Creative Nonfiction: Iridescence by Eugenie Dalland

It was February 2020, and I was barreling down Broadway in lower Manhattan, late for a meeting. I paused on a street corner, waiting for the light to change. My heart pounded in my chest, and as I caught my breath, I watched a bus go by with an advertisement plastered across its windows. It featured an image of a robot in a vast sea of red sand. The tagline read, “Freedom isn’t free.” I knew that it was for a television show’s latest season, but for some reason it made me uneasy. It felt like a public service announcement, though I didn’t know why.

A little over a month later, the message would have a far more definitive meaning. I had just arrived in New Orleans for a wedding and a residency at the home of my friend Lucia, who picked me up from the airport in an old, beat-up Jaguar sedan. The weather was beautiful as we drove by an abandoned construction site on Canal Street that had collapsed in October 2019. The top floors looked like concrete pancakes, with two massive cranes dramatically frozen in mid fall. Something about the destruction was, perversely, fascinating, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the remnants of this sad and avoidable accident. One of the construction workers had alerted his bosses to the buckling braces of the upper floors, the result of substandard supports and rushed construction by shady developers. They threatened to fire him for speaking up, and three days later the building collapsed, killing three people.

As usual, the city had neither the funds nor the propriety to organize the site’s dismantling. The dilapidated building sat untouched, an extraordinary vision of catastrophe that, as the months passed, became just another feature of the landscape. The extent of the city’s handling of the incident was a large tarp secured over the front of the building to mask the rubble from the multitude of tourists on Canal Street. As if on cue, the wind ripped the tarp off one day in late January, exposing a decomposed body whose torso was wedged between two collapsed walls. Its twisting legs dangled in the breeze above throngs of horrified sightseers below.

Lucia recounted this macabre denouement as we made our way back to her sprawling French Quarter home where I was to spend three weeks writing. The air was pleasant and warm, a stark contrast to the biting cold of New York City. In March, New Orleans is threaded with jasmine that grows in heaping bundles over fences and up walls, as common as a weed. The blossoms look like tiny white propellers nestled within dark foliage, and their scent is almost as intoxicating as the gardenias that bloom a month later. Solemn visions of the rotting corpse and its swaying legs arose in my mind as I inhaled the jasmine’s unavoidable perfume.

The wedding was canceled the morning after my arrival due to the spread of the virus. Boarding a plane back to New York seemed unwise, so I decided to stay with my friends in their home until further notice. I figured I’d get tons of writing done—maybe even enough for a book. The tides of panic were rising daily, but we had wine. A lot of wine.

I stayed in a spare apartment behind their house, built in the mid-19th century. The walls were made of twelve-inch stone, which kept the interior rooms cool and slightly damp. Narrow French doors opened on to a large courtyard laid with moss-covered bricks. Tropical foliage climbed up the walls of this enclave, and the trickle of a small fountain provided a kind of lullaby at night. Two sleek cats prowled in the shadows of the garden, hunting lizards.

Each morning I sat beneath a canopy of palm fronds whose pointed fingers cast shadows on my hands while I read. An enormous magnolia tree stood in a dark corner of the courtyard,  carpeting the ground with its waxy leaves and cream-colored flowers. Despite the fact that I’d spent much of my childhood in New Orleans, I’d never before realized that a magnolia blossom, before it has bloomed, smells faintly of lemon.

The moment I left these confines, however, the world around me filled with terror and uncertainty, as piles of the dead mounted outside hospitals. Even the air seemed different when I ventured outside: neither warm nor cool, but rather an impossible kind of temperature that felt like the temperature inside of a dream. The streets of the city were apocalyptic in their barrenness of human activity. I did not miss the throngs of tourists, but the immaculate silence that replaced their chatter was deafening. Gargantuan cloud formations sailed serenely across cerulean skies, but on the ground, there was little movement aside from the stray cats that sat like talismans on top of fences.

While I was free to enter and exit this dreamscape (wearing blue plastic gloves and a flimsy mask), that movement constituted my sole option of physical engagement with the outside world. My sense of want grew to proportions I had not known were possible. The mundane actions of my public life, such as kissing a friend goodbye or pressing up against strangers on a subway now appeared to me like sumptuous liberties. I felt barred from living my life, in all of its minute exchanges, when I stepped out on to the street, as though straps had suddenly been cast around my arms and legs, and buckled tightly.

I made it as far as City Park one day, a fair distance from the French Quarter. A group of ducks rested on the surface of a wide, shallow lake, and I stood there staring at them for several minutes. Sweat pooled in my plastic gloves, puckering my fingertips as though they’d been immersed in a bathtub. I suddenly had the nerve-wracking impression that my entire body was wrapped in that thin plastic, unable to move. My mind strayed to thoughts of the ocean. I remembered swimming illegally in the Hudson River’s dark, choppy waves the previous summer, behind the skirts of the Statue of Liberty. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to jump into the lake with the ducks. I fled, instead, back to my perfumed cell.

That freedom should not be taken for granted was something I could not understand until now, when the sensation of restraint flooded my body the moment I left the house. The jarring concurrence of my emotional experiences—pleasure and terror, freedom and confinement—created in my mind’s eye a strangely flickering effect. Inside the courtyard there was laughter and beauty and wine; outside, there was a hushed silence as though the city was holding its breath as a demon passed by. It was in this way that delight was woven into the same cloth as terror.

I found a name for this effect—iridescence—in a book I was reading. Of Gwendolyn, George Eliot’s anti-heroine in Daniel Derona, Eliot wrote that “those who feared her were also fond of her; the fear and the fondness being perhaps both heightened by what may be called the iridescence of her character—the play of various, nay, contrary tendencies.” As I sat beneath the palm fronds in the courtyard with the book in my hands, I wondered what my visceral impression of the corpse have been like without the near-obscene sensuality of the jasmine’s fragrance. Would the small, pristine flowers have seemed so alluring without the grievous vision of rotting flesh? Do the details of life, I thought, have deeper meaning when presented in concert with some version of their opposite? The advertisement’s injunction came back to me and I rolled the words around on my tongue. “Freedom isn’t free, freedom isn’t free.” They tasted like something forgotten.

Spring gave way to the heat of early summer, and I went on rides throughout the empty city on Lucia’s ancient bicycle. The day before I left to return home, I strayed further than usual and got lost. Many of the street signs throughout the city were blown off during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and most were never replaced. I stopped in the middle of a block beside a derelict house, its Greek Revival facade obscured by a dusty-looking cumquat tree. I squinted to see the names of the streets ahead and behind me. “DESIRE” was written on one of them. I turned to look in the other direction, barely making out the letters of the other thoroughfare. “PIETY,” it read. I laughed into the brightly lit silence, the sound going nowhere. It felt like the universe was winking at me. This wasn’t quite the same “iridescence” that Eliot wrote about, but perhaps it was an extension of something it implied: the distance between “contrary tendencies” is sometimes shorter than we assume. In my case, at that moment, it was only a few strides.

Eugenie Dalland is a writer and editor based in upstate New York. Her essays, reviews, and other writing have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, and Cultured. She is the editor and publisher of Riot of Perfume Magazine.