After class one day Professor Bill bent down to pick up a book one of his graduate students had dropped and felt something pop in his chest, a spontaneous pneumothorax, as it turned out. Within moments he had difficulty breathing. Paramedics were called, he was taken to nearby Oschner, chest tubes were inserted to relieve pressure, and he wound up on a ventilator in the medical ICU. Hours later, difficult breathing made a curtain calclass="underline" another pneumo, another chest tube. Further complications ensued. Four months along, chiefly at the urging of his insurance carrier, at last off the ventilator and doing well, Professor Bill was transferred to a long-term facility forrehabilitation. That very night a bullet from a drive-by shooting a block away penetrated the wall of Bill's room and his chest, all but severing his vena cava. Blood and the oxygen it carried drained away from his brain. Only the intervention of an eighteen-year-old orderly, who recognized what was happening and thmst his fingers into the leaking vessel, saved Bill from death. This all happened ten years ago. Now Bill spent his days wandering about downtown, occasionally lecturing passersby on street corners or patrons in Wendy's and Winchell's on early American military history, most often not speaking at all.
As Buster Robinson would have said: Long after midnight when death comes slipping in your room, you gonna need somebody on your bond.
Or Gnostics: If you find a way of getting out what is within you, it can save you; if you don't, it will kill you.
But often enough it won't matter how hard you listen for the universe's voice outside you, for the still, small voice of truth inside.
Often enough, no matter what you do, the wind's footsteps are all you'll hear.
34
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."