The Map of Moments (11 page)

“Charlie…” he said.

“Don't patronize me,” Charlie said, soft but firm. “Really. You have no idea. I saw looting all across the campus, and men with guns, and a body that stayed on the sidewalk for two weeks, people walking right by every day. Hell,
I
walked by, tried not to look at her face. Jim Delahunt, a professor here, Max—a
professor
—didn't even go around one time; he stepped right over her.” Charlie poured Max a drink and handed it to him, challenging him to respond.

I should go,
Max thought. But though they hadn't exactly been close friends, he felt as though he should do something to help.

“City Park,” he said.

Charlie frowned and sat behind his desk. “What about it?”

Max walked around the office, running his finger along the book spines. They were in perfect alphabetical order.
Before or after the storm?
he wondered. “What do you know about the place?”

“Stupid question. What do you want to know?”

“The past. A long time ago, before the city was here. Maybe the French were there?”

“Well, yeah, they founded the city. Early eighteenth century. But…”

Max could not help smiling. Had he seen a change in Charlie's eyes already? “A friend of mine is interested, that's all,” he said. “And I was looking for an excuse to come out here before I fly home, so I said I'd see if you were still around.”

Charlie put down his drink and leaned forward, steepling his hands in front of his face. “Exactly what do you want to know?”

“What did it look like? Who and what was there? Anything you know, really.”

“It was marshland, mainly. Swamp. Forest. Lots of oak. Much of it was reclaimed to form the park. Back then, before New Orleans was founded by Jean Baptiste-LeMoyne, you had different Indian tribes there.”

Max tried to keep his face neutral, but inside he was translating everything Charlie said into the vision he'd had the previous day. Marshy ground …oak trees …Indians …It all fit, and with every word that Charlie uttered, Max became more scared.

This was stuff he did not know, yet he'd seen it all.

“These Indians …did they practice ritual sacrifice?”

Charlie frowned and leaned back, then broke into a smile. This was the man Max remembered. “Never thought of you as a gore hound, Max.”

Max smiled back. “I'm not. But my friend is writing a historical novel, and he was just wondering…”

“Historical novel?”

“Yeah.” Max tried not to look away, feeling foolish for lying.

“Well, there're no real records, to be honest. There are myths and stories of sacrifice, but there's no saying they reflect actual events. I seriously doubt it, if you want my two cents. Rituals, yeah. Offerings. But blood sacrifices and that kind of crap, I'm gonna say no.” Charlie picked up his glass and tapped his wedding ring against it again. He looked down into the despair he had obviously been inhabiting, then up again. “You haven't had a drink.”

Max lifted his glass and sipped, and he had an intense flashback to the previous day: Ray, the bar, and what had happened afterward. “They didn't mind the rain,” he muttered. “And the men wore masks.”

“I think the Biloxi wore masks in some of their tribal ceremonies,” Charlie said. “There was an offshoot of that tribe here. Though I'm no real expert, of course.”

“The Frenchman,” Max muttered. He had been so close, he could have reached out and touched him, but the man had still not noticed him.
That's because I was never really there. I was witnessing the moment, not actually there at all.

“The one I mentioned? Jean—”

“No, no,” Max said, waving his hand. He took another drink, and the flashback this time was simply his need to remember.

“So, your friend's novel?”

“Work in progress.” Max shrugged, then drained his glass.
I didn't know any of this,
he thought. And yet he remembered the Indians—Biloxi, perhaps?—the Frenchman, and their surroundings. He shivered.

“It's good stuff,” Charlie said, lifting the half-empty bottle. “Amazing what you find in fellow professors’ rooms.”

“Maybe you should go with your family, Charlie.”

“Houston? Fucking hate the place. I live here. I was born here, forty-two years ago. Lived in six houses in New Orleans. My house now …not too bad. I can live there, at least, though I wouldn't want the kids to see it.” He poured some more whiskey without offering Max any more. “Besides, there're ‘plans’! The university will rise again from the waters, like a soggy fucking phoenix, ready to…” He shook his head and sipped some more.

“It'll be all right,” Max said. “Eventually.”

“Yeah.” Charlie put his glass down again. “You know, I might be able to find you a book on the Biloxi. Dan Petti-grew used to have a thing for them, and he went back to Chicago when everyone evacuated.” He stood, swayed a little, and then headed past Max and out into the corridor. “Come on.”

Max did not really want a book about the Biloxi. He did not want to walk past the office he'd once occupied, where he'd spoken to Gabrielle on the phone, made plans with her, and daydreamed about their time together, and fantastic sex
in that hot attic. But Charlie's eyes had changed as soon as Max had asked his first question. Here was an intelligent man, unable to come to terms with what was happening to the city he loved and desperate for somewhere else to aim his intellect.

And Max had left. After only six months, he'd fled the city this man had loved his whole life.

So he followed Charlie, watched as he appropriated the book about Biloxi Indians from Pettigrew's office, and was glad when Charlie shook his hand and wished him well. “Maybe you can come back here to teach, one day,” Charlie said. Max was not sure how much he knew about the circumstances in which he'd left—they'd never been that close—but he nodded, and said maybe, and then it was time for him to go.

As he descended the stairs and went back out into the ruin, he heard the steady
chink …chink …chink
of Charlie losing himself again.

Max started walking along St. Charles Avenue. He hadn't thought about arranging for the cab to return, and he hoped that he'd be able to flag one down. The odds were stacked against him, though. How many cabs were running in New Orleans two and a half months after Katrina? Not many, and those that were probably stuck mostly to the French Quarter hotels. It hadn't been very long since they'd started letting people back into the city.

The small slug of whiskey haunted the edges of his perception, but as he walked and broke a sweat, it was not the
only ghost troubling him. The map was in his back pocket, and it never quite sat comfortably. He was always aware of it, could always feel it, as though it was announcing itself to him. He found himself dwelling once again on the Second Moment, a boxed section of neat, meticulous writing that said
The Pere's Kyrie.
He knew of the Kyrie, but he had no idea who the
pere
might be.

The writing had appeared in Jackson Square, not far from his hotel in the French Quarter. He knew eventually he would go to that spot, try to figure out what the Second Moment was all about, and see if anything strange would happen. He was torn between curiosity and fear. If he went and nothing happened, that would mean last night never happened. But if he went and something
did
happen …he would no longer be able to pretend it was anything but real.

He needed to find out about the Pere's Kyrie. But now he walked a little faster, and the day grew a little warmer, and another ghost began to bother him more. This one had a name but no face, a link to his past but nothing by which he could connect. Its name was Coco.

He knew he ought to go back to the hotel. New Orleans wasn't really ready for visitors. It needed tourists, and it needed the people who were the heart of the place to return, but given the pace of the recovery so far, it would be years before things were put back in order. By then, many of the older generation would have died, and many of the younger generation would have moved on to somewhere that didn't have the character, the history, or the finely woven fabric of life in New Orleans.

This city might be dead,
Max thought. And the idea hit
him like a blow to the gut. The people who loved it too much to stay away, or so much they never left in the first place, might be inhabiting some kind of necropolis, and not wake up to that truth for years.

God, he prayed that wasn't so, that it wouldn't ever be true. If not for Gabrielle, he never would have left this city. New Orleans could be resurrected, he felt sure of that. America
needed
New Orleans.

Max held the book Charlie had given him against his chest like a schoolboy, thinking about ghosts. His memory of Gabrielle haunted him, but other things haunted him, too, and that was why he couldn't just go back to his hotel and wait out the day until his flight home. He'd never been the kind of man who'd run from his ghosts. The only thing he'd ever run from was Gabrielle, and he'd cursed himself for a coward ever since.

No more running.

But before he went looking for the Second Moment, he had to at least look into the other ghost that was haunting him. It weighed on him, filled him with a nervous energy, like he knew there was something he was supposed to do but couldn't quite figure out what.

Gabrielle had loved him. But the woman he thought he'd known wouldn't have cheated on him with one of his own students. The woman he thought he'd known was loved everywhere she went. Yet Gabrielle
had
cheated. Her family hated her so much they wouldn't even pay for her burial, and she had no real friends.

Had
his
Gabrielle ever really existed? Could the bright, shining intellect he'd seen in those young eyes, the humor
and life he'd seen within her, have been nothing but his imagination?

If he went home without trying to understand how he could have been so wrong about her, that would haunt him more than any spirit could.

When Max had pressed Corinne about Coco, she had glanced away, as if she didn't want to meet his gaze.
I only met him once,
she'd said.
In Digg's. He was bad news. Forget I ever said his name.

Max had heard of Digg's—a bar in the Quarter—and it was as good a place as any to start looking. As if to urge him along this new plan of action, a cab drifted by and slowed down. It was the same cab that had taken him to Tulane.

“Find what you went there for?” the driver asked.

“Partly,” Max said.

“Cool. I drove around a little, but not a lot of people needin’ taxis today. Maybe I came back to work too soon, y'know, but what else am I supposed to do?”

Max didn't have an answer. “Thanks for coming back.”

“Hey, you got places to be and money in your wallet. I'm not out here for the scenery.”

The cabbie turned up his music and wheel-tapped all the way to the Quarter.

D
igg's was on a narrow backstreet, away from the
1
bright lights of the French Quarter, a block away from a fish market and a Cajun seafood take-out place. This wasn't a spot for tourists. The combination of Katrina and the flood hadn't done much damage here, but the neighborhood felt like it had started holding its breath when the storm swept in, and had yet to exhale.

Max walked past Digg's twice before noticing the doorway. A faded wooden sign was screwed into the brickwork, announcing the name. The door was ajar, and immediately inside a stairway led down, its walls papered with decades of overlapping music and gig posters. Hundreds of names
publicized dates long since passed, and perhaps some of those names were long gone, too. The stairway was poorly lit, but standing by the open door Max caught a mouthwatering waft of gumbo and fried chicken, and the familiar scents of bars everywhere: spilled drinks, old wood, good times.

Digg's certainly wasn't doing much to draw attention to itself, but in his seven months here, guided by Gabrielle, Max had come to love local bars and shun the more commercialized tourist areas of the city.

But she had never brought him here.

He wondered whether Coco came here sometimes, sat alone at the bar and thought about Gabrielle. And then he wondered why the man had not been present at her funeral.

Max went down. As he passed the half landing, the sound of subdued conversation, the clink of glasses, and soft laughter rose to meet him. He hoped none of that would stop when he entered.

It was a small bar with brick walls, a vaulted ceiling, and a flagstone floor. The bar itself was brick-fronted, and the furniture scattered around the place was all dark, old wood, well used and comfortable. A candle on each table gave an intimate lighting level. There were maybe thirty people sitting around in small groups or couples, men and women, black and white and every hue in between. A skinny guy working the bar might have been Native American, or some perfect mélange of heritage that gave him skin with the color and gleam of bronze.

Max walked directly to the bar as though he belonged,