Disconnection (11 page)

Those of us born on the Day of the Long Breath are prone to depression and procrastination. I was alive long enough to know that I suffered from both
.

I was born rich but not happy. I was born pretty but I chose to reject it. I was spoiled and thought I could keep whatever I ignored and it would flourish without my attention. I was wrong
.

His name escapes me now. Whatever he was I cannot remember. I am not sure if I even loved him, but when I was alive, on November third, he was the honey on my tongue, the speed in my step. He was my sleeping hour, my time of wake. His words pressed a finger on my pulse and the sound of his silence sent my soul into sanctuary
.

They say death is sanctuary, but it is not
.

My death is as lonely as a single room lapsed into darkness. It carries no sound and forms no light, so scents, no shadows. It does not let me sleep, nor does it keep me awake. I stay hopelessly suspended in images that do not truly exist, in pictures where flying creatures bat their wings past me in shadowy lights
.

My only alarm, my only porthole from this eternal dreamlike state is a girl named Sela. She says she looks like me
.

She says I was murdered. She says they found my body on the banks of the Mississippi River, and that my back had a symbol carved on it. I was branded like a cow on a beef farm
.

Chloe Applegate. Me. Murdered
.

Shortly before my death, my best friend convinced me to leave for L.A. Her name was Lisa and she was the only person not intimidated by my parents’ money. I met her a year ago on a salty night in mid-spring. She came knocking on my then-boyfriend’s door, asking for coke. New Orleans was in short supply then the cops had made a massive bust in Hattiesburg the month before and it had weakened the trade around town. Lisa was prepared to pay my boyfriend double the usual for half the amount. My boyfriend
—
I can’t remember his name now
—
agreed and gave her our supply and we treated ourselves to a lobster dinner that night. Lisa kept coming back and we started talking while she waited on the couch for my boyfriend to cut her drugs for her. We became friends
.

The seasons changed and I went to rehab. My mother found a joint in my room. She’s always been nosy that way, but I guess I am grateful. I came out clean. I left the drugs behind but I kept my friends. What is the good of life anyway if you don’t have anyone in your corner? Lisa might have been messed up but at least she knew me. I needed someone to know me. I was lonely. All my life I had been lonely, but being clean and sober, looking at the world with fresh eyes, made me all the lonelier
.

I can’t always remember days from months, months from years, or any particular timeline, just November third. What I think
—
what my soul tells me, what my intuition describes
—
is that a short time before this date, Lisa asked me the L.A. question. She said things were better out there. We could be famous if we wanted. I never wanted to be famous. I just wanted to be understood. I agreed to go to L.A., mainly to make Lisa happy. New Orleans I would leave behind. The ghost city of the South, the Zombie of the Bayou. The Crescent City of Lost Souls. My home. I would flee
.

Then I met him. He changed my mind about things. Something about him made me want to stay. I wanted to be what he needed me to be. I wanted to transcend again
.

He who I cannot remember, and yet always stays, just at the edge of my mind, like an unplayed note
.

Sela. Wake me up. Sela, I am calling you. Sela, help me find him
.

For surely in my lost memory of him lies the key to my murder
.

C
hloe Applegate’s wake was at the Frances Hopkins Funeral Home off St. Peter’s Street. Her funeral was held right after at a nearby cemetery.

Sela chose not to express her condolences at either occasion. Instead of honoring the memory of a dead girl whom she had never known in life, Sela decided to try and forget Chloe altogether. She would rid herself of the cell phone.

The morning after her visit to the Applegate home, Sela threw the phone out of her car window on her way to work. During the lunch hours, a construction worker, who ordered a BLT with extra bacon and a chocolate milk shake, surprised her by reaching into his pocket and handing her Chloe’s cell phone. “I saw this fly out of your car,” he said. “I thought you might want it back.” Instead of arguing with the kind stranger over the his decision
(Why the hell would you return it when it’s obvious that I went out of my way to get rid of it in the first place, you moron?
she had thought), Sela graciously accepted the phone while at the same time noting that the next chance she had the phone would be history.

Her next chance turned out to be the Dumpster behind Frank’s. Sela wrapped the phone in an old newspaper and stuffed it in with the rest of garbage. She nearly skipped on her way through Frank’s entrance door, she was
that
happy.
Finally
, she thought,
finally it’s over
.

But it wasn’t.

When she came home that night, the phone was waiting for her at her front door, sans the newspaper. Sela, stunned, quickly tossed the phone into the “shrubby.” The next morning, it was waiting for her again. She picked it up and trotted to the sidewalk, where a group of children were playing jump rope. She gave them the phone and told them to have fun. She found the phone in her car three hours later. Her frustrated scream frightened a nest of squirrels out of their home in the nearby pine trees. Sela set the phone on the pavement and proceeded to roll over it several times with the wheels of her car. When she was sure it was squished to smithereens, she drove off.

That night she went to bed certain that Chloe Applegate was out of her life forever. In her sleep she dreamed of women with no faces. In the early morning, a bursting bladder had her busting for the bathroom. When she switched on the light, the cell phone switched on, too, its green screen glowing where it rested on the bathroom counter near the sink. Sela sat on the toilet, relieving herself, watching the phone brighten, hearing its musical ring.

I know that tune, I know that tune
.

What to do with you, phone? I know that tune
.

The phone was here to stay, Sela decided. She could rip it into a thousand pieces and ship it to Afghanistan and it would
still
come back to her. Resistance, as the saying went, was futile.

The next several days Sela spent in solitude. She ignored all phone calls save for the ones she received from Chloe, and that was only because Chloe could not be ignored. When the phone started ringing, it never stopped. All Sela heard over and over was that tune, that strange but familiar refrain, the one that drove her nuts with unknowing, and crazy with remembrance.

Chloe never had good news. Always she was cold, and always she was vague about her afterlife and how she was able to contact Sela.

Sela gave up trying to understand the “Chloe phone” phenomenon. She began to accept it like a case of poison ivy, a rash to the senses, a plague in her life that despaired her and frightened her, but would some day go away after it had finished its course.

Exactly a week from the night when she had first found the cell phone, Sela walked out of Frank’s Diner at the end of an eight-hour shift and found Dean waiting for her.

He, along with several others including Mandy, had left messages on Sela’s answering machine, messages that Sela never bothered to return. It wasn’t that Sela didn’t like Dean, or didn’t want a repeat of last week’s sex marathon. He seemed like a great guy. Sela just wasn’t sure he could handle her secret.

She ignored him when he called her name. She trotted to her car and slammed the door. She heard the knock on the window as she started the engine.

“Sela? It’s me. It’s Dean. Do you remember?”

Sela sighed and rolled down the window. “Hi, Dean,” she said evenly. “Of course I remember you.”

“Oh, yeah? I had thought you’d forgotten.” He stepped back. “I’ve tried calling you for days. You haven’t been home, you haven’t picked up. I’m on a first name basis with your answering machine.”

“Yeah, I’ve had to work all week.”

“Right.” He knew she was lying. Sela knew he knew. He reached out from behind his back. In his fist were a dozen early-blooming pink camellias. “In any case,” he began, “these are for you.”

Sela held her breath
(No one’s ever given me flowers before!)
while Dean explained, “I picked them. I know it’s kind of gay, but you wouldn’t believe how they’re blooming on campus.” He handed the flowers to her.

“They’re beautiful,” she said while inhaling their pleasant scent. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Say ‘thank you.’”

“Thank you.”

“They reminded me of you.”

Sela laughed nervously. “You don’t know me.”

“Sure I do.” He smiled at her. Sela could not help but smile back at him. She had forgotten how beautiful his smile was. “Let me take you to dinner,” he suggested.

Sela’s good feelings fled. Reality hit her hard in the gut. She had to get home. She had a dead girl waiting for her. She replied, “I can’t. I’m tired. I’ve been working since this morning.”

Dean shrugged. “Even more reason for you to have dinner with me. You look like you haven’t eaten all week.”

She hadn’t. Her living nightmare had left her with a nonexistent appetite.

But seeing Dean again stirred a desire in her, a desire to free herself from the chain of Chloe Applegate’s cell phone. The boy in front of her represented all that was good and enjoyable in life. And, thinking back on the one night they shared together, she realized that she missed his company.

“So, do you accept?” Dean asked.

Sela smiled weakly. “Okay. Hop in.”

Dean gave her an awkward half-hug from the car window. On the way to the restaurant, he asked, “Do you want to hear something great?”

“I’m always in the mood to hear good news,” Sela replied.
Especially after this week
, she added silently.

“Well, you’re looking at the guy who made the highest score on the vertebrae histology exam. How do you like that?”

Sela glanced at him. “Vertebrae histology? What is that, like the history of spines?”

“The study of the spines by light and electron microscopy: the transverse process, the pedicle, the spinous process, stuff like that.”

“And I thought waitressing was hard.”

Dean looked over at her. “Is it?”

She shook her head. “No. It just sucks.” She stopped the Beetle at a traffic light where First Gate Church rested at the corner.

The church was small and white, the kind one would imagine perching on a country hillside. Church members stepped out of the wooden panel doors wearing their finest displays of autumn-colored dresses and suits. A card table stood at the church entrance with a sign taped on the front that read,
FIRST GATE CHURCH ANNUAL BAKE SALE: PLEASE BUY FREELY, FOR THE LORD FREED YOU FROM SIN
.

Sela inhaled sharply when she saw Harold Applegate at the front of the steps, shaking his congregation’s hands as they walked by. He wore a tie that pictured a big goofy clown with teeth as long as they were wide.

Seeing him reminded Sela of her ordeal. Of Chloe Applegate. The dead girl with the face and hair similar to hers. The girl who kept Sela awake all night with her tears and complaints. The girl who never let her sleep.

Dean broke through her train of thought. “Who has church at this time of day?” he asked.

“Southerners have church at this time of day,” she answered.

“And I thought Jews were fanatical.”

Sela watched as a young couple and their daughter walked out the doors. The girl looked to be the same age as Sela had been when her parents had died.

Sela, Sela, went quite mad…

A tear fell from Sela’s eyes but she quickly wiped it away before Dean could see.

A sudden bang on the door made both Sela and Dean jump. An old woman dressed all in pink—and who, because of her clothes and clown-like make-up, reminded Sela of Barbara Cartland—stood outside her car. Sela hesitantly rolled down the window.

The elderly woman’s smile exposed two rows of rotten brown teeth. “Chess pie?” she asked.

Sela did not understand. “What?”

The woman moved closer to the door, her decrepit head nearly inside the window. “Chess pie, banana bread, chocolate soufflé, peach cobbler? We got it all. Buy two dishes get one free. Praise the Lord.” She lifted her shoulders in glee and clapped with two ancient hands.

Sela shook her head. “No. No, thank you.” She looked at Dean. “Are you interested?”

Dean’s face was noticeably paler when he also shook his head. “Not for now,” he answered. “Thanks.”

Sela smiled at the woman as she rolled up the window. “Good God,” Dean muttered from the passenger seat. “She’s so old I bet she saw the Garden of Eden.”

Sela laughed.

Fifteen minutes later the couple was seated at a table by a window in a rundown café that Dean had suggested on a tip from
Frommer’s Irrelevant Guide to New Orleans
. The highly rated tourist trap adorned its walls with cheap posters of famous jazz musicians and Mardi Gras beads, its rough air smelling of oyster shells and frying batter.

“Sorry,” Dean said. “The guide made the place out to be a lot better than this.”

Sela shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said, twirling a fry in a sea of ketchup.

Dean gorged himself on a plate of fried shrimp. He asked, “Do you want to go fishing with me this weekend?”

Sela placed the fry in her mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Where would we go fishing?”

“The bayou. My roommate’s uncle has a boat out there. Nice guy, invited me to go out there anytime I wanted. I haven’t been yet. I’ve been meaning to go, but I just haven’t had the chance.”