Messi@ (40 page)

“You have so much strange money!” Andrea was sure now.

“I own buildings in Detroit, Moscow, Kiev, and Tashkent. I take the rent money and fly to more cities to buy more buildings. I know it's hard to believe, but I don't have a place of my own. I am always flying.”

He didn't buy only buildings. He had just offered to buy her.

“Oh, here is my fiancé,” she said as Ben returned to his seat. “He is very, very rich. But thank you, anyway.”

Andrea craned her neck to see who was sitting to the left of the turbaned Satan. It was a veiled woman who snored. She exuded Calvin Klein Obsession and sweat, and her veil billowed with each snore like a sail. At her feet yawned a Gucci carry-on that Andrea imagined was full of cosmetics and romance novels.

Next to the veiled woman sat a large, clean-cut American boy, reading a well-worn Bible. Andrea squeezed out of her seat toward the aisle. As she maneuvered past the American boy she pushed her lower lip forward and said with a pout, “God, I wish I'd brought my Bible! There is nothing to do for the next eleven million hours!” Her knee touched the pointy bone of the boy's knee.

Surprised, he lifted his cornflower blue gaze directly at her nipples, poking through her T-shirt hard as organ stops.

“Well, this is it … the Bible. I mean, I read it. Since I seen the birthplace of our Lord it's got new meanings. I'm in the United Ministries of Love.” He gestured toward the rest of the group, which was scattered throughout the plane. His earnest face showed concern for every penny sacrificed by those who'd saved to send him to the Holy Land.

Andrea got a book called
Insatiability
from the bin labeled
Novels
, and returned to her seat. On the way back, she looked at the boy, leaving him the full promissory charge of her deep green eyes.

The turbaned man, who'd watched the exchange with interest, said in a whisper: “Do not be deceived by their guileless faces. Their young bodies are strong and muscular, but it's survivalist training. Their eyes are trained to spot fire, flood, annihilation signs. They are superalert to what they see as the devil's agents—Jews, foreigners, liberals, commies, Negroes, Islamic people, atheists, multiculturalists, the FBI, the ATF, bankers, feminists. They live only for salvation, the Second Coming, the reward of Rapture. They believe in Jesus, UFOs, decency, honest banking, and their right to buy assault weapons.”

Andrea looked astonished.

“I was trained as a sociologist,” he explained modestly.

Without waiting for any further reaction from her, he took a thick black book from his briefcase marked
ACCOUNTS
. He uncapped a Mont Blanc pen and set its gold nib to work on a new page.

Andrea had a creepy feeling that he was entering a report on her into his book. It wasn't a new feeling. It was partly the reason why she changed her story as often as possible. The world was peppered with file starters who could speak eloquently on any subject, who had university degrees in every field, who worked in every industry. No matter how seemingly benign, they were all police, which was to say, surveillance, arrest, camps, snapping dogs, cattle prods. Her parents were probably not dead at all; they had simply been shut inside a file inside a huge computer controlled by learned men who employed Orthodox priests, Iranian mullahs, and Christian missionaries to further their studies. Oh, stop, she told herself. You're hungry and you have to pee. She felt a little-girl tantrum coming on. Ben had fallen asleep.

Felicity stayed seven days at Tesla's warehouse, helping him water, weed, trim, and pollinate. Sometimes she followed him to bars, where he emptied the video-poker machines using a system he had devised. One day she watched him play blackjack at the casino and win thousands of dollars. He bought exotic blooms with the money, and Felicity helped him load his shopping cart. At night she listened to the boats on the river and stretched like a cat, feeling green power flowing through her and bonding to her cells.

On New Year's Eve 1999, Felicity strolled through the French Quarter in full view of tourists, freaks, shades, cops, barkers, hustlers. She was no longer wearing her white gown, but a man's shirt and pants that Tesla had rummaged for her on the street. It was drizzling, and lights glowed from every window. The clip-clop of the mules pulling tourist carriages over the cobblestones was muted, as if someone had wrapped their hooves in cotton. Old men walked home in the mist with baguettes sticking out of their brown bags like phalluses. Black generals of a nonexistent African kingdom, resplendent in gold epaulets, brass buttons, silver braid, and chef's hats, stood outlined in the doorways of restaurants, distributing menus to tourists. Mimes, tappers, and hustlers were at work in their customary spots on the sidewalks. And of course, the blue notes of a horn spilled from a recessed doorway.

The shrimp Creole at Coop's had been Felicity's favorite. The peppers, tomatoes, and shrimp weren't overcooked; you could taste the bay leaf; and they didn't overdo the cayenne. Felicity knew this, but it was unconnected knowledge, like a piece of paper picked up by wind. She didn't know what it had to do with her.

Her senses were keen. She could smell fresh beignets and chicory coffee from Café du Monde; rosemary baked chicken from Irene's; wet dog leading blind (and blind-drunk) beggar; crawfish and crab bisque out of Tujague's; sweaty tourist; dry cumin, bay leaf, pepper, and prosciutto plus olive salad at the Progresso grocery; cigars and newsprint from Sidney's Newsstand; mule shit; roasting coffee at Kaldi's; vanilla-scented hooker, spent firecrackers, beer, rotting crawfish. By the time she walked the length of Decatur, she had worked up an appetite.

In front of Dead Star Books, a crowd of cadaverous youth dressed in black crinoline waited sullenly for Angelique Risotto, the queen of gothic. Her novels of bloodsucking had a huge following of pale, listless death lovers. She owned lots of real estate, including numerous churches, behind which she garaged the hearses that took her to book signings. The release of a new book was typically celebrated by an appearance in a coffin carried by pallbearers, from which she would leap in a red wedding dress. Angelique was as huge as a whale, and many of her starved followers looked as if they'd been half eaten by Angelique. Felicity crossed the street to give them a wide berth.

The pilot announced that year 2000 had just arrived somewhere over the Atlantic. It was already year 2000 in Israel. Over the course of the next eight hours, the captain greeted New Year's several times, underscoring time's slippery dimension and, Andrea supposed, the roundness of the earth.

Dinner came.

Carroty orange baby penises surrounded a round burnt beef medallion. Wrinkled green peas swam toward shreds of wilted lettuce and fragments of cucumber. A blue-veined sauce in a plastic cup sat on the tray. A hard roll and a square of soggy cake leered up.

Andrea had always eaten whatever she'd been given or managed to scrounge. Black bread with a bit of butter or a dollop of sour cream was her favorite. She also loved raw carrots and scallions, wedges of tomato and cucumbers with salt, and apples, cherries, and peaches. She admired oranges and ate them very slowly, sucking each slice and holding the rest in her hand like a small sun. In truth, she was in awe of oranges. During the siege of Sarajevo she had carried a small orange in the pocket of her peacoat wherever she went. When she was deported she took it out and shared it with the other people on the truck. The orange hadn't decayed at all, and there were enough slices for lots of people. She was not particularly fond of rice, but she ate it with a bit of gravy all the same. She liked cornmeal mush and cakes with salt and onions and cheese, if there was any. Goat cheese was her favorite, particularly goat cheese from Montenegro, where the fiercest and saltiest goats lived. She'd had marinated fish in tin cans and once or twice freshly caught fish from the sea. She'd also enjoyed baked chicken with rosemary, and goat shish kebab, beef stew with new potatoes, fried cow's liver with salt and paprika, pork sausages, lamb brains, and chicken gizzards. After she saw the dog eating brains in Sarajevo, she thought she'd never eat meat again. But she did. She'd do whatever it took to sustain life.

But the airline meal presented a challenge. For the first time in her memory she felt repelled by the idea of meat. The medallion looked to her as if it were taken from a cow with an ice cream scoop. She could plainly see the animal, grazing in a pasture pockmarked by bomb craters. It looked up at her, its round eyes placid but insistent. The animal's sides had scoops taken from them, resembling the cratered pasture. Go away, Andrea said. Obediently, the cow lifted up into the air, a clumsy dirigible, and vanished from her sight. But the burnt meat remained on her tray, solid, congealed, dark. Humanity, it said, is so much bleak meat. She felt sorrow within her own meat, as if the dead matter had triggered death in her body. Waves of compassion, disgust, and fear washed through her. She picked up her knife and fork to cut into the slab, but she put them down. She couldn't.

The fat man, who had been watching her struggle with some interest, pointed to his own special Hindu vegetarian curry dinner, and said: “You can order vegetarian if you call ahead. Would you like to share my humble rice?”

Andrea thanked him and added: “I am not a vegetarian. I'm not sure what it is.”

“You should be vegetarian, my friend. When meat eaters die they go to a special hell where they are surrounded by animals with missing parts … chickens without breasts … cows without rumps … pigs without bellies. The animals scream for eternity for their missing parts, and the sinner must listen for many thousands and thousands of years.”

Ugh. Andrea shuddered and pushed away her tray.

Yehuda ben Yehuda hadn't touched his food, because he was afraid that it might not be kosher, though the stewardess assured him that it was. He was in love; he didn't have any appetite. He and Andrea looked at each other, then back at the food, and burst out laughing.

“I will eat your butt,” he whispered in her ear.

“My butt is a very expensive restaurant,” she whispered back.

Tee-hee. Tee-hee. The young people couldn't stop laughing. They laughed so hard their trays jiggled and the solemn meat shook. The orange baby penises rolled helplessly about.

I will never eat the meat of dead animals again, Andrea promised herself. From this moment on, the flesh of animals will never pass my lips again.

Strangely, the entire plane seemed to share her revulsion. The stewardess ended up taking back over forty untouched scoops of cow. Not even the hungry evangelical boys ate any. It was hard to say whether this collective reaction was connected to Andrea or to the airplane's having just flown into some kind of heavenly vegetarian belt inhabited by fruitarian angels. Nonetheless, Andrea felt some satisfaction and took a bit of credit for it.

Chapter Twenty-six

Wherein Felicity learns about the Language Crystal. Andrea and Ben's flight is seized by eros
.

Felicity would have wandered all the way to Canal Street if she hadn't been stopped by a startling shopwindow. Displayed there was an African fetish—a woman with several pairs of breasts and a polished pregnant belly, pierced by thousands of rusty nails everywhere except the eyes. Next to it a whip with small bells along the strands was draped over a carved wooden phallus.

New Orleans had adopted the vampire as its mascot, despite protests from the Catholic Church. The undead were good business. Manteaux was a ritual art shop that specialized in looted African fetishes, local voodoo objects, and contemporary creep art. Rich vampirophiles roamed the Quarter seeking artifacts of this kind. But the stuff sold at Manteaux went beyond boosterism. An entire shelf held reliquaries containing pieces of saints—a tooth, an ear, a piece of bone. Saint Hildegard's knuckle rested at the bottom of an open velvet box; or so the brass plate captioned it. A two-headed fetus floated in yellow liquid inside a plastic jar.

Felicity walked in the door, setting off a sinister little tin clapper.

She asked the bald man behind the counter about the figure pierced with nails. He put a half-smoked cigar into a heart-shaped bronze ashtray and licked the bottom of a luxuriant Stalinesque mustache before answering in a thick accent.

“That African fetish is one of my very best. It's like the witch hurt every part of her except the eyes, the better to make her suffer. My accent is Albanian, in case you are wondering.”

“I was, but I don't know Albanians. And the whip with the bells?”

“Interested? Australian. They call that a bull-roarer. It's an Aborigine telephone. They talk to their gods on it. But if you wanted to use it for something else”—the man winked—“you could.”

The bald Albanian's eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose like two angry caterpillars.

“Sit, sit.” He knocked a beaded fetish off a tall three-legged stool and invited her to perch. Behind her crouched a South Asian demon with gold smoke pouring out of his ornamental nostrils. A Tibetan prayer wheel hung over her head. The walls and ceiling teemed with shrunken heads, human bones, blood-caked fetishes, stuffed snakes, giant eggs, and primitive lethal weapons. Some of the dusty display cases were too dark to allow the disquieting shapes within to be identified.

Felicity flipped open the lid of an oblong wooden box on the counter. Nestled in moth-eaten black velvet were some curled lacquer spirals that looked like pig tails.

“Ah, those,” exclaimed the shopkeeper, “are the preserved penises of infidels taken in Jerusalem by the Knights of Saint John in the very first Crusade, seven hundred anno Domini.”

Felicity hastily closed the box, pinching her finger.

“This is a mad
Kunstkammer
, no?” The Albanian relit his stogie. The squashed butt ends of his cigars splayed obscenely in dolomite ashtrays and floated in brown liquid in bronze cuspidors all around the shop.