Messi@ (43 page)

“Don't make any sound,” he whispered in her ear. “I'm adding you to my fusion. I'm going to take my pleasure in you right here in the dormitory so the idiots can hear us.”

The Albanian looked into her eyes, and when he was reasonably sure that she wasn't going to scream, he removed his hand.

“I had the solution but now I can't remember it,” Felicity said.

The hairy Albanian held his grotesquely swollen penis in his hand.

“It's no good. I have no opening. I am all smooth down here.” She spread her legs wide to show him.

The dream-within-the-dream Albanian vanished.

A feather-light hand touched Felicity, waking her. She sat upright, alarmed. In the moonlight streaming through a window, she saw the child with the soft blond curls standing by the side of her bed. She looked as if she'd been washed, coiffed, and dressed at a subterranean beauty parlor, and seemed to be asleep. She touched Felicity softly, like a baby looking for its mother's breast. The child took Felicity's hand and led her to the window. The dark shapes of the other slaves turned uneasily on their mattresses. Felicity, obeying the stubborn goodwill emanating from the child, crawled out the window and onto the sidewalk. She turned to help the girl out, but her helper had vanished back inside.

The night was liquid and full of moonlight. On Decatur Street drunks still mumbled on stoops. Light and smoke poured out of a bar. An intermittently flickering neon sign above it proclaimed the place to be
Desire, Ltd., Where Every Miss Is a Hit
. A half-naked girl with a feather mask on was sitting on a stool haranguing the passersby. When she saw Felicity, she cried, “Girl, you look like a ghost. You look like you need a job. Come on in and tell Sylvia everything.”

Felicity went in. Unfortunately, she couldn't tell Sylvia very much because she didn't know anything about herself. All she knew was that her name was Scheherazade, and that was already a stripper kind of name. Nobody had any problems with that name. Her hair had grown two shapeless inches over the past ten days, and she looked pretty scary. Sylvia clipped it to a manageable fuzz again and died it red. She also undertook to teach Felicity the stripper's art, and to everyone's surprise, she could dance pretty well.

The first milky dawn of the new millennium was sunless and gray. The pilot wished everyone, particularly Andrea, a “happy next thousand years” and announced that they would be landing in forty minutes.

“I'm afraid,” Ben told Andrea, “that there will be media.”

“Media? Television? Newspapers? But this is what I ran away from. I don't want to be Vanna White! We have to get away from them.”

“It's easier said than done.” Ben looked very worried. “In America they run everything—heaven, hell, downtown, uptown. You have to pay a fortune to stay out of newspapers. Of course, people pay to get into them, too. It's complicated.”

He fell silent, contemplating the immensity of the web that people now trashed in like helpless flies. He too had run away from the overbearing presence of news, from the sense of constant emergency Americans lived in. He thought that he had found freedom in the eternal questions, in the mystery of divinity. Instead, he had run into Andrea, a creature in flight like himself, whom he was now helping deliver into the arms of the very world he'd fled. It didn't make sense. He had to do something to help her. They had to escape what awaited them on the ground.

The nun in gray with the white collar, who'd been reading the
Osservatore Romano
, approached quietly and put her small, white hand on Andrea's shoulder.

“I know what's troubling you, child,” she whispered to Andrea. She spoke too softly for Ben to hear.

“
Ecce porta inferni
,” said Andrea, in the Latin Father Eustratius had taught her. “I stand before the gate of hell,” she added in English, not sure if the nun understood.

“
Partiti sunt vestimenta mea
,” the sister said. “They shared my garments.”

Ben watched in astonishment as the two women hurried to the rest room. The announcement had just been made for everyone to return to their seats. Ben watched anxiously for the two women, gone for what seemed like eternity. As the plane was about to set down on the runway, they emerged from the tiny cubicle.

The “nun,” in her gray habit with the severe collar and wimple, went back to her seat. The other, in her platform shoes and her ridiculously brief miniskirt, sat next to Ben. His eyes traveled the length of milky white legs that had not seen daylight in a long time, and paused, intrigued, on the snow white midriff with the almond of a belly button set vertically in it like a tear. He blushed as he tried to gauge the deep shadow between the thighs. All in all, the sister was not badly made. Though she was not as young as Andrea, her flesh was nonetheless firm and all the more enticing for having been untouched. Or so Ben imagined, from his paltry knowledge of nuns.

Atlanta, from the air, looked ready for the twenty-first century. Its skyscrapers and domes looked to Andrea hopeful, the very opposite of the lazy dens and warrens of the Old World. BookAir made a bumpy landing, made almost inaudible by the passengers' shouts of glee. It had been the longest night of their lives.

Ben was back in the land of his birth. He had gone to the Holy Land to speak with God and was back without having succeeded, though he had brought back with him a creature such as the New World had never seen.

The passengers waited impatiently while FBI agents boarded the plane and led the terrorist out. One of them looked for Andrea, but the passengers began rushing out, so he decided to wait outside. When nearly everyone was out of the plane, he radioed a fellow officer outside that he had missed the girl.

The lines at the passport control booths were long. Ben went to the one that said
U.S. Citizens Only
. “Sister” Andrea was right behind him, while the real nun was in the
Non–U.S. Residents
line. Ben could see, immediately outside Customs, a restless mass of camera-armed people jostling one another. He made it through passport check and waited anxiously for the “sister.” Andrea's improvised document, bearing the picture of Ben's sister, Clarisse, was a most shoddy piece of work. But her green eyes, peering disturbingly out of the gray wimple, affected the young Customs officer just as they affected everyone else. He stamped her immigration form, which Ben had helped her fill out, while losing himself in her eyes and reciting, doubtless, a little prayer against his inappropriate wave of lust.

At Customs, they went to the area of
Nothing to Declare
. Indeed, what was there to declare? Self was undefinable contraband. Still, thought Ben, somebody momentous and metaphysically illegal is being smuggled in. If only you knew. But the hyperkeen dogs who could sniff a grain of cocaine in a saltshaker let Andrea pass without a whimper.

An animated discussion was taking place between the CNN producer, who claimed exclusive rights to the story of the Girl Who Saved BookAir Flight 459, and several producers from the other networks.

Exclusive rights to a news story? The ABC producer was outraged. “What next? Exclusive rights to the next war? Exclusive rights to the Second Coming? News belongs to everybody!”

But the CNN man wouldn't budge. The flight had landed and CNN had already surrounded the area with trucks and cameras. There was no room for anyone else. This was their city, and as others were quickly learning, the business of news was very much like the business of war. To the mighty belonged the turf.

“You can't control the goddam news!” shouted the frustrated ABC man. He knew because that was his business. Every day, he fought the ocean that was the news, and every day he retreated before the chaos.

“Yes, we can,” said his counterpart calmly. “We can control everything but the outcome. And word from above is”—he winked—“that now that Jane and Ted are born again, we can even ask for outcomes.”

“Then get the hell out there and make your own news! Who cares about what
really
happens?” The NBC guy was really steamed. He had a sudden and queasy vision of a world of virtual news, things that never happened but everyone thought did. Perhaps the flat-earthers were right, and those who said that we'd never gone to the moon. He himself had come close many times to that edge where it was hard to distinguish between fact and fiction.

“And you don't make up news?” the CNN guy said ironically. “You make it up all the time.” For him, that virtual world had arrived long ago. The surprise was not in the ease of fabrication; he had no qualms about that. The surprise was when news really did happen, when amazing occurrences like this girl's plucking a bomb from a terrorist in the sky were actual events, not the constructs of the network's purple prose men.

They went back and forth, but then the discussion became irrelevant. Passengers from BookAir flight 459 were exiting Customs. Everyone rushed forward.

The blood-sniffing hounds of the media let the “sister” pass. All their eyes were trained on the miniskirted, high-platformed “Andrea,” who had just left the passport area with a U.S. stamp on her Vatican-issued passport.

“Andrea! Andrea!” Their collective cry rose like a wall before the nun and behind Andrea.

The nun walked unafraid into the throng, and after rocking for a time in the violent motion of their shoving, pushing, and questioning, she said clearly, in Italian-accented English, “I am not the one you are looking for!”

By the time the truth of her assertion had been verified, Andrea, with Ben at her side, was on a flight headed for New Orleans.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Wherein we witness Reverend Mullin's boundless fury, and the promise of Armageddon

Pictures in
Our Mirror!
There it was, the most private part of America's most public televangelist, stretched longingly and obscenely toward a child's hand.
WHORING MAN OF GOD
!
MORE PICTURES INSIDE
!
HE PAID FOR FILTH
!
DEGRADATION OF CHRIST'S MAN
! The tabloid was at every checkout counter in America in a matter of hours.

Our Mirror
called Mullin eight hours before press time and offered to squelch the story for $15 million. But feeling that he had successfully prevented blackmail for the much lesser sum of $2.1 million, he'd tried to bargain. Having captured the demon girl, who was now being trained at SMD, Mullin thought that he had a bargaining chip. But
Our Mirror
could care less about what he did with the girl who had mailed them the compromising photographs. Mullin might have paid the outrageous ransom, but he didn't have the money. His entire fortune was tied up at the moment in the great plans of the Lord. His gold was working for Jesus.

The consequences of the scandal were devastating and swift. The revenues of the Ministry of the Utmost God dropped precipitously the very next day. Three hundred Christian TV stations denounced Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin as filth, though they couldn't kick him off the air—the contracts ran into the year 2005. Mullin blamed the machinations of rival preachers under the direction of Satan. He cried on television, asking for forgiveness. The timing couldn't have been worse; during Christmas the appeals of the ministry had been particularly desperate. Mullin had all but promised his followers the Rapture within the month, and Armageddon shortly thereafter. It made sense for the believers to send all they had because in short order they wouldn't be needing any. But the photos in
Our Mirror
stayed their pens in midcheck. Worse even than the withheld money was the outrage in their hearts and the fear that the reverend's hypocrisy might invalidate his promises. So many of his followers had already sold everything they had, broken relations with disbelieving members of their families, and prepared like good scouts for their ascension to heaven. What were they going to do if neither Rapture nor Armageddon were to follow? Their fear and disappointment were quickly turning to anger. Mullin fulminated against Satan, who in collusion with rival preachers, the pope, communists, the queen of England, the
Times-Picayune
, NBC News, and the mavens of secular humanism, through the instrument of a wicked girl, had dealt him this blow for the purpose of nullifying his revelations of the End. But Mullin could hear the thunder of the approaching storm, and neither the paradisiacal inducement of his First Angels Choir nor his rhetorical summits would still it. He needed to make good on his promises fast; he had to stun his constituency with signs. He needed Jesus to really come through.

All plans for the fulfillment of the prophecies had to be pushed rapidly forward now, though some of the elements were still at the developmental stage. It was more important than ever that events should unfold as he had prophesied.

On the second day of the year 2000, Mullin woke up as he had for two days in the grip of an epic fury. He hadn't been sleeping since New Year's, when firecrackers and every weapon men owned were unleashed to welcome the cascade of significant zeros. Mullin pulled the rip cord by the bed, and the curtain over the skylight parted, letting in a gray light void of signs and portents. The sky had been a blank slate each morning; there wasn't even a cloud to look at. The air was heavy and still, as before a storm, but no storm was coming.

He saw again before his mind's eye the face of his blackmailer and wished to annihilate her. He had so far avoided her, letting the SMD curriculum take its course, but he could bear it no longer. He called for Felicity to be brought before him. The Bamajan who answered the phone made him wait more than twenty minutes. When he came back, his voice was shaky. He apologized: “We don't know how in God's name she got away. It's never happened before!”

“How long since she vanished?”

The Bamajan said he didn't know, but he did. To his dismay, the girl had been gone since Christmas Eve, and no one had noticed.