Chapter 1

New Orleans is filled with ghosts. Some of them are even real, but most of them are just people: displaced, homeless, refugees from the new world order. Pretending to live, going through the motions of productive existence.

I think the ghosts are happier, yet I wonder what Marie Laveau would think about the changes in her city. I’d studied her back in the day, years before an unknown congresswoman from the Yankee states would set us all on the road to perdition in the name of utopia.

Her face is all over the city. Beautiful, graceful, with a wide toothy smile and plans that seemed like a good idea at the time. She’s very charismatic, the ideal mouthpiece for a government dedicated to making everyone the perfectly inoffensive best person they can be.

Tulane still exists. Well, sort of. The land it sits on is there, and it’s still called Tulane, but it’s more an indoctrination center than an institute for higher education, sterile and perfect metal and glass.

Ghostly fingers stroke my spine as I walk past the skyscraper of five hundred square foot apartments built atop what used to be Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. The mausoleums exist only in the memories of older folks like me. You can’t even find pictures anymore. I have no idea what the government did with the human remains that had been interred there. The tombs were ground into aggregate for concrete. Maybe the bones were, too.

I suppose New Orleans isn’t any different than any other city in the United States. Maybe the changes hurt more because it’s my home, and so much of its history was destroyed by one single bill, signed into law with a negligent sweep of a pen.

All of humanity lives in cities just like this one. It’s a more efficient use of resources. Every scrap of old construction was demolished, starting in 2020, my first year of college. It’s all high-efficiency cinder block, solar panels and wind farms atop buildings now. Graceless, without beauty, but inexpensive and easy to build.

The land outside the city is carefully managed to produce crops and new growth forests to replace what we’ve cut down since the Industrial Revolution. I haven’t seen it, of course. No one has. Exit from the city is prohibited, and it’s surrounded by a wall to make sure everybody stays where they’re supposed to.

I keep walking. It’s my day to stand in line for groceries. It’s done by alphabet. My last name starts with R, so my grocery day is Thursday. Laundry is Monday, cleaning my shoebox of an apartment takes all of ten minutes on Tuesday, Wednesday is mandatory group therapy to ensure everyone in New Orleans is as happy as they can possibly be. And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, including mandatory daily exercise. I don’t even get to pick my own food. It’s all prepackaged meals, supposedly custom designed to my optimum weight and age.

Thirty-seven isn’t that old. Maybe I just feel my age more these days. I don’t think my meds are very helpful, but my therapist doesn’t seem concerned. I hope I get a new dosage with my food rations this week.

Thursday is the day I most miss those shrimp po’boy sandwiches, beignets, and coffee with chicory, all illegal now for being unhealthy. I sigh and squeeze myself into line between M. Reynolds and O. Reynolds just outside the windowless cinderblock structure housing the commissary. There used to be a restaurant here that served the most decadent Sunday brunch with live jazz every weekend.

We don’t speak. What is there to say?

But I want to. I want to ask O. Reynolds if she feels the cold leech into her old bones when she walks past Lafayette Cemetery No. 1, but she’s deaf as a post and I don’t dare ask my questions above a whisper.

Somehow, I think she does. Despite the heat of the late afternoon sun, she huddles in a threadbare shawl, probably crocheted with her own gnarled hands a lifetime ago. It’s faded blues and pinks, with virulent orange stripes. Her lips work over a mouth empty of teeth and she clutches a strand of rosary beads in a dark fist.

Every Thursday, I wonder how she’s managed to keep them. Blatant religious symbols are frowned upon, lest they upset other people who can’t mind their own damned business. Maybe her extreme age renders her invisible. I haven’t reached that blessed state yet.

I don’t ask the man in front of me. M. Reynolds is young, with the dead-eyed stare of hopelessness and boredom. Even if I had the wherewithal to pose a question, he has no frame of reference to understand my words.

He’s still handsome, though. He gives me a sweet, appreciative smile when I step between him and O. Reynolds. I preen a little, even though I’m close to old enough to be his mother.