The Future Fucks Up the Past
At the Sonesta on Loyola I woke early on the 2nd of February, 2020, got my shit together and into my backpack, took the naked-roofed elevator down from the thirteenth floor (they made no pretense of fake numbering) and prepared to catch the Amtrak north. I swear I did not hear the phrase “numerical palindrome” mentioned on what little news I watched that early morning. About a month from this date, the first case of covid-19 was found in Louisiana. People asked me why I went to New Orleans before Mardi Gras and I could never quite explain why — until now. I would not have said, at the time, “Something inside tells me I need to travel now, now, Now!!” but that’s not far from the actual truth. Ostensibly, I went to see a band, but in truth, I craved travel. I had the horizon sickness.
I had a pleasant sit in Union Station, a bit starvy, eyeballs dulled out by the designs on the wall. It filled slow, but by train-loading time, the lines stretched back. I am amazed at how there is always a certain distance we put between ourselves in lines, and this line was no exception. Had we put six feet between us, we would have needed a bigger Union Station. The people in the line most close to me happily admitted to drinking way too much the night before — “but this is New Orleans, so . . . .”
I hustled down the railroad line at dawn that Sunday like a kid catching the bus on the first day of school, hoping for the best seat up near the front.
Looking back from future vantage point of more than two months, I have to wonder now: where in the big easy might I have inhaled a little covid-19.
I was in the cramped Faulkner House bookstore for quite a while, this semi-mythical place where the author was supposed to have lived in 1925. The proprietress beamed with happiness and when I asked with a bemused smile why so, she answered: “I get to read and sell books pretty much all day.”
The person who put the wild “Catcher in the Rye” paperback on the doorstoop of the house on Chartres? Did the covid-19 virus live in the sun on that book, that morning? It doesn’t matter, because I was unaware of any news, having shut it off for the trip. I dared not touch the book. It was like a small, odd matutinal sculpture.
I ate breakfast that morning starvily quickly, in a tight but not not over-crowded little place called Pére Quelqu’un. The waitress did not seem ill.
The street crowds in the Quarter were not the heavy, stumble-bumbling crowds of Mardi Gras, and, you know, I swear, I actually (perhaps in introvert unconsciousness) put six feet between me and everybody else I stumbled across as I walked six miles all that morning and on into an increasingly chilly and windy afternoon. It was a mindless à pied pleasure.
Now, in April, I remember the guy who had fallen in the narthex of St. Louis Cathedral, about whom I wrote this poem?
Inside the cathedral
at the redolent crux
of the busiest
tourist district
of New Orleans
fetally curled right
in the center
of the narthex
lies a man
in mixed clothing
he is quite still
he has the stillness of
those unlit candles
stacked close by
some lit, some not
a Saints cap with
fuzzy fleur-de-lis
has clung in the fall
to his greyish head
keep moving, tourists that way
medics have been called
nobody worry, keep moving
is he dead
who saw him fall
the painted ceiling
with scenes of saints
and martyrs and mothers
draws all camera eyes upward
straight-up noon but chilly inside
this gigantic religious cave where
visitors can willfully mill
photograph the scenes
sit meditatively
Medics have been called
in one of the burnished pews
siren in the distance
O look, honey,
there’s St. Blaise,
patron saint of throat ailments.
We just missed his day…darn…
a man wearing a backwards baseball cap
walks up to the still man
shines a beam of light
straight down at his eyes
walks away
leaving, I see a woman
with two small children
and I want to say Wait
don’t go in there
there’s a there’s a there’s a
guy on the floor
dude on the floor
in there,
might scare the children
but then I realize it won’t
scare the children at all
outside on the steps
of the cathedral
two street comedians
do dance steps before
an enthralled crowd
Dead, perhaps, the first Louisiana victim of a virus no one knew was about? I could never find a news story about him. Is it misguided to view the past backwards and also through the sharp prism of future events?
Exceptions? The several homeless folks I talked to after I ran out of money to give them. We didn’t hug or anything, as I am still a hands-off kinda guy despite efforts toward change, but we were close enough for the exchange of a buck or an apology.
All in all, I had been my usual self-isolating self, even in the crowd at the concert. Ah. Didn’t I puff on a vape pen there? Maybe so, maybe not.
But the worst was, as Keb’ Mo’ likes to sing, yet to come.
The Crescent made the same slow curve, replete with deep horrid clicks, that I had felt in the dark two nights before, but now I could see what I had merely felt before: Greenwood Cemetery, serving the needs of dead people (among them the author of the invaluable “A Confederacy of Dunces,” John Kennedy Toole) since 1830, a superterranean necropolis that went on and on and on, block after block of bric-a-brac homes for the dead all a-glitter in a honeyed madrugada light that was, if not mocking, portentous.
The train seemed to slow for our necropolitan viewing pleasure. A church’s steeple punctuated the grisly tableaux — New Orleans Baptist Church, it says — and then we were past, and here came the much happier window scenes of morning birds rising from Bay Je Ne Sais Quoi.
The train picked up speed after a stop or two in undernourished little towns, and soon we were moving quickly northwards through the seedy underbelly backyards of towns like Laurel and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Toward the end of the trip, I recall hearing a passenger not far behind me make one of those sounds that indicate sinuses in despair. I know people who give the stink-eye to people who cough like that. At the time, it was an auditory hassle, like listening to a friend who pointlessly yet inexorably curses for no reason beyond their own.
I remember it today in a darker light.
© 2020 Thomas N. Dennis
