Ghost of a Flea

Many of the entries from Alouette’s computer, lacking referents or perspective, proved utterly indecipherable. Others had to do with various projects at work and appeared to be of no more than utilitarian interest. There was a file of personal letters and e-mail messages, another of (I think) references to newspaper and magazine articles. But the one that caught my attention had been identified simply as GOK-Alouette’s code, I recognized, for an intellectual shrug, God Only Knows-and I sat thinking about it as the waiter brought my catfish au beurre noir and grit cakes studded with bits of bright habanero pepper, side of white asparagus, and vanished to reappear at irregular intervals, bursting suddenly upon the scene to linger there like a declaimed quote, or shuttling up all but unnoticed, superfluous as a footnote.

The GOK file was a hodgepodge of lists, passages from novels and self-help books, advertising slogans, obituaries, cross sections of classified ads, altogether the most eclectic jumble of disparate things heaped up in a single place that I’d ever come across, a tour through America’s waste lots and past its false, ruined faces, a landfill of used-up words, expended cartridges of old thoughts clattering to the floor. One list comprised science-fiction titles.

“The Education of Drusilla Strange”

A Fabulous, Formless Darkness

To Walk the Night The

Man Who Fell to Earth

A Mirror for Observers

Another juxtaposed mysteries by Margery Allingham, Jonathan Latimer and Patricia Highsmith (provocative n added, one presumes in all innocence, to Ms. Highsmith’s given name), movies from the era of such actors as Broderick Crawford, Richard Carlson and Robert Mitchum, and TV shows like I Led Three Lives and (with painstaking documentation of each individual episode) The Prisoner. One contained a longwinded though rather breathless review of Donald Westlake’s Richard Stark novels from an alternative magazine in the Midwest, another several excerpts from Millay’s Collected Poems and Adrienne Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe. A publisher’s flyer for a new translation of I’m Not Stiller had been scanned in.

Messages everywhere.

Somehow I hadn’t been altogether surprised to find my own first novel, The Old Man, listed there. Over coffee I sat thinking of that novel’s dedication, to David: Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can’t be raised on carrots. Now here I was looking for others, shadows, with my own son gone missing-out in the world somewhere, as Buster Robinson and four or five generations of bluesmen put it. LaVerne would have had something to say about that. So for that matter would almost everyone else. Probably, if he knew, even my waiter, who ibid’d by long enough to refill my coffee and drop a check, albeit the wrong one, on my table.

“What’s the F for?” I asked when, outwaited so to speak, at length he returned. I’ll read anything. F. Prokov.

“F? Oh. The name tag, you mean. Not mine. I’m filling in for my roommate, has a part in a new play. My name’s Alaine. Like Elaine but with an A.”

As we got the check straightened out and, finally, paid, I showed great control in refraining from complimenting him on just how well he fit in with the general waitstaff. Definitely in the groove. They’d probably wind up asking him to stay on.

Outside the bar next door, near a crape myrtle whose limbs had crossed like fingers then intergrown to the point of having no separate existence, a young man and woman stood talking.

“But honey, you know what I mean,” the man said as I came out of Tender Buttons. He looked into her face as though he had himself forgotten what he meant but thought he might find reminders of it there. Farther along, half a block or so, I paused to marvel at a dogwood’s spectacular involucres, as though huge thumbs had pressed each flower into place, then before a yard whose chain-link fence was interlaced with pinwheels of every size and color, dozens of them, all whirring gaily away.

Following upon several hours of sunlight, New Orleans had again gone gray, as if the city had been turned inside out or some anti-city been unearthed, bleak where the original was bright. Purple-gray bellies of clouds hung overhead. Wind whipped about in the trees and beat its fist against the sides of buildings. Lines from a poem I’d read years ago came to me:

Tell me again why, at the edge

of the world, the wind screams.

Across the street, someone had stacked magazines at curbside for pickup after sorting them into bundles and wrapping each bundle with twine. Now a man perhaps my age in layers of ragged clothing sat tearing apart each bundle and picking through, placing his selections carefully in a new pile beside him. Wind threw back exposed covers like bedclothes, ripped through pages. It would be a long winter. There was little enough a man could do about that, but he might at least stock up on reading matter.

About the same time I came across that poem in a magazine, I also read a book of short stories by one of the young Southern writers then briefly fashionable. Something troubled me about the stories, some residue I couldn’t quite define or throw off. After a few days I picked the book up again, and soon had it: each story ended with a man walking back to his hotel alone or standing at a window looking out. This was in the early Nineties, and I was living, more adrift than usual, in a constant shuffle back and forth between furnished rooms and LaVerne’s. David had vanished, I thought for good, leaving behind a few moments’ silence on my answering machine. Putting in his own time (I imagined) walking back to dreary rooms and standing by windows. Watching the world pass by just out of reach, acceptance, participation, understanding.

We always have to understand, don’t we, the two of us? That’s another thing I must get away from.

Closer to home I passed a neighborhood grill and looked in to see a waiter who at first appeared to have been in a terrible accident, his arm a clutch of raw meat. But it was merely bacon he held, draped over the arm (much as in movies fancy waiters hold towels over their arms) preparatory to cooking.

Five or six blocks further along, a homeless man had deposited his jumble of bags beneath a tree in an empty lot and lay knees up among them as though reclining in a field of high grass or flowers. Person and possessions, man and baggage, were indistinguishable, equally still, equally serene, in perfect lack of expectation.

Chapter Eleven

Thing is, I walked out of the building and the cops were standing there waiting for me

There was this sort of gate at the entryway, and I froze just outside it. The gate was cast iron and once had something written on it in art deco script, but now only two letters were left, an L and an I, spaced far apart.

“Don’t s’pose you live here,” one of them, the older one, said.

“Don’t rightly see how anyone could. Back home our barns’re better’n this shithole.”

I held both hands up in plain view.

“You been drinkin’, boy?”

I shook my head. Best, always, to say as little as possible. That was true back home, even more true here in the city. I’d been in New Orleans a year or so at the time, and was learning fast.

“Here to buy dope, then.”

“No sir.”

“Damn. You’re one polite nigger, ain’t you?”

They walked me over to the squad between them. I made to lean against it and spread my feet.

“No need for that,” the older one said. He smiled. The smile reminded me of alligator gars into whose mouths we’d jam sticks, then watch them sink and fight their way back to the surface and sink again till they died. “You been up to the third floor by any chance?”

I shook my head.

“You sure ’bout that.”