JAYL313

Casey drew Ole Girl to a halt and turned off the engine. By now, the sun was setting, and this sector of the Ninth Ward—or was this Bunny Friend?—had not fared well since the storm. Here, the streets were cracked and humped, desperately in need of care. He looked at the scrubby grass and dandelions trying to force their way into the world and thought of what his cousin had said about not belonging.

The one time Casey had felt he belonged anywhere, it had all come apart in the space of a few weeks—first the evacuation, then watching on the news in their Memphis hotel room as the levees broke and New Orleans was left to die. Before the Storm, the city had felt like some sort of alternate universe situated at right angles to the conventional world, but Casey had never believed that was really true. New Orleans was still America, of course. One of its greatest cities. Surely not even a rich, post-dumb faux cowboy like Bush Jr. would consider leaving her to drown. But he had. They had.

Casey shook his head. No use reliving Storm trauma. Across the street stood a square two-story building that reminded him of classic Westerns—though he wasn’t sure why. It didn’t look like a Spanish mission or a Wild West saloon. No. It was… a theater?

Jayl’s Jordans crunched on the gravel as he approached. “You ever hear of Club Desire?”

“I thought that was a sex club in the CBD.”

“Nigga—!” Jaylon started, but he couldn’t help laughing. “Back in the segregation days, this was the spot. Everybody who was anybody came through here on the Chitlin Circuit—and a lot of the cats from here in town played on the regular.”

Jaylon liked jazz well enough—they’d danced more than their share of second lines together—but he had never been the music obsessive that Casey was. They weren’t here for music.

“Yeah?” Casey frowned. “Listen, man. I don’t… You know I don’t do this no more.”

“Relax,” Jaylon said. The way he smiled as he did put Casey at ease—made him feel like he’d been silly to think that Jaylon had brought him tagging without telling him beforehand.

Inside, the club was in dire disrepair. Chunks of plaster drywall littered the floor, fallen from the ceiling. Shopping bags, tree branches, and fast food trash lay in piles, having collected here and there like drifting snow. Toward the uptown corner, Casey saw five or six dirty diapers stacked together. His heart sank as he realized somebody must have been living here. The pastel accents on the dirty bundles hadn’t even had a chance to fade.

Casey’s eyes slid over the sad tableau until some gravitational force fastened like a tractor beam onto his attention. In the southern (not southern—uptown, Casey reminded himself) corner of the club, a mythic scene had been painted in hard, bright colors. Conky, the robot from the old Pee-wee’s Playhouse, knelt with his boom box face upturned as above him a group of sainted jazz musicians—Jelly Roll Morton, Satchmo, Sidney Bechet, James Booker, Fess—gathered around Buddy Bolden, who extended a finger toward Lil Wayne, Juvenile, Trombone Shorty, Jamison Ross, and Kamasi Washington.

Wait. Casey had been wrong about the light in here. At first, he’d assumed that sunlight must be shining down on the painting from gaps in the ceiling. But there were no holes—none that he could see from here. Outside, the sun had all but set, and there were no streetlights along this stretch of Desire Street. The light shone from the painting itself—and it wasn’t because of glow-in-the-dark paint: The haloes around the jazzmen’s heads, around the more contemporary musicians’ heads, all glowed softly but robustly enough that Casey could see his surroundings even though the open door they’d used to enter was entirely dark. It wasn’t just the haloes, either. Juvenile’s oversized white T-shirt gleamed as well, as did Professor Longhair’s jewelry.

“Wow,” Casey said, and as he did, he realized he was speaking as quietly as he would in a church. “What kind of paint you used?” Even as he said it, he realized he made no sense. Paint didn’t behave this way. It didn’t give off this much light.

Jaylon ignored the question. “Listen, mane. You can’t tell nobody about this. Not yet.”

“Who would I tell?” Casey asked. “What am I seeing?”

“You know what it is,” Jaylon said. “Better than anybody.”

Casey’s scalp contracted.

“Oh. Hey. Oh,” he said. “We said we wouldn’t. We said we wouldn’t do it on purpose.”

“I know,” Jaylon said. “I know. And I didn’t. Not at first. I mean… We couldn’t ignore it forever.”

You couldn’t, Casey thought but didn’t say.

“You ready to see more?”

“You quit smoking?”

“Yeah,” Jaylon said. “Mostly.” He slid a pack of Newports from his track pants and flipped open the top. Casey took one and Jaylon followed suit, then lit both of them.

The second drag made Casey light-headed. He savored the feeling, and the dirty blue taste of the smoke. He was shocked by Jaylon’s revelation, but not surprised. Jaylon had kept tagging after he returned to New Orleans. It was inevitable that he’d drift into… whatever this was. If Casey had understood that fact sooner, maybe he’d have gotten back to it himself. But he hadn’t—and that was a good thing. Wasn’t it?

“All right,” he said. “What else you got to show me?”

As he followed Jaylon’s burnt-orange Jeep, Casey wished they’d just driven together. The thought of riding shotgun with his cousin warmed him. He and Jayl had spent so many nights haunting the city streets in Jayl’s old Escort GT, either driving aimlessly or tooling around City Park, halfheartedly looking for the old municipal swimming pool that the white folks filled in with concrete instead of sharing with Black folks when integration became law. Tonight, time had become a silken membrane dividing the present from the past, and he knew for sure that if he could reach from the exact correct angle, he could touch that skin, slick it against his fingertips.

This wasn’t the first time Jaylon had shown him something strange. No, the first time was in the summer of 2005, after their first year at UNO. They lived together in a rickety old house on Mandeville Street, and Casey had found a paid internship around the corner at Chez Lazare…

June 2005

Chez Lazare was situated inside a converted funeral home at the corner of St. Claude Avenue and Elysian Fields. Casey remembered finding the place after reading A Streetcar Named Desire and wondering if this was the very house Williams had described. Next door, Gene’s Daiquiris and the po-boy shop were painted a bright Pepto-Bismol pink, but Lazare’s front-facing building was a simple muddy gray with dirty white trim.

Casey had just bought a pack of Newports from the Robert’s across the street, and Mandisa, the home’s executive director, didn’t have any work for him right now, so he was just sitting outside sweating gently in his polo and jean shorts.

Patricia, a golden-skinned mixed woman with thick blunt fingers and blurry prison tattoos, sat gabbing with Marjane, a thin Lebanese girl with sharp eyebrows and delicate wrists. Casey loved listening to them gossip and squabble companionably.

“—What did you think, though, Case?” Marjane asked.

“What?” Casey said. “Of what?”

“You read comics n shit, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So what about it? What did you think of that new Batman?”

“I mean, it’s the best one so far,” Casey said. “But there’s some shit that don’t fit with who Batman is, ya heard? He lets Ra’s al Ghul die in the train. Batman wouldn’t do that shit.”

“I mean, he said, ‘Just because I won’t kill you doesn’t mean I have to save you,’” Marjane said.

“Yeah, but allowing death through inaction goes against the core of his character,” Casey said. “Bruce Wayne watched his parents die before his eyes, and he set out on a lifelong crusade to make sure nobody else goes out like that on his watch. Letting the Demon’s Head perish—even in a wreck that he caused—is antithetical to Batman’s muthafuckin’ motivation.”

“Well, damn,” Patricia said.

“I know, right?” Marjane said. She sounded proud, and Casey stretched like a plant in direct sunlight. “I told you. Casey knows all that shit.”

“Ay, goddammit!” The shout drew Casey’s attention back to the street. A rawboned black woman was charging against traffic. As she crossed the neutral ground into the uptown lanes, a rust-red Mazda 6 nearly clipped her, and the driver leaned on the horn as the car dopplered down the avenue. The woman wore what looked like a long red sleep-shirt mottled with stains and old-school house slippers on her feet. Her braids had come unpinned from her skull, sticking out at odd angles.

For an instant Casey thought he heard more shouting, but if so, it was from far off. When he moved to New Orleans for college, Casey thought he might be overwhelmed by the place—the way it seemed separate from conventional reality. He’d felt none of that, though—not for all that first year. Now, as sophomore year approached, he would have these moments of déjà vu, these little patches of bullet-time where he felt himself drifting against the surface of a giant soap bubble.

The woman’s hand on Casey’s wrist snapped him back into his body. “Please,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “They gone kill me.”

“Who?”

“Hey,” Marjane said. “Get inside. Now.” She pulled at the woman’s hips, gesturing with her chin toward the building’s doubled front doors.

The woman disappeared into the office, and now Casey did hear shouting. A heavy-set bullet-headed Black man and a short, thick woman were crossing Elysian Fields from the downtown side—just as the other woman had.

“Y’all seen anybody running?” the woman called.

The man gained the steps. “Crackhead-ass woman come this way?” he demanded. His voice was flat and hard.

“Who y’all looking for?” Patricia asked.

He turned to stare at Casey. “You seen her?” he asked. “You see anybody?”

Adrenaline brightened his vision, but Casey noticed a bulge in the man’s burgundy jean shorts. It might not be a pistol, but…

“See who?” Casey asked. “What’s up?”

“Our cousin Marva havin’ a psychotic break or sumn,” the woman said as she climbed the steps. “We tryna find her, take her home. She come this way?”

“I didn’t see nobody,” Patricia said.

“She inside?” asked the man. “What y’all doing here?”

“This is a place of business,” Marjane said. “We work here.”

The man grunted, dubious, and went for the door. Nobody moved to stop him as he led his girlfriend inside.

Casey, Marjane, and Patricia waited for a moment in silence. Casey didn’t know whether to look at them or avert her eyes. He realized now that he was physically terrified in a way he hadn’t been in years.

He felt foolish in his surprise. Crazy niggas were bound to show up at a battered women’s shelter once in a while. The real surprise was that the woman on the run came from outside instead of within. Not for the first time, Casey wondered whether he should have gone with Jaylon to get a job down at the beignet stand in City Park, serving pastries and coffee in a paper hat. Interning at Chez Lazare was more interesting, though—and to be honest, the fact that nobody expected him to be at work before ten in the morning had heavily influenced his decision.

The double doors opened again. Mandisa Russell stepped outside followed by the man and woman. Mandisa was a round, muscular stud with a skin fade and neck tattoos from her days in the Hollygrove projects.

“—I get it, though,” she was saying. “Y’all concerned. Believe me, we see her come through, we let y’all know. I got ya cell number and errythang.”

“Didn’t mean no disrespect,” the woman said.

“Don’t tell me,” Mandisa said. “Tell my folks out here.”

The man dipped his bullet-head and frowned. “We didn’t mean nothing,” he said in a chastened tone that made Casey wonder what Mandisa had said to him inside. “We come on strong ’cause we worried.”

“You good,” Casey said, reflexively.

The man held Casey’s gaze for a moment, then seemed to find what he was looking for. He took the woman’s elbow and led her back down the front steps. Casey watched them go back the way they had come.

Mandisa was the first to pull in a whooping breath. “Well!”

“Yo,” Patricia said, and shook her head.

“Got her out the back before they made it inside,” Mandisa said. “Ioknow what the fuck that was, but we need to beef up security.” She made a point of finding Casey’s gaze and holding it. “You good?”

“Yeah,” Casey said. “Yeah, I just… I never seen nothing like that. I’m from the suburbs.”

“Up there in Baltimore, right?” Mandisa said.

“Catonsville, Maryland,” Casey said. “Yeah.”

“If I give you the afternoon, you gone come back tomorrow?”

“Oh, no doubt,” Casey said without thinking. Instead of scaring him away, the incident had proven to him that the work they did here truly mattered.

On his way back to his LeBaron, Casey checked his Razr to see three missed calls and a text from Jaylon.

PRICE IS RIGHT.

Casey sucked his teeth. That meant he should grab his gear and “come on down.”

Jaylon must have scouted a location in the park and wanted to know what Casey thought before they returned to it by night. But no—what kind of location would Jayl need Casey’s approval for? He pulled into a spot by the Peristyle, an open, columned pavilion designed as a site for dance parties in the early years of the twentieth century. The structure reminded Casey of a perfect scoop of sherbet. He loved its lines, and the fact that it had been designed for pure enjoyment.

As he rounded the back of his Chrysler, he saw Jaylon trudging wetly from the direction of the café. Sweat stained his short-sleeved white button-down. His bow tie hung loose and his white-and-green paper hat dangled from his left hand.

Jayl’s Escort was parked a few spaces down from Casey’s LeBaron. As he reached it, Jaylon craned his neck in his cousin’s direction and rolled his eyes theatrically. He gestured with his chin to let Casey know he wouldn’t need his gear. Casey slid into Jayl’s passenger seat and they headed out to Marconi Drive. To their left, the buildings of the community college sat sleeping in the heat.

As Jaylon drove, Casey recounted the events that had him off work early.

Jayl hummed low in his throat like their grandmother. “Ain’t that some shit,” he said. “You can always come work at the Morning Call.”

“This is the whole point of Chez Lazare,” Casey said. “I should’ve expected some shit to jump off sooner or later.”

Jaylon sucked his teeth. “Couldn’t be me.”

When Jaylon turned right down Taylor Drive, Casey knew where they must be headed. Here, the breeze held better sway than it did in the Marigny. Jayl’s car AC was broken, but the perfumed air slid through the interior and almost made Casey forget the danger he’d faced earlier in the day.

When he was little, Casey had taken City Park for granted—it was just a cool place New Orleans families would cook out, visit the art museum or the little Storyland theme park. In those days, he’d been unaware of the park’s vastness. It was significantly larger than Central Park in New York City. The fact that much of it had been abandoned when the golf course had fallen into disuse meant that the park was largely an undiscovered country. If New Orleans felt like an alternate-reality banana republic hidden at the bottom of the country, City Park was the treasure secreted in one of its socks.

Jaylon parked at Pan American Stadium, and together, they struck out on foot. They hadn’t been back to this location since Jayl had started work at the café, but this little clubhouse was one of Casey’s favorites. Last time they were here, he had used it to test out a couple characters: Bee Sharp, a Pam Grier type with an Afro and bug-eyed sunglasses whose arms were covered in a swarm of bees, and her archnemesis the Hanging Judge, a wizened, hateful man in judicial robes and a powdered wig who commanded an army of mutant pigs in SWAT gear.

Casey’s heart sank as they reached the low, broad concrete building. Someone had erased the Judge. Bee Sharp hung at the center of the wall, gritting his teeth as he projected the swarm from his right arm at a blank patch of wall where the villain should have been. He—wait.

“What… the fuck…?” Casey said aloud.

Sharp was positioned wrong. Casey had painted him standing over the Judge, flexing in triumph as he drove his right foot, Bruce Lee style, into the Judge’s sternum. Not only had the Judge been eliminated from the scene, it was almost as if Bee Sharp was—Casey shook his head. It was silly, but it really did look like Bee Sharp was reacting to the Judge’s escape.

Removing the art was one thing—the city was full of self-righteous dickheads who felt street art contributed to the moral decline of New Orleans—but this was something else. To come behind Casey and repaint his figures… It was an insult so grave that Casey was almost more impressed than offended.

“… What…?”

“I came over here on lunch to see if we might want to tag the other side and found your mural like this.” Jayl sucked his teeth. “Don’t make no sense.”

“Why would… Who would do this?”

“Mane, I’m confused than a mug. You ask me, it looks like that nigga left.”

Casey flinched. He hated the idea, and even more, he hated that he’d been thinking the same thing. He had the distinct feeling that if he were to look away from Bee Sharp right now, when he looked back something significant about the painting would have changed. His position, his facial expression… something.

“That’s not funny,” he said slowly.

“Naw,” Jaylon said. “It ain’t. But the real question is, what is we gone do?”

“Ioknow,” Casey said. “I mean, whoever did this is… good.”

“Fuck that shit,” Jayl said. “You do not mess with another nigga’s tag.”

“I know that,” Casey said. “I know, but…” He couldn’t say the rest: What if that’s not what happened?

He didn’t realize until he and Jaylon were headed back to their apartment in their separate cars that when he had first drawn him, Bee Sharp had been a woman.

August 2018

“I got invited to this festival in New Zealand couple years ago,” Jaylon said as he fingered a set of keys on a fat ring. They stood before the old beauty supply store at the corner of St. Claude and Elysian Fields. Casey hadn’t been over to this part of town since he got back, though he’d come close—the busiest part of Frenchmen Street was only blocks from here. “It was one of those times when you can feel your life changing. When it’s like a door is opening inside you, and you know you don’t quite understand what’s up yet, you know?”

Casey laughed wryly. “I do. I do.”

The joy of being with Jaylon again mixed with the dark feeling of Casey’s unease. Jayl was a grown-ass man. He could take care of himself—and had since he’d come back to town alone. If what he’d made at Club Desire didn’t frighten him, should Casey be frightened for him? But was that what this was? Was Casey frightened for his cousin or for himself? He swallowed and looked away. How could he talk about this to Jayl?

“I didn’t sleep for three days after I got home, and at the end I was delirious. That’s when I figured it out. And that’s when I painted the piece at the Club. Took me eight hours.”

The shop was a long low building covered in tags. Looking at the riot of colors, Casey recognized a murderer’s row of talent from the Gulf and beyond. Jayl unlocked the shop, ready to lead Casey inside, but Casey’s train of thought derailed as a man with dirty white-boy dreadlocks zipped past on a double-decker bike. He’d never seen a bike like that, and questions crowded into Casey’s mind: How are you supposed to stop your bike when you’re that high up? What did the man do at traffic lights? The light on the corner had just changed, so if Casey had known to look, he might have seen then. Where were these people coming from? Who were they? The man’s tattoos were blurry, and his clothes seemed like they’d been treated to communicate a sense of wear, like a hobo Halloween costume on an elementary school child. He wore a pair of ballet flats.

Casey opened his mouth to say something, then deflated.

“Nigga, you don’t even know!” Jayl said. “Before I left on my trip, I saw a white motherfucker walkin’ a purple dog.”

“Oh uh-uh,” Casey said, incredulous.

“Nigga, I thought I was watching cartoons!”

They both laughed hard.

“Wait,” Casey said. “Figured what out? That glow effect?”

Jaylon’s expression grew solemn. “Well,” he said. “I’m finna show you.” He stopped short. “Maybe—nah. Come on in here.”

Casey had expected to find the place a wreck—but then why would Jayl have brought him here to begin with. The shop’s interior was meticulously clean. Work tables lined the walls, and here and there canvases stood on easels or leaned against the walls. Everything Casey saw was in Jaylon’s style, so this space must be his alone. And he’d been busy. The splashes of color reminded Casey of fireworks displays or botanical gardens. The air seemed to sing with beauty, with raw creativity.

There was a vibe in here, Casey realized. A hum, almost. He thought briefly of the Magic Shop at Disneyland and the family trip they’d gone on together when they were ten. Was he dissociating?

He followed Jaylon toward the back of the shop where stood a covered canvas ten feet wide. Jaylon stopped short for a moment, frowning. Was his mind racing the way Casey’s was right now? Why would it be if he was taking all this in stride?

Without a word, Jaylon pulled the fabric away.

For a moment, Casey didn’t understand what he was looking at. It was balloon caps against a flat gray background. But no. It was… The stylized letters of the tag seemed to breathe and strain, but instead of being painted onto the background, they projected from it into the air.

Like a hologram, Casey thought. But that wasn’t it. Holograms had an irreality to them that set them at odds with their surroundings. Not this. The tag—JAYL313—simply projected out from the surface into the air before it.

“—see it, too,” Jayl finished.

“What?” Casey asked. He wanted to glance at his cousin, but he couldn’t. The tag wouldn’t let go his gaze.

“Right before I uncovered it, I asked myself what I would do if you couldn’t see it, too.”

“This… What is this?” Casey asked.

“It’s a tag.”

“It’s not… on anything.”

“It is and it isn’t,” Jayl said. “When I roll the canvas across the room, the tag goes with it, so it’s anchored or something, you know? That’s that shit I don’t like…”

Casey felt as if he stood in two places at once. One of him was here with Jaylon, and the other stood in an alien landscape that his life would become. Seeing the tag made him feel a bitter pang of loss. Had he wasted his life? Wasted himself? With great effort, he spoke calmly, trying to roll with all this, incorporate it into his world without becoming something less than human. “It’s 3D?” he said. “You figured out how to… I don’t know. Wait. What don’t you like?”

Jayl sighed explosively. This was a sore subject. “It’s still on something,” he said. “I want it to stand up. I want it to… I want it to exist on its own.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Sure.” Jayl shrugged. “But so are a lot of things.”

Casey’s scalp tingled, his face was hot, and an electricity shivered from the tips of his fingers up to his forearms. “Do you know what this means?”

“I think so. A little,” Jayl said. “One thing I do know is it means we need to talk about what happened back in the day.”

Casey swallowed. He felt his brows knit in a frown.

“I mean with the Judge.”

“I know what you mean,” Casey said.

“Then you remember,” Jaylon said tonelessly. “That shit happened.”

What bothered Casey wasn’t so much that the world he’d understood was being taken away, it was that Jaylon was caught up in it. If it had been just him, in the old days, he might have—he might have— He didn’t know what he would have done. But it didn’t matter: He and Jaylon had promised to protect each other. He’d quit drawing and painting because it had gotten too weird. He’d feared that once the weird crept into his life through the slightest gap, it might begin to influence everything. It might make him—and Jaylon—into people Casey couldn’t recognize—wouldn’t want to recognize.

“I want you to watch me make one. Make it with me,” Jaylon said. Casey realized now that Jayl might have been speaking for a while, and that most of what he’d said Casey had missed. At least he hoped he’d missed it.

“Not tonight,” Casey said. “Not—I need to sit with this, okay?”

“I ain’t told nobody else,” Jaylon said. “Only you. For a reason.”

“I know,” Casey said. “I know. Just…”

“You’re a better tagger than me.”

Laced with panic, Casey’s laugh spiraled up toward the studio’s ceiling.

“Case—”

“Jayl, bruh,” Casey said. “Listen. I love you. I’m your dog. Truly. But you were right—This shit is crazy crazy, and I need time to… to even take on what you just showed me. Let me think on it before you pitch me this or that. Please.”

Jaylon reached into his mass of dreads and scratched his scalp as he watched Casey with eyes that were just a little too wide. Feverish. “That’s… fair…” he said slowly. “I guess—ah—you want to head out, or… do you wanna play Madden for a while? I got the new one…”

Casey wanted nothing more than to hide from the world in his bare apartment right now, but he couldn’t leave before reassuring Jaylon that they were still cool. If they could do something normal for an hour or two, then maybe he could shake this feeling. This feeling that he’d soon be forced to abandon his cousin. Again.

“Aight then,” he said. He hoped the words didn’t sound as forced as they felt. “I got Ravens, baby!”