Messi@ (6 page)

“Darling,” the major sighed, “I could trace for you, step by step, the quite reasonable chain of events that lead from Edenic hyperspace to the nuclear age to Kashmir's disappearance, but I'm not sure—”

“Edenic hyperspace?”

“A description of the state prior to the one that most traditions insist is now ending. The point is, in helping me find Kashmir you will begin to fulfill the mission I've always imagined for you. More crab, darling?”

Felicity was irritated—her mentor had chosen the wrong time to try to involve her in his obsessions. All she was interested in was Mullin's connection to the disappearance of the TV star who liked jazz and Jack Kerouac. What did occult traditions, humming crystals have to do with it? And this End of the World business, she was sick of it. The newspapers were full of apocalyptic hokeyness.

“Somehow,” she said bitterly, “the end of the world is contingent on my finding the vanished Vanna. Am I reading this correctly?”

“In a way.” Notz was not satisfied with her grasp of matters. By this time, she should have seen more. Then again, she didn't have a psychic adviser who could see simultaneously into the past and into the future as he did. The channeler Carbon was due later that evening for a channeling session.

“Must be Vannageddon,” she teased.

“Put crudely, yes.” The major was displeased. “You aren't listening very well. This Vannageddon, as you call it, is a specific event, followed by specific aftermaths, and it concerns everyone, especially
you
.”

“No, Uncle, it doesn't concern me right now. Maybe you should be talking to that fundamentalist Bible freak, Jeremy ‘Elvis' Mullin. He'd tell you it's all in the Bible. The four horses and all. The Antichrist. The Second Coming. Probably even Vanna White.”

“The Second Coming,” Notz insisted, “what do you know about it?” Oh, no, Felicity thought, now he's going to quote that hoary old Yeats poem.

Sure enough, the major began to recite:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

I'd love to come just once, Felicity complained silently.

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs—

That, she couldn't help noting, was pretty sexy. Her own thighs felt suddenly quite soft. How long had it been since she had slowly moved them apart, submitting to the head of a man with a lion's body? Probably never. Miles was skinny, with the body of a scrawny cat, and Ben had been no lion either, although his head was quite leonine.

while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle—

The cradle was not to be. She had decided a long time ago that she would not bring into the world something to die. Sometimes she thought that her elusive pleasure had perhaps retreated from her after she'd made this decision. She had denied death life; and death, displeased, had taken her orgasm. Hey, Death, Felicity called, give it back, bitch!

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Dear Uncle. He always was, in an unpredictable way, predictable. Felicity loved his voice, rich as bread pudding with whiskey sauce.

“And if,” Notz went on, still in the voice of the poem, “a cradle can rock the centuries, may not a wheel spin them? Why not the Wheel of Fortune watched by millions? The wheel of chance from which are born phrases and clues, things and mysteries? The gyre in a falconer's hand?
Kismet Chakkar?
Could not such vulgar wheels display the signs to the multitude? Well, answer me, what could be better?”

Felicity couldn't argue. Grief had made her gluttonous, and she felt as stuffed as a merliton. The food, spreading its delicious warmth through her, was making her sleepy.

“The point is,” the major was saying, reverting to the proper subject of the conversation, Felicity herself, “that I believe you when you say that there is only half of you. Love, and the loss of it, leaves huge holes in us. Christ, who reputedly loved everyone, was like a sieve by the time he died, nearly transparent. You may not understand this yet, but one of my gifts is to look at a person and be able to determine just how much of them there is. Most people, trust me, have had extraordinarily large chunks removed. Their souls are miniscule, like commas in the compact
OED
.”

“So … am I going to be whole? Or what? Where is my missing half?”

“Your other half is coming,” said the major, peering into his bread pudding as if he saw someone in there.

“I hope you don't mean my better half. I hope it's not this Indian babe, anyway,” Felicity said gloomily. She didn't know if her uncle understood her sexual dilemma. In truth, she didn't either. She had successfully seduced a girl she'd met at the Rubyfruit Jungle, but the encounter had confused her. Her pleasure had been as elusive as when she'd sought it with Ben Redman, whose uncomfortably large penis had distressed her terribly. Ben, dear Ben, her first boyfriend, was a high school jazz connoisseur, veteran of medication identical to hers, now rabbi extraordinaire. With Miles she'd felt something approaching physical satisfaction, but his junk habit had made physical intimacy a rare occurrence. It's a good thing she wasn't as paranoid as the major, or she'd believe she was the victim of an evil conspiracy.

Felicity was nearly asleep as she filled her mouth with a spoon of bread pudding that exploded there with pungent sweetness.

“Your mission, then,” concluded the major, ending off a long speech she'd barely heard, “is to
wait
for specifics.”

“My dear Uncle,” Felicity said formally, “I would be very grateful to you if at this dramatic moment in my life and at this late hour, you would tell me the truth as simply as you can.”

“Of course, darling. Everything in creation is subject to a sequence. Before anything
is
, there is something else, and before that
something
, there is something else. You are familiar, I am sure, with theological attempts to pin everything on a Prime Mover. I have no opinion about that. What I do believe, however, is that the sequence moves according to a will that
wills
it to go on. I have undertaken the modest task of exercising
my
will to take part in the sequencing of creation.”

“Is that all?” said Felicity. “Isn't that, I don't know … presumptous?”

“Doubtless. Which is why one must make sure that nothing is left to chance. We must be well informed.”

Felicity wasn't sure she understood. But she was too tired to investigate such loftiness. Before they called it a night, they needed to discuss the funeral.

“The old woman ought to lay in state at her own house,” the major said.

“There is hardly anyone left, Major. All her contemporaries are dead, and nobody in the family spoke to her after she left the church and tore up that lottery ticket.”

“Be that as it may, the woman embodies the twentieth century. You can't quickly dispatch such a person.”

“She's not a book, Uncle. She's a corpse. And anyway, what's so great about the twentieth century? Stony sleep, was it? Good riddance, I say. I don't see the point of any nostalgia. Anyone who survived it must have had either plain dumb luck or a deal with the devil.”

The major couldn't suppress his smile. “How you talk—and there is only half of you! I shudder to think of the complete creature.”

“I would like to bury her tomorrow, Major.” Felicity was determined. “I don't want that slimeball, Mullin, there, but I suppose I'll have to let him officiate. Grandmère trusted him.”

For the sake of propriety then, but also for reasons of a residual affection (Felicity's) and grudging respect (the major's), they had more wine and recalled the old woman in all her crazy steadfastness. She had taken uncomplaining and strict care of Felicity after her mother's desertion. She had faced poverty with a big black purse, from which an inexhaustible supply of small change always poured forth. She had refused Notz's money, though he managed, through Felicity, to help. Marie-Frances Claire Le Bec stood up to authorities and was feared in many lousy city offices. She had been a talented seamstress, skilled enough to copy even fancy clothes. Before the conversion to Mullinism, she had cooked meals for the nuns, taking a pot of red beans and rice every Monday to our Lady of Perpetual Succor Chapel.

Felicity closed her eyes, swimming through the major's words like a nymph through seaweed. A shadowy figure that was her missing half was swimming toward her from very far away. The world's secret societies were weaving their nets above and below her, and Felicity let herself be lulled by the story just as in the old days, when she'd been a special little girl with a special great mission in a future so unimaginably wonderful only sleep could make it bearable.

Notz carried his niece to the guest bedroom and laid her down on a baldachin bed that had belonged to Teresa de Avila before her vision. After, she lived an ascetic life and slept on the stone floor of the convent cell, where she wrote mystical love poetry. Major Notz delighted in collecting artifacts belonging to saintly converts of the upper classes who left their luxuries behind for lives of poverty. The major saw himself as a specialized bird of prey who followed behind the saints, hunting their abandoned belongings. He would have given anything to own something of Gautama's, but his belongings, like those of Muhammad, had long ago been worn out by the superstitious pawing of followers seeking miracles.

The major surveyed the sleeping form of his rebellious niece and tried to hold at bay the affection that always threatened at such moments. He could not allow himself the all too human indulgence of sentiment if she was going to fulfill her destiny and his plan. Viewed from above, there really wasn't that much to the girl. She had bony knees, and her long, skinny legs looked like they needed a shave, and her feet needed scrubbing. Her eyes were shut too tight, and her breasts pointed up like two Mongol mini helmets. Even in sleep she seemed coiled up, ready to strike, unable to leave the world completely behind.

“My angry little Messiah, my Dulcinea-cum-Christ,” murmured Notz, as if that were a dish he might whip up.

Chapter Four

Wherein the sisters of Saint Hildegard Hospice are seen to wonder about the girl Andrea
,
her habits, and her charm

Although they couldn't say exactly what was wrong with the girl, something clearly was. She was sick. Sometimes she shone as if she had a fever. Her eyes looked past everyone. When he first saw her, Father Hernio pronounced: “I have seen this in the eyes of other youths. She has the virus of indifference!”

Father Hernio had been observing the Shades and neotribals who gathered in Jerusalem's bohemian coffeehouses. Some of them had bones in their noses and earlobes. Their faces and bodies were sometimes completely covered with tattoos. One man had fifteen bronze studs in his face, like a pincushion. Another had a complete brain tattooed on the surface of his shaved head. And some had what appeared to be an entire body inscribed over their own. These disfigurements, thought the priest, implied a degree of faith in the future. Such skins could certainly not be discarded when the body died. Surely they would be dried and preserved. But the body art also implied an absence of faith in present-day life. In the eyes of these youths Father Hernio detected the virus of indifference.

But the sisters knew that Andrea was not sick from indifference; she was traumatized by what she had seen and experienced. There was a difference! Sisters Rodica and Maria busied themselves feeding Andrea, as if fattening her up was as great a task as teaching orphans, which they also did. Andrea stubbornly refused to communicate beyond the occasional “Thank you,” in English, but now and then, as she had in the case of Mr. Rabindranath, she delivered an opinion in Hebrew.

But if her mind did not permit her to trust her new home, her body had no such scruples. A week of the good sisters' ministrations resulted in all sorts of new curves and little plumpnesses where before there had been only skin taut over bone. Her cheeks changed from deathly pale to a marble-pink hue, and her hips and even her behind showed promise of womanliness.

Sister Rodica sometimes felt awkward in Andrea's presence, particularly when she failed to observe any modesty. The young woman commenced to project an unabashed carnality that wafted off her like attar. She loped like a feline when she walked, and the sweater over the nightgown she sometimes wore to bed was no impediment to her newly assertive breasts. God forgive her, but Sister Rodica acquired a permanent blush. In comparison with Andrea's troubling young flesh, Mr. Rabindranath's penis—which, since the first incident, had floated into the foyer one other embarrassing time—was like a discarded section of garden hose. While watering the convent's ten thousand roses, Sister Rodica had smiled at the comic hose in her hand. But Andrea was another matter, particularly since the sister had undertaken to teach the Bosnian girl about the life of Christ, a task that required standing close enough to bask in her animal heat.

In reproach to Andrea's unconscious sensuality, Sister Rodica dwelt unduly long on the story of Mary Magdalene's inability to enter Mother Mary's house in Gethsemane.

“The Magdalene tried three times to enter Mary's house, and three times she failed. The weight of her sins pulled her back.” And: “Mary's purity stopped the Magdalene three times. Three times.”