Messi@ (49 page)

While Dr. Luna had these uneasy thoughts, a young woman stood before him with a pad, ready to take his order. She had barely any hair on her head but what there was struggled between several colors. Each strand was a different hue. In her lips, three gold studs gave her a funny triangular mustache. When she spoke, he saw that her tongue was lined with some kind of metal.

“I will have this.” The Mayan father pointed absently to an item on the menu labeled Tofu Nightingale Nest. “And I have a question … I was here the other day. Did anyone find a sweater?”

The metallic girl took his order, then said, “You look sad. I will go ask at the back. We will find your sweater.”

Dr. Luna was touched by her compassion. She put her pad in her back pocket, then said: “Didn't you come in here once with the girl from
Gal Gal Hamazal
?”

“Yes. Andrea.” He had once had lunch with Andrea here.

The entire staff and all the customers in the restaurant heard this and began to comment.

“I never watch TV,” a boy said, “but I saw her once when I was waiting for a bus. She's a very unhappy girl, I think.”

“There is a rabbi in the Knesset who wants the show stopped because the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are sacred. This girl could bring about the End of Creation,” remarked a rail-thin youth with tiny gold glasses sewn right into his skin.

“
Gal Gal Hamazal
is a gate for the disappearance of people,” the waitress said. “I had three roommates who disappeared because they watched too much television.”

“True.” The thin youth nodded gravely. “Television is a portal through which people pass into the afterlife, while still alive. Already, people are nothing but heads and fingers connected to the evil neural World Web. Their bodies are gone.” He spoke with so much bitterness Dr. Luna felt the need to comfort him.

“You are still young.” He didn't know what else to say. The boy was a philosopher, but so was everyone in Jerusalem. The whole city was in need of comfort.

Dr. Luna was pleased that his acquaintance with Andrea had awakened such interest among the usually sullen young. He agreed that the rabbi's fears were well founded.

“The rabbinical objections have parallels in Mayan beliefs,” he explained. “The priestly language is forbidden to the uninitiated. I can't say much about the disappearance of people now … Our people have disappeared for centuries.”

The multicolored metallic waitress, who had gone to the back to ask about his sweater, came back with disappointing news. No one had seen it. The other patrons' sympathy was immediate and energetic. They understood the importance of vestments and symbols.

“Whoever took it is going to bring it back!” vowed a bald-headed giant dressed in an African skirt and a leather jacket.

Everyone concurred. Dr. Luna ate his Tofu Nightingale Nest, a round-bottomed concoction with bright pimento slivers in the saffron-tinted tofu curds. These young people were not at all bad. During the course of his dinner he was astounded to hear them express beliefs very similar to his. They too lamented the destruction of the natural world. Some of them had never seen a wild animal except on a television screen. After they renounced the virtual world, they saw none. They spoke lovingly and nostalgically of birds. One small Australian youth with what appeared to be antennae grafted to his skull remembered every bird he had ever seen. He recited their names with eyes half closed in rapture and cried after the name of the last one, the snow ygdrin. He had seen the last ygdrin at the Sidney zoo.

Dr. Luna returned to the convent, content with his outing. He had also changed his mind about the young. The boy who had cried over the ygdrin looked a little like an ygdrin himself. Perhaps the birds were not gone after all, but had become these armies of painted young people with their plumagelike tattoos. It was not unheard of. The world had begun with bird people. He thought affectionately of Andrea, who, though unscarred and unfeathered, was yet a member of this generation. It distressed him to think that they were inheriting a world on the brink of annihilation. There would, of course, be another world, but these children would be sacrificed before they could even register a complaint. The cosmic forces, he well knew, had their intricate harmonies, but for an earth-ling all of it brought sorrow. He forgot all about his sweater, though he had been assured by the denizens of the Fig that no stone would be left unturned in search of it. He smiled at the quaint expression. This was Jerusalem—there were a lot of stones. He imagined them in their bird guises, led by the whiteness of Andrea, searching for his brightly colored sweater among the stones of Jerusalem. He knew also that he would never see this, because it was time to return to Indian America to report to the elders what he had found.

What have I found? I found the spirit of the young, he answered himself.

Next day, the scholars found all their cherished objects. They had been shoved under the cot in Andrea's room. Retrieving them one by one, Sister Rodica wept, and when she returned them one by one, the scholars looked ready to weep as well.

Lama Cohen expressed all their feelings when she spun her prayer wheel and said, “She played with it.”

Indeed, as each of them put away their things, they were glad that their orphan had taken and perhaps played with them. Her touch had added an imponderable substance to their possessions and in a mysterious way facilitated their leave-taking. Then the scholars began to pack, this part of their mission having come to an end.

Chapter Thirty-three

Wherein the necessity for action seizes our heroines. Dinner with Major Notz. Ben's oracle
.

Andrea leaned over and kissed Felicity's mouth. In that instant, Felicity's body spoke to her with all the voices locked within it. Fear! Fear what? God! one voice said, louder than all the others. God what? She heard others—Miles, Grandmère, Notz, garbled, speaking fast, questioning—and each voice died in the kiss. She understood now: every kiss she had been given or offered had been in quest of something. Felicity drew away and asked Andrea: “Who are you?”

Andrea opened her eyes, and her face came back from so far away it took a fluid eternity to regain its features. “I've been so many people, I'm too tired to remember them all.”

And then they gave themselves to the kiss.

There have been many kisses in the world, Andrea thought, but this kiss is different. There's been a lot of kissing this girl done, but this is different, thought Felicity. They kissed for so long they remembered, if that is the word, every kiss they ever kissed. All the incomplete kisses of their young lives rushed to be completed.

“Damn!” Felicity drew her breath. “This is
the
fucking kiss.”

“Light chocolate!” Andrea licked Felicity's lips.

“Balkan swarthy candy with long white legs.”

They laughed and played and were lighter than air, and then kissed some more, and each rime the kiss overwhelmed them. They lay there with their hearts beating hard.

“I have a feeling that every time we kiss we make something.” Felicity saw a marble sculpture of their lips on a green lawn.

Andrea heard something that sounded like many human voices speaking at once. She thought about Rodica and how she'd wept when pointing out a painting of Judas betraying Christ with a kiss. “That man,” Rodica had said, “made kissing evil.” That's it, Andrea thought. Judas had made kissing evil, but when she and Felicity kissed, kissing was made good again. Their kisses were snaking like seismic fissures through the psyches of the citizenry, causing them regret, pain, humility, and a dolorous need to emerge from hiding. People jolted to awareness by the return of their forgotten pasts were burning the phone lines trying to make amends to those they'd hurt a long time before.

“Do you suppose we ought to try this in public?”

Andrea was all for it. They were going to take the kiss for a walk.

The phone rang as they were about to go out the door. It was Major Notz.

“Finally. How are you, darling?”

“I tried to call you all day, Uncle. I had a nasty experience, and you'll have to help me with the terrible revenge I am planning on someone. And I want you to meet a friend, Andrea.”

He invited them to that evening's dinner at Commander's Palace.

“You'll like my uncle; he's a first-class eccentric. Every Tuesday he eats dinner at this restaurant.”

Andrea liked whatever Felicity said she'd like.

It was evening already and the city pulsed with an energy unusual even by its elevated standards. The fog-shrouded neon above the hotels on Canal Street sent plumes of soft light drifting over the street.

“New Orleans is an old whore,” explained Felicity. “She takes a long time to get ready and a long time to wind down. No party ever really ends here; it just keeps smoldering till the next one.”

Felicity waved to the Shades massed on her street. They cheered when they saw her.

“Man, you're back.” The girl with the sixteen rings in her cheeks was glad.

“Don't go anywhere without me,” laughed Felicity and handed her a twenty. “Wine all around. Happy New Year.”

They let out a cry of thanks, sounding like birds. For a moment, Andrea saw a flock of many different kinds of birds glistening with rain under the streetlights. She was beginning to enjoy her ability to see metaphors become literal. Was this a kind of power, or just craziness? She didn't care. The world had been literal for too long.

Felicity and Andrea walked with their arms around each other, kissing now and then. At the streetcar stop they collided with a gang of drunk rednecks.

“Fucking dykes!” slobbered one of them.

Andrea gave him the finger.

“Why, it's bigger than his dick!” exclaimed Felicity.

Something crude might have taken place if Andrea hadn't spotted a slender young boy on the neutral ground, looking lost.

“Look, it's Michael, the boy from the Bama … the Jamaican potato dish.” She dragged Felicity by the arm toward the boy. Inexplicably, the rednecks parted to let them pass.

“They were weird,” the bellicose one told his companions, but he couldn't explain the mortal fear that had seized him when Andrea gave him the finger. He didn't have to explain; the same claw of impending mortality had seized all of them.

The women overtook the boy, who had started to walk faster when he saw them. Felicity touched him on the shoulder. The boy's hair stood on his head like a fright wig.

“Easy, lad. I am one of the angels of the First Angels Choir.” Felicity hummed “Rock of Ages,” and the boy looked trustingly back and inclined his head lamblike. Felicity patted it, smoothing down some of the quills.

“Do you know anything about the Dome?”

“Well, you're an angel, shouldn't you be there now?” Michael Bamajan trembled.

“She fell, she's a fallen angel …” Andrea smiled, but seeing his quills return to vertical, she added quickly, “But she's still an angel. Look at her.”

Indeed, beatific green light streamed through Felicity and joined a strong rose aura around Andrea. Together they made a kind of window that seemed to the boy more beautiful than the rose window of Notre Dame. He rubbed his eyes.

“I overheard two Bamajans talking …” He hesitated, but another look at the women nearly blinded him. He spoke quickly. “They said that some of the evangelists were taking little packages to different places in Louisiana. And there was some science talk I didn't get.”

“What places?” Felicity had a pretty good idea what these packages contained.

“Lots of places—the Exxon plant in Baton Rouge, a gypsum processing plant, the Akzo salt mine at Armadillo Island. I don't know …”

“Armadillo Island!” exclaimed Felicity. “Isn't the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve stored near there in salt domes?”

“Are the packages bombs?” inquired Andrea, suddenly remembering the smell of the book-bomb on the airplane.

“I'm afraid so,” said Felicity. “I believe that Armageddon isn't entirely up to God.”

The Dome was the salt dome called Armadillo Island. Now Felicity knew both where Mullin's paradise was and where the nerve center of his operation was located.

They let Michael Bamajan go, but he remained rooted to the spot, following them with his eyes until they turned the corner.

Commander's Palace had pulled out all the culinary stops to welcome the millennium and was now serving the leftovers at a discount. The foyer was jammed with starched locals waiting for their tables and discussing the menu. Ella Brennan had announced on television that every dish for the next month would be an exact replica of one cooked in 1901 by her great-grandfather. There was something immensely soothing in this, a guarantee perhaps that tradition was not to be upset by the mere passing of time. Enormous vases filled with lilies, orchids, and roses stood between the tables. A five-piece ensemble was already performing staunch classic jazz compositions. The light of flambeaux reflected splendidly off the crystal chandeliers and the warm red velvet of the curtains.

Felicity, holding Andrea's arm, shoved her through the waiting crowd past the operatic kitchen, where a gastronomic performance was unfolding in spicy clouds of smoke and steam. The cooks wore leaves and frolicked in a sylvan landscape under the kindly gaze of an aging Pan with furry white eyebrows. Andrea shook her head and they became cooks again.

Major Notz was seated at his usual table, with Boppy Beauregard standing by, still as a bronze statue. A magnum of champagne with a white towel around its neck stood in a silver bucket by the table. When he spotted his niece, Notz swung his bulk with a groan halfway out of the chair. To Andrea the scene looked like a painting by Frans Hals she had seen in Sarajevo. It was a picture of infinite bourgeois opulence, whose reality had been as remote from her war-torn world as the planet Mars. Now here it was, out of its frame, in vivid color. The triumph of the flesh, she thought, and she let her hand disappear in the major's paw as Felicity made the introduction.