THE GOODNIGHT SHOW

None of the children spoke as their stretch of Jackson Avenue sprang into being around them. The fog had returned, near solid, like spiderwebs, but after everything that had gone on since they’d left Perry’s house, even the clammy, unseasonable cloud wasn’t enough to bother Perry. What bothered him was the way Peaches shuddered against him, the way none of them reacted to Doctor Professor’s magic keyboard. Had the city’s turmoil sapped its potency, or were Perry, Brendy, and Peaches now fortified against it?

As Perry considered the question, he saw his front door open, and three grown-ups exit to stand on the porch. Two, he recognized—his parents, but the shortest, darkest of the three was unknown to him.

“Mama Lisa?” Brendy said.

Perry scowled, wondering how his sister could be silly at a time like this.

“That’s right,” the woman said. “Hello, Brendolyn.”

“Call me Brendy, please!” Brendy chirped. She ran in place for a moment, then zipped to her grandmother and jumped into her arms.

The woman let out a squawk, then kissed Brendy’s forehead right on her hairline. Her smile faded as she looked up. “Thank you, Henry. Well done.” She gestured with her chin at Mr. Casey. “And here you are, as well. What’s your name again?”

“Cuh-Casey,” Casey said. “My compass Roux gave me took me to the kids. That’s no regular storm in the Gulf. It’s not just one hurricane, it’s like all of them, ever, stacked up together. And it’s alive.”

Mama Lisa closed her eyes and nodded. Her expression was one of worry and relief. “That is so,” she said. “That is why the Ancestors have brought me here.”

Perry swallowed, and for a moment, everyone stood silent. Mama Lisa had a glow about her. Like a shadow, it clung close to her, but as Perry watched the woman, he began to suspect that he perceived it not through sight, but by some other sense that had been boosted and refined by the Clackin’ Sack. This was his chance to explain to his grandmother that she’d made a mistake, that the sack should not be his.

But he didn’t move. He didn’t speak. Maybe Mama Lisa and the Ancestors had made a mistake, but it didn’t matter now. There was no time to give the sack to anyone else, to train them in its use. We’re enough, he’d told his sister. We can do this. He hadn’t doubted when he said it, so why should he now?

“Ms. Lisa—?” Doctor Professor began.

“No,” said the woman. “You are dismissed.”

“What about my songs?” he asked. “I ain’t asking for my own self. I got a job to do, and these kids was helpin’ me do it.”

“I’ll summon you when you’re needed,” she said. “Away.”

Doctor Professor wavered, and his expression of shamefaced uncertainty gave Perry a mean little thrill. He shrugged glumly and started playing again:

Gone leave tomorrow on a northbound train!

And ya won’t see me no more!

Shut all the windows and turn out the lights

Cuz I won’t be back agaaaaaaaaaaaain…!

And he was gone.

Immediately, Mama Lisa’s mood softened. The hardness, the formality dropped out of her voice. Perry had often seen his mother shift moods this way, but with Mama Lisa, the change was more pronounced.

“Well, look at you all!” she said, grinning. “Y’all have grown so big!” She bent her knees, bobbing confidently under Brendy’s weight.

“Mama helped us get the stuff you left!” Brendy said. “I was so mad! I thought I got a dusty ole rock, but it’s got a div inside named Billy Pete!”

“You sure this y’all’s gramma?” Peaches spoke into the crook of Perry’s neck.

“I dunno,” Perry said. “Maybe it’s a trick.”

“It’s no trick,” Mama Lisa said. “I’m sorry I’ve had to wait till now to meet you all.”

“Perry—” Peaches’s voice cracked, and Perry fought to keep his expression neutral. Crying and wailing wouldn’t help now.

“Mama Lisa, Mama, Dad,” Perry said. “We’re real happy to see y’all, but, uh—but Peaches has been through a lot. Can I take her home and come back, and she’ll come see us all in the morning?”

“She can sleep here,” Perry’s father said. “Shouldn’t she sleep here?”

“I need my house. My bed,” Peaches said, so low only Perry could hear.

“I be right back,” Perry called. “I promise.”

“Yvie?” Perry’s dad sounded genuinely perplexed.

Perry grinned a grin he didn’t feel. “You know how it is,” he said. “Peaches does what Peaches does. No use arguing.”

He glanced in Mr. Casey’s direction. The grown-up searched Perry’s face for a bit, then offered him the slightest of nods. “Do what you gotta.”

Perry buried his face in Peaches’s hair. “Okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay.”

He could tell the words meant nothing to her.

The sky had grayed and bunched itself like a furrowed brow, but Casey Trismegistus barely noticed. As he followed the no-sound of Jaylon’s graffiti tags down Elysian Fields, an eerie silence settled over the city. At first, he saw men and women standing on ladders, hammering boards onto their windows or nailing their shutters closed, parking their cars on the sidewalks and the neutral ground. After an hour or so, human activity ceased, and an eerie quiet settled over him.

Casey was intimately familiar with his own version of Elysian Fields. He’d walked and driven down it many many times on his way to UNO. He wondered whether the college existed in this world, and if so, how similar it was to the school he’d attended. It wasn’t until he’d been walking at least two hours that he noticed the lack of storm damage. That was one of the reasons this place unsettled him so—he’d seen no storm damage of any kind anywhere since he’d come to the Hidden City.

Many of the houses and businesses he passed had been boarded up, or had sandbags heaped against their front doors, but none of the windows were blank and broken. No faded crosses appeared on the sides or fronts of houses. Reverend Keith seemed to hate the Storm, seemed aware of what it could do, but did the people here know about Katrina or the levee failure? If the city had been hidden to protect against the Storm, maybe they had no idea.

Casey spat a string of cusses as the heavens opened above him, but after a beat he realized that the rain didn’t touch him.

It wasn’t as if he wore a forcefield or had sheltered himself against it, the rain just seemed uninterested in him and contented itself to fall everywhere else. Casey walked through it for several yards, marveling. Then, unable to resist, he began to experiment. He jumped from one spot to another, trying to catch the wet, and failed.

The Hidden City in trouble, baby, and I gotta do my part…

Casey’s mother had said that his great-grandpa had come here after his death to deliver something. Had he succeeded? Did it matter?

A ghostly boy rode past him on a white ghost bike. Casey wondered if he’d been killed somewhere along Elysian Fields. He knew the intersection where Saint Claude gave way to Rampart was particularly dangerous for cyclists.

That thought forced Casey to consider the nature of death here in this haunted magic city. If it was possible for dead folks from Casey’s own world to come here, what happened when they did? Was the ghost boy one of these? Had Daddy Deke arrived here as a translucent specter or as a living man? Hell, what if he’d become a zombie or some species of talking animal?

Casey had to stop thinking about Daddy Deke. About the Storm.

The not-sound he’d followed was stronger now, but it was also harder to interpret. It seemed to ring from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Casey walked another block, listening carefully, and the sound seemed to weaken by just a shade. He retraced his steps to stand in front of a house he’d passed before. It was a camelback positioned a little ways back from the avenue.

A few more experimental steps convinced Casey that he needed to head around back of the place, but he’d seen a couple NPD squad cars pass during his hike, which meant police existed here. He had no way of knowing whether they were as dangerous and unpredictable as the NOPD, and while he had the feeling that his sorcery would stack up just fine against some armed-and-jumpy cops, he knew they might be magic, too.

Cautiously, Casey made his way up the long set of stairs to the house’s front door and peered in the front picture window. The place was full of dust-covered furniture, stacks of books, children’s toys strewn across the floor. Nothing he could see suggested Jayl’s presence. Maybe he’d misread the sound and was standing at the wrong house.

But he felt it again. A brief interruption in the flow of energy. He turned to look behind him just in time to see a tag wink into sight on the avenue. At first it was hard to see through the rain, but this one said YARBOH!!@. This was the place, all right.

Casey tried the front door. It gave a little, but seemed stuck. He put his shoulder into it, and when the door burst open Casey smelled the must and rot of molded insulation. As high up as it was, this place was water-damaged—likely from leaks in the roof.

He searched the kitchen, a bathroom, and one of the bedrooms before he headed to the converted studio upstairs.

In here, the energy was enough to overwhelm. The air crackled with it, and Casey smelled the same clean-laundry aroma the sky trolley had exhaled. The scent was much more powerful, though, and it carried with it a warm golden shine that enfolded both Casey and Jaylon in its aura.

“Oh shit,” Casey whispered. His legs failed him. He dropped to his knees. He thought he had driven all doubt from his mind. He’d crossed worlds on this mission because he knew Jaylon was still alive in the Hidden City, but some doubt must have lingered, because the sight of his cousin heated his skull, made it pulse.

All his life, he’d read and heard about people being thrilled. He realized, now, what they meant. An exquisite electricity raced through him, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with magic.

“Jayl,” he said. Was he shouting? “Jayl. Jayl. Jaylon!”

As he walked Peaches home, Perry thought about what Mr. Casey had said. The storm in the Gulf wasn’t a storm, it was the Storm. All storms stacked together. How could a thing be itself—tangible, factual, of-the-world, but at the same time more? Well. Wasn’t Perry himself an example of this? He was a living boy. He lived with his family, played with his friends, went to school, but did the Clackin’ Sack make him not himself, or more himself? What if it was somehow both?

The Storm. The Storm. The Hanging Judge. Mr. Larry.

When he was very little, before he met Peaches, even, Perry had wanted superpowers. He’d read about Spider-Man and the Phantom in the Sunday paper and ached to pull on tights and fight crime. He would even mix potions from food ingredients and seasonings and choke them down in the hope that they’d give him super-speed, or lightning eyes, or the power to read minds. Of course, none of it had worked.

He checked comics collections and science fiction books out of the Nola Library, searching them for clues, but real life had offered him no magic words, no lab accidents. In real life, there was no such thing as comic book superpowers. The closest he could come to that would be to learn an instrument. But then Peaches entered his life. When Perry had asked her about her strength, her ability to do the impossible, she hadn’t understood: What you mean, how I do that? If something need pickin’ up, I just pick it up.

He’d asked his mother about it.

The world is a big place, she’d said. With all sortsa folks in it. Everybody got something. Everybody got something makes them special. Even you.

How I’m special, Mama?

Well, you part of my heart, but you run around on two legs getting into things all the time. If that ain’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.

But his mother believed he was destined for greatness. She told him all the time. Perry had believed it, too, until the Hanging Judge. His encounter with the Judge had shown Perry that he wasn’t special—or that even if he was, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t strong enough to do magic. He wasn’t bright enough. If he struggled so to learn piano, how could he ever—ever—be strong enough to protect himself and his loved ones from monsters like that?

The Hanging Judge wasn’t the Storm. But if the Storm was all storms, then couldn’t it include such a specter? Or one like Koizumi Yakumo, the living congealed darkness that slept beneath the boneyard? No. The Storm had nothing to do with the Judge, and it had nothing to do with the haint who’d stolen Peaches’s letter from her daddy. If Perry was to get through this, he had to keep his eye on the ball. Maybe the Clackin’ Sack gave him the power to fight the Judge, imprison him permanently, but he’d have to figure that out later.

As he walked through the fog, one arm around Peaches’s waist, Perry imagined that the haze would not close behind them after they passed. In his mind, it made way to let their bodies pass and held its new shape thereafter. If, on his way back, Perry came this exact way, he would see the channel their walking had created in the mist, and he could trace it again if he chose. Thinking this way helped Perry turn his mind away from the Judge, away from musings that did no good. It also kept him from wondering just how he would find the words to ask Peaches what Stagger Lee had done to her. Physically she seemed fine, but it was clear to Perry that she’d been hurt both inside and out.

“Are you okay inside?” he asked as they reached Peaches’s back porch. They had to enter the house this way, because she had never had a key to the front door. Several chickens had congregated at the edge of the porch, clucking like church ladies as they pecked after bugs and other food.

“Naw,” Peaches said. “But I heal up fast.”

Inside, the house smelled damp and dusty, but not rotten. Stacks of newspapers stood in the gloom. To Perry, they looked like gravestones.

“Are your ears ringing?” he asked as they crossed the kitchen and entered the hallway beside the grand staircase. “Do you feel fuzzy? You’re not supposed to sleep with a concussion. We could maybe go to Charity.”

“Hospital no good for me,” Peaches said. “The machines there can’t see through me, and even if they could, the knives and razors can’t cut me.”

“I’m sorry we got separated,” Perry said as they climbed the stairs together. He realized now that he’d never seen Peaches climb stairs without running.

“Wait,” Peaches said. “I wanna see Fonzy.”

She turned and started back down. Perry watched for a beat, then followed. In the parlor on the first floor, part of the wall had given way, creating a gaping hole that led into the walled yard. This was how Alphonse, Peaches’s horse, came and went. The house had been raised to keep it from flooding, and Perry knew at the very least that Alphonse couldn’t navigate stairs—this was why the entire first floor belonged to him. If that was the case, though, how did the horse get in and out of the hole? Every time he visited, Perry hoped to catch the horse leaving or returning, but he had begun to suspect that he would never know Fonzy’s secrets.

“Fonzy!” Peaches called. “Hey, hey! Alfonso?”

She passed out of sight into the junky living room, still calling. A sickness gathered in the pit of Perry’s belly as he realized what had happened. Mr. Casey said the horses and mules had all disappeared, taken by Stagger Lee and the Storm. Should he tell her?

Peaches emerged through the kitchen doorway wiping at her face. “He not home right now,” she said. “It’s fine. He’s fine. He go out all the time.” She gestured with her chin, and Perry stepped aside to let her pass, then followed her back upstairs to check on the other animals.

Did they have time for this? Perry wondered, but the question angered him. If he couldn’t care for Peaches, help her get back into fighting shape, they were all as good as lost, anyway.

After saying their goodnights, Peaches and Perry headed for the bedroom. It was a large chamber full of antique furniture—most of it draped in sheets to keep the dust off. The ceiling in here was even higher than the ceilings in Daddy Deke’s house. Exposed beams stretched overhead, and sometimes Peaches climbed up to walk across them, her arms stretched out to either side. Perry had only done so once, and the feeling of nothing beneath him or around him, no floor to hold him up and no handholds to keep him from falling, had been almost too exquisite to bear. He knew that one day he would walk those rafters again, and he would enjoy himself at least as much as he had before, but he kept putting off trying, savoring the anticipation.

Peaches’s bed was enormous. It consisted of six twin-sized box springs and two king-sized mattresses stacked together in the western corner of the room. At its foot sat one of those old-fashioned TVs that was less an electronic appliance than a piece of furniture like a sofa or a credenza. The hole where its screen should be was wider than Perry’s arm span, and from time to time, the box, which lacked any plug or cord that Perry could see, would turn itself on. Ghostly blue light would flicker across the set’s interior, and its neglected innards would be replaced by what looked like a theater stage. It was only ever one program that the children had seen inside it—and that was the only one they cared to see. (Peaches had no interest in Morgus, or News with a Twist, or even Tha Jon Reaux Yung Money Sheaux. No. When they were here, they only had eyes for the Goodnight Show.)

As Perry watched, Peaches climbed onto the bed and knelt with her arms crossed, like a king surveying his realm. She made her decision and started grabbing the pillows that lay piled in the bed’s left corner and built herself a mound of them. She always arranged things this way to watch the show. When the time came to sleep, she would dole out pillows to whoever was with her and modify her nest to cradle her through the night. Perry wasn’t sure she actually did this on nights when neither he nor Brendy were with her—she didn’t seem to need food with the same regularity they did, and her need for sleep was likewise either nonexistent or much less than Perry’s own.

“Do what now?” Perry asked. Peaches had said something or asked him a question.

“I said I made room for you, too.”

“In your pocket?”

“Yeah. In my pocket. You gotta watch the show right next to me this time, heard?”

“You don’t like people touching on you while you’re sleeping or watching the TV.”

“I don’t,” Peaches said. “But you ain’t people.”

Perry opened his mouth, but words failed him.

“I know you gotta get home. I know Miss Yvette be worryin’, but you got time for this… Please.”

“No, it’s not that,” Perry said. “It’s not— She knows where I am. It’s just that—something’s different. Something’s wrong.”

“I’m different? I’m wrong?”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You think I can’t handle a nasty ole gangsta with jewely teeth and a gun?”

“I know you can.”

“Because I’m strong as anything,” Peaches said. “Can’t nobody or nothing get the best of me.”

“I know. I know it. It’s just— There’s something you’re not saying, and I don’t know if it’s because you just don’t feel like it, or because you can’t.”

“Perry,” Peaches said with a frown. “I’m not like y’all. I could eat a million million bombs, and I still wouldn’t explode. I’m hard inside and out.”

Perry knew that this was true, but he also knew that it was somehow not. He suspected that Peaches knew this as well but had chosen to make an argument she knew Perry could not refute.

“And you would tell me if something was really wrong? You wouldn’t lie to me or try to keep it secret like a grown-up would?”

“I already told you bout grown-ups.”

“I know,” Perry said.

“So will you come in my pocket with me? Because our show bout to start.”

Right now, Peaches seemed both closer and farther away than she’d ever been. Perry’s blood still sang at the sight of her, at the smell of her, and he wished he could just let the joy of the invitation pierce the dread enfolding him like a sodden cloak.

As light began to flicker in the depths of the TV set, Perry kicked off his shoes and climbed into the pocket. They half sat, half lay, hip to hip. Peaches reached for Perry’s hand and held it lightly as the figures on the stage resolved.

Perry wondered whose bedroom this had been before the Storm. He imagined an elderly couple who had dressed in their best formal clothes and lain down together just as the rain began in earnest. He imagined them holding each other as the sound of the weather swelled like the noise of a passing train, happy alone together after decades. As the house began to shake and shudder around them, they had closed their eyes and dissolved into Forever. In Perry’s mind, this was not death. It was the same sort of thing that had happened to Mama Lisa. It was not a cessation, not even a becoming; it was a going-on to somewhere better, even more full of magic than the city in which they had lived their entire lives, and inside Perry’s imagining, there was no room for fear.

The rain started slowly, but it fell with purpose. For now, it seemed to coexist with the fog, tamping it down to lie close against the ground. Mama Lisa stood before the window, staring out at the deserted expanse of Jackson Avenue.

This rain. Should she try to command it?

Mama Lisa could feel the Storm testing its limits, curious to learn just how far it could swell. What would she do if she tried to rebuke the weather, to remind it of its place, and it defied her? Yvette and the babies needed their faith in Mama Lisa’s authority. So long as they didn’t mistakenly believe her to be all-powerful, their faith would be a comfort to them.

“Your hair is different,” Yvette said softly. “You used to wear it long, but now it’s short. It suits you.”

“Hm,” Mama Lisa grunted. “Thank you, baby.”

Her body felt like a suit of borrowed clothes. She had been elsewhere—she wasn’t sure where exactly, or for how long—and during that time, she must have been formless. The thought didn’t entirely make sense to her, but now was not the time to muse on such things. What mattered were this place and this time.

“You looking out for Perry and Peaches?”

“No, hon. Perry’s fine. He and Peaches just need some time. He’ll be back directly.” Mama Lisa chose not to mention that when Perry returned, it would be alone. “I was just thinking about that chocolate cake.”

Yvette bowed her head, stifled a grin. “I’m not sure what cake that would be.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Mama Lisa hummed. “My cakes used to come out wrong every time I baked them. They’d fall, or they’d be dry, and I never quite knew what I did wrong. Your grandmother tried to show me, but it just didn’t take. I had to find my own way.”

“But you figured it out.”

“I figured it out. That cake when you were three years old was the first one that came out just—” She sighed. “—perfect.”

“It was so pretty.”

“It was. I made my own icing from scratch. Iced it myself.”

“And I stuck my little hands right down in it.” Even now, the memory thrilled Yvette. “I scooped out giant chunks and just shoveled them right into my face.”

“And you wore the chocolate on your face like a fake hobo beard on Halloween.”

“I never!”

“‘Mama Lisa, I don’t know nothing bout no cake, I promise! You baked a cake? What a cake is, anyhow? Who took it? Where?’”

“If it wasn’t for your hands and face, you mighta convinced me,” Mama Lisa said.

“Except I stepped in a chunk and tracked chocolate from the kitchen to the bathroom and into my bed.”

They laughed together.

“Does—?” Yvette began. She bit the question in half. She looked down, nodded. “Okay, then. Guess we better get cooking.”