 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
dominant species, and they dug down through the alluvial layers, and found one of those chairs,
even if they themselves did not use chairs, were not constructed physically for the use of chairs, had
never seen a chair, still they would know it for what it had been made to be: a chair. Because it
would be the essence of chairness. And from it, they could reconstruct the human race in replica.
That is the kind of graveyard one means when one refers to the world-famous Saint Louis
Cemetery.)
The Saint Louis Cemetery is ancient. It sighs with shadows and the comfortable bones and
their afterimages of deaths that became great merely because those who died went to be interred in
the Saint Louis Cemetery. The water table lies just eighteen inches below New Orleans--there are no
graves in the earth for that reason. Bodies are entombed aboveground in crypts, in sepulchers,
vaults, mausoleums. The gravestones are an different, no two alike, each one a testament to the
stonecutter’s art. Only secondarily testaments to those who lie beneath the markers.
We had reached the moment of final nightness. That ultimate moment before day began.
Dawn had yet to fin the eastern sky, yet there was a warming of tone to the night; it was the last of
the downhill side of my chance. Of Lizette’s chance.
We approached the cemetery, my unicorn and I. From deep in the center of the skyline of
stones beyond the fence I could see the ice-chill glow of a pulsing blue light. The light one finds in a
refrigerator, cold and flat and brittle.
I mounted my unicorn, leaned close along his neck, clinging to his mane with both hands,
knees tight to his silken sides, now rippling with light and color, and I gave a little hiss of approval,
a little sound of go.
My unicorn sailed over the fence, into the world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery.
I dismounted and thanked him. We began threading our way between the tombstones, the
sepulchers, the crypts.
The blue glow grew more distinct. And now I could hear the chimera winds rising, whirling,
coming in off alien seas. The pulsing of the light, the wail of the winds, the night dying. My unicorn
stayed close. Even we of the spirit world know when to be afraid.
After all, I was only operating off a chance; I was under no god’s protection. Naked, even in
death.
There is no fog in New Orleans.
Mist began to form around us.
Except sometimes in the winter, there is no fog in New Orleans.
I remembered the daybreak of the night I’d died. There had been mist. I had been a suicide.
My third wife had left me. She had gone away during the night, while I’d been at a business
meeting with a client; I had been engaged to design a church in Baton Rouge. An that day I’d
steamed the old wallpaper off the apartment we’d rented. It was to have been our first home
together, paid for by the commission. I’d done the steaming myself, with a tan ladder and a steam
condenser and two flat pans with steam holes. Up near the ceiling the heat had been so awful I’d
almost fainted. She’d brought me lemonade, freshly squeezed. Then I’d showered and changed and
gone to my meeting. When I’d returned, she was gone. No note.
Lizette and I were two sides of the same coin, cast off after death for the opposite extremes
of the same crime. She had never loved. I had loved too much. Overindulgence in something as
delicate as love is to be found monstrously offensive in the eyes of the God of Love. And some of
us--who have never understood the salvation in the Golden Mean--some of us are cast adrift with
but one chance. It can happen.
Mist formed around us, and my unicorn crept close to me, somehow smaller, almost timid.
We were moving into realms he did not understand, where his limited magics were useless. These
were realms of potency so utterly beyond even the limbo creatures--such as my unicorn--so
completely alien to even the intermediary zone wanderers--Lizette and myself--that we were as
