Orleans by Sherri L. Smith

pavement rose up, wet and mineral, from the broken road. Daniel kept his eyes on the ground. The humidity fogged his face mask and the rain dotted his vision with tiny magnifying droplets, giving him a sense of vertigo. Evening was falling fast. He adjusted his goggles for lower light, his breath heaving like a bellows in his ears. The Superdome was ahead of him, where Poydras Street was partially blocked by a wall of debris. According to the datalink, he needed to go west of the Dome, into Uptown. But the Superdome was an icon of old New Orleans—the defining silhouette of the city’s skyline, the sports stadium that had housed thousands of football games and concerts in its heyday. Now that he was here, he couldn’t help but take a look.
    A causeway of broken concrete had been laid out like a dam, a crossing for the earliest funeral parades. At LaSalle Street, the young river that was the far end of Poydras became a pond. He could see the dull grayish sheen of the water up ahead as he came down the road. And then he saw the memorials, like faces of the dead peering up out of the water—masques made for Mardi Gras of years past sunken beneath the surface as if pulled under by mermaids or undines.
    The Drowned Dead, names painted lovingly along the cheeks and brows on the masques, slowly deteriorated beneath the muck. It accounted for the milky quality of the water leaking from the pond into the river stream. Daniel had mistaken it for silt of some sort, minor pollution. But it was the face paint and the decorations of these memorial masques, washed away by the gentle lapping of the dammed pond.
    Thirty thousand people had huddled inside the Superdome after the first of the big storms. Katrina turned the Dome into a refugee camp. Lorenzo turned it into a morgue. Jesus turned it into a tomb.
INQUIRY: Number of dead buried in the Dome?
RESPONSE: The New Orleans Superdome can seat up to seventy-two thousand people. Number of dead unknown.
    The street was wide and exposed. Daniel was grateful that the sun had set, leaving a dim twilight through the fading rain. He had no desire to run into any of the locals. He reached the causeway, the peaked tumble of rocks and debris that blocked the flow of water and lead across Poydras to the ramps of the Dome. Daniel looked at the footing, the tiny slides where the rocks were unevenly stacked. Marking his path, he hauled himself up to the crest. The path was surprisingly even on top. For a moment, he could picture the long line of mourners two-stepping beside the shrouded bodies.
    Wide enough for a parade, he thought.
    The Dome loomed above him like a poached egg in a cup. The top was shattered, tapped by a giant spoon. He picked his way across the bridge to where the old wheelchair ramps led up to one of the double-wide entrances.
    “It weren’t no parade,” the smuggler had told him when Daniel first commented on it, six months ago in that small bayfront divers’ bar on the Chesapeake. “They started piling bodies to keep down the rot. The Dome had generators and air-conditioning back then, so they ran it high like a refrigerator and kept bringing them in.”
    “It wasn’t done second line, like New Orleans used to do?” Daniel had asked. He had seen footage of the funerals, tearful black-draped crowds on the way up the slope, cheerful dancing mourners on the way back. It was this second line of partiers, often strangers joining the dance, that gave the marches their name. They carried feathered umbrellas and were led by jazz bands. One news story had shown a photograph of a woman, mascara running with tears as they carried her husband and child into the Dome. The headline had read RESILIENT—THE SOUTH WILL RISE AGAIN . The woman was quoted as saying Jesus had risen on the third day, and for New Orleans, the third day was coming.
    “Hell, no,” the smuggler had cursed. “That was a show for the reporters, something the mayor and the governor fixed up. By the end of it,