TREE MUSES

November 2018

Casey didn’t think about it often, but if he had to, he could pinpoint the moment he and Ximena began to come apart. His transition had evened out, finally, after what had felt like a second puberty, and Ximena was still busting her ass in grad school at Towson. A blizzard came early that year, muffling everything under its crisp white blanket, bringing life in the DMV to a halt. That same weekend, the head cold Casey had been fighting for the past few days gained the upper hand, making him feverish and irritable.

He hated being sick. Ximena brought him zinc, juice, and extra-strength cough drops, as well as a bottle of niacin. “If you really want to burn that fever out, take some of these,” she’d said. “Daddy used to give them to me—but I’m serious. It will burn.”

Casey nodded, croaked his thanks, and drank the whole half gallon of orange juice in what felt like a single pained swallow. He took the niacin and retreated to the bed, sucking on a zinc lozenge until the dark of sleep covered him over like a snowbound street.

Sometime in the night, Casey sat up, burning. Acrid sweat soaked his side of the bed, and the heat in him was nearly unbearable. A sizzling sound hissed at the edge of his hearing as he held his left hand before his face. He felt the heat baking off his skin. He felt like the Human Torch ready to Flame On.

The heat intensified, dancing in the air of the room. Casey felt the niacin pills resting like hot stones in the pit of his belly. Was he dreaming this? He remembered picking smooth, glowing stones from the ashes of an earthen hearth and gulping them down his throat. A dream? A dream. Somewhere distant, a single bell rang, and then Casey heard Ximena calling his name, her voice ragged with terror. He felt a hand in his, larger than his own. Large enough to swallow him the way big fish eat the little ones.

Then, in the dark, those haunting tones. A carpet of needles, of metal splinters. All he had to do was step.

“No,” he said aloud. “Absolutely not.”

The tension in the air snapped, then, with a twang Casey felt at his core. He fell back against his pillows and slept so deeply that it felt like being unborn.

The next morning, his fever was gone. He felt like a new man. He rose before Ximena, cooked a breakfast of pancakes and maple bacon. Before he was done, Ximena appeared in the kitchen doorway, rubbing her eyes.

“What the fuck, Case?”

“All better,” he said. “You got class?”

“No,” she said. “They’re canceled. Everything’s canceled.”

“That’s what I figured,” he said. “So, pancakes, bacon, Golden Girls marathon. Come and get it.”

When they ate in front of the TV, Ximena didn’t laugh at the old ladies squabbling together. Every so often she’d hum low in her throat, instead. Casey didn’t realize it for a long time, but that was the end for them.

Since then, he’d wanted many times to ask Ximena what had happened. He knew why she couldn’t come with him back to New Orleans—she’d resolved to move to New York, give acting a real shot—but it was more than that. It had something to do with his bizarre dream of heat and a bell.

He understood it better now, he thought. The dream wasn’t a dream—or some of it was and some of it wasn’t—but Ximena had seen something alien in him. Something that set him apart. She’d rolled with him through everything else, but this was just too much. He thought to call her, to ask about it, but that seemed unfair. If he did, she would read something in his tone, know he was preparing to take some drastic step. And even if she didn’t—what did they have to say to each other now? The pressure to talk to her about his art, about Jaylon’s disappearance, about Bee Sharp and Dr. John, would be too great, and she deserved better than to be forced to worry over Casey’s sanity—or worse, to know he told the truth and the world was not what she had always believed it to be.

Instead of phoning Ximena, Casey drew all the curtains in the apartment, but too much light came through the living room windows, so he brought in foil from the kitchen and covered them over. He turned the thermostat up to 90, then changed into cargo shorts, a polo, and a pair of Tevas. He fitted his copy of Gris-Gris onto the turntable but didn’t switch it on. Instead, he pulled up Spotify on his phone, connected it to his smart speakers, and set “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” to repeat.

By the time he ripped open his new three-pack of sketchpads, he’d begun to sweat. He rummaged in his underwear drawer until he found a fleece sweatband to keep the liquid from his eyes. That strange, warm smell of gas heat came to him then, and when it did, he felt a door open in the back of his skull. He took that for encouragement and rushed back to the living room to sit in lotus position and sketch to the music.

The first thing he drew was a hooded figure standing on what he believed must be a forest path. The music fizzed in Casey’s skull as the figure turned their head to look over their shoulder. They stopped moving then, and Casey moved on to the next sketch. This one was of Doctor Bong from the old Howard the Duck comics. His version was more monstrous, though. More like something Richard Case would have designed for Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol, but with the suggestion of Mignola’s deep shadows. The monster’s bell-shaped head vibrated, constantly ringing in sympathy to the music surrounding Casey. Yes. That was the way to go.

Now Casey drew with less conscious thought. Instead of checking the page to see if his figures did what he wanted, he tore out each page and dropped it on the carpet, taking only the barest bit of care to keep them from overlapping. The heat pressed against his slick skin like an angry housewife ironing a dress shirt. He smelled gardenias.

Casey let the sketching, the heat, the music, the scent of his own sweat draw him from himself. He felt that heat in his belly again, that burning heaviness, like he’d swallowed a grill’s worth of burning charcoal briquettes. The sizzle rose up around him, the strange tones of the song’s central riff, the drumming, the tinging of the bell.

He stood in darkness. At some point, he’d shifted his pencil to his left hand, and he felt its slick solidity against his fingertips. A strange heat played up his forearm to his shoulder. He didn’t take the time to wonder where he was. Instead he bent and began sketching a path to walk on.

Bells. Red skies. Animated constellations. A rushing, tideless drift.

One night back at Smith, soon after he and Ximena first met, she and Casey had dropped acid together. In those days, Casey still thought of himself as a lesbian—much to his parents’ dismay. An older girl, Tosha, had cautioned Casey about the drug. She sat in her own dorm room, where she sold weed, pills, and hallucinogens to curious classmates, her plum-shaped body situated on a lime-green beanbag chair. The sleeves of her baby-doll dress were flared with lace, and she wore a pair of mauve tights against the bitter Massachusetts cold.

“People say it’s volatile and shit, but what they mean is you don’t always know what you bringing to it, you know? Sometimes tripping is like jumping into a fast river from real high up. So high you can’t see what’s on the bottom. Sometimes there’s rocks. Sometimes there’s little fishies…” She trailed off, smiling. Thinking of those pretty little fish, Casey felt sure. After a beat, she seemed to remember the conversation. “So be careful, you know? Don’t be the second-best cliff diver.”

“Who’s the second-best cliff diver?”

“Exactly!” Tosh said. Tickled, she began to laugh.

Casey turned to Ximena, confused.

Ximena combed the fingers of one hand through her mane of curly dark hair. The way the light shone on her, kissing her with brightness as it moved into the world, tightened something in Casey’s chest.

“This girl higher than giraffe-pussy,” Ximena said.

Tosh giggled some more and then pointed the first two fingers of her right hand toward her eyes, then stabbed them in Casey’s direction. “He knows,” she said.

Casey felt a thrill of anxiety. He felt as if he’d been spied on.

“Whatever,” he said. “Ain’t no thing.”

They dropped in Casey’s room and played Mario Kart for a while on his hand-me-down TV/VCR. After what seemed like an hour or two, nothing had happened, and Casey rolled onto his back on his shitty little mattress and let his thick dreads cover his face. “Nothing,” he said.

“Boop-BOOP!” Ximena answered.

Casey sat up to look at her. She had fitted fuzzy socks onto her hands and was trying to pull gloves onto her feet. She labored for a moment, confused, then shed a sock so she could use her fingers to adjust a glove.

“Girl,” Casey said.

“No, just… you gotta get it,” Ximena said. “Look.” She got her toes into the glove and looked up at Casey. “I’m upside-down,” she said, and beamed at him.

“Oh, SHIIIIIIIIIT!” Casey said.

And they were off.

Casey remembered the rest of the night as a series of fragments, but he sensed a whole alongside it, divided from the rest of his life into a vacuole of now, a timeless, magic bubble that could never be ruptured by the present or future. Casey remembered sprinting down the trail to Paradise Pond, whooping, hands in the air. He remembered playing Connect Four in someone else’s common room, shouting “Domino, motherfucker!” every time he won a match.

He remembered trying to find a way into the dining hall after some sort of MacGuffin he knew must be stashed there. He wasn’t sure whether Ximena was with him the entire time, but he knew they’d spent a significant chunk of time watching Thriller over and over and trying to learn the choreography, and then crying into the sunrise, watching Ximena’s hands flutter like wind-blown leaves above her head.

That feeling of emergence, of new sunlight falling on a different world than the one night had swallowed the evening before, was a small echo of what Casey felt after passing through the Door. A sky so delicately blue, clouds so exquisitely formed that all of it, together, looked like a matte painting. Except the clouds moved, grazing like skyborne sheep, held aloft by an echoing chord of something, of—

Had he been dosed? That old acid trip was the only time Casey had experienced this sense of stillness preceding a chaotic din of impressions, of—of—of—

The clouds were moving steadily toward the west. The air smelled of summer. It was warm out, but not hot. Not for New Orleans.

Casey sat on a metal bench. His heart sank. He shut his eyes against the realization that nothing had happened. He’d had some kind of break and taken off running around town, doing God knew— A figure trudged up the embankment carrying a sodden briefcase. It paused to fit a wet hat on its furry head.

He didn’t understand what he was seeing. The man—it must be a man because it wore a sodden green business suit with crimson pinstripes—seemed to be wearing a furry mascot head, or—no, not just a head. Its gloves were furred, as well, and it— No. That was its face. Its bright orange buckteeth, its—!

“Yo!” Casey shouted.

The creature blinked at him. “You good?” it asked.

Casey bristled like a cat. Part of him ignored the word that thrilled through his mind. It made no sense. It was impossible. It couldn’t— Someone had dosed him!

A nutria! A nutria! A fucking talking nutria wearing a three-piece suit!

Before Casey knew it, he was running full-tilt down the asphalt path.

Arms and legs pumping, Casey ran. He hadn’t sprinted like this since his freshman year at UNO. He’d run track in high school, but only because he wanted to add discipline to his running when he needed to evade the cops or rival bombers. At first, his body carried him along through muscle memory while his bright and overwhelmed senses flooded his brain with information it couldn’t read. Gradually, he returned to himself, and marveled at how well his body still worked. He’d been smoking lately, four or five a day, but his bound chest expanded and contracted confidently as his knees pushed high, the blades of his hands slicing, slicing.

He knew where he was. That was the first realization to penetrate his consciousness. He was on Canal Street, just crossing Rampart. So far, the lights must have gone his way, because traffic had spared him. The facades of the shops and hotels made sense to him. On his right, he was passing that shitty little gym that had always looked suspicious to him—like a mob front, or a—or a—

He nearly stumbled as one of the red Canal streetcars descended from above.

It had—it had been in the air. It had been up above, and it angled its nose up and drifted down. It had no wheels, just bunches of springed metal feet sheathed in black rubber toes that gripped the pavement as the streetcar set down beside a shelter. Casey stopped running and trembled as he watched people and oversized animals disembark. Casey didn’t register it until the crowd of commuters had dispersed, but a couple of the figures in tattered suits looked as if they’d been dead a long time. Like—no.

Like zombies.

Panic welled in Casey’s chest again, constricted his scalp. His legs quaked from terror or exertion—he wasn’t sure which.

A hand fell on Casey’s shoulder. “Hey, now,” someone said. “Hey. Young man?”

As Casey turned to meet the voice he wondered what he’d do if the speaker was another talking animal or undead.

He sagged as he recognized the man he’d always thought of as Umbrella Hat Preacher. When he’d worked at Betsy’s the summer before the Storm, he’d seen the man every morning, standing at the bus stop by the Saenger, shouting his Good News through a megaphone. Casey had never bothered to learn the man’s name. Instead, he had avoided the preacher as much as he could.

“You’re here?” Casey asked.

A shadow of confusion swept across the man’s broad dark face, then gave way to a smile. “Most mornings,” he said. “And you look like you in need, young man.”

“I need…” Casey said. “It’s too much. There’s animals, and—and—”

“Come on siddown with me. Get off ya feet,” the man said. He wore a bright red T-shirt untucked at the waist with loose khaki slacks. He looked younger than he should. Squeezed under the band of his umbrella hat, his hair was still mostly black instead of the steel gray Casey had seen on him last week. He looked a bit slimmer, a bit healthier, a bit less tired than he had then.

Casey let the man take his elbow and guide him to the streetcar shelter. Casey realized as the man sat him down that the streetcar had been waiting for them to clear the way so it could lift off again. Watching it go made Casey feel like the last man on Earth. “Fuck. Fuck—! ”

“What’s the trouble?” Umbrella Hat Preacher asked gently. “You don’t need to cuss and swear.”

Casey’s mouth worked. “There’s—animals. In clothes. Talking.”

“You from Away, ain’tcha?”

“No. Yes. No. I drew a path and walked on it and—!”

“Oh.”

The man’s tone stopped him short. He seemed surprised, but not shocked. He sounded as if what Casey had said was unusual, but not utterly impossible. He took a seat beside Casey on the corrugated metal bench. “You questing, sounds like.”

“What?”

“You ain’t came here for nothing, did you? You after something.”

“My— Jaylon. My cousin. A wizard. Doctor—? Or maybe it wasn’t him—? He said it couldn’t get me here, but then I came anyway.”

“Ain’t the best time,” Umbrella Hat Preacher said. “Storm coming. We used to had horses and mules, but they up and gone. The carriages and equipment was just lyin’ in the street like they been raptured away. Then the traffic lights and street lights went, and the earth swallowed up City Hall. We in trouble. God wants me to speak on it today.”

Casey opened his mouth and shut it. Usually when he heard religious talk, he tuned it out, but Dr. John had mentioned God, had said that sorcery was possible through the imitation of His voice. Casey’s own mother often recounted conversations with the Creator, and while he had accepted her speaking to the dead as true without believing, exactly, in ghosts, Casey had more trouble with that—and he hadn’t prayed, himself, in years.

“How do you know that?” he said.

“All we can do is ask Him and listen,” said the preacher. “Sometimes you can’t hear nothing. Sometimes you feel just the smallest urging in the right direction. Sometimes you think you know and you get it wrong anyhow. If you drew a path and walked on it, that’s God.”

Maybe it was. Maybe— Casey felt in his pants pockets. “I lost my pencil.”

“I got one, I think.” The preacher leaned over. He had one of those wheeled wire shopping carts sitting next to him. A battered guitar amp sat inside it, his blue-and-white megaphone nestled beside it on a cushion of plastic shopping bags. He retrieved a short golf pencil and handed it to Casey. As he did, their hands touched, and a thrill almost like static electricity passed between them. Both men rested in it for a moment, then drew their hands apart.

“God with you,” Umbrella Hat Preacher said softly. “God is with you.”

“Okay.”

“Brung you this far.”

“Thank you,” Casey said. “Hey. What’s your name?”

“Reverend Keith,” he said. “What your name is?”

“Casey.”

“Casey Trismegistus. You know what that means?”

He shook his head.

“Great and great and great again. Thrice-great. That’s you.”

“Oh,” Casey said. “Thanks? Thank you.”

The shadow of another flying streetcar passed over them, and this time Casey tried to take it in stride, even if it did seem like it was coming down too fast. He stood frozen in place as the shadow abruptly disappeared. He turned, looking back up toward the river. No cars were farther up the line, either. It was as if they’d all just… winked out of existence.

“They done it again,” Reverend Keith said. Grief and desperation roughened his voice. “Those dirty murdering motherfuckers!”

“Who?” Casey asked. “What did they do?”

“They took the sky trolleys.”

Casey felt cold all over. “Who could do that? How—?” But he knew. “The Storm.”

Reverend Keith nodded, angry tears streaming down his face. “It’s taking us apart piece by piece.” With both hands, he swept the umbrella hat off his head, let it fall before his feet. He buried his fingers in his kinky hair and sobbed.

“How can I—?”

The Reverend’s recovery was unsettlingly swift. “This ain’t your fight. Find your cousin and get him out. Now. Walk in faith.”

Before Casey could wonder what the preacher meant, the golf pencil throbbed in his grasp. “I will,” he said. “I will.”

He shut his eyes and drew.

At first Casey thought he had walked back into the real New Orleans—except what was this if not the real city? Instead of burying him under an avalanche of sensory information, the city sizzled quietly, realer-than-real. All the colors, the air itself, hummed and glowed with energy. Casey stood across the street from Favela Chic, with its low blue façade and yellow trim. He’d devoured an order of their meat and crawfish mini pies just last Thursday night.

If there were as many flying trolleys here as there were streetcars in New Orleans—at this time of day, that meant hundreds of people had disappeared. Tourists—were there tourists in the Hidden City? How could there be?—working people, transit drivers… He couldn’t think about this right now. Terror was a shadow at the edge of his mind, and if he gave it any attention, it would overwhelm and cripple him.

This early in the day, Frenchmen Street was busier than it should have been. Someone was playing barrelhouse piano to a brisk beat, singing high in his throat like Champion Jack:

Dump ’em on the table, lemme get my fingers hot

Gimme all them mudbugs, gimme all you got

Ain’t no ice in my sweet tea and I’m sweatin’ through my shirt

But you know that ain’t no nevermind, just gimme gimme gimme—!

Whoever it was couldn’t have heard about the trolleys. When Casey turned to see where the music was coming from, he stopped short, stunned. Where Three Muses stood in his own city, a barked brown arm rose fifty feet into the sky. From here, Casey could see another arm pressed against it, and at the top, two palms held the club like a serving platter in a restaurant. When Casey collected himself enough to look at the sign above the wrought-iron gate where the bar’s front door would have been, he knew there must be a third arm and hand he couldn’t see. TREE MUSES, read the sign in angular faux-Greek lettering.

The music came from the bar up there, cascading like falls.

Casey smelled the boil, bright and spicy. If he hadn’t already decided, it was a done deal now. Casey stepped under the sign and into a door set where this arm’s elbow would begin. The elevator was one of the old kind with the accordion gate, but it seemed fashioned entirely from wood. The smell in here was exquisite—boozy, with a touch of tobacco with all the ugly notes filtered out. With a mix of guilt and nostalgia, Casey thought of the cigar shop over on Royal Street where the Israeli sisters with the big booties squabbled at each other all day.

The elevator stopped, and Casey stepped into the club. This morning’s show was lightly attended, but with a storm on the way, that made sense. A couple flies leaned on the lacquered bar, sitting on wooden mushrooms. The pianist sat off to the left, rocking from one song to the next. That wasn’t Champion Jack. It couldn’t be. He’d died in Germany in the early nineties. But he did look like a boxer gone a little to seed. As Casey stared at the man, he started in on “Evil Woman.”

Casey didn’t know what to do next, but he knew he needed a drink—and maybe a meal. But would they take his—? He froze midway through his turn back toward the bar.

Another Casey stood there, his face a mask of comical surprise.

He had a farmer’s tan, his head and arms darker than Casey’s own. It seemed to be summer here, after all, so that made— No! No! It did not make sense!

He was a couple inches taller at least, more heavily built, a bit paunchy in the middle. His cheekbones were Casey’s, though, and his hair was a bit rougher—like he should have refreshed his fade a few days ago. Instead of Casey’s full beard, this other Casey was clean-shaven. Since he transitioned, Casey had worn a beard to make his manhood obvious, but this Casey passed just fine without it.

… Unless…

… Unless he wasn’t passing.

With some effort Casey dragged his focus away from that line of thinking. Regardless of what this cat had going on, he was on a mission. Trismegistus.

The Doctor had said this place was populated by the living and the dead. Casey hadn’t realized he meant that some folks here were still alive in— He kept thinking of it as the real world, and he knew that wasn’t right. This city was hidden, not imaginary, and if Reverend Keith was alive and well in both places, then anyone might be—including Casey.

“So, uh,” that other Casey said, his voice thick with confusion and shock, “my compass says your name is Trizz. Trismegistus.”

“Casey,” Casey said. “Trismegistus is the epithet. I think.”

“Where did you come from? How…? How?”

“There’s another city. It’s like this one but not as… colorful, I guess?” Casey Trismegistus said. “No zombies, no talking animals. Streetcars instead of those… flying things.” He paused, feeling sick as he thought about what he’d seen. “Do you have a cousin? Jaylon?”

Nola Casey shook his head. “No family here in town. Ain’t been home in a while, either.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

Nola Casey shook his head. “Only child.”

“Christ. Well. Uh. What’s that like?”

Nola Casey shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. Didn’t have to share my toys or nothing.”

“What kind of money they got here?”

“What?”

Casey gritted his teeth, then pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, willing his jaw to relax. “I said, what kind of money do they have in this world? I need a drink.”