The Heavens Rise

“A metaphor for what?”

Marshall gave the man his best grimace, shook his head as if the very idea of metaphors in general filled him with despair. The more he tried to deny that his supposed vision had been the truth, the more the stupid Neanderthal across from him believed that it was.

“I appreciate you comin’ and I don’t mean to be rude. But I need to—”

Anthem rushed into his bedroom, but he was in such a desperate hurry that he didn’t bother to shut the door behind him, so Marshall followed.

Anthem found it on the top shelf of his bedroom closet, just where he’d left it months ago. Silver-plated, gleaming in the harsh light from the overhead bulb, looking as new and full of untapped promise as it had the day his brother Merit gave it to him as a graduation present. He’d stashed it there because of the words of an old girlfriend from college, who’d assured him the only way she’d been able to quit smoking was by carrying an unopened pack of Marlboro Lights with her everywhere she went. I needed to feel like my little friends had left me completely, she’d told him.

He uncapped it and drank. There was no burn. Just a warm rush of inevitability, and already the rationalizations were tumbling through him right behind the firewater. Sometimes he didn’t get called at all. Some guys would go whole shifts without getting called up once.

Floorboards creaked behind him, and there was Marshall Ferriot, standing in his bedroom door, and Anthem in the closet with a flask like some desperate gutter trash.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Seriously, dude. I need you to—”

“You shouldn’t be alone right now, Anthem.”

The phone rang, and Marshall seemed more startled by it than Anthem was. Anthem brushed past him and yanked the portable from its cradle next to the bed. The woman on the other end had already started speaking to him by the time Anthem realized he was still holding the flask in his left hand. From the weight of it, it felt like he’d downed half the thing in thirty seconds.

“Hey, Landry. Driver’s gonna be at your place in about thirty. We got a grain ship hatched a leak in one of its dry bulk containers and they’re turnin’ it around and sending it to Houston for repairs.”

“Don’t send the driver,” Anthem responded, the smell of the bourbon on his breath dilating his nostrils as he spoke.

“You’re pickin’ up this baby in Destrehan, A-Team. You gonna drive yourself?”

“Just . . . I’m good. I’ll get myself there.”

“All right. Suit yourself. These guys want to turn this ship around yesterday. Sounds like they’re losing a fortune by the hour.”

He hung up on the dispatcher before he might slip up and allow her to hear any intensifying slur in his speech. Some base instinct drove him to put the flask to his mouth and empty the rest of it down his throat. Then he hurled it at the wall so hard it sounded like the thing had dented before it clunked to the floor.

And there was Marshall Ferriot, studying him with a piteous expression.

“It was almost empty. I . . . I couldn’t just let it go waste. Had to finish the . . .” Anthem sank down onto the foot of his bed. Six months gone in an instant because of, what? One sick kid’s deranged coma dream, brought on by medications and brain injuries and God knows what else? Six months, down the drain. Down his throat.

My hero, my God, my angel. The very words she used to whisper into his ear after he’d finished bringing her to the edge of pure bliss out at the old push boat in Madisonville. Same damn words he’d hear every time he went there to add beads to the little altar he kept for her in the pilothouse. No one knew those words.

“Do you still want me to go?” Marshall asked.

“No. No, I don’t.”

“Okay . . .”

“Can you drive me to Destrehan? Aw, fuck that. I need you to stay with me. Make sure I don’t do anything stupid. Half the fucking Russian captains pop open a bottle of vodka to welcome me onto their damn ship, and I’ll— I just need you to watch me. Okay. Make sure I don’t do anything stupid now that I’ve . . .”

“You want me to come on the ship with you?”

“Well, it’s only fair, right? Now that you’ve done your duty and shared your little message with me, it’s only fair you stick around for the consequences, isn’t it?” His voice was boiling with anger, and when he saw the wounded expression on Marshall’s face, he felt a stab of regret. Then he felt the bourbon, sloshing in his stomach, fiery and potent and poised to unleash its black magic into his veins.

“I’m sorry,” Anthem muttered.

“Don’t be,” Marshall whispered, but he looked crestfallen, and he was studying the floor between them. “Of course I’ll go with. The way I told you, it was all wrong—”

“Enough about that. I’m sure you saw all kinds of things while you were under”— my hero, my God, my angel—“and if it’d been me, I don’t know, I probably woulda wanted to tell people too. So just . . .” His face flushed, but he couldn’t tell if it was the booze or the threat of new tears. He gestured to the closet. “Pick out a jacket. It’s gonna be cold out there. Then we gotta hit the road.”

FROM THE JOURNALS OF NIQUETTE DELONGPRE

For days now, I have watched the horrors that have befallen the city of my birth. And while I must admit, they pale in comparison to the perversions of natural laws that sent me into exile from the very city the world now weeps for, they have inspired me. Inspired me with such force I’m reminded that no matter how much I have been changed on a cellular level, I am still human. Still a teenage girl who will always consider New Orleans her home.

There are masses of starving and dehydrated and dying black people gathered outside the Convention Center without help or any sign of it. I have seen the cries for rescue painted on the rooftops sticking up out of the ebony floodwaters. I have tried to stare at all of it without turning away, and for the most part, I have succeeded.

In the hours after Katrina apparently bypassed the city by a hair, I watched the first reporters stumble out of their hotels and onto Canal Street and into the milky light of a post-storm dawn. They walked dry streets, surveyed a few tree limbs and, because the power was out, they made superficial assessments of their immediate surroundings and declared that the savagery Katrina had been expected to visit on my hometown had not come to pass. Sure, part of the Superdome’s shell seemed to have been torn loose and a bunch of shattered windows in the Central Business District. But aside from that . . .

And I knew they were wrong. They didn’t know my city like I did. They didn’t know the fingers of water that bisected most of its neighborhoods, the streets upon streets of tiny, one-story houses sitting in the shadows of levees and passing ships that often sat higher in the water than the midpoints of the levees themselves. I knew as soon as they put helicopters in the air, as soon as the first reports from outlying areas started pouring in, that the devastation would become clear.

And I was right.

I’m ashamed to admit this, but at first, there was a part of me that was relieved. I knew the body blow of this awful storm would knock my family’s disappearance out of the city’s collective memory. For a while, at least. And that would give me time, more time to consider what lay ahead for me.

I had a nightmare last night. I know I will have it again. I hope I do. It will remind me of my newfound mission.

Apparently Sid-Mar’s, a Bucktown restaurant Anthem’s family used to always drag us to, has been destroyed by the surge. Last night, I dreamed of its flooded interior. The gray water’s inexorable tug peeled Mardi Gras posters off its walls and the overturned tables drifted through the swirl of debris like the skeletons of porpoises. There were no people in this dream; just a slow ballet of ruin.