The Heavens Rise

He wanted to sink his teeth into the bastard’s gloved fingers, but he knew that would just bring the darkness back. Because that was how this thing worked; the darkness came and then you woke up in a hell of your own making, of Marshall’s making.

“I’m sorry. I know you probably think it doesn’t mean anything. But I am, Danny. I’m truly sorry. You see, some things, they’re just bigger than you. Bigger than me. Bigger than everyone. And this is one of them. I didn’t ask for this. It came on . . . well, almost like an infection. At least I think that’s what happened . . . anyhoo . . . the point here, Danny, is that I have a lot I need to get done in a very short time. And it’s gonna be easier for me if everyone thinks I’m dead. Now, before you think I’m a complete bastard let me be very clear about something. A bad thing is going to happen to your son tonight. But you get to decide just how bad it’s gonna be, Danny. Are you with me?”

The knowledge that he couldn’t run, that if he cried out for help or made a mad grab for something heavy, the darkness would return in an instant, filled Danny Stevens with a kind of drunken, floaty feeling, a sense of complete powerlessness and surrender. But images of Douglas walking through the front door, calling out to him, were like jagged chunks of glass underneath his splayed palms, spiking him back into his body, preventing him from floating away to join his wife in whatever heavenly place she’d just escaped to.

“Danny? Are you listening to me?”

Danny nodded.

“Good. Because I’m going to ask you a question, and I need you to answer honestly, okay? ’Cause if you do, the worst thing that’s gonna happen to your son is that he’s gonna come home to find his parents dead. Which is very sad, I know. But my parents are dead too. So, boo-hoo. Join the club.”

A silence fell, and Danny could hear the sounds of his own heavy breathing as if from far away.

“Ask me what’s going to happen if you don’t tell me the truth, Danny.”

“Wh-what’s going to–”

“If you lie to me, the police will find Douglas chewing your neighbor’s face off.”

“I won’t. I won’t lie. I promise I won’t oh God please—”

“Okay. Okay. Christ, easy. Enough already. Chill. Just chill out and listen, okay?”

Danny nodded.

“Does anyone else know about our little arrangement?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. Just like I promised. I mean, Sally didn’t even—” Just saying his wife’s name aloud squeezed the breath from him. Marshall shot the woman’s bloodied corpse a quick glance, like he thought he might have gone too far but would consider that possibility later, after a beer.

“All right, fine. You didn’t tell anyone. But do they know? Does anyone suspect anything? Anyone. Take your time. Think about it. Because believe me, I don’t want to come back for your son, but I will if I have to, Mr. Stevens. I will.”

Several minutes later, after he had finished a litany of silent prayers asking for forgiveness from a God who now seemed more remote than ever, Danny Stevens spoke the person’s full name. And after studying his face for a bit, Marshall thanked him, nodded politely, and brought the darkness back for the last time.

17

NEW ORLEANS

Ben had been looking for Marissa all morning, but he only checked the dive bar a few blocks from her house because he was getting desperate. He’d actually forgotten about the place altogether; there was no sign out front and if you drove past it too quickly, you could easily mistake it for just another one of the Faubourg Marigny’s brightly painted shotgun houses.

They were a few blocks from the French Quarter’s jolly chaos, but it was just past ten in the morning, so Marissa was one of only three customers inside, and the only one sitting at the bar. Her hands were resting palms down on either side of a sweating, half-empty rock glass—rum and Coke, Ben figured, her usual, but not so early in the day—as if she were trying to levitate it with her mind.

“Can you change the channel, please?” Ben asked the bartender as he took a seat.

“Do not change the channel,” Marissa said.

“Enough already, Marissa. You’re not—”

“Do not change the channel,” Marissa repeated, with enough force in her voice to make the bartender set the remote back on top of the register.

And so they sat there for a while, watching the same loop of terrible images most of the city had been hypnotized by for twelve hours now: blackened trailers guttering flames in their shattered windows, a morbidly obese white woman, her uncombed hair like bales of straw, screaming bloody murder as sheriff’s deputies shoved her back from the scene of a scorched home in which her young daughter had burned to death. Only now the woman’s screams were silent, her excruciating display reduced to a visual backdrop for speculating news anchors. The gas leak had probably started in the middle of the night, they were explaining for the thousandth time, and that’s why no one had called the emergency number posted on warning signs that ran the pipeline’s length through Ascension Parish; because they hadn’t been awake to smell the cloud of methane spreading over their homes, before something, probably infinitesimal, had ignited it: a pilot light, the small spark inside a light switch. Someone’s furtive late-night smoke in the backyard.

“Remind me again what I said to you in my office that day,” Marissa whispered.

“I’m not going to help you punish yourself for something you didn’t do.”

“Remind me, Ben.”

“Or else what?”

“Marissa Hopewell Powell is not in a position to reprimand anyone on her staff today. So, if you can find it in your heart, just remind me what I—”

“You said it wasn’t the right time for us to take risks. You said . . . we needed time to let the Lanes get comfortable, to let you get comfortable—”

“Comfortable,” Marissa snarled, and when she lifted her glass to her lips, it trembled in her hand. “If I wanted to make people comfortable, I should have gone to work in a fucking mattress store,” she growled. Then she drank.

“Marissa—”

“You came to me with a line on Judge Crowley weeks before he ruled the owner of that damn pipeline didn’t have to reduce their operating pressure—”

“And no piece of mine would have forced him to rule another way, and you know it. It’s gradual, what we do. It’s cumulative, if it works at all. You get a silver-bullet hit piece maybe once in a lifetime. Anything else is movie crap. And come on, you know how this state is. It’s just like Edwin Edwards use to say. Unless we catch ’em in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, then we’ve got nothing. It takes time—”

“We don’t have time!”

Ben hadn’t seen her come apart like this in years, not since their fifth hour of night rescues after Katrina, their fifth hour of listening to the anguished, pleading wails of Marissa’s trapped and dying neighbors calling out to them from attics and rooftops. One minute she’d been ordering them in the direction of one house, the one flashing SOS at them with a flashlight, then she’d crawled to one corner of their aluminum boat, curled into a ball and started shaking all over until Ben curved an arm around her back and held her until she went still. Of course, she’d repaid the favor a few days later, when they’d finally arrived at the Ernest M. Morial Convention Center on foot, expecting the National Guard, food and water and finding only masses of the abandoned and the dying. That’s when Ben fell to his knees and wept, and the proud, educated black woman who had once snapped at him that she would never be his mammy, collected him off the ground, took him in her arms and kissed him gently on the neck while whispering assurances that everything would be all right. On many nights in the years since, they’d called each other randomly and without explanation, sometimes in the hours just before dawn, because something about the other person’s voice served to remind them that the bloated corpse they had awakened to find in their bedroom, the one piled in the corner like several sacks of sand, was in fact just an untethered memory that had taken on the illusory weight of a nightmare.