Strange Animal by Lorette C. Luzajic

after The Devil: a Life, seventeen glazed ceramic figurines, by Nick Cave (Australia) 2023

“’I know it sounds strange, because it is a strange story,’ she said.”

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

1. I have many strange stories: this is one I seldom tell because I don’t know how. I don’t know what to make of it myself. My interpretation of the memory has changed many times over the years, but it remains a conundrum I can’t make sense of. I can only relay what happened, as best as I can recall it. I’ll let you decide what it means. If anything.

2. So many unexplained mysteries take place in New Orleans. That means this story is really something of a cliché.

3. Still. Vampires are true, I can tell you that much.

4. What was I doing there? I don’t know, not really. There was a film called Highway 61 (about the same highway where blues legend Robert Johnson allegedly traded his soul to the devil for music at the crossroads.) It was about a quirky couple from Northern Canada who took a drive all the way to Louisiana. After the movie ended, my girlfriend looked at me and said, “So, you wanna buy a pick-up truck and head to New Orleans?” We were hangry for adventure, so that is what we did.

5. Fast-forward into context. The romance of two young, free-spirited girls blazing south in a freedom mobile turns sour fast. There were so many expenses and we did not think that out at all: we naively believed the universe would provide. In its way, of course, it did. Our friendship was a bit weary by the time we got there. There was magic, yes, those nights in the back of the truck’s belly, parked in a cotton field in Alabama, looking up into a star-spangled eternity. That’s all that matters now.

6. Okay, so the thing I saw. Then or now, I don’t know what it was.

7. It was some sort of animal. Nothing like anything I’d ever seen or known. It was crouching there in the shifting shadows, on a wraparound porch on the Esplanade above North Ramparts, on the outskirts of the French Quarter. I was stumbling back to the squat, with a goth queen named Wolfgang from Salt Lake City, a fiery redhead in a long black cloak. Our eyes met with the eyes of the thing. It was a distorted and grotesque gargoyle. It’s hard to remember now what is memory and what is a memory of memory, embellished or glossed over, altered along the way. It was somewhat larger than a raccoon but looked more like a cat, but it had a long, coiling tail like a monkey, and it had many folded legs, like a spider. It had the face of a bird, but flat, like an owl. After glaring at us for a time of frozen silence, it opened its beak or jaws or God knows what those fangs were all about and made a deep, raucous sound: CAW, CAW, CAW. We tore out of there when the thing sounded its warning.

8. In the basement of the burn-hollowed plantation house we were squatting in, a thin, vague girl was sweeping furiously in the centre of a dozen tealight candles and the broken mirrors that amplified the flames. The goths had their own linguistic currency that I wasn’t a part of- I didn’t know their gods or their lore or the mysterious operations of their underworld. It wasn’t enough in New Orleans to say you liked Nick Cave or This Mortal Coil. And in a sense, all their frayed lace and gloomy eyeliner were not sufficient, either. You had to embody Byron, or be a million years old, or actually drink blood, to be real.

9. Even so, they were clean and friendly and they were fellow readers, and if I was tired of Anne Rice and Edgar Allen Poe, they were less prone to havoc than the gutter punks who slept upstairs and in the servant’s quarters out back. The goths were fey and elegant. They did not get into brawls or piss and vomit where they slept. Their repertoire of mythologies meandered through time back to Sumer and Assyria. They loved to recite poetry. So I liked them.

10. It would have been weirder to see that thing somewhere other than New Orleans, you understand. Santa Monica or Orlando or Houston, no matter. But the jewel of the Mississippi River was overflowing with old spirits and voodoo. The darkness was palpable even in the blazing noonday sun.

11. One of the velvet-gowned urchins nodded knowingly when word got out about what Wolfgang and I had seen. They said it might have been a strix, as matter of factly as if we had seen a poodle. They immediately offered up sage and a small stone bowl full of wildflowers and herbs meant to protect us from this mythological force we had encountered.

12. Some years later, my dad asked me about The Thing That I Saw. He had carried my story inside a framework of belief that was different from but similar to the paradigm of the goths. He was deeply concerned that what I witnessed was a demon. I had to admit, that was my best guess. But I didn’t believe in demons. There had to be some other explanation.

13. Yes, I was crazy. Yes, I was a troubled youth. Yes, I had umpteen diagnoses and severe childhood trauma. And no, I was not sober. I was shitfaced on daiquiris and nickel shots and whatever crumpled pills I found on the bar floor or in my pockets. We all were. We always were. My testimony wouldn’t hold up in court. Yes, I could have been seeing things and probably was. Still, Wolfie and I both saw the same thing at the same time, and we heard it, too. There is also the simple math: I have never seen any other strange animals in my time. I was not prone to paranoia or dark hallucinations. I saw that hideous thing and I only saw it that one time. One time too many.

14. The wildest and worldliest man I’d ever known was the one I briefly married. He had seen all manner of things you could not believe. One day he found me poring over old texts about cryptozoology, turning up nothing that matched. I told him about the sighting. I expected some kind of knowing mystic nod, but he said simply, “It was some kind of animal who got too far from his jungle. The south, those ships, anything could have hitched a ride.” Years after, a National Geographic at the library had a spread on hideous marsupials. There were so many weird creatures, and many looked like hybrids of old folktales. Of course all monsters are those from here on earth.

15. What’s stranger than the porch sentinel is everything else about New Orleans. I fell in love there, with an enigmatic ex-con, and mayhem ensued. And I found something of myself there, even though I was so lost. I put dust from the cemetery into my bra, still have it saved in a tiny tin box. I looked for swamp ghosts and dodged gators in the rural backwoods of the south. I was eaten by fire ants. I witnessed a hundred things I can’t explain.

16. I still remember a hippie strumming his guitar on that Mississippi riverbank, Led Zeppelin: Yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers, but everything is born to die….

17. I went home. I went elsewhere. I went back. I never saw Wolfgang again. I still have a picture of him.