Chapter 15

Tue., Sept. 27, 12:52 p.m., The Bulldog

“I’m Arthur Cole,” the man says, returning with Sunshine’s much needed medicine and a new cold beer for himself.

“My name is Sunshine,” she says, smiling for the first time since she saw her house yesterday. “Thanks for the drink.”

“My pleasure,” Art says, running his newly unencumbered hand through his nest of curly brown locks. “So where are you staying?”

“Right around the corner. But I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to take it, though.” Sunshine rolls her hand over itself like a half of an illegal motion penalty. “Gwen’s a nice enough person and all, but she just, I don’t know, she just irks me.”

“I know people like that.”

“I guess I just have a low tolerance. But that doesn’t change the fact that if I have to stay there much longer, I will shoot myself in the temple.”

Art ponders for a second, realizing that he’s been hearing on the radio that the suicide rate for New Orleans residents is up by about five thousand percent since the storm, and it makes him nervous now when somebody even references the subject. Just then, he realizes he might be able to offer a solution. “I might have something for you, if you’re interested.”

“What’s that?” Sunshine replies, not able to hear him over the passing of a caravan of armored personnel carriers.

Art leans in closer, and says, more loudly over the din of the passing trucks, “I said, I might have a solution to your problem.”

“My Gwen problem?” she asks, nearly screaming to hear herself over the military might being flexed on Magazine street.

Arthur Cole holds up one finger and glances out to the street, the universal signal for, “let’s continue this conversation once the military occupation of our beloved street has come to an end.”

Sunshine nods, and starts in on her new drink, this time just sipping.

Art does the same with his beer bottle, marveling at the size of the vehicles traveling on a street that was originally designed to carry horse drawn carriages and streetcars. The column, with their booming diesel engines, shake everything, the tables, the chairs; Art thinks they’re even rattling his teeth a little. He grasps at one of his top front teeth to check, but everything seems to be firmly in place, dentally speaking.

For the void of the desolate city to be filled by these trucks serve to make the city feel even more lonely. Sunshine sips at her drink as she watches the last of the army vehicles go past. To the east, toward downtown they move; she can see them continue on their route up the curvature of Magazine street, a street, like most east-west streets in New Orleans, that follows the gentle crescent of the Mississippi river. The clamor from the trucks, now three blocks away, has been relegated to nothing more than a gentle hum.

Arthur, with his index finger still raised, turns to Sunshine and smiles. He lowers the finger. “Okay,” he says, “now that we can hear one another.”

“Yes, you were saying before we were so rudely interrupted.”

“Well, I might have a solution for your housing...”

Sunshine is waiting for Art to finish, but the words have stopped for the time being and Art’s jaw has dropped so his mouth is wide open, and his head drops slightly, so now his eyes look to be peering through the top of his skull to something behind her. Sunshine turns to see what it is that has made Art sort of turn off, like he is a robot and somebody just flipped a switch.

Coming up Magazine from the direction the Army trucks just disappeared is a man pulling a rickshaw. Now this, by itself is a bit odd, not to mention anachronistic, but what he’s carrying in his rickshaw, a person dressed like a big yellow bird.

Sunshine sets her drink down. “Is that Big Bird?” she asks Art quizzically.

Arthur Cole shakes himself from his dumbstruck reaction to the scene unfolding on the street in front of them. He squints. “No, I don’t think so.” he replies hesitantly.

“Well what is it, then?”

“Um, well…” Art clears his throat. Now that the rickshaw has come closer and is directly in front of the Bulldog, he has surmised the identity of the costume. “The passenger of that rickshaw is actually the San Diego Chicken.”

“The mascot?”

“Yes.” Arthur Cole peers into his beer as if to check to see if it has been dosed. The beer, looking like beer, invites itself back to his mouth.

Sunshine shakes her head. “What, on God’s green Earth is happening to this city?”

“We’re going to need a lot of shrinks.”

As the rickshaw pair pass and head west up Magazine, Sunshine sighs. “So what’s this you were trying to explain before the chicken people begun their parade?”

The orange glow of the dust haze is a particularly harsh light against her pale skin, making her look, to Art, as if she was wearing a face full of rouge. “I have an apartment. You can rent it.”

Sunshine is suddenly very excited. “An apartment? What kind? And how much?”

“It’s the other half of my shotgun. My current tenants are moving to Houston like everybody else. They’ll be out by Thursday.”

Sunshine’s mood glooms slightly. “Oh, I don’t know if I can handle Gwen until Thursday,” she says to nobody and particular. She tilts her head back as if to knock some marbles in her brain from the frontal to the occipital lobes; Sunshine can only think when the marbles are parked in the rear. “But I’m a big girl,” she finally says. “I should be able to handle a little unpleasantness. For God’s sake,” Sunshine says, pulling a cigarette out of her purse, “I quit smoking once. Talk about unpleasant.”

Tue., Sept. 27, 12:56 p.m., The Bulldog

A hiccup? Is that what it was?

Archibald had seen this happen to humans many times, but such a thing had never happened to him. It just wasn’t part of his kind’s makeup.

A hiccup?

As startling and unpredictable as it seemed, yes, Archibald is sure that is what just happened to him. His knowledge of human anatomy is second to none, considering his occupation, and this aforementioned knowledge tells him that a hiccup is caused by a spasm in the diaphragm. But does he even have a diaphragm? Archibald realizes he should have studied the physiology of the earth ostrich before he chose a form, but, well, he had been lazy, so he really has no idea if he shares this piece of biology with the human. But that’s what it was, he’s almost sure, a hiccup.

From his research, most of it, albeit, situational, he has observed human beings hiccupping often after drinking large quantities of his favorite human invention, alcohol, but in over one hundred years and calamitously huge episodes of alcohol consumption, Archibald has never experienced what he is sure he just experienced, the human hiccup.

He is, above all, a scientist. There has to be a logical explanation for the possible diaphragm spasm, assuming he has such an organ.

Wait! There it goes again. Another hiccup!

And there she is, the human woman, the one the human man refers to as “Sunshine.” He just glanced at her from the corner of his bird’s eye and then the hiccup struck, involuntary and jolting.

Archibald averts his eyes. This cannot be happening. This woman, as far as he can tell, is just as normal as any of the other random humans he’s come across in his years as lead scientist on his mission. He decides to use the only real weapon at his disposal, the scientific method, to see if it happens again. Archibald straightens his superbly long neck, faces the wall of the bar, and then, in a move similar to a camera pan in an Oscar winning movie, rotates his head towards this woman, this fiend.

Hiccup.

Fuck. What in the hell is going on here? Archibald again averts his eyes, this time staring at a crack in the sidewalk upon which he stands. Below him, a couple of worker ants are fighting over the dead carcass of a termite—your everyday scene here in this insect infested planet, one Archibald has even witnessed from a subterranean perspective, being and ostrich and all, and one with whom he’s seen enough to draw his own scientific conclusions. Insects, while dumber than humans, certainly seem to have a sense of purpose.

And this hiccupping seems to have a purpose all its own. He looks up again, but now the mysterious and all powerful woman, this “Sunshine,” has departed. Did she disappear? The other human, the man, is still at his table, staring at his beer with an absent minded, but prideful swagger; Archibald cannot explain it to himself, the look of this man, but it is both inherently prideful and self-conscious—but enough about this useless human. Where did the woman go, the one with the power to make him hiccup?

Just then, she reappears with a new drink. Archibald stares in her direction, but the hiccups have ceased.

“I like the way these cosmos make me feel like a feather in a thunderstorm,” she say to the man with the unfortunately curly set of locks. “Or, maybe I just like to get drunk,” she says, giggling at her own joke.

“Don’t we all,” the man says, saluting her in an airborne toast that is not met materially, but hoisted in the air by the woman, nevertheless. She takes a long sip from her drink.

Hiccup.

So that’s where she gets her power from, the fabulous human creation, alcohol. Archibald immediately realizes the importance of this moment. He must study this woman. She could possibly be the missing link for which he’s been searching for all these years.

Tue., Sept. 27, 3:02 p.m., Perdido Beach, FL, Suite 901, Sun Beach Condos

Having just spent the last two hours working on his tan in the cool confines of the Sun Beach pool, Luigi Lucriccio ambles into the kitchen, a beach towel around his waist, dragging the heels of sandals against the tile floor as if his feet might fly off the planet if he dared actually making a proper, full, off the ground step with his feet. This enforced vacation brought on by the hurricane has had Luigi work ever so carefully on his conservation of energy, as if any exertion might bring on thought, and thought, at times like these, can be very dangerous indeed. Xanax has been a good friend these last few weeks, nearly as good a friend has had been Jim and Jack, Beam and Daniels, respectively.

This conservation of energy principle, while a strong plan in theory, doesn’t necessarily work all the time. There are trips to the store that, while taken in a very slow and deliberate manner, still require some of those damned British thermal units to be burned somewhere in his body. And a man, even a fairly accomplished cook like Luigi, can only eat from his own kitchen so often; his trips to the Lambert’s Café in nearby Foley, Alabama, home of the world famous “throwed rolls,” where the waiters don’t bring your dinner rolls to the table, they actually throw them to you from across the room, the trips to Lambert’s have served as his sole source of human interaction these past few weeks, save the occasional conversation with another resident / visitor of the Sun Beach condos at the side of the pool.

“Nice day,” an old lady from Tennessee had once said, reading a Southern Interiors magazine, knowing full well Luigi’s hometown and completely missing the irony of the situation.

Truth is, Luigi doesn’t know one way or another whether his house had been flooded by the storm or not. His house is one of the few located at the edge of the flooding. Luigi could tell by using Google Maps that there was standing water at his house, that much was for sure. The depth was another thing altogether. His house at 4801 Loyola Street was near the edge of the flooding—in fact, six blocks away, St. Charles Avenue was completely dry. He knew this from both Google Maps and from radio reports. But his area was a little different. There was very little news emanating from areas of the city that had been under. Had there only been a foot or so of water, then Luigi had been spared. His house was built a century ago when the apparently smarter natives build homes on piers; Luigi figured his house is about two and a half feet above ground, hopefully high enough to escape the nasty, disease infested, stagnant water that had engulfed so much of his city.

Last week, while eating at Lambert’s, a very young girl in a neighboring booth turned around, stood on her bench, leaned over the back of it to ask Luigi a question. “Have you seen the Easter Bunny?” she asked.

“How old are you?” Luigi asked.

“I’m six,” she said, squinting her eyes with childhood authority.

“Is the Easter Bunny here?” Luigi replied playfully.

“I think he might be in the other room,” the girl said, pointing her finger towards the entrance to the kitchen.

“Over there?” Luigi asked, craning his neck to look behind him to where the kitchen was located.

“There are lots of people going to visit the Easter Bunny,” the girl said, nodding her head confidently. “He has eggs.”

Huevos, Luigi mused. Yes. The Easter Bunny has balls. “Where does he hide his eggs?” Luigi asked.

“Oh, he hides them everywhere. Between the sofa and the wall, sometimes even!” the excited girl replied. “Sometimes,” she whispered, “he even leaves them somewhere other than your house.”

Luigi decided to counter with temporal logistics. “But it’s not Easter,” he argued.

“Sometimes, Easter has to come early,” she replied.

Luigi was confused, but this was a childish conversation, so he went with it. “Where else would he hide them? In the yard?”

The girls eyes widened. “No, sometimes, when the weather gets bad, he has to hide them in a hotel room.”

Still confused, Luigi pressed on. “Why would he hide them in a hotel room?”

The girl, still profoundly interested in the conversation, stole a glance back behind her to her parents. She whispered even more quietly. “Because even though it’s not Easter,” the girl said, wrapping her hands around her mouth to make a kind of whisper bull horn, “there’s no where else to put them.”

Luigi slowly impaled one of his dumplings from his bowl of chicken and dumplings with his fork, securing it with the two leftmost tines and deposited in his mouth, a nod to nourishment, but not enough for him to not be able to continue his conversation, open-mouthed, etiquette be damned. “Why is there no where else to put them?” he asked, trying not to show his mouthful of food to the six year old conversationalist.

The girl looked at him with childish disdain. “Katrina flooded everything, silly, and the Easter Bunny doesn’t like to swim.”

Luigi nearly choked on his half-chewed dumpling. He realized he was seated next to a family in a similarly relocated situation. “I see,” he said, wiping away a tiny bit of juice off his lip from his near-choking experience. He collected himself quickly and replied, “That bunny is really smart.”

Her eyes widened again. “I know. That’s why I love him so much.”

He yanks at the bottle of Jack Daniels, pulls it close, grabs a glass from the cabinet, scoops a handful of ice from the freezer, and pours the bourbon almost to the top of the glass. He would have called this a game day drink, back when he was in college. He takes the bottle of Sprite from the refrigerator and tops of the beverage—just enough to tell himself he isn’t drinking the Jack straight, and stirs the drink with his index finger. When the ice stops spinning, he takes the cocktail glass and deposits its contents down his throat in one solid stream.

He realizes that the plan he’s been considering for a few years now is the only way, the only way to help the people, like the little girl and her family, to get back what was once theirs. The government has abandoned them, as it has abandoned everyone who once called New Orleans home. He knows he can fleece millions from the Federal treasury and, given a little time, make some of the people who have been so destroyed by this tragedy, at least partially whole again, with enough left over for himself for him to be able to live a fairly lofty existence, albeit in a foreign country, one without an extradition treaty with the United States. All he needs is a temporary job, for the initial infrastructure, and for Ishtar to say yes, which he most certainly will. For the girl in Lambert’s, he will do the dirty deed. All he needs is a little time and a whole lot of what’s gotten him this far.

He refills the glass with ice, Jack and a splash of Sprite and downs the concoction again. Rinse, repeat.

Chapter 14

Mon., Sept. 26, 11:38 a.m., 3801 Banks St. (front yard, sort of)

Sunshine, having finally pulled herself up from the mud, has finished crying, at least for the time being. She is still sobbing; it was a very powerful cry, but she’s mostly just sniffling to keep the newly formed snot in her nose from dripping out and onto her upper lip. A snot moustache would be intolerable under any conditions.

There stands what’s left of her house, her existence here in New Orleans. She will retreat with Gwen and try to figure out what to do next. Right now, with the corpse of her former residence slapping her in the face, she has no idea what to think or why she should even think it. In fact, the idea of thinking in general seems like the kind of thing that could render a person paralyzed, that person being Sunshine in particular. Thinking, as a concept or an notion or even a vague hypothesis, is dead, like in those gangster films. She wants thinking dead. She wants its family dead. She wants the cousins of thought to be sent to the bottom of the river with concrete sneakers and not to be found until the next generation of archaeologists come around, discover them, and end up believing that is what people wore for shoes.

Sunshine hopes Gwen keeps her liquor cabinet well-stocked and doesn’t mind sharing. And by sharing, she means with a funnel.

Tue., Sept. 27, 10:22 a.m., 1000 Valence

Deidre drags the luggage out of the back of Judge Mule’s black Land Rover, the luggage flopping to the street like dead horses, and into the foyer of the house. Her own home, located in Chalmette, is still unreachable and completely flooded over the roof like everyone else who lives in a one story ranch house in St. Bernard Parish.

The Judge has offered she and her husband a room at his house until her FEMA trailer becomes available, an offer she willingly and happily accepted, seeing as how Judge Mule’s house is in one of the few pockets of the city where electricity has been restored. Hell, the man even has his cable service, for God’s sake. It could be months, she’s sure, until the trailer will be able to be put in her front yard in Chalmette.

The judge isn’t a perfect man, she knows, but deep down, he’s a good man, a decent man, one who looks out for those he has under his wing. He’s her big bird today, and she’s never felt like she needed a nest more than now. When her husband arrives later this evening, she will have made them all a feast from the canned goods in the judge’s cabinets, the only food in the place that hasn’t spoiled over the month without electricity since they’ve been gone. They deserve it, those men. They’ve been through a lot and Deidre is a good woman, one who recognizes her place in her good men’s lives.

Tue., Sept. 27, 10:48 a.m., 341 Octavia

Arthur Cole is astounded to find out that he has both electricity and cable (not to mention the internet!) at his house. He is further astounded by that, through his cursory inspection of his property, absolutely no damage took place on the premises, not a broken window, a missing shutter, not even a missing roof tile. When one is living a clean life as apparently Arthur Cole has, one reaps the benefits! His home, his castle, after almost a month away, is exactly as he had left it, minus one terrible detail. The refrigerator.

The fact that he had the equivalent of an entire deer carcass worth of meat in his freezer was not lost on Art when he arrived at his house. Actually, it made its presence known the moment he walked through the door, a combination of the smell of a million dead rats combined with the proliferation of tiny fruit flies who seemed to have made Art’s house their home. What he had not counted on, however, was the ooze.

The ooze, for lack of a better explanation, is a primordial layer around where the suction section of the freezer and refrigerator doors meet the body of the appliance itself, a layer encrusted with thousands of dead insects, but, more importantly, a slimy substance not seen on this planet since the invention of the single celled organism. A sort of film seemed to be, slowly but surely, generating from inside the now refrozen center of his refrigeration appliance, pouring itself in minute drips down the refrigerator’s side and, in tiny pools, to the ceramic tile floors below. Since the electricity has probably only been on for a few days at maximum, Art’s convinced that the creatures inside the freezer’s cavity have conspired to create a life form of their own and are using the ooze as a medium with which they will soon exit the hive they infest and unleash themselves upon the outside world, that world being the world inhabited by Arthur Cole and his home. A collective intelligence is the only answer for whatever it is that is slowly releasing itself from Art’s fridge.

The stench, an odor with whom there can be no earth-borne allegiance, announces to Arthur that the doors of this large kitchen appliance are never to be opened again by a human being not wearing some kind of Mars rover radiation suit. The only solution is duct tape, a dolly and a trip to the curb. Any other action, he knows, would result in instant death. Just as FEMA has been advertising on the radio in their addictive slogan, “When in doubt, throw it out!” There has never been a more doubtful item in this world than Arthur Cole’s refrigerator.

Tue., Sept. 27, 11:40 a.m., Perdido Beach, FL, Suite 901, Sun Beach Condos

Having just extracted himself from bed, Luigi Lucriccio sits out on the ninth floor balcony of his rented beach condo, overlooking the white sand beach and rolling waves of the Gulf of Mexico. His “hurrication” has been rather peaceful, spending most of his time right here in his condo with its wireless internet access and spectacular view. He’s smoking a cigarette and browsing the web on his laptop, making is daily trip to nola.com to try and glean some news from the home front.

According to the internet, his city is finally opening back up. “New Orleans is open for business,” Mayor Ray Nagin is quoted as saying. Further down in the article is the list of zip codes. Apparently, they are allowing people back into the city, but only to certain areas. Parts of the city still remain flooded or otherwise uninhabitable. His zip code, 70115, is one of those that are now open.

He sighs. The moment has come. He can go back home and… well, do whatever it is that he does on a daily basis, which, quite frankly, isn’t much. Living on the dead dad’s money has been nice, to be sure, but it can get quite boring. Perdido has actually been a welcome change of pace, excepting the forced evacuation part. Welcome, but lonely too. Maybe, when he gets back, he’ll get a job. The storm has to be good for something, and Luigi is pretty sure that something is motivation.

He knows that when he gets back home, things will be different, though, that’s for sure. Luigi’s not sure if any of his friends are going to be returning to his home city, ever, a problem that has been gnawing at him since a few days after the shock of the breaches to the levees happened.

Just then, on cue, it happens, a text message on his phone from one of his closest friends, Sunshine. “Are you in New Orleans?” it says.

Text messaging is a new concept for Luigi. For the last few years, he’s seen kids frantically typing at their telephones and he thought, what are these fools doing, and how are they so adept and typing words into a number pad with only, what, maybe twelve keys. Where do all the letters go? Messaging was, to him, only something for the foolish, the vapid, the trendy or the young, and Luigi is none of those things. He’d hit that age where gadgets were no longer cool to him, a fact that suited Luigi just fine.

Then the hurricane arrived and completely ruined the cellular system for anybody with a phone with a 504 area code. Suddenly, the only way to communicate with people was by text messaging, and it is that way still, nearly a month since the storm. Luigi has had no choice but to become a reluctant convert.

He slowly maneuvers through the keys to reply to Sunshine. “In Florida back soon,” is all the patience his fingers have.

Tue., Sept. 27, 12:04 p.m., 341 Octavia

Having finally dragged the offensive refrigerator out to the curb, Arthur Cole finds himself spent and desperately needing a drink. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any stores open and his Yugo doesn’t much like the Mississippi River bridge’s access ramps, far too steep, so shopping for some booze on the west bank is out of the question. He has enough canned goods for food; that’s not a problem. But the one bottle of wine he had in the house went bad in the heat after the storm, and there’s nothing else on hand, save a couple of Vicodin in the bathroom to relieve the stress of having to move that awful fridge. Worse, there is still a large swarm of fruit flies hovering in his kitchen, even the thought of which is making him queasy. No. The Yugo will have to venture forth.

He’d heard reports on the radio that business owners have been allowed in for over a week and he wonders if the term business owners applies to bar owners. It would make sense, seeing as how bars are businesses.

Unfortunately, this thought makes Arthur Cole think about giant, bar sized refrigerators, a thought that takes all of the pent up vomit from earlier and makes him spew right there on his living room floor.

No time for mopping. Now he really needs something to drink.

Tue., Sept. 27, 12:32 p.m., The Bulldog

As if heeding his desperate call, the chalkboard sign in front of The Bulldog announces it’s status as being OPEN. Art yanks his Yugo into a parking spot directly in front of the bar and almost forgets to take the keys out of the ignition as he bolts from the drivers seat. His haste further endangers his life. As he leaves the car, he is nearly flattened by one of the many National Guard Humvees patrolling the city streets.

Having narrowly escaped death, Arthur Cole needs a drink more now, today, than ever in his life.

Tue., Sept. 27, 12:41 p.m., The Bulldog

It’s a good thing Gwen lives around the corner from a bar. Otherwise, Sunshine might not have made it through another hour. Not that Gwen is a particularly nasty person, no. It’s more of a grating thing, and that woman’s shoes! Abhorrent. The Nike sandals were the last straw. When Gwen donned those, Sunshine had to leave. For her sanity’s sake, there was no other choice.

She saunters in through the open double doors of the Bulldog into a long, dimly lit room, full of dark woods. Once her eyes adjust, she can see on the left is a long bar made of a deep brown, almost mahogany wood, lined up with empty barstools. Behind the bar is a large mirror, maybe the size that awful Yugo she saw just outside the bar, in front of which sit maybe thirty different spigots of a variety of different beers, in front of which is a tall, bald, tattooed man with a six inch long pencil-thin goatee. She assumes he is the bartender.

“Cosmopolitan,” she says.

“We just opened today and we’re still washing the glassware. Do you mind if it’s in plastic?”

“I don’t care if it’s served in a hollowed out loaf of bread, so long as I can drink it.”

“Fair enough,” the bartender says and begins to mix the concoction.

Sunshine glances back outside, into the glare, squinting in the harshness of this uneartly post-Katrina dusty daylight, and sees a man at a table out front she hadn’t noticed when she walked in. Her thirst must have set her vision in the tunnel state. She decides that there are few things more depressing than a woman sitting by herself in a bar, so she grabs her drink and heads out to sit at the table adjacent this man and his bottle of beer.

The scene before them is something out of an Armageddon science fiction movie. The Yugo, to start with, doesn’t so much resemble a car as it does a box of metal with some wheels on it with a few pieces of glass thrown on for pastiche. But that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the true strangeness around them; the sun is out, but it’s more of a diffuse blur through the red dust haze that shrouds the city. There is very little vehicular traffic on Magazine street, normally a very crowded thoroughfare. The few vehicles that do pass by are limited to National Guard Humvees, large open topped trucks loaded with household debris, the occasional bulldozer and the rare passenger vehicle. The limited traffic, interspaced by minutes, seems to move in slow motion. The police cars, in particular, rove through the street in front of them completely covered in the orange, Mars-like dust that has settled on every flat surface available, roofs, tree limbs, sidewalks, the top of the table where she is sitting, like pictures Sunshine had seen of Seattle after Mt. St. Helens erupted, but this time, instead of white ash, it is an orange red dust, and it is everywhere. Sunshine feels her eyes welling up with tears. Fighting back the onrush of emotions, she takes a long deep pull from her cocktail, followed by a deep breath and then, as if putting things into their proper perspective, a sigh.

The man at the table next to her says, “So, where is your house?”

“Was,” she replies.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Mid City. Took on eight feet of water and then burned to the ground.”

The man squints his eyes. “At the same time? Is that even possible?”

“I think they happened in that order, not concurrently.”

“Well, I am really sorry to hear you lost your house.”

Sunshine takes only the second gulp from her cosmopolitan and finishes the drink. “I think I’m going to need another one of these.”

“Allow me,” the man says. “Considering you’ve lost everything I feel the least I can do is pony up for one drink. Is this a madras?” he asks, the ice clanking against the plastic.

“Cosmo,” she replies and reaches into her purse for a cigarette.

Chapter 13

Fri., Jun 22, 9:15 p.m., Dos Jefe’s

Lush Muffin has grown very tired of Art’s company. She desires male companionship and Art, as usual, is a poor substitute for the real thing. She fishes through her purse and captures her cell phone.

“Luigi,” she says hoarsely.

“I’m taking a shower,” Luigi replies, with the sound of a cascade of water in the background. “Nice to hear you’re still alive.”

“Ditto.”

“What’s up? I’ve got soap on my head and I’m afraid it will dry out my scalp if I don’t rinse it soon.”

Lush Muffin loves the fact that Luigi Lucriccio shaves his head. “Are you planning on heading out?”

Luigi coughs. “I don’t know. I feel brutally beaten, like I’ve been dragged behind a freight train over a street of shattered glass. It’s not pretty here right now. I’ve only been up for a few minutes.”

Lush Muffin cackles. “You’re worse than me!”

“And that’s saying something.”

She bristles. “Well, are you going to be a man about it and come find me or are you going to wallow in pathetic-ville?”

“Wallowing is not my forte. Let me sweat out some of last night in this shower here and I will call you when I’m out.”

“Okay, but hurry. I’m bored.”

Art hears the last sentence, grips his red snapper and downs the entire drink. He is, of course, better looking than Luigi, but just doesn’t seem to get any credit for anything he does or says. Arthur Cole feels like the most underrated man on the planet.


Wed., Jan 12, 2:53 a.m., Audubon Park Riverview

Having wandered down the street from the Monkey Hill Bar deliciously drunk, Elizabeth and Luigi hold hands, laughing at nothing in particular, at the fact that they’re laughing and there’s nothing either of them can do to stop it. They’ve made it all the way through the park, across the railroad tracks and up the hill which is, in fact, a natural bluff of high land at a point where the river’s curve is extreme and abrupt, that curve causing, after hundreds of years, the land on this particular stretch of the river to be higher than at most other points.

They sit down at the edge of the bluff over the river. Beneath their dangling pairs of feet is a rubber coated chain link fence, under which sit piles of crushed rock. This is to keep the river from eroding the base of the bluff. In the battle of man versus nature, this is a temporary victory for man.

Elizabeth squeezes with her left index finger and thumb a spot on her right elbow, for no apparent reason, holding her right arm up and eyeing her skin in the dim light of the urban evening.

“My arms are fat,” she says.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?” Luigi asks.

“I want to grow up to be the invisible woman,” Elizabeth replies. “That way, I can sneak into your house and fondle you when you least expect it,” she says, grabbing Luigi between the legs.

He smiles. “I think I’d like that.”

Elizabeth abruptly relinquishes her grip. “What about you, Luigi? What do you want to be when you get out of elementary school? A fireman?”

Luigi tosses his head back and sighs. “I don’t know. I think about what I’m doing with my life, which, admittedly, seems like less and less each day. Invisible sounds awfully nice, come to think of it. Then I just wouldn’t have to deal with all of this adulthood crap.”

“Crabby man!”

“Sorry,” Luigi chuckles. “It’s just that, well, I like you and I’d love to be able to just spend every day frolicking wherever, just hanging out, you know? No real pressures, no deadlines, no job, which, I’m surprised I still have one, given I’ve taken off the last ten days just to hang out with you.”

“Well, it has been fun.”

“You’ll get no disagreement from me.” Luigi reaches out and puts his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders. “I just sit here and wonder what would have happened if you and I hadn’t met at Sunshine’s New Year’s Party.”

“You’d be asleep, going to work tomorrow,” Liz quips.

“Sleep. So overrated.” He pulls Liz close and they kiss, a sloppy, drunken mouthful, tongues roving in every possible direction.

Fri., Jun 22, 10:00 p.m., Dos Jefe’s

Luigi Lucriccio flings himself through the double doors of Dos Jefe’s as a gunslinger would enter a saloon, his unbuttoned velvet, tiger skin print vest flapping in the rush of wind created as the air conditioned inside air swooshes through the open doors and greets the stale, warm, humid summer evening. His bald head is reflecting a streetlight outside. As soon as he crosses the threshold, that reflection is erased, replaced by the multi-colored ambience of the neon lights directly above the doors.

Lush Muffin’s eyes become transfixed; he is cute, in a biker-turned-intellectual kind of way.

His reluctant smile meets her gaze. Luigi knows she’s gorgeous, and that in itself allows the smile to form automatically, but it’s tempered with the knowledge that she is also the devil, at least as far as his health and sleeping patterns are concerned.

Her straight strawberry blonde hair sits as a floppy helmet atop her head, the length of which drifts to where it barely dodges against her shoulders. She smiles in return, purposefully and without Luigi’s reluctance, her top lip retracting towards her nostrils to reveal her gum line above her upper row of teeth. When Lush Muffin smiles, it is always a genuine reaction, never forced, and Luigi is beginning to realize that he is becoming, in her eyes, the genuine article.

------------------------------------------
Late September, 2005
-----------------------------------------

Tue., Sept. 27, 2005, 9:50 a.m., Jefferson/Orleans Parish Border, River Road National Guard Checkpoint

The not-so-curious thing about the checkpoint is they are stopping people in crappy cars and letting those in more fashionable vehicles pass through undeterred. Unfortunately for Arthur Cole, his car is in the former category. His 1988 Yugo GVX might be the crappiest car ever built, and he likes it that way. He enjoys the fact that he can keep the thing running and that other people despise his automobile. It suits him just fine. Except for today. Today, he gets to find out if the false credentials his buddy emailed him are good enough to get him into the city, as it is still closed to the general public since the Hurricane.

“State your business,” the unsmiling National Guard trooper with his very large M-16 says. The man is much taller than the Yugo and has to sort of crouch down, bending over his gun in order to look Art in the face.

Arthur Cole takes his credentials from a manila folder in the passenger seat (seat is a liberal term for it, seeing as how it’s more a mess of coils than a proper seat, the upholstery having long since disintegrated) and hands the document to the soldier.

After a cursory glance, the trooper hands him the paper back. He surveys the car once again and says, “I wouldn’t go anywhere off the beaten path in this thing. You’re not going to make it very far if you do and there are no garages to get your car fixed.”

“Thank you, sir,” Art nods and drives his Yugo into the comparative squalor that is the recently flooded Parish of Orleans.

Mon., Sept. 26, 9:58 a.m., Jefferson/Orleans Parish Border, Airline Highway National Guard Checkpoint

Sunshine smiles at the boys with the big guns. She waves. They wave back, not even gesturing for her to stop so they can check her fake credentials she downloaded from a friend. Her red Mazda Miata has its top up for now, unfortunate, because had it been down, she might have attracted even more attention from the boys, maybe even a phone number or two. That probably could be helpful, seeing as how her house is probably difficult to get to, at best, especially in her Miata. Gwen, who stayed throughout the storm, promised they would be able to get there in her Jeep. The only thing that means is Sunshine will have to put up with Gwen, an unpleasant but necessary requirement, given the fact that Sunshine’s second story apartment’s neighborhood was under eight feet of water and there is a certainty that a good deal of debris still litters Banks Street.

Sunshine has no illusions about staying at her own house; there’s not liable to be power or water for months. But she’d sure like to get some of her things out. Things seem to mean more to her these days than they did before August 29th.

Not that Gwen doesn’t have a good heart, she just annoys Sunshine to no end. Thanks to Gwen, however, she’s got a place to crash tonight. Tomorrow will be decision day, whether to head back to Texas to her parents’ house with her tail between her legs yet again, or to hopefully find another friend with which she can room until her place becomes livable again. So far, she’s had no luck. The friends she’s been able to contact (cell phone service is still quite sketchy and the primary mode of communication has been through text messaging) haven’t come back to the city yet. At present, Gwen is her only option.


Mon., Sept. 26, 11:30 a.m., 3801 Banks St. (front yard, sort of)

Sunshine has never cried so much in her entire life, going back, she thinks, until her first memories, sometime around age three. She is kneeling in the mud, her mud caked hands gripping at her platinum blonde hair, streaking Sunshine’s normally tonsorially perfect coif with chunks of wet dirt and clumps of dead grass. Her white sundress is smeared around the knees and ankles with the wet, probably toxic soil. The wail of her voice can only be described as that of a panicked howler monkey moments before its death.

Gwen stands impassively by her side, smoking a cigarette and staring at the charred front columns—what is left of Sunshine’s house. With her unencumbered hand, Gwen gently strokes Sunshine’s head, being careful to avoid the soiled parts, of course, and whispers, “Shhhh. It will be all right.” Gwen takes a deep pull from her cigarette knowing that there is nothing right about what she sees.

Everything behind the cement columns in front of the house seems to have collapsed into a two foot high layer of black nothing. Usually, when one sees a picture of a burnt house, there are some things one can recognize, maybe the corner of a picture frame or trophy or something, but it appears that anything metallic was completely melted and, from what Gwen can tell, the metallic objects are melted into black amorphous blobs, looking something akin to giant robot turds, atop a completely incinerated, square, house sized sandbox of black ash.

Mon, Sept. 19, 12:14 p.m., Atop the Ruined Roof of the Superdome

Archibald is upset.

The most exciting time of his life, surfing Hurricane Katrina at the mouth of the Mississippi River, has been followed by three week period of boredom. With a capital B.

He’s drinking a screwdriver. Archibald refuses to think about the fact that he had to run all the way to Baton Rouge to steal oranges from the supermarket to make the orange juice for his drink. Or the fact that drink ice is currently NOT AVAILABLE in this city, what with the lapse of electricity and its cohort, lack of refrigeration. No. He chooses not to think about that, for he can see the Entergy crews busily repairing the city’s electrical infrastructure and therefore restoring drink ice to his now quiet little Bourg. The warm screwdriver will soon be a thing of the past.

And the experiment survived. Okay, that’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s not a bad one either. The fact that his regeneration machine operates without the need for public works was as necessary today as the day they started. And, as bored as he has become with his experiment, he doesn’t relish a new assignment, fraught with learning the language of a new species and especially finding what it is they like to drink that brings them pleasure. For all Archibald knows, a new assignment’s drink of choice could be sand, and, well, since he’s been an ostrich on this planet for nearly one hundred years, Archibald has had his fill of sand.

He decides, for boredom’s sake, to make a mental list of the things that he loves and hates about this planet that has been his home for so very long.

He loves:
Scotch
Orange juice
Anything with alcohol that can be mixed with orange juice
Surfing
Nipples

He hates:
Mimes
Cameras (they steal your soul)

After composing his mental list, Archibald decides that, on balance, this planet isn’t really that terrible, not perfect, but not the worst spot on the map. He just needs something, something that will make him feel alive, a task, an errand, a complicated web of lies and deceit, anything, to motivate him thorough the next day and the next.

Chapter 12

Fri., Jun 22, 8:36 p.m., Dos Jefe’s

Now that both Art and Lush Muffin are on their third Red Snapper, Art figures this is a good time to casually place his hand on Lush Muffin’s exposed knee. She doesn’t seem to notice. Art makes a mental note to use this method to make inroads later on this evening.

“Art?”

“Yes, Lush Muffin.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t shave your head, you know, just to see what it would look like?”

“Couldn’t I just put a stocking on it or something?”

“Well, yes, I’m sure you could, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

“It would allow me to see what it would look like.”

Lush Muffin furls her brow. “I suppose it would, but it’s not the same.”

“How?”

“It’s just not.”

“Is that woman logic?”
“Kind of.” Lush Muffin knocks back the last of her latest red snapper and slides the empty glass to the edge of the bar. The trained Jackson knows this means Arthur Cole is buying her another one of these.

Art empties his glass and places his glass adjacent to hers.

“I think people who try new things, well, to me, that means they’re not scared.”

“Now all of a sudden I am a pussy because I just don’t feel like shaving my head?”

“Well,” Lush Muffin says, smirking, “I doesn’t mean you’re not a pussy.”

Art lifts his hand off her knee and grabs his crotch. “This is one hundred percent man sausage, that I can guarantee.”

“Vulgar,” she hisses.

“Sorry, but you’re challenging my manhood over here, an affront that, I believe, demands vulgarity in response.”

Jackson brings them their red snapper refills.

“You’re scared.”

“I’m not scared of anything. I simply don’t want to shave my head.”

“Believe what you want,” she says, smiling, slowly sipping her cocktail, her eyes glancing over the rim of the glass at Art’s frustrated face, his jawbone throbbing outward as he clinches his teeth.

“You are a real pain in the ass.”

“I know, but I’m beautiful and I can get away with it.”


Fri., Jun 22, 8:42 p.m., Dos Jefe’s

“Hey Karl,” Sunshine says, an empty glass of Chartreuse and a full Cosmo in front of her.

“Yes?”

Sunshine extends her arm towards the group of law enforcement types, “Do you see that guy over there, the kind of burly one with the tattoo of a school bus on his forearm?”

Karl Cerullo cranes his neck backward. “Sure, I see him.”

“I’m going to marry him.”

Karl chuckles. “The one with the faint moustache? Sunshine, you hate men with facial hair.”

“He will have shaved that off by the time we get married.”

“I see.”

“We’re going to live in Dallas.”

“Again, I didn’t think you liked anything about Texas.”

“Well, it is like a whole other country and we’ve proven recently that I’m rather xenophobic, but I’ll be a fugitive when we get married.”

“A fugitive, married to some kind of lawman, in Texas.”

“Dallas.”

“Right.” Karl Cerullo absent-mindedly twists the hair on his beard at the jaw line. “Well, so you should probably go meet this future husband of yours, I mean, if you want your Texan dream to come true, it might be a good first step.”

“No need.”

“No need to meet your husband? Is this some kind of immaculate nuptial?”

“He will come looking for me when the time is right, and then we’ll play musical orgasms for the rest of our lives.”


Sat, Jun 23, 1:56 a.m., Abidjan, Cote d’Ivorie, Home of Didier Drogba

Asleep, Didier is dreaming of a faraway place, a city in America. He is constantly aware of this city because of a person who is forever unsuccessfully trying to outbid him on e-bay. New Orleans, a place he has never been, is haunting him this evening.

In the dream, Didier is walking through a pile of huge leaves, dead banana leaves, he’s pretty sure. The aforementioned leaves are lying in a shallow pile on the side of a street. High above, a blimp circles slowly and he can hear the hum of the blimp’s engines. There is a man in the blimp who has a public address system. “Have you all seen the rock, paper, scissors party? It’s on the radio,” he broadcasts in English from his circling blimp.

Up ahead, standing on the street, is a creature, human-sized, with the head of a hamster and the body of a Lake Victoria perch. The creature is beckoning Didier forward with his fin, curling it like a person would curl his index finger.

Didier walks straight ahead towards the hamster-fish, all the while the hamster-fish is walking backwards until the fish creature has turned a corner. Didier rounds the corner and sees, there on a billboard in front of him, a giant picture of Roman Abramovich, the owner of Didier’s football club and beneath the picture, written in his native French, is the phrase, “Soyez célèbre, soyez important, vivez pour toujours!” Be famous, be important, live forever!


Fri., Jun 22, 8:58 p.m., 725 Constantinople

Luigi Lucriccio bolts sitting straight up from his dream, covered with sweat. This nightmare had been just as bad as most he has had in recent days. He looks over at the clock and realizes it’s nearly nine p.m. and he has been sleeping since just after noon, after his cocaine finally ran out.

The dream is hazy in memory, but it had something to do with him becoming some kind of half rodent, half fish-like creature and he was painting a giant mural with text in French, after which a huge, dreadlocked black man approached to come see his work.

This is exactly the reason he doesn’t like to go out with Lush Muffin. God only knows what kinds of chemicals they ingested last night, but he does know that the eight-ball helped him make it to Camellia Grill for a nine a.m., ahem, dinner. He’s pretty sure he was no longer with Lush Muffin, but remembers something about the San Diego Chicken. No, that can’t be right. Was there a costume party? Everything is vague, as it is most nights he hits the town with her.

He does remember making out with Muffin in one of those photo booth stalls at F & M’s, but that was around ten, before the F & M’s crowd, known for their late till sunrise schedule, had even arrived. That was after the cheese fries, an early dinner of sorts, and before they had scored the giant rock of Columbia’s finest. There was a cab to D.B.A. on Frenchman, during which they were doing lines on a mirror in front of the driver, or in back of the driver, as logistics would have it, but definitely well within view from his rear view mirror.

He can’t shake the image of eating at Camellia Grill with a chicken. A woman, yes, but a chicken. Cluck. A costume, to be sure, but still. How did all of that come about, and how did the chicken eat without removing her head piece?

There’s a definite gap between arrival at D.B.A. and Camellia Grill. There were shots, he does remember, but doesn’t remember exactly what was consumed. Lush Muffin wore a red sundress. She was, as always, rubbing her concave belly in an effort to keep it where it was, the opposite of convex. She smelled nice, he remembers, a combination of floral shampoo and booze, an odor he could still ascertain even after the large quantities of excess cocaine in his nostrils.

Getting out of bed is necessary, he realizes. Getting out of the house, while seeming to be a daunting task, is also required. He does not need to keep living like this.

When Elizabeth was hit by the bus in January, Luigi made a vow never to let himself fall in love with anyone. Loss is far too painful. Self medication, the only answer, must be moderated, he is sure, but for now, he needs the numbness, the absence of feeling, the ritualistic cleansing of his heart, so broken in so very many pieces. Lush Muffin, with her own pathetic self medicated tendencies, provides the perfect companion on his quest to quell the memories of Liz. With her, he can be both medicated and connected. With Lush Muffin, he has found a counterpoint.

The vomit will spill from his lips momentarily, after which, he will rinse and continue.

In a year or so, he will be wealthy beyond his dreams, so now is the perfect time to not reflect and just live. Venezuela is where he will begin anew.