 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
“I lied to you,” she said.
I touched the side of her face. The high cheekbone just at the hairline. “I know. My unicorn
would never have let you touch him if you weren’t pure. I’m not, but he has no choice with me. He
was assigned to me. He’s my familiar and he puts up with me. We’re friends. “
“No. Other lies. My life was a lie. I’ve told them all to you. We can’t make it. You have to
let me go.”
I didn’t know exactly where, but I knew how it would happen. I argued with her, trying to
convince her there was a way for us. But she couldn’t believe it, hadn’t the strength or the will or the
faith. Finally, I let her go.
She put her arms around my neck and drew my face down to hers, and she held me that way
for a few moments. Then the winds rose, and there were sounds in the night, the sounds of calling,
and she left me there, in the shadows.
I sat down on the curb and thought about the years since I’d died. Years without much
music. Light leached out. Wandering, Nothing to pace me but memories and the unicorn. How sad I
was for him; assigned to me till I got my chance. And now it had come and I’d taken my best go,
and failed.
Lizette and I were the two sides of the same coin; devalued and impossible to spend. Legal
tender of nations long since vanished, no longer even names on the cracked papyrus of
cartographers’ maps. We had been snatched away from final rest, had been set adrift to roam for our
crimes, and only once between death and eternity would we receive a chance. This night...this
nothing special night...this was our chance.
My unicorn came to me, then, and brushed his muzzle against my shoulder. I reached up and
scratched around the base of his spiral horn, his favorite place. He gave a long, silvery sigh, and in
that sound I heard the sentence I was serving on him, as well as myself. We had been linked, too.
Assigned to one another by the one who had ordained this night’s chance. But if I lost out, so did my
unicorn; he who had wandered with me through all the soundless, lightless years.
I stood up. I was by no means ready to do battle, but at least I could stay in for the full
ride...all the way on the downhill side. “Do you know where they are?”
My unicorn started off down the street.
I followed, hopelessness warring with frustration. Dusk to dawn is the full ride, the final
chance. After midnight is the downhill side. Time was short, and when time ran out there would be
nothing for Lizette or me or my unicorn but time. Forever.
When we passed the Royal Orleans Hotel I knew where we were going. The sound of the
Quarter had already faded. It was getting on toward dawn. The human lice had finally crawled into
their fleshmounds to sleep off the night of revelry. Though I had never experienced directly the New
Orleans in which Lizette had grown up, I longed for the power to blot out the cancerous blight that
Bourbon Street and the Quarter had become, with its tourist filth and screaming neon, to restore it to
the colorful yet healthy state in which it had thrived a hundred years before. But I was only a ghost,
not one of the gods with such powers, and at that moment I was almost at the end of the line held by
one of those gods.
My unicorn turned down dark streets, heading always in the same general direction, and
when I saw the first black shapes of the tombstones against the night sky, the lightening night sky, I
knew I’d been correct in my assumption of destination.
The Saint Louis Cemetery.
Oh, how I sorrow for anyone who has never seen the world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery in
New Orleans. It is the perfect graveyard, the complete graveyard, the finest graveyard in the
universe. (There is a perfection in some designs that informs the function totally. There are Danish
chairs that could be nothing but chairs, are so totally and completely chair that if the world as we
know it ended, and a billion years from now the New Orleans horsy cockroaches became the
