INTRODUCTION

     The editors used to send me out to cover the weird stories. The five-thousand-dollar sex doll. The Trashcan Symphony. Gems like that. So, naturally, when the whole spectacle played itself out in the news, they asked me to find out about the tattooed girl and write an in-depth piece. But when I started to research what had actually happened, I began to see the outline for a narrative of greater-than-magazine-format dimensions looming in the residual smoke. I started to get to know the people involved on an intimate level, and everything would have gone well except that, over the course of that month, I developed kind of a little heroin habit and missed the deadline. The editors fired me.
     When I finally got my laptop out of hock, I had soured on the idea of the article. I still felt the story of the tattoo had to run somewhere, but I soon learned that people get touchy when you tell their stories too accurately. Eventually, I even had to leave town because a homicidal Cuban, whom you are about to meet, was out to kill me, and so was the New Orleans Police Department. But that is an entirely different story.
     Some elements of this novel may seem to border on fiction, but I assure you that all of the events actually happened, at least according to the freaks who reported them to me in an extensive series of taped interviews. You will notice that I have included actual excerpts from the transcripts of these interviews, which took place in the early fall of 1996 in an empty turn-of-the-century industrial building in New Orleans. I lived there on the third floor, and the interviewees upon whom I have closely based the characters would have to rattle their way up the old manually-powered freight elevator, pulling down hand over hand on a hemp rope that ran over a rusted steel pulley. Often they would bring groceries for me because I had developed an irrational distaste for leaving the building. Tall windows lined the front and back of the space, which was empty except for a bare mattress with someone else's happy memories etched all over it in overlapping stains. My visitors usually sat on the mattress, on the floor, or paced.
     If you want to imagine me, just think gorgeous.

CHAPTER 1. TURNED AWAY

     When Prytania Relf's boyfriend disappeared with their motorcycle, she packed a large duffel bag, left San Francisco, and headed back home to New Orleans to find the tattoo artist who had begun her snake tattoo some months before. The trip had taken two days, and now she drove through the night at seventy miles an hour on the raised section of Interstate 10 that crosses the swamp between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Close off to the right, the dark mass of a tree line blocked out a sky without stars as she slipped a White Zombie CD into the player. Prytania, whose friends knew her as Tania, didn't know she had blown speakers and thought White Zombie actually sounded better breaking up on her car stereo. The Interstate rose into a long arch, sloped off to the right, then slid down into the final stretch across the wetlands to New Orleans, where an amber mercury-vapor glow shone against a close overcast in the distance. As the tree line receded, a light that blazed bigger and more intensely than any artificial light she had seen before came into view, like a sun or a star that had deviated from its assigned trajectory to a dangerously close orbit, or like Godzilla welding the earth to the sky with his breath. No. Bigger and brighter than that. Had we been there to see it, we might have felt an indefinable sense of unease, as if Nature might take offense at the rival star. We might have seen it and said to ourselves, in that room under the one where all the talking goes on-we might have said, "Well, now we have really gone too far," but Tania had no such thoughts. She only wondered what it was, and as she looked, she began to see the details. Towering flames gushed out of a slim cigarette of a smokestack jutting from a snarl of pipes, metal armatures, tanks, and smaller smokestacks that released steam, smoke, or dim blue flames.
     Her eyes began to tear, because whatever they were burning at Norco was irritating her mucous membranes. A couple of hives popped up on her wrist. She cursed and rolled up the window on the expanse of fertile, contaminated swamp that stretched out to the torched horizon just beyond which lay the Mississippi River, the intestinal tract of the country.
     Every waste product between the Rockies and the Blue Ridge Parkway ultimately finds its way down the old brown sluice, be those products inanimate or otherwise, and any route you take to New Orleans, you must enter over water or swamp. By the time you get within twenty miles, they are already trying to poison you-even before you make the first bar. When you get into town, you are on a patch of land way below sea level, and once in the French Quarter, you look way up over the high wall that runs parallel to the levee and see ships passing by above. Without the extensive system of earthworks and turn-of-the-century pumping stations of red brick and monstrous green piping, the water would seep in from all around and rise up into the streets, and the river-who knows what bed she would end up in?

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