Cleve’s work has become somewhat fashionable among the gallery crowd, and he has begun getting shows uptown, where the art patrons don’t think they’ve gotten their money’s worth unless they pay upwards of five hundred for a piece. We have both cut back to half time at the Blue Shell. Whenever we have a night off, we try to work our way through the last of the Dixie beer, and we listen to Sarah Vaughan or Mingus or Robert Johnson, and when the music ends we sit and stare at each other, and a thousand secrets pass between our eyes.
I hate to look in the mirror. I hate to see the beginnings of an old man’s face.
I hate the loose skin of my throat and the hollows around my eyes. But I know what Leah’s eyes must look like by now.
Sometimes we talk about magic.
In a city of millions, an ancient city overcrowded and mean enough, a kind of magic could evolve.
Ancient by American standards isn’t very old. Two or three hundred years at most... and the abandoned mills and factories are no more than sixty years old. But I think of New Orleans, that city mired in time, where a whole religion evolved in less than two hundred years—a slapdash recipe concocted of one part Haitian graveyard dust, one part juju from the African bush, a jigger of holy Communion wine, and a dash of swamp miasma. Magic happens when and where it wants to.
In a great, cruel, teeming city, one could create one’s own magic... intentionally or otherwise. Magic to fulfill desires that should remain buried in the deepest pit of the soul, or just to get through the desperate hustle of staying alive from day to day. And out of the desperation, out of the hunger for bread or love, out of the secret hard bright joy at the madness of it all—out of these things something else could be born. Something made of bad dreams and lost love, something that would use as its agent the abandoned, the forgotten, the all-but-useless.
The obsolete engines, the rusted cogs... and the steel hooks that stay honed sharp and shiny. The machinery of a forsaken time.
The love that no one wanted anymore.
I go up to the roof of Cleve’s building and I look out over the city, and I think about all the power waiting to emerge from its black womb, and I wonder who else will tap into this homegrown magic, and I howl into the wind and rejoice at the emptiness within me.
And nowhere else on the horizon have I ever seen so many billions of lights... or so many patches of darkness.
(1990)
Poppy Z. Brite, Swamp Foetus
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