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But for the smell, the street was empty. Hundreds of scattered of papers fluttered around his feet as he walked, but no other movement was present. Amongst the trash were fliers for the Chris Owens sex show, where the tourists were promised live sex on stage, but were treated only to something more akin to a fancified strip tease. There were free drinks, of course, granting that you didn’t mind the two drink minimum and the second would cost you twenty bucks. Ash Wednesday was like no other day in New Orleans. Quiet and desolate. The entire city, even the buildings themselves, seemed to be nursing hangovers.

The smell was made up of a voodoo concoction that not even the most vile demons of hell could dream up. Vomit and piss from a thousand tourists, mixed with the sweat of social anxiety, testosterone, and laughter and fear. Fear above all. Fear of the crowds, mixed with the exhilaration of being caught in the middle. Fear for personal safety as the crowd moved along through the streets of the French Quarter. Fear of the unknown that lurked around every corner and just inside each recessed doorway.

While the previous night allowed screams to sound like nothing more than whispers, this morning heard echoes everywhere. Echoes of his footfalls on the black tarmac of Bourbon Street, echoes of his breath that seemed to come in shorter and shorter spurts because of the oncoming heat of the day. The heat would eventually intensify the smell, but he hoped to be safely tucked away behind his bar by then. Inside, where the air conditioning and the heavy, plastic door curtain would keep all the demonically forged odors at bay.

“Fucking tourists,” Frank mumbled to himself. He continued to walk as fast as he could through the street in an attempt to beat both the smell and heat. Unfortunately, both had weighed him down to nothing more than a slow crawl on his way to work. He walked with his head down.

After all the time he’d spent working on Bourbon Street, one would think that Frank would have become accustomed to the smell. But, he doubted that such a thing would ever happen. And, after all this time, he should have known better than to walk with his head tucked into his shoulders. Predators were everywhere in this town, and even in the ravaged streets of post Mardi Gras.
For all the trouble the tourists caused New Orleans knew upon which side its bread was buttered, and who was doing the buttering. If not for the tourism, New Orleans would be dead in the dirt. But, there wasn’t a day that Frank didn’t thank God for the fact that he worked in a local’s bar. Dealing with the locals didn’t prove itself a blessing so much as an absolute pleasure in the relief from having to sling beer and Hurricanes to the tourists.

Only another block and he could finally get inside and away from the hell that had become of his beautiful New Orleans. One more block and the smell would go away. It would still take an hour or so before he would be able to shake the smell from his clothing and skin. Once it was on you, it made itself at home and didn’t take kindly to being asked to leave.

The smooth whiskey voice of an old Billie Holiday recording drifted quietly from one of the open windows above the street. Obviously a looping CD to which someone had passed out, but Frank was thankful for the travelling music. Somehow, the music lightened his heart and made him remember why he had come here in the first place. Suddenly the smell wasn’t so bad, the heat became bearable, and the thought of drunken tourists was at least tolerable.

“If you’d surrender
Just for a tender
Kiss or two
You might discover
That I’m the lover
Meant for you …”

God bless Billie Holiday, he thought.

The smell was always worse at Canal and Bourbon, just as one entered the Quarter. Now at the 500 block, Frank could not only breathe again, but so could his soul. He glanced up briefly and saw the turn off to St Peter. Just around the corner and he would be away from it all, taking the words of Billie with him.

Maybe today, he thought, the bullets would stay in the gun.

Maybe.

“Yo mama ain’t workin, Rock-n-Roll. Open these goddamned doors, boy.”

Frank looked up again to see the old man standing with a big grin, showing what was left of his yellowing teeth. He was unshaven and looked as though he’d slept in the very clothes he was wearing, if he had been to sleep at all.

“Don’t you have a home, Sally?”

“‘Course I do. But yo daddy came back, so I had to leave yo mama’s bedside.”

“You keep it up, Sally, and you’ll be drinkin down street.”

“Shit, I’m just playin. You know me.”

“Yeah, I know you Sal. And I also know someone who shouldn’t be drinkin this close to the sunrise.” Frank pulled the keys to the bar out of his pocket. “Y’all want some coffee to start? D’ja eat yet? I’ll make you some eggs, yeah?”

“You always know how to put a pretty smile on my face, Rock-n-Roll.” Sal offered him another of his less than award-winning smiles.

The air inside was cool. Not in a cold and refreshing way, but cool like a tomb and just as stuffy.

“Sally, open the aircon, yeah?” The old man grumbled and moved to switch on a wall-based air conditioner that was almost as ancient and dilapidated as the hands that now turned its knobs. With a series of clanks and clunks, and no small amount of protest, the air conditioner started running at full blast.
“Jesus’ sweet mama! Ain’t that nice?” Sal spread his arms out wide to catch the cool air under his arms.

“You wanna scare mother Mary away? Christ, Sally, put your arms down. Bad enough I gotta look at you all day, and now you wanna make me cry?”

“You know somethin? You an asshole in the AM, R-n-R.”

“Yeah, well, if I didn’t have to see your face outside in the mornin sun, you wouldn’t hafta see my asshole inside the bar.”

Music drifted through the darkened bar, along with the smell of cooking eggs.
“Somebody went and left the juke on last night.”

“That ain’t the jukebox, Sal. Somebody’s gone and left their music runnin out on the street.”

That was back on Bourbon, Frank thought, but he didn’t bring it up to Sal.
“Did they? I didn’t hear nothin out there. Typical Ash Wednesday. Quiet til everybody starts headin t’church.”

“Oh, yeah, I suppose that was back on Bourbon. You want grits?”

“Naw, you got pork?”

“Damn you’re demanding, yeah? No I ain’t got pork, I got grits. You want em, or not?” Frank stood holding the spatula like a machete.

“No, jus the eggs.”

“A’ight then. Here ya go. Sauce?” Frank reached below the bar to pull out a bottle of Tabasco. “Coffee’s brewin. Be ready in a minute.”

“You can throw me some Jameson with it. I need the hair of the dog. I swear that music’s getting louder. Sal said looking over his shoulder as if to glare at the jazz diva herself.

The music was getting louder. Not by much, but they could now hear Billie’s words, instead of the muffled rhythm of the songs.

“If you’d surrender
Just for a tender
Kiss or two
You might discover
That I’m the lover
Meant for you …”

“At least it’s Billie.” Frank pulled the coffee from the brewer and took a cup for beneath the back counter. “Could be worse.”

“Could be your own crap you call music, Rock-n-Roll” Sal grinned, half-chewed eggs seeping between his teeth.

“You know, I don’t get you. You insult my mother, and I let you in. Then, I cook you breakfast and you turn around and insult me. What kind of shit is that?” Frank slammed the cup on the bar, loud enough to drown out Billie’s voice for a moment, and then slopped the tar over the rim.

“Yeah. I guess some people never learn.” Another egg-laden grin spread across Sal’s face.

The music stopped.

Frank opened his eyes. It was Ash Wednesday, and he had to get to work. Stumbling from his bed, he slipped into a pair of blue jeans and pulled a t-shirt over his head after giving it a good sniff of evaluation. On his way to the front door, he stopped. Placing his hand on the door frame, he hung his head and stared at the doorknob. After a moment of consideration, he reached down to the end table next to the door, opened the drawer, and took out the gun.

Maybe today, he thought.

Aside from the constant clicking of his desktop ten key, the silence in the office was deafening. Jonathan Prince had become accustomed to the cessation of sound over the past six months, but today the stillness had become almost intolerable. There was a time when he would have paid good money to replace all the noise in his life with this blessed silence; a time when his entire life seemed to be made up of constant noise and clamor. But since the day of the mass disappearance – the Big D as he’d come to refer to it – when all hell broke loose and it seemed the noise would never end, the price he’d paid was no more than his ability to tolerate the unending silence.

Jonathan was a simple man. His world was made up of consistency and regularity. Awake every morning by four, coffee ready by the time he padded his bare feet into the kitchen. Shower, shave, dress, another cup of coffee and out the door by five-thirty. Arriving at the office, he’d have his daily tallies ready and waiting for him from the day before, exactly where he’d neatly placed any work he couldn’t finish by quitting time into the almighty in-box.

Freddie, one of Jonathan’s office mates, whom he normally despised but wished well now that he was apparently enjoying his afterlife – or wherever the hell he was, along with everyone else – had given him an ironically beautiful framed quote for his desk. Designed with deep, flowing calligraphy, it read: “A Clean Desk is a Sign of a Disturbed Mind.” It was meant to be a backhanded compliment at Jonathan’s constant uniformity; his belief that everything had its order and everything had its place. Jonathan loathed the thing. What sort of idiot would go to the trouble to frame and market anything that was tantamount to a bumper sticker, much less the idiot who purchased the damned thing? But as much as Jonathan loathed it, he’d placed the frame at the corner of his desk. Though, the gesture was more a matter of social appeasement than anything else. Better to keep the wolves at bay, he thought, than to invite a fight.

After the Big D, Jonathan had continued to get up every morning and head into work. There didn’t really seem to be much sense in doing this, considering that no matter how many tally sheets Jonathan entered into his ten key they amounted to the same negated and hollow amount. What was a few thousand against a few million when money no longer served any purpose other than fire kindling? What difference would that extra decimal point make in the grand scheme of things? But, Jonathan needed to have this structure in his daily life in an attempt to give reason to his new existence. The Big D had happened with such suddenness that Jonathan knew it could reverse itself at any moment with the same celerity. When that happened – if it happened – someone would have to be there to account for the missing time. Someone would have to be held accountable, because someone is always held accountable. If responsibility was to be left upon Jonathan, he was going to be damned sure that all the t’s were crossed and all the i’s were dotted. Secretly – not that he had anyone to tell secrets to in this new world – he had hoped that day would never come, and by the looks of things it probably wouldn’t. But, just in case, the returning order wouldn’t find him with his pants down.

So, day after day, he would awake from dreamless sleep at what he supposed was 4:00 AM, stumble down the staircase and throw a few coffee grounds into cold water. He’d stir it up as best he could, drink-chew it with a grimace and then walk into what had once been downtown Portland.

For reasons just as inexplicable as the disappearance itself, the electricity had stopped working on the Big D. With hindsight, Jonathan figured that this would have happened anyway, as there was no one left to attend to such matters. But, he wouldn’t have expected it to happen on the same day. In fact, nothing mechanical had worked since that day. not simply electrically based mechanisms, but everything mechanical. Wind-up watches, battery powered radios, anything with gears or wires attached had been rendered completely useless. Jonathan was certainly no mechanic. He knew his way around a car engine enough to understand the basics, but he couldn’t figure out why all the cars seemed to have just stopped wherever they were when the Big D happened. They were all over the highways and freeways, silently sitting like stones that someone had carelessly tossed onto the roads. Jonathan had seen a couple of incidents where cars had apparently collided, but he supposed that it was nothing more than mere coincidence that the accidents had happened only a moment before the disappearance had taken place. There seemed to be no other signs of bedlam to be found in the city, or anywhere else for that matter.

Although the walk took a lot longer than it had when he’d regularly ride the light rail, he enjoyed the walks to and from work with a newfound interest in the world. He no longer had to worry about teenagers harassing him, or bothersome street urchins begging for a quarter to “get something to eat,” when he knew damned well that they would just put the money in their booze fund. He had the time now to see the world through eyes that he had – for purposes of self-preservation – covered up for so long. His only real worry now was the approaching winter, and how the weather might make it difficult to walk the five miles into the city.

Jonathan lived in East Portland. Sans the train, it now meant a hike across the Washington bridge. He remembered that, while traveling to the city on the light rail, he’d often thought about how slick the bridge might be after a heavy rainfall. How dangerous it would be to cross such a high bridge on foot. He thanked God back then for the comfort and safety of the train, but now it seemed that his gratitude was premature. It hadn’t rained even once since the Big D, which he thought very odd for this time of the year. In fact, it seemed to Jonathan that the weather had actually been somewhat arid for Portland. Arid, yes, and somewhat stuffy. Much like he were in a small room with no windows.

However, he didn’t have time to analyze the weather because there were beans to count, t’s to cross and i’s to dot. The change would be coming any day now, any hour, any minute. And, when it did, someone would be held accountable. Someone would have to be held accountable, because someone is always held accountable. There must be a sense of order in the world, he thought, otherwise there just isn’t a point to the world and it may as well not exist at all.

The sun’s light shone down on Jonathan. And, though the air seemed suddenly more arid than before, in that moment, that split second of time, a smile began to slowly creep across his face. No existence. No order, no point, no sense, no existence. He finally understood the framed quote. Moreover, he suddenly understood Freddie and his own sense of order. Jonathan decided not to go into work that day. He looked aroound for a brief moment. He half expecting Death to float up right then and there to ask how he was enjoying his stay, like a waiter inquiring about a meal. Contentedly eyeing the yet empty bridge, Jonathan hopped up on the hood of a nearby abandoned Hyundai and waited in the sunshine.