Crescent City Connection

Allah.
    He just plain felt good, almost as if his life was about to change—though how it could, he couldn’t imagine.
    Maybe it was the painting he was working on—the angel who was half-white, half-black. He called it Pregnant with Possibility. Her head was the size of a pin, she had no neck, and her huge belly contained both heaven and hell.
    It was a breakthrough for him. Most of his work was crude, raw, obvious as fur. This one was minutely detailed. It terrified him, yet he was obsessed by it and couldn’t stop working on it.
    He had dreamed of her lately, the lady with Pandora’s Box so neatly juxtaposed with Valhalla.
    Dahveed hated the painting and said he couldn’t sell it, it wasn’t the sort of thing he handled, and maybe The Monk ought to try his luck over on Julia Street. This was Dahveed’s greatest insult. Though his gallery was in a high-rent section of the French Quarter—very nearly the highest—Julia Street, in his lexicon, meant effete and la-di-da. The Monk paid him no mind at all. He was painting it because he had no choice, not because the House of Blues might take it. They had taken some of his paintings, and Revelas had acted as if he’d been elected president. This was nothing to The Monk. One of his vows was that of poverty.
    He prided himself, if not on poverty itself, on being a true outsider, being able to get along without much money.
    His salary here at the gallery, plus the little he got from his paintings, covered the rent with enough left over for food and utilities. He knew how to cook rice and beans and other things—vegetables, mostly—that cost practically nothing and were about the best things you could eat. He burned a lot of candles, which really cut down on electricity, and he needed only white robes to wear. A woman friend had made those, before his vows were complete.
    He finished his chores and waved good night to Revelas. He had painted in the early part of the day, and now he could get on his motor scooter and go home and pursue his spiritual life.
    Once home, he cleaned his house from top to bottom. This might have been easy, as there was very little in it, but The Monk was a thorough cleaner. He threw off his robe and washed it, along with his towels and sheets from the night before. Then, naked, he pulled up his one tatami, shook it out, and swept his floors—living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom.
    He scrubbed the bathroom and kitchen. Then he got in the shower and let the water run till all the hot was gone. Finally, after donning a clean white robe, he could put his tatami back down, light a candle, and sit down to meditate.
    On Mondays, he would start with a mantra and then he would stop and simply sit, until he realized a subject had taken hold in his head; and then he would ponder that subject. He would sit with that subject, that idea, for a whole week, and the next Monday a new one would come to him.
    It was Saturday now, and for nearly a week the subject had been his mother. This wasn’t the first time—far from it—but it was always hard for him. He felt her pain when he thought of her, when he let himself go to her in meditation—such a lovely woman, so sweet, so naive. So deeply betrayed.
    He always cried, and he wondered if it were literally her pain he felt, if he could, by sheer force of his mind and soul, reach across continents and oceans and find her, pluck her pain out, suffer it for her.
    She was one of life’s true innocents, so vastly undeserving of the thing fate had sent her. After she had gone—and after the incredible perfidy of his sister-in-law—he had left town to become an itinerant seeker, almost literally with a begging bowl, like the Buddha himself.
    By a stroke of amazing luck—and because of a woman he met—he ended up in New Orleans, where the river flowed so close you could stick your toes in, where the air was velvet and carried the music of a thousand artists trying as hard as he was to bring order to their own chaos. It was a wonderful place to be in love, and The Monk had been, though he had had a name then, before his woman dumped him. That was when he took his vows.
    The art started before that, on the road. He didn’t know how, or why; just one day he was sketching on the lined page of an old notebook, and he realized that he’d fallen into a sort of trance. As soon as he was able, he bought some art supplies, and the thing came out of him, he couldn’t stop it.
    It was better, in a way, than