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.
