THE RAIN CAME DOWN (Guest Post Hanrahan)
This is a ghost town.
A small island of activity and false cheer surrounded by devastation, ruin, and the scent of mold that recalls how death recently swept through with a wide scythe. Bodies are buried, or in some cases, re-buried, but the restless ghosts of anger, abandonment, hopelessness permeate the atmosphere.
The French Quarter never got the worst of it. When the levees broke, and the water reclaimed the land that belonged to it all along, the high ground of the Quarter escaped its deadly eviction. Not so the places where people lived. From the mansions of the Garden District to the shacks of the Ninth Ward, the water took back the swamps where people dared to build.
Parts of the central business district were reopened, but the aquarium, where all the fish eventually died due to power loss rather than flood, and the stadium that became a place of refugee horror, and smaller businesses who didn’t have the financial stroke to rebuild, all remained closed.
Where were all the people?
Those whose homes were rotting from the inside out, with walls covered in deep moss, floors buckled and ceilings collapsed. Those who lost all their belongings to the water. Where were they? Those who were told by their insurance companies that they couldn’t reinsure unless the levees were built to withstand a category five hurricane while the city planners and the federal government were re-building to withstand no more than a category four. These homeless and hopeless people were living in other parts of Louisiana, or Texas or as far north as Minnesota and west as California. If they were lucky, relatives took them in. If not, a fresh start was their only hope. Fresh starts for the aged and the handicapped came seldom.
There was talk of just razing the ramshackle homes of the Ninth Ward, building low cost housing or even higher cost housing to replace the blight of poverty. Some local politician made a joke about the flood causing “tens of dollars of damages” in the Ninth Ward. No one laughed. People who lived in ramshackle houses did so because they couldn’t afford anything better. Rebuilding places with rents they couldn’t afford meant permanent displacement.
New Orleans was badly broken and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men in Washington and Baton Rouge were flailing their arms in panic and doing nothing to get things fixed.
Surprise, surprise.
What a perfect place to be. Death, devastation, hopelessness, and oh yes, a constant steady rain, it was a perfect backdrop. I was able to get a suite at a small, fancy hotel in the Quarter for next to nothing because tourism here is at an all time low. Hurricane season may be past, but no one wants to come see the horrors they all read about and then promptly turned a blind eye to.
Now the resentment was festering, whispers of people getting rich from government handouts, of scams, of laziness and living off the dole. Get off your fat, complaining ass, middle America, and come down here and see how easy it is to get by in the Big Easy right now. Drive around the condemned neighborhoods, count the houses, the schools, the churches that are vacant, ruined by water or destroyed completely by the storm. Then we’ll talk about hand-outs.
This is where it began for us. This is the city where I first spoke to him in the Café du Monde, where we played our cat and mouse game, where I fucked him for the first time. Where else could I go but to New Orleans after what happened?
He wanted me to kill him. He wanted to die. He said as much when he opened the door. That was the plan. Kill him, kill Domino, kill them together, kill Domino first because he was the danger and because I wanted Teri to see him die, and then kill the Princess. Romeo and Juliet with a twist. But Domino was already on the run and the Princess had decided to resign from life. Looking into those pale blue eyes rimmed in kohl that was smeared by emotion, seeing the complete resignation on his face, I realized I had become his method of suicide.
Teri was in love with a man named Kim who no longer existed. He and his kind had turned Kim into a monster named Domino, who was self- destructing. Teri’s one constant, his twin, betrayed him. More than once, it would seem. Teri, who valued control above all else, had no way to control his own pain of loss. Death was easy. Death trumped pain.
I put the tip of my Glock against his temple, and he didn’t move a muscle. His eyes were fixed on mine the whole time. He knew how to defend himself, how to strike, but he used none of those skills on me. Because I was his grim reaper. He didn’t blink, didn’t twitch. I know how this goes. The bullet enters at this thin part of the skull and powers through the brain. The opposite temple bulges out for a moment and then explodes brain matter and blood all over the wall. The body drops, convulses, maybe, and that’s it. Done.
“Do it,” he said to me and I replied,
“It’s because I love you.”
“I know, Robert. Do it.”
A clap of thunder outside the hotel suite echoes gunfire and draws me back to the window. No one is out on the streets below. Absolutely no one. “What time is it, Robert?”
I turn at the sound of his voice. He’s huddled up under the white sheets and the burgundy silk duvet as if he’s still freezing. He wears no makeup, giving him a youthful and vulnerable appearance. He’s tied his dark hair back in a ponytail. The thick terry robe of the hotel envelops his small frame. He’s slept for hours. He eats, not much, but enough, he bathes, he sleeps.
“It’s almost six in the evening. You want to go out for dinner?”
We’re in the heart of Dunraven land. I have no doubt they are watching our every move. He snuggles into the pillow. “No.”
I walk over to the bed and get in with him. I take him in my arms. He lets me. He doesn’t hold me, but he lets me hold him. There’s been no sex. There’s no room in him for sex right now. There’s been no discussion of all that went wrong. He never was one to pour out his pain. There have been no tears. He internalizes his agonies. “He’ll kill us both, you know,” he says softly, his words tickling my chest.
“He can try.”
“You don’t understand, Bob. He’s a machine. Once Kim is pushed down, again, Domino will be in a rage. He won’t stop.”
“Why can’t your little friends in Dunraven take care of him?”
“Because they don’t know how bad he is, because I won’t let them know.”
“You’re protecting him?”
“It’s not his fault he’s the way he is.”
“And for that you’re willing to die?”
“For Kim, I’m willing to die.”
I rest my cheek against his dark hair. “Not me, Princess,” I muffle my voice in his hair. “I’ll kill both of those fuckers before I let him hurt you. Domino and Kim.”
“You won’t see it coming,” he says with a sigh, and then he sits up abruptly, as if waking from a nightmare. “I have to get back!”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Raine!”
“What about him?”
“Domino is going to kill Raine! I have to get him out of there, I have to protect him.”
“After what he did to you?”
“I don’t expect to ever have a relationship with my brother again, but I can’t let him die, now can I?”
“What makes you think it’s not too late already?”
He stares at me and then leaves the bed. “Get your things organized,” he says as he flings open his Louis Vuitton suitcase. “We’re going back.”