Messi@ (33 page)

Felicity felt more and more at peace with herself. She sang and she lived
feeling
. She had no past and she felt no need to think of the future. She lived in an eternal
now
, punctuated by the steady rain that fell on the roof of the building like a lullaby. One night a violent thunderstorm shook the building, but the thunder and lightning that had frightened her so much, once upon a forgotten time, did little more than punctuate her happiness. She recalled vaguely that she lived in a city that floated on water, where rain came often in great bursts, but she did not care for the outside any more than she did for her past. Her secret knowledge that some of the women in her class were famous historical figures remained twined around her arms in the invisible bracelet, but she rarely sensed its presence now. It did not seem to matter. She saw them every day and was glad to see them, but little by little they became transformed and quiet. If they were indeed who Felicity thought they were, they gave no sign of it. They rarely spoke, and the silence was soothing.

The School for Messiah Development was rigorously segregated. The women, who were all students, ate alone. The teachers were all men, but Felicity had glimpsed other males, muscled types with dark sunglasses who never looked at her.

In a small classroom with pillows on the floor, an Indian man with a white turban spoke about Jesus. On the wall behind him were brightly colored lithographs from his life. Jesus was blond and blue eyed, not dark and Semitic the way she had seen him in song. His hair reached past his shoulders. One of his hands stretched out in blessing, while the other rested on top of a crooked staff that was also a snake. His eyes followed her everywhere, no matter which way she turned her head.

“You wonder,” the turbaned man said, “what kind of Christian I am. I was not always a Christian, but all that is left of my past is the turban on my head. My heart is full of Jesus and my mind does his work. You too will have only an outward trace of your wicked life left, after you accept him. You can decide now what you want to keep, or later, but it will be harder later.”

Felicity was certain that nothing remained from her former life. All that must have at one time mattered to her was no longer an inner concern, but something removed from her like dresses worn on occasions no longer important. She knew that she was not alone; Jesus was with her. Now and then an anguished voice within protested this, but it broke against the joy she experienced.

Beware, the broken inner voice said; this happiness you feel is false. But it did not feel that way at all. Light danced in all her bones, and her heart was seized with so much tenderness she cried often and with abandon.

“Pay good attention,” the teacher said, reading from Revelation words that struck a painful and familiar chord in her:

“‘Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked to me,' wrote John, 'saying to me, Come I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication.… So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness. And I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast which was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations and the filthiness of her fornication. And on her forehead was written:
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
.'”

Felicity knew then that in her wicked former life she had been that woman. All the happiness drained from her, replaced by a wave of sorrow so profound her weeping changed. The salt of her tears was bitter now. She knew that this bitter salt was the oldest salt on earth, an element stretched like a shroud over the first layer of matter. Felicity saw the air fill with millions of salty sevens. The very fabric of the air was woven out of myriads of that number writ in salt. And she saw the woman on top of the beast, which gave off an unbearable stench of corpse. The mounted woman was the Whore of Babylon, drinking the cup full of the still-living ejaculates of her many lovers. She, Felicity, was the Whore of Babylon. She became a single cry of agony, reduced only to a burning wish for salvation. She folded in on herself, wet with her own tears, and implored the lithographs: “Take me, Jesus!” Her whole body exploded with light, and the rings in her nipples, the invisible bracelets on her arms, and the gold loops in her ears became incandescent and burned her. She tore them off, without taking her eyes off the Savior, imploring him between sobs, “Save me, save me!”

Two times a week, the women sat before computer terminals. Felicity's job was to download streams of names, numbers, and photographs of men and women. Some of them wore suits, others had on work clothes and hard hats. At first she thought that these were employment records, but soon she realized that they were more than that. She seemed to be downloading the contents of some vast industrial company's computer. Other women were similarly engaged with long files.

At the end of her first hour, Felicity tired. She rested her arms on top of the console, and her invisible bracelets began vibrating. After a time, she found herself touching the keyboard lightly. Her fingers punched in an oddly familiar sequence, though she couldn't remember its purpose.
Make Love to People from History
appeared on the screen. The message confused her. She was as filled with love as she could hold. How was it possible to “make” more love?

She walked out of the room, and nobody stopped her.

Day after day, her happiness alternated with sorrow. At night, spent and thin, she sunk beneath her coverlet of darkness and was as if dead. She knew only day and night and was unaware of either the year or the season.

Chapter Twenty

Wherein Andrea and Ben hastily depart Israel

Yehuda ben Yehuda withdrew from his account all the money that his father, Dr. Redman, had reluctantly surrendered to his son's religious education, and bought two airplane tickets with it. They were the cheapest tickets available, on BookAir (“The Airline for People Who Read”), a cut-rate airline that offered no-frill flights around the world. Instead of fancy electronic entertainment—movies and music and earphones—BookAir offered only rafts of used books left behind by previous travelers. Their flight was scheduled to leave in the early evening from Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, arriving in Atlanta next morning.

Andrea's lack of papers was a problem Ben undertook with some pleasure. He had created numberless fake IDs in high school for his underage classmates. His work had been quite renowned. He had with him an expired driver's license that had belonged to his sister Clarisse. He pasted a small picture of Andrea over Clarisse's. He next produced a birth certificate modeled on his own, a painstaking calligraphic work that Xeroxed perfectly. He booked Andrea's flight under the name Clarisse Redman.

They boarded a bus full of soldiers, many of whom leaned on their guns looking dreamily at Andrea, who wore a tiny miniskirt out of which her skinny legs stuck out like a puppet's. They recognized her.

“All these soldiers want to kiss me,” whispered Andrea to Ben. “I am going to perfect my kiss so that it becomes atomic, a laser. I'll then be able to kiss everyone who wants to kiss me.”

“The whole world?”

“Why not?” She wrapped her bare arm around his shoulders and put her head on his chest. A female essence like almond and warm burnished copper suffused him.

“This must be my
chingush
day,” she said.

“Your what?”

“My
chingush
. Since I was small, I always lose one day a week to the
chingush
. It's like a little tornado; it picks me up and it takes me somewhere. When I come back I don't remember what happened that day at all. I think that only good things happen on my
chingush
day.”

“How do you know if you can't remember?”

“Because I feel good afterward, like I took a sauna.”

“Which day is it?” Ben wanted to make sure that he knew so that he could mark it in his calendar: “Wednesday is Andrea's
chingush day
. Don't expect to see her.” His father always marked his wife's periods on his desk calendar. “Be extra careful,” he wrote in the squares.

“I never know which day it is. All I know is it's once a week.”

Great. The
chingush
could strike any time.

What Ben did not know and Andrea did not tell him was that her
chingush
had once lasted four years. That is how long she had been lost until the day a man had brought her to Saint Hildegard's. She remembered nothing from those years, as if she had not existed at all. If she had told Ben, he might have run away from her. But Ben, from his fairly limited contact with citizens of the Old World, had already understood something about Andrea's
chingush
, namely, that being lost was part of every European's past. What little he understood of history made him aware that Europeans needed to forget the past and were thus often amnesiac and lost, whereas Americans suffered amnesia in the present and were lost amid all their bounty. This was one of the reasons he had left his country. There was another difference, too, which was that the amnesia of Europeans could cover centuries, while Americans could experience an eternity of forgetfulness in the space of just an hour.

“Do you have all your things?” asked Ben.

Andrea pointed to the cardboard tube she had laid on the luggage netting over their heads.

“Is that everything?”

“Everything.”

In addition to what she wore, Andrea had kept the round box bought at the
suk
and Sister Rodica's cotton underwear. They rattled about inside the cardboard tube.

“You'll need another change of clothes,” said Ben. Her miniskirt bothered him, but not as much as her high platform shoes. She looked as if she might topple from them at any moment.

Andrea allowed that she might. All she really wanted, though, was a pair of fluffy white wings. Once more, she was Victory.

In Tel Aviv she purchased a gold Byzantine cross from a Yemeni jeweler—Ben protested weakly, thinking of his mother—and a gold pendant inscribed with the Jews' lament in Babylon. Andrea hung these two symbols on a chain she already wore around her ivory neck.

“It's all the clothes I need.” She leaned her head back for Ben to better admire her jewels.

Ben leaned close and held the Jewish talisman, and read:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

let my right hand wither;

let my tongue stick to my palate

if I cease to think of you,

if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory

even at my happiest hour.

Ben-Gurion Airport was a cross between an army barracks, a Roman forum, and a multipurpose church. When they arrived, a cordon of soldiers was keeping the crowds away from an armored limousine. To one side, a wailing family of Palestinians watched their enormous bundles dismantled by Israeli soldiers. Toothpaste tubes were squeezed out over silk pantaloons, and jars of yellow saffron rained over holiday suits. It was not a pretty sight, and Ben, despite his rabbi-induced conservatism, cringed. At heart he was as liberal as his father. Oppression made him sick.

Andrea's attention was riveted by a group of arriving immigrants from Russia, who lay on the ground, kissing the asphalt of Israel. They looked like overweight birds stuck to the tar. She saw the joy that radiated from them like puffs of blue smoke. She could taste their tears washing into the tar. Years of quiet terror and a vast store of daily humiliation poured from them like sweat. Enjoy this moment, Andrea urged them silently; it's the best. This is it. Soon you will receive the blessings of reality, its imaginative hassles, sadistic bureaucrats, inevitable heartbreaks, and you will see the grinning skull of capitalism. Most of your pain will return. Her unspoken compassion was genuine and effective; it swept over the overwrought immigrants like a cool breeze. For a millisecond they stopped sweating and felt at peace.

Getting onto the BookAir jet presented no difficulty. Andrea slipped unbothered past officials and baggage checkers, through metal detectors and gate security. It was almost as if she were invisible, which was eerie, considering that her face had been in every Israeli living room and her name in every newspaper. Ben observed that she had the uncanny ability to make herself plain, almost bedraggled. She achieved an everywoman look, an air of ordinariness and modesty. She didn't get a second glance from anyone, despite her miniskirt and platforms.

They had already rolled onto the runway when the pilot announced that they would be delayed. Andrea looked past Ben and some other people toward the window at the dark sky. The ground and their airplane shook as if struck by a terrific wind.

“There they go again, the Israeli jets!” someone said, pointing to the streaking lights of hundreds of Israeli fighter jets taking off for parts unknown.

Andrea felt as if the clanging of all the bells and the popping of champagne corks marking the passing of the second millennium all over the world had lodged in her body. She was experiencing a planetary hangover, though she hadn't had a drop to drink. The fighter planes seemed to go right through her.

After the jets roared away, BookAir finally received permission to depart, and the Promised Land faded behind them.

Chapter Twenty-one

Wherein Joe leans on the Shades. Angel Zack considers the unfairness of his duties
.
The Council of Great Minds. Nikola Tesla
.

Joe knew what he had to do. Lean on some Shades. Not that it gave him any pleasure. Shades were so passive, hitting one was like punching a pillow. He had cleared some of them from a park last year, and they'd gone limp as overcooked spaghetti. It had taken hours to load a dozen of them into the van. All the way to the station they'd chanted, “The True One comes! The True One comes!” and when Joe's partner told them to shut the fuck up or he'd stuff the True One up their asses, they'd started taking off their clothes. And then they returned to the park anyway. Which is where they were now, doing their lizard thing, though some were quite actively holding out their begging bowls.