revision 20250331
The first dawn of the year crept reluctantly over the Industrial Canal, pale light filtering through a gauze of winter haze that shrouded the Port of New Orleans railway switch spur. Spent fireworks casings littered the St. Claude Avenue railroad crossing and adjacent side streets like abandoned party favors, their gunpowder residue mingling with the harsh diesel breath of idling locomotives. The remains of a tattered “Happy New Year” banner fluttered from the front porch of a nearby house, its deflated mylar balloons mirroring the hangover atmosphere of the leaden morning.
Manuel Suarez parked his rail inspector’s vehicle two blocks riverside from the crossing. The damp chill met him as he stepped out, prompting him to zip his NOPB maintenance jacket closed before layering his reflective safety vest over it. His mind remained slightly foggy, and his intestines protested the early hour. Even after forty years with New Orleans Public Belt Railroad, New Year’s Day shifts still felt like punishment duty. As he scanned the emergency work order, he heard the equipment truck rumble to a stop behind him, his three-man crew arriving to start the day’s unwelcome task.
“Happy New Year’s, boss,” shouted Darnell, youngest of the crew. His enthusiastic, festive greeting as he jumped out of the cab received no reply. The crew’s only response was a unified groan when he slammed the truck’s door.
Manuel looked up from his clipboard, a wary eye assessing the maintenance workers. Experience taught him a crew’s alertness on the day after was always a crap shoot. From the pained expressions of most, he knew how the day’s work would go.
His breath crystallized in the cold air as he walked with his men toward St. Claude Avenue. Through the murky daybreak, the crossing appeared ghostly and indistinct, as if not fully materialized into the new year. Through the mist, he could make out a couple of joggers on the road next to the right-of-way as they suddenly stopped mid-stride, one of them bending over as if in pain. Must be hungover, too. He mused to himself.
“Signal system’s been triggering false alarms since midnight,” he told the crew, consulting the work order. “Probably some drunk college kid thought it’d be funny to—”
A sudden hollowness opened in Manuel’s chest as they approached where the joggers stood—now staring at the tracks. The morning light pierced the gloom, revealing a splash of crimson against the gravel right-of-way. Not paint. Not a discarded costume from last night’s revelry.
“Jesus Christ,” whispered Darnell. “Is that—”
“Go call it in,” Manuel ordered Darnell, already moving toward the still form. “And, you two, keep those joggers back.”
The woman lay in the precise angle of repose that only the dead achieve—one arm extended as if reaching for something, legs arranged too neatly for someone who had tripped and fallen or possibly been dumped there. Her neck bent at an impossible angle. Her auburn hair spilled across the gravel, framing a face that seemed almost peaceful despite the circumstances. Her emerald cocktail dress, inappropriate for the winter chill, sparkled dully in the soft mist.
Manuel crouched beside her, careful not to disturb anything. Twenty feet from the nearest track. No drag marks. No sign she’d been struck by a train. The gravel beneath her was barely disturbed, as if she’d been placed there. His weathered hand hovered over her wrist, a formality—the bluish tint of her skin told him everything he needed to know about how long she’d been there.
“Dispatcher says NOPD’s on their way,” Darnell called, jogging back from the truck. He stopped short, swallowing hard. “They’re asking if it was a train accident.”
Manuel shook his head slowly. “Train hits don’t look like this. And they sure as hell don’t leave the victim’s shoes perfectly aligned.” He nodded toward the woman’s feet, where expensive heels were positioned with unnatural precision, as if someone had carefully placed them on her after death. He knew even the most agile super model could not strut this gravel runway.
A small clutch purse lay nearby, its contents undisturbed—driver’s license visible through the clear window. Lynda Bellamy, Philadelphia address. A tourist, maybe, or a transplant who hadn’t updated her ID.
“What’s that?” Darnell pointed to something glinting in the gravel near her outstretched hand.
“Don’t touch it,” Manuel warned, leaning closer. A small gold pin in the shape of a fleur-de-lis winked in the strengthening light, just beyond the woman’s fingertips. Too clean to have been there long. “Go back and radio dispatch. Get me an update on when the signals first malfunctioned and for how long.”
Darnell returned as the first wail of sirens cut through the morning stillness. A flock of starlings erupted from the nearby power lines, their wings beating a frantic rhythm against the gray sky.
“The cameras,” Manuel said suddenly, glancing over at the signal post. “They record when the warning system activates.”
“Dispatch said they went haywire around 2:15,” Darnell replied. “Showing signal activations when no trains were coming. Just a couple of shadowy blurs crossing the tracks. Then nothing for about forty-five minutes—complete electrical dead zone. System came back online at 3:02.”
Manuel’s gaze returned to the woman’s face. In another life, she might have been preparing for a New Year’s Day brunch right now, nursing a champagne headache, laughing about last night’s excesses. Instead, she lay discarded by the tracks while the city nursed its collective hangover, unaware that the new year had already claimed its first tragedy.
The approaching police cruiser sent water arcing from a puddle as it rolled to a stop. Against the early light’s muted backdrop, its strobing red and blue lights cast the surroundings in rhythmic flashes that evoked the Carnival decorations now materializing in storefronts throughout the city. Three Kings Day stood just days away, heralding Carnival season’s beginning, while Mardi Gras lurked some two months on the horizon, when these subdued thoroughfares would transform into channels of revelry, awash with beads, pulsing with music, and teeming with inebriated celebration.
But for now, as Manuel stepped back to let the officers through, he knew this woman’s story would be reduced to incident report shorthand—another statistic in a city that balanced celebration and sorrow like few others. The officers nodded grimly as they approached, already discussing theories, already using the past tense when referring to the woman in green.
The veil of morning mist began to lift as the sun intensified, revealing the modest Bywater homes lining the right-of-way along Press Street. Manuel and his crew gave brief statements to the detective, then returned to their routine. As the crew began work on the malfunctioning railway signals, Manuel returned to his car.
Sitting behind the wheel, Manuel reached over to the back seat to grab an incident report. I hate fucking paperwork.
As he turned forward again, a chill that had nothing to do with the January morning crawled up his arms. In the passenger window, a shadowy mass materialized—not one, but two identical silhouettes watching him with an unnatural stillness that froze his breath. Manuel’s fingers went numb against the steering wheel as the twin shadows observed him for three slow, deliberate heartbeats before dissolving into the brightening daylight, leaving only their impression on his racing pulse.
He pressed his palms against his temples, where a pulse banged painfully. Ah shit, I knew I shouldn’t have finished off that bottle of tequila last night. But even as he tried to dismiss it, Manuel couldn’t shake the bone-deep certainty that whatever had been watching him wasn’t merely a hangover hallucination—and somehow, it was connected to the woman in the emerald dress.
New Orleans was waking to the first day of the year, oblivious to the tableau at the crossing—a woman’s final stop in a city where the celebration never really ends, just pauses occasionally to acknowledge its dead.
Dawn sashayed across the Bywater in the measured cadence of a second-line parade. Morning mist swirled from the Mississippi, carrying the fragrance of sweet olive and azalea through the streets. The smell of rich dark coffee and beignets drifted from the local pastry shop, mingling with the industrial aroma of diesel from the port—a symphony of scents defining the Crescent City itself.
Jackson Dupré stood at the front window of his modest shotgun home, coffee mug in hand. Chicory-scented steam curled past his face as he watched the first drumbeats of Mardi Gras Day pulse through the cool morning air. The vibrations settled in his chest with the weight of cemetery lead. Each beat hammered home the brutal truth—these were rhythms Lynda would never hear again. Her voice echoed in his memory, that poetic Philly accent calling them the heartbeat of New Orleans.
“You can’t understand this city until you feel it in your bones, Jack,” she’d told him during her first visit nearly a decade ago. “It’s like the whole place has one giant pulse.” He’d laughed then, this Northern club owner who’d somehow become one of his closest friends, showing up faithfully every Carnival season with her husband Jeff, bringing their outsider’s wonder that somehow made him see his city anew.
Jackson watched through the smudged glass as revelers gathered, their costumes fracturing the pale light into kaleidoscopic shards that reminded him of promises long scattered. A familiar pressure built behind his eyes—not quite tears, but the weight of recognition. Each sequin and feather refracted the morning sun, memory and reality bleeding together until he couldn’t distinguish which sensation belonged to which timeline. A woman in a sequined green cape twirled past, her beer can catching the light like a tarnished scepter, while a man in a papier-mache gator head stumbled by, his cigarette smoke creating a ghostly halo above his head. Their shapes blurred at the edges of Jack’s vision, reality dissolving into memory until he couldn’t trust which present moment was true.
His time-worn features ghosted against the glass, graying temples highlighted by morning light that seemed to pulse and shift like a living thing. Behind him, case files sprawled across the side table next to his old leather armchair—the coroner’s report on Lynda’s death marked with yellow sticky notes. “Cervical fracture inconsistent with the body’s position,” one note challenged. Another questioned the forty-five-minute gap in witness statements. The official ruling of “accidental” stood in stark contrast to the crime scene photos showing Lynda’s carefully arranged body and lack of intervening factors.
A saxophone wailed in the distance, its sharp notes slicing through the air like molten droplets of raw emotion, beckoning more celebrants into the growing throng. Jack sipped his coffee, bitter and black, letting it scald his tongue, the pain anchoring him to this particular now. A familiar uneasiness washed over him, starting at the base of his skull and spreading like ice water down his spine.
He recognized the warning signs—another involuntary time shift approaching. These episodes had plagued him for years, but they’d grown more frequent and intense since Lynda’s death, as if her absence had somehow destabilized his already tenuous relationship with chronology.
Outside, the scene shimmered like heat waves rising from summer pavement, merging past and present. A woman’s sequined costume flickered between modern spandex and Victorian bustle, her smartphone morphing into a delicate fan and then back again. The shotgun house across the street cycled through decades of paint jobs—fresh lavender fading to weathered gray, bursting into 1920s butter yellow before settling into its present-day turquoise.
The sights before him rippled with temporal instability. Jack blinked hard, each heartbeat desperate to settle his vision into a single timeline. Waves of vertigo crashed through Jack’s inner ear while gravity wavered between centuries.
“Focus on your breath, Jack.” Lynda’s voice echoed from last year’s Carnival when she’d found him disoriented on his porch, mistaking his temporal episode for a panic attack. She’d never known about his temporal instability—Jack had carefully guarded that secret even from his closest friends. Still, her instinctive advice had helped ground him, her steady hand on his shoulder comforting him to a single reality as the world around him gradually solidified again.
Whole damn city’s celebrating while we’re saying goodbye. Recollections of past jubilant Mardi Gras celebrations wrestled in Jack’s mind with thoughts of today’s solemn task of tribute and remembrance. That saxophone would’ve had Lynda on her feet, her sharp tongue cutting through Jack’s haze: Someone needs to teach that boy about reading the mood. The memory of her voice settled into a hollow ache beneath his ribs.
His phone buzzed from its perch on the windowsill. Setting his mug down, he picked up the phone, each movement feeling like it belonged to someone else.
Reggie’s message glowed on the screen. You ready for this, brother?
Ready? The word ‘ready’ dissolved on his tongue like burnt sugar—sweet in memory, bitter in reality. Ready for a Mardi Gras without Lynda’s laugh echoing off these weathered walls? Ready for a jazz funeral when they should be dancing?
The masqueraders flowed past like a river of iridescent color against the faded pastel buildings, their joy a discordant note in his requiem. Their costumes painted living murals against the weathered cottages—purple morphing into gold, green dissolving into silver. The rhythm of their footsteps merged with distant drums, creating a heartbeat that pulsed through the sidewalk and Jack’s bones. Bursts of laughter clawed at his raw nerves, their cheers mocking his loss. A brass band warmed up on the corner, the sound reverberating in his bones, but all Jack could hear was the deafening quiet where Lynda’s voice should be.
Get it together, Dupré. He pressed his forehead against the cool window glass, the pressure holding him in this present, even as time seemed to slip through his fingers like spilled glitter. A tear tracked down his cheek, and he wiped it away with the heel of his hand.
The case files behind him beckoned with unanswered questions, each inconsistency in the reports a thread waiting to be pulled, a timeline waiting to be unraveled. Jack squared his shoulders, drawing in a deep breath that tasted of chicory, grief, and the metallic tang of determination. Time might be fluid, but justice was absolute—and he intended to find it, no matter which timeline held the truth. This wasn’t just another Fat Tuesday—this was the day he’d say goodbye to Lynda and the beginning of his search for the reason why he had to.
Jack moved away from the window and stepped into the front hall. Morning light filtered through the lace curtains on the front door, catching the gold threading of his elaborate Carnival tuxedo, throwing prisms of light down the long, narrow hallway. Outside, a solo trumpet player warmed up somewhere down Dauphine Street. The pre-parade commotion—shouting vendors, clattering carts, laughing children—filtered through an open window, each sound a counterpoint to the hollow silence inside him.
He paused before the hallway mirror, studying his reflection. The rough texture of the braid work along his crimson jacket’s edges caught beneath his fingertips, each golden thread and carefully placed bead representing hours of perfection. The gold iridescent paisley vest beneath sparkled with green and purple rhinestones, a masterpiece of New Orleans charm that had consumed weeks of intricate handwork.
“Well, well, Dupré. Lynda would’ve…” The words congealed in his throat.
The familiar pressure built behind his eyes, a barometric shift that had nothing to do with weather—the first warning sign. The mirror held his likeness loosely, as if negotiating which version of Jack to display. The trumpet notes stretched into strange laments, each tone elongating as if played through water. The walls of his shotgun house seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with each note.
His skin prickled with the electric charge that always preceded a shift, like standing too close to lightning. He recognized the pattern now after years of these episodes: first the pressure, then sound distortion, followed by visual fragmentation, and finally the distinctive electrical sensation that meant he was about to experience what he’d come to call a “membrane thinning”—not quite memory, not quite vision, but an actual bleeding through of alternate timelines into his present reality.
“Not just imagination,” he whispered to himself, a reminder he’d learned to use when the shifts came. “A convergence point.” The copper taste flooded his mouth—the final confirmation that this was no mere hallucination but an actual temporal displacement.
Then Lynda materialized beside him, her cool touch at his collar. Her perfume, a wisp of gardenias and vanilla, filled his lungs—the same scent that still clung to the birthday card she’d sent him three weeks before her death, now preserved in a ziplock bag in his dresser drawer.
“Perfect as always, Jack,” her voice whispered through the veil of time, the Philadelphia accent softening the edges of her words.
His pulse stuttered, then accelerated. A sound escaped him, half sob, half laugh, as contradictory impulses warred within: the urge to embrace her phantom form battling with the instinct to flee from this beautiful torment.
He stumbled backward, shoulder blades striking the wall. A framed photo of last year’s Mardi Gras—Lynda laughing between him and Jeff—tilted precariously, the past literally knocked off-balance by her impossible presence. His palms pressed against the faded wallpaper, every imperfection in its texture a desperate touch to hold on to reality, while his eyes remained fixed on her face, drinking in details he’d feared were fading from memory—the slight asymmetry of her smile, the faint scar above her left eyebrow from a childhood fall.
These glimpses across timelines—these moments when the membrane between what was and what might have been thinned to transparency—left him both grateful and gutted. Lynda’s presence faded like a radio signal caught between stations, leaving only the static of absence.
The morning light transformed his trembling hands into abstract art as he steadied himself and adjusted his vest. His attention drifted across familiar walls where local artwork, jazz posters, and Carnival memorabilia mapped his life’s prominent moments. An old sign from a defunct jazz club held court above the front door, its edges worn from the same flood that had taken his mother’s photo albums. Antique clocks graced the mantelpiece, each set to a different time zone, their discordant ticking creating a symphony of temporal dissonance that somehow steadied him when the shifts came.
“Time’s always keeping me dancing to different rhythms.” A weak laugh escaped him as the timepieces continued their asynchronous tempos.
Dread settled in his gut as he sank into his worn leather armchair. The familiar creak welcomed him—one of life’s few constants in a world where even reality refused to stay put. The manila folder on his side table seemed to pulse with each tick of the nearest clock.
His chest constricted as he opened the police report Reggie had risked his badge to obtain. The clinical language felt wrong, reducing Lynda’s vibrant life to cold statistics:
Location: 100 yards south of St. Claude Avenue Railway Crossing…
Injury Description: Fracture of the cervical spine (C2)… significant displacement… disruption of the spinal cord…
Cause of Death: Immediate and catastrophic interruption of the spinal cord, leading to respiratory arrest…
Circumstances: Accidental fall at approximately 2:15 AM…
Note: Witness statements pending from… The names inexplicably blacked out.
The words hammered against his temples—witness statements still missing after two months? The forty-five-minute void around the time of death gaped like a pothole after a heavy rain. Lynda had been magnetic, drawing people into her orbit like revelers to a free drink. The idea of her dying alone in the place felt fundamentally wrong.
“Accidental. My ass!” The words tasted bitter.
A thought crystallized, sharp and sudden—what if the inconsistencies in the police report weren’t just sloppy detective work? What if that forty-five-minute void wasn’t just missing information but actually missing time? The same temporal distortions that plagued him might somehow be connected to Lynda’s death. His fingers traced the blacked-out witness names, wondering if someone else who experienced time differently had been there that night.
The world rippled around him, strong enough to set the crystal decanter singing on his sidebar. From outside, the sound of a passing brass band transformed into The Spotted Cat’s house quartet playing a Cab Calloway rendition of St. James Infirmary. The scene materialized with the clarity of present moment—Lynda swaying in her red dress, her husband, Jeff, watching from their usual table, his eyes full of raw devotion that Jack had always envied a little.
These shifts had intensified since Lynda’s death—maybe not a coincidence, but a connection. Perhaps his ability to perceive multiple timelines wasn’t just a burden but the very tool he needed to uncover what really happened that night. If the truth existed across different versions of reality, who better to find it than someone who walked between them?
“Happy Mardi Gras!” A reveler’s shout pierced through the dimensional membrane, sending a jolt of pain behind Jack’s left eye.
The scene shattered like broken glass, each shard of memory cutting as it fell away. Mardi Gras day snapped back into focus with the abruptness of a slammed door, leaving the taste of pennies on his tongue—the familiar copper tang that always accompanied his shifts between timelines.
He rose unsteadily, fighting for balance. A final glance at his reflection showed Lynda’s smile flickering at the edge of his vision, there and gone like heat lightning.
Squaring his shoulders beneath the crimson jacket, he committed himself to uncovering the truth. The police report’s conclusion was too convenient, leaving too many questions unanswered and too many leads unfollowed. He owed Lynda and Jeff answers—even if those answers existed across different versions of reality.
With practiced care, he tilted his top hat to the perfect angle and drew in a breath. Carnival beckoned outside, a swirl of color and life that would carry him toward Lynda’s river farewell. The truth seemed to dance just beyond his grasp like a masked stranger at a Krewe ball—familiar yet disguised, known yet hidden.
He reached for the doorknob, hesitating at the threshold. Doorways were always worst for the shifts. But some doors had to be walked through, no matter the cost. Gathering his resolve, he stepped out to face the bittersweet symphony of New Orleans in full revelry, the weight of Lynda’s unsolved death heavy as a Mardi Gras crown upon his brow.
A peculiar hollowing sensation radiated from Jack’s sternum as he started down his porch steps, as if someone had scooped out his insides with a rusty ladle. Time rippled, the festive morning scene fracturing into crystalline shards. His skeleton hummed at a frequency just slightly askew from the passing quartet playing Notes from a Distant Yesterday. Behind his eyes, pressure built with the intensity of a summer thunderhead, reality splitting along invisible fault lines. Through this kaleidoscopic distortion, he glimpsed an older version of himself—silver-threaded hair beneath a weathered top hat, dissolving into the crowd like a paddle wheeler fading into the Mississippi’s dawn mist.
The rusted iron porch railing bit into his palm as he steadied himself. Flakes of ancient paint crumbled beneath his fingertips, embedding themselves in his skin like temporal debris. A tremor spiraled up his arm, settling in his shoulder, where it pulsed in counterpoint to his stuttering heartbeat. From somewhere down the street, a brass band played Jellyroll Morton’s Oh Didn’t He Ramble, the notes stretching and compressing like accordion bellows, some arriving in his ears before they’d been played, others delayed by seconds.
Not again. Jack tried to focus on a fixed point—a purple feather floating on the breeze, a child’s laugh, anything—but the familiar metallic taste flooded his mouth. Not now. Not today. His jaw seized, molars grinding against each other with a sound only he could hear.
The vision flickered—one, two, three heartbeats—then collapsed, snapping him back to present Mardi Gras morning with the suddenness of a glass shattering on tile. It left behind not just the sensory echo but a profound nausea that coiled in his gut.
The city’s exhalation filled his chest. The mingled aromas of pralines caramelizing in copper pots, chicory coffee steaming from café windows, and powdered sugar dusting fresh beignets momentarily grounded him in this reality. His fingers found the small protective charm his sister, Belle, had given him, tucked in his vest pocket, its surface warm against his skin despite the morning chill.
A cluster of early revelers stumbled past, their sequins catching sunlight and throwing it back in fractured patterns. One woman—glitter embedded in the creases around her eyes, feathers drooping from her headdress—halted mid-stride, her laughter evaporating as she noticed his complexion.
“Where y’at, Jack!” she called out, her voice carrying the particular lilt of the Ninth Ward. “Chile, you peaked early. Carnival spirit done got to you already? You lookin’ like you seen all the way to Ash Wednesday and back.”
“Just getting into the spirit,” he managed, but the words scraped his throat.
As the time shifts worsened—more frequent, more intense, more disorienting—his body felt increasingly threadbare, like a favorite shirt washed too many times, the fabric thinning where realities rubbed against each other. Time had never played by the rules for him, presenting itself not as a flowing river but as a shattered mirror, each fragment reflecting a different moment, a different possibility, a different version of himself—and sometimes, a world where Lynda still breathed.
His phone vibrated against his chest. The screen illuminated with Zara’s message: Working the door at Maison. Stop by. I bet you’ll need a friend today. The corners of his mouth lifted in a genuine smile. Zara always sensed when he needed a lifeline, as if she could read the temporal disruptions in his voice, his posture, his silences.
For a blessed moment, the world steadied around him—colors regained their proper hue, sounds their natural cadence. Jack savored this pocket of stability, knowing from experience how fleeting such moments could be.
The walk from Bywater to Marigny became a gauntlet of memories, each street corner an ambush. Not timeline remnants this time, but raw recollections: Lynda’s laughter spilling from that café where they’d shared crawfish étouffée during her last visit; her voice calling from a neighbor’s porch during last year’s St. Joseph’s Day; her silhouette framed in that doorway, backlit by Christmas lights as she’d waved goodbye. New Orleans transformed into a living photo album where every page unleashed fresh grief.
A group of tourists weaved across his path, faces painted in garish purples and greens, beads clacking against their chests like plastic rosaries. Their laughter scraped against his raw nerves. The smell of spilled beer and cheap hurricane mix rose from the sidewalk, mingling with the perfume of blooming magnolias from a nearby courtyard.
They don’t understand, he thought. To them, it’s just a wild party, a chance to shed inhibitions along with their sobriety.
But Jack knew better. His mind drifted through past celebrations, memories of Lynda dancing in the street, her arms raised to catch beads, face alight with joy. He understood how locals embraced this time—from Twelfth Night’s first slice of king cake to the final bead tossed on Fat Tuesday. It was more than parades and excess; it was New Orleans’ soul laid bare—a frenzy of cultures and traditions colliding before the quiet contemplation of Lent.
“Happy Mardi Gras!” A sunburned tourist in a plastic mask raised a daiquiri in passing.
“Laissez les bons temps rouler!” Jack replied, tipping his hat, the familiar phrase settling in his mouth like ashes. Let the good times roll—a cruel imperative when your world had stopped spinning.
The crowds swirled around him, an irresistible current of humanity flowing toward the heart of New Orleans. Their bodies pressed against his occasionally—a shoulder here, an elbow there—each contact a brief tether to this timeline. The crush of people generated heat that rose through his clothes, making the cool morning air feel like a blessing against his face.
He adjusted his top hat, fingers tracing the worn velvet band where Lynda had once pinned a small gold fleur-de-lis. The absence of that pin now felt more substantial than its presence ever had. A question surfaced in his mind, one that had been haunting him since he’d seen the inconsistencies in the police report: What if her death wasn’t an accident? What if the missing forty-five minutes held the key?
How could the world keep spinning like this? Jack’s fingers curled into fists at his sides. The sharp pain anchored him, preventing another shift. Lynda’s gone, and it’s like the city doesn’t even notice. The parades still roll. The bands still play. The sun still rises.
Jack understood and loved New Orleans—a city that danced in its graveyards and celebrated in the face of disaster—where joy and sorrow walked hand in hand down streets worn smooth by centuries of both. But today, that duality felt less like wisdom and more like betrayal, as if the city’s refusal to pause its revelry somehow diminished Lynda’s absence.
In the distance, the bell tower at St. Louis Cathedral chimed out the hour. The main bell, Victoire, deep tone rippled across the Quarter. Jack counted each toll, using the steady progression of sound to hold himself in this moment, this timeline, this reality—however imperfect it might be.