The Black Ocean

Lost on the Lost Shores of New Orleans, They Dreamed Abraham Lincoln Was the Magician of the Great Divide

42 Lost on the Lost Shores of New Orleans, They Dreamed Abraham Lincoln Was the Magician of the Great Divide In unison, the administration unknotted their ties and rolled up their sleeves and dismissed them into darkness that was no longer darkness but a state redefined as a temporary failure of light, though the rain shone on everything like staples that hold a body together after the soul has slipped out. They didn’t want to be infinite, but more human. They cried out, placeless and disembodied, scrawling their names and messages everywhere, a graffiti of prayers pushing back against nothingness, against the rain, indivisible. The rain behind their eyelids. The rain pearls of cotton dissolving on their chaffed tongues. They were woe-smitten, a scattered multitude suddenly visible as if a false wall had fallen, or a green screen had been flailed diaphanous by the storm, a one-way window everyone could watch them through, even as their mouths filled with some stringy albumen of shame and rage, sour, worming up the gullet, forced forward by the palpitation of disbelief, this latest indignity, while the sun emerged and bore down on them like a thumbscrew, like a punctured pouch of embalming fluid, and the dogs, frantic inside their heads, how they wanted out, that incessant barking, the raw paw-pads hanging on, spraddle-legged, splayed on the scorched shingles, until finally they knew no one 43 was coming, and waded into the Great Divide, into that viscous swill that sawed them in half. But this was no magic trick, for there, where the dead bumped, gibbous-eyed, blind as stones, there where nothing spoke or sang, they could feel their legs dragged down, scoured logs, bloated pincushions of gout, a raddled reef of flesh clotting in the murky depths. They were already ghost-eyed, wandering, their torsos wimpling, skimming the septic waterways of their disaster. Where, we asked, did they all come from? Out of the rain. Out of the ruin. Out of the hole in his head, their passage paid for though the past was a sieve they kept passing through . . . * He pulled his hand out of his hat and the rains came again. The rain a threshold. The rain snub-nosed. The rain a shirt coming apart, sodden and sudden. He was black and seared blacker around the edges. Jagged. Like a brute silhouette, a crude paper cutout, or a note crumpled up, stuffed inside their mouths— He pulled his hand from his hat and held out the bridge they’d never make it across, bright lights 44 and the river braiding its spell of filth beneath it. He held out questions, unanswerable, and the smell of wet newsprint that won’t wash off. He held out a red scarf, rigor mortis, a small band of farmers shaking pitchforks at a tank. He held out two white milk teeth and a bloody teat. He pulled his hand from his hat and the sky felt like the cool page of a book when you put your cheek down on it, and Los Angeles, their love, burned like a burning bush, and O! Washington, Detroit, Memphis, the sun setting, the night sinking behind barricades, into dumpsters overflowing, into skullcaps sticky, a damask of teargas and sweat. He held out a gold medal, a fist, mule flies, a white picket fence. He held out a banjo full of bilge and Big Bill Broonzy dozing in the back of a gold Cadillac parked beneath a loblolly, the most beautiful of pines, spreading, swaying, shading the graves of the martyrs, and the dust of Jerusalem they shook from their shoes and the patsy’s bullet plucked out like a dead bumblebee. He pulled his hand from his hat and they heard the sound of the levee coming apart like a wave of slurpy thunder, and the pictures of the missing flapped in the wind and each brick sang out and they could see in his eyes the black ocean rising 45 and the light suctioning down through the grease traps of the inner-ear, what all snagged there, the unutterable, the grunts, the cries of surprise the body makes when pierced by fear. Levitate them, we said, so he pulled his hand from his hat and held up the hole in his head they passed through darkly. He held up the paltry poultice of spit and glue, black armbands and...