So death had turned up its nose at us, leaving us once again to our own devices. I was still painfully sleepy, irritated beyond reason and generally hung over well into the afternoon. I therefore willfully ignored Jim and his ridiculous plan, only hours after we had pulled into the campsite, to get up and re- arrange the stuff in the car. A thin layer of sweat kept my skin sticking to my sleeping bag. I was already drowning in hot, used-up air, but I pulled my pillow over my eyes.

'Look, Mr. Finn, go ahead and fuck with it to your heart's content,' I said, and drifted back off to sleep.

When I finally got up, Jim's stuff was all neatly stowed & squared away in the trunk, so I just straightened up my stuff in the back seat, as the trunk was pretty well spoken for. At least I'd have my tapes and such close at hand while driving. I took my bike off the flimsy trunk rack and U-locked the front wheel to the frame, then chained the whole thing to one of the larger trees beside the tent.

Looping around the Quarter on the streets close to Bourbon, a parking spot eluded us for twenty minutes or more. I was still wrung out a bit from the events of the night before, perhaps, but for whatever reason I felt considerably foggier than usual that afternoon. The hassle of driving and parking claimed the attention of most of my brain, and I was unprepared for anything to happen for several minutes after we started walking again.

Jim and I climbed out of the car, discussing what we should do (eat, and then drink?-- drink, and then eat?--) as two guys walking by asked for a cigarette, or change, or something. They looked like shoe-shine con-men, healthy, dusted and grimy. Somewhere in their thirties, with skin much darker than ours.

Sympathetic, unworried, I said, 'Don't have any right now,' as I stood on the cement, the driver's door still open around me. There was this moment though, (flicker, flicker) where they were standing and staring at us and I felt like a goldfish in a shark tank. I thought they might know exactly how many dollars were in my pocket, or that under my jacket was the black rectangle of our tape player. I closed the door, trying to do something natural. Jim gave them a cigarette, though, or said something friendly to them, because on the surface, the incident melted away and they continued down the sidewalk.

We started to move down the street, crossing over to the other sidewalk, the other two men shiftying out of sight.

'Think we should move the car?' I asked, just to ask.

"Nah, it'll be all right. Besides, where the fuck are we going to move it to?"

'Point.' It was still daylight. And nothing had ever made any sense to me, anyway.

We hit Bourbon Street down from the largest squall of humans a bit, mostly shuttered houses pressed right up against the sidewalk. We stumbled into a bar, more properly a shack I suppose, made of cement and plaster, its wooden supports at crazy angles, and inside as dark as you could want. Everyone at the bar was a couple decades older than we were, so I just asked the bartender about someplace to eat.

A couple blocks over we found the place he sent us to, white walls soft-lit, and ordered the sampler dish. When the gumbo arrived, I set about learning to break open a crab claw. Jim grinned at me grinning as I finally wrestled it into submission, crab juice squirting onto the tablecloth. The rest of the food was just what I had been hoping for: rice, beans, tomato and spice. As I ate I felt a flash of something abnormal, like contentment, and I wished deeply for something to happen, something good, to suddenly wake up and find my life at the tips of my fingers, somehow less revolting and tiresome than before.

The idea of spending money on food tended to frighten me. After you'd eaten, what did you have left but a feeling? Even though it was only twenty apiece, I felt momentarily uncertain of myself.

'This was definitely a good idea,' I said, and Jim, looking cheery and full, nodded, convincing me, almost.

We went back to the car for some reason, maybe in part to check on it. I put the tape player in the footwell throwing a pile of random clothes on top. This was only peripheral paranoia. I was more worried about the car itself: brand new, more or less in our care, with no alarm on it, deep inside a crime-ridden tourist trap. I wished we had teleported in.

I'm not sure what exactly we did for the rest of the night. We obtained drinks, but I was edgy enough about the previous night to keep it down to a few. I know we wandered up Decatur, eager to see what a weekend in this place would be like. Sadly, it just seemed more crowded, and we meandered through the emptier side streets with a sense of relief.

Soon it seemed a good time to head back. But here I was, barely tipsy, in the one section of the city with an actual grid to follow, and neither of us knew which street we'd parked on. As we checked two blocks west of Bourbon up and down past several intersections, I got progressively more and more panicked and less and less sure of my memory. After enough time had passed, I wasn't even sure (think think shut up think think think) whether the street we'd parked on ran east-west or north-south.

Jim led us down a street that looked completely unfamiliar.

'Are you sure this is where we parked it?' I franticked at him.

"No, I'm not sure! I'm looking for it!"

'What if it's not there?'

"It's there! We just have to find it!..."

We took several more turns before I saw what appeared to be our rented blue econobox appear half a block away. Perhaps because it was book-ended by unfamiliar cars, but for some reason I didn't feel any relief, any sense of recognition. The cold wet boa constrictor failed to uncoil from my stomach as we walked quickly up the sidewalk to see the passenger window smashed in--

Some strange internal process suddenly flooded me with an endorphin calm (yes, how silly, everything's just fine) nature lends to all her brave coyotes as they sprint off the useless cliff and fly toward the glorious expanding accelerating flatness of the desert rock below.

Staring through the curiously transparent window space, I pulled the blue door open, scrambling into the back seat, patting the seat cushions as though hoping my clothes and bags had simply become invisible, or had cowardly retreated under the front seats.

My sense perceptions (striped seat fabric under knees, glittering bits of aqua-tinted glass on gray ribbed floor mat) stayed unbelievably sharp as my eyes roamed across the street to safely closed sleeping green shutters, gaslight creating flickering shadows at the end of its reach.

I leapt out of the car suddenly, running up and down the sidewalks, looking wildly each way for anything dropped or thrown down. I heard a soft ringing in my ears, as if from a direct blow to the back of the skull, perhaps from straightening up into the corner of a kitchen cabinet at great speed. So I can't tell you what I said, or what Jim said, for that first minute or two. There was just an endless sensation of weightless, isolated horror and nausea. Picture Dave in 2001 as the explosive bolts hurl him spinning into the vacuum.

The glove box was still hanging open. Above it on the dashboard rested a clear plastic cup holding an inch or two of beer abandoned by the thieves. I stared at it for a long moment. Somehow this little bit of carelessness added a touch of humanity to what was otherwise an implacable demonic presence.

Absurdly I thought about gloved hands dusting the cup for fingerprints before I threw it, at full force, out into the street. I could see a little bit around that corner, enough to know that kind of effort would never take place, not for me, not in this city, not in this lifetime.

I pulled the trunk release on the other side of the driver's seat, just inches from my missing bags. I walked behind the car where Jim and I both stood behind the open trunk, in awe at the precise stacks of Jimmy's stuff, exactly where he had left them. Some small portion of my heart noted that my largest bag, containing my license and traveler's checks, remained steadfastly in the trunk as well. But as I had the receipt for the checks in my shoe, I couldn't help but wish they had taken the damn checks and left me my tapes.

My functionality was minimal. At first I asked Jim to drive, but he was considerably drunker than I was, and I wasn't going to take that chance two days running. Although I watched my hands move on the steering wheel, I can't tell you how exactly I managed to swing us around to eastern boundary of Rampart and drive down to the cop shop.

I parked the car under blinding floodlights on the asphalt of the gas station next door. I re-read the car rental agreement there in the light of the gas station, trying to translate the legal jargon into words I could understand. We'd need a police report in case of theft, if we had insurance, which of course we didn't, but if it was a Thursday, or your last name does begin with an 'R' then blah, blah, blah. Something would have to fall out of the sky for it to-- instinctively I looked up. Nothing falling at the moment. I got out. Jim convinced me I'd be happier if he didn't come along.

The first police station door I tried was locked. Even in a city like this one, I reasoned, the cops must do their thing around the clock. The other door swung open, and I helplessly pulled and vaulted my way up the stairs around a landing to a steel door. I hesitantly opened it and stepped into a tiny waiting area blocked off from the rest of the room-- a few desks, a radio, two cops, a file cabinet-- by a L-shaped counter.

The dispatcher, who looked like Captain Kangaroo might have if he'd spent several years convincing blood vessels in his nose to explode, said something to me. I really didn't know why I was there. I had the momentary impulse to just walk back out through the metal door. For a moment it was immensely quiet, and then I put words in the air, like putting up my hands, or waving a white flag.

'I'm here to report a theft.'

They gave me a form that was something like an autopsy report. I wrote:

'Several bags (dark blue) containing:

Even at that moment I was still capable of saying to myself, '--and the walkman's radio tuning is for shit, and the camera was pretty marginal, and the boombox was on its last legs.' But that wasn't the point.

Here's what I really had lost, here's what I should have written (striking my forehead after each item on the list):

In short, virtually every object on this scummy planet I desperately wanted to hold onto. All of which most likely dumped in a trash can somewhere within a dozen blocks. How many rocks of crack could they have possibly gotten for it all? I mean have you ever tried to sell used cassette tapes?!

I felt totally unable to imagine what came next.

'Well, I know it's not too likely that anything'll come of this, I just thought that on the off-chance any of your officers came across someone with this stuff tonight...'

Captain Kangaroo looked pained behind that bushy gray mustache of his. I felt him sending out helpless guilt as he responded, "Well, you know, you gotta lock everything up in your trunk. A lot of people-" he paused meaningfully- "come down here and they just leave all their stuff out in the open--" he spread his hands-- "and whattya expect? I mean, this is a high-crime area."

Right as he finished speaking, a second door opened next to the one I'd come through, and a third cop, shaped something like a young Jabba the Hutt wearing a grimy gray 'members only' jackets above tent-size brown pants, stepped over to the counter. Jabba passed a cup of coffee to the second cop behind the desk, who until then I hadn't paid much attention to.

The guy who he handed the coffee to was in his thirties, with short brown hair slicked stickily against his head, and I had the odd impression he might have been an ethically shaky desert mechanic in another life. He looked like a weasel-- he had the build for it.

I absently-mindedly responded to the dispatcher. 'Well, yeah, we had more stuff than would fit in the trunk...' The dispatcher leaned back in his chair a little, impatient in advance with whatever I would say.

The weasel took his coffee from the oversized gray arm, with a "Danke schoen" in what he seemed to think was a perfect German accent.

I was still talking to the dispatcher. '...And I was more worried about the car itself than anything else...'

"You like my German?" the weasel asked the members-only jacket, who shrugged.

'I mean, there was a trunk release inside the car-- I didn't think anyone could miss it. Then again, they left their beer-cup on the dash-- I guess I just wasn't expecting such sloppy crack-heads--'

The weasel was droning on, "I like the Germans. I sorta figure, anyone who takes out six million at one shot's gotta be doing something right."

I trailed off, watching the dispatcher look sideways at the weasel in uniform.

"It's just too bad while they were at it they didn't get those, what, transylvanians..."

Jabba, bored, asked him, "You see that, what is it, Schindler's List, yet?"

The weasel grinned, "Well, I been meaning to, but I gotta tell you the truth, I been kinda putting it off--" he grinned wider-- "'cause if I go in there and see all that stuff happening up there, I'm not gonna be responsible if I start beating off right there in the theater."

Jabba chuckled.

The dispatcher looked uneasy under his eyebrows for just a second as I slid his copy of the form across the counter at him.

I walked to the exit door and yanked it open. The weasel above the shiny seven-pointed star on his blue uniform smiled at me, and I let my lip curl at him like a cockroach before I let the door close behind me.

I spoke through the empty passenger window. 'You're not even going to believe what happened in there.'

Jim glanced over at me silently, his eyes startled, and surrounded by tenacious bits of broken glass.