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.