The Heavens Rise

the kind Anthem had described to him the other night. And now, here he was, feeling as if events around him had been manipulated in some mysterious and unknowable way, but at a speed that was suddenly visible and obvious. Undeniable.

You are beautiful and you deserve better. Not the words of that deranged man who had just filled his bedroom with terror. The words that had come through that man.

A faith experience. Isn’t that what they called this? The kind of bullshit you read about on those vaguely Christian pamphlets left behind in hospital waiting rooms, the kind with crude, brightly colored illustrations. And it had happened to him.

When Elsa stepped inside his front door to tell him what the police had said, she froze in her tracks and gave him a funny look, and that’s when Ben realized he was smiling.

V MARSHALL

16

MANDEVILLE

OCTOBER 2013

Danny Stevens made it to the front porch just in time to see the taillights of his wife’s Mercedes disappear around the wall of stately oak trees at the end of their driveway. He tried her cell, but there was no answer. Satellite radio, Kelly Clarkson, his wife’s impatience: Danny blamed all three in equal measure.

“Metamucil,” he said after the beep. “Orange-flavored. None of that pink lemonade crap . . . And sorry. You know, about . . .” What was he apologizing for? His irregularity or his forgetfulness? He wasn’t sure, so he hung up.

Just a few minutes earlier, Sally had cornered him in the kitchen, armed with pad, pencil and her plainest pair of eyeglasses, the ones she only wore to Albertsons on the weekends. Danny had insisted up and down that they weren’t out of anything, only to realize his omission once he was alone with his bloat. But that’s not what was really bothering him. Lately, he’d been consumed by a burning need to issue some kind of apology to his wife whenever she entered the room. And he often did, usually a mumbled, halfhearted thing, as reflexive and irritating as a dry cough. Sometimes she would hear it and stop in the doorway to ask if something was the matter, and he’d do his best not to give her a guilty look. Because in the end, what did he have to feel guilty about?

Unlike most of the men he worked with at Cypress Bank & Trust, he’d never cheated. (Not on his wife, anyway.) And he was a damn good provider—that was for sure. The house was proof of that: two stories of French Regency perfection with immaculate limestone walls and second-floor windows adorned by slender, intricate iron railings. Just another year of bleeding the Ferriot trust and the damn thing would be paid off too. Because that’s what good providers did; they made deals that had to be kept in the shadows.

It was a crisp autumn afternoon. The house wasn’t right on the Tchefuncte River, but it was pretty close. Just a few yards of smooth, rolling lawns separated them from the glassy green waters and the boat dock they shared with their neighbor Lloyd Duchamp. Technically the oaks between the house and the water belonged entirely to Lloyd, but he’d allowed Sally to dress them up with string lights last Christmas, probably as penance for that awful hog of a motorcycle he’d bought after his wife left him.

Danny loved Beau Chene. And no matter how bad things got at the bank, he’d fight like hell to stay within its grassy, wooded borders. The place had given his son a damn near perfect childhood, a childhood where Douglas and his friends could water ski in their own backyard and spend afternoons on the rope swing without fearing stray bullets. Nothing like his childhood, trapped in the Irish Channel with a mother who refused to let go of the old house on Constance Street even after the blacks moved in on all sides.

But things at the bank were bad, had been bad for a long time in fact. Like most of the other managers and officers at Cypress, Danny wore the fact that he was employed by the last locally owned bank in New Orleans as a badge of honor. But lately the whispers about a sale to one of the nationals had grown into a dull clamor, and even senior staff were starting to jump ship to JPMorgan Chase. Layoffs were imminent, he was sure of it. And if his situation were any different, Danny probably would have left by now.

But his situation wasn’t different. There was one trust he just couldn’t afford to leave.

His son had arrived for a visit the night before, but he’d only been home an hour or two before zipping across the causeway to meet up with some friends. They’d probably done a circuit of all the old Uptown bars they used to frequent in high school with their fake IDs, and now Douglas was probably sleeping it off at a buddy’s house. Midway through his junior year at Chapel Hill, his son’s connection to his hometown was still as strong as ever. Good, Danny thought as he made his way to the kitchen. Too many of us leave. Too many of the good ones anyway. As for the fact that Douglas had left his bags at the foot of the stairs? Everyone has room for improvement.

Home alone, for a half hour at least. Too fast for a quick wank to some of the new porn he’d downloaded the night before: naughty nurse stuff, a little spanking thrown in, predictable but efficient. (And the truth was, at fifty-five, a quick wank wasn’t as easy to pull off as it had been a few years before.) The news was out too. More depressing footage off that awful pipeline explosion over in Ascension Parish; trailers turned to molten heaps, mothers weeping for the incinerated children. The whole place looked like Pompeii, and though Sally couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away from the coverage, he’d had enough after twenty minutes.

So John Coltrane and a quick scotch would have to do, but as soon as Danny closed his hand around the bottle of Balvenie, he was swallowed by a wave of silent darkness.

•   •   •

His first thought when he came to was, I’m having a stroke. He was in the front parlor. It was still light out, the Audubon bird prints were still safely in their frames.

The last thing he could remember was holding the bottle of scotch. Had he downed the whole thing? Was this the end of some alcoholic blackout?

But there was no headache, no sour stomach even. No pain of any kind. And for some reason, that scared him more than anything else—the fact that this feeling of complete disorientation, this sense of having lost time completely, wasn’t accompanied by any physical sensations at all.

It was like he’d literally been plucked out of time and moved to a different . . . second? Minute? Hour?

Some kind of weight was tugging against his right arm. When he looked down, he saw he was holding one of the massive candleholders his wife kept on the mantel. The thing was solid glass, the base a fat pillar, the platform still matted with the waffle-print residue of those high-end beeswax candles Sally loved.

A brain tumor? Wasn’t this how it started with Jake Bensen? No, that wasn’t it. The guy had tripped. One day he was walking across his bedroom and it was like his right foot wasn’t quite attached to his ankle. MRI. Inoperable. Four months. Just four months from diagnosis to—

A car engine distracted him from this quickening panic. Then he heard another sound: someone breathing, someone standing a few feet away.

Before Danny could turn or scream—and he started to do both at the same exact second—the darkness returned. And this time it felt like great pincers rising up from under his feet, closing high above his head, sealing him inside an obsidian tomb.

•   •   •

His office. He was standing in the middle of his office and the flat-screen computer monitor was turned around so he could see it. He blinked and tried to focus.

The candleholder was in his right hand still. He dropped it and it hit the hardwood floor with a deep, fatal- sounding thud. His entire body was sore, the same kind of bone-deep ache he used to feel after the gym.

The glowing computer screen looked grainy. He took a step toward the screen, fearing for a second or two that his legs wouldn’t respond to his commands. But they did. He was back inside his body, and whatever was on