Messi@ (48 page)

“I am not very well educated,” Andrea said, “but of one thing I am certain: no emperors in history have ever freed their slaves or recalled their exiles. No such thing could have happened in Ovid's time.”

But Felicity believed Ovid. She rested her amphora in the dust at Ovid's feet and said to Andrea: “Well, he must know, because he is reporting from his time. Maybe history is not taking place the way it's been reported for centuries. It's still happening, changing, taking turns.”

Ovid drank from his cup, waiting for Scheherazade's reply.

Andrea was not convinced. “But is it the same history? The world Ovid lives in is not the same world I learned about in school. If in Ovid's present world the emperors are freeing their slaves, it means that his world is ending. Emperors do not dismantle the bases of their power out of generosity. They must need to self-destruct.” Andrea had not wasted her time among the scholars at Saint Hildegard's. “No wonder Ovid misses his sorrows: in them he was alive. The end of his world is also his end.”

“Ovid,” Felicity spoke, “our age knows you for your sorrows. If you were to suddenly accede to happiness, we would want to know nothing of you. What you say cannot be. If your age of peace has come, how is it that we know nothing of it, and how is it that history continued after your good news in an endless chain of estrangement, exile, and sorrow?”

“To that I have no answer. Perhaps Rome declared her peace many times but few heard the news. In any case, this is good-bye. I have decided to sever all routes to the past and the future. Farewell, princess of sleep, comforter of Thrace's exile.” He sauntered off the edge of the well, planted a kiss on the girl's cheek, and walked away. The waves in the sea rolled into view.

“Wait a minute longer, poet. I want to introduce you to my friend …”

Andrea chose an avatar—a woman draped only in long curly hair—and said: “Beatrice.”

“Ah,” said Ovid, turning briefly around and enveloping Beatrice with a kind but distant gaze, “Dante's love.” And then he turned again and walked away.

“We'll ask for Dante now.” Felicity typed
Dante
, but someone else showed up instead, a gaunt old man carrying a skull. He walked slowly toward them on a field littered with bodies, the aftermath of a battle. Black clouds floated in a gray sky.

“I greet you, Scheherazade and Beatrice. I am Nostradamus. The soup of cyphers that I have spent my life preparing has boiled over. Everything I have predicted has already happened. The world of humans is done. You are on your way to a function where angels and humans will mingle. It will be terrifying. The lion will devour the lamb.”

Scheherazade and Beatrice stepped with distaste among the corpses, some of which were still bleeding through holes in their armor.

“You have scared the world for far too long, Nostradamus. You are tired. Sleep now.” Scheherazade was angry. She felt no affection for the old bird of doom whose prophecies had come true one by one, and were still unfolding. What evil dream had seized the poor man to give him such detailed visions of war, pestilence, famine, and death? Even now, so many years after his own historical death, Nostradamus prattled on, omen after omen, nightmare after nightmare. Sleep, you old coot. Scheherazade granted him rest across time.

Felicity typed
Dante
again, but there was no answer. She typed
Amelia Earhart
then, and
Joan of Arc
, and no one appeared. An abandoned city showed on the screen, but nothing moved within.

Then a message came onto the screen, a banner floating above the silent houses:
Greetings, Scheherazade. Your cyberlovers from the distant past are saying good-bye. They are all disconnecting, withdrawing to their niches of time in anticipation of a great event
.

Andrea was disappointed and Felicity was angry. She scrolled through her list of electronic addresses. There they all were, people from all ages: Alexander, Archimedes, Hoffman, Homer, Jefferson, Joan of Arc, Laotzu, Marx, Plato, Saint Teresa … Even if they lived just around the corner, they still had the strength of imagination on their side. Felicity wrote the following message:

Scheherazade, who has given closure to your restlessness and made your nights bearable, now asks something of you. This is the most important request she has ever made in her life. Listen, all. Come now out of cyberspace and be with her and her new friend, Beatrice. Come from your hideouts in ages past, from countries far away, from your offices. Come out from behind your pseudonyms, leave your shells at once. Get in your cars, strap on your wings, teleport if you must. For this time only, you must come and join us! While every person in New Orleans will soon mask for Carnival in order to become someone else, you are invited to come here and be yourselves!

Then she selected
SEND ALL
.

Felicity typed her real name and address. She had no way of knowing, and perhaps neither did her cyberlovers, that the actual entities whose identities they had so carefully claimed were already in New Orleans, engaged in a grave activity. Others, of course, were mere humans whose online service had mysteriously failed.

“Your cyberfriends make me think of my friends in Jerusalem.” Andrea told Felicity about the scholars and the nuns at Saint Hildegard's, and how she had left without saying good-bye.

“They must miss you.”

“They must hate me.” Andrea felt sad for a moment.

The evening of Andrea's departure from Jerusalem, still ignorant of the fact that she was gone, Professor Li wrote to his wife in Beijing.

My Blossom:

I have been wasting time waiting for permission to translate the manuscript. But not entirely. The distinguished guests of this hospice have provided me with much food for thought. They are all emissaries of certain religious currents who appear intent on a mission I have not been able to fathom. They have gathered in Jerusalem to receive instructions about some momentous event that is supposed to conclude the Christian millennium. I have not been trained to understand the core of their religion, which is supposed to be a mystery, in any case. I do have the sense, nonetheless, that a sort of monstrous, unbalanced occurrence is palpable here in Jerusalem, a city unlike any other. I would not be surprised if an entirely unknown element, something that might be called
mysterium
, were one day to be discovered leaking from the stones. A sort of radiation. Forgive me, blossom. I digress. This is also a consequence of this city, which considers itself the center of the world, making everything else a digression. There is also a girl here, a Bosnian refugee, whose presence has somehow captivated all of us. She was raised under the Yugoslav communist regime for the early part of her life. Because of this I feel a certain empathy for her that I doubt my religious-trained friends would understand. If the tragic mistakes with which we are all familiar had not occurred in the former Soviet sphere, this girl could have been a leading comrade of the first rank. She has a genuine revolutionary sensibility. As it is, she is a refugee, tossed about by the winds of circumstance …

Having allowed himself the luxury of sentiment, Professor Li pushed his laptop away and looked out the window. A raindrop hung there from the tip of a bare olive branch. Ah, poetry. It wasn't something he thought about very often nowadays. In his youth, he had written poetry. But then, so had Mao. And Stalin. It didn't prove anything. The time had come to return to China. His search for the manuscript had been unsuccessful, but he had gained something else, a mission that was yet unclear. Dr. Li had an unsettling vision of himself a few months hence, after returning to China. He saw himself in a large, cold auditorium, standing before thousands of blue-clad Chinese from the highest ranks of society, talking … about Andrea. He tried in vain to modify this ludicrous picture by willing himself to speak of other, important things: the future of Confucian scholarship, the direction of education in the twenty-first century. It wasn't working. Every time he opened his mouth, unbidden words came to him: Comrades, I must speak to you about Andrea the Orphan. Andrea, the mistress of the wheel. Andrea, the one who has astonished and seduced me.

Just about the time Professor Li finished his letter, Lama Cohen, panicked by her inability to locate her prayer wheel, began searching the closet where she kept her few things. She remembered last using it the evening before, prior to her meditation. She had fallen into a deep dreamless sleep, interrupted only by the passage of a white bird through the room. The bird had been tall and smelled strongly of tobacco. The lama had woken up smiling at the bird in her dream, but now she wondered if the bird had been a dream. Lama Cohen shivered. White birds were a bad omen. Was she going to die soon? There would be no doubt about it if the bird had indeed taken her prayer wheel. But while the white bird was a likely suspect, Lama Cohen rather knew who'd taken it. She had early on discerned in Andrea an impishness that reminded her of her own self. Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, naughty Iris had shoplifted from every interesting store in the better ski resorts of the Rockies and found enough time to seduce considerable numbers of men her father's age. Still, her sympathy went only so far. Her wheel was her professional tool, like a doctor's stethoscope. She had to retrieve it. She had already opened the door of her room to go out and look for Andrea when she heard a series of low moans at the window. She left the door half open and pried open the wooden shutters. Standing on the windowsill, looking straight at her with round eyes, was a white owl. The bird moaned again and Lama Cohen laughed. How could she have suspected Andrea? Here was the culprit.

“Where is my prayer wheel?” she asked of the bird, who looked apologetic on top of being terminally sad.

“You must return to your congregation in New Mexico. Bring them the good news of the coming of Andrea the Orphan.” The bird enunciated the words like an ancient teacher of the dharma.

Father Hernio noticed that the box containing the ashes of his parents was gone. Curiously, he felt neither panic nor anger, but relief. He understood that the loss of this object signaled the end of his journey in the weary city of miracles. He saw stretched before him the city of Mindanao and the ocean beyond it. The city and the ocean teemed with millions of people gathered to hear his message. “I have brought good news from Jerusalem,” he said. Standing next to him, enveloped in green shimmer, was Andrea, holding a dazzling emerald wheel. The priest began to pack.

The disappearance of his bull-roarer was particularly grave, because Father Zahan was at an impasse. He needed to request instructions about the next stage of his mission. He had received his first set of instructions in a dream exactly one year before. Darumulun, the supreme Yuin deity, had ordered him to go to Jerusalem to meet other holy men in advance of a great meeting that would decide the fate of the visible world. Father Zahan had been surprised. The Yuin had no apocalyptic theology like the Christians. For them, the End had come a long time ago, close to their beginnings in dream time. The Yuin had angered Darumulun then, and they had had to remove an incisor and scar themselves during initiation ever since, in penance. After that, the Yuin distinguished no longer between the visible and the invisible worlds. But Father Zahan had not questioned his dream. Such dreams came only three times in the life of any man. These were his guide dreams, proceeding from dream time: they had to be obeyed. Even Darumulun had to acknowledge other gods. Even heaven, it seemed, was subject to change in these troubled days.

Father Zahan had last employed his communicator in the Garden of Gethsemane on a day when there were no tourists. He had asked the gods to guide him and had concluded with a plea for peace among them. He hated to admit it, but he had become quite distressed by the way heaven mimicked discord among men. Or was it the other way around? In any case, he had received no answer but for the burst of rain that broke unexpectedly over his head.

Dr. Carlos Luna shivered. He couldn't find his Aztec-wheel sweater. This sweater, knit for him by the seven
brujas
of his native village, near Palenque, from the finest hair of a young llama, was his protector both against cold and against the world. When he was wrapped in it, neither cold nor indifference bothered Dr. Luna. This sweater was indeed warm, as Andrea had already ascertained. She had pulled it over her head and stretched it down just past her naked butt, noticing how soft it was. Together with Professor Li's shawl, she was dressed quite comfily. The mirror on the door had given her back an image of disheveled but stylish loveliness.

Dr. Luna was certain that his sweater had been stolen by one of the many idle neotribals who loitered at a café he liked to frequent. Their looks of admiration for the sweater's intricately woven calendar hadn't escaped him. Doubtless they were interested in reproducing its intricacy on whatever unadorned skin they still possessed. It had been exceedingly hot in the café, and he seemed to remember removing his sweater.

Dr. Luna tucked a rarely smoked pipe in the pocket of his black trench coat and went out to investigate. He tipped an imaginary hat when he passed the open door of the chapel where Mother Surperior and Father Tuiredh were absorbed in the study of what appeared to be a large dark shape floating above their heads. These Christians are very strange, he said to himself.

The Fig, a vegetarian restaurant on Haik Efraim Street, was a popular neotribal hangout. The sign read:
THE FIG
,
Just the Garden, No Internet
. He hoped to find his sweater. If not, he would pin a notice on the bulletin board, offering a reward for its return. The waitresses had hair painted in various colors, earrings and rings in various parts of their bodies—more parts than were visible, he suspected—and spoke six languages (without saying much in any of them, he thought meanly, then regretted it). Father Luna was not mean, but he found the fashion of body piercing and scarification for no good ritual reason distasteful. Mayan people scarred themselves when they became adults, in order to signify their separation from childhood. But these young people seemed to do it for the opposite reason, in order to remain children. Punctured and scarred like this, they incurred only ridicule in the adult world and were always shunned and given only the least responsible tasks. He was horrified by this waste of strong young people in the Christian world. Just when they should be called to serve their people, these youths became most adrift. Everything had been set on its head and was exactly the opposite of what it should have been. The young were more idle than the old, men served machines, women were barren, little screens had replaced meetings between the people, the wondrous senses were in decline, nature or what remained of it was being defoliated and erased. Most wild animals were dead or dying.