Messi@ (41 page)

“What's that?” Felicity asked, thinking the word sounded vaguely obscene.

“Oh, you know. Like a curio cabinet. The
Kunstkammer
. Every bourgeois European household had one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sometimes they devoted a whole room to oddities.”

“What was the purpose of it?” Felicity was rather enjoying the hairy man's lecture.

“The world was much more mysterious then. Doubtless, the purpose was to examine the hidden order that underlies the physical world. People were fascinated by the similarity of patterns between, let's say, a seashell and a mountain plant. It must have seemed to them that nature was pursuing a plan, or many plans; that they were living with all sorts of mysteries … plots. This was before Linnaeus, mind you. Classification was a matter of texture, of taste … not physical laws.”

On a small shelf was a little book handwritten in a language Felicity had never seen. She asked the shopkeeper about it.

“Goatskin. Written in Coptic. A treatise translated as
The Language Crystal
.”

She touched it. The texture was coarse and the black letters were inscribed deeply into the leather. An illustration in the middle of the book depicted a naked couple standing under a sort of disco ball filled with letters. The letters were funneling from the ball into their open mouths.

“Everything is explicable through the Language Crystal. There are a small number of sounds that, in combination, contain the entire universe. The actual Language Crystal exists … but this is just a book about it. Everybody has a Language Crystal in their brain, which can be plugged into the Great Crystal.”

“I don't understand.” Felicity frowned.

“Look at Africa, for instance. Europeans, who are rationalists, claim that AIDS came from Africa, but Africans, who use the Language Crystal, claim that AIDS was brought to Africa by AIDS, the Agency for International Development Services.”

As Andrea walked down the aisle to the rest room, she noticed that nearly everyone was holding or reading a book. She passed by two Arab men reading the Koran together, their dark heads touching. An American girl wearing shorts was staring at an open copy of
The Teachings of Don Juan
. She wasn't exactly reading. It was as if she'd seen a spider and was wondering whether to shut the book on it or not. A well-dressed Frenchwoman was folding the corner of a page to mark a spot in Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex
. A young nun in a gray habit and wimple was reading a week-old
Osservatore Romano
. An Orthodox Jew was bent so low over his paperback Torah his curls brushed the page. An unshaven, consumptive-looking man with burning eyes was reading something called
License to Carry a Gun
. Two gay men were intent on a passage in
The Prophecies of Nostradamus
.

Andrea had to wait for the rest room behind an elderly couple dressed in secondhand polyester pantsuits. Andrea imagined that they had waited in lines for most of their lives. She recognized her grandparents in them and the grandparents of all her friends. Their bent backs, the humble incline of their heads bespoke an infinite patience, honed by decades of poverty, in eternal wait for bread, milk, medicine, shoes, a vacant toilet stall. They wanted to take as little space as possible. Their whole bodies tried to shrink in order to communicate deference. They meant no harm to anyone; all they wanted was a little crust of bread, a corner on the park bench. Ground down by wars, these old folks shuffled on the edges of the world in felt slippers, fearful of everyone and everything.

Just then, the toilet was free and the old man gestured gallantly to his wife to go first. This was a small victory over his burning bladder. Andrea noted it and silently blessed the old man, who felt suddenly better without knowing why.

The old people took a long time in there, so Andrea went up the length of the plane to the first-class cabin. The toilet was occupied there, too, so she leaned against the back of a seat occupied by a manicured gentleman smoking a Dunhill cigarette and leafing through
Variety
. Her bladder was becoming a hot balloon. She imagined squatting next to the portly figure who smelled of cologne, leather, and smoke, and letting go her stream. He looked up at her just as the fantasy was becoming unbearable. His gaze was interested, but not greedy. He took the Dunhill out of his mouth and said, “Ever thought about a career in television?”

“Well, yes,” said Andrea, surprised.

The man nodded agreeably, as if this came as no surprise. “What happened?”

“I met an Italian millionaire. I'm flying to his island right now. I guess I don't really care for television.” She became suddenly cross. “It's evil.”

“Are you magnetic?” the man continued, disregarding her remark. “Do people come up to you for no good reason and begin talking to you?”

Andrea had to admit that they did.

“Do they think that they know you from somewhere? That they've seen you before?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever acted?”

“No. Biology was my best subject in high school. I took some ballet classes, but after the earthquake in Los Angeles … My parents were in the house at the time, you see. Our classes were canceled, and by the time I got home … After the funeral I moved to my uncle's place in Tel Aviv, and I didn't do anything much after that.”

A man came out of the bathroom. Andrea rushed into the vacated stall. When she came out she felt greatly relieved, but she was still angry.

“Television,” she spat at the Dunhill smoker, “is the devil. It's sucking all the people in and sending their souls to a place of dots.” Ben had actually said this, and she had liked it.

“You're absolutely right.” He smiled. “I'm Reed Sharpless, agent, producer, talent scout. You ever hear of
Hollywood Squares?
I did that. If life on the island proves too boring, give me a call. I definitely think you're magnetic.” He handed her a card.

Andrea returned to her seat, thinking about this program she'd never seen,
Hollywood Squares
. She imagined it to be the nemesis of
Wheel of Fortune
. When she asked Ben, he said that
Hollywood Squares
was to
Wheel of Fortune
what the hamburger was to the pizza.

“The first fast food in America was hamburgers, which were small, individualistic portions. Now the most popular food is pizza, which is shared and communistic.”

This explanation didn't satisfy Andrea, but she liked Ben even more.

Ben became engrossed in Gershom Scholem's
Kabbalah
, and a silence full of turning pages settled in the cabin. It was as if an angel of reading, finger to his lips, had taken over the jumbo jet, causing everyone to fall into a private pool of words. It's strange, thought Andrea, listening to the leafing, but the world will go on only for as long as everyone keeps reading. When they close their books, it's over. She didn't know where this certainty came from, but she was sure enough of its tightness.

“Can you explain the Language Crystal?” Felicity was still touching the goatskin book and experiencing a chill, as if an ice cold pen were writing words on her body.

The Albanian relit his cigar. He looked Felicity in the eyes and she sank into their bottomless black pools. The hymns that were her comfort tried to rise from within her, but she couldn't sing. There was a lump in her throat; she was near tears. She wanted desperately to hear about the Language Crystal.

“At the simplest level, the crystal makes us share a story. I knew a man with a pencil-thin mustache,” he said, and Felicity, too, knew a man with a pencil-thin mustache.

“He called himself a Levantine,” she continued.

“He came from the fabled potbelly of Asia Minor called the Levant because he could levitate and also because of his fabulous levity …”

Felicity saw him clearly. “He loved women of different races, different countries, different regions …”

“Mexican, Thai, Chinese, French, Russian.… And each one cooked for him some form of burrito, spring roll, egg roll, crepe, or blini …”

“His women
were
just like food. He was a sampler of women, a connoisseur of some kind, and then he hit on the idea of combining his girlfriends.”

“He saw his Thai woman in the morning, his Japanese girl at noon, his Russian Katia in the evening. He planned his love life like gourmet meals.”

“In fact, he quit eating altogether and fed only on the salt, musk, and juices he absorbed from his lovers. He wrote down everything about them, all the combinations, and he called his method love fusion.”

“He got very thin, and after a while he tried to combine all his lovers into a single physical person …”

“… and developed a complex explanation having to do with the end of the individual …”

“… the advent of the collective person!”

“Right! He claimed that people were going to become very thin and insubstantial in the future, and that they would have to band together to make whole units …”

“The amazing thing was,” continued Felicity, “that these women believed him. They considered his theory sound and overcame, by sheer intellectual will, the age-old difficulties of jealousy, possessiveness, territoriality … They became one.”

Felicity stopped. The thread of the story snapped and receded from her like smoke. The story had floated up like an island in the middle of a gray sea and had exhausted her. She looked down and saw that she was still touching the goatskin book.

“It never fails!” The Albanian looked away and Felicity surfaced like a cork to the surface of herself. She felt that now she
could
sing, but had no desire to do so.

The shopkeeper explained: “The Language Crystal made it possible for both of us to weave a story. It is odd, though, how
perfectly
you shared, how little of
you
there was in it.… You are utterly clear, like a windowpane. People usually add something of their own, some detail of their personalities, but you … It's most unusual.”

“What's
my
story?” Felicity asked anxiously. She felt keenly the absence of her memories.

The lights in the main cabin were dimmed, but most of the reading lights were still on. Andrea imagined the string of lights floating below the stars, above the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean. She was a mere dot of pulsing life, and then she became aware of an insistent and pleasurable sensation. She streamed back into her body. Ben was kissing her neck.

“Did you know,” he whispered, “that Hong Kong is the most densely populated city on earth?”

She'd had no idea, but she didn't want him to stop. He kissed her ear-lobe, her cheeks, and her nose. As his kisses became more insistent, so did her delight in them. She sunk lower in the uncomfortable seat, oblivious to the discomfort or perverse pleasure of the fat man, the Iranian woman, the Bible boy, and all the others around them. She could feel them straining to ignore her and Ben's nuzzling and not succeeding. Her excitement grew by degrees, as did her radiating warmth. She saw the edges of the heat field that she was emanating. It was widening, like a circle in the water. She tried to see if she could make the field bigger or smaller by increasing and cooling her excitement. It worked. My God, I can turn on this whole airplane! And why not? Andrea asked herself judiciously as she let her fingers play lightly on Ben's upper thigh.

Andrea moved her index finger like the big hand of a clock over the tip of Ben's penis, and row after row of the jumbo airplane caught fire. Those who had been reading succumbed quietly to the wave. The two students of the Koran blushed and pulled away from one another. The student of Don Juan stretched like a cat, feeling the crotch of her jeans go taut. The gay men stretched a blanket over their collective lap. The Frenchwoman lay her sweater over
The Second Sex
, pushed the edge of the hardcover book between her legs, and bore down on the sharp corner. Even the old couple woke with a start and remembered something dim and vaguely happy. Andrea's immediate neighbors simply evaporated. The Sikh's fat sizzled, while the Iranian wrapped her breasts around the boy missionary. Andrea laughed out loud. The whole plane was eroticized, and Andrea had caused it!

“What was
that?
” inquired Ben.

“An orgasm,” said Andrea.

Few of their fellow travelers had any idea what an orgasm was. Iran had outlawed the very discussion of it for so long, the lucky few who'd felt pleasure compared it to the dead Khomeini's speeches. The turbaned capitalist sociologist commonly experienced only a swelling in his pile of banknotes. The Bible readers were sure that “orgasm” was one of Satan's names.

Ben remembered his brief flirtation with the work of Wilhelm Reich, the leader of the short-lived orgasm movement. Back then, Ben had believed that world harmony was contingent on orgasmic fulfillment for everyone. When he became disillusioned with Reich, he agreed with the situationists that orgasm was in fact a tool of capitalism, and that the world of those who knew orgasm and those who didn't broke down between those who'd been exposed to a half century of television, its sex machinery humming, and the hungry billions who huddled around village-common radios that exhorted them to die for God.

Andrea considered briefly the frenzy about her. Outside the window, shooting stars streaked past the plane. They sprayed gleeful light dust, revealing swatches of starry sky. Ah, cried everything, let the games begin. Andrea felt flooded by giddy gratitude and thought that she was, all in all, and notwithstanding the terrible facts, a lucky girl.

Ben believed that they were passing through a heavenly belt. He had studied questions relating to angels and had been taught that there were many angelic nodes. He knew the names of many angels, where they resided, what they did, when they interceded, how they interacted with humans, and how they could be summoned. He believed that many worlds existed. Some of these were man-made hells. There were surely man-made heavens, too, like now, here, with Andrea. He was certain that the man-made worlds were few in number compared to the great profusion of worlds inhabited and managed by spirits of the air, angels, demigods, ousted gods, demons, fictions, and myth creatures. He had until now worked only in the human world, but now he felt as if he had been given permission to explore all the others.