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Joan didion west and south5/7/2023 “Whose fault is it,” the old woman was saying to the waitress in the coffee shop, her voice trailing off. The death had seemed serious but casual, as if it had taken place in a pre-Columbian city where death was expected, and did not in the long run count for much. After the police ambulance came I followed the old woman through the aqueous light of the Pontchartrain Hotel garage and into the coffee shop. “Dead,” pronounced an old woman who stood with me on the sidewalk a few inches from where the car had veered into a tree. Charles Avenue I saw a woman die, fall forward over the wheel of her car. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead. The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence. In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology.
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