THE CITY HAD followed Rimbaud's advice: Je est un autre. "I" is another. Or maybe it was just that I had become another. Which I guess was pretty much young Arthur's point. Everything had changed because I had changed. The shape of the jar defines what is contained. We can say only what language allows us to say. And to say more we must change language itself. It was a quest Rimbaud finally fled, taking his sad, doomed refuge in Abyssinia. But he'd almost done it. He'd bent language almost, almost, into new shapes-before it sprang back.
And now I was in a kind of Abyssinia myself.
Soon enough I'd lost all sense of time; I might just as easily have been on the streets a week, six or eight weeks, months on end. Not that anything was lost. On the contrary, each moment was scored deeply into my memory. That veiy immediacy mitigated time's flow. Days and time of day had become irrelevant. Only the moment mattered.
I pass from missions doling out watery soup and day-old bread donated by Leidenheimer Bakery to others where we queue for beds (take a number please) till available spaces are filled(shipwreck victims awaiting allocation to lifeboats), to squatters' pads in abandoned, half-demolished buildings reeking of fresh humanrefuse and decomposing foodstuffs, to curiously medieval communities pitched beneath the vaults of passovers and bridges and Villonesque thieves' societies met in the cloisters of canal culverts.
I sleep upon benches and beneath them, in the recess of doorways, at the foot of hedges set out sentrylike alongside public parks, public buildings, apartment complexes, unreclaimed lots.
Days, I walk. Walk uptown on Carrollton to Oak or Freret or Maple, along St. Charles from Broadway to Napoleon to Jackson, downtown following the curve of the river to Esplanade then hopscotching back up through the Quarter, lakeward on Canal past shopfronts topped with boarded-up vacant spaces and across Basin, what used to be Storyville. Walk as though, for the city to keep its existence, not fade away, it must daily, hourly, ceaselessly be traced over, repaced, reaffirmed.
One afternoon I found myself on Prytania. Sitting on the steps of a recently renovated, still-unoccupied double across the street, through the front windows of my old house I watched Zeke step from table to mantel and back again, speaking animatedly with someone out of sight, huge ceramic mug in his hand. An early dinner, perhaps, just now finished. Or tea. A variety of containers, plates and bowls were set out. Zeke picked up a book from the table, opened it and read aloud. A hand and lower arm came into view, narrow wrist, slim fingers entwined about the stem of a wineglass. Then for the second time a police car cruised slowly by and I knew it was time to pick up my bag of belongings and move along.
Another afternoon, could have been the next, or weeks later, or a month (no seasons here in New Orleans to help orient us to passing time, not even that, only the ticking over of day and night), I found myself sitting on the levee with a man whose face I knew. We both had our heels spurred into the ground and sat crouched over, knees in the air. He had a bag of food he'd salvaged from the Dumpster out behind Frank ie's in the riverbend: a melange of fried shrimp, garlic toast, pasta and fish, soggy, forlorn fries, broccoli and carrots, even half a steak. I had a plastic bottle I'd filled with water at an Exxon station and four beers I'd filched from a car whose driver stopped off at Lenny's Newsstand for a paper and left the windows down.
I tore one of the beers free of its plastic webbing and handed it to my companion. Nodding thanks, he worked the can into the dirt beside him, digging out a niche for it. On the back of a pizza carton he carefully set out for me four shrimp, portions of pasta, three pieces of fish, fries, a watery mound of broccoli and carrots and something else, mirliton maybe. Nothing to cut the steak with, so I'd have to wait till he'd had his share, then he'd pass it along.
Down on that shining blade of water a barge the size and shape of an aircraft earner inched upriver. Behind us, at the base of the levee, car after slow car, a train clanked by. A small plane caught and threw sunlight as it coasted through clouds. Everybody, everything going somewhere, it seemed.
We ate. And when my companion held the empty can high over his mouth to drain out the last drop, I handed him another beer. He looked momentarily surprised, hesitated before accepting it.
"Obliged," he said. Among the first words to pass between us.
"You a reader by any chance?" I asked once we'd eaten awhile.
He grunted and took a sip of beer. Pulled a paperback from his back pocket. It was a perfect mold of his buttock. An ancient, off-size Avon edition that originally sold for 35 cents, The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes.
I took the book and looked through it. It was well paged, sentences roughly underlined, words scribbled in margins. My companion had been doing research, as he had with The Old Man, creating a life for himself.
"Always loved books myself, from the very first, early as I can remember. Used to hold them up in front of me, couldn't of been more than four, five years old, pretend I was reading. What I'd done was memorize them, word for word."
"Yeah? Well, good on you. That's what Brits say. Good on you."
He drank off half the remaining beer in a gulp, made a spoon of two fingers to scoop up vegetables.
"Always liked that, good on you."
"See your point. Somehow that really says it, doesn't it?"
My companion nodded. "Good on you." His eyes peered into the middle distance, lost in memory. "Doubled up for a time with a Brit. We looked out for each other, done for each other, you know? This was some years back. Nights we'd lie there and he'd start telling me all these things he knew. Things out of books. Greek plays, the Lake Poets, Christopher Smart and what Sam Johnson said about him, old Bertie Russell. We're the true hollow men, the stuffed men, he'd say, headpieces filled with straw. Rat's feet over broken glass in our dry cellars and like that. Nigel, his name was. Smartest man I ever knew or'm likely to."
For a moment, again, his eyes went away.
"Thing was, Nigel truly loved his drink. One day we were sitting at a bus stop on Magazine, just getting out of the heat for a minute, you know, not half a mile from where we are right now, when a cab pulls over and a man in a pinstripe suit gets out to go into an antique store. Nigel says, the way he always would, Good day t'you, and this stops the guy dead in his tracks, cause he's British too, you see. They talk awhile and the man pulls out his wallet and hands Nigel a fifty-dollar bill. Nigel, he just sits there staring at it Good on you, Nigel says to him finally. Good luck to you, ta, the man says.
"We went straight over to the K amp;B on St. Charles, Nigel and I did, and we bought a gallon of cheap gin, another of bourbon, three or four six-packs of Ballantine beer. Had them put it in proper bags and everything. Nigel stood there folding and unfolding that bill and folding it up again. Counted his change half a dozen times at least, once he'd turned it over.
"I don't remember a lot else. Not much of a drinking man back in those days, and all that alcohol hit me hard. I came 'round sometime that evening. Fireflies, what we always called lightning bugs when I was a kid, blinked here and there. 'Searching for an honest man,' I remember Nigel said. 'Like Diogenes.' His voice sounded funny. 'Rest of this money's yours now, I guess.' Eight dollars and some jingly. 'You been a good mate, Robert Lee.' I don't recall anyone else ever calling me by name, not for years.
"I walked over there by him and he was laying 'cross the tracks. And the whole bottom of him, waist on down, it was like one a them ventriloquist dummies, nothing much left there, just this flat, floppy stuff. He'd passed out on the tracks and a train had run over him.
"They did what they could at Touro-that was the closest hospital, where they took him. But he passed on later that night. I was sitting watching a old movie on TV, something with Jimmy Stewart, when the doctor came out and told me. For a long time all I could think of was Nigel saying to me, You been a good mate, Robert Lee. Last best friend I had. Last friend period."
"Look," I said after a decent amount of time had passed, "I don't mean to get too personal here, don't want to crowd you, but I know you."
"Don't see how. 'Less you caught me on Johnny Carson last week, that is."
Carson, of course, hadn't been on in years.
"From the picture on your books. The Old Man, Mole, Skull Meat. I've worn out four orfive copies of eveiy one of them, gave away as many more to friends. You're Lew Griffin."
He scooped up another mouthful of vegetables. "You think so?" Washed them clown with a hit of beer. "Griffin, you say. Griffin." He shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe I used to be. My old man used to say here in America we could be anything we wanna be. Yeah, right. But I don't remember much these days. What I do remember, it comes in spurts, same as my pee does. Stand there five, ten minutes before it lets go. Then everything shuts down again. Can't even much say as I want to remember, not really."
He ranfingers across a permanent stubble of beard. Dry skin flaked off onto his shirt.
"Griffin…"
His eyes strayed again, grappled after footholds somewhere among things of the world, river, meal, clouds, sun,
" 'In the darkness things always go away from you. Memory holds you down while regret and sorrow kick hell out of you,' " I prompted.
"Well, that's the truth for sure." He scooped up what remained of the vegetables, a greenish paste nearly as appetizing as baby food from the jar. "Don't guess you'd have any more a these beers?"
He well knew I did. I tore the next-to-last one free of its webbing.
"Obliged."
We sat quietly together. Plane, boat and train gone now. Sky, river, tracks and street all empty. Closest thing to silence you'll find in a city.
"Guess, some point or another, you musta had hell kicked out of you too, be my guess," he said.
"You'd he right."
"Sure I would. Good beer." He held up the can. "Don't mean to be hoggin' it, mind." He handed the can to me. I drank and returnedit He set it down again in the niche he'd made for it. "You from around here?"
"Coming onto thirty-five years. Not much more than a kid when I moved here. Guess it's home by now."
"Guess it is. Never spent much time anywhere else myself, mind. Love this goddamn city. Ain't always been easy, though. Ever' few years, city gets to lie a real motherfucker. Mess your mind up good. Break your heart."
"Yeah."
We sat quietly side by side. The sun was beginning to set New Orleans doesn't go in much for twilight. Sun there on the horizon one moment, light still good, ten minutes later it's nighttime.
"We've met before," I said. "You don't remember."
He shook his head.
"Hotel Dieu. You'd been beaten pretty severely. Everyone thought a truck had run over you. I don't know when this was-a while back-but you were pretty bad off. They weren't sure you were going to make it for a while there. Then you left. Just got up one day and walked out."
"Can't say as I remember any of that. Sorry."
"Sorry?"
"Sounds like it might be important to you. Sorry I can't help." He held out the beer can. "You want the last of this? Dance with the one you brought?"
No.
"You had a book with you. At the hospital." I rummaged in my bag and pulled it out. "This one."
He took it from me, looked at the cover, then turned it over to read the back cover. Held it like a deck of cards, fanning his thumb along the edge back to front, riffling pages. Several pages all but separated themselves.
"Later, when you asked, I left my notebook with you."
I exchanged book for notebook. He browsed through, turning pages at random.
"That's your writing. All but the first four orfivepages."
"Yeah. Could be, I guess. Not so's I canremember, mind you. Definitely strange. Places I recognize in here, people I know I've come across, sure. Not much to tie it all together though, is there?"
"Not a lot. But you doremember the book, the notebook, writing in it…"
"Maybe. Hard to say."
He held the beer can against his ear as one might a seashell.
"Not much I can depend on these days. Too much of it gets away from me. Just slips away and I never even know it was there." He held up the empty can, looking at it. What does one do with a thing like this? "Hotel Dieu."
"Supposed to be called University Hospital now, but no one does."
"Something back there in the shadows for sure. Be a hell of a time pulling it out, though. Nudge it into daylight, stand up straight, tell us about yourself. You were there, you say."
I nodded.
"I remember I was pushing my boat up the Nile. All these little sucking kisses on my skin where leeches were attaching themselves. I was living off some hard, bitter-tasting fruit off trees on the bank and the raw flesh offish with teeth like razors that I snared in nets improvised from old shirts. Had these big grins on them."
His own drunkboat, his own African Queen.
"All these people were after me. They wouldn't give up. Never even knew who they were. See them, feel them, back there behind me. Someone pulled a tube out of my throat."
"You were on a ventilator for a while. A breathing machine. I was there when they took you off."
"All at once I had to breathe again. Had to go on. Before, it had been so easy."
"Always that choice."
"We spoke, didn't we? Something about a missing son, old man looking for him. Everfind him?"
I shook my head. "No."
Night had not so much fallen about us as it had toppled there, collapsed, capsized. Lights lashed up from boats on the river, others stabbed at the darkness from cars racing past on Leake Avenue behind us.
"Someone else brought news-or no news. They drank together."
"Right. The detective and the old man, the father who'd hired him. In a bar on Decatur. Detective's come to tell him his son is dead."
" 'Nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning.' I do remember that. You the one read it to me?"
I shook my head again.
"Someone else, then. I was terrible sick, some kind of flu, burning up one minute, freezing the next. Let go in the bed a couple of times I know of at least, too weak to crawl out. Guess he probably cleaned that up too, in between reading this book to me, spooning soup down me. Had to be a week at least, I was like that. He must of read that book to me cover to cover half a dozen times."
"Don't suppose you remember what he looked like."
"Not paying much attention at the time. Not quite there, right?
Couldn't get outside myself. Young man's what I see now I look back on it."
"Black or white?"
"Black. Like you. Mostly his eyes I remember."
"His eyes."
"Brown. With green floating around somewhere in there, never could say just how or where. Like yours."
"Ever hear his name?"
He thought it over. "Sorry. Can't recall his ever using one. Not much use for names, situations like that."
"He never introduced himself? Hi, I'm Carl, I'll be your waiter for today?"
"He could have. Like I say, I was pretty far gone."
"Never heard another staff member speak to him, maybe call him by name?"
He shook his head. "I think I'dremember. Whole thing's etched in my mind. Like a dream, doesn't make much sense, but you can't shake it off, can't get shed of it. I thought I was dying. Held on pretty hard to whatever I could grab on to. Strange times."
Dark now was absolute.
"One more beer, you want it," I said.
"You don't?"
"Got your name on it."
"Why not, then."
First he rolled it along his forehead, then popped it open and drank.
"One thing," he said.
"Yes?"
"Never thought of this before."
I waited.
"When I first started coming out of it. Most of it's kind of a blur, you understand, what happened when, the order of things. All jumbled up together. But now I think about it, there was this one time I came half awake-early morning, late evening, no way to tell-and someone's standing there over me saying, You're going to be okay, you hear me, you're going to be okay, it's just a matter of time now.
"I remember reaching up, things still not too clear. Didn't know him. Could be one of those who'd been chasing after me. My hand's huge up there, blots out the whole sky. I try to ask him. He takes my hand and bends close over me.
Now his face fills the sky. Can't make out what I'm saying.
" 'David?' he says, 'You're asking after David? He's gone on. Sicker ones than you here now, mate. But not to worry: we'll take good care of you.'"