A rookie homicide detective, Angela, shaped like a barrel with eyebrows painstakingly plucked then drawn back in a high arch.
A thirtyish guy, Louis, Louie, maybe Luis, who’d just opened a bookstore specializing in used textbooks. School bookstores had long held an unchallenged monopoly, repurchasing texts again and again at bargain-basement prices and reselling them at penthouse premiums. It wouldn’t last, he knew that, but for a while he’d be able dramatically to undercut the schools and still pull a fair profit. And even once this passed, he’d be left with the satisfaction of knowing he’d done good work-ah, America!
Dennis, bald except for a gray, limp ponytail sprouting off the back of his head, who taught drawing and design at three community colleges and served as part-time docent for the Delgado.
Danny and Steve. They ran an uptown B amp;B catering to gays and offered up, everyone said, breakfasts so good that guests got up an hour early just to enjoy them.
Phillip, who’d gone through the master’s program in social work with Rick. He worked at the state hospital over in Mandeville, had for years.
Charles, a waiter at Petunia’s who, whenever he was able to clear time, played clarinet with a local klezmer group, string bass with a pickup blues band meeting each weekend on Jackson Square. That group’s washboard player frequently spilled out of her top. The group was very popular.
Towards ten that night, things began trailing off. God, we were old. Ten o’clock and the party’s over. Pots of polenta gave out as had mushroom and roux earlier; plates of cheese, andouille sausage, toothpickspeared peppers and olives faded away; folks reaching into honeycombs of beer and wine bottles came up empty, which given our diminished tolerances was probably just as well. With Rick I saw the last few stragglers to the door, then put on Charlie Patton cranked high as we began stacking dishes, glasses, coffee cups, ashtrays.
“Thanks for letting me use your place, Lew.”
“My pleasure. Great meal, fine company.”
In the next room, slurring his words majestically (as I generally did these days, following the stroke), Patton saddled up his pony.
“You want, you’re not into this right now, too tired to deal with it, we could leave it. I’d be glad to swing by early, before work, take care of it then.”
“Just as soon get it done. I’m fine. Help me wind down some.”
We worked away, Patton’s guitar plucking at the edge of our world, calling up strong feelings I had no name for, feelings that, once summoned, I knew, would be slow to go away. Cleanup mostly done, we knocked off to share half a bottle of Australian Shiraz-cabernet I’d tucked away for safekeeping in the vegetable drawer, sitting together for the most part wordlessly, before Rick headed home. I was stacking a final few plates on towels, long ago bereft of drainer space, when the phone rang.
I made my way to it, shouted Hang on! Just a minute! and, carrying the phone with me, Deborah’s cordless, went to turn down the music.
“Sorry.”
A pause. “Mr. Griffin.”
Maybe I should have left the music alone. Go back now and crank it up.
“I apologize for calling so late. I wanted to say how sorry I am to hear of your recent difficulties.… Our bodies will go on betraying us, won’t they? Still, a stroke, if not too severe, can be an interesting thing. The jar gets shaken in intriguing ways…. You’ve made, I understand, a full recovery.”
I wrung out the dishrag and draped it on the windowsill to dry. More accurately, probably, to mildew.
“I was pleased to hear that. If there’s anything I can do … As you know, I’ve had considerable experience with this sort of thing these last several years. I would hope that you might call on me. Not that I think for a moment you will.”
Time ticked in the wires.
“I am hardly a monster, Mr. Griffin. Few of us are. It’s not as though I’m sitting here with drums going, waiting for those mighty gates to open.”
“I am a man, Jupiter.”
“Ah yes. Sartre, to balance my own King Kong. Interesting, isn’t it? How, increasingly, we seem to live our lives as allusion, reference-not directly, but refracted from something else.”
The CD player had shut itself off, dropping the house into a supernal quiet.
“Thousands of years ago, Mr. Griffin. Thousands of years ago, something, a creature who had not existed before, lugged itself up out of the slime and sat drying on a rock, looking around. It had no idea what it was, what it would become. Even where it was. But at that point, even with no words for it, the creature knew two things.
“It had knowledge of itself. It was self-aware.
“And it knew, as it struggled even to breathe in this new world, that it hurt.”
Without response to that, I remained silent.
“Of course, personally, I have also the pragmatic, absolutely nonphilosophical consolation of knowing that, for me, the pain will soon be over. An unfair advantage, some might suggest.”
“I’m sorry,” I said after a moment.
“Why should you be? From your vantage, no doubt, I’ve earned my pain.”
“We all do, in our own way. Just that sometimes it seems so out of proportion.”
“Yes. Yes, sometimes it does.” A cough started up in his chest, like a fist closing down; I heard him turn it away, end it, by sheer force of will. “I do apologize for calling so late.”
“Not a problem.”
“Good…. I should hate to impose.” A man walked slowly past on the street outside, a step or so off the curb, looking in. He was shabbily dressed, eyes bright with something: drink, fever, too many lost battles, too much time alone. “I wonder if you may have given any further thought to what we last spoke of.”
“Alouette, you mean.”
“I suppose I do.” When I said no more, he added:
“She’s well?”
“She is. As is the child.”
“Good. Very good. And may I ask concerning the … notes … she has been receiving?”
“Dr. Guidry, I understand and appreciate your concern, but that’s something you really need to take up with Alouette directly, not with me.”
“You’re right, of course. And I’d be happy to do so, if only she’d take my calls. At any rate, Mr. Griffin, forgive me. And thank you for your time, of which already I’ve taken up far too much.”
“Not at all. Good night, sir.”
I heard the receiver get set down and was about to hang up myself when a voice came on the line.
“Mr. Griffin, Catherine Molino here. You remember me?”
“Of course I do.”
“Thank you for talking to him. He doesn’t have much to look forward to these days. Perhaps …”
“Yes?”
“I was thinking that maybe someday it would be possible for you to come and see Dr. Guidry, speak to him about his daughter. That would mean a great deal to him.”
“Why would I want to do that, Mrs. Molino?”
She didn’t speak for several moments. “Because he is old and sick and alone, Mr. Griffin. Or simply because we’re all human.”
Without waiting for a reply, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Griffin. Good night,” and hung up.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I opened my eyes. Another eye hovered inches away, regarding mine. A rat. Its whiskers twitched. Obviously, whatever I was, I was too big to eat here. But he could go get help, haul me back home for later.
I sat up. Hard to believe what effort that took. For a moment the rat stood watching. But I was moving around now, no longer an easy target, alleyway carryout. The rat moved off towards the wall, sniffing at better prospects there.