The Heavens Rise (33 page)

She glanced up briefly when Ben entered the room, but when he didn’t say a word, she went back to reading. As soon as she turned the last page, he began to tell her the rest.

P
rove it,” Marissa said.

“What? On
you
? No way. You heard what I just said—”

“Ten seconds, fifty seconds. What’s it gonna hurt?”

“You! It’ll hurt
you.
”

Ben rolled his eyes, brushed past her and threw open the back door. A few seconds later, a tiny sparrow zipped into the room and landed on the cashier’s desk right next to the journal.

“Left,” Ben said. The sparrow fluttered up into the air, then dropped to the table a few inches to left. “Right,” Ben said.

The sparrow complied, and Marissa felt a strange heat spreading through her abdomen, then turning to icy chills as it ascended her spine, and suddenly her hands were going to her mouth against her will. Ben continued to manipulate the tiny bird.
Left, right, left, right . . .
And then the thing’s skull collapsed into a tiny little spill of gore and
it fell to one side with a soft plop and all Marissa could hear was the sound of her own breaths rasping against her sweaty palms.

Ben walked toward the aquarium, holding the door open until she found the wherewithal to follow him, and then they were standing before the cloudy, moss-dappled glass, and finally she saw it, pulsing in floating tendrils through the water. And even though she wanted to bring her hands away from her mouth, she couldn’t, and this made her feel both terrified and terribly self-conscious at the same time.

“We wouldn’t have to hurt anyone,” Ben finally said. “Not physically, anyway. We’d never have to spill a drop of blood. Not one.”

“We?”

“Think of the potential, just for a minute. Before you freak out. Think of the confessions we could force from their lips when the cameras were rolling. Think of what it would mean if we married it to our investigative skill. Vultures will start to feed off an animal just because it’s stopped moving. And they’ve been feeding off this city for years, Marissa. If we scared the vultures away, this city could walk again. Hell, it could
run
. We could—”

“I need to go. I need to . . . just . . .” She started for the open doorway to the courtyard. “This is . . .”

“We don’t have time,” Ben called out to her. “Isn’t that what you said to me that day, after the pipeline blew? This city lost its margin of error fifty years ago. That’s what you said, Marissa. And somebody’s supposed to be telling the truth. Even when no one wants them to.”

“Ben . . .”

“Not one drop of blood. Not one. Words, Marissa. We’d be working with words. Only, instead of ours, we’d be working with
theirs.
We couldn’t go after the ones we hated directly, you see. The risk of changing them would be too great. But we could take away the environment they used to thrive in, piece by piece. Crook by crook. Thief by thief. Liar by liar—”

“Ben, this is absolutely. You just can’t—”

“We could take away their
luck
. Their good fortune. Their culture of
corruption. Don’t tell me you can’t see the potential. Don’t tell me that you weren’t sitting there wondering what kind of
good
this could have done if some little privileged white family from Uptown hadn’t keep it a secret for eight years.”

“
You want to go there with me
?” She whirled on him, finger pointing, words flying from her faster than she could think. “You want to play that card while you talk to me about the casual enslavement of other human beings? Because that’s what this is, Ben. This is a violation of everything anyone who values the human mind believes in. Including me. A person’s ability to think for themselves. Free will, for the love of God. Where would I be without those things? Where would
you
be?”

“Small moves with a giant hand,” Ben whispered. “Small moves with a giant hand, Marissa. That’s what this would be. Precise, specific, brief. And just enough to advance a bigger objective.”

“What bigger objective?”

“Our city, Marissa! The same one the rest of the country is ready to cut loose into the sea as soon as they’re done with their wild weekend. The same one they want to blame for their racism and their addiction to oil because they can’t manage to care about most of the people here because they’re black and they’re poor. It’s the same objective we’ve had for eight years, Marissa, and only now we wouldn’t have mountains of lies standing in our way.”

“This is insane,” she whispered, her vision blurred by tears she couldn’t bring herself to fight.

“You’re right. Maybe we should have given up a long time ago. But we didn’t.”

“Tell me,” she said quietly. “Do you really believe
this
is the only way to do any good here anymore? After everything you’ve been through, after everything you’ve seen, is that really what you believe?”

“After everything you’ve taught me. Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Okay . . . Then I quit. If this is truly what it takes, then I’m out. I can’t do it anymore.”

His eyes fluttered shut as if he had tried to brace himself against the blow a second too late, and she could see he was fighting tears as well. But now that the words had left her mouth, she was backing away from the tank’s sweep of glass and its terrible, pulsating potential.

“Marissa . . . please . . .”

“No, I’m sorry, Ben. That’s it. I’m done. But don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me and I’ll be long gone by the time you get to
work.
So don’t you worry . . .”

“Marissa!”

She expected him to call after her again, but there was only the sound of her shoes crunching twigs as she hurried to her car.

She got almost as far as the freeway when her foot slid off the gas pedal and found the brake, and her hands left the steering wheel and ended up bunched together in her lap. For a few seconds, she thought he’d followed her and was using his power on her. But wouldn’t she have blacked out? Wasn’t that how it worked? But here she was, alone in her car, the rutted road behind her empty save for shadows cast by branches and moss. And she suddenly wished that he had forced it on her instead of leaving her with this bitter litany of all the sacrifices she’d made for her profession, for her city.

But was that why she was hesitating now? Not because she truly wanted what he’d offered her, but because she wouldn’t be able to face the sacrifices she had already made if she gave up on everything now. And why did she have to give up? Why did she have to leave? Did she truly think he would hurt her if she didn’t?

But the question that had brought her to a standstill was the one she’d just asked him a few minutes ago, a question so pointed and absurdly leading she never would have been able to include it in a professional interview in good conscience. Did Ben truly believe his newfound power was the only way to help New Orleans?

Maybe not. But you sure do.

You prayed for courage and you got an opportunity to be courageous.
That was what the true believers in her mother’s church had always preached. You didn’t get to pick what the opportunity would be. That wasn’t how the universe worked, or seemed to work, anyway.

You didn’t get to pick your miracles You could either lean into them or run the other way. And that’s all she was doing. Running.

Ben must have heard her car coming back down the road because he was standing in the middle of the courtyard when she returned. He held his ground as she approached, as if he thought any sudden moves might spook her again, but his eyes were bloodshot and every muscle in his body appeared to tense with each step she took in his direction, as if she were a fearsome wind he was determined to lean in to without loosing his balance. The tiny building behind him looked too forlon to be harboring such an earth-shattering secret, and for a while she studied it as Ben studied her.

“Come inside, Marissa,” Ben finally whispered. “Come with me. Please.”

And then she felt him take her hand, and together they stepped out of the cypress-filtered sunlight and into the shadows.

L
ast night he asked me to drive him to the Luling Bridge, and I said yes, even though I knew the risks were high. It’s possible someone could have recognized him, although he more closely resembles what he looked like as a teenager than the man they’ve been showing on the news constantly since the accident.

It’s funny what he remembers, and as much as Ben and I have tried to outline some logical process to figure out which memories are returning first, we can’t seem to identify one. The guilt over keeping him a secret from his family started to go away when he didn’t recognize any of his brothers in the photographs we showed him. That’s part of why I agreed to take him to the bridge, because I knew it meant he wanted to see the ships on the river. Another memory returning.

The bridge feels monumental for being so far from a densely urban area.
At its height, you can see the entire sweep of Jefferson and Orleans Parishes to the east, and the great black bowl of Lake Pontchartrain to the north. The river banks directly below it are sparsely populated, lined by a smattering of grain docks.

It was the middle of the night and he leapt from the Jeep as soon as I slowed down, even though he was shirtless. Dressing him isn’t the easiest. He is almost seven feet tall. And there are some other concerns. By the time I stopped the Jeep, I realized what he was about to do. By the time I called out his full name, he had leapt up onto the railing and the wings at his back had extended, two smooth flaps of flesh with slender, exposed ligaments securing them to a ridge along his spine that inflated almost like parachutes as he dropped over the side and into the darkness.

Of course, I’d seen him fly before, but never by dropping from such a great height, and my heart was in my throat as he shrank in size, plummeting toward the dark river. There is much of Anthem in him, but this split-second, wordless impulsiveness is entirely new. Or at least it’s not the Anthem I remember. That Anthem announced everything he planned to do, and often didn’t do very much of it. There are aspects of this creature, this being that are entirely different. And then there’s the physical. The impossibly perfect muscles. The incredible height. The idealization of his teenage features.

It was not just my words that created him—my hero, my God, my angel. It was the marriage of those words and the collective images they inspired inside his imagination each time I whispered them to him over the years. And in that fateful instant on the old push boat in Madisonville, my words met the history of his dreams, and he was reborn.

By the time I saw him rising up from the darkness, it was too late for me to move, and in a dizzying instant, he had taken me in his giant arms and we were rising up alongside one of the bridge’s massive copper-colored towers, until we had passed the blinking red light at its very top, and I could see New Orleans aglow on the dark, watery horizon. And as my screams
turned to laughter, I thought of Ben and the work he and Marissa would begin soon.

He has asked me to help, and even though I have asked for time to consider it, I know I will say yes for one reason. I have learned that magic withheld gives birth to nightmares, and so I have no choice but to stand back, open my heart and let the heavens rise.

T
his novel exists in its current form largely due to the generosity of a man named Cory F. Heitmeier. Cory is a pilot with the New Orleans–Baton Rouge Steamship Pilots Association, an organization that hasn’t always been treated kindly by writers in the past, and even though he’d never read any of my books, he agreed to take me out on a ship with him. We traveled the exact same journey Anthem and Marshall take in this novel, only no one got shot or transformed into a great winged beast by the time we reached the relief pilot in Chalmette. I’m eternally grateful to Cory, his Coast Guard commander and the other pilots at Vessel Traffic Control who took the time to answer my technical questions.

As always, I’m grateful to my best friend, business partner and cohost of
The Dinner Party Show
, Eric Shaw Quinn, who demanded that I get over my terror of boarding and disembarking a giant, moving ship by way of a glorified rope ladder and a swaying platform atop a crew
boat. It was one of the scariest experiences of my life but I’m glad I did it and I think the book is all the better for it. (And if you haven’t listened to our Internet radio show, you should, because we’re funny. It’s always streaming at
TheDinnerPartyShow.com
. Special thanks to our team who kept the show running so smoothly while I was working on this novel’s revisions: our sound guy, Brandon Griffith; our computer genius, Brett Churnin; and our guest-relations dudes, Billy McIntyre and Nick Cedergren.)

New Orleans is a profoundly changed city as a result of Katrina, and I moved away several years before the storm hit. I was able to get a fine-tuned sense of her new, bruised spirit from friends who opened their homes and their hearts to me during the multiple visits I made there to research this novel. The book is dedicated to two of my good friends, Sid Montz and Christian LeBlanc, because they both played a major role in this process. But I also owe similar debts of gratitude to Spencer Doody, Phin Percy, Joyce Hunter and Ralph Mascaro, who did a wonderful job of driving me up and down the rivers and bayous of Lake Pontchartrain’s North Shore while I searched for the right location for Elysium.

I wrote several drafts of this novel before I submitted it to a publisher, and those drafts were given invaluable, probing reads by my agent Lynn Nesbit and my friends Marc Andreyko, Gregg Hurwitz, Becket Ghiotto and Eric Shaw Quinn. This was the first time my mother read an early draft of one of my novels and it was an interesting experience for both of us. Thanks, Mom. I hope I wasn’t too difficult. Thank God for email, huh?