Something Rising (Light and Swift) (25 page)

“Read your palm?”

Cassie turned and saw a man standing behind her, smiling in the moonlight. He was short and overweight; his glasses rested on the tops of his cheeks. He wore a long-sleeved red T-shirt with baggy shorts, and sandals with thick wool socks.

“How much?”

He was already walking toward the canvas chair sitting in the middle of the walk in front of the cathedral. “How much do you have?”

Cassie reached in her pocket and pulled out a bill. “Ten bucks.”

“Okay,” he said with a shrug. “Come sit down. Give me your right palm.”

She sat down and held out her hand.

“My name is Alan, by the way.” He held her hand only a few seconds, tracing her lifeline with his thumb, then let go. She expected him to say, You will have a long and happy life.

“You are healthy, active, you live strongly inside your body.”

“Where do other people live?”

“Oh, they're all over the place. Most live in the past. To dwell in the body is to be fully in the present moment, but that can be a grievous thing, and a lot of work.” Alan crossed his hands over his round stomach and looked up at the sky above the church; his chin was soft, and Cassie could easily imagine him as a little boy. “You … in terms of style, you pride yourself on being free of …
the chains of femininity, do you understand that? You pride yourself on not being bound to a single presentation, but that is a matter of willful naïveté. You need to think more about how
absence
and
denial
are statements as surely as anything else.” He stopped and stared with great concentration at what looked to Cassie to be the wisps of clouds passing in front of the moon, silent so long she almost concluded the reading was over. “You live in … Pennsylvania, off the Pennsylvania turnpike, no, Ohio. Someplace … I can see flatness, desolation. Ohio? Ugh, I'm sorry, but that's just
so
ugly. You live in a world where the spirits have completely flown, there are no voices left, and that causes everyone around you to act out against the … well, it's really painful, isn't it.” He stared at the sky. “Even here the voices are weakened, it's nothing like it used to be, we all used to feel like radio receivers, voices coming through all the time. We'd spin the dial and listen to our favorite songs. But now it's like they're far away, children calling from a great distance.” Alan looked at the sky, not at Cassie; she felt her eyes fill, unaccountably, with tears. She blinked them away.

“How do you gain power? This is a question I always want answered, I mean, this is something I look for. You are competitive, particularly with men, and this is in conflict with your feelings of loyalty and protectiveness. You are in search of your better nature, but this competitiveness stands in your way, and you don't know how to get around it. I can see … a sort of geometry, a Ferris wheel, ah, ah, you're a gambler.” His gaze moved back and forth over the roofline of the church as if reading something there. “You measure your life in wins, but you should be counting your losses. The spirits want me to remind you that chance is the equivalent of death.”

“I don't play a game of chance.”

He ignored her, turning his head slightly, straining to hear another conversation. “You want to travel, but not very far. Authority, hierarchy, the notion of a superior are all so anathema to you, it's a wonder you're able to function at all. You should avoid run-ins with the police. People talk to you a great deal, even strangers, and the reason is that you appear to stand exactly in between, on the fulcrum of happiness and despair, and this registers to the outside world as a tabula rasa on which they might scribble their own names. You consider your life a secret, and living in a secret is like living in a prison or a drafty old house.

“These spirits, the ones still left, are German, which is a surprise to everyone, all the yuppies and frat boys want to hear is that they should drink more, consume, consume, and they want to hear it in a French accent, but the spirits keep quoting Rilke.

“To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars
.

“They asked me to say that to you, I don't know what it's called. You are an orphaned child, this is very clear, but most of us are, and our only hope is to recognize it and cling to one another as best we can, or else harden our hearts to our own orphanhood, which is pointless. There is a world beyond this world.” Alan looked at Cassie for the first time since the reading began. “You make me sadder than anyone I've seen all week.”

Cassie stood, for a moment she just stood there. She took a deep breath, nodded at Alan, his hands still crossed over his belly,
then walked back to the guest house, where she called home to tell Belle she was there and safe, something she'd never done before.

The next morning she chose a coffee shop just outside the Quarter, on Magazine Street, by the smell outside. Inside, the decor was vaguely Cuban, the ceilings were high, and an antique roaster sat in the corner, the brass so shiny it mirrored the bar where she sat. She ordered a black coffee from her server, a sullen young person of indeterminate gender. Cassie had never before confronted someone whose sex wasn't immediately apparent; this child was of medium height and very thin; his/her hair was dyed a dull blue and gathered into two small doughnuts above the ears. His lower lip, eyebrow, and nose were all pierced, and his ears sported so many studs and rings, he could have emerged from the hail of an industrial staple gun. His eyes and lips were dark with makeup, and his fingernails were painted alternately red and black (chipped and fading), but his voice, when he took Cassie's order, was that of a young girl, and she walked like a girl. In her black pants and loose white shirt, there was neither the evidence nor absence of hips or breasts.

Cassie took her notebook out of her backpack and reviewed the notes she'd made reading Laura's journals and letters, and after talking to Uncle Bud. The first sip of her coffee was good but burned her tongue. She twirled a pencil around and through her fingers, a habit she'd picked up from her father, and considered that all of her mother's life had been lived in the same sort of alienation. Of course her mother remembered New Orleans as
her soul's paradise, she could hardly do otherwise, but Cassie had been surprised to discover that Laura had spent most of her childhood alone, locked in the little house on Rendon Street while her mother, Gladys Dubuisson, neé Beauvray, silent over thirty years now, spent all day and evening at the LaFollettes', cleaning and cooking for the four boys. When Laura was eleven or twelve, she began to accompany her mother to work, and it was there, in the exquisite ancestral home of the LaFollettes in the Garden District, that Laura had met the LaFollette boys.

Behind Cassie the coffee-shop door opened and closed, and someone took a seat at the counter, leaving two seats between them. She glanced over at the man, who appeared to be in his mid-forties. He was wearing a white seersucker shirt with red stripes and a pair of yellow golfing pants, both well worn, and broken-down running shoes. He threw a driving cap on the counter; Cassie noticed the band inside, stained yellow. She guessed that when the temperature broke 110, this man ended up in a heap on the sidewalk.

“Greetings, Themis!” the man shouted jovially at the server, who gave him a slit-eyed nod. “I'll have the usual.”

“Bode, don't shout. My head aches me awful,” Themis said, pressing her temples with her fingertips.

“Sorry, love.”

Themis set about preparing the man's cappuccino. Bode stood up and pulled a handful of items out of his pocket: crumpled dollar bills, spare change, business cards, lint, Starlite mints—mostly cracked—tattered Post-it notes, and square slips of paper covered with spidery handwriting and what appeared to be mathematical formulas. A nickel rolled Cassie's way down the counter, and she caught it.

“Keep that,” Bode said, smiling. “You earned it.” His black hair was shiny and badly cut, his teeth were coffee-stained, and his smile was crooked. Cassie nodded and slipped the nickel in her pocket.

Bode patted the pocket of his shirt and pulled more bits and pieces from his pants pockets, then rummaged through the mess on the counter. “You wouldn't happen to have a pen, would you?” he asked Cassie. “Not that I mean you owe me.”

She reached into her backpack, pulled out a pen, and slid it to him across the counter.

“Thank you, I just need to make note of this one …” He trailed off. He wrote a few sentences or figures on a Post-it, then folded it up and put it in his pocket. He hummed, drank his cappuccino, wrote more.

Gideon LaFollette,Gladys's employer, was from an old family. A judge. Laura had written in her journal that in New Orleans at that time, there was no distinction between honesty and corruption. The worst politicians, policemen, and lawyers were sometimes the dearest fathers, the most pious Catholics. Gideon's wife, Elise, was a former debutante and morning drinker. Their firstborn, William (whose nickname was Bank), became a relentless capitalist of unknown occupation, although Laura had been careful to note that he was cruel to his gun dogs and had never married. The second son, Jared, became a lawyer, then a judge, like his father. The third, Ori, was Laura's favorite—the best friend of her middle and high school years, although he was older—kind and shy. He had become a pharmacist after his mother forbade him to play jazz trombone, his true love. And then there was Jackson, sometimes called Jack-Q (Cassie didn't know why), born five years after Ori and treasured as the family baby; southerners
make a cult of spoiling the lastborn. Jack gambled from the sixth grade on, twice expelled from Catholic school for shooting craps. Only his father's influence allowed him to graduate. By the time Laura began to date him, when she was sixteen and he was a year older, he was a pool player of some notoriety, not a hustler but a shark. He lied to everyone about everything. He claimed to be older, to have a pilot's license, to have served as an assassin in West Africa. Laura had written,
He liked to pretend he had seen great suffering
. Cassie knew that after Laura fled to Indiana, Jackson had gone on to become a doctor and to marry a rich, consumptive neighbor, a girl Laura described as see-through. Cassie ordered another cup of coffee and a scone. The story was more in the gaps than in the details, the rich shark cast aside for the poor hustler; Laura's abandonment of her mother and her home. Cassie knew only one other thing: that Jackson LaFollette still lived in New Orleans, at least according to the phone book. He was sixty years old, surely prosperous, respected, and out of the game. Maybe he was out of the game.

The coffee-shop door opened another two or three times, mostly on sleepy-looking young people ordering strong coffee to go. A man joined Bode at the counter, leaving only one seat between Cassie and the conversation.

“Thomas, my brother!” Bode stood up and threw his arms around the newcomer. Thomas sat down and ordered a coffee.

Bode seemed beside himself with happiness and patted Thomas on the back.

“Bode, was I not clear about my head?” Themis asked.

“Foolish of me, sorry. Thomas, do tell.”

“No, you tell. What happened with the backer?”

Cassie looked at Thomas, then down at her notebook, then at Thomas again. She ran her thumb lightly along the edge of her coffee cup. He was a tall man whose body was shaped by work: broad-shouldered, with a thick chest and narrow waist. His hands were wide and dry, scarred. His blue jeans, thin with age and washing, were tucked into work boots nearly white with plaster dust, and she could see the muscles of his shoulders moving through his thin white T-shirt. His spine was right there, close enough that she could have touched it, a chain of crescent moons.

“Ah, well, yes, the backer,” Bode began. “There's a small problem, a very slight problem that caused the backer to, well, back off.”

“I see,” Thomas said, stirring sugar into his coffee. His hair was sun-bleached, but there were black streaks in it: a peculiar combination of colors, and he needed a haircut.

“I said to the backer, I said as I say to the many tourists who mistake me for a homeless man, ‘I will accept your money.' And then I showed him the machine, which is, as you know, flawless.”

“I don't actually know that.”

“Well it is, except for this one small problem, which is that it can't be turned on with a living subject inside it, and once it is turned on, a living subject can't
get
inside it. A stumper.”

“That is a snag.”

“Other men, lesser men, would see the ignition problem as fatal.” Bode took a drink of coffee.

Cassie picked up her pencil and began doodling in the notebook, a rectangle, a dotted line suggesting the trajectory of a struck object.

“Let me add, since we're being honest,” Bode continued, “that the size of the living subject doesn't seem to have an impact on
the results. Cockroaches have died, rats have died, rabbits have given up their rabbit lives. That's as far up the food chain as I'm comfortable going, Thomas, I've got to say. Let go and let God, I say. And I believe I could mention something about tying a knot in the rope that would hang me.”

Thomas looked at Cassie, giving her a half-smile as he scratched the back of his neck. “I think, Bode, that you're supposed to tie a knot in the end of your rope and hang on.”

“I've never known you to hold with correcting, Thomas.”

“No, I don't. Generally.”

“But I prefer your way. Holding on to the end of the rope, as you mentioned.”

Themis emerged from the back carrying clean cups and looking worse than before, her lips in starker contrast to her pale face. “You want anything else?” she asked the three, generally.