New Orleans Noir

their angular faces pointing eastward; everything about them—the whiteness of them collectively—caught the pupil of the eye and pinned it down. One of them, the girl on the edge of the crowd, stood dark-haired and falling apart; she spoke of her ex, the one who dumped her.
    What was his name?
    Schevoski, Schevoski was his name and she hated him now.
    The tail end of her yellow hair stood away from her shoulders, parted in the middle; there was a strand in the corner of her mouth, her lips purred upward, as if she could not help but notice that she was the dying kind in the crowd; he had, indeed, dumped her, gone back to Russia or some other place where boys go when they’re done with you.
    Where had she met him?
    At the university, at Tulane, where she’d turned the corner of St. Charles and some other street she could not remember, now that she was drunk, now that she stood amidst the other Tulane girls with their Tulane bodies and wished, she wished she could evaporate.
    Yes, now she remembered, she had turned the corner of Tulane and some other street and she wanted something to occur, something that girls her age wanted to happen without having to call out to it; help me, it whispered.
    And there, Schevoski stood.
    He had been pronouncing a singular word, like beast , and saw her, standing there before him; this is when he asked her: Can you? he asked in the beginning, but then, then when he saw how vulnerable she was, he said: Say it, beast.
    Beast, she whispered. Beast.
    How did he look to her now? Could she recall the drunken weave of his posture when she met him? It was that, that, that cooing sound he made, as if he were calling out to her, Come here, there is something I need you to do.
    For no one needed her, not really.
    Or was it that he had no face at all? Even when her friends asked her to describe the boy she’d come across at the corner of St. Charles and some other street, she could not remember—Napoleon, was it?—she could only say that he was from Russia and something had bitten her about the flesh.
    He was invisible.
    It was no wonder that because she had felt like this, that he was invisible, he wove around her a feeling of powerlessness. He had crept up behind her, just behind the ear, and let her go.
    Now, now that she and the white girls stood near the edge of the jukebox at Miss Mae’s, they, too, cooed, as Schevoski had cooed, and lifted their angular faces upward; a water stain the shape of a guitar lay flat on the ceiling.
    One of the girls whispered: Look where he died.
    And they all laughed again when she whispered, Look where he died, all laughing and shouldering each other, as if they knew, inwardly, that this was Schevoski and that thing he called music; the beast was dead.
    They looked at her, the broken-hearted girl who had driven them here, and yelled: Look where he died, Look where he died. Schevoski. Schevoski is dead!
    Why had they been so cruel? the girl thought. Because she could not remember one street? One word? Because this water-stained guitar was his voice and mind? Why ever had she driven them here?
    She leaned over the edge of the jukebox and vomited.
    And the other white girls, the girls who had come to mock her in their drunkenness, shouted as she vomited: Schevoski! Schevoski is dead!
    And she vomited and vomited, her index finger over the Bee Gees label of the jukebox, until her mouth grew immediate and she turned, held her stomach, and stumbled through the shouting girls and their exclamatory language, stumbled until she reached the wooden door of the bathroom, stumbled until everything she had eaten this morning came up.
    Finally, her stomach was bare.
    And the world seemed to spin around her and the water-stained guitar seemed to crawl upon the ceiling, follow her through the wooden door of this place and mock upon her the power of its language; Schevoski is dead. And you are dead. You, beast .
    And the girls who she had driven here, the Tulane girls, as if they had suddenly become aware of their cruelty, took their fists and banged on the outer walls of the lavatory; they banged and their banging seemed to echo throughout Magazine Street and the city of New Orleans that there was a girl in the john and she was weak and her old man had dumped her and she brought us to this place so we could mock her, make her afraid, tear down these walls she had collapsed into and whatever it was she had left, we would take it. Everything would come true.
    Her head