NBA Season Preview 2018-19: Pelicans light out for the territories

This narrative preview about the New Orleans Pelicans is adapted from the opening chapter in With the Memphis Blues Again:

3035 K.D.

DAY 5

They had lit out for the territories. They had expected artifacts of truth. Instead, they found no rhyme and no reason. Thick clouds gathered on the water. Ghosts emerged in the shapes and the shadows. They were not wrong to see the past tacking a line across the whale gray waters. Despite the mist and a slit of sunlight, everything lay within the kiln of the visible world, its manes and its hunters. The nets did little to delay their travels. The ghastly wraiths minded their progress with a distance bordering on prehistoric weariness, as if time’s fecund larvae might still percolate in the still waters, or a magician’s spinneret. Inside the ken of Old Man Riverwalk, they had approached the River’s former delta, where the flood waters swallowed everything of import within their mightily frothing swell.

The oil-bleached sand sludged through the cracks in the young man’s fist. He squatted under the arc of his unibrow, contemplating this rare hint of un-flooded parchment. A rare gust of samurai wind cut across the dying sandbar, and pellets of sand slashed the slow gathering waters.

The men had left the oil rig where the colony gathered in the flood’s wake. They set out with patience running thin, and on their journey, they had seen no ships as they passed through the Gulf’s ever-expanding Dead Zone, and no ships approached further on, where the River’s mouth had stretched wide like a boa constrictor’s jaws, until the shoreline, its deltas and its swamps, vanished into a vast and haunted harbor.

Like a flickering tongue, the sandbar lapped the air where tides chose to waver. Once upon a time, the tide did not exist at all. The Mississippi had forced everything in its path into the Gulf, shaping the world on the whims of its appetite. Now, however, the bloated River settled in stagnant waters, breeding out the disparity between life and death.

Inches below the water’s surface rested a marble door. The lid of some lost crypt, it was the relic from a lost empire washed in waters that cared not for human endeavor. The young man without a unibrow squinted into the shallow prism, attempting to read the runes that danced in the gray shallows. Much of the carvings had been smoothed into blank spaces, but some letters remained.

“The name M-A-R-A-V-maybe an I mean anything to you?”

The young man with the unibrow remained in a crouched position, a 7-foot giant curled into a fetus, holding tightly to the silt dripping like wax from his knuckles. He had a world, but no handle.

“Yo, how long we going to camp here, A.D.?”

The young man with the unibrow rose, his arms and legs long and slim, like poles supporting an ancient beach house — the kind nobody builds or lives in anymore. He watched a speck float in the sky’s distant gray tides. He drifted with the sight, his legs scissoring the water like the slow-moving stilts of a heron. The water filled the holes he left behind like a beast grown lazy with its ravenous appetite. In gurgling swills, the empty spaces filled with a flood’s certainty.

The other young man, the one standing over the watery crypt, followed his partner’s stare. “How many are there?”

The man with the unibrow spoke. “The lead one is smaller than the rest. I think it’s a different species of bird.”

The birds drew closer. The shapes of their wings and bodies became more distinct as the dotted line approached. Behind the small speck of the first bird were what appeared to be twenty-three pelicans. Some started to dive into the water with a suddenness that suggested they had been shot. Their dives proved futile, however, and their bills rose empty from the waters. Others glided along the water’s surface, having long ago given up the search for food. The small bird, however, took its time, fluttering in a manner both rapid and patient, before eventually landing on a patch of granite-colored sand. It seemed to both lead and ignore the flock behind it.

“Boogie, I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but that one at the head of the pod is a passenger pigeon.”

“Like what used to peck breadcrumbs on city streets?”

“No, like the species that’s supposedly been extinct for centuries.”

They watched the birds peck and claw in the shallows, while others swam at a distance.

The young man without a unibrow, but who was just as tall, removed a heft of bread from his rucksack.

“Careful,” the other man warned, “we may not have enough as it is.”

The man laughed. “But what else you gonna do with pigeons?” He broke the bread into crumbs and scattered them on the water, as the other man thought to himself: only one’s a pigeon and not even the kind of pigeon known for eating bread crumbs. Of course, the pelicans cared little for either man’s thoughts. They pecked and nibbled at the bread. They tossed crumbs into the air and swallowed them like rainwater. As they did so, the two men climbed into their boat and shoved off from the sandbar eroding into the water. The motor of the boat guzzled on gasoline, breaking the stillness before it and leaving a wide ‘v’ behind it.

BEYOND THE DAYS WHEN THEY STOPPED COUNTING

The motor on the boat did not buzz. No oil combusted. It sat in silence and offered a weak reminder of a world that once roared on gasoline. That world no longer existed. The gray water congealed between the banks, trembling in muted whispers, aping a time before this one. The waters crept towards the poisoned Gulf, slow and numb and without purpose beyond the mechanical. The looming size of the banks spoke to what was once a higher, more powerful tide, or perhaps to the migratory habits of glaciers. The present offered no precise answers, only hunches and a desire to train in the lost arts of knowing. Roots jutted out from the sloping lands, choking on gray dust and even grayer air. The dark trunks and bare branches stood like giant scarecrows, but there were no birds to frighten. The sky lay frozen as the tundra once had. Anthony and Boogie rowed, emerging larger than their efforts primarily due to the fact no else existed. They arched their backs and pulled the oars. They rowed against the tide’s bloat, away from that lost southern land and into the unknown north. The dead-ness of everything spoke of the inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

At night, they camped in between the muddy murk and the dried slopes. Sometimes they slept in the concaved mouths of the old embankments. They discovered artifacts in the silted ruins of the natural world. They pulled up fishhooks and fished out arrowheads. They found old washing machines and dryers, carburetors, and electric fans in search of outlets. Sometimes they found whole cars. Once they found a rusted pickup with a skeleton inside. The bones wore a veil of faded denim. Sometimes the bones wore nothing but a bottle of bleach. They found muskets and shackles. They found the rotted planks of rafts and steamboats. Everything in the world meeting the same end in the same mud of the past and often, although they didn’t speak to it, they didn’t recognize any of it, causing them to wonder what was really lost and what was found was more a matter of debate than actual understanding.

They recalled distant stories about how the northern territories were cold and frostbitten, but as they rowed and the days surrendered before them, they felt no change in the weather. The sun rose and set in stagnation. In fact, other than a trading of light for darkness, it was difficult to assume weather was still a function of the earth’s orbit. The storms that greeted them earlier on their journey had been reduced to anomalies. Variables were now extinct. Constance had been achieved. The year was 3035 K.D., but it could have been any other year. They often heard the old man’s words on the wind that would not blow and wondered if he was right about everything and nothing. They feared they were headed nowhere. On a night as black as any other, they arrived at what they surely believed to be the headwaters, for the River’s banks widened into an oblivion beyond measure.

“Shine a light,” said Anthony and so Boogie did.

He strobed the path before them and what they saw was a field of sludge — an impenetrable marsh. They rowed until they could row no further. That night they slept in the bottom of the boat. In the morning, the sun would reveal in full what the flashlight had only glimpsed: Lake Itasca was no longer a lake, but a marsh full of ten thousand puddles.

Scattered in the mud were horned Viking helmets as if internet hoaxes had come to life. Swords, battleaxes, and tomahawks. Some of these were embedded in corpses, some skeletal and some like bloated bog men. When the two travelers lifted their heads to the sky, when they looked for someplace to aim their questions, they noticed that beyond the haze and fog were rafters holding up the dawn’s gray veil.

“Can you see that?”

“See what? This graveyard?”

“No, beyond the clouds, can you see the roof?”

Boogie stared at the gray sky.

“It looks like the bottom of a ship.”

“That’s no ship,” said Anthony, pointing to where they had entered the lake in the night. Beyond the tip of his index finger was the pale shape of a wild animal’s jawbone. The marsh’s murk ebbed between the teeth that were large as tree trunks.

“Does that answer anything for you?”

“This doesn’t answer s**t,” said Boogie, noticing a giant pair of spectacles in proportion to the wild animal’s skull.

They walked along with the Old Man Riverwalk’s prophecy gurgling in memoriam: “You seek The Garnett Trail, but you will not find it, at least not together.”