Messi@ (51 page)

“And this is but the beginning,” the reverend taunted them. “There are a hundred deaths before the End!”

He rubbed the fava bean controlling the rose between thumb and forefinger, and the splintered flower of light gathered itself together and a jet of blood shot up from its center and reached the domed ceiling, nearly blotting out the stars virtualed there.

In truth, he didn't despise those scientists and soldiers who'd try to prevent him from accomplishing the Lord's revenge as much as those Christians who had fashioned for themselves a sugary peacenik Jesus who forgave endlessly, a wimpy sap who justified softness and vice. This was an act of egregious surgery and wicked revision. Mullin knew that Christ was made of burning light and of the hard, blackened shell of the world's sins. When he did come back, it was going to be inside a ball of fire as large as the globe, a ball of fire on the surface of which the flesh of sinners sizzled. Layered inside the fire were the epochs of men, bubbles of fashion and frivolity stuffed with millions of faces distorted in pain. The fireball would roll over countries and continents. It would evaporate the oceans.

Mullin closed his eyes and heard the hissing steam of the oceans going up to form heavy black clouds. From the vast store of oil below his feet to the Gulf of Mexico, the black fire snaked out of control, torching the earth and the skies, setting off refinery stacks and sulfur processors. The smell of the devil, burning oil and sulfur, must be reaching the hells of Wall Street by now. When Mullin opened his eyes again, the fireball of righteousness had reached the lower edge of Greenland and was rushing across the barren rocks, charring them.

The reverend's faithful, sweat shiny, now surrounded him with a firm knot of hot flesh. The wild tremors gave way to a different movement, a steady rolling wave. They linked limbs to steady the small island on which the reverend stood.

When the object wind subsided, it gave way to history rewritten the way it should have happened the first time. They saw the Crusades shoring up the Kingdom of God in a Jerusalem without Jews or Muslims. They saw the children of Christian America praying in their classrooms at dawn under a waving Stars and Stripes that had a bright new cross at its center. They saw Paradise and trod the flower carpet of the Garden of Eden. They stood before the molten bronze of God's quill on the mountain. They stood close enough to Jesus on the Mount of Olives to taste the metallic sweat of his fervor. There was also Muhammad's heaven, where they might go for research and allow themselves to be kneaded by the perfumed hands of frolicking Fatimas.

Those were the big things.

But they saw also the smaller triumphs. The World Trade Center towers folded into each other like an accordion, done at last. The town of the capitalists, the disbelievers, the Marxists, and the Jews crumbled into dust and was blown over the marshes out into the Atlantic.

Elsewhere in America, wheat silos collided with missile silos, mixing bread and radiation, causing poisoned loaves to fall on burning farmhouses. A rain of golden ash filled in the skyline of Oklahoma City, one of the pulsing dots on the map wall.

One by one, the cities of the world launched their sports domes, their church spires, their looping freeways, their radio towers, their television dishes, and their chimney stacks into space. Some were in flames, some just floated detached, like a child's squiggles.

“Oh, look there! Dear God!”

Everyone looked. Zooming from the Dome roof were thousands of gold-and-blue dragonflies beating their wings and making the air vibrate. Their eyes, which could be seen through the whirring of their wings, were filled with a cold intelligence.

“Damn!” cried the reverend. “The angels!”

Indeed. Those were no dragonflies. They were angels. The air crackled with electricity, and sheets of gold and electric blue clothed the reverend and his faithful. All around them the angels flew, celebratory and musical, among exploding buildings, collapsing apartment houses, folded bridges, rivers turned into geysers. Cracks appeared in the earth now, an intricate web of widening fissures sucking down all that had not exploded, burnt, or floated off. The angels multiplied over the cracks like luminous spiders. There were now millions of them.

“Sweet Jeezus!” exclaimed the reverend to his faithful shadows, “I never knew the Lord had such numbers!”

“Amen! Amen!” cried the dwellers of the Dome.

“Give me a close-up on that!” The reverend pointed to a swarm of commalike shapes funneling around a tower.

When the commas came into close-up view they proved to be a mob whirling around the top of the burning city of New Orleans. Parts of their bodies had vanished, leaving them hollowed out in the shape of question marks made out of phosphorescent bones. Then they jelled into a single lump of clotted black matter. They now looked like a single fat exclamation point.

Mullin knew what had happened.

“Can you believe that? Incomplete Rapture!” He filled with admiration for the wondrous intricacy of the End. “Woe unto you, you disbelieving fool!” he said to himself. “You who thought that it was going to be simple Rapture for the righteous and fire for the sinful.”

He turned to his shadows. “We now see half Rapture for the half righteous, quarter Rapture for the quarter righteous, and decimals of decimals for every thought, and fire for everybody, woe unto us!”

“Amen,” cried the faithful.

Mullin was drained. “Back to your stations! Change the channel!”

The burning world faded as if it never was. The silos went back to silence, the wrathful fires of the Lord retired into their mustard seeds. The floating body parts and the homeless objects went back to the bodies and homes they came out of. New York filled back up with Jews. The cross faded from the flag. The angels folded themselves inside their burning dots, becoming mere pixels. The rose of light squeezed back into the favabean button. He put it in his pants pocket.

The bells tolled midnight and Mullin made the sign of the cross over his people.

“God bless you in the New Age, and congratulations! Operation Apocalypse is now concluded. Had this been the real event, you would have been instructed to pray as well as watch. Glory be to Christ and his coming!”

The First Angels Choir, arrayed on a platform above the banks of computers, rent the salty air with the strains of “Amazing Grace.” They were a splendid sight indeed, pleasing to the eyes of heaven. Among them were the proudest flowers of his collection, a bouquet of races and colors, including even an Indian princess, Kashmir Birani, who had forsaken a multitude of heathen deities for the glory of Christ. And in a little while Mullin would ascend in an elevator to the observation deck, where two Bamajans had just herded a crowd of strippers and a uniformed policeman. Hopefully the blackmailer was among them, her wicked heart beating like a caged bird watching a cat's paw slide between the bars. Mullin hoped that she had seen enough of the show to tremble at the coming wonders. What the hell was the policeman doing? Caught in the net, he supposed. The Bamajans were getting dumber and dumber, even as the miracles came nearer and nearer.

Sylvia-Zack looked down on the pompous dot that was Reverend Mullin and choked alternately from fury and disbelief. Had I but waited a day to imprison myself in this body, I would right now be causing you such guilty torments, Preacher, you would prefer a stint in your apocalypse! Look, Zack, Sylvia shot back, if we are going to share this body, which incidentally used to be all mine, we must restrict these bouts of rage, lest they impede our circulation. Since you can't use any of your angel tricks now, I advise employing human patience until we have an opportunity to properly roast Mullin. Slattern, strumpet, trollop, Jezebel, muttered Zack.

On the fifth day of the year 2000, a rainstorm swept over New Orleans, flooding the streets and sweeping into gutters and drainage ditches the millions of religious pamphlets scattered there by wild-eyed evangelists:
Jesus: The Ultimate in Body Piercing, The Romans' Map to Heaven, How to Get to Heaven, The Second Coming: Surely I Come Quickly!
Drunks stirred amid the soggy pages and drifted away with them. The Mississippi River came up to the top of the levees, gleaming above the city like a gorged snake. Some New Orleanians were sure that this was the hour of their submersion. But the weatherman on the weather station said that the rain would stop, and as soon as he said it, it did. No fewer than 60 percent of all Americans thought that the Weather Channel was the voice of God.

Major Notz adjusted the satellite antenna on the roof of the Hummer, his ear on the world. He felt fierce, contained, and lucid. He wore the white uniform of an Iraqi colonel. The major's uniforms were all the expression of a determined martial state, but some were more emotionally charged than others. British uniforms made him feel serene. The Iraqi uniform, made by Saddam Hussein's personal tailor, represented sheer fury. The major fancied himself the incarnate rage of Babylon, and his rage was directed at Mullin, who had trespassed the agreed-upon boundaries of his role. This Pygmalion had forgotten he was Notz's creation.

He remembered the day Mullin acquired his “greatness,” but it wasn't the way Mullin remembered it. At about the time that Mullin thought he'd found his calling at Motel Six, the major acquired controlling interest in a television station. After much discussion among the members of his organization, it was decided to employ this station to broadcast exclusively Christian programs, and the twenty-four-hour channel GOV (God's Own Voice) was born. In subsequent years it grew into an empire. The challenge had been to find charismatic preachers who weren't too smart. The major foresaw the vast wealth that these men could acquire, and his intention all along had been to control this wealth for his own purposes.

To carry out his project he relied on the help of friends in the Fellowship of the White Dawn, an occult order founded in Ireland in the fourteenth century for the purpose of establishing a secret world government. Members of the White Dawn, in addition to occupying important posts in many countries, supplied the major with some of his best uniforms and objects for his collections. The fellowship believed that people's faith in the coming of an avatar was an opportunity not to be missed, and they had mobilized their resources to find a suitable candidate. The major was charged with spearheading the project. At a time when syncretic consciousness was uniting all religions, finding an appropriately charismatic but intellectually limited avatar was quite complex. The democracy of television solved the problem, however, by electing the preacher with the best ratings, and that had been, regrettably, Mullin. Once he'd been found, there remained the question of how to best make the prophecies of various faiths agree within the rather invertebrate rhetoric of the Louisiana preacher. This was still a work in progress.

The major sat back in his seat and studied the road as if it were a page of alien text. He was driving himself, having decided that from this point on, his hand had to be at the wheel, literally and otherwise.

Felicity and Andrea left Commander's Palace in a taxi. Crowds were dancing on the streets and fireworks made continuous streaks of light in the rainy sky. New Orleanians had resolved, in characteristic fashion, to celebrate the new millennium until Mardi Gras. The Shades on Felicity's street were gathered around a bonfire, singing camp songs. Their painted school bus was parked on the sidewalk.

Felicity had an idea. “Hey,” she called to them, “what do you say you and your friends come up to my place and I cook you an omelet?”

The Shades were overjoyed. They had been eating from trash bins for months.

“You can take showers, too!” she promised in a burst of magnanimity. “And gas up the bus. We are going on a trip after breakfast.”

The shades spread themselves all over Felicity's little apartment, making joyous noises over her torn collages of birds and Victorian ladies, while she got out her huge black iron skillet and proceeded to crack a dozen eggs, beating them with Grandmere's whisk.

Andrea was sure that she'd arrived in Paradise. As she helped straighten out the Shades' rags, handing them towels and soap, she decided that she had at long last escaped the war. Watching Felicity cook and seeing the pink naked Shades with the bodies drawn on them like a second skin, she felt fortunate and free. The scholars at Saint Hildegard's had been a good and peaceful family, but they had been old and reserved. The Shades were her own age, and filled in her family needs with warmth and sexiness. Watching them eat greedily, Andrea silently thanked something out there.

“Hey, isn't it some fucking holiday?” a pink nude wanted to know.

“Sixth of January, the feast of the Epiphany.” Felicity knew her holy days.

“The Epi … What's the Epiphany?” The Shade was puzzled.

Felicity laughed. It was the first time Andrea had seen her laugh, and she blushed. Felicity laughed like a flower opening, from the root up. The sound of her was like petals thrown in the air. Everybody began to laugh.

“Yeah, it's Three Kings' Day, when you get gifts. Frankincense, myrrh, and gold,” she said between peals of laughter.

“Goodie,” said the pink nude, “we get gifts!”

When they were done eating, Felicity explained that the trip they were going to take was very important. But she didn't have to explain anything. The Shades would have done anything she asked them to.

The night melted away like an ice cream cone.

The old school bus, painted in colors that were once described as psychedelic, was covered with the faceless body of the True One—the Shades' one obsession. At least half of them now believed that Felicity was the True One, while the others were beginning to think that Andrea was.

The old road hog took a while to start, so Felicity and Andrea arrayed themselves on the layers of ratty sleeping bags that covered the floor. I have always been a Shade, Andrea thought. Felicity felt at home, too. She loved the feeling of a trembling, cheap, naive life. It must have been a blast, once upon a time, to be a pink child in a world of metal men. New Orleans still had bars where old hippies with white hair came together to remember sleeping with one another in the bowers of the Golden Age. New Orleans had bars for the natives of every age since the last century. Each generation had its own bars where, safely ensconced in the jukebox music of its own era, it could pretend to be young again. The twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties all lived side by side like big, wet birds invisible to one another. Perhaps, thought Felicity, even ancient ages past, since the beginning of time, had their secret hideouts in New Orleans. They certainly traveled freely through her computer, loving her as if she were their secret hideout. Maybe she was. And now it was over, the millennium, the millennia, the ages of men. As the old bus rattled and roared, Felicity's mind raced ahead into the future, but she saw only bright white light.