Messi@

by Andrei Codrescu

  “Fucking pansy,” laughed the Nazi. “We useta grease up guys like you and play pass-the-meatball.”

  When both men were naked and Felicity had their clothes in a bundle at her feet, she asked again for their story.

  “I want to know who owns you, and I want it in plain English. And just to reassure your fucking bare butts, I’m a lesbian. You’re ugly as shit to me, and it would only give me pleasure to shoot you. I’m a member of S.C.U.M., if you must know.”

  This speech unsettled Bamajan, but the Nazi just grinned.

  Bamajan lowered his head, and covering his exposed parts with his hands, related quickly that he was in charge of protecting the Most Holy Reverend Jeremy “Elvis” Mullin; that he and millions of others around the world believed that Mullin was the reborn Redeemer; that he himself belonged to a Hindu sect, though he had been born a Muslim; and that the entire sect had converted to Mullinism in 1996.

  “Mullinism?” Felicity stifled a laugh. “How many of you are in the city?”

  “Ten—”

  “Shut the fuck up, you rice cake!” hissed the Nazi, straight backed and stark naked, staring hatefully at Felicity.

  “I’ll get to you in a moment, Goebbels! Where’d you find this scum bucket, Bamajan?”

  “Many of our followers are converted in prison.”

  “You talk too much, soy breath!”

  Felicity’d had enough. “Get the fuck out, both of you! Turn around! Open the door! Out!”

  The last she saw of them was their asses, one hairy white ass stenciled with swastikas and one round brown hairless ass atop two spindly legs. She called the police and reported two naked men prowling the neighborhood.

  The real thing. Felicity was shaking, still clutching the Beretta. Sangfroid. Wait till I tell the major. Uncle, I was on the verge of a transtemporal sexual experience when I was rudely interrupted. Or even better: I was about to be bedded by Joan of Arc when a real, live Nazi invaded my office. Adrenaline pumped through her. She paced. She made coffee. She wanted to call somebody, but she no longer had any friends. Miles’s crowd was into nightclubbing and drugs and staying up all night. In the daytime world she’d made few lasting acquaintances. Still, she wanted real, live, fleshy, friendly human contact now. She poured a cup of truly evil java and was startled by the thought that she had enjoyed the company of the two naked men. It had been a relationship, as they say. Was she this despondent, deprived, twisted?

  Felicity was bothered by her body’s evident interest in the disturbing images of the day—the whore’s finger in Mullin’s mouth, a Nazi’s tattooed dick, a virtual fuck world. Why couldn’t she get off like everyone else, in the missionary position, with a finger on her clit? In the normal world of men and women, orgasms were as bountiful as peanuts. Or were they? The images that aroused her despite herself came from that normal world, after all—the world of pedophile preachers, tattooed dicks, and techno-perverts. What if everyone was thriving on hellish and tormented imaginations made “normal” only by a common agreement to treat hell as if it were home? In the last five years, death had taken more than a dozen of her friends. Dying young from the sexual plague was so common now only the loved ones of the deceased mourned. The world no longer empathized. All the stores of common grief were empty, and the store of compassion, once abundantly open at the death of the young, was empty, too. What if another cargo had moved into those empty stores, crawling pornographic visions intended to blot out the pain with … quaking peanuts?

  If such were the case, if the world was hell, salvation had to come from somewhere, and soon. The genetic puzzle was nearly unraveled; the tiny demons crossing the wires deep within were all named and numbered. In a few years, scientists had mapped the human genome, giving names to every tiny particle in the blueprint of life. And yet death strolled at leisure, picking the choicest of the young, without hurry, without panic. What gives death such confidence? I suppose, thought Felicity, that death knows something that makes it confident. What does death know? Maybe death knows that we all feel guilty about something. Maybe we feel guilty about knowing something that we aren’t supposed to know. Like what am I not supposed to know that I actually know? Felicity searched the trembling bud knotted tightly in her sternum, a knot of knowledge, brimming with guilty puss like a boil. But it was nothing; it was only guilt about knowing … death. Felicity surprised herself with the circular banality of this discovery: death drew its power from her knowledge of death. As idiotic as the near tautology was the simplicity of the solution: death will be ended by one who knows nothing of it. An innocent, a freak, an idiot. This brought back a dim memory: Felicity’s a freak! Felicity’s a freak! She heard childhood voices chanting this but was comforted as soon as she heard them. Children! Of course. Children had no idea that they were living in hell. They felt no guilt knowing death. Children were freaks and idiots. She, Felicity, was almost as freaky as a child, guilty knot notwithstanding. She had not yet had an orgasm. She felt relieved, and proceeded to investigate the contents of her would-be assailants’ pockets.

  The naked men were picked up before Felicity had even examined very thoroughly the contents of their wallets. A young policeman knocked at her door. Felicity shoved the men’s clothes behind the bedroom door and let him in.

  Officer Joe Di Friggio hid his green horns under a studied frown.

  “You the one who called?” He pulled out his notepad. “Willing to testify in court?”

  She answered only the last question, saying that she preferred not to show up in court. She had merely glimpsed them out the window and done her citizen’s duty.

  “Isn’t it illegal,” she asked rhetorically, “to be naked on the streets?”

  Officer Di Friggio looked doubtful. After all, this was New Orleans. Joe wrote down his number on the back of a ticket and handed it to her. “In case you change your mind?” She reached for it and tugged, but Joe held on. “You never know about these naked characters,” he said.

  “You mean there are a lot of them?”

  “Dozens every night.” The patrolman grinned, still holding on to the ticket. “We pick ’em up like pecans in October.”

  “Your country upbringing,” said Felicity, finally wrenching the ticket from him, “has given you colorful speech.”

  “Hate to disappoint you, but I’m from right down here in the Irish Channel. Only I’m Italian.”

  This was more than Felicity wanted to know.

  “Are they dangerous?” She hoped this sounded sincere.

  “Naked men,” he snorted. “How dangerous can they be? Unless they was hiding stilettos in their behinds.” Joe laughed, showing many white teeth. “Unless what they wear in front presents a threat to you.”

  “On the contrary,” said Felicity. “I’m always surprised by the disparity between advertising and reality. But I do call the cops, just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “Just in case one of them lives up to the ads.”

  After he left, Felicity allowed herself to tremble some more. She double-checked the locks on all the doors before she stripped again. She pulled on the loose black denims of the Nazi and fastened them to her skinny middle with the belt of her bathrobe. She tried to imagine what it was like to have a penis covered with tattoos. Her trembling was compounded by a fierce arousal. She flopped down on her bed and turned on the laptop, ready to make love to people from history. Or anyone else for that matter.

  Chapter Six

  Wherein Andrea, the Bosnian orphan, is fascinated by a television game show

  Andrea’s improved health did not escape the notice of the hospice’s guests. Some of the scholars began to follow her around; others arranged to bump into her at breakfast or in the library. The girl became a subject of discussion among the distinguished residents.

  One plausible explanation for their common fascination was offered by Dr. Luna, the Mexican priest: “We spend our lives studying and watching, watching and waiting. When something or someon
e unusual appears, we agitate. To people such as ourselves, a girl like this is like a new language!”

  The first sign that Andrea was returning from the mist she had been wandering in was when she began to watch television in the lounge after supper. She was especially interested by the game show Gal Gal Hamazal, the Israeli version of Wheel of Fortune. She sat transfixed through the entire half hour.

  After watching the program for the first time, she was in much improved spirits and even told a little joke to the assembled guests.

  “Did you know,” she said in English, “that Christ came through Sarajevo carrying his cross? A man stopped him in the road and asked, ‘Where did you find the wood?’”

  “Poor child,” murmured Father Tuiredh, “to have survived there.”

  It was the only mention of her past, and no one asked for more. The hospice’s guests were happy just to be near the child. Time seemed somehow to have expanded, allowing them to complete in days research that had been dragging for months. They slept less every night and looked forward to breakfast with Andrea like restless children.

  Watching Gal Gal Hamazal became a Tuesday evening ritual at the hospice. Television was forbidden to the nuns, but they had their ways. At the hour of the broadcast, Mother Superior was always secluded in prayer in a little-used chapel at the far end of the convent.

  As the hour for Gal Gal Hamazal neared, the doors to the guest rooms began to open, letting out the motley assortment of residents. There was Father Hernio, a Filipino priest who ministered to six hundred souls in Berlin; Father Zahan, from Australia, a native Yuin, also a Catholic priest, who wrote books on tribal religions; Lama Iris Cohen, a Buddhist nun and the highest-ranked Westerner of the Tantric branch of Tibetan Buddhism; Father Magh Tuiredh, an Irish cleric who wore the embroidered name Lugh on his cassock; Dr. Carlos Luna, an Indian from Oaxaca, Mexico, wearing a bright sweater depicting the Aztec calendar; Professor Weng Li, from the University of Beijing; Earl Smith, a Hopi from Arizona; and Mr. Rabindranath, now decently clad in trousers and white sweater, smoking clove tobacco from a meerschaum pipe.

  Each guest greeted Andrea and the sisters with varying degrees of effusiveness. Father Zahan smiled most widely and patted Andrea’s hair. While the others sat modestly on straight-backed chairs, Lama Cohen made room for Andrea on the small couch by the rain-streaked window. The lama was hoping for snow. She had grown up in Vail, Colorado, and felt oddly nostalgic. Something about the Bosnian girl reminded the lama of a snowflake.

  The little television sat on a small dais covered in red cloth.

  Although most of the company had never watched Gal Gal Hamazal before the previous Tuesday, they anticipated it as if it were a precious ceremony vouchsafed only to a lucky few.

  The vivacious hostess of the show, Gala Keria, appeared to wild applause. Green eyed and tall, with dark, shoulder-length hair, dressed in a black leather miniskirt and a long-sleeved white T-shirt poked by nervy nipples, she had a half-knowing, half-sad grin that made men and boys alike a little soft in the head.

  The cohost greeted her ironically, announcing that he was, as always, utterly surprised by her wardrobe. He just didn’t know what to think. The audience applauded long and hard—whether in support of the host’s bafflement or in favor of Gala’s wardrobe was hard to say.

  “Gala is like mercury,” he effused. “I don’t think we can hold her very long. If you are beautiful, intelligent, and aged between eighteen and twenty-five, start thinking about her job now.”

  Gala, unlike her American counterpart, did not simply turn letters. When the three contestants were introduced—an engineer from Rishon Le-Zion, a jeweler from Jaffa, and a soldier from Jerusalem—she patted the engineer on the back, hugged the jeweler, and kissed the soldier, who blushed. She then sauntered over to the blank puzzle board, inside which hid the secret letters, and bowed. The category appeared. It was CREATION AND CREATOR. This met with approval from both audiences: the studio’s and the hospice’s.

  “What better puzzle?” Father Hernio observed.

  “The best!” agreed Lama Cohen.

  The engineer spun the wheel; it came to rest on 800 Shekels.

  “Mem!” he said. “I would like mem!”

  The studio audience now began chanting, “Mem! Mem! Mem! Mem!”

  Sister Maria was astonished to see the otherworldly Mr. Rabindranath begin to rock back and forth, silently mouthing “mem.” All those present, with the exception of Dr. Carlos Luna and Andrea, began to do the same. Why, of course, thought Sister Maria; they are all chanters and vocalizers. Most religious traditions use mantras and chants.

  Beaming, Gala turned one of the squares and revealed mem. She smiled radiantly. But she was not done. With a generous sweep of her pretty arm she reached farther down the blank board and flipped over another mem. The audience went wild. “Mem! Mem! Mem!” The little salon of the Saint Hildegard Hospice positively quaked with the unleashed energy of mem. And like the goddess Isis surveying one of her ceremonies, Gala whipped up the frenzy, conducting the chant with her arms and her feet, dancing with abandon. Sister Rodica was sure that the surge would never stop but would break into chaos. She imagined the audience might tear out of the studio, spill into the streets, hug strangers, dance, and shout, “MEM! MEM!” with tears streaming down their faces, until the whole city was one unleashed hora. But as suddenly as it surged, Gala stilled the wave, and the engineer spun again.

  Surprise, decided the wheel. This was an audience favorite; unlike its counterpart in America, the Israeli Surprise was not always a good thing. If the contestant guessed the letter correctly, the surprise would be a car or a refrigerator. But if the contestant failed to guess, the surprise might involve a brief humiliation before the audience—such as a spanking by Gala herself or a verbal lashing by the host, with audience participation. The strongest punishment surprise so far had been a contestant’s being forced to crawl on all fours and bark at the audience. Gala had climbed on his back and waved her scarf, driving the audience wild.

  “Lamed!” said the engineer. “I want lamed!”

  For a suspended moment, the world plunged into anxious silence. And then, like the sun breaking through clouds, Gala’s marmoreal arm traveled graciously toward the board and revealed with the authority that only she possessed the existence of lamed!

  The emotion in the room seemed to Sister Maria quite disproportionate to the activity on the screen. She had seen the show before but had never felt this kind of involvement. But Sister Rodica understood the frenzy; Gal Gal Hamazal was her favorite pastime in the whole world, because she was a great believer in wheels. The Carpathian village of Piatra de Moare, where she was born, had been built around a huge round stone that resembled a giant millstone. Consequently, everything in Piatra de Moare was round: the wells, the church, the houses. She missed her village so much she felt like crying every time she saw the symbol for Gal Gal Hamazal on TV. Until now she had never felt that anyone else shared her emotion.

  To be honest, Sister Maria had always considered Gal Gal Hamazal a low-class sort of thing. Secretly she had contempt for what she perceived as Sister Rodica’s simplemindedness. Sister Maria didn’t tell anyone, but she had read more than the Lives of the Saints! And yet here were all these learned scholars as absorbed as four-year-olds in a new set of building blocks! Sister Maria was not a little disappointed.

  “Lamed! Lamed! Lamed!” The audience on the screen and in the lounge of Saint Hildegard Hospice became one as nuns, mystics, and professors burst out: “Lamed! Lamed!” Sister Maria seemed to hear just below their childish voices another sound, a kind of lament: Mene, Mene, Tekel. Then other biblical laments surfaced momentarily and vanished like bubbles in a soda. Then, quite distinctly, the crack of a whip. Then more bubbles of sound, muddy, moaning, weeping. Then “Lamed! Lamed!” again. She was having odd sensations today. She looked at Mr. Rabindranath, absorbed in the pleasure of chanting the Hebrew letter, and couldn’t quite associate him with the naked
floater.

  “I find it curious,” Sister Maria burst out, unable to control herself any longer, “that distinguished scholars such as yourselves find this game so stimulating.”

  This seemed to amuse the company—it was just the kind of remark they expected a smart nun to make.

  “It’s like this, dear Sister,” Mr. Rabindranath said, accepting her challenge for the rest of the group. “We are all devotees of the wheel. Every one of us lives by a wheel that contains and instructs us. I, for instance, believe in the great Wheel of Karma. Lama Cohen here meditates on the Tantric wheel, a very beautiful wheel with angels and demons on it. Dr. Carlos Luna even wears his wheel on his sweater. Father Zahan has written and meditated on the meaning of circular enclosures for the Yuin and Murring people, and as a Christian he is doubtlessly delighted to be in Jerusalem, the city of a thousand cupolas, circular ceilings, great rotundas—circles and spheres everywhere you look. In Professor Li’s China, the circle is the symbol of heaven. The Tao is familiar throughout Asia, including Father Hernio’s native Philippines. Father Magh Tuiredh’s Celtic ancestors performed their rituals inside circular magic groves. And Mr. Earl Smith, from Arizona, can draw in sand the great Wheel of Creation on its cardinal point axes. Have I left out anyone?”

  “I am a little familiar,” Sister Maria said modestly, “with the wheels of some religions.” In truth, she knew only less than a little but made a mental note to study. “Still, Gal Gal Hamazal is hardly a sacred wheel on the level of those you have mentioned.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” Mr. Rabindranath smiled a bit smugly. “It may be a new religion for the masses in our time.”

  Sister Maria remembered with distaste the tapered brown flesh of his flaccid penis, and she also wasn’t sure what he meant: was TV the religion, or the Wheel of Fortune itself?