So you’re a Civilian, I presume?”

  “Like, Civil Law?” Mr. Romano answered with a piercing inflection.

  “Yes ‘like Civil Law,’” Professor LaSalle mocked.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Then you must’ve been familiar with State v. Keller, isn’t that right, Mr. Romano?”

  “Uh…no.”

  “No? You weren’t reading all pertinent case law over the summer, at your leisure, of course?”

  “Uh…no, I didn’t.”

  “Well, then you must be familiar with it now that it was assigned for today’s class?”

  “Uh…”

  “Mr. Romano, I assure you that if you decide to pursue a career in Criminal Law in the Twenty-fourth District of Louisiana, where your hometown of Kenner is located, and you ‘uh uh uh’ as much as you’re doing in my classroom today, neither Judge Williams nor Judge Breaux will hesitate to tomahawk his gavel into your gaping mouth.”

  “…”

  She took another pull from the coffee.

  Zibby watched the guy in front of her type What is the difference between people and humans in law school? into Google.

  Professor LaSalle stared down at the roster, sucking at the coffee until that irritating bubbling sound came shooting up the straw. The room had a Hunger Games feel, and the coliseum was an anxious District 12 awaiting the announcement of their tribute.

  The door flung open and a girl came stumbling in, whispering “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and hunched over as if evading enemy fire.

  “Get out,” LaSalle said without taking her eyes off the roster.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alexandra Zeigler.”

  “Get out, Ms. Zeigler.”

  “But I’m only…”

  “I’m going to assume that you’re a one-L, and that being the case, today is your first day of classes, this being your first class on your first day of classes, is that right?”

  “Uh…”

  “Please, Ms. Zeigler, if you cannot be timely on your first day of class while you still have some inspiration before the legal profession inevitably breaks you down, then I cannot believe that you would otherwise be prepared for the assault the rest of your peers”—she swept her arm across the class like Miss America—“have painfully been sitting through. Now get out. Speak to Mr. Romano outside of class to hear his inspiring legal argument on what makes us human.”

  The girl turned and walked toward the door, repeating “But the parking” to herself as if she had witnessed the frontline carnage of a warzone.

  LaSalle returned to the podium without looking at the class. She mouthed names to herself, which Zibby could hear between the pauses of fingernails rapping against the podium in that pinky-to-index-finger percussive rhythm.

  “Ms…. Mr…. Ms…. Dufossat? Ms. Dufossat.”

  Zibby froze, treating the Criminal Law professor like a Tyrannosaurus rex.

  “Élisabeth Dufossat?”

  Zibby raised her hand and pondered whether there was a statute of limitations on breathing.

  “Ahh, there you are. Is it safe to assume that with a name like that, you’re also a native to Louisiana?” Zibby stood up to answer the question, but LaSalle stopped her. “Oh, no, no, Ms. Dufossat, you need not stand to answer questions here. Formal procedures like that are solely perpetuated in movies and books that take place at Harvard Law, back when professors were real tyrants. As you have surely observed, Loyola is a much more progressive atmosphere complete with safe spaces to emulate the real world.”

  Zibby remained standing, but clamped her jaw to block the “uh…” from slipping out of her mouth.

  “You may sit, Ms. Dufossat.”

  She sat back down.

  “Are you a classmate of Mr. Romano’s?”

  Zibby never knew a Romano and it wasn’t possible for someone from the suburbs to go to Lusher, but she turned around and gave the sulking, pale student, who appeared as if he’d had an extra-terrestrial encounter, a second look.

  “No. I went to Lusher.”

  “A local? Okay, what neighborhood?” “Pigeon Town.”

  “Only a real local would use ‘Pigeon Town.’ Those real-estate agents really push ‘Leonidas,’ don’t they? Just like that ‘New Marigny’ crap over in the Seventh Ward.”

  A smile started to form on Zibby’s face, and she thought that maybe Professor LaSalle wasn’t the stone-cold bitch she appeared during the first ten minutes of class.

  “Okay then, Ms. Dufossat, I’ll assume you’re also a Civilian and therefore…”

  “Actually, I’m not.”

  LaSalle put down her coffee and sauntered out from behind the podium, sliding her nails along the wood. “Excuse me?”

  “I’m in Common Law,” Zibby said.

  LaSalle stood directly in front of a guy seated in the front row, close enough that he had to push his chair back to avoid getting clonked in the nose when LaSalle crossed her arms. She squinted her eyes—surely to peer deeper into Zibby’s trembling s
oul—and pursed her lips. Zibby couldn’t help but make the comparison to Michelle Pfeiffer in I Am Sam.

  “Ms. Dufossat,” She connected her hands behind her back and started to pace across the front row of students, who pulled in their laptop screens as the professor drew close. “You are aware that Louisiana clings very close to its, however attenuated, connection to the European Continent, and in so doing is the only state in this country that has adopted the Civil Code or Napoleonic Code or Roman Law, as you will, which is the most perfectly constructed document ever created”—she looked up at the crucifix hanging on the wall below the clock—“by man.”

  “Yes, I’m aware.”

  LaSalle turned her head toward Zibby, as if she were surprised to hear any answer other than “Uh…”

  “So you can’t plead ignorance. Which means you made the conscious decision to abandon your own brethren.” Zibby attempted to explain that she just wanted to keep her options open, but the professor cut her off. “Well, Ms. Dufossat, lucky for you, this class does not utilize the Louisiana Civil Code, as this is Criminal Law, where statutes reign supreme across all fifty states. However, our first case does come from Louisiana, concerning the killing of a pregnant woman, which should give you a familiar taste of our shared bedlam in the swamp before you leave us for spontaneous, ex post facto Commoner World, where judges rule from their sovereign, ivory thrones like Popes ordained by Christ himself.”

  Zibby remained silent.

  “Okay then, Ms. Dufossat, please do us the honors and tell us what happened in State v. Keller.”

  Zibby looked at her laptop screen. She had located State v. Keller with her cursor, the vertical line blinking next to the case name at the same pace as LaSalle’s clicking nails, as if they were synced.

  “State v. Keller, Louisiana Appellate Court, First Circuit…”

  “You can skip all of that. What transpired to bring this case before the esteemed First Circuit?”

  “Mr. Keller killed…”

  “In this class, Ms. Dufossat, we will refer to all defendants as ‘the defendant.’ In Criminal Law, we wear our prosecutor’s caps, and therefore plan to dehumanize the individual. In Constitutional Criminal Procedure, you will wear your defense caps and weasel a way to find any loophole or officer misconduct that will get the schmuck off. This also prevents confusion and keeps students from ruffling through their casebooks to find whether the defendant’s name was Smith or Williams or Johnson.”