way through the Quarter, The Seven Seas, Lafitte's, La Casa, she'd get on to something hard.
Hard news, she meant.
I remember-or imagine-or I dreamed-her leaning across the table, breasts pushing up towards her blouse's undone top button as they came to rest on the tabletop.
You understand, Lewis?
Guess I did.
But I had to wonder how provisional all our understanding is, finally. Look, I told her: I'm a black man, still young. You're a white woman, what, halfway along in life? We've come up in different worlds. Hell, we exist in different worlds. Always will. You think there's some secret passage behind the bookcase like in old movies, lets us get from one to the other?
Felt for a moment like I was back at UNO, one of those embarrassingly intense late-night sessions debating such topics as the problem of evil, whether to order pizza or burgers, and whether black folks had souls.
'What I think there are,' she said, 'are doors. We only have to choose to-' Her hand made the gesture of reaching out to push a door open, hesitated, then fell on mine.
'In and out of lots of doors, are you, then?'
She nodded. 'Had a few slammed behind me, too.'
'Bet you have.'
Then-seemingly without transition-we were talking about King Lear.
I remember throwing back a drink and lowering the glass to shout out (voice ratcheting up along the whole of the line, glass thumping down on the final word; I'd suddenly become Sir Lewis Gielgud):
And my poor fool is HANGED?!
For all I know, I may have done the Canterbury prologue as well. Or gone on at untowards, unoccasioned length about Pushkin's black grandfather.
Shortly thereafter we found ourselves on the street bearing aloft the opinion that we could do with food.
Streedights were shelled in rainbow. Buses heaved their way up out of the fog like mythical, half-remembered beasts and fell back into it. Winds blew in across Lake Pontchartrain, bearing the infant Change in their arms.
When I turned to ask what she'd like, to eat, I meant, she came into my arms.
Then it got really strange.
At some level I'd known all along, I think, that I was dreaming, but till this point the dreams had clung tenuously enough to reality that I could elect not to question, simply to go along. Now those bonds were forfeited and I was apart, at once in the dream and above it looking on.
Had I ridden my bicycle here? Apparendy so. And left it outside the bar, where now someone briefly squats down to remove the rear wheel and tucks it beneath his arm as though this were his usual morning baguette, striding away untroubled. I follow him into a nearby art gallery where he's about to hang it around the neck of a bronze ostrich and demand its return. He shrugs and hands it over: no big thing.
But now the bicycle wheel's become a reel of film, and in the passover it's come partially unwound. Thumb jammed at the center, fingers dialing, I start rewinding. Images click against my wrists.
'Guess you must show that to your wife, get her primed and wet, huh?' the bearded man behind the counter says. 'Have to tell you: I've handled my share of erotica through here over the years. But that damn near made me wet.'
When I grope for bus fare back out on the street, film tucked beneath my arm the same way he'd carried it, I drop the reel. It hits the pavement and begins smoking. Burns its way through like a cattle brand, making a kind of patterned manhole. I lean over and look. There's a whole subterranean city below. Streets, buildings, cars. Someone walking by down there looks up at me. Our eyes meet.
I awake lying on the floor, eye to eye with Dana, who's just stepped into view above me, naked except for the press pass alligator-clipped to one nipple. Swampy, mothball smell off her body.
'You're ready, aren't you, Lewis?' Definitely I seem to be ready. She lowers herself onto me. 'News at six? Good news for a change?' Body warm as a bath. Completes itself with my small emendation. Press pass swinging gaily back and forth as she moves above. 'Don't forget me, Lew.' Moving ever faster as a long moan escapes her. 'Whatever happens, don't forget me.' She throws her head back in abandon. When she brings it forwards again, her head has become a grinning skull.
'Jesus!'
I started awake-really awake thistime-heartpounding, fingernails pushed hard into palms. Probably crescents of bright blood there.
'Bad dreams, my boy?' Standing by the window, from the sound of it.
I heard the tab rip from a beer can, which cinched it. I was getting pretty good at this. Think of men in old movies sitting faithfully before their sonar screens listening to blips.
'My boy, your black ass,' I said. 'Been reading those damn British novels again, haven't you. Thought you told me you were done with those.'
'Yeah. But sometimes what we're done with isn't done with us, you know?'
Time rolled itself millimeters thinner.
'You're a Trollope, Slaughter. A slut, just like Molly Bloom. I ever tell you that?'
'As well you as another.'
'Good to see you, Hosie-in a manner of speaking. Thanks for coming.'
'How you doing, boy.'
'There you go with that boy shit again.'
'What can I say? Three generations-'
'-out of slavery. I've read Himes too, remember?'
He pulled the tab on another beer and held it out to me. I reached and found it. Always had his shoulder bag with him those days. Never far from a corner store here in the civilized swamp.
'I most assuredly do remember,' Hosie said. 'And I'm here to tell you I can groove on that. Know where you're comingfrom. I hear you.'
Once he'd written an entire column on local government in current catchwords and cliches, another time a whole essay in song tides. Hung out in cafes and bus stations and bars just to listen to people talk, then he'd go home afterwards and write it all down. I often wonder what Hosie would have thought if he'd lived into the rap era. He'd have loved hip-hop's special language- flavor, down on, up for.
'What time of day you think it is, anyway?' he said. Man never did have any sense of time. Forever ringing doorbells at three in the morning only to say, authentically surprised and apologetic: Hey, I wake you up? I could hear his hand rubbing at the window.
'Everything gray out there. Tops of buildings look the same as sky.'
He downed most of the rest of his beer at a gulp and belched magnificently.
'Raining,' I said.
And hard, from the sound of it. Water would be rising inch by inch towards midtown porches, trash at curbside all over the city levitating, the Corps of Engineers' clever pumps chugging away at their efforts to push water out of the city and back up to sea level.
'Weather will continue bad, yes. More calamities, death, despair. Not the slightest inclination of a change anywhere. No escape. The weather will not change.'
'Henry Miller.'
Very good, sir. Your prize.'
He set another beer, cracked open, on the nightstand. Three there now in a perfect row. I'd counted them the way movie cowboys count expended bullets.
'You love them so much, Lew. Literature, the language itself.'
'You taught me that, Hosie, a lot of it.'
'I did, didn't I? I did.' He was quiet a moment. 'And I wish like hell they'd never let you down. Everything does, you know, sooner or later.'
No answer to that. I didn't try. Rain bucketed down outside. Somewhere a phone rang unanswered; stopped; started up again.
'You've all been taking turns, standing watch,' I said.
'Guess we have at that.'
