I wake up from an afternoon/evening nap, burrowed underneath crisp hotel sheets and a downlike comforter that smelled faintly, not unpleasantly, of cologne and sweat.
The ceiling fan ticks over my head, and the last vestiges of sunset threw faint purple light through the window. This entire trip, I have been on my own internal sleep schedule, without an alarm or even a clock to gauge time. No matter when I sleep, there will be something going on in the Quarter when I woke up. Tonight I want to walk and think and drink.
There is a rippled full-length mirror in the corner. I touch the cold glass. For a moment, I recall the liquid mercury my brother and I had played with as children, stolen from science labs and secreted in small, impossibly dense vials. The way the surface would shine like steel, then shatter into tiny balls when touched. I always had a fascination with stuff like that, the idea of things seeming solid, yet being fluid.
Maybe it was a premonition of the life I was going to walk through. I just know that I am startled for an instant when my fingertips encounter solid glass, instead of passing through the mirror, through that membrane like the mercury, scattering my image, scattering me into tiny droplets.
When had I become so unsubstantial? At what point had I become this fragment, this ghost?
Ten years past, I had lost my HIV status. Nine years past, I had lost my health for the first time. Seven years past, I had lost my first close friend to AIDS. The years that followed held a slew of losses, funerals, betrayals, missteps.
I feel like an object plunging to earth, scattering great chunks as I plummet through the atmosphere. But the heady rush of wind is almost exciting, almost a comfort. Now, feeling close to reaching the ground, there seems nothing really substantial left.
Just a pebble and a streak of light, and maybe an upcoming divot in the ground.
***********************************
He is dying, surely.
His breath comes in ragged, close snorts. His legs have begun to purple underneath, the blood pooling even as his heart flutters in his massive chest. He is every firefly I had ever captured in a jar, glowing more feebly even as I watch.
My brother had come for his semi-daily visit. He and Mom are going through his suits. In a surreal gesture they place a jacket, still on its wooden hanger, across his still form. I watch as they debated his burial wardrobe, a fly on my own wall.
Red tie or blue? The jacket smells faintly of Aqua-Velva and decade-old cigarette. It smells of my father’s hugs, of his stony silences, of his life already passed. It feels obscene, it feels appropriate. Because I guess obscenity is sometimes appropriate.
I just sit there, my hand touching his cold arm. Whatever it was that would make me cry seems to have broken.
They go with the blue tie.
*******************************
In a weird way, every night in New Orleans can pass for Halloween. The smell of exotic Haitian incense wafts from open doorways, and even the liquor seems darker, denser, clustered with spirits. I drink from a plastic cup, pulling the frozen grain alcohol and fruit juice while I walk the street.
It’s not my first. It’s not my seventh.
Dinner is a cheap bowl of Jambalaya and two dozen raw oysters, shucked while I watch by an old black man who never, never would meet my eyes. The band in the restaurant is loud, mediocre, and tries with mixed success to determine the demographics of it’s clientele.
It seems to be primarily a nineteen-sixties, beach music crowd, judging from their reaction to the selections. And the cargo pants.
The French bread is fresh, hot, with coarse flakes like the mother of all biscuits on the outside, creamy like Wonderbread on the inside.
Dinner is eleven dollars. As usual, I over tip. I am paying for way more than the service. I am paying for the music, for the aging woman in the aging plantation dress who stands outside and holds the menus. I am paying for the black man who never takes his eyes from the oysters, who is behind a glass window on display as he works. I am paying for that.
Blending with the crowd again was more than easy. It’s like merging with fellow drops of water in a canal. No one looks at me, that I am aware of.
It was as if I have become what I had wondered I would become, what I have feared and, sickly, hoped I would become. A ghost, a wandering spirit unseen and unfelt. That streak of light without substance, only maybe not even with so much light.
After watching some street performers, professionals who painted themselves gold or silver and posed with tourists, I wander off Bourbon Street towards Jackson Square. It was so different at night. Maybe the presence of a church created a reverence, or maybe it was just the brash glitter and neon of Bourbon Street that made it seem so quiet by comparison.
Some of the artists were packing up their stuff. The Hispanics who created miraculous spray-paint art across from Cafe Du Monde had already cranked up their boomboxes, and a mixture of jazz, hard rock, and ethereal new-age mood music trickled around the square.
Scattered around, like the uneven glow of an old string of Christmas lights, flickering candles adorned the card tables where tarot card readers, psychics, and palmists sat in the near-dark.
I walk around the square, stopping to touch a tired and disinterested horse as his owner haggles with a young couple for a carriage ride. The horse smells like sweat, and street, and grass, and manure.
I decide on impulse to find a psychic, or card reader, or someone on the square who can tell me something about myself. Not even something I don’t know, just.. something.
The drinks have made my head swim, and I feel as though I needed something, anything to point me in a direction. Back in the hotel room, there was sleep, and if I chose, Sleep.
I find her on the corner next to the cathedral. She is huddled in a shawl that had seen better days, smoking a cigarette like it was a respirator.
Decades of hard living, or years of alcohol use, or maybe just months of crystal meth, have hollowed her out and left her withered. Her hair is cut short, uneven, has been dyed at some time. Her eyes are a startling blue set in dark hollowed recesses. She does’t seem to notice me at first, unlike the predatory calls I am getting from her competition.
Here’s my theory on psychics. I figure that if someone really has that sort of a gift, it must seriously do damage.
We simply weren’t meant to see more than there is to see, intuit more than the surface of this mirror. It’s not in our chromosomes. So when someone can, and does surpass their mortal limitations, then they must really get messed up from the experience.
So the few times I have been to card readers or psychics, I have always chosen the ones that looked the most lost, the most burdened. Once I got a chair flung at me. Another time, my card reader got into a fistfight with a passing drunk and upset the table. Both times, I figured I got my money’s worth, and just lacked the insight to interpret the data.
She stubs out her cigarette.
“Have a seat,” she points at the flimsy folding chair across from her with a nicotine-stained finger. I sat, ask what she charges, what she did actually, since I don’t see a sign or evidence of cards on the table.
“I read people,” she rasps, “I read auras.”
“How much?”
“You let me read, you donate whatever you think it’s worth. Maybe ten, maybe twenty. A guy gave me sixty once. I have already decided on twenty.
I imagine what I looked like to her, what I seemed to look like to everyone. Someone in their late twenties (a trick of genetics, because I am in my late thirties), post college, short cropped platinum hair and average to athletic build. Jeans and shirt from Old Navy. Not wealthy looking enough to mess with, not attractive nor ugly enough to turn heads.
Just a guy, maybe a little pale, who always walked as though he had earphones on, even when he didn’t. In reality, I am only some of those things, but I know what people see.
So I prepare for the usual banter about fortune and love (that dark woman, they’d say) and health (long, healthy life, they’d say). I usually get the pre-packaged version, which is okay, I suppose. It meant my disguise still held up under scrutiny.
“You have a sickness,” she says.
I hold myself perfectly still, staring at her.
“You have had this sickness for a while. I see it in your aura. Your aura is black, and streaked with purple. I don’t see that very much, not in a young person.”
She lights another cigarette, difficult to do in the gathering winds on Jackson Square, but she is a professional.
“The dead follow you around. They think you are one of them.”
I stare at her, not blinking.
*******************************
The Oxycontin is powerful stuff, administered by the eyedropper and mixed in the pudding that is all my father’s body could process. When the Hospice workers bring it, they caution about its potency.
They also let us know that in his comatose state, Dad can’t make sounds or facial expressions to indicate pain. See the crease between his eyes?‚ a nurse asks, pointing to the furrows in my father‚ weathered skin, that indicates he is in pain. You give an eyedropper full every four hours, or whenever you see that crease.
That last afternoon, I am left to the eyedropper while Mom and my brother made arrangements. At this point, the pudding has been discarded, and I simply empty the eyedropper into my father’s slightly open mouth. His breath is putrid.
I watch the crease in his forehead disappear, and place the lid on the medicine. It probably hastens his death, that drug. But it eases his pain, or so they tell me.
Later in the hour, we play out a familiar tableau on the King-sized bed. My older brother holding one of my father’s leathery hands, My suddenly elderly mother holding the other.
I sit at his feet, touching his cold leg while Mom, tearfully, whispers that it is ok to go, that she is going to be okay, that I would be okay.
With these lies on her lips, she sends my father off. A hoarse breath rattles from his body, and we sit like statues in the silence, waiting for the next inhale. Outside, a dog barked.
The clock in the kitchen ticks downstairs, ticks like screaming.
*********************************
We are meant to live in linear time, with every moment following the next. To live otherwise is insanity. Yet even as I sit across from the smoking woman on Jackson Square in the humid November night, I also sit at my father’s feet. Waiting for that next breath.
I place a twenty into her hand, stand, and make my way back to the hotel on the edge of the quarter. Past the staggering tourists, past the gay bars with their incessant steamy rhythm, past the drunks passed out, or possibly dead, on the corner.
Past the dark windows of the convent. And I can feel the ghosts trailing behind me like the vapor trail of a comet. It is as if whatever I have, whatever I am, exists only as a means by which they traveled.
In the room, I begin to pack for my trip home. I place my father’s lethal painkillers back in my suitcase, unused this time.
I touch the mirror again as I pass it, placing a fingertip over the reflection of my cerulean eyes, my father’s eyes. It is solid glass, and I am not surprised.
There is no epiphany, no moment where I decide life is worth living and the endless questions worth pursuing. There was no newfound determination to stick things out, or rededication to making this thing work. The moment has simply passed, is all.
Like the staccato ticking of the kitchen clock, some invisible membrane has moved, by degrees, past my line of sight. The dead follow me around. They think I am one of them, and maybe I am. Today, though, this remains metaphor.
Whatever mild curiosity remains insofar as what happens next, it is enough to see me through the passage of night into day, one more time.
I knew, I know, that I need more to fully secure a position in the land of the living. But sometimes just letting the current of time move me past the window of opportunity is enough. Sometimes that has to be enough. Perhaps one dark night it won’t be. Not tonight. Not this night.
I am flying out over New Orleans on my way home. Flying past the vulnerable streets and fragile levees that would someday fill with water, become submerged and ripe with corpses and sewage and the ill-hidden secrets of the city.
Barriers we make to hold back the inevitable give me a sense of security, even as I know them to be flawed.
Not this time, not this storm, but someday, I knew the flood would find me. In the meantime, like the city I love so much, I will walk in the shoes of the dead, and find a flimsy balance between who I was and who I had left behind.
