Messi@ (56 page)

Seated on yellow director's chairs under the awning of the brand-new New Jerusalem Café, the staff and guests observed the tide.

“Man,” said Joe, “I don't know how the ground can take it.” The marshy soil of New Orleans had been sinking five inches every year.

“And these are only the ones we see,” Ben agreed. “And it's still early morning.”

“My mom used to take me on Mardi Gras to see the Indians,” reminisced Felicity. “We followed the Branch of the Downtown Wild Magnolias, who'd be dancing on Tchopatoulas Street. People lined the street to watch them show their feathers and dance. Mama told me that the chief's robe weighed more than fifty pounds!”

Ben remembered his first Mardi Gras parade, perched high on his father's shoulders, watching the Krewe of Iris roll down Saint Charles Avenue. The fire-breathing chariots of the all-women crew had frightened him. And when the flambeaux carriers passed by, lighting up the night with their torches and throwing wild shadows, he couldn't hold it any longer. He had peed right on Dr. Redman's neck, who nearly dropped him under the wheels of a float when warm liquid trickled down his spine. Ben decided to keep this to himself.

“Once the Lords of Misrule occupy the intersections, we might as well give up trying to go anywhere.” Joe wasn't worried. Since his rescue from the Dome, he had resigned from the police department and was now in the considerably mellower position of chief of security and master steward for the New Jerusalem, the café owned and operated by Felicity and Andrea.

New Jerusalem was situated on Royal Street at the intersection of Orleans. The sign bore the legend
Every Level All the Time
hand-lettered in slightly Gothic script by Andrea. Felicity had invested in the business almost the whole $2.1 million that Mullin had gladly handed over in exchange for his freedom and unconditional return to anonymity. She'd spared no expense on the two lavish performance stages, the fully equipped kitchen, a multiservice spa and confessional, and the computer stations built into every table. Attached to the café was a communal apartment building where the Shades and the wait staff resided. The wait staff consisted of the singing angels of the First Angels Choir, with a considerably enlarged repertoire now that included blues, the devil's music. Only Kashmir Birani, faithful to Mullin, had refused to come along, going off with the reverend in his gold Cadillac.

People began drifting into the café. Felicity rose to her feet to greet a tan, handsome man in a finely tailored Brooks Brothers suit. He returned her gaze, both arch and amused. He mouthed a word Felicity could not make out, and then it dawned on her. Ovid! Of course. The Roman poet, but a shade on the Internet, had come farther than his exile had ever flung him. Felicity embraced him. He was scented by an ancient oil, nard of the Black Sea, Getian perfume.

Standing close by was tuxidoed Nostradamus, perfumed by cigarette smoke and fried fish, holding a newspaper in his hands. “Behold,” he cried, “the sad fate of the deerskin-bound book! It has come undone like the springs of the world! Ten popes have gone and not a face looks gentler!” He handed her the paper.

She thanked him, glorying in her armies of time.

Ben Redman was explaining to Joe: “Listen, Di Friggio, here is the good part. What goes on onstage is not as important as what goes on in the bleachers. One billion souls of the dead are watching the spectacle. It's their reviews that count. Who wins or loses onstage is of no importance.”

Overhearing this argument, Felicity laughed so hard tears squirted out of her eyes. She hadn't laughed this way since she had eaten mushrooms with Ben and watched him do headstands. Only Redman could do this to her.

“Did I say something funny?”

“Yes, darling. You did. I really do love you, you know.”

“Okay, but do you believe I'm right?”

“I believe everything now, Ben. A week ago, I didn't believe anything.”

“Then what's so funny?”

“Well, the numbers got me. Billions and billions! You go, girl!”

“When you're like this, I just want to throw you down on the floor and spank your café-au-lait ass.”

Felicity laughed. “And then try to shove your baseball bat in places too little for it. I know you, Ben Redman.”

Andrea applauded. “What about me?”

“Same idea.” Felicity kissed Andrea's shoulder.

Joe felt all their kisses. He had been communicating telepathically with Felicity since he'd seen her enter the Dome with Andrea, Ben, and Major Notz, and picked up the strains of an eerie but uplifting music coming from them.

The café's first customers did not walk in off the street. The largest room in the café was given over to computers and virtual-reality stations built at eye level within comfortable nooks equipped with overstuffed leather chairs and couches. Cyberentities hovered both inside and outside the screen, exiting their designated environments at will. The thin-as-cigarette-smoke French poet Antonin Artaud drew together his scattered pixels and walked as far as the door of the VR room. He was followed in short order by Henri Michaux, André Breton, René Crevel, and other members of his generation, who traveled in a gang even in ectoplasm. After skewering the surroundings with disdainful glances, they surrendered to the evident licentiousness and separated, heading for the women in the room. Other literary gangs took tentative steps into the new millennium, gathering substance into their images and interacting with embodied creatures as if they were made out of the same stuff.

Karl Marx, who'd wandered into this room looking for a bathroom, was astonished. He watched a gang of literary cybertravelers gain mass and dimension, exit the screens, and become physical entities. What was the economy of this time-and-space free-for-all?

“Who are you? Who are you?” Marx kept asking as entities streamed in from cyberspace. The cyberoids were covered with a superfine powder of salt, as if they'd passed through the Dome on their way to New Jerusalem.

They stated their names for Marx like schoolchildren answering a roll call:
Benjamin Fondane, Ilarie Voronca, Tristan Tzara, Apunake, Paul Celan, Gherasim Luca
… Marx reeled in amazement—even though he himself was an embodied creature from another level, he could not grasp the existence of the pixilated apparitions. He'd never believed in other worlds and had always disdained saccharine spiritual conceits, even before he wrote his mature works. He had believed neither in God, nor in Christ, nor in the Bible. He had been certain of the material world only. Regret for his misguided faith filled him, even as a stubborn inner voice admonished: You are feverish, Karl Marx. This is a dream.

Several pudgy boys with long hair and bad posture were voyaging in MOOs and MUDs, oblivious to the cyberinvasion around them. A large postmodern wolf urinated on one of the boys, and he gave out a war whoop. His next-console neighbor jumped into a pool of furry-mucker mud and felt up the tail of a large, flirtatious lizard.

A barefoot man with long hair and a crown of thorns on his head walked past Marx to the doorway and stood behind Sister Rodica. She started, turned around, and fell out of the director's chair. Andrea helped her up, but Sister Rodica, her eyes fixed on the longhaired man, fell to her knees and touched her forehead to the ground. The man fixed his burning black eyes on her and said, “Oh, lust-laden one! Let spirit do the work of the spirit!”

Nostradamus explained: “It's not Jesus; it's Mani, the Persian. Get up, Sister.”

Reluctantly, Sister Rodica rose to her feet.

Mani admitted it: “I'm not your Christ—I was the first one crucified. Others were crucified after me, and long before Jesus. A row of crosses as long as the Akbar seacoast stretches between us.”

A naked man with a wooden cross on his back pushed through the painted and sequined revelers toward the New Jerusalem, shouting: “Repent! Repent! Shed your devils!”

Felicity recognized him—the man with the LCD cross who had first greeted her when Tesla'd sprung her from the School for Messiah Development. She invited him to come by later to watch the performances.

The sunny morning gave way to a warm, cloudy afternoon, the afternoon in turn to a velvety evening. The intoxicated creatures crowded every inch of the street, and inhibitions dropped like boa feathers. Young women bared their breasts and young men displayed their penises. Pierced nipples, penis chains, leather whips, and restraints brushed against skin. The masked celebrants danced to music pouring in from balconies and boom boxes. A parade passed nearby on Ramparts Street; echoed police sirens mingled with a traditional Mardi Gras tune played by a high school brass band.

The New Jerusalem was thick with bodies pressed tightly against one another. Two Day-Glo Shades lit a bank of black candles set on a wagon wheel above the center stage. Other Shades hung a black cross with chains and hooks from the wheel. Two bare-chested blond men wearing tight vinyl pants climbed on the cross and draped themselves over the arms, bent at the waist, their arms and legs swaying over the heads of the crowd. A bare-breasted woman, wearing only black thong panties and red fishnet stockings, slowly walked her slave in front of the cross. The stoned slave followed the leash attached to his collar.

Shades lit candles on the side stage, revealing a girl stretched naked on a wooden palet. A red-robed priestess in spiked heels and a Mylar bikini heated a pair of pliers red hot over a Bunsen burner flame, and then burned an elaborate ankh on the small of the girl's back. Another woman knelt in front of the girl and kissed her mouth. The smell of burning flesh filled the air. A man with Chinese characters inscribed on his back and leather straps tattooed on his body masturbated as he watched.

Two naked Magdalenes danced, grinding their crotches into the faces of the thieves hanging upside down on the cross. The slave master unleashed the slave Christ before the cross, and several shades helped hoist him up, his back to the audience. The master pulled off the vinyl pants, exposing his buttocks. A leather harness held his genitalia. And then a young girl in red vinyl boots with six-inch heels began to whip Christ's bare bottom.

One by one, women and girls took turns hurting Christ, who winced but did not cry out. Some used whips or paddles; others hit his reddening bottom with their open hand. A costumed nun, her enormous breasts pushed up by a stiff corset, a black veil hanging past her midcalf, and a pink Burmese python around her neck, beat Christ for a long time. Each time she let her leather thong fly at his back she rushed forward, the huge, pale snake dangling terrified from her neck. A long, thin dildo protruded from her pelvis, and when she was done whipping the now bleeding Christ, she plunged the dildo into his ass and began to fuck him to the technodisco beat. The appreciative crowd began to applaud the furious fucking.

Kneeling at the foot of Christ, his female master rubbed salve on his behind, comforting him after the ordeal. Now and then, an unscarred girl or boy leapt forward toward the cross, shedding their clothes and asking to be beaten. The pierced and branded mob surrounding the cross obliged, and moans of ecstatic pain filled the air.

Mr. Rabindranath had witnessed many spectacles of self-mortification and ritual sacrifice in India, but he was quite astonished by what was unfolding here. He found Andrea near the front of the center stage and asked her: “Who are the people being branded and crucified? What is their religion? What are they celebrating?”

“Only their bodies are here,” she reassured him. “Their minds are traveling in cyberspace.”

He didn't understand. Andrea took him by the hand and tried to press through the crowd, but movement was impossible. Mr. Rabindranath squeezed her fingers and began lifting up. Andrea felt her feet leave the ground as she followed. The two of them floated above the heads of the crowd to the next room, where computer consoles blinked and breathed like lungs. Some avatars were moving through electronic cities and forests, entering the room at will, while others were going from the room into the screens. Andrea pointed out the travelers going out rather than in, though it would have been hard to explain exactly what in and out were in this situation.

“The ones going in—they are human minds,” Andrea said. “They have found happiness in cyberspace. They've left their bodies behind for use by the celebrants, who play with them like dolls.”

Mr. Rabindranath understood. The cybernauts, addicted to electronic existence, suffered abuse to their abandoned bodies without pain or complaint. Their minds were fulfilled in cyberspace, linked to other minds in a spaceless, timeless existence.

“These other minds,” Andrea continued, “the ones coming in from cyberspace, are so potent now they are creating flesh bodies. Their purpose is to embody. Sometimes they take over the bodies left behind by the other voyagers, but sometimes they just incarnate at random in anybody vulnerable. They are taking over a lot of bodies. The cybertrafnc is mad just now.”

They floated back into the performance area, where other brandings were taking place. The girl with the brand-new ankh moved painfully through the crowd, helped along by her attendant lover. Other Christs clamored to be crucified, after the first was lowered down. More and more bodies gained the side stage to be branded, until there seemed to be no more spectators, only a human mass reveling in their shared pain.

Ovid was nonplussed. He sat onstage below the latest Christ, speaking into the ear of a white-robed man in sandals. “It is a good bacchanalia, Aristotle, but it compares only negligibly to Roman Saturnalia, which of course paled compared to the worship of Baal in Babylon.”

“This mystery religion seems to be led by women,” observed Nostradamus, who had found a vantage point, standing on the shoulders of a muscular dwarf called Pythagoras.

“They always are,” replied Mani, swatting at a swarm of angels buzzing around his head. “Everywhere I go,” he complained, “these winged pathogens follow me. Ostensibly for my protection. As the first crucified one, you see, I get an honor guard.”