Fearful Symmetries (22 page)

“Ya can’t shoot him,” called Mrs. Adler.

As the front door to the little house creaked open, we could hear Pa yell back, “Self-defense.”

Alice screamed, “No!” and lunged at the globe. She tripped, hit the pedestal and although Mrs. Oftshaw moved to catch either her or Captain Gruthwal, she caught neither. The globe hit the floor and exploded into stars of glass as the ink seeped into the parlor. There was more blackness in that glass bubble than you could have guessed. Darkness filled the room by the time I’d grabbed Alice’s hand and was helping her off the floor. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I held on tight to my sort of sister and she held onto me until the moonlight shone.

We were standing in the clearing of pines where the shack was. Pretty was walking around the side of the place, obviously heading for the front door, while Pa, naked as a jaybird, his pecker flopping, the .22 raised and aimed, was heading for the side. At the corner they met face to face.

“Say yer prayers, tater face,” said Pa, and I yelled out for him not to shoot.

He turned quick and saw me and Alice standing there, and his eyes bugged. “Oh,” he said, and it was like he lost his breath for a second. It was the first time I seen him scared.

“The whole fuckin’ family,” he said. “No problem, I’ll plug all you crumb snatchers at once.” Mrs. Adler was at the window just plain screaming, not even saying anything.

Pretty swept the razor in front of him and slashed Pa’s forearm. The gun dipped down for a moment, but Pa groaned a little and raised it again. I couldn’t look and I couldn’t not look, expecting any second for Pretty’s head to be shattered like the glass globe. He brought the razor up as if he meant to split Pa down the middle, and Pa froze in his usual stance when he was about to pull the trigger. Before he could fire, though, we saw some shadow, moving low through the night.

Jundle hit Pa behind the knees and my old man crumpled up and whimpered, the gun flying out of his hands. I dove for it and grabbed it away, but backing up I fell onto my ass. Pa kicked the hog in the head and scrabbled after me on his knees. “Give me that gun, Jr. That’s an order.”

He got up and stood over me with burning eyes and a hideous expression. In my fear, I pulled the trigger, and the bullet went through his left eye and come straight out the back with the crack of bone and a splurt of blood and brain. He stood there for a second, that eye hole smoking like the ash on one of Jundle’s cheroots, and then he fell forward like a cut tree. I rolled out of the way. He was so heavy with death that he would have made a pancake of me.

I wanted to think about the fact that I’d just killed my Pa, but there wasn’t a second. Alice was standing at the window staring in like she was hypnotized. By the time I reached her, Pretty had already commenced slicing up Mrs. Adler. She was slit open from the chin to belly button and blood was everywhere, soaking her nightgown, pooling on the floor in the moonlight. I saw her heart beating inside her. She moved her mouth to make a blood bubble whisper, and I could tell by reading her lips that her last words were, “Pretty Please.”

I pulled Alice away and put my arms around her. She didn’t move a muscle and was cold as stone. When I drew away, I found a huge grin on her face. Next I knew, Pretty was beside us, drenched in blood, laughing, with an arm around each of our shoulders. “How’d we get here?” I asked Alice when the hug broke up.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but let’s get.”

I looked around and saw Jundle, recovered from his foot to the face, taking a piss against the side of the house. When he was done, he took the burning cheroot from his mouth and touched its red hot tip to the planks where he’d relieved himself. Fire sprang up as if from gasoline and in a blink the flames were creeping up the side of the shack.

The hog trotted over to us and made a motion with his head that we were to climb on his back. Somehow, though it didn’t seem possible, we all fit. He grunted, squealed, farted, took three enormous jumps and lit into the sky. We were flying upward on the back of a hog. I was petrified, and could feel Alice’s arms wrapped around my chest and her face pressing into my back. I couldn’t see Pretty, and didn’t know how he was managing to hang on, but I still heard his laughter, which hadn’t ceased since he sliced up his Ma.

At one point Jundle swept down low over a dirt path through a wood, and we saw the shot and butchered bodies of our parents riding the back of Cynara the old heifer, heading off to, I guessed, Hell. By the time Jundle reached an altitude where we were soaring through white clouds and stars, I was exhausted. It was peaceful way up there. I wrapped my arms around the enchanted animal’s thick bristly neck as I fell forward into sleep.

I woke, confused, in my own bed the next morning, and so did Alice and Pretty Please. Ma, who had our breakfast ready as always before leaving for work, seemed never to suspect a thing. We couldn’t wait for her to leave for work. When she finally did, Alice said to me. “What do you make of it?”

“Did we kill your Ma and my Pa?”

“I guess we did,” she said.

Pretty actually nodded.

“It ain’t possible,” I said. I ran to the bathroom and checked for the razor in the cabinet. It was gone. I ran back to report to Alice.

“We gotta act like nothing happened,” she said. “Deny everything.”

“It’s gonna be hard to forget. How’d we get back from Mrs. Oftshaw’s?”

“Jundle,” said Pretty Please, and me and Alice almost fell over. It was the first time her brother had said anything but that which had become his name.

Later that morning, we were back at the rose garden of the church in order to keep our deal. We sat on the bench, looking at the fountain, all of us still tired from the doings of the night. Eventually the Minister came out to see us. We gave him a seat on the bench between me and Alice. Pretty didn’t budge for him.

“Did you go and look in on Mrs. Oftshaw?” he asked.

I nodded and Alice said, “We did.”

“She’s got a magic hog,” I told him.

“She’s got a man’s head floatin’ in water,” said Alice.

“We shaved,” said Pretty Please, another surprise. The Minister looked quizzically at us. “You must tell me the truth,” he said.

“Us deputy angels got inside her place, and I took this little box,” said Alice. “I spied on her whispering into it. Then she shut the lid down tight. Must have been a curse or something.”

I looked at Alice but she wouldn’t look at me.

“Give me that,” said the Minister and took the fancy box from her hand. “There’s no such thing as curses, dear.” He pulled the lid off and held it up to look inside. We saw it there, a shiny red wasp with a long stinger that looked like a piece of jewelry cut from ruby. Only thing is, its wings started to flutter, and then all of a sudden it took off. It flew straight up into the Minister’s face and sunk that long stinger into the white jelly of his left eye. The box hit the paving stones, and the poor man screamed, bringing his hands up to cover his face.

We never got paid for spying that day cause we ran for our bikes with Pretty hot behind us. We pedaled like mad back home and hid with the curtains pulled over, expecting Sheriff Bedlow any minute for hours on end. But he never did come, and the Minister never told on us. Maybe he was afraid that people would find out he’d promised to pay us for spying on Mrs. Oftshaw. As it was, he had to start using the Mount Chary Galore on that eye, the only thing he claimed would stop the burning.

A few weeks had gone by, and I still didn’t know what to make of that crazy night. Then one day my Ma called all us kids together when she returned home from work. Before we ate dinner, she sat us down on the couch, herself in a chair across from us.

“I hate to have to tell you this,” she said, and I could see her grow weak. She lowered her head slightly so we couldn’t see her eyes. “Your Ma,” she said, nodding toward Alice, “and your Pa,” she said to me, “are dead. I don’t know how else to put it.”

Neither Alice or me said a peep. If my sort of sister was half as surprised as I was, her tongue felt turned to stone.

My mother cried and we moved closer and put our arms around her. Finally Alice said, “What happened?”

My Ma just shook her head.

“How’d they die?” I asked.

She was silent for a time, drying her eyes, and eventually said, “Car crash out in California.”

“That ain’t really what happened, is it?” asked Alice, softly, stroking the back of Ma’s neck.

Ma shook her head. In a whisper she said, “No.”

“What then?” I asked.

“It’s too terrible. Far too terrible to describe.”

A few days later, the summer ended. Me and Alice had to go back to school and Pretty was sent to the basement. He’d slowly lost all his new power of speech, but not before my Ma got to hear him say the word, “Love,” which managed to lift her out of the funk caused by finding out about Pa’s death. From then on, when Mrs. Oftshaw was coming to the house, me and Alice made sure we were out. We’d had enough of her magic, but it was our secret and we talked about it when we’d slip out into the woods to kiss. Late one afternoon that fall, after the weather had gone cold, I spied Mount Chary bathed in the last golden light of day, like an ancient, gilded pyramid, looming in the distance down the end of the one road out of town, and I got a feeling for the first time in my life that everything was finally
right
.

A gun shot.

A pirouetting shadow.

Steel wheels rolling on steel rails, rushing not quite smoothly, not silently, over gravel ballast and softwood crossties hewn long ago, then soaked in creosote to form this magic ladder stretching all the way from Penn Station to the city of New Orleans. I do call it magic, the railroad, all 1,377 miles of it. I lie in my narrow upper berth, the sleeper car swaying and jerking side to side beneath me, around me. We’re racing northeast over Lake Pontchartrain not too long past dawn, heading home. Out there, the morning sun has set the estuary on fire, and the white inferno is too bright to look at for more than a few seconds without averting my eyes. There are already (or still) fishermen on the water in their fragile, bobbing boats, casting lines or reeling them in again.

How can they drift in the fire?

How can anyone bear that heat?

I haven’t slept, because it was easier for me to stay awake all night than get up in time to make it to the Union Passenger Terminal on Loyola at six
A.M
. Now, I’ll try to catch a few daylight hours of shut-eye, but first I’m watching as the
Crescent
sails over the lake. When I glance directly down, from this angle I can’t see the tracks below me, not the rails and crossties and gravel ballast of the Norfolk Southern Bridge. I only see the brown-green water, as if the train has, even if only briefly, become another sort of boat. The impression is disconcerting, and it’s almost as hard to look at—of course, for different reasons—as the sun blazing on the lake.

I’m not afraid of drowning, but I am afraid of being trapped inside a sinking train. I am afraid of burning.

Below me, Annapurna is stretched out on the lower bunk reading. She slept last night, wise girl. Despite her name, she isn’t Hindu; she’s from Gloucester. Her parents just liked the name. No one ever calls her Annapurna, except, she says, her family. She goes by Anna, and I’ve never called her anything else. Anna is stretched out beneath me reading by the light of the lake of fire. I’m the writer, but Anna is the one who reads books the way some people eat popcorn. This morning, she’s working her way through a volume of Thomas Hardy that she picked up in a bookshop on Dauphine Street. She’ll read “A Mere Interlude” and “The Three Strangers”; I’ll sleep.

I followed her to New Orleans because she offered to pay for everything. She had business there, not me. Personally, I can do without the mid-August heat and the tourists who swarm the Vieux Carré, where she insisted on staying. Anna is never, herself, a tourist. She prides herself on that. She’d never, for instance, attend Mardi Gras.

She’d say, “That’s for locals, and it’s for tourists who come to get drunk and catch beads and pretend they know what Mardi Gras is about. To pretend they belong. But I’m not a local, and I’m not a tourist.”

Anna travels a lot, never a tourist and never a local, but, instead, passing through wrapped in this limbo she has created for herself. Sometimes, I wonder if she even sees the places she visits, and other times I suspect she experiences them more intimately than most and with a perspective she can only manage by keeping herself at arm’s length. She’s a photographer, and she’s fortunate enough that she doesn’t have to live off her art. Which isn’t to say she isn’t good at what she does; she’s fucking brilliant. But she inherited a lot of money from an aunt or uncle (I’ve never been clear on which), so she has the luxury of not having to whore herself out to whoever is willing to pay.

“You’re not a whore, William,” she says.

“Close enough,” I reply. “I’m selling my thoughts, not my body. That’s the only difference. I’m a legal whore, maybe because thoughts are intangible and nowhere near as much fun as sex.”

“Plenty of places it’s illegal to speak your mind,” she says. “To write down your thoughts for other people to read.” She begins reeling off examples, and I concede her point.

This is a conversation from the dining car on the way down from Manhattan. It’s an old, recurring conversation, and this time it recurs over dry salmon and a flavorless medley of steamed vegetables as we’re leaving D. C. and entering Virginia. She abruptly changes the subject to Louisiana voodoo, and I pick at the desiccated fish on my plate while she lectures me about sympathetic magic, the African Diaspora, Marie Laveau, and Papa Legba. I say hardly anything at all, because I don’t know shit about voodoo. After dinner, when we’re back in our sleeper compartment, she shoves a tattered paperback from one of her carry-ons into my hands—
The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion
. I flip through the pages and see that the two authors are anthropologists, one from Tulane and the other from Columbia University. Anna assures me it’s thorough, trustworthy scholarship, and for a while I pretend to be interested in remedying my ignorance while she watches the night rushing by beyond the windows.

Then the porter comes round to fold out our beds, and I’m relieved that I can climb into my upper berth, set the book aside, and play
Angry Birds
on my iPad. Anna tips the man, because Anna tips almost everyone. She can afford to. The porter’s name is Romalise. I ask him if he’s from New Orleans or New York (from his accent, I suspect the former), and he confirms my suspicions—the Lower 9
th
Ward, to be precise—and he talks a few minutes about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, about how his family came back when so many others didn’t, and about a Vietnamese restaurant where he was once a
Chef de partie
before the floods. When Anna and I are alone again, she explains that
Chef de partie
is really just a fancy phrase for line cook; I don’t bother asking what it is that line cooks do. I’d rather be flinging vengeful pixel birds at snickering green pixel pigs.

This night seems so innocent, and lying here in my bunk peeking at the white, white burning expanse of Lake Pontchartrain, it also seems a lifetime ago. I know this because it’s one of the last nights before I wander alone—long after midnight—down St. Peter towards Jackson Square and come to the black wrought-iron gate wedged in between a tobacconist and a shop that seems to specialize in the unlikely pairing of alligator skulls and Catholic tchotchkes. At first glance, this gate appears no different than any number of other such gates I’ve passed, most leading down short brick corridors or alleyways to modest courtyards. I almost keep walking, because there’s a cool, half-hearted breeze breathed from the direction of the Square, cool air off the river; and so what if the sun’s down, the night’s still hot enough that I’m sweating like a pig. But I don’t keep walking; I do stop.

Later—no, sooner than later—I’ll regret not having continued on my way. Sooner than later, I’ll regret having stopped at the black gates,
before
I stop at the gates. Can the present affect the past, and can the future affect the present? Retrocausality. The impossible only seems impossible until it happens.

I peer through the bars. The gate opens into an arched passage, no more than ten feet long, into one of the small courtyard gardens. The garden is lit, even at this late hour, and I can see carefully tended banana trees and night-blooming jessamine. The redbrick walls are mostly obscured by the clinging vines of bougainvillea and wisteria. There are voices, of women and of men and of people whose sex I can’t discern.

There are voices, enough of them that the courtyard should be crowded with people. It sounds like a party. The voices, laughter and the clink of glasses, a live jazz band—trumpets, trombones, saxophones, clarinet, a drummer.

There are voices, but I can’t see anyone. So I tell myself the party’s inside, obviously, and only some acoustical trick, sound ricocheting off the walls and then up the passage to the black wrought-iron gates, is responsible for what I expected to see being at odds with what I
do
see.

It’s almost three in the morning, and I wake Anna when I open the door to the hotel room we’re sharing. I try to be quiet, but I bump into a suitcase that neither of us bothered to put in the closet or a corner or some other place out of the way. She switches on the lamp beside her bed, and I apologize for waking her.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says. Could I ask for a more clichéd greeting?

“It’s just the heat,” I reply. “It’s still sweltering out there.”

She squints at me and rubs her eyes. “They say it should be a little cooler tomorrow. There might be a thunderstorm or two in the afternoon.”

“Doesn’t it just get hotter down here when it rains?”

She looks annoyed and switches the lamp off again.

The next morning, before we split up and she heads to the Garden District and Lafayette No. 1, we get beignets and coffee from a place called Café Beignet. The crispy squares of fried dough come in a paper bag at least half filled with confectioners’ sugar. The grease from the beignets has made lumps of some of the sugar, and Anna picks these out and eats them.

“It’s a wonder you have a tooth left in your head,” I tell her, and she ignores me and begins talking about the Karstendick tomb in Lafayette No. 1. We’re here because her most recent obsession is cemetery ironwork, and Anna’s informed me there are several superb examples of cast-iron tombs scattered around the city. Most date back well into the 19
th
century.

“In this climate, with the floods and all,” I say, “it’s pretty hard to believe they haven’t all rusted away.”

“You know, people
do
take care of shit.” Then she goes on a bit about Gothic Revival influences and Doric columns, frieze embellishments and
pintelles
and downspout grotesques. I honestly try to pay attention, but the heat is distracting, and the talk of ironwork leads my mind back to the black gate and the courtyard.

Anna drops the bag of powdered sugar into a trash can and asks about the night before.

“You really did look pretty shook up,” she says.

So, I commit a lie of omission and only tell her about staring into the courtyard and hearing an invisible party. She raises an eyebrow and frowns, clearly disappointed.

“That’s all?”

“Yeah,” I reply. “It was just a bit weird.”

“We clearly have very different ideas of what constitutes weird.” Then she suggests that the party was somewhere just out of sight, in one of the apartments opening out into the courtyard, and there was nothing more peculiar at work than echoes. Out of sight, but not out of earshot.

Great minds think alike and all that shit.

Anna flags down a taxi and leaves me standing on the corner of Bienville and Chartres. We’ve made plans to meet up for dinner at Tujague’s. I don’t know much worth knowing about restaurants, and so, whenever we travel together, I always let Anna choose. She’s assured me I’ll love the shrimp remoulade at Tujague’s.

The Crescent Line speeds across Pontchartrain, and I turn my back on the rippling white fire and quickly drift off to sleep. I dream about the courtyard, and if I dream about anything else upon waking I’m unable to remember that I did. The dream is as good as video, faithfully reproducing even the most insignificant details of that night. Assuming any details are
in
significant. Having written that, I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant.

So, the dream, as good as the night itself.

Conversely, the night, as good as the dream itself.

I press my face to the bars, straining for a better view of the courtyard. Now that I’m listening closely, the music rises and falls, as do the voices and Dixieland jazz, the rhythm makes me think of the wheels of trains against steel rails, and of waves rushing forward, then dragged back into the sea. A clot of drunken college students passes by, and they laugh. Probably, they’re laughing at me, but I ignore them. And that’s when I notice the shadows moving about in that counterfeit patch of jungle. Shadows that sway to the same cadence as the music and the jumble of conversation. Only, almost immediately, I realize I’m not seeing
shadows
, plural, but a
single
shadow. It washes to and fro, falling across the vine-covered walls and the drooping banana leaves. In no way does the shadow strike me as out of place in the empty courtyard.

It is, after all, only a shadow.

Same as the comingled voices are only voices and the jazz is only brass and percussion and woodwind.

You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

Do I? Do I really?

“William, I don’t think you’ve heard a word I’ve said.”

I glance back over my shoulder at St. Peter Street, but there’s no sign of anyone who might have spoken. The street is empty. The voice was familiar.

On the way to New Orleans, I’m still awake at 2:51
A.M.
when we pull into the Salisbury station, and the dimly lit platform is deserted. No one’s waiting to get on, but the
Crescent
stops anyway. I’m scribbling something on the third from the last page of a Moleskine notebook, and I stop scribbling and stare out at the depot. My head is filled with Pink Floyd, “Waiting for the Worms” spilling in through my earbuds. The volume’s up too loud, because the volume’s always up too loud. Fuck me if I know why, but I tap at the window with the eraser end of my mechanical pencil, three quick, sharp taps.

And I see the black dog watching me from the platform. If I’d seen it a second earlier, I wouldn’t have tapped against the sleeper compartment’s window. I swear I wouldn’t have. I don’t know what sort of dog it is. When I get back to Boston, I tell myself, I’ll figure that out. I
will
try. It might be a very large black lab. Or it might not be. I’ve never been a dog person, and so to me the dog is simply a big black dog. It’s watching me, while I watch it, and its eyes flash a brilliant emerald green, shining back the light from the train. The dog is sitting near one of the closed doors to the station, its ears pricked forward; everything about the animal speaks to its attentiveness. It tilts its head to one side, and I almost shout down to wake Anna. Almost, but only almost.