With the work I did, how I lived, there’s no way I was going to keep regular hours. I didn’t keep hours at all. They just loomed around me and passed by like Carnival floats. But my course through days and nights had zigzagged a lot worse than usual that past week or so, and maybe it was starting to wear me down.
Walsh and I walked out of the bar into streets suspended timelessly somewhere between dark and light. Everything was either blinding white or dead black, edges leached away by gray-like in old movies. For a moment I didn’t know if it was morning or evening. And for another terrifying moment I had no idea where I was.
Then Walsh’s hand fell on my shoulder and it all began settling back in place.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” I said.
“Know what you mean.”
We walked back to his car, in one of those narrow downtown lots that look like they’ll hold maybe eight cars, but the attendants have twenty of them lined up in there.
“Talk to you later,” I said.
“The hell you will. Get in the car, Lewis.”
“I’m going to walk. Clear my head.”
“Man thinks he’s at the beach.”
“Then I better be watching where I step.”
Walsh laughed.
A plane had gone down in Lake Pontchartrain months back, and stories of swimmers treading on disembodied heads as they waded into high water were all the rage. Supposedly this had led to temporary closure of the beach. But the real problem was pollution, all the sewage and industrial waste we’d dumped into the lake. Authorities went on playing open-and-shut for years before they finally closed the beach down. I always wondered what happened to all the rides and buildings they had out there.
I held my hand up, touched finger briefly to forehead, and started off toward Poydras. Watching where I stepped.
Carborne, on bus, on foot, and trolleyback, people were whooshing out of the business district like air from a punctured balloon.
I turned up Magazine and walked along slowly, realizing that this one spinning about me now was a world, a life, I’d never know. Homes and families to go back to or leave, regular jobs, paychecks, routines, appointments, security. A fish’s life would hardly be more alien to me. I didn’t know what that said about me, I didn’t know how I felt about it, but I knew it was true.
I was coming up on a cross street when a man wearing a filthy suit stepped out from around the corner of the building ahead and directly into my path. Bent with age, he turned bleak red eyes to me and stared. Pressed to his chest with both hands he carried a paperback book as soiled and bereft as his suit. Are you one of the real ones or not? he demanded. And after a moment, when I failed to answer, he walked on, resuming his sotto voce conversation.
A chill passed through me. Somehow, indefinably, I felt, felt with the kind of baffled, tacit understanding we have in dreams, that I had just glimpsed one possible future self.