Messi@ (10 page)

Felicity stuffed the pictures into a manila envelope and stuck it behind the framed print of Botticelli's
Primavera
hanging in the bedroom. Then she pulled on a T-shirt, got back on the bed, and pulled the warm laptop onto her naked lap, ready to make love with people from history.

The doorbell began ringing repeatedly, insistently. Felicity glanced at the clock radio—11:45
P.M.
A little late for business. And she was on the verge of meeting Joan of Arc. She pulled on a pair of jeans and reluctantly put Joan on hold.

Felicity slid out the top drawer of her bedside table and took out the Beretta. She slipped it into the waist of her jeans. The cold barrel on her belly gave her gooseflesh. “Get bigger,” she whispered; “you're not just symbolic.” She cracked the door, secured by the safety chain. Standing there looking mournful were the Pakistani and his friend. Their faces, glazed by the streetlight, were moist and fleshy like wet pears.

“Can we talk?” whined the Pakistani.

She decided they were too stupid to be dangerous, and opened the door. The tattooed bodybuilder sat down on the only chair, and the Pakistani's eyes fastened on a framed photo of Mahatma Gandhi on her desk.

“We have a common hero!” he exclaimed, evidently pleased.

“What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“You fucking bitch!” growled the American.

“Beg your pardon?”

“What the gentleman means is, we would like the film,” explained the other. “You give it to us, we leave. No problem.”

“Let me put it this way, doll. You can give us the pictures or you'll never want to look in the mirror again.”

“You're such a fucking cliché.” Felicity took out her gun and pointed it at the man's shiny forehead. “Maybe I mess up
your
mirror, Jack. Take off your shirt!”

The thug wasn't particularly startled, but his partner launched into a stream of nervous chatter: “This isn't necessary. We were only asking. The film belongs to us.”

“Take off your shirt!”

Deliberately, without taking his eyes off the gun, the one in the chair pulled the sweatshirt over his head. His torso was swarming with swastikas, hundreds of them, like a nest of spiders. They came crawling out of the hair on his chest and buried themselves in his armpits, and tattooed below each nipple in two vertical columns were the words
WHITE
and
POWER
.

“I'll be switched!” Felicity nearly dropped the gun. “A real live Nazi!”

“I'm sure he had to do such things in prison,” the Pakistani sputtered.

“You can start with your names.” Felicity clicked off the safety.

“Bamajan.” The Pakistani instantly complied. “It means ‘announcer of God.' A herald.”

“Harrold? Bama? From Alabama? The Crimson Tide?” The Indian's accent was funny. But the name was weirdly familiar. Miles's junko partner had called himself that—he must have been God's announcer, too.
That
Bamajan, whom she hadn't seen in two years, was a trumpeter, so his name fit. He was also a heroin dealer and a pimp. The announcer of Satan, more like it.

“You can just call me Your Worst Nightmare,” offered Mr. White Power, in his turn.

“Nice name. Look, we can do this one of two ways. I can shoot one or both of you for breaking and entering, or you can tell me your story nice and easy, and I'll tell the cops you were just playing.”

Truth be told, Felicity had no idea what to do. She was afraid to pick up the phone and let her attention waver for even a second. The Nazi was coiled like a snake, just waiting to get to his piece. She couldn't just hold them indefinitely. The men were silent, seeing, she imagined, right through her.

“You got swastikas on your dick, too?” Her best tough-girl voice.

The Nazi rose to his feet. “With your permission.” He undid the belt of his pants and they fell with a thunk to his feet. Felicity was sure that there was a gun in the pocket. He wasn't wearing any underpants. The lower part of his body, including his penis, was as densely tattooed as the rest of him.

“You look like a freakin' jigsaw puzzle!” Felicity was genuinely amazed. “Who assembled you? Hitler?”

The man made a move to pull his pants back up, but Felicity barked sharply, “No! Step away from them!”

Hitler's jigsaw puzzle did what he was told, and Felicity ordered Bamajan to shove the trousers toward her. She felt with her foot a wallet in one pocket, a gun in the other.

“You working for Mullin?”

“We do his bidding,” answered Bamajan fiercely. “He is God's messenger. We are God's announcers. Gandhi was one, too. Be simple! Be simple!” He was becoming agitated.

“Okay, Announcer of God, take off your clothes!” Felicity had hit on a solution to the standoff.

The Pakistani didn't unravel so easily. He was more layered than your average American. Under his shirt he wore a kind of teddy with laces at the back. His flowery boxers were backed up by a pair of powder blue bikini briefs. His brown skin looked like just another layer of clothing, and for a moment, Felicity actually thought that he would remove another layer. There wasn't a hair on his body—his pubis was shaved clean, smooth as a pat of butter with a Vienna sausage stuck in it.

“Fucking pansy,” laughed the Nazi. “We useta grease up guys like you and play pass-the-meatball.”

When both men were naked and Felicity had their clothes in a bundle at her feet, she asked again for their story.

“I want to know who owns you, and I want it in plain English. And just to reassure your fucking bare butts, I'm a lesbian. You're ugly as shit to me, and it would only give me pleasure to shoot you. I'm a member of S.C.U.M., if you must know.”

This speech unsettled Bamajan, but the Nazi just grinned.

Bamajan lowered his head, and covering his exposed parts with his hands, related quickly that he was in charge of protecting the Most Holy Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin; that he and millions of others around the world believed that Mullin was the reborn Redeemer; that he himself belonged to a Hindu sect, though he had been born a Muslim; and that the entire sect had converted to Mullinism in 1996.

“Mullinism?” Felicity stifled a laugh. “How many of you are in the city?”

“Ten—”

“Shut the fuck up, you rice cake!” hissed the Nazi, straight backed and stark naked, staring hatefully at Felicity.

“I'll get to you in a moment, Goebbels! Where'd you find this scum bucket, Bamajan?”

“Many of our followers are converted in prison.”

“You talk too much, soy breath!”

Felicity'd had enough. “Get the fuck out, both of you! Turn around! Open the door! Out!”

The last she saw of them was their asses, one hairy white ass stenciled with swastikas and one round brown hairless ass atop two spindly legs. She called the police and reported two naked men prowling the neighborhood.

The real thing. Felicity was shaking, still clutching the Beretta. Sangfroid. Wait till I tell the major. Uncle, I was on the verge of a transtemporal sexual experience when I was rudely interrupted. Or even better: I was about to be bedded by Joan of Arc when a real, live Nazi invaded my office. Adrenaline pumped through her. She paced. She made coffee. She wanted to call somebody, but she no longer had any friends. Miles's crowd was into nightclubbing and drugs and staying up all night. In the daytime world she'd made few lasting acquaintances. Still, she wanted real, live, fleshy, friendly human contact now. She poured a cup of truly evil java and was startled by the thought that she had enjoyed the company of the two naked men. It had been a relationship, as they say. Was she this despondent, deprived, twisted?

Felicity was bothered by her body's evident interest in the disturbing images of the day—the whore's finger in Mullin's mouth, a Nazi's tattooed dick, a virtual fuck world. Why couldn't she get off like everyone else, in the missionary position, with a finger on her clit? In the normal world of men and women, orgasms were as bountiful as peanuts. Or were they? The images that aroused her despite herself came from that normal world, after all—the world of pedophile preachers, tattooed dicks, and techno-perverts. What if everyone was thriving on hellish and tormented imaginations made “normal” only by a common agreement to treat hell as if it were home? In the last five years, death had taken more than a dozen of her friends. Dying young from the sexual plague was so common now only the loved ones of the deceased mourned. The world no longer empathized. All the stores of common grief were empty, and the store of compassion, once abundantly open at the death of the young, was empty, too. What if another cargo had moved into those empty stores, crawling pornographic visions intended to blot out the pain with … quaking peanuts?

If such were the case, if the world was hell, salvation had to come from somewhere, and soon. The genetic puzzle was nearly unraveled; the tiny demons crossing the wires deep within were all named and numbered. In a few years, scientists had mapped the human genome, giving names to every tiny particle in the blueprint of life. And yet death strolled at leisure, picking the choicest of the young, without hurry, without panic. What gives death such confidence? I suppose, thought Felicity, that death knows something that makes it confident. What does death know? Maybe death knows that we all feel guilty about something. Maybe we feel guilty about knowing something that we aren't supposed to know. Like what am I not supposed to know that I actually know? Felicity searched the trembling bud knotted tightly in her sternum, a knot of knowledge, brimming with guilty puss like a boil. But it was nothing; it was only guilt about knowing … death. Felicity surprised herself with the circular banality of this discovery: death drew its power from her knowledge of death. As idiotic as the near tautology was the simplicity of the solution: death will be ended by one who knows nothing of it. An innocent, a freak, an idiot. This brought back a dim memory:
Felicity's a freak! Felicity's a freak!
She heard childhood voices chanting this but was comforted as soon as she heard them. Children! Of course. Children had no idea that they were living in hell. They felt no guilt knowing death. Children were freaks and idiots. She, Felicity, was almost as freaky as a child, guilty knot notwithstanding. She had not yet had an orgasm. She felt relieved, and proceeded to investigate the contents of her would-be assailants' pockets.

The naked men were picked up before Felicity had even examined very thoroughly the contents of their wallets. A young policeman knocked at her door. Felicity shoved the men's clothes behind the bedroom door and let him in.

Officer Joe Di Friggio hid his green horns under a studied frown.

“You the one who called?” He pulled out his notepad. “Willing to testify in court?”

She answered only the last question, saying that she preferred not to show up in court. She had merely glimpsed them out the window and done her citizen's duty.

“Isn't it illegal,” she asked rhetorically, “to be naked on the streets?”

Officer Di Friggio looked doubtful. After all, this was New Orleans. Joe wrote down his number on the back of a ticket and handed it to her. “In case you change your mind?” She reached for it and tugged, but Joe held on. “You never know about these naked characters,” he said.

“You mean there are a lot of them?”

“Dozens every night.” The patrolman grinned, still holding on to the ticket. “We pick 'em up like pecans in October.”

“Your country upbringing,” said Felicity, finally wrenching the ticket from him, “has given you colorful speech.”

“Hate to disappoint you, but I'm from right down here in the Irish Channel. Only I'm Italian.”

This was more than Felicity wanted to know.

“Are they dangerous?” She hoped this sounded sincere.

“Naked men,” he snorted. “How dangerous can they be? Unless they was hiding stilettos in their behinds.” Joe laughed, showing many white teeth. “Unless what they wear in front presents a threat to you.”

“On the contrary,” said Felicity. “I'm always surprised by the disparity between advertising and reality. But I do call the cops, just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“Just in case one of them lives up to the ads.”

After he left, Felicity allowed herself to tremble some more. She double-checked the locks on all the doors before she stripped again. She pulled on the loose black denims of the Nazi and fastened them to her skinny middle with the belt of her bathrobe. She tried to imagine what it was like to have a penis covered with tattoos. Her trembling was compounded by a fierce arousal. She flopped down on her bed and turned on the laptop, ready to make love to people from history. Or anyone else for that matter.

Chapter Six

Wherein Andrea, the Bosnian orphan, is fascinated by a television game show

Andrea's improved health did not escape the notice of the hospice's guests. Some of the scholars began to follow her around; others arranged to bump into her at breakfast or in the library. The girl became a subject of discussion among the distinguished residents.

One plausible explanation for their common fascination was offered by Dr. Luna, the Mexican priest: “We spend our lives studying and watching, watching and waiting. When something or someone unusual appears, we agitate. To people such as ourselves, a girl like this is like a new language!”

The first sign that Andrea was returning from the mist she had been wandering in was when she began to watch television in the lounge after supper. She was especially interested by the game show
Gal Gal Hamazal
, the Israeli version of
Wheel of Fortune
. She sat transfixed through the entire half hour.

After watching the program for the first time, she was in much improved spirits and even told a little joke to the assembled guests.