The Heavens Rise

The whole building looked like it had once been a corner store, and the ceilings inside the apartment were about twelve feet high. No shades on the soaring windows, just frilly lace curtains that covered only the bottom half of each one. (Some girlfriend had probably hung them for him.) And the top half of each window offered a bleak industrial view of the loading cranes visible above the floodwall across the street.

The TV caught him off guard, just as every TV had since he’d come out of his coma. Out of all the things that looked different after eight years in purgatory, televisions had undergone the most dramatic transformation. They were flat as boards now, and hung all over like electrified paintings. The rest of the walls were mostly bare, except for a poster from the Krewe of Ares parade from 1999. It featured an expressionist rendering of the parade’s lead float, a towering plaster statue of the god of war himself, multiplated armor sitting astride his insanely large muscles, giant head covered by a massive Spartan helmet replete with the typical Mohawk and plunging cheek guards that revealed a glimpse of his apelike jaw. It wasn’t the dreamlike statue that had rattled through the perpetual Mardi Gras parade in Anthem’s soul, but the resemblance was close enough that Marshall had to look away quickly to avert a twinge of nausea.

“How long you on call for?” Marshall asked.

“Till nine a.m.”

“Do you love it?”

“Being a pilot?” Anthem asked.

Marshall nodded, trying to hide the fact that he was studying Anthem’s every move. The way he was tapping the edge of the Diet Coke against the counter ever so slightly, shifting his weight back and forth between each foot. A dry house, indeed. Maybe giving up the hard stuff had been harder than he let on.

“There’s usually a moment . . .” Anthem said, straightening. “So I’ll pick up a ship anywhere from Baton Rouge to Chalmette. But my favorite route’s southbound in the morning. Especially when I hit Audubon Park and it’s sunny and the oak trees are all spread out, and you can just see Holy Name Cathedral above the tree line, watchin’ over it all. It’s like . . . I feel connected to the past.”

“Awesome,” Marshall said. “I’ve always wanted to go out on the river. Can you see Cannon?”

“Nah. It’s not tall enough. Most of what you can see of Uptown’s just trees.”

“And the Fly, right? You used to hang out at the Fly a lot.”

Don’t lie to me, shithead. I followed you and Nikki there after you got back together. I watched you kissing on the stairs of rocks that lead down to the water’s edge. If I’d known what I was capable of then, I would have made you drown her.

“Some,” he said. “Who didn’t, right? A few Coronas. A little weed, maybe. Blast some Cowboy Mouth. Same shit I’d do today if I didn’t have a job.”

Anthem gave him a big toothy grin, and Marshall tried to return it.

“The morning sun beats down upon me like the Devil’s smile,” he said slowly and quietly.

“I’d rather be anywhere else but here,” Anthem sang back at him, straightened, eyes brightening. “Was it a blinding lack of subtlety or just a lack of styyyyle, responding to the ways and means of fear?” With that, Anthem skipped past Marshall toward the stereo. “Take me back to New Orleans, and drop me at my door. ’Cause I might love you—” He yanked his iPod from its charging cradle. “I’ve got it here, just a sec.”

“The message . . .”

Anthem slumped over his stereo suddenly, and when he went to set the iPod back in its cradle his movements were sluggish and unfocused.

“Yeah . . . listen, man, I’m not sure I really—” But before he could finish his own sentence, he flounced down onto the sofa as if he’d been placed in time-out. The sofa was too small for the living room and it was too small for him; the cushion crumpled so much under his weight, Marshall wouldn’t have been surprised if it spit out from under him like an inner tube on a water slide.

“So you think Nikki gave you some kind of message?” he finally asked.

“Not Nikki. Her mother.”

Anthem Landry’s eyes were saucer-wide, his lips pursed, his giant frame preternaturally still as he braced himself for a blow from another dimension of existence. He’d stopped nervously rubbing his thighs and now his hands gripped both kneecaps as if they’d been glued to them.

The connection between them was as pure as the one Marshall had forged just moments earlier by using his power, only this had come from quick thinking. Quick thinking, patience and the time-honored tradition of turning a disadvantage into an opportunity. Yes, Anthem’s soul had seemed different, more vivid and overpowering, but it also given Marshall plenty he could use.

“It started as a vision, really.” Marshall let his focus shift to the hardwood floor between them. “A Mardi Gras parade. I think it was Ares, the one that used to roll on Friday.” Anthem flinched and glanced back in the direction of the poster hanging on his nearby wall. “I didn’t know her all that well, but I kept seeing Nikki. She had a pair of Mardi Gras pearls around her neck and she was wearing this fleecy pullover and she was beaming and she had her arms around a man. And after a while, I realized that man was you. And she was whispering the same words to you, over and over again . . .”

Anthem’s lips had parted and his chest was rising and falling and when he went to close his eyes, several tears slipped from them; rather than wipe them away with one hand, he chewed his lower lip and let out a desperate wheeze.

“Are you sure you want me to—”

“Keep going.”

“I mean, it gets kind of—”

“Keep going.”

“My hero, my God, my angel. That’s what she kept whispering.”

It was as if the giant’s strings has been cut, and six words alone had done it. Had they been a private incantation Nikki had whispered only while in the throes of passion, or the creation of Anthem’s own longing and grief? Either way, they were the key. He slouched back against the sofa, his face twisting with the first contortion of a sob. Then his giant hands went to his face, forming a protective shield, and Marshall advanced several steps toward him, trying his best to prevent the sound of the sexual excitement flickering within his belly from lighting up his voice. “Then I saw her mother. I didn’t know who she was at first, ’cause I’d never met her. But she told me who she was, and she told me who you were. And she said if I ever came back, if I ever joined the living again, I would have to set you free. I would have to tell you the truth about what happened that night so that you could move on.”

Anthem dropped his hands from his face, which was now a snotty, tear-streaked mess. “Wh—what ha —”

“She was driving that night. Nikki. She was the one behind the wheel, but she had been drinking and she didn’t tell her parents and they got into an accident . . .”

“An accident? Did she—”

“Millie was killed, and Nikki and her father, they covered it up. And they ran.”

Marshall could see the disbelief fighting a losing battle inside the man a few feet away from him, and he wondered if he’d chosen the right tack. He’d thought of adding in some bullshit detail about Nikki drinking that night because she’d found out Anthem had knocked her up. But it was too far.

“You need to go, dude.”

“She told me you had to know the truth so that you could finally let her go. So that you could stop drinking so much . . .”

Anthem was on his feet, pointing toward the door. “All right, man. That’s enough. I’ve got a long night ahead of me and this is just a little— I mean, for fuck’s sake, you’re asking me to believe—”

“I’m not asking you to believe anything. It was just . . . I felt like it was my duty to tell you.”

“She just walked away? Is that it? From all of us? She just walked away. All these years and not one word because she was drunk? Because she killed her own—”

“It could be a metaphor, for all I know.”