Page 3 of Man of His Dreams

Although it was only mid-March, the air was already warm and muggy. He was going to have to get used to the humidity. But unlike his neighborhood back in Oakland, this city was pancake-flat, which made walking easy despite the hazardous sidewalks: their pavement cracked, buckled by tree roots, or missing entirely. At first Flip made his way up to Bourbon Street, but he soon tired of the crowds and strolled down to Chartres Street instead. He then headed out of the French Quarter and into neighborhoods that his phone informed him were called Marigny and Bywater. Fewer tourists here, by far, although the architecture still looked exotic compared to that of the West Coast.

Eventually he found himself in a park along the river, where he stood at a railing and looked out over the muddy water. Big ships passed, tugboats pushed barges, and somewhere someone played a mournful tune on a saxophone. This could be a scene in a movie, he thought. Flip Devin is…. He wasn’t sure how to finish that title. What was he?

The answer came to him in Scratch’s voice: You’re lost, kid.

Well, maybe. And his phone GPS wasn’t going to help this kind of lost. He’d just have to find his way home on his own—wherever that home might end up being.

He passed a small market not too far from his apartment and picked up enough basic food items to fill a couple of plastic shopping bags. He’d gone about a block when his phone buzzed. After a few moments of trying to juggle phone and bags, he set down the groceries so he could check the message. It was from the airline, informing him that his luggage was on its way to New Orleans. Which initially heartened him, until he followed up by tracking the AirTag and discovered that now his suitcase was back in Oakland, where it had started.

Lovely. He sat on a bench in the shade and made another call to customer service. The rep insisted that his luggage piece would arrive any time now.

All the way home and then while he put his purchases away, he reminded himself that he wouldn’t die without the contents of that suitcase. Nothing in there was irreplaceable. He’d never owned much that had sentimental value, and the items he did possess—along with his embarrassingly large book collection—were currently tucked away in a storage unit in Berkeley. He couldn’t really explain why his wayward stuff was causing him so much distress, but his jaw was clenched and his shoulders were tight.

One of the hallway closets contained a small washer/dryer unit. He put in all of yesterday’s clothes and then spent a chunk of time figuring out how to get the thing started. It was a waste to run such a small load, but otherwise he’d be out of clean clothes by tomorrow. Unless a miracle happened and his suitcase showed up. He didn’t dare hope.

What he needed was to get some work done. That was a good distraction, and his deadlines weren’t going to meet themselves.

He maneuvered the little desk—heavier than it looked—so that it faced one of the tall windows, then brewed himself a cup of coffee, sat down, and fired up his laptop. Because he couldn’t help himself, he checked on the suitcase again and found it still in Oakland, which spurred him to do an online chat with an airline customer service rep who assured him that his luggage piece was on its way to New Orleans. Finally, he opened his current manuscript.

The page just sat there, cursor blinking.

He was thirty-two-thousand words into this novel, which would have been fine if he hadn’t also been thirty-two-thousand words into it last week. And the week before that. And, okay, the week before that. He wasn’t even sure if it was writer’s block or simply a crisis of confidence, because during the past month he’d typed thousands of words and then deleted every one of them because they felt stupid. His muse, it seemed, was as lost as he was.

Today he clicked away for an hour or so, until he realized that not only was the entire scene wildly out of character for his protagonist, but Flip had also written himself into a corner and had no idea how to get out. Growling, he highlighted the whole section and made it disappear.

Maybe another walk would help.

This time he stopped for a late lunch at a place on Decatur and wondered how long he could last on a diet of étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo, and red beans and rice. With beignets added for good measure.

Fortified, he set out again and eventually made his way to the Garden District, where he gawked at the mansions and avoided stumbling over the tree roots that breached the sidewalks. Azaleas bloomed behind iron fences, crows called from rooftops, and Mardi Gras beads hung from mossy tree limbs.

He set up camp for a bit in a nice bookshop with comfy chairs, later emerging with the new release by Gabriel García Márquez. Flip had heard somewhere that, before García Márquez died, he’d requested that this manuscript be destroyed. The dementia he’d experienced while writing it had been bad enough to affect his writing, but he was still lucid enough to recognize the work as sub-par. His sons, however, had published it anyway.

If Flip dropped dead right now, his unfinished novel would die too, but unlike García Márquez, he didn’t have a zillion fans who would be devastated by the loss. In fact, the only ones who would be upset were his publishers, who’d never recoup his advance.

What would happen to his current books in print and to incoming royalties? He had no idea. No will. No next of kin. The only people he was truly on speaking terms with nowadays were his agent and editor, and if he didn’t finish that damned manuscript, they’d stop talking to him too.

By the time he returned to St. Philip Street, he was footsore and exhausted. His intention was to go up to his apartment and take a nap before finding a late dinner nearby. The world—and the book—could wait another day.

As he fumbled in his phone for the code that unlocked the door to the building—he was shit at remembering numbers—someone called from across the street. “Hey! You!”

He twisted and saw that it was the fortune teller who’d set up a cloth-covered card table and two chairs under a gallery. He’d nodded to her during his trips in and out today but hadn’t otherwise interacted. She was in her sixties, he’d guess, her pale skin deeply lined, her short hair dyed several neon colors, her nose sporting both a ring and a stud.

“Hey! Tall boy!”

“Yeah?”

“Come ’ere.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need my fortune told.”

“Good. ’Cause I ain’t gonna tell it.” She gestured him forward.

It was bound to be some kind of scam, or maybe it was just general craziness in action. But she seemed dead set on getting him over there, and he was curious why. Flip crossed the street and, as directed, sat across from her. The sign on the table identified her as Miss Amelie.

She didn’t say anything as she gave him a close visual inspection. He figured he might as well do the same, and they peered at each other for several moments. He upped his age estimate into the seventies and noted the sharp alertness in her eyes. He was willing to bet that nothing much got past this woman.

“How long you plannin’ to stay?” she finally asked, lighting a cigarette.