What’s this river that I’m in?

The air hung like wet burlap, dense and teeming with heat that had memory in it — not the memory of people, but of moss, water, brick and blood — old blood, river blood. The sky was a colour I didn’t have a name for, something between the green of a rotting peach and the blue of a faded curtain in a dead aunt’s parlour. The kind of colour you don’t linger on because it starts to tell you things about the inside of your amygdala. Things no one wants to know.

I was walking Bourbon again. The pavement was warm and slick like it was alive, like it wanted to breathe something out of me. My boots stuck a little with each step, and I swear the sidewalk sighed. The music — that lazy, weeping jazz — came from somewhere I couldn’t name. Always from somewhere else. The St. James Infirmary, probably, with those freshly iced Betty Boop bodies on white slabs. I saw a woman sweep broken glass with her bare feet and she was smiling like she’d been told a secret by someone who’d already gone.

I danced for a while. I don’t know how long. Coulda been minutes or centuries. Coulda been the Willie Nelson. My hands waved in front of me like I wasn’t sure they were mine, and the city let me — the city lets you do things like that when it’s close to drowning. I had a partner — she had red eyes and no shoes. She said her name was Sunday. I think I loved her or killed her or maybe both, but that was before the rain came, back when the river still knew its place.

When the rain comes — as it will, without reason or rage — they scurry beneath eaves, heads low, as if bowed in prayer to the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The world, then, becomes a hush of shutters drawn.The mind, a closed room.

But when the sun speaks — they vanish again, into cool shadows, where glass clinks against lemon, and time sighs softly into itself.

What is this flight from weather, this fear of the sky’s moods? Rain, I do not mind. Shine, the same.

They asked me again what happened, why I came back without a photo or a memento or anything but this bad liver and a scar shaped like the mouth of a saxophone. I said the past doesn’t hand out souvenirs. It swears.

Colonel Tom was there, with his chin like a busted fencepost and his tie too tight, talking about deals and maps and handshakes like they still meant something. He told me I was looking south when I should’ve been looking north, but the sky was upside down and the river was in the sky and the sun was behind my knees. I told him I didn’t want a map, I wanted a reason. You gotta do what you feel is real.

There was a girl once — light as a bulb swaying from a nail, pale in the way paper is sometimes when it’s almost burning. She used to whisper, “Gordie baby,” like she was tasting something, and when she looked at me she looked like someone seeing her own ghost and deciding to keep it around for company. I think she’s still in my head or in the fog off the bayou or the smell of beignets left to rot on a broken stoop.

One afternoon — maybe morning, maybe not — I stood in the river up to my wrists. My boots stayed dry because my feet weren’t there anymore. I had my hands in the river, my feet back up on the banks. Looked up to the Lord above and said, “Hey, man, thanks.”

I saw a cloud that looked like me, but I didn’t wave back.

I can show you: the moment the drops begin, nothing alters. The trees breathe still, the stones remain unmoved. Only the mind stirs, draping itself in difference.

Can you hear? Can you hear the symmetry — when it rains and shines in syncopated time, and both are mirrors held to the same face?

It is not the weather that shifts —but thought that turns its coat inside out.

Sometimes I feel so good it’s like being cut open. A clean slice. She told me she knew. She said, “I know exactly what you mean.” She did. That’s the worst of it. My baby, she don’t know me when I’m thinking ’bout those years.

The water’s higher now. Muddy. Slow and thick and full of things that don’t swim anymore but haven’t quite sunk. I keep asking what this river is. It doesn’t answer. It just wraps around your legs like bullwhip kelp and hums.

Backward they run, their heads inverted, a mirror’s echo: sdeah reiht edih dna nur yeht — when the rain comes.

Rain. Shine. Rain.

It is only the sky reflecting the mind reflecting the sky.

My memory is muddy, what’s this river that I’m in? New Orleans is sinking, man, and I don’t wanna swim.