We were the three of us in bed together, the Palm Tree Wholesaler and the Division-I High Jumper and me. The High Jumper slept in the middle and on his side, his back facing me and his left leg thrown over the legs of the Palm Tree Wholesaler, who released long, grunting snores in choppy blasts. This snoring seemed a conscious labor, an object of severe but frustrated focus. The athlete’s breathing was nimble in comparison to his lover’s, and together the two sounded like unfamiliar animals getting acquainted in a black wilderness.

I had not asked what brought them together, even though I wondered about it constantly. The D-I High Jumper was around twenty-five, a couple years younger than I was. The Palm Tree Wholesaler was white-haired, bearded, in his early sixties at least. His snoring got louder, then it ceased altogether, and I felt movement through the mattress, the flop of sheets being tossed aside, the weight of him rising off the bed. He padded to the bathroom; piss dribbled into the toilet bowl. I listened to him flush and rinse his hands. “You awake over there?” he asked. “Yes,” I said. “How awake?” “Completely,” I said. “Come sit with me,” he said. 

I followed him to the suite’s darkened living room, where the sky filled the windows like a curtain of blue velvet, no stars, the upper columns of the twinspan bridge glowing orange, a fire someone had left to burn out on its own. The Palm Tree Wholesaler, boxer shorts softly edged by the milky light of a moon I could not see, gathered up a bottle from the minibar, hooked his fingers into two glasses.

I sat by the window. From there I could look down and see the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel. Or, the collapsed construction once meant to be the Hard Rock Hotel. I’d driven the D-I High Jumper and the Palm Tree Wholesaler past the wreckage earlier that night, on my pedicab. They asked to stop for a photo. The High Jumper broadcast shaky footage of the twisted metal and exploded concrete to a small audience of friends on his phone. The upper floors of the half-finished building now leaned petrified at a steep angle, and I imagined the moment when the ceilings came smashing down to meet the floors. Despite the humid night, I’d shivered, felt the now-familiar compulsion to flee the city, the incipient panic seizing the muscles in my chest. The High Jumper cackled, “Only in New Orleans, y’all, only in motherfucking New Orleans,” while the Palm Tree Wholesaler wagged his dick for the High Jumper’s camera before pressing it back into his shorts. He put a hand on my shoulder to steady himself, and climbed back onto the bike. “Take us somewhere fun,” he said. “Someplace lively.” I pedaled them around the Quarter for six hours. At first, I stayed on the street with the pedicab and read Gargoyles while they drank in one dive bar after another. Near midnight I was convinced to join them. I changed into a spare T-shirt so as not to be caught drinking on company time. 

The Palm Tree Wholesaler ordered us shots of Jameson and Miller Lites. The D-I High Jumper kept curling an arm into the Palm Tree Wholesaler’s, or caressing his thigh, or scritching the snow-white hair at the back of the Palm Tree Wholesaler’s head, and though the Palm Tree Wholesaler never reciprocated these gestures, it was clear that he liked being on their receiving end, that there was a fresh comfort to it. He seemed magisterial, a man who’d finally taken just one small step off the beaten path and found the kingdom he’d been prodigal from waiting for him there. The Palm Tree Wholesaler handed me money, a fifty- or hundred-dollar bill every half-hour or so. No matter how many drinks were in him, he retained the nervous habit of turning his back to me and hunching over his wallet to extract the bill. From time to time they fell into long stretches of awkward silence, mouths frozen at half-smiles, and I understood the reason for this when the D-I High Jumper dropped a plastic baggie of mushrooms on the floor while yanking his phone from his athletic shorts. I wondered how the sad light of those barrooms appeared to them, how the glow thrown by each dust-furred bulb might in its passage through their dilated pupils and into their brains transform into some strange personal heaven, totally inaccessible to me.

In their suite I watched them fuck in the dark, the D-I High Jumper slowly thrusting himself into the Palm Tree Wholesaler, whose moans were absorbed by the couch pillow where he’d buried his face, his swept hair like a single whitecap on the surface of a black lake. When they finished, he offered me another five hundred dollars to stay the night, which is why I ended up across the table from him as the sky grew pale. 

The Palm Tree Wholesaler poured and we sat drinking. He told me about his wife, how they had an agreement, how she was free to do whatever she liked, too, how he didn’t mind, how he loved her still but only in a certain way. Their children were grown, one a criminal defense lawyer and the other in residency for internal medicine. 

“Why stay together?” I asked. 

The Palm Tree Wholesaler swirled his drink and smiled and said, “You are young.” 

He was from Georgia, someplace coastal and beautiful. I asked him about his work. In the dark, the Palm Tree Wholesaler described the scope of his operation: the number of people he employed, the major clients he served, his ingenious adaptations to volatile market demands. It seemed to me absurd, in a world where money was stockpiled through blind transactions in some technological nether space, that a man could sit atop a fortune generated and sustained by the interstate sale of trees. Excited to have an audience, he went into the bedroom for his phone, then showed me photos of the palm tree farm which had been in his family for nearly a century, rattling off names of species as he swiped: the medjool date palm, the queen, the Mexican fan, the Bismarck. He showed me black-and-white photos from his grandfather’s era, when the farm was modest, and then photos from the fifties, when it started expanding. In contrast to these quaint images — men in dented straw hats and rolled-up shirtsleeves, women in simple dresses that displayed muscular arms — the present-day farm seemed sterile and bloodless, a place of machinery and noise, hardhats and neon safety vests, the older simplicity wrecked by the forces of efficiency. 

The Palm Tree Wholesaler played a video of a tree being uprooted by a backhoe and several men with picks and shovels. Following the backhoe’s lead, the men worked in a slow circle around the base of the tree. As it began to loosen and sway, one of the men tossed aside his shovel and hugged the trunk to steady it in place. The Palm Tree Wholesaler swiped to a video of the tree slowly being lowered onto a truck bed. “This is what they do all day,” he said, sounding pleased with himself, and then, as though for proof, he swiped to a photo of a truck bed piled high with palm trees. Then there was a photo of a man gripping his leg just above the knee, his jeans slick with dark red blood. The image lit the Palm Tree Wholesaler’s face briefly before he clicked off the screen. “Oh,” he said. “Unfortunate accident, about a year ago. But he’s fine now. I took care of him. And his family.” He added this last bit with mild annoyance. 

I asked, “How much do you pay someone like that?” 

“Pretty well. At least I think so.” His teeth flashed in the dimness. “Why, you want a job?” 

“Maybe.”  

“I thought you were a writer,” he said. “A bohemian in New Orleans.” He said this without irony, and I saw that he honestly considered both me and the lifestyle he thought I was living exotic. Something in me coiled tightly. I know this doesn’t explain anything, not really, but when the Palm Tree Wholesaler said, “What do you write, anyway?” it was like a lever that forced open a floodgate, and I ended up telling him I hadn’t written a word in years, that I used to write and write and write like a steam engine, but now I couldn’t muster even the slightest bit of energy for it, that it felt ridiculous to write, to create anything at all. I even admitted that I was depressed, that I drank too much, that I couldn’t stand being around the few people who were once my friends, and that the past hours with him and the D-I High Jumper were the most lively I’d had in a long time. 

When I finally finished, the Palm Tree Wholesaler lifted his glass to his lips and said, “Again, sounds like youth talking,” and when I glared back at him, he smiled and said, “Don’t take it the wrong way.” 

The sky had lightened to the blue a PC screen throws upon a dark room. The Palm Tree Wholesaler stood. But then he paused; he’d caught sight of the toppled construction project. “Look at that mess,” he said, shaking his head, “Who wouldn’t be depressed, living in a place like this?” He set his glass on the windowsill and shuffled toward the bedroom. I drifted off on the couch. Late morning, the D-I High Jumper nudged me awake and pointed at a breakfast plate, scrambled eggs and sausage links and buttered toast, waiting on the coffee table.

***

That afternoon, the three of us took mushrooms in an Uber to a landscaping expo.

At the convention center, the D-I High Jumper and I stood discreetly behind the Palm Tree Wholesaler while he negotiated name tags for us at a front table. When the woman there seemed baffled, we watched the Palm Tree Wholesaler go off to the side to speak with a second woman. The second woman disappeared behind a vinyl screen with the expo’s logo on it, then reappeared with two laminated name tags clipped to lanyards. The name tags only said GUEST, and the D-I High Jumper and I bowed our heads as the Palm Tree Wholesaler lowered them around our necks. 

We passed through an archway of palmetto leaves and palm trees in massive pots, and the landscaping convention exploded into life all around us. A beaming woman invited us to caress a sample of Kentucky bluegrass. A pair of men in bright green polos on gleaming tractors matching their shirts stared at their phones. In the middle of the hall, a makeshift greenhouse of clear-plastic housing steamed from within, populated with the vague shapes of shrubs and trees. Booths marked with trade names lined the perimeter of the massive hall, advertising lawncare and water systems, all meant for a vast scale, the potential clients not homeowners, but golf courses, botanical gardens, entire municipalities. The mushrooms were kicking in. The three of us stopped before a flatscreen to watch an infomercial about how one company was “reimagining” urban public spaces: an overgrown park cross-faded into a manicured lawn with a reflecting pool; an exhaust-stained double highway became a tree-lined boulevard. For a minute I became emotionally invested in these gaudy transformations: Each blighted “before” photo brought on the beginnings of a panic, from which each resplendent “after” photo seemed to save me. The Palm Tree Wholesaler said, “I’ll tell you what, they could use some of that in this town,” waving his hand to acknowledge New Orleans. “This city stinks to high heaven.” 

The convention seemed endless. We wandered into Hall J. Everywhere, people clamored to shake the Palm Tree Wholesaler’s hand, either nervously introducing themselves or trying to hide their dismay as they reminded him of their names. I asked if he had a booth at the conference, if he was here to sell trees, and he said, “I’m on the board of the association. I’m the keynote speaker this year.” 

While he posed for a photo, flanked by four women from the expo’s Women in Landscaping contingent, the fire alarms started screeching. From high above, sprinklers threw water onto us. The hall erupted into a frenzy, staffers materializing with rolls of can liners and conventioneers scrambling to cover their posterboards and screens. One man popped open an umbrella and held it over a cardboard diorama of a golf course while he himself stood getting soaked, and this sent the Palm Tree Wholesaler and the D-I High Jumper and me into such a fit of laughter that we ended up rolling on the wet carpet, drenched through our clothes.

When we joined the crowd outside the convention center, we saw the reason for the alarms: another collapsed under-construction hotel a few blocks down the street. Our clothes dripped as we stared at the sand-colored cloud that hung motionless against the blue sky. 

*

At dinner, we sawed apart three bleeding steaks and the Palm Tree Wholesaler said, “There was a time I would have only thoughts about myself. They’re a client, you know, the Omni Hotel group. They were going to line their entire valet area with my palm trees.” He wiped grease from his lips with a napkin. “But now I don’t feel even a tinge of annoyance.” Smiling at the D-I High Jumper, he said, “Maybe I’m just a happier person.” The High Jumper said, “Just wait until the mushrooms wear off,” and we all laughed. When dinner ended, we drank our way through the Quarter again, and the Palm Tree Wholesaler got loose with his money again, handing me two or three hundred dollars at a time. 

On a Bourbon Street balcony, he told me that he wanted me to come back to Georgia with him. He owned a condominium building, there was a vacant unit that I could live in, nothing out-of-this-world, but it was near the beach, and he wouldn’t charge me. “You could write to your heart’s content,” he said, and drained his cup. He stared down into the streaming crowd, Bourbon Street a red underglow in his beard. “You wouldn’t have to worry about all this shit,” he said, and threw the plastic cup into the crowds.

In the suite, I watched him get fucked on the couch again. As he began to come his arm groped in my general direction and he laced his clammy fingers into mine, and it was not long after this, as I lay in bed listening to their mingled snoring, that I heard what I thought was close thunder. The hotel quaked and the fire alarms screeched and we bolted up in the bed like the Three Stooges. We joined a glut of pajamaed guests and went hammering down the stairwell, the D-I High Jumper supporting the Palm Tree Wholesaler, who had trouble with stairs, for all eight floors down to the cavernous lobby, where a concierge with a bullhorn stood on the reception desk and repeatedly warned us to stay indoors, to stay calm, not to open the doors. Over the panicked crowd, I saw that the hotel’s high, street-facing windows were filled with a blank gray swirl, a whole world of dust outside moving like it was in a hurry to get somewhere. Nothing else was visible. Material reality had suddenly decided to rearrange itself.

I squirmed through the crowd to the windows. With my forehead against the glass, I could feel irregular thumps, like handfuls of dust were being tossed against the window. I thought of the cracked basketball courts near my house — silent at this time of night — being obscured by a rolling carpet of dust. The thumps were like a countdown to a new year, to a new life, to an ending that was also a beginning, and each beat on the glass seemed gentler and more playful than the last, and, though I’d lost count, I was still in the act of counting the thumps when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the D-I High Jumper. “I need your help getting him back upstairs,” he said.

We got an Uber to the airport after fifteen tries. As traffic crawled, I watched the Palm Tree Wholesaler buy three tickets to Savannah on his phone. To our left the eastbound lanes were totally empty. I checked my phone. There were a string of texts from the emergency line, enlisting able-bodied people to assist in searching for survivors trapped in the rubble. If you could help, said one text, you’re needed. 

“We’re all set,” the Palm Tree Wholesaler said, shoving his phone back in his pocket. 

“Thank god,” the D-I High Jumper said, turning around from the front seat and making inadvertent eye contact with me. I fixed my gaze forward on the Infiniti QX80 in front of us whose license plate read BLE55ED. 

The Palm Tree Wholesaler began thinking out loud. “I’m pulling all of my business out of here. I’m never coming back. It’s a shame. It was really such a wonderful place. It was looking so good for a while, money flowing in like Niagara Falls. What the hell happened? Everybody got greenlit. California money is pumping through this place, serious fucking money, but you can’t lipstick a pig, a fat fucking greasy fucking shit-slathered pig rolling around in big piles of — ”

Without a word, I stepped out of the car and into the stopped-dead traffic. It’s not like I was overcome by a wave of selflessness — there’s not a heroic bone in my body — but the texts buzzing against my thigh were particle waves that revealed my shape and position by throwing light on the negative space around me, revealing the invisible strings that fixed me in place. The Palm Tree Wholesaler stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Come on,” his tone that of someone yelling after a spoilsport walking off the field of play. 

I didn’t turn back. Ahead of me, the city smoked and shimmered.