EXTENDS TO EVERYTHING

Peaches left the rain behind as she stepped into the building. She could still hear the weather marching through the streets like a conquering army. The dead cabbie had said she had no friends here, but he was wrong. Mr. Larry was in here, and he could tell Peaches what she had to do to come out on top against Stagger Lee.

She had walked for blocks and blocks before her surroundings began to seem familiar, and when she reached the Department of Streets, it was shut up tight. At first she despaired, but after a few minutes, she began to walk around the building, looking for a door she could pull open without doing too much damage.

The first couple of times she’d passed this way, Peaches had seen only wooden doors with old-fashioned locks, but this one was metal and heavy—well, what other folks thought of as heavy.

She yanked gently at its handle, and the door stood firm at first. Then, with the sound of popping springs, it came open. She didn’t even need to pull it off its hinges.

“Thass right, baby,” she said quietly. “I got this. Ain’t nobody need to worry none. Peaches on the case.”

Inside, she encountered something she’d rarely seen before: darkness. Peaches’s eyes needed very little light to see, but the dark in here reminded her of the darkness beneath the boneyard vault.

The thought made her shudder. That dark had been absolute. It had weight and substance. Peaches had rubbed it between her fingers like oil and listened to it squeak… And then? And then nothing. She didn’t remember.

But she did. Part of her did.

Peaches had made her way down the steps, walking by feel. She wanted to call out, but the silence cowed her. There was no music beneath the tomb, not even that buzz that only Peaches could hear. That buzz she suspected might be electricity, or magic, or maybe even Life itself.

She wanted to ask her daddy if he was with her, but she didn’t dare. It would be wrong to summon him to a place like this. He didn’t belong with dead things, because he was alive and well somewhere. He had to be.

Some—

Outside the Department of Streets, lightning crashed.

Peaches shook from the noise. The wind, the storm sound, reminded her of That Night. The smell of smoke as the schooner burned. Of wood Peaches had trusted creaking and splitting.

Peaches had awakened in her little twin bed. It was as if the noise in the heavens had reached down and shaken her with loud hands. Her cabin turned on its side, spilling Peaches from her bed onto the yellow papered wall.

The cabin door fell open, and her daddy ran into the room. He had his do-rag tied around his ginger cornrows, and he hadn’t even taken the time to cover his empty eye socket.

“Daddy! What’s happening?”

He didn’t seem to notice that the cabin had turned on end. The floor had become a wall, but he ran across it anyway and gathered Peaches into his arms. He smelled of sleep-sweat, but also piney and sweet. He smelled like home. As he carried Peaches out of the cabin and up to the foredeck, she knew everything would be all right.

“This ain’t no regular storm, swee’pea,” he said. “That damb lightning already struck us twice, and we had a deal, me and that lightning.”

“Daddy, there’s fire!”

“I know it,” he said. “These damb elements won’t do right.” He set Peaches carefully on the listing deck, then tilted her a little to change her balance. “Baby, you got ta go. I’ll catch ya up later.”

“What? Go where?”

“I’ma— Whoever sent this storm, I know you can hear me right now! Best believe there gone be consequences and repercussions! For every onea my crew get kilt, I’ma kill ya twice, ya heard me?”

Peaches glowered and stuck out her chest. “We’ll get ’em together, Daddy!” she crowed. “We gone hit ’em fa real!”

“Chin! Highball!” he bellowed. “Furl them damb sails, damb it! We cain’t have this damb wind just a-blowin’ us all around—!”

He stopped short and turned to put his hands on Peaches’s shoulders. “Listen here, swee’pea. Listen. You got a mouth on ya, and you got the strength to back it up. Daddy need you ta find somewhere safe, or find somewhere dicey and make it safe, and I be along directly, ya heard?”

“What?”

“Thangs getting rough out here on these Seven Seas—the kinda rough I don’t want you messin’ with till you a little older. This ship goin’ down, and I be gott-dambed if you goin’ down with it!”

Panic lit up her little body from the inside, like a jack-o’-lantern. “But Daddy—!”

He took Peaches in his arms and held her close. Her heart fluttered in her chest while his beat steady and slow. Peaches found his rhythm, and their hearts beat together once, twice, three times.

Then he pitched her into the air.

Peaches shrieked as she watched her daddy and his ship fall away below her. She wailed, then sputtered as she passed through a cloud bank. The moisture plastered her dress against her body, but it didn’t slow her progress. She kept going and going. Before she hit the top of her arc, she had time to see the sleeping face of the silent yellow moon and hear the sound of church bells tolling, tolling as the world she knew gave way to some other.

Peaches’s daddy had thrown her so hard and so high that if she wished, Peaches could have kept right on going. She closed her eyes and considered letting herself drift past the sky into space, into whatever came after space.

When she opened her eyes again and looked down, the storm and its clouds had gone, or she had gone so far from them that they were nowhere in sight. She shut her eyes again and willed the weightless flying feeling away, and began to drop toward the moonlit ocean.

It took a long time, but eventually she hit the water with an almighty slap, then sank down and down, past fish, past mermaids, into the darkest dark, so dark that it was not dark at all, because dark was something and this was nothing.

She awakened much later, floating on her back. No human sound came near her, just the roar of the sea, the cries of seabirds, and the workings of her own body.

She was numb. An emptiness had settled in her belly, but she wasn’t hungry. All she was was alone.

After a long time—days, maybe—Peaches turned onto her belly and began to swim.

Mama Lisa took her glasses off and set them on the table. She rubbed the bridge of her nose for a beat, then took a sip of her orange juice. This was the moment she had dreaded since her return. Since before her return. To put the quality of her absence into words was not easy, but that wasn’t what bothered her. The most troubling aspect of all this was that she knew what her grandson wanted to ask, and she feared the answer would place him beyond her help.

Certainly, she could explain to him what she remembered of her disappearance, and her fragmented understanding of what had become of her afterwards, but the explanation would be worse than useless.

Her own grandmother, Mother Maudell, had appeared to her during her morning run. Lisa stopped short, stunned, as the woman’s body broke the summer air. No longer wasted by cancer, the woman stood inches above the sidewalk on Paris Avenue, wrapped in a swirl of chanting female voices. Without a word, she had taken Lisa by the wrist and stepped away with her into a fast-flowing river of time and imagery.

Mama Lisa shook her head, banishing the confusion of memories. Visions of Stagger Lee shooting Lheresday in the belly, of a jazz orchestra playing to beat the noise of a cataclysmic storm, of a thickset, dark-skinned trumpeter angrily turning his back to her—to the city itself?—as he played louder and louder until the music was more than music, and the notes blurred together the way wavelengths of light combine to create a pure-white glare…

“I’m not sure where I was,” she said. “Everywhere. Nowhere. But that’s not what you want to know, either, Perry. Do you know what I am?”

“A teacher?”

“Yes. A teacher. I consider it my highest duty to impart knowledge to those in need. The young, the old, whoever. But I am also a mother, a grandmother, and I love my family dearly. The answer to your real question is a hard one, but to refuse you an answer would go against— It would be against everything I believe.”

“So tell me.”

“You want to know whether there is a weapon or an artifact inside the Clackin’ Sack that will allow you to defeat your enemies and save Peaches.”

“Is there?”

Mama Lisa shut her eyes. A lump had formed in her throat. It didn’t budge when she paused to clear it, so she resolved to speak past it. “There is such a weapon, but it’s not for you or me to use.”

Numerous expressions danced across Perry’s nut-brown face. “… What?”

“It’s too powerful. It would annihilate you, Peaches, the city, everything. If you had decades of training, the danger would still be too great! If I…” Mama Lisa trailed off. She realized now that she had begun to cry and that her tears colluded with the lump in her throat to distort her words. She fought to make herself understood. “I know you won’t understand. I know you think we adults lie or obscure the truth to suit our ends—and—and sometimes we do. But, Perry, if I told you what that instrument was and how to obtain it, it would be as if I killed you myself.”

Perry was silent for a long time, but he didn’t resume eating. He frowned and looked at his hands, and Mama Lisa knew he was ordering his words. How like his grandfather and his great-grandfather he looked then.

“Mama Lisa,” he said, and his voice didn’t waver at all. “I’ve been through so much. We have all been through so much. If there’s even the smallest chance I can succeed, I have to try.”

“Peaches is strong,” Mama Lisa said. “She’s a hero.”

Perry’s voice rose now, but it was still measured. “She is strong,” he said. “She is a hero, but sometimes even heroes need saving. I’m her best friend. She needs me. She’s earned our help over and over. Mine. Yours. Brendy’s. Everyone.”

“Perilous.”

“Don’t you understand, Mama Lisa? You are the answer to my prayer. God has sent you to help me help Peaches.”

“Perry—!”

“Listen to me,” Perry hissed. “Listen. If you refuse, it’s not just me you’re telling no. I know you’re afraid. So am I. That’s because we’ve been paying attention. Do you remember the story of Jonah and the Whale?”

“Of course I remember!” Mama Lisa snapped. “That has—!”

“Look inside yourself,” Perry said. “Look. Are you resisting because you know it’s right? Do you fear for me because you know I can’t handle the responsibility? Or are you just… scared?”

Mama Lisa looked her grandson in the eye and realized he had asked her yet another question to which she did not know the answer.

Casey Bridgewater awakened with a start. Even before he fell asleep, a fierce wind had begun to blow through the city. It made him imagine giant children on roller skates gliding through the streets, reaching out to rattle walls and windows. Every once in a while, the wind howled as well, like an idiot swamp-haint declaring its territory. The sound that awakened him was different. It was a voice.

It’s time, the compass said again. We must retrieve it.

The little girl, Brendy, lay sleeping on the loveseat across from the sofa where Casey slouched. She lay with her head thrown back and her mouth wide open as if to loose a howl of her own. Casey couldn’t help but smile to look at her. Better not to make too much noise.

Instead, Casey reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the compass. “All right,” he said. “Take me, then.”

Suddenly, he stood in water up to his waist. He took a step and slipped on what felt like a slick of underwater mud. He fell backwards, sputtering, trying to keep the floodwaters from invading his mouth.

In the car, said the compass. Glove box.

The dirty orange street light was just enough illumination for Casey to make out the shape of a car sitting in what must be the flooded driveway. He swam for it.

He felt blindly for the door handle until his hand closed around it. He pressed the plunger and pulled. He slipped off his feet again, went down. He sputtered and coughed as he took an accidental breath of water. This wasn’t working.

Casey shook his head and grasped the door handle with his right hand. Now he paused. A stray quote from the Hagakure surfaced indistinctly in his mind. Something about how when sudden showers blow up, people run, take cover, trying to avoid getting wet, got wet anyhow. But if one were to resolve from the beginning to just be soaked, perplexity would evaporate… And the rest of the quote—the important part—resolved clearly in Casey’s memory: And this understanding extends to everything.

Sputtering and struggling in floodwaters, trying to keep from losing his footing or swallowing water, Casey was filling his mind with noise. If he could resolve to just be in the storm, to accept the weight of his sodden clothes, the rainwater running into his eyes, the mud and slick, the darkness of the night, lit intermittently by bomb-flashes in the heavens, then… He took a settling breath. He braced his left foot against the car’s frame and just pulled, thinking of nothing else.

The water had risen. It pressed heavily against the car’s door, trying to keep it closed. Still, in his single-minded focus, Casey felt the metal budge. He pulled, straining, and the door began to open. He groaned low in his throat, and the round sound roughened into a scream of triumph as he dragged the car door open. He snatched the glove box open, felt inside.

His hands fell on a velvet drawstring bag much like the one Roux had given him. Casey had no idea what was inside, but it must be important.

“All right,” he told the compass. “I’ve got it.”

He fizzed away again.

“Good Lord.”

For a split second, Casey thought he’d been dreaming. Then he realized that he was soaked to the skin, sprawled on the couch. Across from him, the little girl lay snoring having moved not at all. The girl’s mother stood in the living room doorway. She still wore her apron, and the smell of frying chicken followed her into the room. Casey’s mouth watered.

“No wonder you threw in with us,” the woman said. “You disappear and reappear like my kids do.”

“Oh, Lord,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wet up your— Is that chicken and waffles I smell?”

“Sure is,” said the woman. She smiled as if to let Casey know that wetting up the couch was the least of her concerns.

She sat down next to her daughter, stroked her hair lightly. “Brendy’s a real heavy sleeper,” she said. “Always has been. The only way to get her up is for me to call her, then turn on the overhead light and call her again, louder.”

Casey glanced at the contents of his right hand. Gingerly, he pulled the bag open enough to see inside. It looked like the mouthpiece to a horn.

“Only mama,” he said absently. How could this thing help?

“Brendolyn,” the woman said, her voice hard with command.

The Trouble Compass buzzed again in Casey’s pocket. He ignored it for the moment.

The girl’s mother frowned. The overhead light was already on. The girl just as sweet as before, but something was missing.

“Everything all right?” Casey asked.

“No,” the woman said. “No, I don’t think it is.”

Someone had knocked down a wall between two of the bedrooms to create a large, high-ceilinged chamber cluttered with nonsense items—car tires, fast food wrappers from chains Casey didn’t recognize, broken ink pens, and a lot of coins and what must be insulation or bright orange cotton batting. Jaylon levitated above the room’s center wearing tattered jeans and no shoes. His hair and beard had grown out, making him look like an escaped slave hiding out in the bush. At first, the way his limbs moved made Casey think his cousin was dancing. He wasn’t wrong, he guessed, but that wasn’t all Jayl was doing.

He gestured as if sawing or shaping the air, working it and folding it. As he did, Casey began to see the changes he was making. He made brushing motions with his left hand and pulling motions with the fingers of his right, massaging and massaging as a tag began to take shape in the air. In his mind’s eye—or in the vision given him—Casey saw Jayl in his Saint Claude studio. He saw Jaylon drop a can of paint as he stared at the blank canvas before him and begin making motions like these.

It was as if he uncovered and created the tag at the same time, but to do so, he manipulated sound, light, and air, stretching and coaxing them into a desired shape. Casey knew he should do something, should say something, but he couldn’t interrupt. Eventually, he saw that this was a longer tag reading YIK PRAMMA IKLSS.

While Jaylon worked on it, it began to fizz at the edges, subliming like dry ice. Jayl leaned back at the waist, curling his palms toward his chest as the letters trembled under his enchantment, then drew his wrists together and formed his hands into a hinged pair of claws. He thrust them out before him in a “Hadouken” motion. A tangled bouquet of notes sounded in the room, and somehow Casey knew that this was also the tag. The sound receded abruptly to the edge of Casey’s hearing as the tag winked out of sight.

“Jayl!” Casey called. “Jaylon!”

Jayl didn’t respond. Instead, he began dancing a new tag, summoning it from the fabric of the Hidden City.

“Jaylon, it’s me!”

Very carefully, Casey stepped closer. His vision of the room distorted and bowed, rippling out of shape. Much more disorienting was what the energy did to Casey’s thoughts. When he’d dropped acid back at Smith, the most surprising part of it, for him, had been the conceptual hallucinations—perceiving spacetime as a viscous substance lying everywhere in puddles and drifts—seeing alien script threaded into the bark of trees, the bent blades of grass, unreadable and secret. At the time, Casey feared that if he managed to read any of the messages, he could never return to Earth.

Earth.

The word echoed in Casey’s mind. He felt himself moving down a strange corridor, forward and back, at the same time. He began to hear a chorus of distant voices. “Jayl—!” he barked—or thought he did. He felt hands on his shoulders. He felt his own hands on Jaylon’s bare shoulders. He felt a sweetness, a hidden union, and felt all of it tremble and flicker, as if ready to wash away.

Casey’s vision skipped, and he was half crouching, half kneeling on the cluttered floor. He and Jaylon were both inside a halo almost too bright to bear. A Door stood open behind Casey and to his left. He must have drawn it to take them back to New Orleans. He had thrust his pencil into the floor to anchor him against the pull of an unseen force that held Jaylon, fought to keep him here.

Jaylon’s face was expressionless. His eyes were open, but he seemed blind. Whatever they saw was not Casey or the house around them, or the city of Nola, but the alien landscape that Casey had only barely pulled himself away from moments ago.

“Please!” Casey screamed. “Please! Come back with me! I need you! I can’t do this by myself! Everything’s wrong! Everything’s wrong without you!”

Jaylon didn’t respond. He gave no sign that he’d heard at all.

A burning roughness rested in Casey’s throat. He felt as if he’d been crying and puking for hours. So many of his favorite memories included Jaylon. He felt as if it was with Jaylon that he’d become himself.

He realized dimly that he was shouting—“switched beds in Mamaw’s third-floor room because H. T. wouldn’t move, and yours was under the vent! You kept getting too cold, and even under all them blankets, your teeth would chatter!”

He remembered Jaylon’s face, his glow as he recounted meeting President Obama at Willie Mae’s.

“You used to copy Garfield strips, and you had all the Calvin and Hobbes books!”

He remembered Jaylon’s red eyes and wet face the night they’d come back from visiting family in Baton Rouge to find Jaylon’s pet rabbit, Scrimshaw, dead in his cage.

“You always knew all the names of all the African presidents. Please! Please come!”

He remembered Jaylon and H. T. teaching him how to throw a punch. Jaylon lightly grasping his wrist, pulling it gently toward his own chest. Don’t punch at a nigga. Punch through his ass.

Jaylon made no response.

“I’m sorry! I know you thought I’d go back with you when the city opened up again! I stayed in Baltimore because I knew! I knew something about me was… The—the—the— My body didn’t fit me! I’m sorry I left you, I swear if you come with me I’ll never leave you again, just— Please! Damn it, Jaylon!”

Casey saw himself sitting aboard a jet at Dulles Airport, waiting in line to take off on his first-ever international flight. H. T. sat beside him, poking blunt fingers into his side and telling idiot jokes to distract him.

He saw the arcade at the Esplanade in Kenner, himself, Jaylon, and H. T. sitting in the massage chairs at Spencer’s Gifts, pretending they were under attack aboard a spaceship. A long, thin scream drifted to him from far away.

The noise snapped him back to the present. His hand was still outstretched, but now so was Jaylon’s. A tag hung half-finished in the air, and now Jaylon’s eyes were trained on Casey as if he could see again. “Whaaaaaaat’s haaaaaaapppening to meeeeee!” he called.

“I don’t know!” Casey shouted back. “It’s magic! You’re doing magic!”

“IIIIIIIII’m glooooooowiiiiiing!”

“Yes!” Casey called. “But this world is ending! You gotta come with me!”

“IIIIIIIIIIIIII got woooooooorrrrk!”

“You can work there! Please!”

Jaylon’s eyes rolled back in his head, and his chin drifted up toward the ceiling. He is my champion. His power will protect me.

Casey’s voice died midshout. “Is that—? Who’s there?”

He is my champion.

The voice he was hearing was not a voice at all. It was Casey’s mind translating a wave of communication to him. This was the city making herself understood as best she could. He remembered explaining to Ximena that he felt like New Orleans had cast him out.

It didn’t cast you out, Ximena had said. It’s a city. It’s not alive. It doesn’t love anyone or hate. It doesn’t want.

This was true, but it was also… not. Casey felt as if by going to Smith instead of resuming his studies at UNO, he had abandoned New Orleans, abandoned Jaylon. It wasn’t that leaving had been wrong, it was that he’d made the decision out of fear. Fear of what was happening to their art. Fear that the city would never again be what it was. That the storm had taken its spirit, leaving behind an aching septic wound.

Nola was not New Orleans, but the same spirit animated it, allowed it to communicate.

“Let Jaylon go,” Casey said. “I’ll fight in his place. I’ll fight with everything I’ve got.”

The Hidden City examined him, considered his offer.

The city didn’t respond.

Instead, Jaylon shook his head, as if waking the rest of the way up. He blinked. “Casey?” he said calmly. “You came for me?”

“Of course. Of course I did.”

Jaylon glanced over his shoulder as if he’d heard someone else speak. “I will!” he said.

“What?”

“Trismegistus,” Jaylon said. “Thrice great.”

“It’s the name the city gave me,” Casey said. His face was numb now. He barely felt his own tears. A sense of deep loss, of futility, cut a deep gash in his spirit, and he wasn’t sure why.

“That’s dope as fuck!” Jaylon said. He’d never sounded more like himself. “I’ma link up with you later. Don’t die.”

“No. No. Jay—”

“Nigga, we magic! We everything! Make anything! And—” His voice threatened to break now. “Don’t get killed,” he said. “If I have to cross the Gulf to find you, I will.”

“Jaylon.”

“I seen so much. It’s the bells, Case. It’s hard to— There’s a Higher Planet,” Jaylon said. “Bells herald you across and you come bursting like a quasar beam. Jewels everywhere. Singing sand. You’ll see. It’s everywhere.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll see you. I’ll see you from There.”

Now Casey could hear the Storm. Howling, rushing, clattering over the city. Faintly, from far off, he felt wind and wet. “Nuh—”

“Later on, bruh,” Jaylon said. “I can’t wait to show you.”

Jaylon ducked through the open doorway just as the Storm peeled off the roof. Casey let the portal wink shut and lifted his face to the flashing heavens. The rain still wasn’t touching him. Not because it didn’t want to—because it couldn’t. Casey laughed.

He shut his eyes and felt inside himself for the part of him that was Bee Sharp. His gut trembled as gravity dropped away from him. He fell headfirst into the sky.