Messi@ (45 page)

They were waked on the second day of the year 2000 by riotous birds in the azalea bushes below the window. A mockingbird that had lived at the Columns a long time sang the sounds of lovemaking—and of creaking doors, smokers' coughs, and flushing toilets.

Andrea turned to Ben, still sleepy, then turned away to sleep some more. She slept for another hour, which Ben spent thinking about Felicity, whose presence he sensed close by but out of focus somehow. It filled him with anxiety. He had to call her as soon as possible. He had her grandmother's and her uncle's telephone numbers. And then, of course, he had to, sometime, call his own family, which was by now doubtless tearing out its collective hair. Ben had called only once, one day before leaving Jerusalem.

They had coffee and chicory for breakfast.

“Today we are going to meet my parents,” announced Ben.

“I want to explore the city,” announced Andrea. “I want to walk everywhere by myself. I can meet your parents later.” She put on Ben's blue work shirt and wiggled into a pair of his jeans.

Ben argued against this, but Andrea had made up her mind. He gave her instructions in the use of the streetcar, and a few dollars, and pointed her in the direction of the French Quarter, with stern instructions to return by lunchtime, when they would go to meet his parents.

Lunchtime came and went. Andrea had not returned.

I will not panic, he told himself. He called his parents, assured them that they were safe, and told them that Andrea's notoriety made it necessary to remain in hiding for a time.

“Why should she hide?” exclaimed his mother. “She stopped a bomb. She should be on TV, like everybody else this heroic.”

“It's a Basque thing, Mother. You wouldn't understand.”

After this nerve-wracking call, Ben set down to wait. His efforts at reading were in vain. Everything seemed vague except for a small flame that contained Andrea's face like an old-fashioned miniature. She was the only focused image inside him. His parents and his city were large, amorphous shapes that floated aimlessly around.

At three, when there was still no Andrea, he decided to look for her.

Where do you begin looking in the city that care forgot but whose patron saint is Joan of Arc? In the city of aboveground tombs and countless dives? Ben groaned thinking about just what kind of impression the vulnerable orphan might make in the smoky hells of nighttime New Orleans. Only he knew how innocent Andrea really was. She might be introduced to heroin, cocaine, and the jazzy variety of oral sex favored by trumpet players, before being sold to a pimp who'd put her to work on a street corner before selling her again.

On the streetcar going downtown, Ben studied the familiar faces of New Orleanians. His landsmen, black and white, looked worried. Their faces and foreheads were lined, there were circles under their eyes, and their hands tightly clutched their belongings. They stared out the open windows, looking alone in the universe. These millennial humans appeared vampirized.

Andrea got off the streetcar where it turned onto Canal Street, and immediately sensations assaulted her, making her skin tingle as if she had been lowered in a bath of salts. A group of black women dressed in white stood on the neutral ground singing so powerfully that leaves and dust swirled about them. A cart with balloons and wind chimes gave off an intense chocolate smell. Two men clad in long leather coats held hands watching a policeman on a black horse. A bus stopped abruptly halfway through the intersection—its destination was written in lights and alternated, flickering
Desire
, then
Cemeteries
, then
Desire
, then
Cemeteries
again. Above her head, the high-rise hotels and the stores sported billboards greeting year 2000.

A street preacher accosted Felicity. He had gold teeth and wore a white hat. He addressed her loudly through a microphone attached to a speaker he carried on his back.

“Look,” he proclaimed, “Louisiana is gone! and Florida and Texas, too! Three things I now know. Armageddon has begun. The United Nations invaded the United States of America. At Saucier, Mississippi, Gulfport, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana, there are battalions of foreign troops waiting for word from the assassin of President Kennedy, who lives in New Orleans and who is, let me tell you, an acquaintance of mine! For such is the world now, black and white all mixed up, devils riding on the backs of angels! Massing for invasion! They will cause a great ball of fire that will ignite the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi! But fear not, girl! You will be taken under my wing, and with Jesus in your heart, God willing, you will bypass the End. Our chambers are being furnished for the return of Christ. But first we must kill the Antichrist! The UFO that's crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, has been repaired. The Antichrist is on board! Thousands of alien babies brought forth by human mothers are gathering in the French Quarter to welcome the repaired vessel, which is on its way even as we speak.”

The preacher took a step forward and exhaled painfully bad breath, ready to pounce on her. But just as he was about to lay his sweaty palm on her shoulder, another hand took her arm and drew her gently away. It was a tall boy with glasses, who looked no older than sixteen.

Andrea was quite willing to be led. “Who are you?”

“Bamajan Michael.” He explained that he was a recruiter for the School for Messiah Development, an institute dedicated to finding people with Messiah-attendance potential. He had been instructed to find souls, and he'd been at it for a week. So far he had been wholly unsuccessful.

“Messiah attendance? Like holding a towel for God?”

The boy smiled. “There is so much you don't know. For instance, I might have a Ph.D. in molecular physics.”

“So? I might have a degree in psychology, and I might say you are nuts.”

“Well, I would say that I am a priest in training of the Division of the Cosmic Egg of the Apocalypse. My supreme teacher has studied all the religions of the world and synthesized them. He has said that the cracking of the Cosmic Egg is imminent. The Messiah comes soon!”

“Who is your teacher?” Andrea asked. “And why is he cracking eggs?”

The boy explained that the supreme teacher had told his followers: “From the holy city of Jerusalem to the fleshpots of New Orleans is a long, jagged line. Few trod it without perishing. It is said, by those who know, that only one made of equal parts flesh and spirit might one day walk the jagged line. The One has come.”

“That's interesting,” said Andrea. “I just came from … Australia. My parents were killed by Aborigines several years ago.”

“I'm sorry,” said the boy urgently, not quite hearing her. “We have to go to SMD right away. I haven't been there in so long I might have been stricken from the recruiters' ranks!”

As they walked, he told her that thousands of trainees had been working to welcome the Messiah. The trainees were instructed by highly skilled Bamajans. The most privileged were females, chosen to be in the First Angels Choir, who would welcome the Messiah and assist in the birth of a new world.

Andrea wanted to believe him—it all sounded quite beautiful.

“Bamajan … sounds like a Jamaican potato dish,” she said.

The boy tilted back his head, gazing heavenward, as if asking Jesus to help him with this irreverent candidate.

He looks like he wants to be kissed, thought Andrea.

Bamajan Michael led on, and on Bourbon Street they stopped in front of a building that was cordoned off by police. Yellow tape that said
CRIME SCENE
was stretched across the sidewalk. An angry policeman paced back and forth. He looked to Andrea like a statue of Dante she had once seen in a museum.

“Oh, my God,” said the boy. “What happened?”

A street person seated on a stoop spit in the general direction of the building. “The freaks fled the coop. Cops found a couple of fresh stiffs inside. Reading only a bit of Anton Chekhov's stories might have saved them all the embarrassment—are you familiar with the manner of Anton Chekhov's death?”

The boy let go of Andrea's arm and walked away.

Andrea wandered, looking in shop windows. She was hungry. People shouted and whistled, and firecrackers exploded at her feet. From the open door of a smoky bar, a bare-breasted girl wearing a feather mask called out to her:

“Hey, skinny. You look like you need a Whopper with fries. Come on in—make a decent wage. Put some tits on you.”

“Okay,” said Andrea. She went in.

“Good move,” said Sylvia. “Welcome to Desire, Limited. And ‘Limited,' which means ‘limited,' ain't no joke!”

The dark interior was lit by Christmas lights strung around the mirrored stage. Andrea stepped carefully to a booth and lowered herself onto the slashed vinyl seat.

“You wait right here and I'll have a girl bring you a burger!”

“Vegetarian,” whispered Andrea.

“Make that a veggie burger!” Sylvia shouted to the cook sitting at the end of the bar, reading Marcella Hazan's
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
. “Everybody's got a kink. There's a new girl here says she doesn't know what an orgasm is. I'd rather be a vegetarian. Now, from my reading of feminists on the subject, from Millet to Roiphe, I have learned that this orgasm may be a fiction, but girl, let me tell you, if that's fiction, you can keep reality!”

At the bar an old man with a bald scalp snapped his suspenders and shrieked at odd intervals. Onstage, a skinny black girl with huge tits was sliding down a copper pole. “You want pussy,” she shouted, “lick this pole!” The speckled mirror behind her was covered with greasy palm prints.

“
Got my mojo workin
'
!
” wailed the juke.

Five or six bored girls were watching television. The show was familiar. Andrea walked over and sat on a stool to watch, too. The dancers were abusing the contestants on
Wheel of Fortune
. The category was
CLUE,
(two words), and four letters showed on the board:
M-PP---C-----.
The girls were shouting, “
R
, you cow!” The “cow” was a platinum blond California divorcee who'd said that she collected ceramic statuettes of elephants with their trunks up.

The divorcee asked for an
R
, and two
Rs
popped up in the second word. The strippers high-fived one another in triumph. The elephant-statuette collector stood to gain a matched luggage set and telescope if she solved the puzzle. It was not to be. A thickly-accented Southerner named Richard, an assistant manager at Kinko's in Macon, Georgia, took his turn and swiftly discovered a
T
and a
C
.
MUPPETS CREATOR
appeared. Vanna applauded. The girls shrieked. For another $500 he also solved the clue:
JIM HENSON
. Richard beamed as if he had won the Civil War. He won a Volkswagen and a ballooning trip over Austria.

“And he gets to fuck Hitler!” tee-heed one of the girls.

They all broke up over that one.

“Such better prizes!” exclaimed Andrea, but no one heard her.

“
The boys are back in town!
” screamed the juke. The old man snapped his suspenders. What an interesting country. Andrea liked the New World.

The cook brought Andrea a veggie burger. After she had devoured it, Sylvia, who had watched her approvingly, summoned the new girl who'd never had an orgasm. “Honey,” she said, “you teach this one what I taught you.”

The girl they called Scheherazade had been in the dancers' dressing room, assiduously trying to identify the face in the mirror. Andrea's face struck her as more familiar than the face she had just been studying in the mirror. Could she be me?

For her part, Andrea was struck by the dancer in an entirely different way. Something about the stripper reminded her … of her mother. It was impossible, but there it was; the loving shadow in the eyes of the woman from Sarajevo was in Felicity's eyes. Andrea kept nothing back.

“Mother,” she exclaimed.

“Excuse me?” Scheherazade wasn't sure she'd heard right. The girl was young, maybe seventeen, but everything in her body said, No, you are not this girl's mother. And then a tiny voice of doubt said: How do you know? You may have ten children for all you know. You may be a hundred years old. You may be your own grandmother.

“Get off it, you little slut,” said Scheherazade in what was actually a friendly voice.

Andrea laughed and apologized. “I'm sorry. I don't know what made me say that. I maybe was thinking about my mother. She was very beautiful, like you.”

Good. I am beautiful. I am young. And the bitch has a sense of humor. Maybe she is me, after all.

From the moment that their two pairs of green eyes met (Andrea's were a lighter green, like young wheat), they experienced recognitions that traveled through their bones like electricity. When they spoke, their words trailed echoes behind them, traces of something they strained to hear but couldn't.

Felicity applied herself to teaching Andrea what she had just learned herself only the day before. She taught her how to put pasties on her nipples, how to shave her pubic hair, how to step in and out of a G-string, and how to shimmy down the copper pole slick with the sweat of the previous dancer. But between each of these lessons stretched immensities of time. It was as if they were operating on two levels at once: a slow, mundane, endless horizontal field, where their gestures were practical; and another, dizzying vertical, where they groped toward each other with tentacles of feeling. Andrea had not lost the sensation she'd had when she called Felicity “Mother.” On the contrary, the impression strengthened, and it was all she could do to keep herself from bursting out in tears.

When Scheherazade fit Andrea with her own gold G-string, a wave of warmth seized her from the soles of her feet to her blazing cheeks. On its way to her cheeks, the warm wave passed between Felicity's legs and touched her nipples. And in that passage, the wave released the locked spring that no man had been able to turn. Felicity had an orgasm.